Okay, I actually work at a newspaper (and, yes, I get the irony of providing an url for it...)
Why are we so intent on replacing newspapers when they are the most effective medium for news?
I disconcurr that they are the most effective medium. Here's my rant: Like all media, newspapers need to be profitable. No surprise, this is accomplished by having more revenue than expenditures. For newspapers this formula causes a variety of problems:
1. Percent of non-content expenditure is high. Every day my newspaper spends x dollars... and x is a very big number indeed. Most of that x goes to paying for non-content stuff. If you add up how much is spent on journalists (plus their support expenses) and wire service and photographers and then compare that to how much is spent on production personnnel, consumables (ink, paper, film etc), sales and support staff, distribution (moving 250,000 newspapers in vans!), promo, marketing, exec yatta yatta... you find out that less than 10% of expenditures is spent on developing content! This is not an effective way to get the news out.
2. Revenue requirements demand a mass market. Any newspaper with less than 100,000 sales is doomed. There just won't be enough readers to support ad revenue. So how does a newspaper maintain readership levels? By stampedeing to the Lowest Common Denominator. The content is kept easy (grade 8 reading level), short (those gen X-ers hate to read more than 200 words... witness the fact you've given up on this post already) and only cover topics perceived as having the widest appeal. That, my friend, is low-quality content.
3. It's plain just not efficient. Our paper runs three Sun E300s, a 220R and a small boatload of sparc 10s as servers. We have 250ish clients (65 of which are yosemite-or-better macs. Not cheap). More than enough computing power to put up a hefty news www site. If that were done, we would eliminate the cost of production and distro (there are more people designing ads than writing news, btw) allowing for either a) more news or b) more profit.
With one glance at the Washington Post while I'm buying coffee at 7-11
7-11 coffee? DC is a tough town! It's true that consumer convenience is the primary reason for the continuance of the newspaper... a point succinctly made by our former publisher "If we weren't a tabloid, we'd be out of business"... in reference to being easy to read on the bus. The biggest thing keeping papers around is that it is portable, cheap and universally accessible. A computer weighs 10kg, costs $1000+ and sits on your desk. But with the recent "day-trade-on-your-cellphone" tech front opening up, it's only a matter of time before the electronic media catch up in that dept.... and a cellphone is even easier to read on the bus than a tabloid!
haven't we been talking about stuff like this for years?
1.Sure have. However, keep in mind that the astronomical speed at which computer tech has been developing for the last 30+ years is all quantitative growth. The basic concepts of hardware design haven't changed dramatically, we can just do it bigger, faster, cheaper... What we're looking at with holographic "disks" is a quantitative change... and that's going to be slower. It's like saying back in 1920 "We've had super-fast trains for years, and look how fast the automobile is developing... what the hell is taking those aeroplane guys so long?"
2. The vast majority of people have never been victims of violent crimes.
3. The vast majority of people who support the death penalty have never been falsely arrested/chagred/convicted of any crime.
4. Columbia University Law department study of all dp convictions since 1977 shows 68% were "seriously flawed" (read: mis-convicted) cnn blab here
And... Welcome to the Rambus competition IBM! Really! I appreciate it!!
Be careful when you welcome IBM to a new arena... rmember Apple's "Welcome IBM... Seriously" ad when the PC debuted? Sure, IBM isn't the batch-processed, sta-prest juggernaut of yore, but they can still come into a new market, clobber everybody with an inferior "standard" and go back to making adding machines after the whole market is dragged, kicking and screaming, down to the lowest common denominator.
Feel free to mod me down if you wish... I was on a karma roll anyway.
I admit that I haven't read the full documentation (hey, life is short and the only MS product I use is Age of Empires) but wasn't one of Java's major security features the elimination of pointer use/direct memory access? I'd be (marginally) interested to see how they will restrict this enough to avoid giving the mafiaboys of the world another hook while still making pointer use useful....
Of course the big worry is that the internet will encourage gov'ts with localized (ie State, Province, Canton) taxes to move to national consumption taxes like Canada's GST or the VAT in Britain. In Canada a lot of mailorder businesses moved to Alberta where there is not Provincial Sales Tax... GST kinda took the shine of that
Y'know, grappler, I can never figgure out if you're being sarcastic or not... assuming you're not:
Still reeling from the absence of the Ten Commandments in public schools, I reached for my news-paper on Monday and saw that they are teaching evolooshun without having the entire fossil record from the first genetic material to the present.
I'm still reeling from the fact that churches can teach the bible and have still not found a four-legged insect ( Leviticus 11:23. ) or any archealogical evidence of giants ( Gen.6:4 ) proved that the earth is immobile (1 Chr.16:30) or admitted that the bible tells them pi == 3.0 (1 Kg.7:23)
sheesh. It's a good thing you don't have to live up to the standards you set for other people!
I've been to the zoo, and I decline to write of the horrid, disgusting things I have seen the creatures do.
That's nice. I've been to war and have seen the horrid, disgusting things people do.
Those people were not actually created by Almighty God. They are creatures of a more demonic sort, and since their skin is not pure and white like that of decent folk
Hang on... I really need to get this straight. You're actually touting this Identity Baptist "mud people" stuff? What's next? Kahzars and ZOG?
Oh yeah, your tryjesus page uses the blink tag... that's worthy of eternal damnation righ there.
A sign of the times... now with MS on its best behaviour, not wanting to screw up their appeal and with a PR problem slightly smaller than Zaire's, we'll probably see a tonne of OEM's start doing this...
BTW, if you really want *BSD, BeOS or Minix (There's gotta be one Minix fan out there) shipping...call your favourite OEM. Dell, Compaq... they don't hire psychics you know. If they perceive sales, they'll ship 'em... eventually.
On a vaguely-related note, my theory as to why OEM's haven't shipped a lot of pre-installed "alternative" OS's is that the Linux/*BSD/Minix crowd has a strong do-it-yerself rep. Why would OEM x ship Red Hat on their box when the customer is: a) Probably not going to be swayed by the convenience factor, since convenience and ease-of-use ranks 47th or lower on a *nix user's priority list (or so the perception goes) b) There are so many *nix brands out there that, chances are, they're not going to get a plurality of the users to make it worthwhile. Sure, they could ship RH, but 70% of the *nix users are geeks who would probably just uninstall it anyway so they could load the latest snap of Suse 42b4a2 that they compiled on the Beowulf cluster of palm pilots they've got in their garage. At least that's the perception from the OEM's point of view.
Last point... and really offtopic. I saw an ad last week for Compaq that said "24x7 Nonstop"... are they trying to tell me their computer will only run for one fucking week?? Sheesh!
Yes, software boxes are excessively big and jewel cases are chock-a-block full of HDPE... but the real environmental disaster is computer books.
Computer books are grotesquely big. However, it's not because of the amount of information. Most of the size/info ration of yer avg computer book is gobbled up with wide margins, high leding and monster fonts. Viz
COMPUTER BOOKS CHOSEN AT RANDOM FROM MY "LIBRARY" The Complete Oracle Reference. 1120pp 30lines 9.5wds/line -----> 319.200wds The CodeWarrior professional Book 440pp 36lines 10wds/line -------> 158,400wds
NON COMPUTER BOOKS SIMILARLY CHOSEN The Social and Political Writings of Castoriadis Vol 2. 360pp 44lines 13.5wds/line -----> 213,840 Holy Blood Holy Grail 460pp 47lines 9.5wds/line ------> 205,827
Note that my non-computer books are svelt mass-market paperbacks, while the computer tomes are... tomes. Despite this disparity in size by about a factor of 6, they both hold, on average, the same-ish number of pages. NB, I didn't include photos or diagrams in my calcs. I just counted that space as "worded".
So how come computer books are so damn big if all the info they contain can be fit into a puny paperback? Several reasons:
1. Compu books are expensive. Not a heck of a lot of people want to read a book on Java... almost nobody when compared to Stephen King's latest, or even Holy Blood Holy Grail (which is on its 14th printing or something like that). Low print run equals higher cost. No consumer is going to pay $40 for a paperback, hence the Rosetta Stone school of book binding
2. Shelf space competition. There are a dozen beginner C++ books out there and, let's face it, they all cover pretty much the same stuff. As a publisher, how do you increase your sales at the expense of your competition? By grabbing the most shelf space! This is especially true for beginner books as beginners haven't developed publisher preference yet. Shelf space is a big deal in publishing and some publishers of non-comp books even offer chains (ie Chapters) incentives to "face" certain books (stack with cover, not spine, facing customer). Comp books are too small a market to be able to justify these tactics so the solution is a really big spine!
So, how do you get a really big spine? Well, some bindery techniques can do some of it, but by and large the easiest way is: thick pages and lots of them. Hence wide margins, high leding, monster type and lots and lots of dead trees.
Medical progress is an aggregate of "mini revolutions" that fall into one broad category.
Two examples: Deficiency theory: Until deficiency theory came along, people assumed that afflictions like pallegra and scurvey were caused by posisons. The most notable was the B1 deficiency that swept Germany shortly after corn became the almost sole food for the peasant classes (without treatment, B1 in corn is unusable). The powers-that-be assumed that the corn was somehow poisonous and responded to the outbreak by burning all the crops in the field. Starvation ensued. 200 years later, deficiency theory is developed and the idealized notion of what constituted healthy eating habits changed instantaneously (the actual habits, for economic reasons, was much slower in changing)
Germ theory: What the hell causes disease. Bad vapours? God? Before germ theory the whole notion of sanitization as being a Good Thing was unknown. Surgery (such as it was) would be performed without even a preliminary handwashing by the barber (a proto-surgeon/dentist, demoted over the course of several centuries to a lowly hair cutter). Germ theory developed, baths taken, millions saved. Pretty much over night.
Medical progress is first and foremost a history of revolutions in thinking
Here's the deal: The G3 uses very little power, as has been stated, however that only accounts for the removal of the cpu fan. You'll notice that the Yosemite towers have case fans.
The reason the iMac has no case fan is its "chimney" design. The fanless-computer has been an Apple design mainstay since '84 and was one of the reasons why the original Mac was vertical in design instead of horizontal like all other computers of the time. By building a very vertical box with a horizontal component layout, heat can "chimney" up and out. It's the same theory with the iMac.
On a related note, another reason why I find my Mac far quieter than my x86 beast is the CD drive. Anything above 24x sounds like an F-18 in heat. Apple made the decision that the marginal useful gain a 40x (or faster) CD offers is not worth the the atrocious noise. I bought Caesar III for the Winders machine, and mothballed it after an hour. It accesses the CD so much I found it worthwhile to pay for it again when the Mac version came out.
Please do not ridicule my premises. It is a poor form of argument, and personally insulting as well.
I'm not ridiculing your premises. I'm ridiculing your logic.... that lack of ability to conceive an idea means that ideas is wrong is poor logical form. That is a "logical" construct (and a false one), not a premise.
First, to be fair, I think a zero mod for your post is a bit extreme.....
If you've ever read the bible...
Actually, in point of fact, I have... I, like most atheists, was indoctrinated into my parents' religion as a child and, like most atheists, I went through a looong period of "searching" for spiritual meaning before becoming an atheist.
One: Faith doesn't enlighten. I can have faith in dragons, ufo's or Yahweh. Doesn't mean any of them exist. Any proposition that can be considered "true" must be falsifiable either through a) experimentation, b) observation or c) logical inference from either a or b. Insert standard disclaimers on epistemiology and circular inference here.
Two: The fall from grace, if we are to accept the mythology (and I don't), was the result of humans gaining the knowledge of good and evil. If there was no evil prior to apple snack, then how could that knowledge have been exercised or even recognized? The ability to make said discrimination would have been meaningless.
Two B: I disconcurr that all of the things that are "evil" necessarily had to be perpetrated by "man". Firstly there is evil by permission. god is theoretically omnipotent and, thus, all occurrences in the world are at his permission. By allowing evil to ocurr when he is fully capable of stopping it is an evil by permission. Abetting for lack of a better word. Secondly, there are a bunch of things ocurring directly at god's behest or by his hand in the bible that appear to be patently evil. My personal fave, of course, is the one about the children who moke Elisha because he is bald... God summons she-bears to devour them. I don't remember the chapter and verse and I'm too lazy to look it up but I'm pretty sure it's in Kings... The next time you take a swipe at the bible, try a critical eye. Ask some questions of it. Demand internal consistency. You may see it for what it is, a cobbling of folk tales, morality stories and mangled history cobbled together from different and often contradictory sources.... and in bad translation at that.
It's just that when I look at my surroundings I can no longer attribute the diversity and beauty of the world to random scientific "evolution"
Hm. You, personally, cannot conceive of the notion that the world was generated without god, therefore the world was not generated without god. By extension, I cannot believe that flowers can grow without fairies, therefore flowers require fairies. Great logic. At one time people couldn't conceive of the notion of a round earth, a heliocentric solar system or a bunch of other things.... and they, too, were wrong
"random scientific evolution". Uh, random doesn't have anything to do with it. Also, I assume that you're talking about "natural selection" when you say "evolution". You should really look these things up.
than I can attribute it to the boogey man. Only a higher being could have given us a rose, a bald eagle, a rainbow, etc.
If only a higher being could have given us a rose, then what gave us a higher being? A higher-higher being? Hm. I sense a slippery slope of n(higher) beings. Point two: If only a higher being could have given us a rose, could only said higher being have also given us, say, Anthrax (the disease, not the band... although the band isn't a great example of divine perfection either) or Hitler or cancer? Or is the higher being only responsible for the things you define as good or beutiful?
Actually, it will... not if you only breathe it for an hour, or a couple of days. But as the years tick by, your life expectancy will plummet. Oxygen oxidizes stuff (big surprise). Stuff in our bodies. If we get too much oxidation all sorts of unpleasant things happen to us such as crosslinking of reactive molecules, which reduce the plasticity of the substances they make up leading to all sorts of nasty breakages of Valuable Internal Things (like arterial walls or muscle tissue or, god forbid, yer brain). It's kinda like vulcanizing your body. We're supposed to be gooey and pink like an eraser. Not hard and black like a tire (the comparison of colour, btw, is representative of the nature of rubber... NOT a comment on race)
In point of fact, we spend a lot of energy fighting off the bad effects of oxygen. Vitamin C, E, B3, Selenium yatta yatta... if we don't consume it we get seriously bad effects from increased oxidation (although, lack of collegen from a C defficiency will kill you first). Singlet O, of course, is the worst. A doubling of SuperOxide in your bloodstream will kill you in an hour... if you care, there's a fine stack of links on peroxidizaiton and SOD at http://www.worthington-biochem.com/manual/S/SOD.ht ml
Nitrogen is totally inert... however, Mars is far away and cold, so we may want to consider bringing a big pile of CH4. It has 4 - 6 times the insulating capacity as CO2 so it's a more efficient haul. Should also consider O3. Radiation burns are ugly and there's no guarantee of sufficient high atmospheric electric discharge on Mars to make enough "naturally".
Lastly, doesn't Mars have insufficient gravity to hold enough atmosphere for we poor mammals? We've all seen how badly parachutes seem to work there...
Atually, a better choice than Hypercard would be (to my mind at least) AppleScript. Dig this:
1. It's syntax is simple 2. It has a "record" feature that allows you to hit the record button, do stuff, and then play it back. A great first script for kids is the "desktop icon animation" one 3. It's oop... without the fuss 4. It's nutso powerful. You can script dozens of apps to do stuff (a la VB) 5. It's free 6. If you want to spend money, you can get facespan which is a very nice and quite rational (if somewhat underdocumented) gui builder
PC stood for Personal Computer in the generic sense right up until the moment IBM released a PC brand named "PC"... then it became a brand name. Of course that brand name fell victim to the "Kleenex" syndrome in ensuing years.
Okay, I hit the books: The confiscation component only applies to companies that"traffic"in property that is claimed by Cuban Ex-pats to be theirs and is in excess of $50,000 US (who makes said valuation is either not clear, or I just can't find it...) The HB permits Ex-pats to sue for compensation from said companies. Now since using or trading this property is considered "trafficking" it is subject to the same laws regarding material considered to be the revenues of drug trafficking, meaning that pending legal outcome, the material is "seized".
So, that would explain Pepsi's presence....
here's a fine article from a bunch of international trade lawyers. http://www.skralaw.com/Articles/cuba.htm
Okay, let's actually look at some history, shall we? Shortly after the turn of the century (no, not 6 months ago, the other century...) The US controlled cuban government agreed to the provisions of the Platt Ammendment that stated that the US government had veto power over any political ruling made by the Cuban government that had to do with economics. This is sort of like Canada having to submit its national budget to Clinton for approval. By the Second World War over 70% of all the land in Cuba was owned by American citizens or companies. Since agriculture was the single biggest sector of the economy this was a big deal. The result: A country where the vast majority of the GDP is shipped away, local ownership of anything of worth is minimal, and every economic decision that may alleviate this situation is quashed through the "political process".
So they had a revolution. A perfectly sensible idea given the circumstances (and one that shouldn't come as a surprise to the Americans who had their own revolution over the issue of colonial abuses...)
The difference between the American and Cuban revolution, however, is that while the Americans managed to hold on to all the infrastructure when the Family Compact fled to Canada (My ancestors, BTW... hey Clinton, I want compensation for my lost inheritance, I'm sure messrs. Helms and Burton will support my cause...) When the Americans left Cuba they took or destroyed most of the infrastructure (much easier to do since Agriculture requires more mechanization now than the 18th century and transportation is much more efficient). The result: Cuba is stuck in the same situation as Manchuria in the late 50's. So the Cubans trade one "sugar daddy" (ha ha) for another: the Soviets.
The Soviets have their own agenda, of course. Cuba is of hefty strategic importance, so the Russians finance it to the gills. However, instead of using the financing to develop and economy that is self-supporting and has the potential to run a positive trade balance, they spend the money on stupid things, like Cubas oil industry (the crude out of Cuba is so high in sulfur as to be almost unusable) instead of on smart things like nickle mining or functional agriculture.
So the RSFSR goes belly up and Cuba is left with an inappropriate industrial base geared towards serving a market that doesn't exist anymore. Bad news. And you know what? despite that, Cuba has the highest literacy rate and life expectancy in the carribean (excluding Grand Cayman which is really nothing more than a rogue state for tax evaders... kinda like a rich man's Libya,but without the guns).
Oh yeah, the comment about Cuba being able to trade with any country they wish... Maybe you should actually sit down and read the Helms Burton legislation. If I as a Canadian Citizen (which I am) am a ranking executive in a company that does business with Cuba such as Sherrit (which I'm not) then I can be refused entry to the US for no other reason than that and any property that I own in the United States can legally AND WITHOUT COMPENSATION BE SEIZED BY THE US GOVERNMENT! Oh yeah, Cuba's free to trade with any one they want to...
Just the two cents of a "termainally gullible fool"
I'll take the mod down if need be, but I will not post anonymously
I did it backwards. Bought macs for ten years then got an x86 laptop (god, it was so cheap)) oops! After 5 hours of not being able to get a functional X (anyone got a config for a Mag Verity? Thought not...) I resorted to the dark side. My favourite error is "operating system not found". Wow.
Carbon isn't emulation. It is a "quick fix", but it is a valid OS X api that is fully buzzword compliant (protected this, premeptive that). "Classic" is run as emulation and does a good job of it. It even supports 68k specific memory calls (notably the A5 World) although I would be leery of using a 68k app in the first place (if your really need to play gang wars, buy a used SE for $50) Of course the holy grail is cocoa. However, you will see a lot more carbon apps than cocoa ones for a variety of reasons:
a) Carbon is easy. You can download Apple's Carbon Dater to test your current apps for Carbon compliance. This tells you what you need to change and pretty much how to do it. Sadly, it usually reccommends you change your event loop (a good idea since WaitNextEvent is where cpu sharing parameters are set) however, this has got to be one of the best porting tools I have seen.
b) Cocoa is tied to not-so-popular languages. Well, okay, Java is pretty popular, but not for heavy stuff. The language of choice for Cocoa is Objective C. Ever heard of it? Neither have a lot of other people. So, in addition to learning the API, you really have to learn a new language. With carbon you can keep your C/C++/Pascal app and carbonize it.
The "big plan" of course is to have current apps carbonized ASAP and encourage new products to be written Cocoa from the ground up. In the meantime, don't dis carbon. It means that you will have a ton of native apps pronto.
Apple has already been through one earth shaking change (68k to PPC) and they really learned their lessons. This transition, so far, promises to be smooth. Remember that Rhapsody was canned because the transition from Classic to Yellow Box was considered to be too big a leap too quickly that would lose a lot of developers. Apple's doing it right.
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Why are we so intent on replacing newspapers when they are the most effective medium for news?
I disconcurr that they are the most effective medium. Here's my rant: Like all media, newspapers need to be profitable. No surprise, this is accomplished by having more revenue than expenditures. For newspapers this formula causes a variety of problems:
1. Percent of non-content expenditure is high. Every day my newspaper spends x dollars... and x is a very big number indeed. Most of that x goes to paying for non-content stuff. If you add up how much is spent on journalists (plus their support expenses) and wire service and photographers and then compare that to how much is spent on production personnnel, consumables (ink, paper, film etc), sales and support staff, distribution (moving 250,000 newspapers in vans!), promo, marketing, exec yatta yatta... you find out that less than 10% of expenditures is spent on developing content! This is not an effective way to get the news out.
2. Revenue requirements demand a mass market. Any newspaper with less than 100,000 sales is doomed. There just won't be enough readers to support ad revenue. So how does a newspaper maintain readership levels? By stampedeing to the Lowest Common Denominator. The content is kept easy (grade 8 reading level), short (those gen X-ers hate to read more than 200 words... witness the fact you've given up on this post already) and only cover topics perceived as having the widest appeal. That, my friend, is low-quality content.
3. It's plain just not efficient. Our paper runs three Sun E300s, a 220R and a small boatload of sparc 10s as servers. We have 250ish clients (65 of which are yosemite-or-better macs. Not cheap). More than enough computing power to put up a hefty news www site. If that were done, we would eliminate the cost of production and distro (there are more people designing ads than writing news, btw) allowing for either a) more news or b) more profit.
With one glance at the Washington Post while I'm buying coffee at 7-11
7-11 coffee? DC is a tough town! It's true that consumer convenience is the primary reason for the continuance of the newspaper... a point succinctly made by our former publisher "If we weren't a tabloid, we'd be out of business"... in reference to being easy to read on the bus. The biggest thing keeping papers around is that it is portable, cheap and universally accessible. A computer weighs 10kg, costs $1000+ and sits on your desk. But with the recent "day-trade-on-your-cellphone" tech front opening up, it's only a matter of time before the electronic media catch up in that dept.... and a cellphone is even easier to read on the bus than a tabloid!
1.Sure have. However, keep in mind that the astronomical speed at which computer tech has been developing for the last 30+ years is all quantitative growth. The basic concepts of hardware design haven't changed dramatically, we can just do it bigger, faster, cheaper... What we're looking at with holographic "disks" is a quantitative change... and that's going to be slower. It's like saying back in 1920 "We've had super-fast trains for years, and look how fast the automobile is developing... what the hell is taking those aeroplane guys so long?"
2. The vast majority of people have never been victims of violent crimes.
3. The vast majority of people who support the death penalty have never been falsely arrested/chagred/convicted of any crime.
4. Columbia University Law department study of all dp convictions since 1977 shows 68% were "seriously flawed" (read: mis-convicted) cnn blab here
Be careful when you welcome IBM to a new arena... rmember Apple's "Welcome IBM... Seriously" ad when the PC debuted? Sure, IBM isn't the batch-processed, sta-prest juggernaut of yore, but they can still come into a new market, clobber everybody with an inferior "standard" and go back to making adding machines after the whole market is dragged, kicking and screaming, down to the lowest common denominator.
Feel free to mod me down if you wish... I was on a karma roll anyway.
To the best of my knowledge, unsafe keywords only effect auto-garbage collection...
Allowing restricted use of native pointers.
I admit that I haven't read the full documentation (hey, life is short and the only MS product I use is Age of Empires) but wasn't one of Java's major security features the elimination of pointer use/direct memory access? I'd be (marginally) interested to see how they will restrict this enough to avoid giving the mafiaboys of the world another hook while still making pointer use useful....
Of course the big worry is that the internet will encourage gov'ts with localized (ie State, Province, Canton) taxes to move to national consumption taxes like Canada's GST or the VAT in Britain. In Canada a lot of mailorder businesses moved to Alberta where there is not Provincial Sales Tax... GST kinda took the shine of that
Still reeling from the absence of the Ten Commandments in public schools, I reached for my news-paper on Monday and saw that they are teaching evolooshun without having the entire fossil record from the first genetic material to the present.
I'm still reeling from the fact that churches can teach the bible and have still not found a four-legged insect ( Leviticus 11:23. ) or any archealogical evidence of giants ( Gen.6:4 ) proved that the earth is immobile (1 Chr.16:30) or admitted that the bible tells them pi == 3.0 (1 Kg.7:23)
sheesh. It's a good thing you don't have to live up to the standards you set for other people!
I've been to the zoo, and I decline to write of the horrid, disgusting things I have seen the creatures do.
That's nice. I've been to war and have seen the horrid, disgusting things people do.
Hang on... I really need to get this straight. You're actually touting this Identity Baptist "mud people" stuff? What's next? Kahzars and ZOG?
Oh yeah, your tryjesus page uses the blink tag... that's worthy of eternal damnation righ there.
BTW, if you really want *BSD, BeOS or Minix (There's gotta be one Minix fan out there) shipping...call your favourite OEM. Dell, Compaq... they don't hire psychics you know. If they perceive sales, they'll ship 'em... eventually.
On a vaguely-related note, my theory as to why OEM's haven't shipped a lot of pre-installed "alternative" OS's is that the Linux/*BSD/Minix crowd has a strong do-it-yerself rep. Why would OEM x ship Red Hat on their box when the customer is:
a) Probably not going to be swayed by the convenience factor, since convenience and ease-of-use ranks 47th or lower on a *nix user's priority list (or so the perception goes)
b) There are so many *nix brands out there that, chances are, they're not going to get a plurality of the users to make it worthwhile. Sure, they could ship RH, but 70% of the *nix users are geeks who would probably just uninstall it anyway so they could load the latest snap of Suse 42b4a2 that they compiled on the Beowulf cluster of palm pilots they've got in their garage. At least that's the perception from the OEM's point of view.
Last point... and really offtopic. I saw an ad last week for Compaq that said "24x7 Nonstop"... are they trying to tell me their computer will only run for one fucking week?? Sheesh!
Computer books are grotesquely big. However, it's not because of the amount of information. Most of the size/info ration of yer avg computer book is gobbled up with wide margins, high leding and monster fonts. Viz
COMPUTER BOOKS CHOSEN AT RANDOM FROM MY "LIBRARY"
The Complete Oracle Reference.
1120pp 30lines 9.5wds/line -----> 319.200wds
The CodeWarrior professional Book
440pp 36lines 10wds/line -------> 158,400wds
NON COMPUTER BOOKS SIMILARLY CHOSEN
The Social and Political Writings of Castoriadis Vol 2.
360pp 44lines 13.5wds/line -----> 213,840
Holy Blood Holy Grail
460pp 47lines 9.5wds/line ------> 205,827
Note that my non-computer books are svelt mass-market paperbacks, while the computer tomes are... tomes. Despite this disparity in size by about a factor of 6, they both hold, on average, the same-ish number of pages. NB, I didn't include photos or diagrams in my calcs. I just counted that space as "worded".
So how come computer books are so damn big if all the info they contain can be fit into a puny paperback? Several reasons:
1. Compu books are expensive. Not a heck of a lot of people want to read a book on Java... almost nobody when compared to Stephen King's latest, or even Holy Blood Holy Grail (which is on its 14th printing or something like that). Low print run equals higher cost. No consumer is going to pay $40 for a paperback, hence the Rosetta Stone school of book binding
2. Shelf space competition. There are a dozen beginner C++ books out there and, let's face it, they all cover pretty much the same stuff. As a publisher, how do you increase your sales at the expense of your competition? By grabbing the most shelf space! This is especially true for beginner books as beginners haven't developed publisher preference yet. Shelf space is a big deal in publishing and some publishers of non-comp books even offer chains (ie Chapters) incentives to "face" certain books (stack with cover, not spine, facing customer). Comp books are too small a market to be able to justify these tactics so the solution is a really big spine!
So, how do you get a really big spine? Well, some bindery techniques can do some of it, but by and large the easiest way is: thick pages and lots of them. Hence wide margins, high leding, monster type and lots and lots of dead trees.
Two examples:
Deficiency theory: Until deficiency theory came along, people assumed that afflictions like pallegra and scurvey were caused by posisons. The most notable was the B1 deficiency that swept Germany shortly after corn became the almost sole food for the peasant classes (without treatment, B1 in corn is unusable). The powers-that-be assumed that the corn was somehow poisonous and responded to the outbreak by burning all the crops in the field. Starvation ensued. 200 years later, deficiency theory is developed and the idealized notion of what constituted healthy eating habits changed instantaneously (the actual habits, for economic reasons, was much slower in changing)
Germ theory: What the hell causes disease. Bad vapours? God? Before germ theory the whole notion of sanitization as being a Good Thing was unknown. Surgery (such as it was) would be performed without even a preliminary handwashing by the barber (a proto-surgeon/dentist, demoted over the course of several centuries to a lowly hair cutter). Germ theory developed, baths taken, millions saved. Pretty much over night.
Medical progress is first and foremost a history of revolutions in thinking
The reason the iMac has no case fan is its "chimney" design. The fanless-computer has been an Apple design mainstay since '84 and was one of the reasons why the original Mac was vertical in design instead of horizontal like all other computers of the time. By building a very vertical box with a horizontal component layout, heat can "chimney" up and out. It's the same theory with the iMac.
On a related note, another reason why I find my Mac far quieter than my x86 beast is the CD drive. Anything above 24x sounds like an F-18 in heat. Apple made the decision that the marginal useful gain a 40x (or faster) CD offers is not worth the the atrocious noise. I bought Caesar III for the Winders machine, and mothballed it after an hour. It accesses the CD so much I found it worthwhile to pay for it again when the Mac version came out.
I'm not ridiculing your premises. I'm ridiculing your logic.... that lack of ability to conceive an idea means that ideas is wrong is poor logical form. That is a "logical" construct (and a false one), not a premise.
If you've ever read the bible...
Actually, in point of fact, I have... I, like most atheists, was indoctrinated into my parents' religion as a child and, like most atheists, I went through a looong period of "searching" for spiritual meaning before becoming an atheist.
One: Faith doesn't enlighten. I can have faith in dragons, ufo's or Yahweh. Doesn't mean any of them exist. Any proposition that can be considered "true" must be falsifiable either through a) experimentation, b) observation or c) logical inference from either a or b. Insert standard disclaimers on epistemiology and circular inference here.
Two: The fall from grace, if we are to accept the mythology (and I don't), was the result of humans gaining the knowledge of good and evil. If there was no evil prior to apple snack, then how could that knowledge have been exercised or even recognized? The ability to make said discrimination would have been meaningless.
Two B: I disconcurr that all of the things that are "evil" necessarily had to be perpetrated by "man". Firstly there is evil by permission. god is theoretically omnipotent and, thus, all occurrences in the world are at his permission. By allowing evil to ocurr when he is fully capable of stopping it is an evil by permission. Abetting for lack of a better word. Secondly, there are a bunch of things ocurring directly at god's behest or by his hand in the bible that appear to be patently evil. My personal fave, of course, is the one about the children who moke Elisha because he is bald... God summons she-bears to devour them. I don't remember the chapter and verse and I'm too lazy to look it up but I'm pretty sure it's in Kings... The next time you take a swipe at the bible, try a critical eye. Ask some questions of it. Demand internal consistency. You may see it for what it is, a cobbling of folk tales, morality stories and mangled history cobbled together from different and often contradictory sources.... and in bad translation at that.
Hm. You, personally, cannot conceive of the notion that the world was generated without god, therefore the world was not generated without god. By extension, I cannot believe that flowers can grow without fairies, therefore flowers require fairies. Great logic. At one time people couldn't conceive of the notion of a round earth, a heliocentric solar system or a bunch of other things.... and they, too, were wrong
"random scientific evolution". Uh, random doesn't have anything to do with it. Also, I assume that you're talking about "natural selection" when you say "evolution". You should really look these things up.
than I can attribute it to the boogey man. Only a higher being could have given us a rose, a bald eagle, a rainbow, etc.
If only a higher being could have given us a rose, then what gave us a higher being? A higher-higher being? Hm. I sense a slippery slope of n(higher) beings. Point two: If only a higher being could have given us a rose, could only said higher being have also given us, say, Anthrax (the disease, not the band... although the band isn't a great example of divine perfection either) or Hitler or cancer? Or is the higher being only responsible for the things you define as good or beutiful?
karma whore am I thus, I steal a poet's muse... moderate to 2
breathing pure oxygen will kill you
Actually, it will... not if you only breathe it for an hour, or a couple of days. But as the years tick by, your life expectancy will plummet. Oxygen oxidizes stuff (big surprise). Stuff in our bodies. If we get too much oxidation all sorts of unpleasant things happen to us such as crosslinking of reactive molecules, which reduce the plasticity of the substances they make up leading to all sorts of nasty breakages of Valuable Internal Things (like arterial walls or muscle tissue or, god forbid, yer brain). It's kinda like vulcanizing your body. We're supposed to be gooey and pink like an eraser. Not hard and black like a tire (the comparison of colour, btw, is representative of the nature of rubber... NOT a comment on race)
In point of fact, we spend a lot of energy fighting off the bad effects of oxygen. Vitamin C, E, B3, Selenium yatta yatta... if we don't consume it we get seriously bad effects from increased oxidation (although, lack of collegen from a C defficiency will kill you first). Singlet O, of course, is the worst. A doubling of SuperOxide in your bloodstream will kill you in an hour... if you care, there's a fine stack of links on peroxidizaiton and SOD at http://www.worthington-biochem.com/manual/S/SOD.ht ml
Nitrogen is totally inert... however, Mars is far away and cold, so we may want to consider bringing a big pile of CH4. It has 4 - 6 times the insulating capacity as CO2 so it's a more efficient haul. Should also consider O3. Radiation burns are ugly and there's no guarantee of sufficient high atmospheric electric discharge on Mars to make enough "naturally".
Lastly, doesn't Mars have insufficient gravity to hold enough atmosphere for we poor mammals? We've all seen how badly parachutes seem to work there...
1. It's syntax is simple
2. It has a "record" feature that allows you to hit the record button, do stuff, and then play it back. A great first script for kids is the "desktop icon animation" one
3. It's oop... without the fuss
4. It's nutso powerful. You can script dozens of apps to do stuff (a la VB)
5. It's free
6. If you want to spend money, you can get facespan which is a very nice and quite rational (if somewhat underdocumented) gui builder
It's a winner.... if you have a mac
The mac is not a PC
So, that would explain Pepsi's presence....
here's a fine article from a bunch of international trade lawyers.
http://www.skralaw.com/Articles/cuba.htm
So they had a revolution. A perfectly sensible idea given the circumstances (and one that shouldn't come as a surprise to the Americans who had their own revolution over the issue of colonial abuses...)
The difference between the American and Cuban revolution, however, is that while the Americans managed to hold on to all the infrastructure when the Family Compact fled to Canada (My ancestors, BTW... hey Clinton, I want compensation for my lost inheritance, I'm sure messrs. Helms and Burton will support my cause...) When the Americans left Cuba they took or destroyed most of the infrastructure (much easier to do since Agriculture requires more mechanization now than the 18th century and transportation is much more efficient). The result: Cuba is stuck in the same situation as Manchuria in the late 50's. So the Cubans trade one "sugar daddy" (ha ha) for another: the Soviets.
The Soviets have their own agenda, of course. Cuba is of hefty strategic importance, so the Russians finance it to the gills. However, instead of using the financing to develop and economy that is self-supporting and has the potential to run a positive trade balance, they spend the money on stupid things, like Cubas oil industry (the crude out of Cuba is so high in sulfur as to be almost unusable) instead of on smart things like nickle mining or functional agriculture.
So the RSFSR goes belly up and Cuba is left with an inappropriate industrial base geared towards serving a market that doesn't exist anymore. Bad news. And you know what? despite that, Cuba has the highest literacy rate and life expectancy in the carribean (excluding Grand Cayman which is really nothing more than a rogue state for tax evaders... kinda like a rich man's Libya,but without the guns).
Oh yeah, the comment about Cuba being able to trade with any country they wish... Maybe you should actually sit down and read the Helms Burton legislation. If I as a Canadian Citizen (which I am) am a ranking executive in a company that does business with Cuba such as Sherrit (which I'm not) then I can be refused entry to the US for no other reason than that and any property that I own in the United States can legally AND WITHOUT COMPENSATION BE SEIZED BY THE US GOVERNMENT! Oh yeah, Cuba's free to trade with any one they want to...
Just the two cents of a "termainally gullible fool"
I'll take the mod down if need be, but I will not post anonymously
So you don't lie? Hm. If you were hiding 4 jews in your basement and the SS came to your door and asked if you were harbouring jews...
I did it backwards. Bought macs for ten years then got an x86 laptop (god, it was so cheap)) oops! After 5 hours of not being able to get a functional X (anyone got a config for a Mag Verity? Thought not...) I resorted to the dark side. My favourite error is "operating system not found". Wow.
Carbon isn't emulation. It is a "quick fix", but it is a valid OS X api that is fully buzzword compliant (protected this, premeptive that). "Classic" is run as emulation and does a good job of it. It even supports 68k specific memory calls (notably the A5 World) although I would be leery of using a 68k app in the first place (if your really need to play gang wars, buy a used SE for $50) Of course the holy grail is cocoa. However, you will see a lot more carbon apps than cocoa ones for a variety of reasons:
a) Carbon is easy. You can download Apple's Carbon Dater to test your current apps for Carbon compliance. This tells you what you need to change and pretty much how to do it. Sadly, it usually reccommends you change your event loop (a good idea since WaitNextEvent is where cpu sharing parameters are set) however, this has got to be one of the best porting tools I have seen.
b) Cocoa is tied to not-so-popular languages. Well, okay, Java is pretty popular, but not for heavy stuff. The language of choice for Cocoa is Objective C. Ever heard of it? Neither have a lot of other people. So, in addition to learning the API, you really have to learn a new language. With carbon you can keep your C/C++/Pascal app and carbonize it.
The "big plan" of course is to have current apps carbonized ASAP and encourage new products to be written Cocoa from the ground up. In the meantime, don't dis carbon. It means that you will have a ton of native apps pronto.
Apple has already been through one earth shaking change (68k to PPC) and they really learned their lessons. This transition, so far, promises to be smooth. Remember that Rhapsody was canned because the transition from Classic to Yellow Box was considered to be too big a leap too quickly that would lose a lot of developers. Apple's doing it right.