The fact that there is this expectation for people to be stupid and to cater to that expectation is sickening.
That attitude is a lot like a car mechanic saying you are stupid for not being able to change your own timing belt.
Most car owners know how to drive, put gas in, and maybe change their own oil, points, and plugs, but could not tell a fuel injection system from a leaf spring. They are not stupid, they just expect their car to work, and rely on professionals when it doesn't. This gives them time to focus on areas where their actual talents lie (be it programming, waitressing, or whatever).
The same goes with Joe Average computer user, or at least it should. In the early days of the automobile, cars were for serious hobbyists only, who could field strip their entire engine, and most of them belonged to automotive clubs that resemble the User Groups of the 70's, 80's and 90's. It remained like this right up through the 1920's.
Over the last ten or fifteen years, the computer industry has slowly begun to creep out of that stage. In the future, there will still be "hot rodders" and professionals, but most computer users will be just that... users.
No musician or playwright or stockbroker or whatever should ever be expected to know how to "fix" a computer that has crashed. They should be able to do their jobs without knowing how to modify a kernel or even how to configure a DSL router. It's just a tool! You should not need to know how it works just to use it, any more than you need to know how to build a small gas motor just to mow your lawn!
It is a failure of the entire tech industry that we are still not at that point, and Apple has done more than any single company to try to get us there.
(Wow... That is the first time I have ever been worked up enough about anything to actually post in bold. Blood-pressure check time, I think.)
Actually, the 62xx, 63xx, 64xx and 65xx were all Spindler blunders. Spindler is the one who drove Apple into the ground and changed it from a market leader into a hostile take-over target for Sun and Oracle.
Gil took over the sinking ship, dumped the doomed "Copeland" project, and bought NeXT (bringing Avie T and Steve J back to Apple). He was not a great Apple CEO, but far fromt he worst. His only problem was that he tried to work closely with a corporate culture that he flat-out did not get.
When Jobs took over, he took the scorched earth approach to deal with those that did not want to play his way. It was arrogant, ruthless, and cost a lot of good people and good projects, but it save Apple from oblivion.
We had a 6500 and it took us forever to get into the thing and we still managed to break part of the case getting into it
The whole Performa 6xxx series (which is where the 65xx case came from) were a lot like Chinese puzzle boxes. Very hard to figure out, but if you know where the tabs were and what slid where, it took very little force to remove all the panels.
Next time you deal with one, instead of getting frustrated and breaking the damn thing, count to 10 and then do a quick web search for instructions. That's what I had to do to pop open my Duo Dock so I could add a NuBus Ethernet card. Once I had instructions from somebody who walked the same path, it was a piece of cake.
Any mac that had a built-in monitor (like the good ol' SE/30) was made hard to open on purpose because of the very real chance of electrocution if some kid popped it open and touched the monitor circuits in the wrong place. That goes for the iMac, too.
I could not disagree more. Macs are not "welded shut" at all. Anyone who thinks so needs to attend a MacHack convention and talk to some of the geeks there.
Since Apple products are the monolithic beasts they are, I think they actually inspire more curiosity. Ever since ResEdit and MacsBug were written, neophites have been introducing themselves to the wonderful world of OS hacking. One early example that comes to mind is the classic shareware game, "Spaceward, Ho!". It lacked a few keyboard shortcuts that some people wanted... a quick edit of the resource fork, and viola! Command-T suddenly advances the turn. The new keystroke even shows up on the right side of the menu option, just like in all other MacOS keystroke options. Make one minor change like this to one program and you get sucked in.
Hardware is also tinkered with. The original iMac had a "Mezzanene" slot on the mobo (left over from when that board was meant to become a thin client). A clever German company saw it as a potential unsupported PDS slot to make up for the lack of PCI expansion. They made a combo card of video-out and SCSI.
Mac hacking is possible, you just need to know the platform. Since most hackers cut their eyeteeth on x86 boxes, a lot of the Apple world seems strange and impenetrable, but it's not so bad once you learn it. For example, the LinuxPPC group had an iMac port within weeks of the release, USB support and all.
Okay, okay... enough cheerleading. I'll stop now.
The story was interesting, and almost as one-sided as ESR's speech. It would be cool to get JL and ESR on a debate panel together. (After they each make a quick pass through a metal detector. No need for bloodshed.)
News Flash: Obscure Independent Musician Does Not Like Major Record Labels!!!
I'm sure Baptist Whatevertheyarecalled has some loyal fans, but I'm getting a little tired of virtually unknown artists trying to get noticed by "taking a stand" on a hotbutton issue that gets their name in the press.
I don't like Hole's music, but when Courney Love went on her rant about the big labels and MP3's I had to respect her cred on the issue. She sold a buttload of music as an independant artist, then got signed to a major label and had even more success, so it was not like she was starved for media attention. Having worked on both sides of the fence, she had a perspective that the average working "bar band" lacks.
With or without MP3's, you will never, ever, ever sell 10,000 CD's without finding a way to expose people to your music.
A few bands have gambled on net radio and MP3.com as one way to get heard. Others choose to see the Internet as a threat, and continue to glue posters to utility poles like they did in the 80's. Time will tell which model works best.
Heh... that reminds me of the occasional Gun Amnesty programs put on by the local police. Basically, the police will accept illegal firearms from people, no questions asked. You just walk down to the office and clean your hands of it. And apparently these programs are quite successful.
Okay, time for my off-topic rant of the week...
In the Twin Cities, they had a gun "amnesty" program where they were paying people $50 per gun to turn in their handguns to be destroyed. The idea was to have fewer guns "out there" and make our streets safer. All guns were accepted, no questions asked.
The problems become obvious when you think about it:
1. We were using tax dollars to pay people who were basically throwing away usless old non-functional guns.
2. Any criminal could break into a home, steal a gun, and instead of getting $25 from a dishonest pawnshop they could get $50 from the government. Since no serial numbers were checked ("no time" said officials), the local government bacame the biggest stolen weapons fence in state history.
3. The buy-back program was very good news to gun dealers, who could unload any cheap inventory that was not moving for a quick cash injection, could charge more for their used guns now that there were fewer of them in the area, and expect a lot of new sales from people who had their guns stolen from them.
Okay, I'll stop now... except to say this: the people who came up with this idea are pinheads.
(jphillip: I know that the police-run gun amnesty programs you are talking about are not the same thing. Your mention of it just happened to remind me of this whole foolish debacle.)
Of course, it depends on witch software you're using, but in word we have the nice little "replace" tab.
"Replace" would not do the job I was describing. Read it again. Replace can only replace the word it is searching for; it can't seach for a string, and then edit a different string on the line where it finds it.
Almost every GUI text & document editor on the planet has a find-and-replace command. It is nothing special. It is basically a menu-option version of s///, but can't do anything like g//s///g, which is what my example was showing.
Like I said before, this is just one example of the many things that typical GUI editors can't do. If all you use your computer for is to write letters to grandma or Car And Driver articles, then Word will do fine. If you want to do any real heavy lifting, you should take the time to learn *n?x
Faster still to tell the pothead to stop pasting word documents just to exchange "legalize hemp" messages with his buddies. Ask him to paste it as raw text into his e-mail, or not bother.
Don't get me wrong, I use MS-Word all the time, and I think it is one of the best word processors out there (after Nissus Writer, which is Mac-only so no good on my x86 boxes). I actually like the red and green squiggly lines under my errors, because I'm the sort of person who likes to edit on the fly when I type. It is remarkably over-priced, but just about anybody can steal^H^H^H^H^Hborrow a copy from where they work.
My point was that vi editing is vastly more powerful, versitile, and fast than the offerings of the various GUI methods of playing with text... once you learn it. Sometimes that point is easiest to make by giving an example.
The very fact that you think s/// comes from PERL tells me that you have yet to experience the pure state of euphoria that is UNIX.
How about this, given a list of names, addresses, and phone numbers (not always in that order, but one per line), I want find everybody who lives in east Bloomington, MN (zip code 55420) and replace their old area code (612) with the new one (952) to reflect the changes.
In Windows: Alt-f to each line with 55420 and visually grep where the area code is, then paste 952 over it and move on to the next one, and the next, and the next... Or spend the day formatting it properly so you can export it to a database like MS Access.
Now let's do that in UNIX:
Step one: type "g/55420/s/(612)/(952)/g"
Step two: there's no step two, unless you want to take a coffee break and go laugh at your company's NT admin.
(Note: some flavors of *n?x or various shells might spell "find-every-line-with-this-and-replace-that-with-s omething" differently, but they can all do it.)
Or am I missing the point, and the BSD integration is at the API level? I keep wanting OSX to be more of a GUI on top of BSD, but from what I've read it doesn't seem quite that simple.
It's not.
A lot of people (especially here on/.) see the letters BSD in an Apple press release and immediately assume that MacOS X is just going to be another Unix shell with quicktime and a few other bells and whistles on it. This is simply not the case.
Those who used the old NeXT cube probably have a better idea what to expect. OS X is going to be a hybrid of the NeXT environment (which was built on a Mach kernel) and the Macintosh desktop (which was not). The result will be an awsome OS, with most of the advantages of both Unix and the older Macs, but it is not really one or the other.
If you are a fan of the idea of putting a Mac-like front-end on your *n?x box, there are several open-source projects out there trying to do just that.
Since all 3 of Phroggy's suggestions are mainly rumors sites, let me point you to some more newsish Apple sites:
Mac Central is updated daily, and hosts Andy Inahtko's columns.
Low End Mac Posts links to everything interesting about macs (including the occational link to/.) and has detailed specs for the entire mac line, 1984 - today.
MacWeek sucks, but they cover the trade shows fairly well.
Mac News Network seems to me like it is mostly a forum for product releases and press statements, but a lot of people consider it a favorite. (They were the first one I saw publish the ETA for the Diablo II port, so there's one notch on their belt, anyway.)
And of course, there is the new kid on the block, MacSlash, who took the slash code, and added ugly aqua-themed graphics to it.
OT: have you seen apple's new mouse yet, no buttons! www.appleinsider.com for 3-d sketches
1. This rumor is so old, even/. has already covered it.
2. It is only a rumor. Apple Insider is not a news site, and I have yet to see a single sketch, "lab photo", or bit of gossip that "leaked" to them turn out to be true.
(The wild inaccuracy of the Mac rumor sites is not entirely their fault. Since Jobs took over, Apple has slipped out disinformation to make their actual product announcements more interesting. Shortly before the iMac DV edition, the "leaked" specs for a "17 inch iMac", complete with "business colors" and a CD-RW drive... then went through the motions of a cover-up so the rumor sites would be positive it was true.)
The moral of the OT story: treat all Apple rumors as entertainment at best.
While you're doing the math, don't forget to include in your formula that the vast majority of the Earth's greenhouse effect is caused by water vapor. In nature, yes, but the polutant that is believed to be causing an increase of greenhousing is CO2. Read any book on the topic, or just catch up on freakin' PBS science documentaries and you will hear the same thing.
Excess water vapor from steam, when it cools, becomes liquid water. The earth does a very good job of regulating its own humidity.
I totally agree with those who say that there is no need to worry about the moon. It is a lifeless rock that happens to orbit us.
The Earth on the other hand, is another matter.
The "Greenhouse" effect that Al Gore and others keep whining about is caused by an increase of CO2 in the atmosphere. Any time carbon comes out of the ground and into the air (volcanic activity, coal plants, cars, etc.) it makes the atmosphere retain more of the reflected solar heat from the ground.
We think that this can be partially slowed down by the increase in vegitation that will typically come about when you have higher CO2 levels, and eventually those carbon atoms may find their way back under ground. Studies are underway to confirm or deny the worries about greenhouse gasses, and the issue is not completely resolved.
On the other hand, if we were to start "importing" massive amounts of carbon from an extraterrestrial source (like the moon), and introduce it to our biosphere, the results could get interesting.
Unlike the alarmists on the left, I think the best way to deal with greenhouse emissions is not to relinquish fuel-based power (because such a tactic would keep the third world poor forever), but instead a two-fold plan: 1. Come up with machines that consume carbon gasses as quickly as our other machines are producing them. 2. Use more nuclear power, which produces harmless steam (and spent rods, but no plan is perfect).
Until they are 3D the next generation of development wont take place.
Unless the next big advance in user interfaces eliminates the need for visual pattern recognition. It's hard to imagine, since our eyes work so well as cranial input devices.
CLI's use text, and GUI's use pictures... When it comes to communication, we still have not really moved beyond the concepts that were in full use back in the days of stone tablets, have we?
No UNIX clone will be a consumer OS until it has......It's called Mac OS X, and it will be beta in August and out next year.
First of all, the post I responded to was talking about OS's other than Mac and Windows.
Secondly, OS X is built on the mach kernel, and might even manage to run some UNIX and Linux apps (once you get past the endian switch from the Intel chips), but it is most definaltely not a UNIX clone.
Thirdly, we are talking about OS's that exist now. MacOS X is still in pre-beta (DR2, IIRC).
If I was using what was "soon to come" in my criteria, than Linux is a real candidate. My whole point was that Linux is not ready for grandma's den yet. By next year, it might be the best thing out there. Things change fast in this business.
Just fine them, place some restrictions on their business practices, let them be run over with civil suits, and them keep an eye on them. Don't break them up. No one needs that.
I disagree. I think that the Microsoft breakup will be the best thing to happen to consumers since Bell Telephone died its well-earned death.
If nothing else, there is the tiny chance that bitchslapping the biggest technology company in history will put the fear of God into the boardrooms of AOL/Time/Warner and other heavyweights. Okay very tiny, but it's still a chance.
(BTW: Am I the only one who really loved the Mooby masacre scene in Dogma? Kevin Smith will forever be a hero of mine for taking such a thinly-veiled shot at Disney when they were funding his movie.)
Three replies so far, and all three seemed to have missed my point. Obviously I was not clear enough, or else I sounded too much like somebody who likes M$ products for people to consider what I am saying seriously.
DnD, Cut & Paste are NOT "integrated" into the current predominant OS.
Moving text between one app and another with MacOS or Windows: Very easy. Doing the same with Gnome or KDE: A royal pain in the ass.
Netscape under Win32 or Linux
Netscape for Linux is not a mature product. There are plenty of awesome options on the horizon (Opera, Mozilla, Netscape 6, etc.), but the browser that you get with your typical Linux distro sucks and everybody knows it. I use Linux in spite of the browser problems, because I like it for other reasons, bet let's not kid ourselves.
People in general do not need a clone of msoffice. I don't even think that the file format needs to be the same. What I do think is that there are a lot of features that people expect word processora and spreadsheeta to have, and a lot of current Linux offerings (cough) Star Office (cough) fall way short.
Personally, I don't need Linux to ever be a "consumer" OS... I think it is a great OS as it is. No need for Gnome, just give me a BASH prompt and let me hack away. When I want to run a GUI app, I will boot my G3 to the MacOS. (Likewise, when I want to play games like Diablo II, I switch on the Windows box.)
I mean know one should be exepected to spell perfectly or add large numbers together, but there should be some basic competance.
Please say you were trying to use humor to make your point when you wrote "know" and "competance".
My point was that the presence of computers and calculators != no basic skills learning, and that "basic skills" have become much more of a sacred cow than they ought to be. When I need to divide 4578 by 13.762, I reach for the calculator, even though I could do it on paper if I had to.
The kids in your psych class prove my point. Calculators were surely banned from elementary classrooms when those kids were in 3rd grade, yet they still can't (or won't) do basic math... even with a calculator in their backpack. What have they gained?
Slashdot Mirror
That's no prediction. The net is already all about pornography, gambling, and copyright violations.
That attitude is a lot like a car mechanic saying you are stupid for not being able to change your own timing belt.
Most car owners know how to drive, put gas in, and maybe change their own oil, points, and plugs, but could not tell a fuel injection system from a leaf spring. They are not stupid, they just expect their car to work, and rely on professionals when it doesn't. This gives them time to focus on areas where their actual talents lie (be it programming, waitressing, or whatever).
The same goes with Joe Average computer user, or at least it should. In the early days of the automobile, cars were for serious hobbyists only, who could field strip their entire engine, and most of them belonged to automotive clubs that resemble the User Groups of the 70's, 80's and 90's. It remained like this right up through the 1920's.
Over the last ten or fifteen years, the computer industry has slowly begun to creep out of that stage. In the future, there will still be "hot rodders" and professionals, but most computer users will be just that... users.
No musician or playwright or stockbroker or whatever should ever be expected to know how to "fix" a computer that has crashed. They should be able to do their jobs without knowing how to modify a kernel or even how to configure a DSL router. It's just a tool! You should not need to know how it works just to use it, any more than you need to know how to build a small gas motor just to mow your lawn!
It is a failure of the entire tech industry that we are still not at that point, and Apple has done more than any single company to try to get us there.
(Wow... That is the first time I have ever been worked up enough about anything to actually post in bold. Blood-pressure check time, I think.)
Gil took over the sinking ship, dumped the doomed "Copeland" project, and bought NeXT (bringing Avie T and Steve J back to Apple). He was not a great Apple CEO, but far fromt he worst. His only problem was that he tried to work closely with a corporate culture that he flat-out did not get.
When Jobs took over, he took the scorched earth approach to deal with those that did not want to play his way. It was arrogant, ruthless, and cost a lot of good people and good projects, but it save Apple from oblivion.
The whole Performa 6xxx series (which is where the 65xx case came from) were a lot like Chinese puzzle boxes. Very hard to figure out, but if you know where the tabs were and what slid where, it took very little force to remove all the panels.
Next time you deal with one, instead of getting frustrated and breaking the damn thing, count to 10 and then do a quick web search for instructions. That's what I had to do to pop open my Duo Dock so I could add a NuBus Ethernet card. Once I had instructions from somebody who walked the same path, it was a piece of cake.
Heh heh... and maybe I should follow a few links about how to remember to close your HTML tags... like the /. preview button, perhaps.
For good info on individual models, including some of their weird cases, I would start at Low End Mac, and if you can't find it there, follow their link to MacFixIt.
Since Apple products are the monolithic beasts they are, I think they actually inspire more curiosity. Ever since ResEdit and MacsBug were written, neophites have been introducing themselves to the wonderful world of OS hacking. One early example that comes to mind is the classic shareware game, "Spaceward, Ho!". It lacked a few keyboard shortcuts that some people wanted... a quick edit of the resource fork, and viola! Command-T suddenly advances the turn. The new keystroke even shows up on the right side of the menu option, just like in all other MacOS keystroke options. Make one minor change like this to one program and you get sucked in.
Hardware is also tinkered with. The original iMac had a "Mezzanene" slot on the mobo (left over from when that board was meant to become a thin client). A clever German company saw it as a potential unsupported PDS slot to make up for the lack of PCI expansion. They made a combo card of video-out and SCSI.
Mac hacking is possible, you just need to know the platform. Since most hackers cut their eyeteeth on x86 boxes, a lot of the Apple world seems strange and impenetrable, but it's not so bad once you learn it. For example, the LinuxPPC group had an iMac port within weeks of the release, USB support and all.
Okay, okay... enough cheerleading. I'll stop now.
The story was interesting, and almost as one-sided as ESR's speech. It would be cool to get JL and ESR on a debate panel together. (After they each make a quick pass through a metal detector. No need for bloodshed.)
I'm sure Baptist Whatevertheyarecalled has some loyal fans, but I'm getting a little tired of virtually unknown artists trying to get noticed by "taking a stand" on a hotbutton issue that gets their name in the press.
I don't like Hole's music, but when Courney Love went on her rant about the big labels and MP3's I had to respect her cred on the issue. She sold a buttload of music as an independant artist, then got signed to a major label and had even more success, so it was not like she was starved for media attention. Having worked on both sides of the fence, she had a perspective that the average working "bar band" lacks.
With or without MP3's, you will never, ever, ever sell 10,000 CD's without finding a way to expose people to your music.
A few bands have gambled on net radio and MP3.com as one way to get heard. Others choose to see the Internet as a threat, and continue to glue posters to utility poles like they did in the 80's. Time will tell which model works best.
Okay, time for my off-topic rant of the week...
In the Twin Cities, they had a gun "amnesty" program where they were paying people $50 per gun to turn in their handguns to be destroyed. The idea was to have fewer guns "out there" and make our streets safer. All guns were accepted, no questions asked.
The problems become obvious when you think about it:
1. We were using tax dollars to pay people who were basically throwing away usless old non-functional guns.
2. Any criminal could break into a home, steal a gun, and instead of getting $25 from a dishonest pawnshop they could get $50 from the government. Since no serial numbers were checked ("no time" said officials), the local government bacame the biggest stolen weapons fence in state history.
3. The buy-back program was very good news to gun dealers, who could unload any cheap inventory that was not moving for a quick cash injection, could charge more for their used guns now that there were fewer of them in the area, and expect a lot of new sales from people who had their guns stolen from them.
Okay, I'll stop now... except to say this: the people who came up with this idea are pinheads.
(jphillip: I know that the police-run gun amnesty programs you are talking about are not the same thing. Your mention of it just happened to remind me of this whole foolish debacle.)
"Replace" would not do the job I was describing. Read it again. Replace can only replace the word it is searching for; it can't seach for a string, and then edit a different string on the line where it finds it.
Almost every GUI text & document editor on the planet has a find-and-replace command. It is nothing special. It is basically a menu-option version of s///, but can't do anything like g//s///g, which is what my example was showing.
Like I said before, this is just one example of the many things that typical GUI editors can't do. If all you use your computer for is to write letters to grandma or Car And Driver articles, then Word will do fine. If you want to do any real heavy lifting, you should take the time to learn *n?x
Don't get me wrong, I use MS-Word all the time, and I think it is one of the best word processors out there (after Nissus Writer, which is Mac-only so no good on my x86 boxes). I actually like the red and green squiggly lines under my errors, because I'm the sort of person who likes to edit on the fly when I type. It is remarkably over-priced, but just about anybody can steal^H^H^H^H^Hborrow a copy from where they work.
My point was that vi editing is vastly more powerful, versitile, and fast than the offerings of the various GUI methods of playing with text... once you learn it. Sometimes that point is easiest to make by giving an example.
How about this, given a list of names, addresses, and phone numbers (not always in that order, but one per line), I want find everybody who lives in east Bloomington, MN (zip code 55420) and replace their old area code (612) with the new one (952) to reflect the changes.
In Windows: Alt-f to each line with 55420 and visually grep where the area code is, then paste 952 over it and move on to the next one, and the next, and the next... Or spend the day formatting it properly so you can export it to a database like MS Access.
Now let's do that in UNIX:
Step one: type "g/55420/s/(612)/(952)/g"
Step two: there's no step two, unless you want to take a coffee break and go laugh at your company's NT admin.
(Note: some flavors of *n?x or various shells might spell "find-every-line-with-this-and-replace-that-with-s omething" differently, but they can all do it.)
It's not.
A lot of people (especially here on /.) see the letters BSD in an Apple press release and immediately assume that MacOS X is just going to be another Unix shell with quicktime and a few other bells and whistles on it. This is simply not the case.
Those who used the old NeXT cube probably have a better idea what to expect. OS X is going to be a hybrid of the NeXT environment (which was built on a Mach kernel) and the Macintosh desktop (which was not). The result will be an awsome OS, with most of the advantages of both Unix and the older Macs, but it is not really one or the other.
If you are a fan of the idea of putting a Mac-like front-end on your *n?x box, there are several open-source projects out there trying to do just that.
Mac Central is updated daily, and hosts Andy Inahtko's columns.
Low End Mac Posts links to everything interesting about macs (including the occational link to /.) and has detailed specs for the entire mac line, 1984 - today.
MacWeek sucks, but they cover the trade shows fairly well.
Mac News Network seems to me like it is mostly a forum for product releases and press statements, but a lot of people consider it a favorite. (They were the first one I saw publish the ETA for the Diablo II port, so there's one notch on their belt, anyway.)
And of course, there is the new kid on the block, MacSlash, who took the slash code, and added ugly aqua-themed graphics to it.
1. This rumor is so old, even /. has already covered it.
2. It is only a rumor. Apple Insider is not a news site, and I have yet to see a single sketch, "lab photo", or bit of gossip that "leaked" to them turn out to be true.
(The wild inaccuracy of the Mac rumor sites is not entirely their fault. Since Jobs took over, Apple has slipped out disinformation to make their actual product announcements more interesting. Shortly before the iMac DV edition, the "leaked" specs for a "17 inch iMac", complete with "business colors" and a CD-RW drive... then went through the motions of a cover-up so the rumor sites would be positive it was true.)
The moral of the OT story: treat all Apple rumors as entertainment at best.
Doc Martins or sandals. Hiking boots are for mainframe guys.
I've heard of OS debates being refered to as "religious issues", but that might be getting carried away.
Then again, a lot of Microsoft techs tend to favor the goatee style that people used to call a "devil beard". Hmmm.
Excess water vapor from steam, when it cools, becomes liquid water. The earth does a very good job of regulating its own humidity.
The moon has no carbon.
I highly doubt that. Carbon is an extremely abundant element in the solar system. Do you have a source you can cite?
The Earth on the other hand, is another matter.
The "Greenhouse" effect that Al Gore and others keep whining about is caused by an increase of CO2 in the atmosphere. Any time carbon comes out of the ground and into the air (volcanic activity, coal plants, cars, etc.) it makes the atmosphere retain more of the reflected solar heat from the ground.
We think that this can be partially slowed down by the increase in vegitation that will typically come about when you have higher CO2 levels, and eventually those carbon atoms may find their way back under ground. Studies are underway to confirm or deny the worries about greenhouse gasses, and the issue is not completely resolved.
On the other hand, if we were to start "importing" massive amounts of carbon from an extraterrestrial source (like the moon), and introduce it to our biosphere, the results could get interesting.
Unlike the alarmists on the left, I think the best way to deal with greenhouse emissions is not to relinquish fuel-based power (because such a tactic would keep the third world poor forever), but instead a two-fold plan: 1. Come up with machines that consume carbon gasses as quickly as our other machines are producing them. 2. Use more nuclear power, which produces harmless steam (and spent rods, but no plan is perfect).
Unless the next big advance in user interfaces eliminates the need for visual pattern recognition. It's hard to imagine, since our eyes work so well as cranial input devices.
CLI's use text, and GUI's use pictures... When it comes to communication, we still have not really moved beyond the concepts that were in full use back in the days of stone tablets, have we?
First of all, the post I responded to was talking about OS's other than Mac and Windows.
Secondly, OS X is built on the mach kernel, and might even manage to run some UNIX and Linux apps (once you get past the endian switch from the Intel chips), but it is most definaltely not a UNIX clone.
Thirdly, we are talking about OS's that exist now. MacOS X is still in pre-beta (DR2, IIRC).
If I was using what was "soon to come" in my criteria, than Linux is a real candidate. My whole point was that Linux is not ready for grandma's den yet. By next year, it might be the best thing out there. Things change fast in this business.
I disagree. I think that the Microsoft breakup will be the best thing to happen to consumers since Bell Telephone died its well-earned death.
If nothing else, there is the tiny chance that bitchslapping the biggest technology company in history will put the fear of God into the boardrooms of AOL/Time/Warner and other heavyweights. Okay very tiny, but it's still a chance.
(BTW: Am I the only one who really loved the Mooby masacre scene in Dogma? Kevin Smith will forever be a hero of mine for taking such a thinly-veiled shot at Disney when they were funding his movie.)
DnD, Cut & Paste are NOT "integrated" into the current predominant OS.
Moving text between one app and another with MacOS or Windows: Very easy.
Doing the same with Gnome or KDE: A royal pain in the ass.
Netscape under Win32 or Linux
Netscape for Linux is not a mature product. There are plenty of awesome options on the horizon (Opera, Mozilla, Netscape 6, etc.), but the browser that you get with your typical Linux distro sucks and everybody knows it. I use Linux in spite of the browser problems, because I like it for other reasons, bet let's not kid ourselves.
People in general do not need a clone of msoffice. I don't even think that the file format needs to be the same. What I do think is that there are a lot of features that people expect word processora and spreadsheeta to have, and a lot of current Linux offerings (cough) Star Office (cough) fall way short.
Personally, I don't need Linux to ever be a "consumer" OS... I think it is a great OS as it is. No need for Gnome, just give me a BASH prompt and let me hack away. When I want to run a GUI app, I will boot my G3 to the MacOS. (Likewise, when I want to play games like Diablo II, I switch on the Windows box.)
Please say you were trying to use humor to make your point when you wrote "know" and "competance".
My point was that the presence of computers and calculators != no basic skills learning, and that "basic skills" have become much more of a sacred cow than they ought to be. When I need to divide 4578 by 13.762, I reach for the calculator, even though I could do it on paper if I had to.
The kids in your psych class prove my point. Calculators were surely banned from elementary classrooms when those kids were in 3rd grade, yet they still can't (or won't) do basic math... even with a calculator in their backpack. What have they gained?