I liked both of thesem movies, and unlike Jon I don't think box office equates in any way to how good a movie is
I completely agree with you. You take a recent movie, _Wonder_Boys_ for example. It was probably one of my favourite movies of all time and no one went to see it both times they put it in the theatres.
Star Wars: EP II wasn't just competing against a huge blockbuster of a movie, it was competing against SPIDER-MAN. This is a character who's been in comic books for how long? Forty years? Spidey predates SW by a long shot, and it's certainly not surprising that many, young and old, would go see it. I was expecting it to be huge.
Episode II (excepting a rather bitchy/whiny Anakin) was a great movie, and has every right to boast. We got to see Clone Troopers kick the crap out of droids (and vice versa), we got to see Yoda get his force on, and let's face it, Ewan did a great Obi-Wan! Whena yousa thinkin' wesa bein' a good movie? Sure Lucas markets his stuff like a Jedi, but he's a great capitalist and I can respect that. I just think everyone's upset cause they want to buy the stuff. Your fault, not his.
Anyway, my favourite movie is still The Fellowship of the Ring. I've seen it 7 times and I'm going on 8.:)
I think we should all take a moment to sit back and pat each other on the back for all the open source software any of us have ever contributed on. It's finally taken a mental toll on MS. This article, more than anything else, proves that MS can't beat Linux on Linux merits, so they want to show you that open source software is communist, insecure and anti-United States to try and get the runaround.
Now, I'm Canadian, and the Canadian government hasn't shown a lot of real interest in Linux (although I do know a lot of departments are using it and don't know it) but I'm glad to see the Pentagon is expanding it's use (and hopefully will continue to).
If you've ever written some open source software, take the time to be thankful that your good idea is finally scaring the crap out of the folks in Redmond. That GIF of the Penguin squashing the MS compound is becoming more and more a reality.;)
The whole of the movie before Yoda's battle was kinda cheesy, and was making me a little uneasy. But after Yoda's battle I haven't been able to get the image of a little green, spinning ball sporting a light sabre from here to Malistair. I imagined a lot of stuff when I thought of Yoda kicking some ass, but I never could have conceived this. The Dark Side and Obi Wan be damned, Yoda IS the force!
...I'm using RedHat 7.2 and I won't even update to 7.3. One major reason is gcc 2.96-RH. I've been considering Mandrake and SuSE in RedHat's stead because of the compiler itself, let alone other troubles I've had with RedHat. Besides, wouldn't it be a crossgrade? I don't consider RH, SuSE or Mandrake to be superior to any of the other, they all have their pros and cons.
A) You mixed religion with faith. Anyone can believe in an all-powerful, benevolent deity off ineffable concept. And anyone can capitilize on your fears of hell, build a church and tell you if you don't give you burn. Try becoming a Pagan.
B) God doesn't answer to you. Any deity that could create a universe, planet, or Cher doesn't answer to you. He answers to him. What kind of arrogant slug do you need to believe to honestly think that a Supreme Being would say "He's unhappy about the way I do things, perhaps I should reconsider." He's not a President. You Americans think everything is a democracy. HE GIVES YOU LIFE, YOU WORSHIP EVEN IF IT MEANS YOUR EYES BLEED EVERYDAY.
C) God is ineffable. I don't believe in the Holy Roman Catholic Church, I don't believe in the Protestant Churches of Earth, I don't believe in any religion. The closest thing I have is a book and faith. Faith that there is a being there, faith that I am doing daily what he wishes of me as a servant of the all of everything.
D) Science is a way to explain our universe (and quite well actually, but not entirely) because we inherently are very curious. Is it perfect? Hell no, and it shouldn't be, we're imperfect, all we do is tainted. Are there things we'll never be able to explain? Perhaps, perhaps not. It doesn't say anywhere in the good book that we are never supposed to become as powerful as our God. We were made in his image after all.
E) I agree with some of what you have to say, but remember, you are a tiny speck of a mortal down here saying "It's just not fair, I know you gave me life and all, but I want you to make the world as I see fit, not as you see fit. Just because it's your creation doesn't mean you get to hog all the manipulation rights." Next time you're creating something uniquely yours and someone tries for a piece of the pie you may see how God feels when you bitch and moan like that.
Every job has a burnout rate. I would wager that 80% of the people in North America do their job because they can stand it and they need the money. 15% do it because they love it, and 5% don't need to because they're financially independant. 80% of the population looks forwards to Friday. That's 80% of about 280 million people (I'm discounting teenagers and youngins). Programming doesn't burn you out, your job does.
The CTO of Transgaming came to OCLUG to talk about Linux and gaming, and specifically about WineX. He's an ex-Corel employee who had worked a lot on the Wine code in the development of Wordperfect for Linux, and brought his expertise over to Transgaming.
He showed us a demo of the Sims (ran without a hitch) and talked to us about Wine being an implementation of Windows and not a Windows emulator, just so we'd know the difference. It was nice and all, but I kept wondering "Will this actually work?" So the night after, I compiled it and tried to install a non-copy-protected piece of software. This turns out to be very hard, as the install procedure is kind of strange, and they don't include some of the nice setup stuff by default that WineX has when you subscribe and grab an RPM.
So... what does this have to do with WineX 2.0? I recently subscribed to their web-services so I could get a copy of WineX to use on my girlfriend's Linux box so she could play any video games she owned when she ran Windows. I installed the RPM and tried to run the setup of The Sims (this should have worked) and it couldn't read the disc... hmmm...
So I figured, I'll wait til WineX 2.0 comes out after I tried every game we own and only had success with Starcraft. I hope this release is a good one, and I hope I can play Diablo II with it, but if I can't everyone will catch hell.:)
The subscription fee is pennies btw, $15.00USD for three months. Well worth it if the damn thing works.:)
You can put your CD and your DVD into your computer, which is why it's handy to have an online database to auto-lookup the details. It's hard to put my copy of Good Omens into my 3 1/2 inch floppy drive, and who the hell would want to type in an ISBN number? And who would even remember an ISBN number?:)
You are of course assuming that they want to keep growing trees instead of clear-cutting and making new IKEA coffee tables. Why use trees for anything natural and intended when you can build a machine to do it?
After you teach them the basics (navigating the filesystem, creating/editing/moving files) you should teach them the thing that takes most newbies a month to figure out (I mean really figure out) on their own. Compiling software. Now, this is not a small topic, it's a big one. If they wanted to install kdelibs from source, they would need qt, libxlst, libxml2, but they wouldn't know it.
The best thing you can do for a newbie is teach them how to find what they need to find to install or compile all the software they want. Start off with something simple like an Apache/PHP w/MySQL setup.
Give them the three tarballs (and they should know how to open them after the basics) and tell them to try to compile the three pieces of software together. With some tutoring they'll end up having something, more or less, working (hopefully) by reading README files and the INSTALL files after you've told them they use the configure script to start the ball rolling.
If they run into a rut, then you help them. Once they do get everything compiled together, get them on the path of figuring out how to install MySQL into/opt/mysql and apache in/services/www. This will have them reconfiguring and learning how all the flags work.
Finally, get them to install something that will rock their brains a bit. Once they realize that they're having a hard time, tell them where they can go to get libs, dependancies, etc. (freshmeat, rpmfind, etc.). Navigating the box is one thing, but knowing how to install software makes all the online docs suddenly make sense. Anyone have any comments about this approach?
I don't think the author should be surprised that it takes longer to compile KDE on higher end hardware these days, considering the fact that there's more included with KDE3 than there is with KDE 1.x. I sympathise with him, I compile KDE myself, but I would never complain about it because KDE 1.x didn't have half of the software, backbone, backend, frontend and power that KDE3 has. I appreciate that he wants to run something on his 133, but I had a 133 and I didn't even run KDE on it then, I ran WindowMaker cause hell, it was faster. I'll tell you something though, I've been doing a contract lately and working on a PII 233 with 128MB of RAM running Mandrake with KDE 2.2.2. Guess what? There isn't a massive speed difference between that and my PIII 800EB with 1/4GB of RAM. I run KMail, Konqueror, Cervisia, KDevelop, Quanta+ and many other great KDE applications on this "low end box" without a hitch. Everyone has to realize that if you used those kinds of apps under Windows95 or Windows98 on that hardware, you'd notice just as much of a speed problem. It has NOTHING to do with Linux, KDE or even GNOME for that matter. They'll all run slower, his opinion be damned.
I'm surprised he wasn't complaining about not being able to compile a Linux kernel on his 8088 or fit all the source for it on a 5 1/4 LD Floppy.
I installed this library and the anti-aliasing improvement has been incredible. I highly suggest this to everyone who uses KDE with anti-aliasing. I'm very pleased!
Isn't it legal to rip tracks from CDs that you own and record them onto other CDs? Isn't that like a mixed tape? Perhaps Disney should shoot themselves, they've clearly lost their mind. The question is, what did Apple really do to Disney to prompt this kind of bullshit response?
I can compare it if I wish. If I'm seeing, even on my fast box, a noticable difference between Galeon and Konqueror on several test sites then I would assume I would see the same noticable difference, even more so, on a lower end box. As long as I'm comparing everything on the same playing field, I can benchmark how I wish.
Ok, I don't want to get upset and this guy did do a decent comparison, but I have to argue with his evaluation of Konqueror. He talked about some problems/bugs in Konqueror under the RedHat 7.2 install. I totally agree with him, RedHat packaged it wrong. The KDE 2.2.1 RPMs for RedHat 7.2 (and even the updated 2.2.2 RPMs for 7.2) had problems. KHTML would just crash now and again (well, kio_http) for whatever reason. So I went and compiled KDE 2.2.2 on my system, and it's fine. Konqueror is perfectly normal. I have run tests on my own PIII 800EB w/256MB of RAM and have noticed something significant: Galeon does not run *faster* than Konqueror. I'm not sure how other people are getting this result.
Granted, Galeon is light years ahead of Mozilla in speed (Mozilla is after all based on the Netscape browser that everyone loves to hate) but it's not faster than Konqueror. I don't even want to think about how fast Konq/KHTML will be under 3.0 which is due in a couple of weeks. Another thing that bugs me is he went to all the trouble to download a copy of everything else but didn't even think to get a recent version of Konqueror. I'm not sure if his comparison was very objective.
I think what's more interesting is from a legal standpoint Napster was not distributing music on the internet. Napster was allowing their servers to be used by people who were. I think it's very tricky law. I also don't think that one judge should be expected to make it. But alas, it's not my country's law.
It's hard to find vision. It feels like managers these days are more concerned about their pocket than doing something great. I had a manager like this, he was giving me horrible projects, things that were not at all challenging. Then he pulled me into a meeting and asked me "why my heart wasn't into my work" and I plainly told him "Because I'm not doing anything interesting, not to mention not doing anything I was hired to do at all." Pretty much everything we talked about me doing while I was there ended up not being my domain. I ended up being asked to administer a small Windows network with some attached Solaris and Linux boxes. If you thought you were going to be developing and ended up setting up SNMP with Cricket or creating a backup solution for the managers emails to the number of friends he emailed during the day, your heart wouldn't be in it either. The corporate world is filled with people trying to play a game they don' understand anymore. We need fresh, young minds who want to succeed, not the guys who want to make a buck so they can take part of the day off.
Anyway, I'm doing contracting now because I *don't* like having a job.
I agree with what he said, but one part of it sort of creates a conflict in me.
I love the idea of cheap hardware. Buying a nice Intel box doesn't really hurt someone that much when they're buying a computer. I paid $1800.00 for the box I'm using now, and I've had it for more than a year. A PIII 800EB with 1/4GB of RAM goes a long way, and will generally last me quite a while. To get the equivalent in a Mac (at the time) it would have cost me about $3000.00. So... yes, it would be nice to have MacOSX on an Intel box, but I'll tell you why I wouldn't use it unless I had a Mac.
The hardware Macintosh sells is not only good, but it's fixed. When you buy a game for the Mac you don't think "I hope this game works with my hardware," cause it's a Mac. Of course it works with it, that's why you bought Mac hardware. The point is that you won't have to worry about hardware compatibility. With OSX you'll have to worry about software compatibility (I think, can someone clarify if MacOS 9 software will run on MacOSX?) but the hardware is given.
So, I've been thinking for a long time that I'd save up and buy a Mac. If they released MacOSX for Intel I wouldn't buy it, I'd save my money and buy a Mac. But maybe that's cause I've used a Commodore64, an Amiga and a Vic-20. I like hardware that software is pretty much guaranteed to work with.
"How bout I give you the finger, and you give me my fucking phone call. You can't scare me with this Gestapo crap, I know my rights."
;)
Re:Why I think Jon Katz articles are a Good Thing
on
Heart of the Net
·
· Score: 1
Trouble is I'm not a moron.:)
But seriously. Jon Katz is good for/. because he posts stuff for the rest of the population who aren't technically advantageous. And I agree that his heart is in the right place.
Another thing I notice about what John writes is that he tends to look at the big picture, as opposed to the minute parts of it. Good for Jon.
I also would like to add what you said in saying that Jon Katz talks about his opinions on/. He's not a reporter, he's more of a columnist. I don't agree with everything I hear from Dan Savage, but I don't think he's an idiot or an asshole (well, maybe that's not true about the asshole part). The way Jon sees things is the way most people probably see things, with a little bit of the in-the-know added to it. He's not entirely clueless, and his perceptions are good, so I think people ragging on Jon should realize that a lot of what/. is about is free speech. If you like free speech, don't bitch about Jon.
I would agree, you're right, fresh vegetables are very cheap. I can make a complete tomato sauce for $15.00, lasts me and my wife for ten dinners. I add veal, a low fat red meat, to it and it's a great tomato-meat sauce for $25.00. As for red meat, that's the only one I'll eat normally. I make a turkey every couple of weeks, and the left over meat makes two nights of canneloni, two nights of sandwiches (nice light meal) and one night of turkey soup. So that takes up most of my month, for about $85.00.
Ask yourself if most people know this. I have time to cook, cause I love to cook. But if you think that the average "American" is going to eat only vegetables, fish, and poultry you're crazy. Yes we need iron, but you don't need beef three nights a week. You don't need thick, fattening pastas either. So take a look at what the average Joe is buying.
He has a busy life, he's working 9 - 10 hours a day, and if not working those hours, he's working 8 and spending a couple picking up kids, or going out somewhere after work to do something or other. He doesn't have the time to spend to prepare canneloni for an hour. He puts a nukeable lasagna in the oven. He eats that, he's tired, it's 8pm, he just wants to watch Frasier, maybe some sports or a movie, and crash. This seems to be the consensus throughout many people I know.
What happens when you go to sleep after having a microwavable meal that wasn't self-prepared which contains (most likely) preservatives? You gain fat. You didn't excercise afterwards. Now you may try to work that off the next day during your lunch hour, but then you don't eat lunch and your metabolism is off, so you don't lose weight. Dieticians have told me just that. You have to eat three moderate meals or 6 micro meals a day to keep your metabolism ready to burn fat and build muscle.
And I didn't point out the conspiracy theory (which isn't really an intentional conspiracy, they just notice a trend, and play off of it). A U.S. economist, Paul Pilzer, who has published a book on the subject of good eating and the coming wellness industry, was talking about obesity in the U.S. at a function I attended. If you don't want to believe me, believe him. He's served under two past White House administrations. I'm sure he knows a lot more about economics, wellness, and the food industry than you do. Not to be offensive, but I know you couldn't help implying that I made up what I said, but I lean on his credibility as a highly-paid and highly-desired economist in the U.S.
You are right about the 98% of people who have no medical reason to be obese. But with the kind of food that's in grocery stores that's *not* fresh (it's arrogant to assume everyone buys fresh food, if we could do that we'd see the fresh food section grow much larger than it is now, and packaged food sections shrinking), lack of time on their hands because inflation and their shrinking spending capability requiring them to work long hours, or additional jobs. I posted a small amount of the picture, hoping it would help some people see the bigger one, and hoping that some people might look into it.
Actually, obesity is a plague running across North America and Europe right now. I'm about 40 pounds overweight, and losing it after figuring out a scary trend that's occurred.
I'm not sure if you've ever noticed, but in the past (<= 1850) wealthy people were recognizable because they were fat, because they had the money to eat food. Those who were gangly, thin, scrawny, were recognized as the poor, for the reciprocle reason. Nowadays, you'll see the wealthy working out, staying slim, trying to prolong their health for as long as possible. While obesity is much more common in poverty.
Why you ask? Because of the food industry. If you take a good look at the foods that are being fed to people off a grocery store shelf, you'll realize it's all junk. The cheapest foods, the one's most financially available, are the ones most likely to fatten you, without given you nutrients. They may taste good, but they're horrible for you, and give you enough to continue living.
This pays off well for the pharmecutical industry. Large drug companies make medications that will help you with your symptoms, and not your problems. So if you're malnourished they give you something that makes you feel better, but you're still malnourished. If you have acid reflux because you smoke, drink, and eat bad food, they give you Gaviscon or Zantac and say "This will stop the chest pains", so you can continue to smoke, drink and eat bad food.
So long as we continue to poison 1/2 of the race, I'm assuming that yes we'll not evolve, or at least very few of us will, and even then those of us who do won't know it.
I don't think you survived the dot-com boom unscathed because you spent six years in college, you were just in the right place at the right time. Don't you think it's a little arrogant to assume that everyone with a degree will get to keep their job and those without them won't? There are people without degrees who are far more talented than you may ever be, and I'm saying that without even knowing you, which is ballsy but justified.:)
Slashdot Mirror
I completely agree with you. You take a recent movie, _Wonder_Boys_ for example. It was probably one of my favourite movies of all time and no one went to see it both times they put it in the theatres.
Star Wars: EP II wasn't just competing against a huge blockbuster of a movie, it was competing against SPIDER-MAN. This is a character who's been in comic books for how long? Forty years? Spidey predates SW by a long shot, and it's certainly not surprising that many, young and old, would go see it. I was expecting it to be huge.
Episode II (excepting a rather bitchy/whiny Anakin) was a great movie, and has every right to boast. We got to see Clone Troopers kick the crap out of droids (and vice versa), we got to see Yoda get his force on, and let's face it, Ewan did a great Obi-Wan! Whena yousa thinkin' wesa bein' a good movie? Sure Lucas markets his stuff like a Jedi, but he's a great capitalist and I can respect that. I just think everyone's upset cause they want to buy the stuff. Your fault, not his.
Anyway, my favourite movie is still The Fellowship of the Ring. I've seen it 7 times and I'm going on 8. :)
Now, I'm Canadian, and the Canadian government hasn't shown a lot of real interest in Linux (although I do know a lot of departments are using it and don't know it) but I'm glad to see the Pentagon is expanding it's use (and hopefully will continue to).
If you've ever written some open source software, take the time to be thankful that your good idea is finally scaring the crap out of the folks in Redmond. That GIF of the Penguin squashing the MS compound is becoming more and more a reality. ;)
The whole of the movie before Yoda's battle was kinda cheesy, and was making me a little uneasy. But after Yoda's battle I haven't been able to get the image of a little green, spinning ball sporting a light sabre from here to Malistair. I imagined a lot of stuff when I thought of Yoda kicking some ass, but I never could have conceived this. The Dark Side and Obi Wan be damned, Yoda IS the force!
...I'm using RedHat 7.2 and I won't even update to 7.3. One major reason is gcc 2.96-RH. I've been considering Mandrake and SuSE in RedHat's stead because of the compiler itself, let alone other troubles I've had with RedHat. Besides, wouldn't it be a crossgrade? I don't consider RH, SuSE or Mandrake to be superior to any of the other, they all have their pros and cons.
B) God doesn't answer to you. Any deity that could create a universe, planet, or Cher doesn't answer to you. He answers to him. What kind of arrogant slug do you need to believe to honestly think that a Supreme Being would say "He's unhappy about the way I do things, perhaps I should reconsider." He's not a President. You Americans think everything is a democracy. HE GIVES YOU LIFE, YOU WORSHIP EVEN IF IT MEANS YOUR EYES BLEED EVERYDAY.
C) God is ineffable. I don't believe in the Holy Roman Catholic Church, I don't believe in the Protestant Churches of Earth, I don't believe in any religion. The closest thing I have is a book and faith. Faith that there is a being there, faith that I am doing daily what he wishes of me as a servant of the all of everything.
D) Science is a way to explain our universe (and quite well actually, but not entirely) because we inherently are very curious. Is it perfect? Hell no, and it shouldn't be, we're imperfect, all we do is tainted. Are there things we'll never be able to explain? Perhaps, perhaps not. It doesn't say anywhere in the good book that we are never supposed to become as powerful as our God. We were made in his image after all.
E) I agree with some of what you have to say, but remember, you are a tiny speck of a mortal down here saying "It's just not fair, I know you gave me life and all, but I want you to make the world as I see fit, not as you see fit. Just because it's your creation doesn't mean you get to hog all the manipulation rights." Next time you're creating something uniquely yours and someone tries for a piece of the pie you may see how God feels when you bitch and moan like that.
Every job has a burnout rate. I would wager that 80% of the people in North America do their job because they can stand it and they need the money. 15% do it because they love it, and 5% don't need to because they're financially independant. 80% of the population looks forwards to Friday. That's 80% of about 280 million people (I'm discounting teenagers and youngins). Programming doesn't burn you out, your job does.
He showed us a demo of the Sims (ran without a hitch) and talked to us about Wine being an implementation of Windows and not a Windows emulator, just so we'd know the difference. It was nice and all, but I kept wondering "Will this actually work?" So the night after, I compiled it and tried to install a non-copy-protected piece of software. This turns out to be very hard, as the install procedure is kind of strange, and they don't include some of the nice setup stuff by default that WineX has when you subscribe and grab an RPM.
So... what does this have to do with WineX 2.0? I recently subscribed to their web-services so I could get a copy of WineX to use on my girlfriend's Linux box so she could play any video games she owned when she ran Windows. I installed the RPM and tried to run the setup of The Sims (this should have worked) and it couldn't read the disc... hmmm...
So I figured, I'll wait til WineX 2.0 comes out after I tried every game we own and only had success with Starcraft. I hope this release is a good one, and I hope I can play Diablo II with it, but if I can't everyone will catch hell. :)
The subscription fee is pennies btw, $15.00USD for three months. Well worth it if the damn thing works. :)
You can put your CD and your DVD into your computer, which is why it's handy to have an online database to auto-lookup the details. It's hard to put my copy of Good Omens into my 3 1/2 inch floppy drive, and who the hell would want to type in an ISBN number? And who would even remember an ISBN number? :)
Long live particle-board! :)
The best thing you can do for a newbie is teach them how to find what they need to find to install or compile all the software they want. Start off with something simple like an Apache/PHP w/MySQL setup.
Give them the three tarballs (and they should know how to open them after the basics) and tell them to try to compile the three pieces of software together. With some tutoring they'll end up having something, more or less, working (hopefully) by reading README files and the INSTALL files after you've told them they use the configure script to start the ball rolling.
If they run into a rut, then you help them. Once they do get everything compiled together, get them on the path of figuring out how to install MySQL into /opt/mysql and apache in /services/www. This will have them reconfiguring and learning how all the flags work.
Finally, get them to install something that will rock their brains a bit. Once they realize that they're having a hard time, tell them where they can go to get libs, dependancies, etc. (freshmeat, rpmfind, etc.). Navigating the box is one thing, but knowing how to install software makes all the online docs suddenly make sense. Anyone have any comments about this approach?
I'm surprised he wasn't complaining about not being able to compile a Linux kernel on his 8088 or fit all the source for it on a 5 1/4 LD Floppy.
I installed this library and the anti-aliasing improvement has been incredible. I highly suggest this to everyone who uses KDE with anti-aliasing. I'm very pleased!
Isn't it legal to rip tracks from CDs that you own and record them onto other CDs? Isn't that like a mixed tape? Perhaps Disney should shoot themselves, they've clearly lost their mind. The question is, what did Apple really do to Disney to prompt this kind of bullshit response?
I can compare it if I wish. If I'm seeing, even on my fast box, a noticable difference between Galeon and Konqueror on several test sites then I would assume I would see the same noticable difference, even more so, on a lower end box. As long as I'm comparing everything on the same playing field, I can benchmark how I wish.
Granted, Galeon is light years ahead of Mozilla in speed (Mozilla is after all based on the Netscape browser that everyone loves to hate) but it's not faster than Konqueror. I don't even want to think about how fast Konq/KHTML will be under 3.0 which is due in a couple of weeks. Another thing that bugs me is he went to all the trouble to download a copy of everything else but didn't even think to get a recent version of Konqueror. I'm not sure if his comparison was very objective.
I think what's more interesting is from a legal standpoint Napster was not distributing music on the internet. Napster was allowing their servers to be used by people who were. I think it's very tricky law. I also don't think that one judge should be expected to make it. But alas, it's not my country's law.
Anyway, I'm doing contracting now because I *don't* like having a job.
I love the idea of cheap hardware. Buying a nice Intel box doesn't really hurt someone that much when they're buying a computer. I paid $1800.00 for the box I'm using now, and I've had it for more than a year. A PIII 800EB with 1/4GB of RAM goes a long way, and will generally last me quite a while. To get the equivalent in a Mac (at the time) it would have cost me about $3000.00. So... yes, it would be nice to have MacOSX on an Intel box, but I'll tell you why I wouldn't use it unless I had a Mac.
The hardware Macintosh sells is not only good, but it's fixed. When you buy a game for the Mac you don't think "I hope this game works with my hardware," cause it's a Mac. Of course it works with it, that's why you bought Mac hardware. The point is that you won't have to worry about hardware compatibility. With OSX you'll have to worry about software compatibility (I think, can someone clarify if MacOS 9 software will run on MacOSX?) but the hardware is given.
So, I've been thinking for a long time that I'd save up and buy a Mac. If they released MacOSX for Intel I wouldn't buy it, I'd save my money and buy a Mac. But maybe that's cause I've used a Commodore64, an Amiga and a Vic-20. I like hardware that software is pretty much guaranteed to work with.
But seriously. Jon Katz is good for /. because he posts stuff for the rest of the population who aren't technically advantageous. And I agree that his heart is in the right place.
Another thing I notice about what John writes is that he tends to look at the big picture, as opposed to the minute parts of it. Good for Jon.
I also would like to add what you said in saying that Jon Katz talks about his opinions on /. He's not a reporter, he's more of a columnist. I don't agree with everything I hear from Dan Savage, but I don't think he's an idiot or an asshole (well, maybe that's not true about the asshole part). The way Jon sees things is the way most people probably see things, with a little bit of the in-the-know added to it. He's not entirely clueless, and his perceptions are good, so I think people ragging on Jon should realize that a lot of what /. is about is free speech. If you like free speech, don't bitch about Jon.
Ask yourself if most people know this. I have time to cook, cause I love to cook. But if you think that the average "American" is going to eat only vegetables, fish, and poultry you're crazy. Yes we need iron, but you don't need beef three nights a week. You don't need thick, fattening pastas either. So take a look at what the average Joe is buying.
He has a busy life, he's working 9 - 10 hours a day, and if not working those hours, he's working 8 and spending a couple picking up kids, or going out somewhere after work to do something or other. He doesn't have the time to spend to prepare canneloni for an hour. He puts a nukeable lasagna in the oven. He eats that, he's tired, it's 8pm, he just wants to watch Frasier, maybe some sports or a movie, and crash. This seems to be the consensus throughout many people I know.
What happens when you go to sleep after having a microwavable meal that wasn't self-prepared which contains (most likely) preservatives? You gain fat. You didn't excercise afterwards. Now you may try to work that off the next day during your lunch hour, but then you don't eat lunch and your metabolism is off, so you don't lose weight. Dieticians have told me just that. You have to eat three moderate meals or 6 micro meals a day to keep your metabolism ready to burn fat and build muscle.
And I didn't point out the conspiracy theory (which isn't really an intentional conspiracy, they just notice a trend, and play off of it). A U.S. economist, Paul Pilzer, who has published a book on the subject of good eating and the coming wellness industry, was talking about obesity in the U.S. at a function I attended. If you don't want to believe me, believe him. He's served under two past White House administrations. I'm sure he knows a lot more about economics, wellness, and the food industry than you do. Not to be offensive, but I know you couldn't help implying that I made up what I said, but I lean on his credibility as a highly-paid and highly-desired economist in the U.S.
You are right about the 98% of people who have no medical reason to be obese. But with the kind of food that's in grocery stores that's *not* fresh (it's arrogant to assume everyone buys fresh food, if we could do that we'd see the fresh food section grow much larger than it is now, and packaged food sections shrinking), lack of time on their hands because inflation and their shrinking spending capability requiring them to work long hours, or additional jobs. I posted a small amount of the picture, hoping it would help some people see the bigger one, and hoping that some people might look into it.
I'm not sure if you've ever noticed, but in the past (<= 1850) wealthy people were recognizable because they were fat, because they had the money to eat food. Those who were gangly, thin, scrawny, were recognized as the poor, for the reciprocle reason. Nowadays, you'll see the wealthy working out, staying slim, trying to prolong their health for as long as possible. While obesity is much more common in poverty.
Why you ask? Because of the food industry. If you take a good look at the foods that are being fed to people off a grocery store shelf, you'll realize it's all junk. The cheapest foods, the one's most financially available, are the ones most likely to fatten you, without given you nutrients. They may taste good, but they're horrible for you, and give you enough to continue living.
This pays off well for the pharmecutical industry. Large drug companies make medications that will help you with your symptoms, and not your problems. So if you're malnourished they give you something that makes you feel better, but you're still malnourished. If you have acid reflux because you smoke, drink, and eat bad food, they give you Gaviscon or Zantac and say "This will stop the chest pains", so you can continue to smoke, drink and eat bad food.
So long as we continue to poison 1/2 of the race, I'm assuming that yes we'll not evolve, or at least very few of us will, and even then those of us who do won't know it.
I don't think you survived the dot-com boom unscathed because you spent six years in college, you were just in the right place at the right time. Don't you think it's a little arrogant to assume that everyone with a degree will get to keep their job and those without them won't? There are people without degrees who are far more talented than you may ever be, and I'm saying that without even knowing you, which is ballsy but justified. :)