I'm just going to pretend you weren't comparing a 1.25Ghz G4 (which probably has 266Mhz or 333Mhz fsb) to a G4 quarter the speed and which has 100Mhz fsb.
Pretend all you like, but I was doing exactly that.
If you care about speed, this $500 model is not for you. The lowest of low end, oldest of old G4 Towers can run 10.3 (and most applications) perfectly fine. If just running it "perfectly fine" isn't good enough for you, save up your pennies and buy a G5 Tower, or at least the new G5 iMac.
An old G4 tower from about two years ago will have old software from about two years ago.
Depends on who you buy it from. Were I currently selling one right now, I would probably have 10.3 loaded on it, because I tend to keep my Macs up-to-date.
For that matter, if you are a typical Slashdot DIY type, buy a stripped bare-bones G4 system from a repair shop, load it with whatever HD, memory, graphics card, and CD/DVD drive you like, pick up a copy of 10.3 for $120, and you will probably end up with a nicer machine than this imaginary system which Think Secret is talking about for about the same money.
You may sacrifice a small amount of CPU performance, but if you cared about that you would be looking at the G5 towers, not wishing you could buy a headless eMac.
But I want a "Cube", and they are still selling for "much bucks". I'm hoping this thing will be a new cube, or at least something I wouldn't be embarassed to have on my desk, unlike the current eMac. And being able to plug it in to my KVM> Bonus. I'll hide it behind my desk and tell my boss its the new Blue Man Group Linux...
Hiding a Cube is a bad idea... Heat management required that it be out in the open. The old G4 Tower, on the other hand, did everything the Cube did and then some, while fitting nicely pretty much anywhere you would put a PC tower. Looks like you could snag one for as little as $250 or so if you get lucky with the bidding.
1. Apple has long expressed no interest in selling such a machine.
2. A new G4 desktop system in Spring of 2005? No chance. Apple is moving away from the Motorola G4 archetecture, in favor of the IBM G5. The eMac and the current laptops will probably be the end of the line for the G4.
3. The current G4 eMac is $800, and their margin on it is thin (by Apple standards.) This rumored system is pretty much a G4 with the $100 monitor removed. No way Apple sells it for $500.
4. Everybody who says they would never buy one of the current Macs, but would buy this one for $500 out of impulse, is a damn liar. You can already buy a headless G4 Mac for under $600. Just go to eBay and buy an old G4 tower from about two years ago. Hell, for that matter, you can buy an old G3 tower which will run OS X just fine for about $300. Add a $100 CPU upgrade, and there's your G4 right there.
One thing that's slightly interesting is that it's a "person" who is making every decision, including who to be, by committee.
It's also interesting that what these nine people settled on as their chosen compromise was something rather eccentric and quirky. Most people would expect the moderating force of nine people agreeing on everything to result in something rather mundane, rather than a big orange hulk with red hair.
The presense of wilde in the game presents the other players an opportunity to interact with a character which has a sort of collective mind. That's sort of unusual. If I played that game, and my character meet "wilde", I would probably want to spend some time talking to that dude and figuring out what the heck the deal is with him.
The jist (rather than pasting in the entire text like a total Karma whore):
A group of nine residents in an assisted-living home, some of whom completely unable to operate a computer on their own, all of whom are wheelchair-bound, but none of whom have mental disabilities, created a Second Life character with the help of a person (a resident, IIRC... I just skimmed most of the story), who turned them on to the idea and controls the interface for them.
Pretty much everything the character says and does is decided by a consensus of these nine people, including the look of the character itself (a big bulky guy with orange skin and red hair.)
From the article, it sounds like they were a pretty tight-knit bunch before they even started playing this game, which probably makes it easier for them to cooperatively roleplay a single avitar.
Speaking as a crotchety old man who's older and more crotchety than you, I would like to say that the GTA3 series (3/VC/SA) is fantastic.
In my basement, under the stairs, I have an old Vic20 which I could fire up to play "Attack of the Blue Meanies"... but I would much rather steal a SWAT wagon and go joyriding through the streets of Portland.
Nostalgia's all well and good, but a few of the games which have come out in the last few years are a real hoot.
You are thinking of patent law. Patents give you a temporary monopoly on the sale of a commodity which you invented.
Copyright gives you exclusive rights to distribute a specific work of art. It does not give you a monopoly on the sale of all artistic works.
The commodity in question is movies. The fact that Pixar & Disney have the copyrights to "The Incredibles" does not prevent me from selling a competing movie. My movie might not be as good as theirs, and far more people will probably want to buy "The Incredibles", but that's up to the consumer to decide. There is nothing (apart from my lack of movie-making talent and resources) to prevent me from making a movie which is every bit as good as theirs, and competing with them for movie consumer dollars. They don't have a monopoly on movies, and therefore there is no monopoly.
Then again, somebody posting on/. who doesn't know about Wired probably doesn't know about Cosmo either, so I'm probably not being very helpful by putting it that way.
It's a magazine of puff-pieces written by futurists, techno-fetishists, and Silicon Valley marketing drones. Imagine an entire magazine of Jon Katz rants, printed in the ugliest type-faces imaginable, with lots of charts and graphs that convey no real information whatsoever. That's pretty much what Wired is.
Zeitgeist might not be a popular word in whatever circles you happen to run in, but it is a word that English speakers use a lot,
Actually, no it's not. I'm a native English speaker and I've NEVER heard that word before.
(sigh)
To repeat:
Zeitgeist might not be a popular word in whatever circles you happen to run in, but it is a word that English speakers use a lot
It is a commonly-used word in America. I can't help it if you hang with people who don't use it.
Since I'm from a northern state, I've never heard anybody use the word "reckon" in a sentence, outside of TV shows about the South. People don't use that word up here. We are far more likely to say "guess" or "estimate." That doesn't mean I'm going to scream to the world that it's not a word that is used by English speakers, just because people around me don't use it.
jxyama hit the nail on the head when he speculated that perhaps he should be reading more. If you read a lot, particularilly periodicals, you are far more likely to encounter the word zeitgeist.
Your numbers, rough though they are, seem to bolster my point.
If an "average" skydiver has about.75 of a 1% chance of getting killed this year, somebody who skydives a lot (let's call double the average "a lot") has maybe a 1.5% chance of getting killed each year that they do so, so one would expect almost a third of such folks to die in skydiving accidents over the next 20 years. Those who don't die in car accidents on the way to the jump, anyway.
A diabetic who doesn't give up sugar probably has better odds than that. Like I said, a hobby of frequent skydiving is not a smart choice.
Their right to due process by your assumption of their guilt merely from their arrest. This also puts your due process rights in jeopardy. I would also submit that you cannot determine if the arrests are justified or not. That is a matter for a court of law.
I'm not the one jailing them. My clumsy omission of the word "alleged" on a web forum does not deny them any rights. At best, you could accuse me of slandering them, but only if you can show that I had malace towards these people (who I don't know), and what I said turns out to not be true.
Let me be more specific about the question I asked you before. What rights has the State violated by arresting these people who are reasonable suspected of committing a crime? Any?
The arrest described in the article is the first step
Bzzt!
Oh, sorry about tat. I have this buzzer that goes off whenever somebody uses a "slippery slope" argument in place of logic.
Some people who should have been arrested (because there is compelling evidence that they have broken the law) have been arrested. You have not made a case as to why this is a Bad Thing. You've just nit-picked over my semantics.
What's stupid but interesting is your theory that you have the right to take as much as you want, without ever asking me in person, for whatever your personal pursuit is.
I never postulated such a theory.
Stupid, interesting, and uncomprehending. Quite the trifecta you've got going there.
Doing a single tandem jump, because you want to say you did it once, is one thing. Lots of people are curious enough to give it a try.
I'm talking about people who keep jumping on a regular basis. Sooner or later, 00 is going to come up on that Roulette wheel, and the more times you play, the more likely you will eventually hit it.
People like to say "you are more likely to die in a car than in a plane", because lots more people die in car crashes than in plane crashes, but if you spent several hours a day flying in planes, the odds of you getting killed in a plane crash become much, much higher. How many touring rock stars died in car crashes in the last 20 years? How many in planes and helicopters?
Skydiving is a high risk activity. If I learn how to do beam gymnastics and get really good at it, I could probably do a beam routine over a pit of lava once and not die. Gymnasts don't fall off the beam very often. However, if I keep doing it on a regular bases, I should expect to get killed doing it sooner or later. Anybody witnessing my behavior would have to assume that I'm some kind of nut to keep pushing my luck like that.
It's not my law and it's my right to speak out agains the frivolous use of my taxpayer money to enforce the rights of the yuppie next door to his latest finger-painting. Screw him. His work sucks, his art sucks, and it's not worth my protection.
So for art which you judge to be "good" it is moral to protect the product of the artist's labor, but if you judget it to "suck" (yet still good enough to be worth stealing), the creator should not be allowed to make a living selling it, because you are entitled to a free copy.
Interesting take.
Stupid, but interesting.
I did. I learned about monopolies, cartels, and money-laundering. Perhaps you slept through those classes.
The movie industry is a monopoly? That's funny, I thought there were a lot of competing studios (and lots more competition from Hong Kong, India, Japan, and Europe.)
What rights of the alleged criminals have been violated? What rights of mine have been put in jeopardy by their arrest? (An arrest which appears to be totally justified, as far as the information in this story seems to indicate)
There's nothing in this story about unethical behavior, discrimination, brutality, or unlawful intrusion. There's an awful lot of evidence that they committed crimes, and the FBI arrested them for those crimes based on that evidence.
This is just a story about cops doing their jobs, isn't it?
Yep. Nothing to do with religion. Studies have shown that, with the exception of abusive situations, the break-up of an unhappy marriage usually leads to happier parents, but severely depressed children.
Statistically speaking, children are almost always better off (a lot better off, in fact) being raised by a discontent married couple than living through the divorce of their parents.
Anectotal evidence doesn't count for a lot, but I've certainly found it to be the case among my peers who were raised by divorced parents. One in particular often says her "world pretty much came to an end" when her parents split up. Both she and her brother carried a lot of mental baggage from then on, although both parents were far more happy apart than when they were together.
Bah! I don't need to aproach Terminal Velocity over somebody's cow pasture to feel alive, nor to I need to stare death in the face on a regular basis to prove I'm a man.
Nice that you assume that anybody not stupid enough to hurl themselves into the open sky must be some sheltered couch potato who doesn't derive any joy from life. It couldn't possibly be that I have a life full of extremely fun sport and recreational activities. I must be one of those people who washes his hands twice an hour for fear of germs. Enjoy the delusion, flyboy.
It's more than just jumping out of an airplane and landing safely...
Actually, that's really all you are really doing. If your luck holds, that is. Lots of people die doing that stuff, even with all the safety precautions. It's nowhere nearly as safe as such quiet activities as rock climbing or bear-baiting.
it's a way of living that puts _everything_ in perspective. The sun shines brighter, the air is cleaner, the grass is greener, and your shirts are always wrinkle-free.
Like I said. Adreneline junkie. Idiotic adreneline junkie. Sorry if that hurts your feelings, but I gotta call 'em like I see 'em.
I would say that paratrooper training for combat are much more idiotic adreneline junkies.
I would not describe anybody as idiotic for chosing to trade their personal safety for the opportunity protect our way of life. Heroic, perhaps, but not idiotic.
And what about diving ? Dangerous and not useful.. And leisure airplanes ? And ski, snowboard ? (snow is so dangerous..)
Snow is dangerous? Good heavens, why didn't anybody tell me!? I've been recklessly living in Minnesota all these years!!!
I stand by my statement that regularilly free-falling from great heights on purpose as a means of recreation is completely idiotic. If you want to crap your pants with fear over and over until you eventually get killed, why not just play 1-on-1 Russian Roulette like Christopher Walken in "The Deer Hunter"?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm just going to pretend you weren't comparing a 1.25Ghz G4 (which probably has 266Mhz or 333Mhz fsb) to a G4 quarter the speed and which has 100Mhz fsb.
Pretend all you like, but I was doing exactly that.
If you care about speed, this $500 model is not for you. The lowest of low end, oldest of old G4 Towers can run 10.3 (and most applications) perfectly fine. If just running it "perfectly fine" isn't good enough for you, save up your pennies and buy a G5 Tower, or at least the new G5 iMac.
An old G4 tower from about two years ago will have old software from about two years ago.
Depends on who you buy it from. Were I currently selling one right now, I would probably have 10.3 loaded on it, because I tend to keep my Macs up-to-date.
For that matter, if you are a typical Slashdot DIY type, buy a stripped bare-bones G4 system from a repair shop, load it with whatever HD, memory, graphics card, and CD/DVD drive you like, pick up a copy of 10.3 for $120, and you will probably end up with a nicer machine than this imaginary system which Think Secret is talking about for about the same money.
You may sacrifice a small amount of CPU performance, but if you cared about that you would be looking at the G5 towers, not wishing you could buy a headless eMac.
$500 is less than $600.
I said "less than", not $600.
Less than, as in "about half of" as it turns out.
But I want a "Cube", and they are still selling for "much bucks". I'm hoping this thing will be a new cube, or at least something I wouldn't be embarassed to have on my desk, unlike the current eMac. And being able to plug it in to my KVM> Bonus. I'll hide it behind my desk and tell my boss its the new Blue Man Group Linux...
Here you go
Hiding a Cube is a bad idea... Heat management required that it be out in the open. The old G4 Tower, on the other hand, did everything the Cube did and then some, while fitting nicely pretty much anywhere you would put a PC tower. Looks like you could snag one for as little as $250 or so if you get lucky with the bidding.
I'm betting it's nonsense, though.
1. Apple has long expressed no interest in selling such a machine.
2. A new G4 desktop system in Spring of 2005? No chance. Apple is moving away from the Motorola G4 archetecture, in favor of the IBM G5. The eMac and the current laptops will probably be the end of the line for the G4.
3. The current G4 eMac is $800, and their margin on it is thin (by Apple standards.) This rumored system is pretty much a G4 with the $100 monitor removed. No way Apple sells it for $500.
4. Everybody who says they would never buy one of the current Macs, but would buy this one for $500 out of impulse, is a damn liar. You can already buy a headless G4 Mac for under $600. Just go to eBay and buy an old G4 tower from about two years ago. Hell, for that matter, you can buy an old G3 tower which will run OS X just fine for about $300. Add a $100 CPU upgrade, and there's your G4 right there.
I prefer my games to leave a little more to the imagination.
I take it back. I'm not as crotchety as you, even if I am older. You sound like my dad complaining about how TV ruined Gunsmoke.
One thing that's slightly interesting is that it's a "person" who is making every decision, including who to be, by committee.
It's also interesting that what these nine people settled on as their chosen compromise was something rather eccentric and quirky. Most people would expect the moderating force of nine people agreeing on everything to result in something rather mundane, rather than a big orange hulk with red hair.
The presense of wilde in the game presents the other players an opportunity to interact with a character which has a sort of collective mind. That's sort of unusual. If I played that game, and my character meet "wilde", I would probably want to spend some time talking to that dude and figuring out what the heck the deal is with him.
The jist (rather than pasting in the entire text like a total Karma whore):
A group of nine residents in an assisted-living home, some of whom completely unable to operate a computer on their own, all of whom are wheelchair-bound, but none of whom have mental disabilities, created a Second Life character with the help of a person (a resident, IIRC... I just skimmed most of the story), who turned them on to the idea and controls the interface for them.
Pretty much everything the character says and does is decided by a consensus of these nine people, including the look of the character itself (a big bulky guy with orange skin and red hair.)
From the article, it sounds like they were a pretty tight-knit bunch before they even started playing this game, which probably makes it easier for them to cooperatively roleplay a single avitar.
Speaking as a crotchety old man who's older and more crotchety than you, I would like to say that the GTA3 series (3/VC/SA) is fantastic.
In my basement, under the stairs, I have an old Vic20 which I could fire up to play "Attack of the Blue Meanies"... but I would much rather steal a SWAT wagon and go joyriding through the streets of Portland.
Nostalgia's all well and good, but a few of the games which have come out in the last few years are a real hoot.
Snow is as dangerous as air !
Air is dangerous!? Why didn't anybody tell me?
You are thinking of patent law. Patents give you a temporary monopoly on the sale of a commodity which you invented.
Copyright gives you exclusive rights to distribute a specific work of art. It does not give you a monopoly on the sale of all artistic works.
The commodity in question is movies. The fact that Pixar & Disney have the copyrights to "The Incredibles" does not prevent me from selling a competing movie. My movie might not be as good as theirs, and far more people will probably want to buy "The Incredibles", but that's up to the consumer to decide. There is nothing (apart from my lack of movie-making talent and resources) to prevent me from making a movie which is every bit as good as theirs, and competing with them for movie consumer dollars. They don't have a monopoly on movies, and therefore there is no monopoly.
What is Wired magazine?
/. who doesn't know about Wired probably doesn't know about Cosmo either, so I'm probably not being very helpful by putting it that way.
Cosmopolitan for geeks.
Then again, somebody posting on
It's a magazine of puff-pieces written by futurists, techno-fetishists, and Silicon Valley marketing drones. Imagine an entire magazine of Jon Katz rants, printed in the ugliest type-faces imaginable, with lots of charts and graphs that convey no real information whatsoever. That's pretty much what Wired is.
Zeitgeist might not be a popular word in whatever circles you happen to run in, but it is a word that English speakers use a lot,
Actually, no it's not. I'm a native English speaker and I've NEVER heard that word before.
(sigh)
To repeat:
Zeitgeist might not be a popular word in whatever circles you happen to run in, but it is a word that English speakers use a lot
It is a commonly-used word in America. I can't help it if you hang with people who don't use it.
Since I'm from a northern state, I've never heard anybody use the word "reckon" in a sentence, outside of TV shows about the South. People don't use that word up here. We are far more likely to say "guess" or "estimate." That doesn't mean I'm going to scream to the world that it's not a word that is used by English speakers, just because people around me don't use it.
jxyama hit the nail on the head when he speculated that perhaps he should be reading more. If you read a lot, particularilly periodicals, you are far more likely to encounter the word zeitgeist.
Your numbers, rough though they are, seem to bolster my point.
.75 of a 1% chance of getting killed this year, somebody who skydives a lot (let's call double the average "a lot") has maybe a 1.5% chance of getting killed each year that they do so, so one would expect almost a third of such folks to die in skydiving accidents over the next 20 years. Those who don't die in car accidents on the way to the jump, anyway.
If an "average" skydiver has about
A diabetic who doesn't give up sugar probably has better odds than that. Like I said, a hobby of frequent skydiving is not a smart choice.
Their right to due process by your assumption of their guilt merely from their arrest. This also puts your due process rights in jeopardy. I would also submit that you cannot determine if the arrests are justified or not. That is a matter for a court of law.
I'm not the one jailing them. My clumsy omission of the word "alleged" on a web forum does not deny them any rights. At best, you could accuse me of slandering them, but only if you can show that I had malace towards these people (who I don't know), and what I said turns out to not be true.
Let me be more specific about the question I asked you before. What rights has the State violated by arresting these people who are reasonable suspected of committing a crime? Any?
The arrest described in the article is the first step
Bzzt!
Oh, sorry about tat. I have this buzzer that goes off whenever somebody uses a "slippery slope" argument in place of logic.
Some people who should have been arrested (because there is compelling evidence that they have broken the law) have been arrested. You have not made a case as to why this is a Bad Thing. You've just nit-picked over my semantics.
What's stupid but interesting is your theory that you have the right to take as much as you want, without ever asking me in person, for whatever your personal pursuit is.
I never postulated such a theory.
Stupid, interesting, and uncomprehending. Quite the trifecta you've got going there.
I agree. They are two completely different crimes.
You still don't have a right to be a criminal.
Well, you do, but the state reserves the right to impose discipline for criminal behavior.
Once again, criminal suspects have been legally aprehended. Hooray! No rights were violated in this story.
That was my original point, and none of the flames which followed have managed to refute it.
Doing a single tandem jump, because you want to say you did it once, is one thing. Lots of people are curious enough to give it a try.
I'm talking about people who keep jumping on a regular basis. Sooner or later, 00 is going to come up on that Roulette wheel, and the more times you play, the more likely you will eventually hit it.
People like to say "you are more likely to die in a car than in a plane", because lots more people die in car crashes than in plane crashes, but if you spent several hours a day flying in planes, the odds of you getting killed in a plane crash become much, much higher. How many touring rock stars died in car crashes in the last 20 years? How many in planes and helicopters?
Skydiving is a high risk activity. If I learn how to do beam gymnastics and get really good at it, I could probably do a beam routine over a pit of lava once and not die. Gymnasts don't fall off the beam very often. However, if I keep doing it on a regular bases, I should expect to get killed doing it sooner or later. Anybody witnessing my behavior would have to assume that I'm some kind of nut to keep pushing my luck like that.
It's not my law and it's my right to speak out agains the frivolous use of my taxpayer money to enforce the rights of the yuppie next door to his latest finger-painting. Screw him. His work sucks, his art sucks, and it's not worth my protection.
So for art which you judge to be "good" it is moral to protect the product of the artist's labor, but if you judget it to "suck" (yet still good enough to be worth stealing), the creator should not be allowed to make a living selling it, because you are entitled to a free copy.
Interesting take.
Stupid, but interesting.
I did. I learned about monopolies, cartels, and money-laundering. Perhaps you slept through those classes.
The movie industry is a monopoly? That's funny, I thought there were a lot of competing studios (and lots more competition from Hong Kong, India, Japan, and Europe.)
Fine, fine, fine...
What rights of the alleged criminals have been violated? What rights of mine have been put in jeopardy by their arrest? (An arrest which appears to be totally justified, as far as the information in this story seems to indicate)
There's nothing in this story about unethical behavior, discrimination, brutality, or unlawful intrusion. There's an awful lot of evidence that they committed crimes, and the FBI arrested them for those crimes based on that evidence.
This is just a story about cops doing their jobs, isn't it?
Yep. Nothing to do with religion. Studies have shown that, with the exception of abusive situations, the break-up of an unhappy marriage usually leads to happier parents, but severely depressed children.
Statistically speaking, children are almost always better off (a lot better off, in fact) being raised by a discontent married couple than living through the divorce of their parents.
Anectotal evidence doesn't count for a lot, but I've certainly found it to be the case among my peers who were raised by divorced parents. One in particular often says her "world pretty much came to an end" when her parents split up. Both she and her brother carried a lot of mental baggage from then on, although both parents were far more happy apart than when they were together.
Sure, it's what's known as a fundamental right, which is differentiated from a legal right.
Oh... So it's a fundamental right to profit from somebody else's labor?
Thanks for clearing that up.
Bah! I don't need to aproach Terminal Velocity over somebody's cow pasture to feel alive, nor to I need to stare death in the face on a regular basis to prove I'm a man.
Nice that you assume that anybody not stupid enough to hurl themselves into the open sky must be some sheltered couch potato who doesn't derive any joy from life. It couldn't possibly be that I have a life full of extremely fun sport and recreational activities. I must be one of those people who washes his hands twice an hour for fear of germs. Enjoy the delusion, flyboy.
It's more than just jumping out of an airplane and landing safely...
Actually, that's really all you are really doing. If your luck holds, that is. Lots of people die doing that stuff, even with all the safety precautions. It's nowhere nearly as safe as such quiet activities as rock climbing or bear-baiting.
it's a way of living that puts _everything_ in perspective. The sun shines brighter, the air is cleaner, the grass is greener, and your shirts are always wrinkle-free.
Like I said. Adreneline junkie. Idiotic adreneline junkie. Sorry if that hurts your feelings, but I gotta call 'em like I see 'em.
I would say that paratrooper training for combat are much more idiotic adreneline junkies.
I would not describe anybody as idiotic for chosing to trade their personal safety for the opportunity protect our way of life. Heroic, perhaps, but not idiotic.
And what about diving ? Dangerous and not useful.. And leisure airplanes ? And ski, snowboard ? (snow is so dangerous..)
Snow is dangerous? Good heavens, why didn't anybody tell me!? I've been recklessly living in Minnesota all these years!!!
I stand by my statement that regularilly free-falling from great heights on purpose as a means of recreation is completely idiotic. If you want to crap your pants with fear over and over until you eventually get killed, why not just play 1-on-1 Russian Roulette like Christopher Walken in "The Deer Hunter"?
What exactly does the arrest of criminals by constitutial and fair procedures have to do with "My Rights Online"?
Has software piracy become a right? Perhaps sometime when I wasn't looking?