MacOS X on PCs is like Linux on microwaves: it's very cool, and a neat experiment, but I think for most folks, it's not very appealing.
Much like people that don't want to own Macs don't find it very appealing? You got +5 for this? For the worst metaphore so far this month? Or maybe its just because you personally don't have any interest in running Mac OS X.
Most of the people that I've encountered that are running some form of Hackintosh are extremely pleased with it. It *wasn't* hard, but it also wasn't just putting in a DVD into a drive and going Click, Click. As one person on Slashdot said, its like keeping a 1960s VW going and maintained. Its certainly 90% easier than maintaining 90% of the Linux distros out there, the difference being that if there isn't a driver for your particular peice of hardware, there's a good chance you can't just write your own(as witness by for example the Intel GMA850 folks who wanted to have native support for 10.4.4 and beyond). But then how many people honestly just go out and write their own complex video, or scanner driver on a whim?
But back to my point, it seems to me that if you want a Mac, and you get some hardware that runs Mac OS X, and it runs it like it would a Mac, including all the applications and so on, then you've certainly met you're objective. It would appeal to *everyone* I think that wants to run Mac OS X. I would hardly call that experimental and like running "Linux on microwaves". There's no need to trivialize it.
First question that pops into my mind is would changing your time to some "wrong" value be a potential litmus test for this botnet? If you did and it changed back at some point and you were sure there were no other synchronization processes running on your machine, it might be a clue that you were infected..o.
Actually I use an Inspiron 700m for live performances (electronic dance music) in very hostile club environments, and carry it around to gigs in a backpack, and its done fine over the couple of years I've owned it. I'd say its very solidly built. I've seen some Latitudes choke within six months of purchase on the other hand. This experience, plus some of the others with Mac laptops (where say the old G3s are still kicking around strongly, but the newer white G3s are all dying out due to either hinge problems or motherboard flakeyness), makes me think that the quality of individual laptops are far more influences by their design team than anything else. While its true that most likely Dell says "Ok this Inspiron will sell at this price with these features", but my general feeling is that two different engineering teams can probably come up with two totally different laptops in terms of build quality and longevity.
Oh, BS. I bought a sunlamp for my wife and was immediately struck by the cold, ugly light coming out of it. And then one day I was walking into the room where we'd put it and was noticing how awful it looked - until I realized that the light was turned off and it was sunlight streaming in.
Holy crap. What the hell is the difference if I wrote an "email" in gmail to a friend, or log into facebook to write a "message" to a friend. I'm 36, and sending blocks of text via gmail or facebook or whatever is pretty much the same for me.
Each has their own utility anyways...I mean after all would you put your email address on a resume? Well I know I sure would. My facebook account? Rather doubt it.
I think this whole thing is like talking about how everyone used Lotus-123 and then everyone moved onto Excel. A spreadsheet is a spreadsheet. And an "email", "message" or whatever is just that. Via gmail, or facebook, or SMTP or whatever. Same thing.
Wow! Its people like you that ARE the problem with Wikipedia. Thats the dumbest answer ever, because it tries to hide an arbitrary value system with a smart sounding justification, in this case "notability". A great example is how the Uncyclopedia article has been butchered from a fun and interesting article to one that spends half the article covering the (really minor) issues of the incident in New Zealand, and the the fact that its available in different languages. I mean I find it ironic that the "other languages" section is almost twice as large as the one describing the content.
However at least in this case we could go back and get the original versions of the pages if we liked. In the case of deletions thats just counter intuitive to what Wikipedia has become: the online source for detailed topical information. Whatever fantasy you may have about Wikipedia, the reality of it is that people go looking for EXACTLY random radio stations and web comics. In fact I would argue that the value of any peice of information in Wikipedia is INVERSELY proportional to its obscurity. The more obscure and unknown it is, the more important it is to have in Wikipedia, because really where else are you going to find it? Articles on general chemistry? Thats nice and all, but you can get introductions to that anywhere, and maybe even more well written than whatever has shown up on Wikipedia. But some small web comic I stumbled upon the net and would like to get more information on? Thats not available anywhere, and certainly Wikipedia is THE logical place for information on that. This includes other classes of information such as trivia and internet memes.
What you are effectively saying when you say that you want to delete articles because of "notability" issues, is that you are placing an editorial value judgement on information in Wikipedia without anyone elses consensus, and really its a completely arbitrary judgement. I've spent alot of time as an editor on Wikipedia battle insanely persistent editors who just go crazy with the DELETE nominations, because they are convinced that they somehow have it right. Even if the talk page is alight with lots of other dissenting voices.
...and I find it interesting how none of the posters have mentioned that. Look if its true that Generation Y wants a better work/life balance and flexible hours, this is a good thing. It also says nothing about their ability to compete or not. One of the things slashdotters complain about all the time are bad working evironments, and being a slave to servers and or pagers. Do you think after almost twenty years of this Generation Yers don't see this? A lack of critical thinking has been a problem in North American education systems for a long time now. It appears to me to be better in Europe, but thats just from what I hear. That said, I've noticed that many, many people I work with that are in IT would have come to where they were by themselves anyways. They had curiosity, then read stuff, they hacked and BBSed and whatever else, and then they made themselves the way they were. In most cases this is not going to change. Smart kids will continue to be smart *inspite* of the education system. As for the rest, they will probably fall along their appropriate place on the bell curve. And there is nothing wrong with that.
With this in mind, how many people, especially after 35 in IT start thinking of ways of getting our or changing careers. This might actually make a good slashdot post. How many 55 year old C++ programmers do you know working in your shops? Even if you argue that C++ wasn't around when a 50 year old programmer started, he should have been able to just gone from cobol or fortran to C++. But are there really that many? A few? How many lawyers do you see that are still in their 50s and working. Or doctors?
The point being if we give the message that IT is first of all not a sustainable career, and also that other careers are more fun and rewarding, it should be no surprise to us that those looking forward to us from a younger age would not be swayed by what they see. I don't think we should lay all the blame on the "generation".
You know what? You're right. Sorry if it seemed like an attack. I just get so tired of people doing the whole Mac -> Linux -> Windows thing and arguing over it endlessly, I finally decided to say something. Usually I let it go. For what its worth I do think Macs are better engineered and maybe worth a higher price (at least for me), but YMMV. The fact of the matter is buying any laptop seems to always be a crap shoot. I have a couple of laptops from 1994 that work just fine. Others from three years ago that are sitting junk in my workshop waiting to be parted..o.
What is up with you people? Stop it already. If I want a freaking Mac, I'm going to buy a freaking Mac. No one goes out and tells me when I buy a BMW that I'm an idiot for buying a BMW, because its more expensive than a particular American (or Japanese, or Korean or whatever) equivilant by $12000 on the sticker price. You can go on and on about how American cars are just as good as German cars (arguable), and you can go on about comfort, engine power, suspension and whatever else you like. You can tell me that for the purpose of going from A to B its irrelevant and I'm wasting my money. I'll get from A to B just as well in the American model equivilant. Well tough turkey legs to you, because at the end of the day if I want my BMW, I'm going to buy it. And thats it. There's nothing you can do about it. Sorry.
I feel this is exactly how alot of people feel when this whole stupid Mac vs Non Mac comes up. Its like, whatever the price is that day (and trust me Lenovo's or Dell's or whatever get discounted and promoted so it can change honestly from moment to moment ANYWAYS), its irrelevant. People who want the Mac's are going to buy them.
So just take it easy there, and keep your Lenovo stats in your pocket (however buy as MANY as you feel you want for yourself), and let those of us that want to buy our Mac's buy our Macs. For the record I just bought an Acer laptop new last year, and I've had enough problems with it (hard drive failure after four months, weird "video" problems, and various other things), that I'm buying a Mac next time. I've had Windows machines all my life till now, but the percieved value of the Mac is worth another $200-$300 for me.
Nice try. Maybe you should consider posting on topics you know about. Anyone who's had even a passing interest in parrots knows that they're extremely smart. Behaviorally its been asserted (with lots of supporting evidence), that they're about as smart as a two year old at least. In addition to that if you look for work by Irene Pepperberge, you'll find that she's been able to get parrots to count, discriminate and vocalize between groups of objects (for example she'll put down three blue squares and four red triangles, and ask "how many squares" and the bird (Alex I believe in this case) would respond "Three"), and even the concept of zero (in the same example she'll ask "how many red squares" "None" the bird will respond. There are videos of this very experiment available on the net if you google around). (Actually info available here: http://www.primidi.com/2005/07/09.html)
My mother's African Grey for example, has her cage by the laundry room, which of course has a a washing machine / dryer in it. When my mom would go inside to load up the laundry the parrot would start calling for her, and so she would naturally respond "I'm in the laundry room or Mummy is doing laundry". She developed some vocalizations around this but nothing super distinct ("Mummy is garble garble, etc) partially due to her age (she was less than one year old at the time). Whats interesting is that the dryer has a very annoying buzzer thats loud and obnoxious when its cycle ends, and this used to totally freak out the parrot. So my mom would say "Its just the dryer!".
After awhile (say a few months), the parrot started to vocalize more, and one of her favorite things became "Mummy is in the dryer!". Whats even more interesting is that she combines other sounds with "in the dryer". Like "Chris Pronger is in the dryer" (my mom watches alot of hockey) "Hockey is in the dryer". This could be attributed to semi random "sound" mixing, except that when someone goes into the laundry room she will usually use that persons identifier "Daddy is in the dryer", "Stevie is in the dryer", etc. So while it would be ridiculous to say that she understood the actual words, for sure the sounds "Mummy" and "is in the" and "dryer" got put together in her head. The other thing she does is when people leaves, she calls out "good bye" (fairly standard), and more interestingly "He's coming back!". "She's coming back" depending on the person (for certain people she knows she gets the gender right).
However the research on Alex (cited above) has resulted in far more sophisticated behaviour.
What always amazes me about this attitude, is that no one has considered a pretty good alternative: is it not possible at all that we could find some kind of balance between these two things? I've been told, and read many accounts about the great education systems in Australia and England that in the day had all the Rs (reading, writing, 'rithamtic), and also balanced these out with incredibly violent retribution methods -- the strap and paddel being just two of the most known ones. And while I understand that these are extreme examples, alot of the people that told me about these, were the parent's of my friends -- who often had when I was younger administered similar "discipline" to their kids. Horriffic stuff. And seemingly to me part of a nasty and unnecessary cycle.
While I do understand that this is probably not what you are advocating, on the other hand there's no reason to not have education in a warm, human compassionate environment and maintain high academic standards as well. What is wrong with this idea? And yet everyone chooses the either or scenario.
Slashdot Mirror
MacOS X on PCs is like Linux on microwaves: it's very cool, and a neat experiment, but I think for most folks, it's not very appealing.
Much like people that don't want to own Macs don't find it very appealing? You got +5 for this? For the worst metaphore so far this month? Or maybe its just because you personally don't have any interest in running Mac OS X.
Most of the people that I've encountered that are running some form of Hackintosh are extremely pleased with it. It *wasn't* hard, but it also wasn't just putting in a DVD into a drive and going Click, Click. As one person on Slashdot said, its like keeping a 1960s VW going and maintained. Its certainly 90% easier than maintaining 90% of the Linux distros out there, the difference being that if there isn't a driver for your particular peice of hardware, there's a good chance you can't just write your own(as witness by for example the Intel GMA850 folks who wanted to have native support for 10.4.4 and beyond). But then how many people honestly just go out and write their own complex video, or scanner driver on a whim?
But back to my point, it seems to me that if you want a Mac, and you get some hardware that runs Mac OS X, and it runs it like it would a Mac, including all the applications and so on, then you've certainly met you're objective. It would appeal to *everyone* I think that wants to run Mac OS X. I would hardly call that experimental and like running "Linux on microwaves". There's no need to trivialize it.
Bill is that you?
Sure! Right. Why don't they just order a bunch of loaves of bread and hook them up with Vegemite. :) .o.
First question that pops into my mind is would changing your time to some "wrong" value be a potential litmus test for this botnet? If you did and it changed back at some point and you were sure there were no other synchronization processes running on your machine, it might be a clue that you were infected. .o.
> Wait.. why do you have my nick?
.o.
Welcome to Surrealist Theatre on slashdot! Thursdays at 1:26pm!
Ole!
Unless of course we run out of aluminum! :)
An alternative to this might start:
"It was somewhere just past Rivendale when the drugs began to take hold..."
So how much is the check? :)
Actually I use an Inspiron 700m for live performances (electronic dance music) in very hostile club environments, and carry it around to gigs in a backpack, and its done fine over the couple of years I've owned it. I'd say its very solidly built. I've seen some Latitudes choke within six months of purchase on the other hand. This experience, plus some of the others with Mac laptops (where say the old G3s are still kicking around strongly, but the newer white G3s are all dying out due to either hinge problems or motherboard flakeyness), makes me think that the quality of individual laptops are far more influences by their design team than anything else. While its true that most likely Dell says "Ok this Inspiron will sell at this price with these features", but my general feeling is that two different engineering teams can probably come up with two totally different laptops in terms of build quality and longevity.
Oh, BS. I bought a sunlamp for my wife and was immediately struck by the cold, ugly light coming out of it. And then one day I was walking into the room where we'd put it and was noticing how awful it looked - until I realized that the light was turned off and it was sunlight streaming in.
:) .o.
Dude, you need to get out more!
Wrong!!
Let me try.
Figure I. SCHEMATIC: #32 Hot Woman.
Thats no moon!
Marvin Minksy in some ways set us *back* in terms of AI, especially when you consider his hand in the Perceptron
-1 Woosh! :)
Holy crap. What the hell is the difference if I wrote an "email" in gmail to a friend, or log into facebook to write a "message" to a friend. I'm 36, and sending blocks of text via gmail or facebook or whatever is pretty much the same for me.
Each has their own utility anyways...I mean after all would you put your email address on a resume? Well I know I sure would. My facebook account? Rather doubt it.
I think this whole thing is like talking about how everyone used Lotus-123 and then everyone moved onto Excel. A spreadsheet is a spreadsheet. And an "email", "message" or whatever is just that. Via gmail, or facebook, or SMTP or whatever. Same thing.
-=g
all these measures make no sense security wise what so ever. They are only designed to make the average EU politician feel safer.
There fixed that for you.
Wow! Its people like you that ARE the problem with Wikipedia. Thats the dumbest answer ever, because it tries to hide an arbitrary value system with a smart sounding justification, in this case "notability". A great example is how the Uncyclopedia article has been butchered from a fun and interesting article to one that spends half the article covering the (really minor) issues of the incident in New Zealand, and the the fact that its available in different languages. I mean I find it ironic that the "other languages" section is almost twice as large as the one describing the content.
.o.
However at least in this case we could go back and get the original versions of the pages if we liked. In the case of deletions thats just counter intuitive to what Wikipedia has become: the online source for detailed topical information. Whatever fantasy you may have about Wikipedia, the reality of it is that people go looking for EXACTLY random radio stations and web comics. In fact I would argue that the value of any peice of information in Wikipedia is INVERSELY proportional to its obscurity. The more obscure and unknown it is, the more important it is to have in Wikipedia, because really where else are you going to find it? Articles on general chemistry? Thats nice and all, but you can get introductions to that anywhere, and maybe even more well written than whatever has shown up on Wikipedia. But some small web comic I stumbled upon the net and would like to get more information on? Thats not available anywhere, and certainly Wikipedia is THE logical place for information on that. This includes other classes of information such as trivia and internet memes.
What you are effectively saying when you say that you want to delete articles because of "notability" issues, is that you are placing an editorial value judgement on information in Wikipedia without anyone elses consensus, and really its a completely arbitrary judgement. I've spent alot of time as an editor on Wikipedia battle insanely persistent editors who just go crazy with the DELETE nominations, because they are convinced that they somehow have it right. Even if the talk page is alight with lots of other dissenting voices.
So yeah. Stop it.
...and I find it interesting how none of the posters have mentioned that. Look if its true that Generation Y wants a better work/life balance and flexible hours, this is a good thing. It also says nothing about their ability to compete or not. One of the things slashdotters complain about all the time are bad working evironments, and being a slave to servers and or pagers. Do you think after almost twenty years of this Generation Yers don't see this? A lack of critical thinking has been a problem in North American education systems for a long time now. It appears to me to be better in Europe, but thats just from what I hear. That said, I've noticed that many, many people I work with that are in IT would have come to where they were by themselves anyways. They had curiosity, then read stuff, they hacked and BBSed and whatever else, and then they made themselves the way they were. In most cases this is not going to change. Smart kids will continue to be smart *inspite* of the education system. As for the rest, they will probably fall along their appropriate place on the bell curve. And there is nothing wrong with that.
With this in mind, how many people, especially after 35 in IT start thinking of ways of getting our or changing careers. This might actually make a good slashdot post. How many 55 year old C++ programmers do you know working in your shops? Even if you argue that C++ wasn't around when a 50 year old programmer started, he should have been able to just gone from cobol or fortran to C++. But are there really that many? A few? How many lawyers do you see that are still in their 50s and working. Or doctors?
The point being if we give the message that IT is first of all not a sustainable career, and also that other careers are more fun and rewarding, it should be no surprise to us that those looking forward to us from a younger age would not be swayed by what they see. I don't think we should lay all the blame on the "generation".
You know what? You're right. Sorry if it seemed like an attack. I just get so tired of people doing the whole Mac -> Linux -> Windows thing and arguing over it endlessly, I finally decided to say something. Usually I let it go. For what its worth I do think Macs are better engineered and maybe worth a higher price (at least for me), but YMMV. The fact of the matter is buying any laptop seems to always be a crap shoot. I have a couple of laptops from 1994 that work just fine. Others from three years ago that are sitting junk in my workshop waiting to be parted. .o.
What is up with you people? Stop it already. If I want a freaking Mac, I'm going to buy a freaking Mac. No one goes out and tells me when I buy a BMW that I'm an idiot for buying a BMW, because its more expensive than a particular American (or Japanese, or Korean or whatever) equivilant by $12000 on the sticker price. You can go on and on about how American cars are just as good as German cars (arguable), and you can go on about comfort, engine power, suspension and whatever else you like. You can tell me that for the purpose of going from A to B its irrelevant and I'm wasting my money. I'll get from A to B just as well in the American model equivilant. Well tough turkey legs to you, because at the end of the day if I want my BMW, I'm going to buy it. And thats it. There's nothing you can do about it. Sorry.
I feel this is exactly how alot of people feel when this whole stupid Mac vs Non Mac comes up. Its like, whatever the price is that day (and trust me Lenovo's or Dell's or whatever get discounted and promoted so it can change honestly from moment to moment ANYWAYS), its irrelevant. People who want the Mac's are going to buy them.
So just take it easy there, and keep your Lenovo stats in your pocket (however buy as MANY as you feel you want for yourself), and let those of us that want to buy our Mac's buy our Macs. For the record I just bought an Acer laptop new last year, and I've had enough problems with it (hard drive failure after four months, weird "video" problems, and various other things), that I'm buying a Mac next time. I've had Windows machines all my life till now, but the percieved value of the Mac is worth another $200-$300 for me.
Nice try. Maybe you should consider posting on topics you know about. Anyone who's had even a passing interest in parrots knows that they're extremely smart. Behaviorally its been asserted (with lots of supporting evidence), that they're about as smart as a two year old at least. In addition to that if you look for work by Irene Pepperberge, you'll find that she's been able to get parrots to count, discriminate and vocalize between groups of objects (for example she'll put down three blue squares and four red triangles, and ask "how many squares" and the bird (Alex I believe in this case) would respond "Three"), and even the concept of zero (in the same example she'll ask "how many red squares" "None" the bird will respond. There are videos of this very experiment available on the net if you google around). (Actually info available here: http://www.primidi.com/2005/07/09.html)
My mother's African Grey for example, has her cage by the laundry room, which of course has a a washing machine / dryer in it. When my mom would go inside to load up the laundry the parrot would start calling for her, and so she would naturally respond "I'm in the laundry room or Mummy is doing laundry". She developed some vocalizations around this but nothing super distinct ("Mummy is garble garble, etc) partially due to her age (she was less than one year old at the time). Whats interesting is that the dryer has a very annoying buzzer thats loud and obnoxious when its cycle ends, and this used to totally freak out the parrot. So my mom would say "Its just the dryer!".
After awhile (say a few months), the parrot started to vocalize more, and one of her favorite things became "Mummy is in the dryer!". Whats even more interesting is that she combines other sounds with "in the dryer". Like "Chris Pronger is in the dryer" (my mom watches alot of hockey) "Hockey is in the dryer". This could be attributed to semi random "sound" mixing, except that when someone goes into the laundry room she will usually use that persons identifier "Daddy is in the dryer", "Stevie is in the dryer", etc. So while it would be ridiculous to say that she understood the actual words, for sure the sounds "Mummy" and "is in the" and "dryer" got put together in her head. The other thing she does is when people leaves, she calls out "good bye" (fairly standard), and more interestingly "He's coming back!". "She's coming back" depending on the person (for certain people she knows she gets the gender right).
However the research on Alex (cited above) has resulted in far more sophisticated behaviour.
-=g
And have you thought that after this they still might be standing there handing out socialist pamphlets?
What always amazes me about this attitude, is that no one has considered a pretty good alternative: is it not possible at all that we could find some kind of balance between these two things? I've been told, and read many accounts about the great education systems in Australia and England that in the day had all the Rs (reading, writing, 'rithamtic), and also balanced these out with incredibly violent retribution methods -- the strap and paddel being just two of the most known ones. And while I understand that these are extreme examples, alot of the people that told me about these, were the parent's of my friends -- who often had when I was younger administered similar "discipline" to their kids. Horriffic stuff. And seemingly to me part of a nasty and unnecessary cycle.
.o.
While I do understand that this is probably not what you are advocating, on the other hand there's no reason to not have education in a warm, human compassionate environment and maintain high academic standards as well. What is wrong with this idea? And yet everyone chooses the either or scenario.
Amazing.
Or just get rid of the kids... :) .o.
I'm sorry, you must be looking for Digg. Its just next door. .o.