They spout out a lot of impressive lie^H^H^Hbenchmarks on processor and games performance. Then they hit you with a 15" monitor.
There's a VGA-out for mirroring the internal display on the DV models (the $1299 one and the $1499 one). It's not clear if you can disable the internal screen and use the external screen at higher resolutions than 1024x768.
If you look at the history of Java, and take a step back, it's actually fairly easy to see that Sun is losing interest in Java's original intentions. They sued Microsoft over it just to be a thorn in their side. They claim Java is a write-once-run-anywhere system, but they haven't worked very hard at getting other operating systems to run period.
Bzzzt! Would you care to try again?
Java's original intention was to run on small devices (the *7 smart remote and smart TVs (I know, oxymoron)). The AWT was a hack that came later; written quickly and released far too soon by people who clearly knew nothing about GUIs.
Where is Sun focusing now? Jini (embedded devices, mostly) and server-side Java. These are the places that Java shines. If anything, the embrace of server-side Java is an EXPANSION of the original goals, not a retraction. If Sun can sucessfully execute on Jini, the original dream (lots of embedded devices with different CPUs from different manufacturers can all be programmed in the same language and communicate with each other seamlessly) will win.
What has changes is the temporary focus on applications for PCs has been dropped. This isn't a big surprise, since there's virtually no money in software for PCs. MS owns the office market. Adobe and Quark control the page layout and photo editing market. Other large companies own their specific bits. While there are plenty of small companies picking the scraps from the teeth of the giants, there's no serious money in going head-to-head with these companies. There's a reason why all the well-funded startups are providing services over the Internet, and not software for PCs.
Imagine, you can write on your CV that you not only know Java, not only worked for Sun, but build Sun's Java tools. These people were in demand like hot applepie.
I used to work with someone who had worked on jdb, the original Java debugger from Sun. He was easily one of the worst programmers I have ever had the displeasure of working with...
You have tragically confused civil laws with criminal laws. You are using criminal law examples to illustrate a civil matter
Since civil suits are brought by citizens against other citizens and criminal suits are brought by the government against citizens, it appears that this was in fact a criminal case. I've mixed up nothing.
In fact, the burden of proof is far lower in civil cases than in criminal cases (preponderance of evidence vs. beyond a resonable doubt). Ask OJ Simpson about that.
The problem isn't linking in general. The problem is linking to something which breaks the law. Like it or not, posting.mp3s is a copyright violation. Knowingly pointing other people to them is aiding and abeting.
(Warning: extreme example coming)
Say you had a friend who you KNEW killed people for a living. Say someone came to you and said, "Hi! I'd like to have someone killed. Do you know who I can go to?" You say, "Sure! Just go ask my friend."
(If this is too extreme, think of the neighborhood/dorm drug dealer rather than a hit man.)
I don't see much difference between acting as a reference in meatspace and providing a link on the web. Have you commited a crime by knowingly aiding someone else in commiting a crime? Have you commited a crime by knowing that a crime is happening and not reporting it?
This is going to be moderated down as flamebait, and I don't care.
There is unnatural extinction. it's called deforestation. try that perspective. Why? read the fine-print...
Huh? Let's try this line of thinking, wonder boy:
1. Human beings evolved naturally on this planet.
2. Therefore, human beings are part of nature.
If people cut down forests, it's no different from deer eating every plant in sight and leaving an area barren of vegetation (and killing off other animals thar are dependant on those selfsame plants). If this happens, the deer eventually starve, and there are fewer deer. If humanity destroys too many resources short-sightedly, then we'll face a similar fate. But it's perfectly natural.
In fact, how can ANYTHING that people do not be part of "the natural order?" Because we are sentient? Bah. Monkeys are sentient. Dolphins probably are. Are those cute (and endangered) species also unnatural, oh he who knows nature?
Are human actions "unnatural" because we build stuff? How about bever dams? Bee hives?
because mankind are all a bunch of whining idiots. Humans are not the dominant species on this planet. Does your so-called "intelligence" make you feel you're dominant? Sorry buddy, you are inferior (just as I am).
It sounds to me like you hate yourself, and by extension, humanity. Since you find yourself an unworthy being, please stop wasting precious resources for those of us who like being humans and terminate your current existence. With any luck, the Hindus are right and you can be reincarnated as an animal. In your case, I'd suggest a dung beetle.
So the cure is what? "Phat" is to "bad" as "gnarly" is to _____? At some point you have to say that everyone has an obligation to go out and get the culture they don't have, and get over the fact that a bunch of dead white men brought it to its pinnacle in their language and their culture.
I take it that you speak the Queen's English, right? Ever put something in the boot of your lorry? Ever lit up a fag?
How about AU English and culture? Do you know what Vegemite is?
Oh, I see. YOUR version of English is the norm, and your cultural experiences are the baseline. Makes sense to me. You're a bigot.
The fact is that standardized tests are useless. They don't measure anything at all. Trust me, I speak as someone who scores exceedingly well on them. I got a 1400 (700 Math, 700 Verbal) on the SAT, before they were re-leveled. I entered College with 19 credits, because I got 4s and 5s on AP Tests in Computer Science, Physics, English, US History, Calculus (well, only a 3 on Calc), and Chemistry. I missed only one or two questions on the general GRE (that covers the math, logic, and English sections) and placed in the 89th percentile on the Computer Science GRE. When it comes to filling in stupid circles on a test, I rock.
Meanwhile, one of my closest friends from college did only decently on the SATs (about 300-400 points worse than me) and had to take "bonehead English" in college because she failed the writing exam (she did have a 5 on her AP English test, though. One test shows she's a genius, the other says she's an idiot. Explain that one, standardized test boy.). I also did significantly better than her on the general GRE. Well, she's gotten straight As since _6th_ grade, and is now about to finish up her PhD in BioMedical Engineering, doing things that I can't even begin to understand. Post-doc offers are already coming in for her. Me? I couldn't hack grad school in CS and left with a Master's.
Today's lesson: standardized tests are useless and only measure one thing: how good are you at taking tests? If you think the sole goal of life is filling in circles labeled A-E with a #2 pencil, you're in for a bit of a shock...
Creationism should not be part of a science class because it is not a scientific theory.
When I was in 8th grade, my science teacher presented a theory on how a Coke machine worked: inside was a little man whose job was to count the money you put in, get the right can, drop down the can, and give you any change. He then asked us to disprove this, without actually looking inside of a Coke machine. I don't think anyone in the class was able to disprove the hypothesis. (sample argument: "There aren't enough midgets in the world to put into all the Coke machines!" The reply: "the reason you don't see many midgets is BECAUSE they're all inside Coke machines.")
What did this teach us (besides the fact that our science teacher was a wise ass)? We learned that scientific hypothesis are based on OBSERVING phenomena and selecting the theories that best fit the existing data.
Now, I could easily see a science teacher presenting two opposing theories of creation: the one in Genesis, and the evolutionary one. After giving the students ALL of the evidence, let them decide which one works and defend their opinion in a reasoned paper. If they want to believe in Genesis, they're going to have to find a way to explain a lot of data which indicates that it is a poor theory. If Creationists are going to pretend that what they believe in is science, they're going to have to use the scientific method to back up their hypothesis. Likewise, if someone has silly reasons why evolution works, I wouldn't give them a very good grade.
Simply telling a bunch of students "Evolution is true, Creationism is false" just replaces one idol with another. Teaching students WHY Evolution/Big Bang/etc. best fits the data is far more important that rote recitation.
Apple is promoting boot legging by Beached (yououttaknow@antispoof.nospam.goaway.ny.ca) on Tuesday August 31, @01:49PM EDT (#) (User Info) This machine is being positioned as the ulitmate boot legger. Apple's page is talking about dvd-ram and digital camera's and the ultimate cimematic experience.
Gee, imagine that Steve Jobs talks about creating digial media on a Mac when doing the keynote at a conference on digital media...
Furthermore, this is hardware optimized for graphics production work only. Apple servers are a long way away.
Horse hockey.
First of all, Motorola designed AltiVec (what Apple is calling the "Velocity Engine") as a generic vector processor. They want to use it in embedded chips for signal processing. If it makes Photoshop faster, that's good, too. Moto makes a TON more money on embedded PPCs than they do on the sales of PPCs to Apple. That 2X AGP will be very nice for graphics, though.
Secondly, Did you even _look_ at the specs on this machine? The low-end box is just a G3 with a G4 chip slapped in place, but the high-end boxes have twice the memory throughput (something like 800MB/sec) of the current G3s. They use Ultra ATA/66. The System bus is clocked at 100MHz. There's 1MB of L2 cache running at 2:1. There's an internal 400Mbps FireWire connector for FireWire hard drives, along with the two external 400Mbs FireWire connectors.. There's 10/100Base-T Ethernet built in. How in Bog's name could this NOT make a good server?
Darwin (remember? Apple's Open-source basis for Mac OS X?), if it doesn't already support these new boxes, will very soon. You can run it as the basis for your server OS, or you could just use its source code to write whatever drivers you'd like for LinuxPPC.
And (while this isn't a valid defense for the current products, it's worth mentioning) the G4s were designed for multi-processing and Apple has put pretty extensive support for multiple processors into the upcoming versions of Mac OS X Server and Client. It'll be interesting to see how well multi-CPU G4 boxes scale.
Sheesh. If Apple was giving away gold, there'd be Slashdotters who would find something wrong.
Java may be the future of web scripts, but for real applications it cannot hold a candle to compiled languages such as C++. C++ is the future.
You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.
The project that I'm working has just about finished an EJB (Enterprise Java Bean)-based server product. We're talking about 40K lines of code which does some highly cool stuff that I can't talk about just yet. It is hosted by a Pure Java application server called Weblogic. Our team of 4 people has been able to build this product incredibly quickly, with remarkable stabilty. We're also able to handle hundreds of simultaneous clients with response times Meanwhile, the group working on the client is building in C++. The client is a relatively simple program: send XML to the server, get back XML from the server, put some stuff on-screen based on the results, and repeat as necessary. The client group is woefully behind schedule, working in their "real" language.
So, either I'm on a team of uber-geniuses compared to a team of untrained monkeys, or maybe, just maybe, building real-world applications is far easier, with excellent performance and scalability in Java.
With that aside, JINI technology may fail the java is to complicated for cheap low end user products. Its like using a oil drill for a tooth pick. They should start out with something small that resembles java and is compatible with java but is geared towards small scale devices. I am not psychic but I don't believe people want to by a toaster to surf the web.
This is one of the big fallacies around Jini. It doesn't require a JVM, just a device that can communicate via RMI. If it is just sending out something pretty simple (and expecting something pretty simple in return), then all of this behavior can be hard-coded. A general-purpose computer (a JVM) doesn't need to be emulated.
I haven't reviewed the Jini specs recently, but I'm pretty sure that a device which is only providing a service (or only needs a very simple service from another device) could be done fairly inexpensively without much CPU power.
If they really think that the shape of their box is whats going to keep selling their machiens, they're in the wrong business!
Um, if the shape of the machine isn't important, than why did FuturePower and eMachines make their computers look like the iMac?
This isn't a hard concept to grasp. These machines are designed to confuse people by taking advantage of a well-known product. They are the Ro_d_ex watches of the computer world.
Maybe the computers in Kansas reset themselves back to 1900 a few months early and the school board decided to get those outdated laws back on the books to celebrate!
You're an idiot. Where are those drug-resistant bacteria coming from? Is it perhaps, just perhaps, evolutionary? The environment changed (antibiotics became common), and the bacteria which had a formerly useless genetic quirk (immunity to the effects of various antibiotics) are able to thrive.
Or God just made them in the last 50 years. You decide.
If you don't believe in carbon dating, don't believe in atomic bombs or atomic power. Care to snack on some Plutonium?
Sigh. I swear, the rest of the civilized world must just laugh its ass off at the US. We have states outlawing basic science education in the midst of a technological (and biological!) revolution. I wonder how long it would take for me to brush up my Japanese?
This reminds me of the language laws that France has passed to prevent the use of English words when there's a perfectly good French word. It's trying to legislate common usage, which is doomed to failure. I first learned KB, MB, GB, etc. about 18 years ago, and I am reasonably certain that they have been in use for far longer than that.
The fact that marketing droids abuse their meaning is irrelevant. That's their job; if we started re-defining every word that has been abused by advertisers, we'd all be choosing a whole new language.
You can rant and rave about what you're against, but what are you FOR? Saying that you're against "The Government" and "Commercialism" is easy and infantile unless you have some sort of coherent substitue. The "Age of Horus" doesn't count.
It's not the "People's Internet." Who paid for those cables? Why, it's the evil government and its sidekicks, the evil corporations! Who paid for the research which made the products and protocols that make the Internet interesting? That's right, those soul-sucking companies and researchers working on government grants at government-funded universities and research labs. But, since someone let you read the Cliff Notes to Das Kapital, you think all of this work is somehow yours.
And anyone who thinks that Marilyn Manson is anything more than a 90's version of Alice Cooper is delusional.
To be somewhat on-topic, it doesn't matter what this silly committee decides should be US policy, because US policy is going to be irrelevant pretty soon. Within 5-10 years, most data is going to be transmitted via sattelite, not wires, and it'll be damn-near impossible to jam.
Companies will store data in countries which have lenient data policies and incorporate in the same, just like cruise ships companies register ships in places that have the lax laws. So, if the US was _smart_ it would be encouraging companies to locate servers here, and then get a small bit of moolah for registration and taxes on sales. The easy way to encourage that would be strong encryption and making as few things as possible illegal. But they won't and some third-world countries are going to get smart. I'm thinking something in the Sahara would have lots of space...
Granted, I was referring to the "old" TV Network. But these functioned very well for a long time on mere advertising revenues. It would be *possible* for the ISP's to go in this direction.
TV and radio _never_ functioned that way. Networks have been selling content to affiliates since the dawn of broadcasting. Now some affiliates want networks to pay THEM to cary some shows and compensate them for advertising time. The network system is starting to break down.
As far as something that is funded solely by advertising.. I can think of plenty of internet sites, as well as all those magazines that I can get for free at the super market or local club.
Which _profitable_ WWW sites are soley advertiser funded? The sites making money are Yahoo (which gets money a billion different ways, including advertising), various porn sites (which charge subscription fees), gambling sites (collect from the games), other subscription sites (WSJ), and sites either selling things or auctioning things (and the auction sites skim off the price of the items sold). Advertiser-only sites don't make money.
And saying that an advertising circular is advertising-funded is a tautology. It's like saying a billboard is advertising-funded.
having the gov't step in to stop AOL/MSFT from essentially shutting down the small handful of "ma and pa" ISPs that might be in the black, would be almost akin to having Pizza Hut broken up into "baby Huts" to keep them from quashing some instance of 'Luigi's pasta palace' in Podunk City, Arkansas.
No, it'd be more like having the local phone company start a pizza place and send out free phones to everyone in town with a special button that would directly dial the phone company's pizza place. Sure, you _could_ dial another place, but it's _easy_ to get a BellCo Pizza. Plus, the phone company makes oodles of money from other revenue sources, so it's able to give away BellCo Pizzas.
In a nutshell, that's what happened to Netscape.
Could MS do that to AOL? Possibly. Would the US Gov't sue to try to stop it? Almost certainly.
So in a sense, These companies are becoming more and more like Television stations. Where you can get the entertainment, but you just have to put up with the advertisements/commercials. Broadband technologies will move it even further in this direction.
Actually, it's exactly _unlike_ TV stations. TV broadcasts were free in the US at the beginning. Now cable TV (people paying at least $20/month) is in something like 80% of US homes. DSS and other systems are on the rise, too. The president of NBC recently floated the idea of making NBC a cable station, as a way to get back at affiliates.
Besides the premium movie channels (which cost even more money/month), there is plenty of advertising on cable networks, because advertising alone isn't going to pay the bills. Broadcast networks get money from affiliates (and some get money from producing shows, like Fox, WB, and UPN. ABC, CBS, and NBC have some restrictions placed on them by the FCC. They might have been lifted recently, though). Newspapers and magazines resell their content and some own other media outlets (For example, The Washington Post Company owns Newsweek and several cable companies under the name CableOne). I can't think of a single example of a media outlet which is funded soley by advertising.
If anything, internet access is going to be like any utility, not like a TV network. There's no free electricity, no free water, no free phone service, and free TV is going the way of the dinosaur. Why would there be free internet access ?
No, don't make China the Evil Ones of the Month! I don't like USA bombing the small and weak (or anyone att all for that matter) but rather that than something huge (*the largest*, in fact) and nukeequipped like China.
The Chinese government aren't the evil ones of the month. They've been the evil ones of the last 50 years. And if any group deserves demonization, the government of the PRC certainly does.
Freedom of religion is one thing, but there is a line between religion and political weapons, and Falun Gong is walking on this thin line. Sure you are free to be Christian, but not to burn heretics. They should be free to do their gymnastics, but when they try to gain political power, infiltrate governement agencies and manipulate foreign press, they are a real threats. The Chinese governement is definitely a dictatorship, but Falun Gong will be even worse if they succeed in taking over the country (don't be fooled, they are not just a bunch of peaceful Asian hippies, like every sect they have a "higher" goal decided by the guru).
Can anyone say "Moral Majority?" Heck, if you don't like the right-wing, give Jimmy Carter (born-again Christian, spoke about his religious beliefs) a try. The one thing that both have in common is that most Americans don't want either in power and they aren't. Funny how a democracy works.
You just seriously compared murder (burning heretics) to political power. I fail to see the difference between what you are describing and any other political party. Isn't a political party a bunch of people who share a set of beliefs and work together to gain political power? I guess you just don't like the ones with "funny" beliefs. That makes you a bigot.
My take is that if the roman had succeded in crushing the Christian sect at its beginning, we would already have fusion reactors by now, skipping 1000 years of middle age, inquisition and relious zealotry.
You think the Roman Empire fell because of Christians? You think that the Roman Empire was a pluralistic, democratic society which encouraged innovation? You think the Roman Empire was even worth saving when the barbarians sacked Rome? Whoo boy, education has gone downhill.
Fine, that's great, but I bought a crappy little CTX EzBook 20 months ago with damn near the same specs ('cept the processor) for $300 less. And that was 20 months ago. (I think I saw my model on one of those liquidation sites for $700 or so last week...)
I'm calling bullshit on this one.
You're telling me that you got a machine with a 3.2G hard drive, 10/100Base-T Ethernet, 56K Modem, 4MB of VRAM with an ATI Rage Mobility video card, 24-bit color at 800x600, USB, and a hard-to-damage case for $1300? In 1997? I'm not going to mention the support for wireless networking (the antenna is built into the iBook, just the card is missing) or that a 300MHz G3 is leagues faster than anything released in a laptop in 1997.
It's OK to hate Macs, it's OK to hate Apple; everyone has their delusions. But really, don't make stuff up.
i'm at a party, someone asks me about my kids (hypothetical, I don't have any), and I whip out my color PDA and click through 'em. Gets to pictures of my pets, and a friend collects animal pictures for a montage or something and hey there's one that's really cute, no prob, beam it over to her.
Who (besides an alpha geek) would (1) go to a party with a _PDA_ and (2) go to a PDA for pictures of their kids rather than their wallet?
Making a PDA in 1999 with color, sound, and a billion other unimportant features is doomed to failure because it's too much for currently available resources. Eventually, battery life for color devices is going to measure into the weeks and months, and they will become far more commonplace.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a VGA-out for mirroring the internal display on the DV models (the $1299 one and the $1499 one). It's not clear if you can disable the internal screen and use the external screen at higher resolutions than 1024x768.
-jon
Bzzzt! Would you care to try again?
Java's original intention was to run on small devices (the *7 smart remote and smart TVs (I know, oxymoron)). The AWT was a hack that came later; written quickly and released far too soon by people who clearly knew nothing about GUIs.
Where is Sun focusing now? Jini (embedded devices, mostly) and server-side Java. These are the places that Java shines. If anything, the embrace of server-side Java is an EXPANSION of the original goals, not a retraction. If Sun can sucessfully execute on Jini, the original dream (lots of embedded devices with different CPUs from different manufacturers can all be programmed in the same language and communicate with each other seamlessly) will win.
What has changes is the temporary focus on applications for PCs has been dropped. This isn't a big surprise, since there's virtually no money in software for PCs. MS owns the office market. Adobe and Quark control the page layout and photo editing market. Other large companies own their specific bits. While there are plenty of small companies picking the scraps from the teeth of the giants, there's no serious money in going head-to-head with these companies. There's a reason why all the well-funded startups are providing services over the Internet, and not software for PCs.
-jon
I used to work with someone who had worked on jdb, the original Java debugger from Sun. He was easily one of the worst programmers I have ever had the displeasure of working with...
-jon
Since civil suits are brought by citizens against other citizens and criminal suits are brought by the government against citizens, it appears that this was in fact a criminal case. I've mixed up nothing.
In fact, the burden of proof is far lower in civil cases than in criminal cases (preponderance of evidence vs. beyond a resonable doubt). Ask OJ Simpson about that.
-jon
(Warning: extreme example coming)
Say you had a friend who you KNEW killed people for a living. Say someone came to you and said, "Hi! I'd like to have someone killed. Do you know who I can go to?" You say, "Sure! Just go ask my friend."
(If this is too extreme, think of the neighborhood/dorm drug dealer rather than a hit man.)
I don't see much difference between acting as a reference in meatspace and providing a link on the web. Have you commited a crime by knowingly aiding someone else in commiting a crime? Have you commited a crime by knowing that a crime is happening and not reporting it?
-jon
There is unnatural extinction. it's called deforestation. try that perspective. Why? read the fine-print...
Huh? Let's try this line of thinking, wonder boy:
1. Human beings evolved naturally on this planet.
2. Therefore, human beings are part of nature.
If people cut down forests, it's no different from deer eating every plant in sight and leaving an area barren of vegetation (and killing off other animals thar are dependant on those selfsame plants). If this happens, the deer eventually starve, and there are fewer deer. If humanity destroys too many resources short-sightedly, then we'll face a similar fate. But it's perfectly natural.
In fact, how can ANYTHING that people do not be part of "the natural order?" Because we are sentient? Bah. Monkeys are sentient. Dolphins probably are. Are those cute (and endangered) species also unnatural, oh he who knows nature?
Are human actions "unnatural" because we build stuff? How about bever dams? Bee hives?
because mankind are all a bunch of whining idiots. Humans are not the dominant species on this planet. Does your so-called "intelligence" make you feel you're dominant? Sorry buddy, you are inferior (just as I am).
It sounds to me like you hate yourself, and by extension, humanity. Since you find yourself an unworthy being, please stop wasting precious resources for those of us who like being humans and terminate your current existence. With any luck, the Hindus are right and you can be reincarnated as an animal. In your case, I'd suggest a dung beetle.
-jon
I take it that you speak the Queen's English, right? Ever put something in the boot of your lorry? Ever lit up a fag?
How about AU English and culture? Do you know what Vegemite is?
Oh, I see. YOUR version of English is the norm, and your cultural experiences are the baseline. Makes sense to me. You're a bigot.
The fact is that standardized tests are useless. They don't measure anything at all. Trust me, I speak as someone who scores exceedingly well on them. I got a 1400 (700 Math, 700 Verbal) on the SAT, before they were re-leveled. I entered College with 19 credits, because I got 4s and 5s on AP Tests in Computer Science, Physics, English, US History, Calculus (well, only a 3 on Calc), and Chemistry. I missed only one or two questions on the general GRE (that covers the math, logic, and English sections) and placed in the 89th percentile on the Computer Science GRE. When it comes to filling in stupid circles on a test, I rock.
Meanwhile, one of my closest friends from college did only decently on the SATs (about 300-400 points worse than me) and had to take "bonehead English" in college because she failed the writing exam (she did have a 5 on her AP English test, though. One test shows she's a genius, the other says she's an idiot. Explain that one, standardized test boy.). I also did significantly better than her on the general GRE. Well, she's gotten straight As since _6th_ grade, and is now about to finish up her PhD in BioMedical Engineering, doing things that I can't even begin to understand. Post-doc offers are already coming in for her. Me? I couldn't hack grad school in CS and left with a Master's.
Today's lesson: standardized tests are useless and only measure one thing: how good are you at taking tests? If you think the sole goal of life is filling in circles labeled A-E with a #2 pencil, you're in for a bit of a shock...
-jon
When I was in 8th grade, my science teacher presented a theory on how a Coke machine worked: inside was a little man whose job was to count the money you put in, get the right can, drop down the can, and give you any change. He then asked us to disprove this, without actually looking inside of a Coke machine. I don't think anyone in the class was able to disprove the hypothesis. (sample argument: "There aren't enough midgets in the world to put into all the Coke machines!" The reply: "the reason you don't see many midgets is BECAUSE they're all inside Coke machines.")
What did this teach us (besides the fact that our science teacher was a wise ass)? We learned that scientific hypothesis are based on OBSERVING phenomena and selecting the theories that best fit the existing data.
Now, I could easily see a science teacher presenting two opposing theories of creation: the one in Genesis, and the evolutionary one. After giving the students ALL of the evidence, let them decide which one works and defend their opinion in a reasoned paper. If they want to believe in Genesis, they're going to have to find a way to explain a lot of data which indicates that it is a poor theory. If Creationists are going to pretend that what they believe in is science, they're going to have to use the scientific method to back up their hypothesis. Likewise, if someone has silly reasons why evolution works, I wouldn't give them a very good grade.
Simply telling a bunch of students "Evolution is true, Creationism is false" just replaces one idol with another. Teaching students WHY Evolution/Big Bang/etc. best fits the data is far more important that rote recitation.
-jon
Gee, imagine that Steve Jobs talks about creating digial media on a Mac when doing the keynote at a conference on digital media...
-jon
Horse hockey.
First of all, Motorola designed AltiVec (what Apple is calling the "Velocity Engine") as a generic vector processor. They want to use it in embedded chips for signal processing. If it makes Photoshop faster, that's good, too. Moto makes a TON more money on embedded PPCs than they do on the sales of PPCs to Apple. That 2X AGP will be very nice for graphics, though.
Secondly, Did you even _look_ at the specs on this machine? The low-end box is just a G3 with a G4 chip slapped in place, but the high-end boxes have twice the memory throughput (something like 800MB/sec) of the current G3s. They use Ultra ATA/66. The System bus is clocked at 100MHz. There's 1MB of L2 cache running at 2:1. There's an internal 400Mbps FireWire connector for FireWire hard drives, along with the two external 400Mbs FireWire connectors.. There's 10/100Base-T Ethernet built in. How in Bog's name could this NOT make a good server?
Darwin (remember? Apple's Open-source basis for Mac OS X?), if it doesn't already support these new boxes, will very soon. You can run it as the basis for your server OS, or you could just use its source code to write whatever drivers you'd like for LinuxPPC.
And (while this isn't a valid defense for the current products, it's worth mentioning) the G4s were designed for multi-processing and Apple has put pretty extensive support for multiple processors into the upcoming versions of Mac OS X Server and Client. It'll be interesting to see how well multi-CPU G4 boxes scale.
Sheesh. If Apple was giving away gold, there'd be Slashdotters who would find something wrong.
-jon
Poor assumption. Real chips can retire more than one operation/cycle. That's one of the things that makes a superscalar chip superscalar...
-jon
You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.
The project that I'm working has just about finished an EJB (Enterprise Java Bean)-based server product. We're talking about 40K lines of code which does some highly cool stuff that I can't talk about just yet. It is hosted by a Pure Java application server called Weblogic. Our team of 4 people has been able to build this product incredibly quickly, with remarkable stabilty. We're also able to handle hundreds of simultaneous clients with response times Meanwhile, the group working on the client is building in C++. The client is a relatively simple program: send XML to the server, get back XML from the server, put some stuff on-screen based on the results, and repeat as necessary. The client group is woefully behind schedule, working in their "real" language.
So, either I'm on a team of uber-geniuses compared to a team of untrained monkeys, or maybe, just maybe, building real-world applications is far easier, with excellent performance and scalability in Java.
You decide.
-jon
This is one of the big fallacies around Jini. It doesn't require a JVM, just a device that can communicate via RMI. If it is just sending out something pretty simple (and expecting something pretty simple in return), then all of this behavior can be hard-coded. A general-purpose computer (a JVM) doesn't need to be emulated.
I haven't reviewed the Jini specs recently, but I'm pretty sure that a device which is only providing a service (or only needs a very simple service from another device) could be done fairly inexpensively without much CPU power.
-jon
Um, if the shape of the machine isn't important, than why did FuturePower and eMachines make their computers look like the iMac?
This isn't a hard concept to grasp. These machines are designed to confuse people by taking advantage of a well-known product. They are the Ro_d_ex watches of the computer world.
-jon
-jon
You're an idiot. Where are those drug-resistant bacteria coming from? Is it perhaps, just perhaps, evolutionary? The environment changed (antibiotics became common), and the bacteria which had a formerly useless genetic quirk (immunity to the effects of various antibiotics) are able to thrive.
Or God just made them in the last 50 years. You decide.
If you don't believe in carbon dating, don't believe in atomic bombs or atomic power. Care to snack on some Plutonium?
Sigh. I swear, the rest of the civilized world must just laugh its ass off at the US. We have states outlawing basic science education in the midst of a technological (and biological!) revolution. I wonder how long it would take for me to brush up my Japanese?
-jon
The fact that marketing droids abuse their meaning is irrelevant. That's their job; if we started re-defining every word that has been abused by advertisers, we'd all be choosing a whole new language.
-jon
You can rant and rave about what you're against, but what are you FOR? Saying that you're against "The Government" and "Commercialism" is easy and infantile unless you have some sort of coherent substitue. The "Age of Horus" doesn't count.
It's not the "People's Internet." Who paid for those cables? Why, it's the evil government and its sidekicks, the evil corporations! Who paid for the research which made the products and protocols that make the Internet interesting? That's right, those soul-sucking companies and researchers working on government grants at government-funded universities and research labs. But, since someone let you read the Cliff Notes to Das Kapital, you think all of this work is somehow yours.
And anyone who thinks that Marilyn Manson is anything more than a 90's version of Alice Cooper is delusional.
To be somewhat on-topic, it doesn't matter what this silly committee decides should be US policy, because US policy is going to be irrelevant pretty soon. Within 5-10 years, most data is going to be transmitted via sattelite, not wires, and it'll be damn-near impossible to jam.
Companies will store data in countries which have lenient data policies and incorporate in the same, just like cruise ships companies register ships in places that have the lax laws. So, if the US was _smart_ it would be encouraging companies to locate servers here, and then get a small bit of moolah for registration and taxes on sales. The easy way to encourage that would be strong encryption and making as few things as possible illegal. But they won't and some third-world countries are going to get smart. I'm thinking something in the Sahara would have lots of space...
-jon
TV and radio _never_ functioned that way. Networks have been selling content to affiliates since the dawn of broadcasting. Now some affiliates want networks to pay THEM to cary some shows and compensate them for advertising time. The network system is starting to break down.
As far as something that is funded solely by advertising.. I can think of plenty of internet sites, as well as all those magazines that I can get for free at the super market or local club.
Which _profitable_ WWW sites are soley advertiser funded? The sites making money are Yahoo (which gets money a billion different ways, including advertising), various porn sites (which charge subscription fees), gambling sites (collect from the games), other subscription sites (WSJ), and sites either selling things or auctioning things (and the auction sites skim off the price of the items sold). Advertiser-only sites don't make money.
And saying that an advertising circular is advertising-funded is a tautology. It's like saying a billboard is advertising-funded.
-jon
No, it'd be more like having the local phone company start a pizza place and send out free phones to everyone in town with a special button that would directly dial the phone company's pizza place. Sure, you _could_ dial another place, but it's _easy_ to get a BellCo Pizza. Plus, the phone company makes oodles of money from other revenue sources, so it's able to give away BellCo Pizzas.
In a nutshell, that's what happened to Netscape.
Could MS do that to AOL? Possibly. Would the US Gov't sue to try to stop it? Almost certainly.
-jon
Actually, it's exactly _unlike_ TV stations. TV broadcasts were free in the US at the beginning. Now cable TV (people paying at least $20/month) is in something like 80% of US homes. DSS and other systems are on the rise, too. The president of NBC recently floated the idea of making NBC a cable station, as a way to get back at affiliates.
Besides the premium movie channels (which cost even more money/month), there is plenty of advertising on cable networks, because advertising alone isn't going to pay the bills. Broadcast networks get money from affiliates (and some get money from producing shows, like Fox, WB, and UPN. ABC, CBS, and NBC have some restrictions placed on them by the FCC. They might have been lifted recently, though). Newspapers and magazines resell their content and some own other media outlets (For example, The Washington Post Company owns Newsweek and several cable companies under the name CableOne). I can't think of a single example of a media outlet which is funded soley by advertising.
If anything, internet access is going to be like any utility, not like a TV network. There's no free electricity, no free water, no free phone service, and free TV is going the way of the dinosaur. Why would there be free internet access ?
-jon
The Chinese government aren't the evil ones of the month. They've been the evil ones of the last 50 years. And if any group deserves demonization, the government of the PRC certainly does.
-jon
Can anyone say "Moral Majority?" Heck, if you don't like the right-wing, give Jimmy Carter (born-again Christian, spoke about his religious beliefs) a try. The one thing that both have in common is that most Americans don't want either in power and they aren't. Funny how a democracy works.
You just seriously compared murder (burning heretics) to political power. I fail to see the difference between what you are describing and any other political party. Isn't a political party a bunch of people who share a set of beliefs and work together to gain political power? I guess you just don't like the ones with "funny" beliefs. That makes you a bigot.
My take is that if the roman had succeded in crushing the Christian sect at its beginning, we would already have fusion reactors by now, skipping 1000 years of middle age, inquisition and relious zealotry.
You think the Roman Empire fell because of Christians? You think that the Roman Empire was a pluralistic, democratic society which encouraged innovation? You think the Roman Empire was even worth saving when the barbarians sacked Rome? Whoo boy, education has gone downhill.
-jon
I'm calling bullshit on this one.
You're telling me that you got a machine with a 3.2G hard drive, 10/100Base-T Ethernet, 56K Modem, 4MB of VRAM with an ATI Rage Mobility video card, 24-bit color at 800x600, USB, and a hard-to-damage case for $1300? In 1997? I'm not going to mention the support for wireless networking (the antenna is built into the iBook, just the card is missing) or that a 300MHz G3 is leagues faster than anything released in a laptop in 1997.
It's OK to hate Macs, it's OK to hate Apple; everyone has their delusions. But really, don't make stuff up.
-jon
Who (besides an alpha geek) would (1) go to a party with a _PDA_ and (2) go to a PDA for pictures of their kids rather than their wallet?
Making a PDA in 1999 with color, sound, and a billion other unimportant features is doomed to failure because it's too much for currently available resources. Eventually, battery life for color devices is going to measure into the weeks and months, and they will become far more commonplace.
-jon