Except that AT & T was not a free market corporation. They had substantial government support and regulation.
So you think the gov't MADE AT&T charge MORE money by regulating it? Funny, last time I checked regulated utilities, they had to ask permission to raise rates.
No, Russia today is closer to feudalism than capitalism. Capitalism is characterized by secure property rights, strong punishment of crimes, and minimal government. Russia doesn't meet any of these criteria. They still have a large government, and government agents routinely harrass and demand bribes from businesses. Russia isn't a Capitalist economy in any sense of the word.
Well, I'd think that being able to buy a government official is a form of lassez-faire capitalism;-)
Seriously, in Russia there is an environment where there is little government regulation of what companies do. When someone does want to regulate an industry, money makes the regulation go away. Can you point to any country in any era where similar things did not happen when the government was weak? I've yet to hear of a country where the people have said, "The government is powerless! Let's all obey the natural moral laws of property rights!" In that situation, the only law is the law of the jungle. Randians wish it weren't so, but it is.
Because (unless they have help from the government) governments can't throw you in jail. They can't force people to pay for their "services." They can't pass regulations about all aspects of your life. Plus, the government is a couple of orders of magnitude larger than the biggest corporations. A large corporation has anual revenue measured in the tens of billions of dollars. The federal government spends $2 trillion a year.
Corporations may not be able to throw you in jail, but they can make your life a living hell. Ask Jeffery Wigand sometime. Would you like to have the resources of, say, Microsoft or GE or B&W focused on digging up all of the dirt on your life? Perhaps you could cheeze off Rupert Murdoch and he could then use the reporters on his various newspapers to dig through the info, and then broadcast it on his various networks. I'd wager that more people listen to the voices coming from Rupert Murdoch's various media holdings than listen to the Pope. No power there, eh?
Companies can pass regulations about all aspects of your life. There are planned communities in the US which operate just that way. Disney owns one near Disney Land in Florida. Before the nefarious government broke up some of the large trusts in the early part of this century, there were "company towns" where employees lived. The law of the town was what the company wanted. All of the products which could be sold were dictated by the company (and went to enrich company coffers). And when people would go on strike, they'd hire goons to beat the daylights out of the workers. All of this from one of your highly moral monopolies. Put down "Atlas Shrugged" and pick up a history book if you don't believe me.
As for the amount of money that the gov't spends, I don't see how that enters into the question I asked. Why is a corporation inherently a more moral organization than a government?
The issue *is* whether the government has the right to interfere in the free market and punish successful companies for being "too competitive."
The government can interefere with the free market in the US all it wants; it's the government. And the gov't "intereferes" all the time, mostly for the benefit of everyone. I'm a big fan of things like the Pure Food and Drug Act. Think how many fewer "seal babies" there would have been if the Europeans were as tough as the FDA when it came to Thalidomyde.
Anyone who likes paying 5 cents/minute for long distance (vs. the 50 cents+/minute paid in the 70s) should be kissing the butt of the government for helping to arrange the breakup of AT&T. Bet you didn't know at the time of the breakup how cheap a phone call could be...
If you want to see a country where capitalism is unfettered by the government, take a look at Russia these days. It's a libertarian paradise, isn't it?
And as a by-the-by, why is it that the same people who think that big government is inherently evil think that big business is inherently good? Could it be that maybe, just maybe, any sort of large organization is bound to abuse its power, whether a government or a corporation?
I recently wrote an app that needed non-blocking I/O. I had to implement it with Threads. There was no other option. If MacOS doesn't have threads, I don't see them porting any time soon.
Sigh. Threads aren't the problem.
Mac OS has threads. Cooperative ones. That's perfectly fine, under the JVM spec.
Mac OS has a port of JDK 1.1.8 (MRJ 2.1.4). The Java2 port has been a long time coming, but Apple demoed some early work in May. They ran some Java2D demos incredibly fast (something like 5x faster than comparable WinTel hardware).
What's taking Apple so long is that Java2 is a complex beast. They probably have fewer than a dozen people working on MRJ, and they are building it for two platforms (Mac OS and OSX). Compare that to Sun, which has hundreds, or to IBM (thousands probably). Also note that IBM has yet to release a production Java2 VM for ANY of its platforms (AIX is in beta).
This is one thing that the Mac has gotten right since the dawn of popular Internet usage. Stairways software developed Internet Config, which (among other useful features) lets you specify your preferred program for various protocols. Apple hired one of the Stairways people and integrated Internet Config into the OS.
So, I click on a "mailto" URL in a browser and my mail program opens up. I see an http URL in my email and it opens up in my brower of choice du jour. Other protocols are also supported, but those are the biggies.
With a couple of different extensions I can even click on a URL in any document and have it open up in the right app. There's no way this is a worse solution than repeating the same functionality poorly in multiple programs. Programs that work together are a Good Thing.
There are only 2 real reasons why you'd use Netscape on a mac or win platform.
Here's a reason: IE 4.5/Mac doesn't render/. correctly! Netscape 4.7 is fine.
Maybe IE5.0/Mac will show up in January and fix this...and give XML/XSL/CSS2 support. Maybe.
If there aren't any standards compliant Mac browsers soon, using a Mac on-line is going to be pointless. Jobs needs to kiss Bill Gates' butt a little more...
I think the judge is very important here. It shows that a conservative judge still thinks that MS is guilty (judging from the tone of his finding of facts). Do you think that a responsible administration SHOULDN'T persue a company that breaks the law? Oh, I understand. You only want the laws that YOU like to be prosecuted.
I think that any government offical who isn't on MS' payroll is going to keep this case alive. MS has done Bad Things to ensure that they kept their monopoly. Bill Gates has probably committed perjury (if you think Bill Clinton was lying under oath, there should be no doubt in your mind). This is not an innocent company that is being targeted by the evil government.
What if something like the Y2K bug is a plot to make us turn to the government to help, and then they seize total control?
Total Control? As opposed to the limited control the US Government has now? By definition, the government is in total control. If they weren't, they wouldn't be governing.
As for fear of the Y2K bug being a government plot, there would have to have been a LOT of people in on this plot, and none of them have broken yet! Amazing! Remember, never attribute to malice what can be explained with stupidity. Y2K is the result of incredible managerial short-sightedness, nothing more.
Is Eschelon a Bad Thing? Yeah, because governments are made of people, and it's inevitable that someone is going to abuse the system. Right now, that's far more likely (probability approaching 1, if the contract story mentioned by the BBC report is true) than the US government going Fascist. It's the same problem with Key Escrow for encryption: who guards the guardians. The Romans knew this 2000 years ago.
Now put back on your aluminum hat so that Eschelon can't read your brain waves.
This is _totally_ not true! I have a hard time understanding why you would write something like this unless you have something against judaisim.
Um, I'm Jewish, so I don't have anything against Judaism;-)
Fact 1: By Jewish law a man is required to have at least a boy and a girl (i.e. keep trying till succesfull).
I belive I said this. Apologies if this wasn't clear
Fact 2: Birth control is not permited by jewish law.
Which halachic authority are you citing for this? Take a look at This site for the standard orthodox opinion.
Fact 3: Having sex during the time when a woman menustrates till 5 days after she stops is not permitted (i.e. 2 weeks on, 2 off) - if this bothers you, you'll be interested to know that Jewish men have the most sexual encounters of all other groups during the course of thier lives. In addition sex is almost required after the 5 days are over.
While I don't know anything about this study, yes, the no sex rules you outlined are true. I don't know what this has to do with population control, though, other than Jews aren't supposed to have sex during the time when a woman is least fertile.
Fact 4: By Jewish law _only_ physical damage counts - psychological does not. The reason physical harm counts is that the baby is considered as an attacker, and the mother can use "self defence". In no other cases is abortion allowed.
The "rodef" argument has been applied by Beit Dins for psychological reasons. For example, Israel will allow abortions for teenaged girls. Considering that teenaged girls are perfectly able to deliver normally (and a rather large percentage of them did give birth less than a century ago in Western nations), it can't be for physical reasons.
(for the goyim in the audience: "rodef" means intruder; under Jewish law, you are allowed to kill an intruder who seeks to do you harm. A "Beit Din" is a religious court which is usually composed of 3 rabbis.)
Fact 5: Jews consider life to begin 30 days after the baby is concieved.
Untrue. Please cite your halachic source for this. You do not sit shiva for a stillbirth. Life begins when the head passes out of the birth canal and you can start breathing. Life ends when you stop breathing (feather test or fogged mirror test). It's that "breath of life" idea.
There might be some orthodox sects which agree with your interpretations, but I certainly don't recognize their authority, and neither do most Jews, or for that matter, the State of Israel.
From what I've seen--and I'm sure the experts can enlighten all of us further--merely getting javac to function(got everything in the right folder? Got your path environment set right? Sacrifice the correct barnyard animal?), then executing that Java app(better nuke the henhouse just to be sure) is far beyond the difficulty in even writing a simple Hello World!
I'll play the expert for this one.
First of all, if you run the installer, it'll set up your environment so you can just type "java" at a command prompt to invoke the JDK.
Secondly, starting with Java2 (which was released nearly a year ago), you could specify the starting class in your.jar file's manifest, as well as any other.jars which are needed (and optionally, where to download them from if they aren't on the local system). Any decent Java IDE will build all of this for you automatically. I happen to prefer CodeWarrior.
So, with the latest JDK, you can run a Java program by typing:
java -jar foo.jar
That's it.
The fact that code never compiled into a single file didn't help either--web deployment was a mess, with forty web server connections for a single semi-useful app. JAR finally fixed this, but THAT standard got mangled by CABs.
um,.zip files fixed this in 1.0. Only MS uses.CAB, and their Java support is basically dead. There are a few dozen IDEs out there for Java now, and the vast majority of them can build direct to.jar files.
I get the sneaking feeling that you are thinking of Java for applets. Applets are perhaps the WORST use of Java around. Enterprise apps and embedded apps is where Java's at.
Things have gotten better--J++ and the MS VM have been instrumental in this regard--but the core usability of Java is farrrrr less than VB, and even less than C.
No serious company is using MS' Java tools. They don't support standards, and they haven't been updated in a LONG time. The IBM JVMs (and recent Sun JVMs) are faster on Win32 than the MS JVM.
C I can understand. Java, likewise. Not only is Java new, the API keeps changing. There's virtually no relationship between one version and the next.
(Even for the Swing toolkit, which being new, you'd have thought Sun would standardise between 1.1 and 1.2... no way! It's in javax for one and java.swing in the other. During the betas, it's also been in java.awt.swing.)
Um, no.
The Java API has been very stable. The class file format hasn't changed since 1.0. The only changes to the virtual machine spec (besides clarifications) are the addition of strictfp and widefp in 1.2. The addition of inner classes required a change to the language spec (and the compiler), but not the JVM itself. It was an excellent addition, BTW.
Upcoming Java releases will support generic programming (templates). Once again, there will be NO changes to the JVM spec itself; the language spec and the compiler are being modified.
What has happened is that the class libraries have grown a great deal. All of the old functionality is still there; if you want to write a program using the 1.0 event model, go right ahead. Backwards compatibility has been kept. This isn't any different from any other platform; the shared libraries grow and change over time, while backwards compatibility is preserved with old versions of the libs.
The Swing changes you mention are BS. At some point, it was com.sun.java.swing.* (1.0, I think). You can get a javax.swing.* package for 1.1 (which actually is more up-to-date than the version of Swing for 1.2!). Sun made this change to follow their own conventions for naming packages; it wasn't capricious.
To change a program from the com.sun.java.swing.* packages to the javax.swing.* packages requires a grep. BFD.
. If you ran C++ on an OO-based processor, it might actually have an advantage.
Now I know that you are clueless. Please explain to me what an "OO-based processor" is. Supply some examples.
BTW, did you know that the entire population of the world could fit comfortably into an area the size of Texas with room to spare?
I've heard this before, and I still don't believe it to be true.
People use LOTS of resources. People need to have things like garbage and waste removed. Can you design an efficient machine (a city is a machine of sorts) which can distribute resources (food, water, clothing, fuel) to 6 billion people in Texas and remove the trash (and sewage)? NYC, which is a decently spread-out city (across 3 islands and the mainland of NY) can't find room for its garbage. It has to remove 20,000 TONS each DAY. How could your Texas-sized city remove that garbage on-time to prevent a serious health hazzard?
Would you care to police this mess? Crowding makes people do crazy things. People need space.
The doomsayers might be wrong, but the reason why the doomsayers are wrong is that they scared people into doing something. We worry that oil is running out, so we develop better techniques to find and extract oil. We worry that food is running out, so money is poured into genetically engineered foods. The reason why Y2K won't be a big deal is that people got worried and tested and/or fixed all of the important systems.
If you want to see a society which had no doomsayers, take a look at Russia. No one was allowed to question the asinine decisions made by the leadership, no one ever explored any "What ifs" and you get the mess you see now. God bless the nuts who make us worry.
Unfortunately, all this continues to be taken as "God wants us to keep making more people!" *sigh* How about providing for the ones we HAVE, first??
See, this isn't quite right.
Observant Jews count 613 commandments in the Torah, and the first one is "Be Fruitful and Multiply." However, the Rabbis said that once a couple had both a boy and a girl, it was OK to use birth control (as effective as it was pre-oral contraceptive). Controlling population and not breeding like rabbits (or yeast) was considered OK by Jews long ago.
As an aside, abortion is also allowed in Jewish law, when the birth of the child would do physical or psychological damage to the mother. Jews don't consider life to begin until birth.
Now Christians are rediscovering these exact same concepts, and they think these are new ideas. As in so many other things, it takes Christians an additional millenium or so to catch up to Judaism;-)
Sure, CD's boot, but it's not an easy to task to make yourself a boot disk (read: rescue disk, on hand for the day you fsck your kernel). Which is easier to make? A CD-R that's bootable, or a floppy disk? They make a nice fallback =)
Obviously you've never used a Mac.
All Macs can boot off of CD-ROMs, Zip Disks, Jaz disks, etc. The only current limitation is you can't boot from a FireWire drive (USB booting support has recently been added), and that should be ready pretty soon.
My emergency boot disk is a Zip disk. Iomega Tools for the Mac comes with a big button that says "CREATE RESCUE DISK." It copies the parts of your system that you need to a Zip disk, and puts on a copy of Disk First Aid (or whatever recovery program you like). It's hard to make it any easier to build a boot disk than (1) Insert Zip disk and (2) press button in Zip Tools.
PC hardware is very icky, I agree, but Mac hardware design is hardly saintly. See here for details.
Um, that's a link to the OLD M68K Linux. We're talking 10 year old machines (my SE/30 turns 10 in December). That stuff wasn't so great, but considering that Apple was getting a very responsive GUI working on a machine with less horsepower than my Palm IIIx, I'm impressed.
New Mac hardware is much cleaner. And getting the iBook to boot Linux means that the new iMac and the high-end G4 should be pretty easy; they all use virtually the same motherboard (Apple's new Unified Motherboard Architecure or UMA). The only difference between models is FireWire support, the speed/bus width/RAM on the RAGE 128, and ATA/33 or ATA/66 support.
From what I can tell, the current Mac architecture kicks some serious butt.
Remember Bristol? They used to make (and I think they still do) a MFC compatibility library for UNIX. They ported IE3 to UNIX, and it was a disaster, so MS yanked their licence. Bristol took MS to court and won, so I think they have their license back. Anyway, MS turned around and licenced MainSoft with their technology, and Mainsoft is now making the MFC compatibility library.
Except that this is completely untrue. I did a little research (anyone remember search engines?) and found out that:
Bristol sued MS because MS wanted to renegotiate the contract. Bristol charged them with anti-trust, saying that MS didn't want people to port software to UNIX, now that NT had significant server market penetration
Bristol LOST. See this page for MS' spin on the loss. Bristol's site is strangely silent on the outcome of the case. No press release, and only one link to a story in a newspaper about it (and I can't get the link to load).
-jon
Re:Q3Demo - Ibaibaibaibaiba...
on
No Next Q3Test
·
· Score: 1
Figure out how to use that mezzanine slot to use a V2 card? I'm sure Apple would like to know how you got one in there considering that there are no PCI slots.
It's not a secret; there's a company that's been selling V2 upgrades (via the Mezzanine slot) for the original iMacs for a while. They went out of business and the line was recently picked up by another company.
If I slip the cop who pulls me over for speeding a twenty dollar bill when I hand him my licence, hoping to get out of a hundred dollar ticket, that's bribery. Why is it any different if I slip the mayor (or a mayoral candidate) twenty thousand dollars in campain contributions in hopes that he'll veto a law that's going to fine my factory a hundred thousand dollars for pollution violations?
Because in the first case, you've broken a law that already exists while in the second case you're trying to prevent something from becoming a law. There's a huge difference there.
Not that I think that being able to buy elections is a good thing, but I can't think of any solution that isn't worse than (or as bad as) the problem.
Why? How so? I've never seen or heard that CodeWarrior was aimed at hobbies programmers? I've never used it, but I was under the impression that it was a tool as serious as all the others, suitable for professional development. This claim sounds kind of funny.
For the last, oh, 3 or 4 years, Metrowerks has been selling "Discover Programming for Macintosh" and "Discover Programming for Windows" has been around for a few years now, too. These are copies of CodeWarrior intended for hobbiests. The restrictions are: -No cross-compilation tools (Pro can build Win32 from the Mac compiler and PPC/68K from the Win32 compiler) -No commercial distribution (this restriction is in licence only) -No PPC compilation (for the Mac product) For about $70US, you get Pascal, C, C++, and Java, as well as a bunch of "How-To" books on CD-ROM. It's a really good deal.
The GNU edition of CW for Linux seems to be along the same lines. Makes sense to me.
1 - I want Apple to FORGET Carbon, forget Java in yellowbox -er Cocoa. And ship the technology they HAVE, excuse me, HAD a year ago. They're delaying it to polish Carbon integration, and converting Cocoa over so you can code in Java instead of Objective-C, which, IMO, is complete excrement.
If Apple wants to attract programmers, it should expose its interfaces via languages that most programmers use. There has to be a 10,000:1 ratio of Java programmers to Objective-C programmers.
And the difference between OSX Server and OSX is a LOT more than Carbon/Cocoa. There's a different interface (Apple is porting the Finder to a new OS). There's the small matter of porting ColorSync and AppleScript. There's a completely new graphics system (built on PDF) that remove the royalty-laden (and never-upgraded) Display PostScript.
2 - Yes, but why can't they unbundle the ATI cards, and say, hey, if you want to BTO a box on our site, we'll ship you a box w/o this substandard peice of crap (well, my big gripe is with ATI's drivers), and you can order one from a third party, or hey, we'll ship you a Doodoo 3 with our outrageous markup (which would still be preferable to paying the outrageous markup for the ATI crap which would just get chucked anyway).
Apple is NEVER going to unbundle those ATI cards. The entire goal of their product line is simplicity. It makes products cheaper, and it makes it easier for consumers to understand what they're buying. Giving the rare case (you) greater choice means making everything more expensive for everyone else. Sounds like poor economics to me.
5b - OS 9 kills ATM. Same reason I'm not going to buy OS 9. If I'm going to have to pay Adobe several hundred to upgrade my ancient copy of ATM Deluxe which works FINE on 8.6, then I'll wait until OS X comes out and breaks it again, so I don't have to pay for two ATM upgrades in 1 year. Perhaps this was technically unavoidable.
Turns out that ATM 3.9 works fine with OS 9. If Adobe releases crappy software, this is Apple's fault?
Call me skeptical, but I firmly refuse to believe that you could shove anything into a space as small as the speaker ports on an iMac and have it sound good. Apple apparently disagrees with me, though, saying it "stands the world of PC sound on its ear."
Bose Acoustimass.
I'd imagine that Harmon/Kardon (who build the iMac sound system) could do a decent job, too. The trick (if I remember correctly) is the distance the air travels, so with enough baffles, you could certainly do it in a case the size of an iMac.
I am kind of puzzled why they didn't debut a set of additional speakers for the full serround effect, But I'm sure some fast USB periferal maker will jump on the opertunity soon ennough.
Check out This site. It looks like there are plenty more speakers from H/K.
I am kind of puzzled why they didn't debut a set of additional speakers for the full serround effect, But I'm sure some fast USB periferal maker will jump on the opertunity soon ennough.
Check out This site. It looks like there are plenty more speakers from H/K.
Slashdot Mirror
So you think the gov't MADE AT&T charge MORE money by regulating it? Funny, last time I checked regulated utilities, they had to ask permission to raise rates.
No, Russia today is closer to feudalism than capitalism. Capitalism is characterized by secure property rights, strong punishment of crimes, and minimal government. Russia doesn't meet any of these criteria. They still have a large government, and government agents routinely harrass and demand bribes from businesses. Russia isn't a Capitalist economy in any sense of the word.
Well, I'd think that being able to buy a government official is a form of lassez-faire capitalism ;-)
Seriously, in Russia there is an environment where there is little government regulation of what companies do. When someone does want to regulate an industry, money makes the regulation go away. Can you point to any country in any era where similar things did not happen when the government was weak? I've yet to hear of a country where the people have said, "The government is powerless! Let's all obey the natural moral laws of property rights!" In that situation, the only law is the law of the jungle. Randians wish it weren't so, but it is.
Because (unless they have help from the government) governments can't throw you in jail. They can't force people to pay for their "services." They can't pass regulations about all aspects of your life. Plus, the government is a couple of orders of magnitude larger than the biggest corporations. A large corporation has anual revenue measured in the tens of billions of dollars. The federal government spends $2 trillion a year.
Corporations may not be able to throw you in jail, but they can make your life a living hell. Ask Jeffery Wigand sometime. Would you like to have the resources of, say, Microsoft or GE or B&W focused on digging up all of the dirt on your life? Perhaps you could cheeze off Rupert Murdoch and he could then use the reporters on his various newspapers to dig through the info, and then broadcast it on his various networks. I'd wager that more people listen to the voices coming from Rupert Murdoch's various media holdings than listen to the Pope. No power there, eh?
Companies can pass regulations about all aspects of your life. There are planned communities in the US which operate just that way. Disney owns one near Disney Land in Florida. Before the nefarious government broke up some of the large trusts in the early part of this century, there were "company towns" where employees lived. The law of the town was what the company wanted. All of the products which could be sold were dictated by the company (and went to enrich company coffers). And when people would go on strike, they'd hire goons to beat the daylights out of the workers. All of this from one of your highly moral monopolies. Put down "Atlas Shrugged" and pick up a history book if you don't believe me.
As for the amount of money that the gov't spends, I don't see how that enters into the question I asked. Why is a corporation inherently a more moral organization than a government?
-jon
The issue *is* whether the government has the right to interfere in the free market and punish successful companies for being "too competitive."
The government can interefere with the free market in the US all it wants; it's the government. And the gov't "intereferes" all the time, mostly for the benefit of everyone. I'm a big fan of things like the Pure Food and Drug Act. Think how many fewer "seal babies" there would have been if the Europeans were as tough as the FDA when it came to Thalidomyde.
Anyone who likes paying 5 cents/minute for long distance (vs. the 50 cents+/minute paid in the 70s) should be kissing the butt of the government for helping to arrange the breakup of AT&T. Bet you didn't know at the time of the breakup how cheap a phone call could be...
If you want to see a country where capitalism is unfettered by the government, take a look at Russia these days. It's a libertarian paradise, isn't it?
And as a by-the-by, why is it that the same people who think that big government is inherently evil think that big business is inherently good? Could it be that maybe, just maybe, any sort of large organization is bound to abuse its power, whether a government or a corporation?
-jon
Sigh. Threads aren't the problem.
Mac OS has threads. Cooperative ones. That's perfectly fine, under the JVM spec.
Mac OS has a port of JDK 1.1.8 (MRJ 2.1.4). The Java2 port has been a long time coming, but Apple demoed some early work in May. They ran some Java2D demos incredibly fast (something like 5x faster than comparable WinTel hardware).
What's taking Apple so long is that Java2 is a complex beast. They probably have fewer than a dozen people working on MRJ, and they are building it for two platforms (Mac OS and OSX). Compare that to Sun, which has hundreds, or to IBM (thousands probably). Also note that IBM has yet to release a production Java2 VM for ANY of its platforms (AIX is in beta).
-jon
And they are still a crappy idea.
This is one thing that the Mac has gotten right since the dawn of popular Internet usage. Stairways software developed Internet Config, which (among other useful features) lets you specify your preferred program for various protocols. Apple hired one of the Stairways people and integrated Internet Config into the OS.
So, I click on a "mailto" URL in a browser and my mail program opens up. I see an http URL in my email and it opens up in my brower of choice du jour. Other protocols are also supported, but those are the biggies.
With a couple of different extensions I can even click on a URL in any document and have it open up in the right app. There's no way this is a worse solution than repeating the same functionality poorly in multiple programs. Programs that work together are a Good Thing.
-jon
Here's a reason: IE 4.5/Mac doesn't render /. correctly! Netscape 4.7 is fine.
Maybe IE5.0/Mac will show up in January and fix this...and give XML/XSL/CSS2 support. Maybe.
If there aren't any standards compliant Mac browsers soon, using a Mac on-line is going to be pointless. Jobs needs to kiss Bill Gates' butt a little more...
-jon
-jon
I think that any government offical who isn't on MS' payroll is going to keep this case alive. MS has done Bad Things to ensure that they kept their monopoly. Bill Gates has probably committed perjury (if you think Bill Clinton was lying under oath, there should be no doubt in your mind). This is not an innocent company that is being targeted by the evil government.
-jon
Well, gee, except you can't vote a federal judge out of office. They're appointed for life.
Oh, and Regan appointed Judge Jackson to the bench.
-jon
Total Control? As opposed to the limited control the US Government has now? By definition, the government is in total control. If they weren't, they wouldn't be governing.
As for fear of the Y2K bug being a government plot, there would have to have been a LOT of people in on this plot, and none of them have broken yet! Amazing! Remember, never attribute to malice what can be explained with stupidity. Y2K is the result of incredible managerial short-sightedness, nothing more.
Is Eschelon a Bad Thing? Yeah, because governments are made of people, and it's inevitable that someone is going to abuse the system. Right now, that's far more likely (probability approaching 1, if the contract story mentioned by the BBC report is true) than the US government going Fascist. It's the same problem with Key Escrow for encryption: who guards the guardians. The Romans knew this 2000 years ago.
Now put back on your aluminum hat so that Eschelon can't read your brain waves.
-jon
Um, I'm Jewish, so I don't have anything against Judaism ;-)
Fact 1: By Jewish law a man is required to have at least a boy and a girl (i.e. keep trying till succesfull).
I belive I said this. Apologies if this wasn't clear
Fact 2: Birth control is not permited by jewish law.
Which halachic authority are you citing for this? Take a look at This site for the standard orthodox opinion.
Fact 3: Having sex during the time when a woman menustrates till 5 days after she stops is not permitted (i.e. 2 weeks on, 2 off) - if this bothers you, you'll be interested to know that Jewish men have the most sexual encounters of all other groups during the course of thier lives. In addition sex is almost required after the 5 days are over.
While I don't know anything about this study, yes, the no sex rules you outlined are true. I don't know what this has to do with population control, though, other than Jews aren't supposed to have sex during the time when a woman is least fertile.
Fact 4: By Jewish law _only_ physical damage counts - psychological does not. The reason physical harm counts is that the baby is considered as an attacker, and the mother can use "self defence". In no other cases is abortion allowed.
The "rodef" argument has been applied by Beit Dins for psychological reasons. For example, Israel will allow abortions for teenaged girls. Considering that teenaged girls are perfectly able to deliver normally (and a rather large percentage of them did give birth less than a century ago in Western nations), it can't be for physical reasons.
(for the goyim in the audience: "rodef" means intruder; under Jewish law, you are allowed to kill an intruder who seeks to do you harm. A "Beit Din" is a religious court which is usually composed of 3 rabbis.)
Fact 5: Jews consider life to begin 30 days after the baby is concieved.
Untrue. Please cite your halachic source for this. You do not sit shiva for a stillbirth. Life begins when the head passes out of the birth canal and you can start breathing. Life ends when you stop breathing (feather test or fogged mirror test). It's that "breath of life" idea.
There might be some orthodox sects which agree with your interpretations, but I certainly don't recognize their authority, and neither do most Jews, or for that matter, the State of Israel.
-jon
I'll play the expert for this one.
First of all, if you run the installer, it'll set up your environment so you can just type "java" at a command prompt to invoke the JDK.
Secondly, starting with Java2 (which was released nearly a year ago), you could specify the starting class in your .jar file's manifest, as well as any other .jars which are needed (and optionally, where to download them from if they aren't on the local system). Any decent Java IDE will build all of this for you automatically. I happen to prefer CodeWarrior.
So, with the latest JDK, you can run a Java program by typing:
java -jar foo.jar
That's it.
The fact that code never compiled into a single file didn't help either--web deployment was a mess, with forty web server connections for a single semi-useful app. JAR finally fixed this, but THAT standard got mangled by CABs.
um, .zip files fixed this in 1.0. Only MS uses .CAB, and their Java support is basically dead. There are a few dozen IDEs out there for Java now, and the vast majority of them can build direct to .jar files.
I get the sneaking feeling that you are thinking of Java for applets. Applets are perhaps the WORST use of Java around. Enterprise apps and embedded apps is where Java's at.
Things have gotten better--J++ and the MS VM have been instrumental in this regard--but the core usability of Java is farrrrr less than VB, and even less than C.
No serious company is using MS' Java tools. They don't support standards, and they haven't been updated in a LONG time. The IBM JVMs (and recent Sun JVMs) are faster on Win32 than the MS JVM.
-jon
(Even for the Swing toolkit, which being new, you'd have thought Sun would standardise between 1.1 and 1.2... no way! It's in javax for one and java.swing in the other. During the betas, it's also been in java.awt.swing.)
Um, no.
The Java API has been very stable. The class file format hasn't changed since 1.0. The only changes to the virtual machine spec (besides clarifications) are the addition of strictfp and widefp in 1.2. The addition of inner classes required a change to the language spec (and the compiler), but not the JVM itself. It was an excellent addition, BTW.
Upcoming Java releases will support generic programming (templates). Once again, there will be NO changes to the JVM spec itself; the language spec and the compiler are being modified.
What has happened is that the class libraries have grown a great deal. All of the old functionality is still there; if you want to write a program using the 1.0 event model, go right ahead. Backwards compatibility has been kept. This isn't any different from any other platform; the shared libraries grow and change over time, while backwards compatibility is preserved with old versions of the libs.
The Swing changes you mention are BS. At some point, it was com.sun.java.swing.* (1.0, I think). You can get a javax.swing.* package for 1.1 (which actually is more up-to-date than the version of Swing for 1.2!). Sun made this change to follow their own conventions for naming packages; it wasn't capricious.
To change a program from the com.sun.java.swing.* packages to the javax.swing.* packages requires a grep. BFD.
. If you ran C++ on an OO-based processor, it might actually have an advantage.
Now I know that you are clueless. Please explain to me what an "OO-based processor" is. Supply some examples.
-jon
I've heard this before, and I still don't believe it to be true.
People use LOTS of resources. People need to have things like garbage and waste removed. Can you design an efficient machine (a city is a machine of sorts) which can distribute resources (food, water, clothing, fuel) to 6 billion people in Texas and remove the trash (and sewage)? NYC, which is a decently spread-out city (across 3 islands and the mainland of NY) can't find room for its garbage. It has to remove 20,000 TONS each DAY. How could your Texas-sized city remove that garbage on-time to prevent a serious health hazzard?
Would you care to police this mess? Crowding makes people do crazy things. People need space.
The doomsayers might be wrong, but the reason why the doomsayers are wrong is that they scared people into doing something. We worry that oil is running out, so we develop better techniques to find and extract oil. We worry that food is running out, so money is poured into genetically engineered foods. The reason why Y2K won't be a big deal is that people got worried and tested and/or fixed all of the important systems.
If you want to see a society which had no doomsayers, take a look at Russia. No one was allowed to question the asinine decisions made by the leadership, no one ever explored any "What ifs" and you get the mess you see now. God bless the nuts who make us worry.
-jon
See, this isn't quite right.
Observant Jews count 613 commandments in the Torah, and the first one is "Be Fruitful and Multiply." However, the Rabbis said that once a couple had both a boy and a girl, it was OK to use birth control (as effective as it was pre-oral contraceptive). Controlling population and not breeding like rabbits (or yeast) was considered OK by Jews long ago.
As an aside, abortion is also allowed in Jewish law, when the birth of the child would do physical or psychological damage to the mother. Jews don't consider life to begin until birth.
Now Christians are rediscovering these exact same concepts, and they think these are new ideas. As in so many other things, it takes Christians an additional millenium or so to catch up to Judaism ;-)
-jon
Sure, CD's boot, but it's not an easy to task to make yourself a boot disk (read: rescue disk, on hand for the day you fsck your kernel). Which is easier to make? A CD-R that's bootable, or a floppy disk? They make a nice fallback =)
Obviously you've never used a Mac.
All Macs can boot off of CD-ROMs, Zip Disks, Jaz disks, etc. The only current limitation is you can't boot from a FireWire drive (USB booting support has recently been added), and that should be ready pretty soon.
My emergency boot disk is a Zip disk. Iomega Tools for the Mac comes with a big button that says "CREATE RESCUE DISK." It copies the parts of your system that you need to a Zip disk, and puts on a copy of Disk First Aid (or whatever recovery program you like). It's hard to make it any easier to build a boot disk than (1) Insert Zip disk and (2) press button in Zip Tools.
So, bootability is a non-issue.
-jon
Um, that's a link to the OLD M68K Linux. We're talking 10 year old machines (my SE/30 turns 10 in December). That stuff wasn't so great, but considering that Apple was getting a very responsive GUI working on a machine with less horsepower than my Palm IIIx, I'm impressed.
New Mac hardware is much cleaner. And getting the iBook to boot Linux means that the new iMac and the high-end G4 should be pretty easy; they all use virtually the same motherboard (Apple's new Unified Motherboard Architecure or UMA). The only difference between models is FireWire support, the speed/bus width/RAM on the RAGE 128, and ATA/33 or ATA/66 support.
From what I can tell, the current Mac architecture kicks some serious butt.
-jon
Except that this is completely untrue. I did a little research (anyone remember search engines?) and found out that:
-jon
It's not a secret; there's a company that's been selling V2 upgrades (via the Mezzanine slot) for the original iMacs for a while. They went out of business and the line was recently picked up by another company.
-jon
Because in the first case, you've broken a law that already exists while in the second case you're trying to prevent something from becoming a law. There's a huge difference there.
Not that I think that being able to buy elections is a good thing, but I can't think of any solution that isn't worse than (or as bad as) the problem.
-jon
For the last, oh, 3 or 4 years, Metrowerks has been selling "Discover Programming for Macintosh" and "Discover Programming for Windows" has been around for a few years now, too. These are copies of CodeWarrior intended for hobbiests. The restrictions are: -No cross-compilation tools (Pro can build Win32 from the Mac compiler and PPC/68K from the Win32 compiler) -No commercial distribution (this restriction is in licence only) -No PPC compilation (for the Mac product) For about $70US, you get Pascal, C, C++, and Java, as well as a bunch of "How-To" books on CD-ROM. It's a really good deal.
The GNU edition of CW for Linux seems to be along the same lines. Makes sense to me.
-jon
If Apple wants to attract programmers, it should expose its interfaces via languages that most programmers use. There has to be a 10,000:1 ratio of Java programmers to Objective-C programmers.
And the difference between OSX Server and OSX is a LOT more than Carbon/Cocoa. There's a different interface (Apple is porting the Finder to a new OS). There's the small matter of porting ColorSync and AppleScript. There's a completely new graphics system (built on PDF) that remove the royalty-laden (and never-upgraded) Display PostScript.
2 - Yes, but why can't they unbundle the ATI cards, and say, hey, if you want to BTO a box on our site, we'll ship you a box w/o this substandard peice of crap (well, my big gripe is with ATI's drivers), and you can order one from a third party, or hey, we'll ship you a Doodoo 3 with our outrageous markup (which would still be preferable to paying the outrageous markup for the ATI crap which would just get chucked anyway).
Apple is NEVER going to unbundle those ATI cards. The entire goal of their product line is simplicity. It makes products cheaper, and it makes it easier for consumers to understand what they're buying. Giving the rare case (you) greater choice means making everything more expensive for everyone else. Sounds like poor economics to me.
5b - OS 9 kills ATM. Same reason I'm not going to buy OS 9. If I'm going to have to pay Adobe several hundred to upgrade my ancient copy of ATM Deluxe which works FINE on 8.6, then I'll wait until OS X comes out and breaks it again, so I don't have to pay for two ATM upgrades in 1 year. Perhaps this was technically unavoidable.
Turns out that ATM 3.9 works fine with OS 9. If Adobe releases crappy software, this is Apple's fault?
-jon
Bose Acoustimass.
I'd imagine that Harmon/Kardon (who build the iMac sound system) could do a decent job, too. The trick (if I remember correctly) is the distance the air travels, so with enough baffles, you could certainly do it in a case the size of an iMac.
-jon
Bzzzzzt! Sorry, wrong answer. Would you care to try again?
The original iMac did have a fan. And if you block the vents to the fan on, well anything with a fan, it doesn't work to well.
-jon
Check out This site. It looks like there are plenty more speakers from H/K.
-jon
Check out This site. It looks like there are plenty more speakers from H/K.
-jon