heavier, bulkier, slower, more fragile, less battery life, with a shitty graphics card, half the video memory, no firewire, no USB.
If you want an inexpensive Linux CLI portable, the Toshiba is quite spiffy... but not comparable.
The iBook is a subnotebook with the feature set of a full notebook. Turn a sheet of notebook paper sideways on your desk: that is the total footprint of the iBook. (Set the same sheet of paper on the keyboard of your Toshiba, and you will see that it is much smaller.)
It weights 4.9 pounds (counting the battery and the drive).
It has a battery which, in real-world use, runs about 5 hours between charges when using OS 9. (Running OS X costs you about an hour of that time, because of the less efficient power management, but that still blows the doors off my HP Pavilion, which is lucky to get past 65 minutes.)
No laptop which matches it's features and weight can be found for under $2k. Nice try, though.
I don't really get this. I mean I desperately want to have an LCD panel (don't want a mac tho) but I can't really afford one. Now what's the point of putting these still rather expensive pieces of equipment on top of what were meant to be great budget machines (the iMac)?
iMacs are still CRT-based. It's just the stand-alone CRT's that Apple is no longer making. (They weren't really "making" them to begin with, just re-branding ViewSonics and Sony Trinitrons).
If you are not a Mac user but like LCD, this news is a Good Thing from your perspective. Apple is expanding the scale of LCD's, which will drive the price down (just like they did for USB, Firewire, SCSI, and lots of other technologies).
Thanks to Apple pushing the envelope, you will be able to get an LCD screen for your El Cheapo AMD box a lot sooner.
Mac users who like CRT can still buy them, just not from Apple. (And most of them were already buying from Sony anyway... the Apple CRT's were nice monitors, but overpriced.)
Uh? I'm not a medical doctor (and I seldom play one in Slashdot), but to me that sounds like rubbish.
I am not a doctor either, but I am a former teacher (and the son of a clinical psychologist) who has spent time studying childhood development.
It is well established that mental development is extremely fast during the pre-pubescent phase (when most kids are in Junior High school).
This, along with hormone changes and physical growth, is also why kids at that age are so notorious for being "squirly". There are several factors working against them.
1. They are just beginning to learn to deal with their sex drive. 2. Their bodies are growning so fast, that it is physically painful to sit still for more than 15 minutes. (Teachers who let their kids stand or move around frequently tend to have far fewer behaviour problems with that age group than those who insist on "sitting still with good posture" for a full hour.) 3. Since kids enter this phase at slightly different ages, a classroom full of "average" kids are not going to be learning at the same pace. Some will be overwhelmed while others are bored. Grades are organized by age mostly for socialization purposes and organizational convenience, but the trade-off is you have classrooms full of vastly different aptitude, even among kids who will ultimately be the same intelligence by the time they are taking their SAT's in a few years.
Man, if you think having sex is an 'ugly truth' then i suspect it is already too late for you.
Sex is fantastic. I would reccomend it to any of my friends. That's not what I was saying.
My point is that pornography does expose any children who see it to certain ugly truths (i.e., some people like it rough. Try explaining the BDSM culture to a small child sometime... actually, please don't.), not to mention a lot of lies (For example, real lesbians are, in fact, nothing like the ones in the "adult" movies. As another example, the average person's anatomy bears little resemblance to the typical porn star's)
If you want to make the case that older teens are more than capable of watching that stuff, I might be inclined to listen to what you have to say (I may not completely agree, but I would be willing to listen to evidence)... However, to suggest that young children are ready to be exposed to "meaningless and tawdry" sexual behaviour (as you described it) is wrongheaded.
Instead of throwing labels around how about if you address the isssue, instead?
Actually, I thought I did both.:)
I have seen the studies showing a positive correlation between viewing violence and behaving violently. This is understandable. But let's return to the original question: namely, what adverse affects does viewing "Girls Gone Wild" have on a 9 year old? Any? Studies along similar lines exist, but I am too lazy to look them up at this point, and will defer to Google to help you find them.
You made the (valid) claim that the brain undergoes radical changes from birth to adulthood, but this says nothing about the harm of viewing porn.
My point was that you should not expect small children to understand sex the same way that adults do, no matter how much education you offer, there are some things that they just won't understand "until they're older".
That is an education issue. If people would be more open about sex, rather than being embarassed about it, children would know and understand about these things.
This is a common fallacy (mostly among liberals, but not exclusively). The problem with your point is that children are not little adults.
"Education" is the slow process of turning children into well-informed adults, not an instant means to make small children able to cope with the ugly truths of the world.
The development of the human brain takes two important post-birth leaps forward. The first is during the "terrible twos", when a two-year old becomes a toddler. The brain goes through a remarkable increase in synapse connections during this period.
The second of these stages happens shortly before puberty, when the brain goes through another phase of radiacally accelerated growth.
In terms of real development, the brain of a 16-year old is as different from the brain of an 8-year old as the 8-year old's brain is from a newborn baby. There is a fundamental difference between the way chidren and young adults think, and all education models which fail to respect this difference are doomed to failure.
I oppose any and all censorship of the Internet, but I am very sympathetic to those who wish to prevent their children from viewing pornography and/or violence.
Nanny-state liberals have been insisting on seat-belt laws (and motorcycle helmet laws) in most states. Those who supported such laws should not be surprised, now that the obvious consequences of such laws (which we libertarians tried to warn you about) are starting to crop up.
(I'm not responding to you, personally, bauaba... I have no idea what your views are... just the thread in general.)
Here in Minnesota, the seat belt law allows for an additional fine on a moving violation, but does not allow officers to pull you over for it. Some people have been pushing for more seat-belt enforcement, but minority advocates rightly point out that such a law could lead to a lot more pull-overs for DWB ("driving while black"), and so it hopefully will not go anywhere.
a very large element of chance when it comes to who can be a Jedi
That limitation probably won't work, because people will just keep creating & deleting characters until the random generator gives them one that is well-suited to be a jedi. I bet with in a month the game will be crammed with 12-year old kids playing jedi knights.
Let's face it, a lot of people are bound to say "f* this. If I can't be a jedi, what's the point in playing it?"
Re:Taco got D2 beta AND D2 expansion beta???
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Too bad that Diablo II gets boring even faster than Everquest.
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I would go even further and say that a Canadian from English-speaking parts of Canada would probably feel much more at home in Wisconsin or Michigan than in Quebec... Just as somebody from Ohio or Montana would find Canada a lot more familiar than Athens, GA.
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Been there. It's pretty much the same. (I live in Minnesota, BTW, so I'm around plenty o' Canadians.)
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As an American, the jab would be lost on me, simply because the culture of Canada (at least, the English-speaking part of it) is damn near identical to the culture of the US. We watch each other's TV shows, listen to each other's musicians, use the same word for our main unit of money, and have not had a serious political dispute since the old days of "54-40 or fight". Three of America's four "major-league" sports leagues (NBA, NHL, MLB & NFL) include Canadian cities.
The truth is that Americans enjoy making jingoistic jabs at Canadians (and vice versa) simply because we are such old friends that we view it almost the same way as rivalries between states or provences. It's all in good fun. We like Canada, and are really glad to have them as a neighbor rather than, say, Iran or North Korea.
As for "knowing nothing" about other countries... The thing is, we don't need to... at least not in the way somebody from, say, Germany needs to. We are a huge country bordered by nothing but two allies and two Oceans. Somebody from Des Moines, Iowa would have to travel over a thousand miles to reach the nearest foreign city, and even farther to reach one where English is not spoken.
It's not that we're isolationist, it's just that we're isolated.
For the record, "split infinitives" are not actually a grammatical error.
It never fails. If you attempt to correct grammar on slashdot, you will make some yourself. Your misuse of singular vs. plural in that sentence is a classic example.
Let's be really pedantic and break down the whole damned thing, shall we?
Space, the final frontier.
This is actually a fragment, not a sentence.
These are the voyages of the starship, Enterprise.
Nothing seems wrong at first, except that in the context of their "5 year mission", and the fact that the only destination defined here is "space" they are actually on one voyage.
It's five year mission, to...
Again, the verb is missing. Some grammar nazi's would let this slide as an implied "is".
...explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before!
While connordb points out that the split infinative is not an error, it is pretty sloppy writing. Another problem is the redundancy. How can you possibly explore stange new worlds if you only go where man has gone before? The whole last phrase is unwarrented. Also, are they uninterested in seeking out old civilizations? Is there seach limited to newborn infants in recently constructed cities (on newly formed planets)? "New" is a poorly chosen word.
A more correct way to write the introduction would be as follows:
Space is the final frontier. This is the voyage of the starship, Enterprise. Its five year mission is to explore strange worlds while searching for life and civilizations.
All the drama is lost this way, of course... but then we have all seen the old jokes about what happens to the Gettysburg Address after an English 101 teacher gets done with it.
Strict grammar is effective, but seldom affective.
While we are talking about other hosts for shows, I would like to take the opportunity to mention that Anne Robinson is an annoying hag, and should be fired. Her pathetic attempts at acting mean, her sad jokes that are supposed to sound cruel and always fall flat, and that creepy wink she gives to the camera at the end of the show... it all makes me want to stab her in the face with a really dull knife. The concept of the show is okay, as game shows go, but she is terrible.
Ms. Robinson, you are the weakest link.
IMHO, The show would be much more intense with a friendly, soft-spoken host, calmly grilling the contestants. My choice: The great Peter Faulk, of course!:)
As for Shatner, I think SmokeSerpent is right. There is nobody more perfect for such an over-the-top show.
T.J. Hooker was supposed to knock the US down to 0, so USA's final score in that post should be "-1". (As will my pathetic attempt at humor, once any short-tempered Canadian moderators are done with it.)
Captain Kirk, the character he plays, is from Iowa (USA).
USA: 1, Canada: -1.
Then again, T. J. Hooker is also American...
USA: 1, Canada: -1.
And shatner is still in America, doing Priceline.com commercials.
USA: 0, Canada: -1.
Bill Shatner has nothing to do with Mexico.
Final result, Mexico kicks our asses. (Mexico: 1, USA: 0, Canada: -1) Congratulations, Mexico, for being the least Shanterist of all of the NAFTA members!
PS. I think the Iron Chef was cool before, and will probably keep up momentum if they don't change much. "Who's Line" is doing a good job on ABC proving that a good show does not need a total overhaul to work for American audiences.
I never considered X-Files to be a great show, but I think you are selling it a little short.
When I saw the first X-Files, I thought it was satire...the premise is completely absurd.
It is satire. Or, at the very least, escapist fantasy. They took the silliest stories that were showing up in the tabloids in the early 1990's, and created a setting where they were all true.
If they were to go over the top and play if for laughs (like the "Men in Black" film), it might have been an okay comedy, but the appeal to it is that they play it straight. The actors behave like they are in an ordinary drama about FBI agents. For about 5 or 6 seasons, that made for some fairly amusing television.
I am in the camp of people who thinks the show has really outlived its shelf-life, but if Fox wants to make it and some people want to watch it... that's fine by me. Nobody is forcing me to watch it.
Oh, there is one other thing that people found appealing about the show: Gillian Anderson is hot enough to melt rocks.
The Tick thought he needed a war cry, and "SPOOOON" was the first thing that came to mind, because he was holding one at the time.
For those wondering about the new series, here is the skinny....
The pilot was made, clips of it have been leaked, and it is damned funny.
Yes, it stars the guy who was Puddy on Seinfeld.
No, it does not star anybody else you have heard of.
Yes, the show is written by Ben Elton, creator of the original comic book as well as the animated series.
Characters from the original comic book (Arthur, Chairface, etc.) can show up in the new series, but characters developped for the Fox cartoon (American Maid, El Seed, etc.) can not, because this is a Sony production and Fox holds the rights to those characters. Therefore, if you were a fan of the cartoon, several of your favorite supporting characters will either be absent or re-named.
The show was slated to be a mid-season replacement, but was then bumped to next fall. There is still no assurance from Fox that it will be in the Fall line-up, either... so you might not actually get to see it until January of next year.
Details are scattered all over drooling-fanboy sites like Ain't It Cool, so you can read more there.
Oh, FWIW. The Lone Gunmen did not get more funny as it went on. I had a friend who talked me into watching a couple more episodes, and if anything it got worse. So don't feel bad if you tuned out after seeing the pilot suck so badly. You have missed nothing. (Yea, yea "IMNSHO", "YMMV"... whatever. It sucked.)
Now that black&white displays are disappearing (even from servers), maybe it is time for most unices to patch vi so it changes the text color according to mode... you know, a nice dark blue for insert mode, perhaps a light gray for command mode.
Maybe I should quit jabbering about it and try to make such a patch myself... hmmm....
Slashdot Mirror
If you want an inexpensive Linux CLI portable, the Toshiba is quite spiffy... but not comparable.
The iBook is a subnotebook with the feature set of a full notebook. Turn a sheet of notebook paper sideways on your desk: that is the total footprint of the iBook. (Set the same sheet of paper on the keyboard of your Toshiba, and you will see that it is much smaller.)
It weights 4.9 pounds (counting the battery and the drive).
It has a battery which, in real-world use, runs about 5 hours between charges when using OS 9. (Running OS X costs you about an hour of that time, because of the less efficient power management, but that still blows the doors off my HP Pavilion, which is lucky to get past 65 minutes.)
No laptop which matches it's features and weight can be found for under $2k. Nice try, though.
iMacs are still CRT-based. It's just the stand-alone CRT's that Apple is no longer making. (They weren't really "making" them to begin with, just re-branding ViewSonics and Sony Trinitrons).
If you are not a Mac user but like LCD, this news is a Good Thing from your perspective. Apple is expanding the scale of LCD's, which will drive the price down (just like they did for USB, Firewire, SCSI, and lots of other technologies).
Thanks to Apple pushing the envelope, you will be able to get an LCD screen for your El Cheapo AMD box a lot sooner.
Mac users who like CRT can still buy them, just not from Apple. (And most of them were already buying from Sony anyway... the Apple CRT's were nice monitors, but overpriced.)
I am not a doctor either, but I am a former teacher (and the son of a clinical psychologist) who has spent time studying childhood development.
It is well established that mental development is extremely fast during the pre-pubescent phase (when most kids are in Junior High school).
This, along with hormone changes and physical growth, is also why kids at that age are so notorious for being "squirly". There are several factors working against them.
1. They are just beginning to learn to deal with their sex drive.
2. Their bodies are growning so fast, that it is physically painful to sit still for more than 15 minutes. (Teachers who let their kids stand or move around frequently tend to have far fewer behaviour problems with that age group than those who insist on "sitting still with good posture" for a full hour.)
3. Since kids enter this phase at slightly different ages, a classroom full of "average" kids are not going to be learning at the same pace. Some will be overwhelmed while others are bored. Grades are organized by age mostly for socialization purposes and organizational convenience, but the trade-off is you have classrooms full of vastly different aptitude, even among kids who will ultimately be the same intelligence by the time they are taking their SAT's in a few years.
Sex is fantastic. I would reccomend it to any of my friends. That's not what I was saying.
My point is that pornography does expose any children who see it to certain ugly truths (i.e., some people like it rough. Try explaining the BDSM culture to a small child sometime... actually, please don't.), not to mention a lot of lies (For example, real lesbians are, in fact, nothing like the ones in the "adult" movies. As another example, the average person's anatomy bears little resemblance to the typical porn star's)
If you want to make the case that older teens are more than capable of watching that stuff, I might be inclined to listen to what you have to say (I may not completely agree, but I would be willing to listen to evidence)... However, to suggest that young children are ready to be exposed to "meaningless and tawdry" sexual behaviour (as you described it) is wrongheaded.
Actually, I thought I did both. :)
I have seen the studies showing a positive correlation between viewing violence and behaving violently. This is understandable. But let's return to the original question: namely, what adverse affects does viewing "Girls Gone Wild" have on a 9 year old? Any? Studies along similar lines exist, but I am too lazy to look them up at this point, and will defer to Google to help you find them.
You made the (valid) claim that the brain undergoes radical changes from birth to adulthood, but this says nothing about the harm of viewing porn.
My point was that you should not expect small children to understand sex the same way that adults do, no matter how much education you offer, there are some things that they just won't understand "until they're older".
This is a common fallacy (mostly among liberals, but not exclusively). The problem with your point is that children are not little adults.
"Education" is the slow process of turning children into well-informed adults, not an instant means to make small children able to cope with the ugly truths of the world.
The development of the human brain takes two important post-birth leaps forward. The first is during the "terrible twos", when a two-year old becomes a toddler. The brain goes through a remarkable increase in synapse connections during this period.
The second of these stages happens shortly before puberty, when the brain goes through another phase of radiacally accelerated growth.
In terms of real development, the brain of a 16-year old is as different from the brain of an 8-year old as the 8-year old's brain is from a newborn baby. There is a fundamental difference between the way chidren and young adults think, and all education models which fail to respect this difference are doomed to failure.
I oppose any and all censorship of the Internet, but I am very sympathetic to those who wish to prevent their children from viewing pornography and/or violence.
(I'm not responding to you, personally, bauaba... I have no idea what your views are... just the thread in general.)
Here in Minnesota, the seat belt law allows for an additional fine on a moving violation, but does not allow officers to pull you over for it. Some people have been pushing for more seat-belt enforcement, but minority advocates rightly point out that such a law could lead to a lot more pull-overs for DWB ("driving while black"), and so it hopefully will not go anywhere.
That limitation probably won't work, because people will just keep creating & deleting characters until the random generator gives them one that is well-suited to be a jedi. I bet with in a month the game will be crammed with 12-year old kids playing jedi knights.
Let's face it, a lot of people are bound to say "f* this. If I can't be a jedi, what's the point in playing it?"
Too bad that Diablo II gets boring even faster than Everquest.
Actually, I did.
I would go even further and say that a Canadian from English-speaking parts of Canada would probably feel much more at home in Wisconsin or Michigan than in Quebec... Just as somebody from Ohio or Montana would find Canada a lot more familiar than Athens, GA.
Been there. It's pretty much the same. (I live in Minnesota, BTW, so I'm around plenty o' Canadians.)
The truth is that Americans enjoy making jingoistic jabs at Canadians (and vice versa) simply because we are such old friends that we view it almost the same way as rivalries between states or provences. It's all in good fun. We like Canada, and are really glad to have them as a neighbor rather than, say, Iran or North Korea.
As for "knowing nothing" about other countries... The thing is, we don't need to... at least not in the way somebody from, say, Germany needs to. We are a huge country bordered by nothing but two allies and two Oceans. Somebody from Des Moines, Iowa would have to travel over a thousand miles to reach the nearest foreign city, and even farther to reach one where English is not spoken.
It's not that we're isolationist, it's just that we're isolated.
And another example in my reply to your reply:
"Is there seach limited to..." That's a wrong use of "there". It should have been written "is their search limited to..."
Also, it would not kill me to close an html tag once in a while. :)
It never fails. If you attempt to correct grammar on slashdot, you will make some yourself. Your misuse of singular vs. plural in that sentence is a classic example.
Let's be really pedantic and break down the whole damned thing, shall we?
This is actually a fragment, not a sentence.
Nothing seems wrong at first, except that in the context of their "5 year mission", and the fact that the only destination defined here is "space" they are actually on one voyage.
The whole thing is a grammar teacher's nightmare... which makes it a great choice for Babelfish abuse! :)
Translating "Space, the final frontier" (a sentance fragment) into German and back to English gives you:
"Workstation, the locking boundary."
Ms. Robinson, you are the weakest link.
IMHO, The show would be much more intense with a friendly, soft-spoken host, calmly grilling the contestants. My choice: The great Peter Faulk, of course! :)
As for Shatner, I think SmokeSerpent is right. There is nobody more perfect for such an over-the-top show.
T.J. Hooker was supposed to knock the US down to 0, so USA's final score in that post should be "-1". (As will my pathetic attempt at humor, once any short-tempered Canadian moderators are done with it.)
USA: 0, Canada: -1
Captain Kirk, the character he plays, is from Iowa (USA).
USA: 1, Canada: -1.
Then again, T. J. Hooker is also American...
USA: 1, Canada: -1.
And shatner is still in America, doing Priceline.com commercials.
USA: 0, Canada: -1.
Bill Shatner has nothing to do with Mexico.
Final result, Mexico kicks our asses. (Mexico: 1, USA: 0, Canada: -1) Congratulations, Mexico, for being the least Shanterist of all of the NAFTA members!
PS. I think the Iron Chef was cool before, and will probably keep up momentum if they don't change much. "Who's Line" is doing a good job on ABC proving that a good show does not need a total overhaul to work for American audiences.
Ben Edlund, not Elton. My bad. I had him mixed up with the guy who co-wrote the Black Adder series for BBC TV. Thanks for the correction.
When I saw the first X-Files, I thought it was satire...the premise is completely absurd.
It is satire. Or, at the very least, escapist fantasy. They took the silliest stories that were showing up in the tabloids in the early 1990's, and created a setting where they were all true.
If they were to go over the top and play if for laughs (like the "Men in Black" film), it might have been an okay comedy, but the appeal to it is that they play it straight. The actors behave like they are in an ordinary drama about FBI agents. For about 5 or 6 seasons, that made for some fairly amusing television.
I am in the camp of people who thinks the show has really outlived its shelf-life, but if Fox wants to make it and some people want to watch it... that's fine by me. Nobody is forcing me to watch it.
Oh, there is one other thing that people found appealing about the show: Gillian Anderson is hot enough to melt rocks.
For those wondering about the new series, here is the skinny....
The pilot was made, clips of it have been leaked, and it is damned funny.
Yes, it stars the guy who was Puddy on Seinfeld.
No, it does not star anybody else you have heard of.
Yes, the show is written by Ben Elton, creator of the original comic book as well as the animated series.
Characters from the original comic book (Arthur, Chairface, etc.) can show up in the new series, but characters developped for the Fox cartoon (American Maid, El Seed, etc.) can not, because this is a Sony production and Fox holds the rights to those characters. Therefore, if you were a fan of the cartoon, several of your favorite supporting characters will either be absent or re-named.
The show was slated to be a mid-season replacement, but was then bumped to next fall. There is still no assurance from Fox that it will be in the Fall line-up, either... so you might not actually get to see it until January of next year.
Details are scattered all over drooling-fanboy sites like Ain't It Cool, so you can read more there.
Oh, FWIW. The Lone Gunmen did not get more funny as it went on. I had a friend who talked me into watching a couple more episodes, and if anything it got worse. So don't feel bad if you tuned out after seeing the pilot suck so badly. You have missed nothing. (Yea, yea "IMNSHO", "YMMV"... whatever. It sucked.)
That's funny... I thought that Bose was Bose for the snotty.
"Just getting my data off Boss Kane's archive, Boss"
"Well, I'll be damned if I'm gonna let your restored files clutter up my shared drives! Better store it in the archives, boy."
[sigh] "Yes... Boss."
Maybe I should quit jabbering about it and try to make such a patch myself... hmmm....