Perhaps but all natural system are not repeatable or recordable.
Consider weather simulations. Even if you could create a 'perfect' simulation of the earth atmosphere , it would diverge significantly from the real atmosphere almost immediately because of things like rounding errors and the inability to caption ever detail with sufficient granularity. aka sensitivity to initial conditions. ( that is chaos theory.)
Have you read Learning to Be Me by Greg Egan?
It considers a world in which people record their thoughts, feelings, and experiences in a "jewel" device implanted in their brains, and eventually the jewel takes over for the person's brain as it fails. The story considers what happens when the jewel gets "out of sync" with the subject's brain (presumably for the same reasons - chaotic divergence.
You owe royalties every time you sing Happy Birthday, in fact.
Slight correction, from the Snopes article you linked:
Does this mean that everyone who warbles "Happy Birthday to You" to family members at birthday parties is engaging in copyright infringement if they fail to obtain permission from or pay royalties to the song's publisher? No. Royalties are due, of course, for commercial uses of the song, such as playing or singing it for profit, using it in movies, television programs, and stage shows, or incorporating it into musical products such as watches and greeting cards; as well, royalties are due for public performance, defined by copyright law as performances which occur "at a place open to the public, or at any place where a substantial number of persons outside of a normal circle of a family and its social acquaintances is gathered." So, crooning "Happy Birthday to You" to family members and friends at home is fine, but performing a copyrighted work in a public setting such as a restaurant or a sports arena technically requires a license from ASCAP or the Harry Fox Agency (although such infringements are rarely prosecuted).
Radiation includes alpha, beta, and gamma particles (among other things), of which gamma particles are indeed EM "radiation", but even though all cats are mammals, and dogs are mammals, it doesn't mean that dogs are cats.
<shrug> Whatever, dude.
Wi-Fi routers also don't emit gamma rays, I'm pretty sure.
Uh, no, they don't. You got that much right. For bonus points, tell me why gamma-frequency EM waves are 'radiation' and radio-frequency EM waves are not?
The alternative from Apple's viewpoint (i.e. building Aqua on top of X11) would have involved changing so many aspects of X11 itself that they'd still have been faced with writing yet another compatibility layer on top of it to run X11 applications, so we'd have ended up with a situation that's pretty much the same as the one we have now.
Could be. I don't know enough about the design of X11 to say one way or the other, but I will say that A/UX (ca. 1991) provided a smoother integration of X11 and Macintosh than Mac OS X does.
I fail to see where X itself (as opposed to some of the software that runs on top of it) is more configurable than Quartz or the Windows device layer.
Perhaps not X itself, but as should be apparent by now, when I talk about X, I'm speaking broadly of X-based interfaces.
Even if Quartz/Aqua offer some measure of user configurability, this is not something that Apple endorses, supports, or promotes. As such, it's more of a quirk than a selling point.
"Choice between multiple window managers" This is not an attribute of X itself. There's nothing to stop people from writing different Window managers that run on top of the base Quartz Compositor layer or the Windows GDI apart from the fact that very few of Microsoft's or Apple's customers would want to use it.
Again, this may be possible, but Apple does not make it easy or tout it as an advantage of their user interface. They prefer to give us a one-size-fits-all solution.
"The ability of a single machine to have multiple GUI users simultaneously logged in" Both Apple and MS support a variety of mechanisms for doing this, e.g. VNC and RDP.
Yes, but these are not transparent methods and require the user to make extra efforts to use them. I would love to see multiple monitor/keyboard/mouse support out of the box, but I'm not holding my breath.
They also have their own software for remotely managing clients (in the standard client / server sense rather than the way X uses client and server), i.e. Apple Remote Desktop and Microsoft Terminal Services, both of which have capabilities that go far beyond those of X (e.g. shared clipboards, remote drag-and-drop, file and printer redirection, and a bunch of other stuff).
I have to admit I'm no exper on these, but from my experience of ARDC, it is sluggish enough to make it a pain to use on a daily basis. It's something I would only want to use when I have no other choice. Certainly not to run workaday apps remotely.
All this niggling, however, is getting away from my original point - there is a need for standardized GUI configurability. Apple could be at the forefront of this approach (think multi-user Spaces and screen sharing on one machine), but instead they seem committed to promoting Aqua (or rather Leopard's GUI now, whatever that is called) and giving just enough support to administrators and X users to mollify them. I wish they would be a bit more daring, and really turn the GUI world on its head again.
Look, what most people think of as 'radiation' is stuff like X-rays and gamma rays, which are both EM. The only difference is the frequency band the source is radiating in.
If you think radio waves such as those from a wi-fi router are not radiation, then you don't understand what radiation is, simple as that!
Hate to burst your bubble, but as a US citizen you DON'T have a right to own guns. Read The Constitution, again, in full, and not in part, because it says, "right to bare arms, to defend the state in a militia."
Nope, wrong. It does NOT say that, you need to read it again.
it states the terms in which one is allowed to bare arms, which clearly says only when defending the state within a militia.
No, it gives a justification for the right of the people to keep and bear (not 'bare') arms. At the time, it was common to form a militia from an armed citizenry, who were expected to bring their own weapons. Regardless of the justification given, it directly says that the people have this right, not the State.
The confusion usually arises because people use "radiation" casually to mean only nuclear radiation, gamma rays, X-rays, etc. They forget that they are swimming in EM radiation every day they walk out into the sun.
I had a chemistry teacher who told the class he didn't recommend using a microwave to cook, because "it's radiation." I don't know whether he thought it was making his food radioactive or what, but I had to point out that an electric toaster also cooks with "radiation."
Perhaps they, like many in the UNIX community during the mid 1990s when X was a horribly slow, resource-hogging POS, simply believed that it was poorly suited to personal computers, and therefore not worth considering. There have after all been alternative UNIX-based projects that were intended to overcome what many saw as inadequacies in X, e.g. NEWS, Berlin / Fresco, and Y Windows. Others have attempted to overcome its performance problems by providing direct interfaces to hardware within the X framework (FBUI, DRI, etc.)
Oh, I'm not suggesting that they should have simply adopted X11 and modified it, just that they should have taken some inspiration from the feature set. All the alternative GUI projects you mention had good ideas that would provide fertile ground for a designer of display architectures.
Mike Paquet, who was one of Quartz's authors, said that the reason Apple chose not to use X (after spending some time considering it as a possibility) was due to the fact that their version would end up being so different to any other version time they'd added all the features they wanted that it wouldn't have been compatible.
Inded, and he would know. However, the situation they have now - running X11 on top of Aqua - is not exactly ideal for X11 users. We have some researchers on our faculty who had a devil of a time getting display forwarding to work right on the Macs, for example.
What "neat things" can X do that Quartz isn't capable of?
Mainly network transparency, user configurability, choice between multiple window managers, and the ability of a single machine to have multiple GUI users simultaneously logged in.
Indeed, but what they threw away is the lessons of two decades of X development in favor of proceeding with their own proprietary architectures.
Apple especially had an opportunity to do something about it when they built Quartz and Aqua from scratch - when they were retiring QuickDraw and Display Postscript. Quartz is pretty cool, with its PDF-style display model, but it's not open and it's not capable of the neat things X is capable of, which is a pity.
The point is, why do I have to learn to use different interfaces to do the same kinds of things? I should be able to pick one I like (say Aqua) and use it on any computer.
It would be great if you could just learn how to use a computer *once*, but in our current state of affairs, you have to learn over and over again.
I think the opposite goal is more desirable - a platform standard which allows you to run your GUI on any machine.
Why should I learn Gnome or KDE if I already know Aqua, or vice versa?
The best solution would be an interface definition standard that lets you use KDE on Windows, Mac or Linux with no installation or configuration necessary - just download your profile from a server or USB key.
Oh, yeah, and I'd like a pony too, as long as I'm wishing on pipe dreams...
That's probably why he said "similarly powerful". The Mac Mini is pretty underpowered, you can pretty easily put together something that will run as fast or faster for $300 with a generic parts.
...
That might be because they compared one pricy, all-in-one machine to another pricy, all-in-one machine. It wouldn't be hard to build a tower that can beat both of those machines for that kind of money.
Apples and oranges (pardon the expression). You can't compare an integrated pre-configured machine with a build-it-yourself Frankenputer on price.
If someone gains physical access to your Mac laptop it doesn't matter if you've set a password or not. They can connect its firewire port to another Mac and reboot it in Target mode to gain full access to the hard drive. They can start it up in single-user mode and set any password they want or change permissions on any files and folders.
Unix(TM) was never open source. The source was available under certain restrictions, but it failed on the "free distribution" requirement at the very least.
Slashdot Mirror
> With such confusion as to who was going to be our new overlords, no wonder Esperanto was big.
Ho! Konsiderante ke la Usono estos la hundinac^o de Esperantujo en la venontaj kelkaj jaroj, mi sugestas ke vi fakte lernu Esperanton!
I had "The Voice," from Muse Software, but that was more like an 8-bit sampler than a voice synthesizer.
Have you read Learning to Be Me by Greg Egan?
It considers a world in which people record their thoughts, feelings, and experiences in a "jewel" device implanted in their brains, and eventually the jewel takes over for the person's brain as it fails. The story considers what happens when the jewel gets "out of sync" with the subject's brain (presumably for the same reasons - chaotic divergence.
Slight correction, from the Snopes article you linked:
<shrug> Whatever, dude.
Uh, no, they don't. You got that much right. For bonus points, tell me why gamma-frequency EM waves are 'radiation' and radio-frequency EM waves are not?
Could be. I don't know enough about the design of X11 to say one way or the other, but I will say that A/UX (ca. 1991) provided a smoother integration of X11 and Macintosh than Mac OS X does.
Perhaps not X itself, but as should be apparent by now, when I talk about X, I'm speaking broadly of X-based interfaces.
Even if Quartz/Aqua offer some measure of user configurability, this is not something that Apple endorses, supports, or promotes. As such, it's more of a quirk than a selling point.
Again, this may be possible, but Apple does not make it easy or tout it as an advantage of their user interface. They prefer to give us a one-size-fits-all solution.
Yes, but these are not transparent methods and require the user to make extra efforts to use them. I would love to see multiple monitor/keyboard/mouse support out of the box, but I'm not holding my breath.I have to admit I'm no exper on these, but from my experience of ARDC, it is sluggish enough to make it a pain to use on a daily basis. It's something I would only want to use when I have no other choice. Certainly not to run workaday apps remotely.
All this niggling, however, is getting away from my original point - there is a need for standardized GUI configurability. Apple could be at the forefront of this approach (think multi-user Spaces and screen sharing on one machine), but instead they seem committed to promoting Aqua (or rather Leopard's GUI now, whatever that is called) and giving just enough support to administrators and X users to mollify them. I wish they would be a bit more daring, and really turn the GUI world on its head again.
Look, what most people think of as 'radiation' is stuff like X-rays and gamma rays, which are both EM. The only difference is the frequency band the source is radiating in.
If you think radio waves such as those from a wi-fi router are not radiation, then you don't understand what radiation is, simple as that!
Nope, wrong. It does NOT say that, you need to read it again.
No, it gives a justification for the right of the people to keep and bear (not 'bare') arms. At the time, it was common to form a militia from an armed citizenry, who were expected to bring their own weapons. Regardless of the justification given, it directly says that the people have this right, not the State.
Agreed, GP needs a lesson in humidity.
> Only in the sense that EM Radiation is "that which is radiated". The English language can turn any verb into a noun.
Whatever, dude.
> Radiation radiation is something different entirely.
No, it isn't. There's no such thing as 'radiation radiation'
> Like I said, it's an unfortunate mix of words.
It's an unfortunte misunderstanding by people who don't really know what 'radiation' means - in that sense, you are correct.
RF waves are indeed radiation. For your enlightenment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_radiation
The confusion usually arises because people use "radiation" casually to mean only nuclear radiation, gamma rays, X-rays, etc. They forget that they are swimming in EM radiation every day they walk out into the sun.
I had a chemistry teacher who told the class he didn't recommend using a microwave to cook, because "it's radiation." I don't know whether he thought it was making his food radioactive or what, but I had to point out that an electric toaster also cooks with "radiation."
Oh, I'm not suggesting that they should have simply adopted X11 and modified it, just that they should have taken some inspiration from the feature set. All the alternative GUI projects you mention had good ideas that would provide fertile ground for a designer of display architectures.
Inded, and he would know. However, the situation they have now - running X11 on top of Aqua - is not exactly ideal for X11 users. We have some researchers on our faculty who had a devil of a time getting display forwarding to work right on the Macs, for example.
Mainly network transparency, user configurability, choice between multiple window managers, and the ability of a single machine to have multiple GUI users simultaneously logged in.
Indeed, but what they threw away is the lessons of two decades of X development in favor of proceeding with their own proprietary architectures.
Apple especially had an opportunity to do something about it when they built Quartz and Aqua from scratch - when they were retiring QuickDraw and Display Postscript. Quartz is pretty cool, with its PDF-style display model, but it's not open and it's not capable of the neat things X is capable of, which is a pity.
> What's the point? If you want OS X, run OS X.
The point is, why do I have to learn to use different interfaces to do the same kinds of things? I should be able to pick one I like (say Aqua) and use it on any computer.
It would be great if you could just learn how to use a computer *once*, but in our current state of affairs, you have to learn over and over again.
I think the opposite goal is more desirable - a platform standard which allows you to run your GUI on any machine.
Why should I learn Gnome or KDE if I already know Aqua, or vice versa?
The best solution would be an interface definition standard that lets you use KDE on Windows, Mac or Linux with no installation or configuration necessary - just download your profile from a server or USB key.
Oh, yeah, and I'd like a pony too, as long as I'm wishing on pipe dreams...
...
Apples and oranges (pardon the expression). You can't compare an integrated pre-configured machine with a build-it-yourself Frankenputer on price.
Not if they set an Open Firmware password they can't.
And here's one from a competing company...
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pamplemousse/225029183/
Here's how it's done, ladies and gents...
http://www.flickr.com/photos/marcusjb/440970636/in/photostream/
I have it on good authority that "Single White Female" was actually the first Flash movie...
Stop ... you had me at '10' :)
I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
"You can have my DNA when you extract it from my cold, dead hand!"
Oh, wait...
Unix(TM) was never open source. The source was available under certain restrictions, but it failed on the "free distribution" requirement at the very least.
Citation notwendig.