So what if some ISPs elect to tier pricing? That's not a bit different than a cardboard box manufacturer that charges less to customers that place very large orders.
No - it's VERY different.
Do you think Google doesn't pay for it's traffic volume, in proportion to what I pay for my traffic volume?
That argument is a huge load of crap.
Fed Ex charges shipping by weight.
They don't charge extra if the box contains video tapes, or shredded cheese.
ISP's charge per packet. If you use a lot of packets, you pay a lot. If you use a few packets, you pay less. They already have the right to charge like this. What they want is the ability to charge based on what's IN the packets. That is an entirely different argument.
I can't believe people are so easily misled on this issue.
The problem with legislation is; Without ENFORCEMENT, it can't function.
When you appoint foxes to guard the henhouse, it's worse than no laws, because then the laws are enforced on all but the highest bidder (during campaign financing). Again this wouldn't be a problem if we'd enforce the laws on the softball regulators as well. But it always goes back to "who's babysitting the babysitters".
The flaw in our political system is private campaign finance. No amount of legislation will fix this problem, when the people who enforce the laws can choose not to do so.
I dunno, I've had this argument with both my 18 year old son, and my 12 year old son.
All I know is: I can FINALLY show the original to them, and they will FINALLY agree that I'm right - Han Shot First - and that's the way it *should* be. It's the natural order of things.
I know that the scenes were filmed, and I seem to remember seeing the scenes with Luke's friends in Anchorhead, where Biggs told him he was joining the rebellion (leaving Luke behind on Tattooine).
If this is true, this represents a huge departure from Microsoft's previous M.O.
Prior to this, they used to leverage their OS monopoly, and bundle "free" tools that would enbrace and extend standards in order to capture marketshare in new markets.
Since they're not going to be able to do that any time in the near future (ie. Vista is delayed, and even when it does ship, it's not going to be widely adopted with any speed, due to hardware requirements, different operating paradigm, and evil DRM), they have to take a different approach.
I find that very interesting. I wonder if it's true - and is this a voluntary change in tactics, or a necessary change due to reduced monopoly power?
What would truly be awesome is a file-type registration for source code downloads:
You download the tarball - expand it to a directory/folder - with a.src extension, and when you double-click that, by default, Finder takes the code and compiles it into a nice fat binary for you. Yeah. that'd be sweet.
I might even pay more for a superior sound format (SCD is supposed to be much better on the right equipment - who knows?)
FairPlay DRMed MP3? I haven't felt inclined to buy any. It would have to be just earth-shatteringly great music, and no other format available.
More restrictive DRM? Not a chance, just forget it.
I want to be able to take my tunes on the road, burn back CD's, play them in my car, play them in my rec room, play them on my computer at work. Email a copy to my buddy when I tell him how great album X by artist Y is. DRM breaks that. Yes, there's trivial ways around FairPlay. But that makes me a law breaker. I want my RIGHT to Fair Use RESPECTED.
I think that most serious archaeologists consider (Egyptian) pyramids to be "really fancy burial mounds".
The fact that they line up with the stars, and lasted 5300 years so far, and were really really big in some cases, and have a lot of complex religious mythological significance, is an aspect of the fanciness.
Doesn't change my original point that Mesoamerican pyramids were built for a completely different purpose, and only of superficially similar design. One of the telling differences is that in the Americas, there's something like a half-dozen of these stuctures. In Egypt, there's over 100. In Nubia (south of Egypt, present-day Sudan) there's something like 220. Smaller, built later, but still; fancy burial mounds.
If it's a fake (ie. someone snuck a bunch of huge cut and polished stone blocks in, and stacked them up and buried them) - then I would say that's at least as fantastic as if it were genuine (built by primative humans, and covered up over the centuries by nature).
I certainly find the notion of commonality with Mesoamerican "pyramids" somewhat ridiculous - since the Mesoamerican "pyramids" were not really pyramids (both geometrically, and in the egyptian sense). The Mesoamerican structures were not used for burials. They were used as platforms for temples, and had a completely different method of construction and religious significance.
I would think that this Bosnian "pyramid" (not geometrically a pyramid - the top is flat) more likely has more in common with the Egyptian/African pyramids (both in style, and religious significance) given the regional cultural influences.
However, there are also "pyramids" in Greece, Spain, Italy, China, and the UK. The Greek pyramids were simply pyramid-shaped watch towers. In Italy, a Roman noble had one built as a tomb, inspired by Egyptian pyramids. In the UK and China, we're talking about a pyramid-shaped burial mound made of piled-up clay or dirt - again with a flat top.
The significant things about this pyramid, are basically Osmanegic's claim of dating. He claims they're 12,000 years old. That's a little gutsy, considering that the area was likely under a glacier at the time, and there's no other evidence of any kind of advanced civilization anywhere near there. But when you go that far back in time, things get really sketchy, and evidence is mostly decayed or crumbled beyond any use.
Okay, so let me be clear on this - I *do* consider Osmanegic to be a nut job. I *do* agree with some of the Bosnian archaeological community that he will very likely, in the process of unearthing his pyramid, destroy a lot of good medieval archaeological sites (there was a Crusades-era fortress built on the top of this hill). However, I accept that the evidence he's presented so far, on the shape of the hill, the presence of tunnels, and the unearthing of stone blocks, that this very well could be a real pyramid. I just really doubt that it's as old as he's saying it is. Older than the Egyptian pyramids? Could be. The Greek pyramid is about 100 years older. (though MUCH smaller). So we know that the Egyptians didn't invent the geometric shape (whoo-tee doo). But the size coupled with the date, is pretty significant.
From what I've heard, VPC 7 runs in Rosetta on intel Macs. Veeeeerrrrry Sloooooowwwwwly.
I have not heard whether Microsoft has released a universal binary - it may be more problematic than simply a recompile, since there's the code that does the endian conversion to contend with. Since this stuff was just added, I would guess that it ought to be easy to selectively disable.
Meanwhile, we, Americans, continue to pay illegal immigrant works to do "jobs that Americans won't do."
Fuck that shit. I'll happily pick lettuce for $100k/yr+bennies. "jobs that Americans won't do" is a damn dirty lie. It's "pay that Americans won't do work for". "jobs that Americans won't do" serves to distort the debate, and draw attention from the real issue - which you touch on, which is, that our labor pool is separated into two classes: those with full citizenship rights, and those who are guests, who can be thrown out at any time. Guess which class is easier to exploit and cheaper to hire? The presence of this class means that our labor market is a sham, not free, it's rigged. Whether the people who buy the $40 DVD players benefit, or whether the guys who own the factories where these $40 DVD players are manufactured for about $5 each, the fact is, if we paid lettuce pickers $100k/yr+bennies, we'd then have to pay $50 for a salad. Then $100k/yr wouldn't be much of a salary at all. So for us to save ourselves from having to pay $50 for a salad, we instead exploit this class of labor - which is essentially the economic equivalent of slavery. In a truly free market, skills and merit are rewarded. Not privilege.
The way I see it, we have two solutions to the illegal immigrant problem. And it's because either we have a border with Mexico or we do not. Either we're sovereign nations with our own laws, or we're not. We must either protect our borders, to ensure that we have a real Market, or we must ignore those borders, and normalize our laws with Mexico, so that Mexican workers have the same rights and protections as Americans. Then they'd have no incentive to come to America. But either way, the establisment of a merit-based reward system in the Labor Market would have a huge impact on a large segment of the American Middle Class.
The Falcon 1 addresses a related problem with a novel approach.
The related problem was the rapid boil-off of LOX in the tropical heat. So they covered the LOX section of the booster with a thermal blanket, designed to fall away at launch with cables. Apparently, the blanket did get hung-up on the ill-fated first launch. But perhaps thi principle would be okay for the Shuttle. There's no reason the Shuttle needs to drag all that foam up into space. The only need for the foam was to protect against ice formed by condensation on the cryogenic tank, while the Shuttle sat on the pad between fueling time and launch time. The post-fueling-pre-launch checks weren't intended to take as long originally, so they didn't count on ice build up. So now they band-aid the problem with the foam, which brings problems of it's own.
But a detachable thermal blanket might be just the ticket. As an added bonus, you get to remove the insulation at launch time, which reduces overall weight you need to drag with you up into space. Yeah, there are complications with the blanket possibly not detaching or getting hung up, but I bet those complications are less challenging to overcome than all the fluid-dynamics handwringing they're doing now over random chunks of foam.
It is likely that MS will update VPC for the new Intel Macs.
I'm not counting on it. Why would they, if Cringely is correct? I'm not saying he is, but if Apple bundles "a better windows emulator" - I don't know why anyone would buy VPC. I sure as hell wouldn't - but then I'm stuck in PPC-land, so I won't be able to take advantage of such built-in Windows emulators, real or imagined.
When they do, the performance hit will be very small,
I realize that, and on the one hand, I salivate at the prospect, mainly for the versatility of OS X as a development platform (especially if Apple will let us run Linux in virtualization also). On the other hand, the shiny new dual G5 Power Mac sitting under my desk is now obsolete:(
since the processor emulation is what slows down VPC on the PPC Macs.
Oh, it's worse than that: older versions of VPC on PPC would emulate the intel instruction set, but also have to translate the code stream from little-endian to big-endian. Since the 601/604/G3/G4 families of Power PCs were bi-endian, this was a fairly trivial operation. But since the 601/604/G3/G4 had a FSB that was about 3 generations behind the rest of the computing world, emulation was still barely acceptable, performance-wise. Then, the G5 came along, with it's adequate FSB, and decent clock speeds. And for some idiotic brain-dead reason, IBM crippled the G5 by taking this endian-conversion operation out. When you first tried to run your old version of PPC on a shiny new G5, you got a warning that said "this processor is not supported" (obviously, Connectix *knew* this was going to happen long before IBM delivered). Then VPC 7 came out, which was capable of doing this little-endian to big-endian translation on the fly. With a terrible terrible performance hit. It's actually almost usable on a high-end G4. VPC is the emulation product that was perpetually "almost good enough". Personally, I think Connectix scammed the crap out of Microsoft to get them to buy them. In the end Apple gave IBM a mighty F-U, maybe the endian conversion thing was part of that, I know I was mightily annoyed, because other than this one thing, the Dual G5 is a kick-ass platform. (unless you're trying to build a laptop off one. . . ) Now it's obsolete. I know this because I know Apple's practices, and I know that inside of 5 years, they're going to be shipping critical software that won't run on a G5, universal binary or no. I lived through the 68k->PPC transition. Technically, it was a good thing. But in terms of stretching hardware to the usable limit, it caused many good Macs to be shitcanned before their time. And I also know that I'm not going to be buying an intel Mac any time soon, because 1. Macs are too expensive for me to buy more often than every 5 years, I was hoping this G5 would last 10. and 2. Apple's first couple of generations of hardware typically sucks until they get it right. (still smarting from that sucktacular 601 PPC 7100). And if MacFixit and other sites are right, there's all kinds of little wierd problems that Apple still hasn't ironed out of their first couple of attempts at intel Macs. Though I have no doubt they'll eventually get it right - probably not before they make my G5 unsupported though.
Also I don't know what you mean about feet and shins being vulnerable. They don't hurt any more than getting hit in other places.
Not especially vulnerable, but if you take a good hit there, it can really hamper balance and mobility. It's easier for a short person to defend these areas against a tall person (as opposed to vice versa). And a laceration or contusion in the area of the eye can temporarily blind an opponent, so no, I wouldn't say that eye vulnerability is a myth.
But the REAL vulnerable area is the nipple. One twist, stops the fight cold!
Well, there's more to the size advantage than just physical strength. There's also reach, and relative inaccessibility of vulnerable areas like the eyes and throat. However, it's harder for a larger (or taller) opponent to defend areas like the feet and shins, and heavier opponents are rarely quicker. All that said - reach is probably the most important advantage. Exactly how Yoda held off Count Dooku for so long, I have no idea.
I tend to agree with you - but then there's stuff like Perl, Python, Ruby, - free languages that are popular (worthwhile to take the time to learn - unlike LOGO or BASIC). Java's free but maybe not intellectually accessible for a beginner.
Qbasic even came with some games (remember gorilla?),
We had some old NT 4.0 machines on our network, and I amazed some of my younger co-workers about two years ago by showing them qbasic and gorilla.bas. (and filemanager.exe, the old Windows 3.1 version of Explorer.exe, which was still included on Windows NT 4.0). Ah, those were the days.
I'm a longtime computer person, but as far as programming goes, I kind of fizzled-out 14 years ago with Basic, and shell-scripting.
I tried many times to get into C/C++ or Java, but it just seemed too complicated; with the IDE, the includes, library dependencies, etc. I managed to have a decent career so far without it. But I'm right now taking a "introduction to programming" class, using C++. The teacher assigned us to use Visual Studio, but I couldn't get it to run in my environment, so I tried to compile and run our assignments using xCode on my power mac. Which actually worked suprisingly well. And I learned something very important. C++ *can* be done in a very simple manner, to learn basic programming concepts. None of the assignments actually imported anything but iostream. (Unfortunately, as for the programming concepts, I learned nothing I didn't know 14 years ago).
The point is, C++ can be taught at a very basic, introductory level, and in theory, a student could scale up from there. Though I never did figure out how to make Visual Studio work on my computer. (I've got plenty of experience with Visual Basic 6.0 - bleh).
This would be the perfect deal. And then the sweet "sorry, we're cancelling Photoshop for Windows since there is no demand for a PC version".
While that would be sweet revenge, Adobe switched a while back from developing Photoshop in Code Warrior on a Mac, and then porting to Windows, to developing Photoshop in Visual Studio on a PC, and porting to Mac.
Cutting the Windows version of Photoshop would be rather painful transition of their code-base at this point.
Many Windows Apps are going to require a minimum set of Windows services, a registry, an NTFS file system, event logging system, etc. Apple may be able to implement a Win32 API subsystem that will run on OS X - but that's not going to solve the greater issue that many modern Windows apps using Microsoft's API are very tightly bound into (and therefore dependent upon) a running Windows OS, and all it's byzantine subsystems.
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So what if some ISPs elect to tier pricing? That's not a bit different than a cardboard box manufacturer that charges less to customers that place very large orders.
No - it's VERY different.
Do you think Google doesn't pay for it's traffic volume, in proportion to what I pay for my traffic volume?
That argument is a huge load of crap.
Fed Ex charges shipping by weight.
They don't charge extra if the box contains video tapes, or shredded cheese.
ISP's charge per packet. If you use a lot of packets, you pay a lot. If you use a few packets, you pay less. They already have the right to charge like this. What they want is the ability to charge based on what's IN the packets. That is an entirely different argument.
I can't believe people are so easily misled on this issue.
The problem with legislation is;
Without ENFORCEMENT, it can't function.
When you appoint foxes to guard the henhouse, it's worse than no laws, because then the laws are enforced on all but the highest bidder (during campaign financing). Again this wouldn't be a problem if we'd enforce the laws on the softball regulators as well. But it always goes back to "who's babysitting the babysitters".
The flaw in our political system is private campaign finance. No amount of legislation will fix this problem, when the people who enforce the laws can choose not to do so.
I dunno, I've had this argument with both my 18 year old son, and my 12 year old son.
All I know is: I can FINALLY show the original to them, and they will FINALLY agree that I'm right - Han Shot First - and that's the way it *should* be. It's the natural order of things.
They stripped out a few scenes (including some slightly nastier scenes in the cantina) to bring it down to PG.
Like the one where Han feels up a three-breasted whore?
No wait - I'm thinking of another movie, aren't I?
I know that the scenes were filmed, and I seem to remember seeing the scenes with Luke's friends in Anchorhead, where Biggs told him he was joining the rebellion (leaving Luke behind on Tattooine).
It's in the Howard Chaykin comic book version.
God I'm such a geek.
If this is true, this represents a huge departure from Microsoft's previous M.O.
Prior to this, they used to leverage their OS monopoly, and bundle "free" tools that would enbrace and extend standards in order to capture marketshare in new markets.
Since they're not going to be able to do that any time in the near future (ie. Vista is delayed, and even when it does ship, it's not going to be widely adopted with any speed, due to hardware requirements, different operating paradigm, and evil DRM), they have to take a different approach.
I find that very interesting. I wonder if it's true - and is this a voluntary change in tactics, or a necessary change due to reduced monopoly power?
What would truly be awesome is a file-type registration for source code downloads:
.src extension, and when you double-click that, by default, Finder takes the code and compiles it into a nice fat binary for you. Yeah. that'd be sweet.
You download the tarball - expand it to a directory/folder - with a
I'd pay about 25 cents for a non-DRM-ed MP3.
99 cents for a non-DRM-ed AIFF (lossless).
I might even pay more for a superior sound format (SCD is supposed to be much better on the right equipment - who knows?)
FairPlay DRMed MP3? I haven't felt inclined to buy any. It would have to be just earth-shatteringly great music, and no other format available.
More restrictive DRM? Not a chance, just forget it.
I want to be able to take my tunes on the road, burn back CD's, play them in my car, play them in my rec room, play them on my computer at work. Email a copy to my buddy when I tell him how great album X by artist Y is. DRM breaks that. Yes, there's trivial ways around FairPlay. But that makes me a law breaker. I want my RIGHT to Fair Use RESPECTED.
I think that most serious archaeologists consider (Egyptian) pyramids to be "really fancy burial mounds".
The fact that they line up with the stars, and lasted 5300 years so far, and were really really big in some cases, and have a lot of complex religious mythological significance, is an aspect of the fanciness.
Doesn't change my original point that Mesoamerican pyramids were built for a completely different purpose, and only of superficially similar design. One of the telling differences is that in the Americas, there's something like a half-dozen of these stuctures. In Egypt, there's over 100. In Nubia (south of Egypt, present-day Sudan) there's something like 220. Smaller, built later, but still; fancy burial mounds.
If it's a fake (ie. someone snuck a bunch of huge cut and polished stone blocks in, and stacked them up and buried them) - then I would say that's at least as fantastic as if it were genuine (built by primative humans, and covered up over the centuries by nature).
He may be a nutjob.
I certainly find the notion of commonality with Mesoamerican "pyramids" somewhat ridiculous - since the Mesoamerican "pyramids" were not really pyramids (both geometrically, and in the egyptian sense). The Mesoamerican structures were not used for burials. They were used as platforms for temples, and had a completely different method of construction and religious significance.
I would think that this Bosnian "pyramid" (not geometrically a pyramid - the top is flat) more likely has more in common with the Egyptian/African pyramids (both in style, and religious significance) given the regional cultural influences.
However, there are also "pyramids" in Greece, Spain, Italy, China, and the UK. The Greek pyramids were simply pyramid-shaped watch towers. In Italy, a Roman noble had one built as a tomb, inspired by Egyptian pyramids. In the UK and China, we're talking about a pyramid-shaped burial mound made of piled-up clay or dirt - again with a flat top.
The significant things about this pyramid, are basically Osmanegic's claim of dating. He claims they're 12,000 years old. That's a little gutsy, considering that the area was likely under a glacier at the time, and there's no other evidence of any kind of advanced civilization anywhere near there. But when you go that far back in time, things get really sketchy, and evidence is mostly decayed or crumbled beyond any use.
Okay, so let me be clear on this - I *do* consider Osmanegic to be a nut job. I *do* agree with some of the Bosnian archaeological community that he will very likely, in the process of unearthing his pyramid, destroy a lot of good medieval archaeological sites (there was a Crusades-era fortress built on the top of this hill). However, I accept that the evidence he's presented so far, on the shape of the hill, the presence of tunnels, and the unearthing of stone blocks, that this very well could be a real pyramid. I just really doubt that it's as old as he's saying it is. Older than the Egyptian pyramids? Could be. The Greek pyramid is about 100 years older. (though MUCH smaller). So we know that the Egyptians didn't invent the geometric shape (whoo-tee doo). But the size coupled with the date, is pretty significant.
No, it was the mysterious "not a valid passport site" error that resulted after I filled out their damn form and clicked submit.
From what I've heard, VPC 7 runs in Rosetta on intel Macs. Veeeeerrrrry Sloooooowwwwwly.
I have not heard whether Microsoft has released a universal binary - it may be more problematic than simply a recompile, since there's the code that does the endian conversion to contend with. Since this stuff was just added, I would guess that it ought to be easy to selectively disable.
Meanwhile, we, Americans, continue to pay illegal immigrant works to do "jobs that Americans won't do."
Fuck that shit.
I'll happily pick lettuce for $100k/yr+bennies.
"jobs that Americans won't do" is a damn dirty lie. It's "pay that Americans won't do work for". "jobs that Americans won't do" serves to distort the debate, and draw attention from the real issue - which you touch on, which is, that our labor pool is separated into two classes: those with full citizenship rights, and those who are guests, who can be thrown out at any time. Guess which class is easier to exploit and cheaper to hire? The presence of this class means that our labor market is a sham, not free, it's rigged. Whether the people who buy the $40 DVD players benefit, or whether the guys who own the factories where these $40 DVD players are manufactured for about $5 each, the fact is, if we paid lettuce pickers $100k/yr+bennies, we'd then have to pay $50 for a salad. Then $100k/yr wouldn't be much of a salary at all. So for us to save ourselves from having to pay $50 for a salad, we instead exploit this class of labor - which is essentially the economic equivalent of slavery. In a truly free market, skills and merit are rewarded. Not privilege.
The way I see it, we have two solutions to the illegal immigrant problem. And it's because either we have a border with Mexico or we do not. Either we're sovereign nations with our own laws, or we're not. We must either protect our borders, to ensure that we have a real Market, or we must ignore those borders, and normalize our laws with Mexico, so that Mexican workers have the same rights and protections as Americans. Then they'd have no incentive to come to America. But either way, the establisment of a merit-based reward system in the Labor Market would have a huge impact on a large segment of the American Middle Class.
The Falcon 1 addresses a related problem with a novel approach.
The related problem was the rapid boil-off of LOX in the tropical heat. So they covered the LOX section of the booster with a thermal blanket, designed to fall away at launch with cables. Apparently, the blanket did get hung-up on the ill-fated first launch. But perhaps thi principle would be okay for the Shuttle. There's no reason the Shuttle needs to drag all that foam up into space. The only need for the foam was to protect against ice formed by condensation on the cryogenic tank, while the Shuttle sat on the pad between fueling time and launch time. The post-fueling-pre-launch checks weren't intended to take as long originally, so they didn't count on ice build up. So now they band-aid the problem with the foam, which brings problems of it's own.
But a detachable thermal blanket might be just the ticket. As an added bonus, you get to remove the insulation at launch time, which reduces overall weight you need to drag with you up into space. Yeah, there are complications with the blanket possibly not detaching or getting hung up, but I bet those complications are less challenging to overcome than all the fluid-dynamics handwringing they're doing now over random chunks of foam.
It is likely that MS will update VPC for the new Intel Macs.
:(
I'm not counting on it. Why would they, if Cringely is correct? I'm not saying he is, but if Apple bundles "a better windows emulator" - I don't know why anyone would buy VPC. I sure as hell wouldn't - but then I'm stuck in PPC-land, so I won't be able to take advantage of such built-in Windows emulators, real or imagined.
When they do, the performance hit will be very small,
I realize that, and on the one hand, I salivate at the prospect, mainly for the versatility of OS X as a development platform (especially if Apple will let us run Linux in virtualization also). On the other hand, the shiny new dual G5 Power Mac sitting under my desk is now obsolete
since the processor emulation is what slows down VPC on the PPC Macs.
Oh, it's worse than that: older versions of VPC on PPC would emulate the intel instruction set, but also have to translate the code stream from little-endian to big-endian. Since the 601/604/G3/G4 families of Power PCs were bi-endian, this was a fairly trivial operation. But since the 601/604/G3/G4 had a FSB that was about 3 generations behind the rest of the computing world, emulation was still barely acceptable, performance-wise. Then, the G5 came along, with it's adequate FSB, and decent clock speeds. And for some idiotic brain-dead reason, IBM crippled the G5 by taking this endian-conversion operation out. When you first tried to run your old version of PPC on a shiny new G5, you got a warning that said "this processor is not supported" (obviously, Connectix *knew* this was going to happen long before IBM delivered). Then VPC 7 came out, which was capable of doing this little-endian to big-endian translation on the fly. With a terrible terrible performance hit. It's actually almost usable on a high-end G4. VPC is the emulation product that was perpetually "almost good enough". Personally, I think Connectix scammed the crap out of Microsoft to get them to buy them. In the end Apple gave IBM a mighty F-U, maybe the endian conversion thing was part of that, I know I was mightily annoyed, because other than this one thing, the Dual G5 is a kick-ass platform. (unless you're trying to build a laptop off one. . . ) Now it's obsolete. I know this because I know Apple's practices, and I know that inside of 5 years, they're going to be shipping critical software that won't run on a G5, universal binary or no. I lived through the 68k->PPC transition. Technically, it was a good thing. But in terms of stretching hardware to the usable limit, it caused many good Macs to be shitcanned before their time. And I also know that I'm not going to be buying an intel Mac any time soon, because 1. Macs are too expensive for me to buy more often than every 5 years, I was hoping this G5 would last 10. and 2. Apple's first couple of generations of hardware typically sucks until they get it right. (still smarting from that sucktacular 601 PPC 7100). And if MacFixit and other sites are right, there's all kinds of little wierd problems that Apple still hasn't ironed out of their first couple of attempts at intel Macs. Though I have no doubt they'll eventually get it right - probably not before they make my G5 unsupported though.
Also I don't know what you mean about feet and shins being vulnerable. They don't hurt any more than getting hit in other places.
Not especially vulnerable, but if you take a good hit there, it can really hamper balance and mobility. It's easier for a short person to defend these areas against a tall person (as opposed to vice versa). And a laceration or contusion in the area of the eye can temporarily blind an opponent, so no, I wouldn't say that eye vulnerability is a myth.
But the REAL vulnerable area is the nipple. One twist, stops the fight cold!
How do I go about obtaining an act like this
Incorporate.
Seriously, it costs like $500.
Well, there's more to the size advantage than just physical strength. There's also reach, and relative inaccessibility of vulnerable areas like the eyes and throat. However, it's harder for a larger (or taller) opponent to defend areas like the feet and shins, and heavier opponents are rarely quicker. All that said - reach is probably the most important advantage. Exactly how Yoda held off Count Dooku for so long, I have no idea.
I tend to agree with you - but then there's stuff like Perl, Python, Ruby, - free languages that are popular (worthwhile to take the time to learn - unlike LOGO or BASIC). Java's free but maybe not intellectually accessible for a beginner.
Qbasic even came with some games (remember gorilla?),
We had some old NT 4.0 machines on our network, and I amazed some of my younger co-workers about two years ago by showing them qbasic and gorilla.bas. (and filemanager.exe, the old Windows 3.1 version of Explorer.exe, which was still included on Windows NT 4.0). Ah, those were the days.
I'm a longtime computer person, but as far as programming goes, I kind of fizzled-out 14 years ago with Basic, and shell-scripting.
I tried many times to get into C/C++ or Java, but it just seemed too complicated; with the IDE, the includes, library dependencies, etc. I managed to have a decent career so far without it. But I'm right now taking a "introduction to programming" class, using C++. The teacher assigned us to use Visual Studio, but I couldn't get it to run in my environment, so I tried to compile and run our assignments using xCode on my power mac. Which actually worked suprisingly well. And I learned something very important. C++ *can* be done in a very simple manner, to learn basic programming concepts. None of the assignments actually imported anything but iostream. (Unfortunately, as for the programming concepts, I learned nothing I didn't know 14 years ago).
The point is, C++ can be taught at a very basic, introductory level, and in theory, a student could scale up from there. Though I never did figure out how to make Visual Studio work on my computer. (I've got plenty of experience with Visual Basic 6.0 - bleh).
We're trying to address this to a certain extent with the Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions, but it's a tough problem.
Yeah - it sure was for me!
I got VS2005Express downloaded and installed, but the Passport registration wouldn't work no matter how many times I stepped through it.
Eclipse/Java worked just Jim-dandy first try though.
You misheard him.
He swore to withold and defenstrate the Constitution.
This would be the perfect deal. And then the sweet "sorry, we're cancelling Photoshop for Windows since there is no demand for a PC version".
While that would be sweet revenge, Adobe switched a while back from developing Photoshop in Code Warrior on a Mac, and then porting to Windows, to developing Photoshop in Visual Studio on a PC, and porting to Mac.
Cutting the Windows version of Photoshop would be rather painful transition of their code-base at this point.
Not really likely.
Many Windows Apps are going to require a minimum set of Windows services, a registry, an NTFS file system, event logging system, etc. Apple may be able to implement a Win32 API subsystem that will run on OS X - but that's not going to solve the greater issue that many modern Windows apps using Microsoft's API are very tightly bound into (and therefore dependent upon) a running Windows OS, and all it's byzantine subsystems.