court more game publishers to convince them to release more games for OSX,
Since almost all PCs (including Macs) these days are x86 based (including x86-64), I'm surprised that game publishers haven't taken to releasing games on bootable discs with their own OS. Would game players really care if they have to boot their PC from the disc to play? Plenty of bootable live-OS examples out there to choose from.
Evolution rate is determined (at the upper limit) by the gene change rate per generation. Whether that's "slow" or "fast" depends on how long a generation is and what niches are available for variant offspring to be more viable in than their progenitors. That latter is why we tend to see rapid speciation some recovery time after extinction events: a lot of niches are left empty by extinct species. (Obviously, though, those niches were temporarily absent or the previous occupiers wouldn't have gone exinct -- extending the definition of niche here a little to include criteria like "not raining flaming death from the skies";-) Although clearly, if a critter is well adapted to its environmental niche, mutations away from that optimum are going to be selected against -- which is why we still have critters like crocodiles and sharks (although we have variations of those).
Note that sex -- gene swapping -- greatly accelerates the rate of evolution (in terms of per generation, not necessarily in absolute time) since offspring are then no longer clones of their parents. That probably triggered the Cambrian explosion as much as anything else, although the fact that soft-bodied invertebrates tend not to leave much in the way of fossils may have exaggerated the explosion in the fossil record. I.e, it's not so much that there wasn't a huge diversity of multicellular lifeforms in the precambrian, it's that they were of a sort that tends not to leave easily detected fossils. (Fossil jellyfish, anyone? Or octopus, for that matter.)
What the hell does the cambrian explosion have to do with mammalian evolution? There's a several hundred million year time span between the two, and that's just to the beginning of the mammal line with the synapsids like dimetrodon. Add another hundred million or two before we get to anything that most people would consider mammalian.
Okay, that'll teach me to RTFA. There were two nanoscale images in the article, even if the blurb only mentions the microscale images.
Sigh.
Three orders of magnitude...
on
Nano Scale Artworks
·
· Score: 2, Informative
nano-scale artworks. It includes a 15 micron wide badger, a ten micron long guitar (which was actually played) and a 120 micron long New Scientist logo.
This features are all multi-micron in size. That isn't nano-scale, that's micro-scale, a three orders of magnitude difference. Just because it's small doesn't make it "nano". (Perhaps "nano" is the new "turbo" or "extreme"? Oh no wait, that's "HD".)
Come back when the features are nanometer size, like this one, or these.
They couldn't release the code and they couldn't not release the code either.
The solution to that is to stop distributing anything. If you end up with a warehouse full of settop boxes you can't legally (because of copyright) distribute/sell, that's your tough luck for not doing due diligence on your business plan.
Same goes for any successors in interest to the defunct company.
So what is up with him needing acceptance from Microsoft?
From Wikipedia:
In summer of 1997, he was interviewed by Microsoft for a job in the Internet Explorer Unix team (to work on a SPARC port), but lacked a university degree to obtain a work H-1B visa.
Perhaps he's still trying to live down that rejection. (I seem to recall that he tried more than once to get a job at Microsoft, but I can't readily find a reference.) Mind you, I think anyone who would even apply for that kind of job was probably brain damaged to start with.
So - no, none of the machines I've used linux on in the last 5 years have ever been install and use.
Well, geez, stop messing around with Gentoo and get something like Suse or Ubuntu.
I haven't had to do any of the crap you mention since about 1997, and I've done dozens of different setups, from old Dell and Compaq desktops to white boxes to servers. (Okay, the servers I had to make some manual changes for interface bonding for NIC failover, not exactly something your average user worries about.)
Considering that Smallville is shot at the studio next door, it's amazing that Kansas doesn't look like British Columbia too. (Not that it necessarily looks like Kansas, either.)
That's arguable. In terms of aggregate life-minutes lost, spamming is probably a lot worse than a couple of killings.
(Take a 75 year lifespan, that's 60*24*365*75 = 39,420,000 minutes. Send enough spam that 10 million people spend 5 minutes each dealing with it, that's 50,000,000 minutes lost. And there's a lot more spam than that.)
learn how many people in Canada where prepared to do anything at all to help prevent global warming from actually happening. If memory serves, it was found that almost nobody... effectively 0%... would actually do anything themselves to help reduce the effects of global warming.
And this surprises you? Hey, I used to live in Canada. Canadians are looking forward to global warming. Heck, if they'd done that survey in winter, they'd probably get a negative percentage. This is Canada you're talking about, home of Ottawa, coldest national capital on the planet.
That geneology software gramma bought, the el cheapo card game product they really wanted - it won't work with their machine. Sure there are free alternatives, but it's not the product they chose. And WINE? No guarantees that it'll work.
True, no guarantees, but in my experience that kind of Windows software tends to run better on WINE than the high end packages, because the programmers stuck closer to the most commonly used APIs. Its the high end packages that use some of the obscure API corners that have issues. (OTOH, some of that software is plain buggy even on different versions of Windows - and a lot of the older stuff won't run on Vista.)
It is not ready for your mom or your grandmother or your little sister.
My grandmother (both of them) is dead, you insensitive clod. My mom was programming computers before PCs were invented and my little sister is a software consultant.
Yeah, I think it's ready for them.
If you don't know what you're doing, then no OS is easy and you spend your time trying to figure out how to do the simplest things. Once you've done that, it's not difficult. OTOH, if you do know a bit about the OS (whether Windows or 'nix), it's generally a hell of a lot easier to do simple-but-multi-step things in 'nix than in 'doze.
I wouldn't recommend that somebody who knows nothing about any unix and doesn't know anybody who does should try to install it and figure it out on their own (unless they like that kind of thing). But I'd recommend that over someone who knew nothing about Windows and didn't know anyone who did trying to install and learn Windows on their own. That's the kind of thing that would have them running away with initial bad experiences.
up until the point where they find that they can't play the games that they just bought from their local CompUSA
The average computer user doesn't buy PC games from CompUSA, or much of anywhere else for that matter. If they do games, it'll be PS2 or XBox games they pick up at BestBuy or Walmart.
Or until they try plugging in an arbitrary device and find that it doesn't work.
Out of the box, Linux supports more devices than any other OS. Those that it doesn't are unlikely to be supported by any other OS out of the box -- that's why devices come with driver discs, which if you're really lucky will actually work with whatever version of Windows you have installed, and not clobber some other driver during the install.
Of course, the average computer user doesn't plug in "an arbitrary device" to their computer. They get it set up with a printer, once, then leave it the hell alone. If they want something else plugged in they'll probably call Geek Squad.
By the time you reach college you should be self sufficient enough to manage your own affairs.
Maybe where you live. But here, on plant earth, that is not even close to true.
The operative word in the GP is should. You don't think college students should be self-sufficient enough to manage their own affairs? I'll agree that most of them probably aren't (and I'll admit there are things I could have managed better when I was a student), but they're adults, they really ought to be.
If not, perhaps we ought to raise the legal age of adulthood and make sure all these kids have guardians until they graduate?
He's right. The various "famines" in Africa in the last decade or three are not due to the overall population exceeding the food supply, they're due to localized shortages due to distribution problems, where the distribution problems are primarily political in nature. (Wars or imposed shortages to drive out "undesirable" populations.)
Then why do so some places only have the 10% ethanol during the winter?
That's to "oxygenate" the fuel, resulting in lower CO (carbon monoxide) emissions from cold engines. There are other compounds sometimes used for this, ethanol is relatively benign.
I think the above poster has it backwards anyway, I think alcohol has a higher vapor pressure than regular gasoline. (This based on experience with how fast spills evaporate, I haven't looked it up.)
I wonder if there's a good way to convert digital video into black and white film (maybe with one frame per color channel) since it's got a proven archival record.
As long as you're not using nitrate based (celluloid) film stock -- a lot of pre-1950s footage has disintegrated. For that matter even acetate-based stocks tend to deteriorate over time.
There are other film types -- and the stuff they use (used to use?) for microfiche is rated in centuries if kept in climate-controlled conditions. Under hot and humid conditions, though, fungus can attack the binder for the silver halide. (The diazo-based fiches only have a nominal 20-year life, although I've got some older than that which are fine.)
My question is "what about the other major mosquito-transmitted illnesses carried by the same type(s)? AKA yellow fever, west nile, etc.?"
We have vaccines against those. One shot and you're good for ten years (at least for yellow fever, although you feel like hell for the first day; not sure on the specs for west nile).
There's no vaccine for malaria, nor will there likely be, since it isn't a virus or bacteria.
It's also relatively useless against malaria, and has been for years. Pity, really, I rather enjoy a nice gin'n'tonic in malaria-infested areas. (Tonic water is flavored with quinine.)
About twenty years ago (last time I was in malaria country) the drug of choice was chloroquine -- a quinine derivative, yes, but not quinine. Even then, there were warnings about some areas where chloroquine-resistant malaria was prevalent. That resistance is pretty much everywhere, these days. The effective antimalarials are also pretty rough on the system if you're taking them for more than a couple of months.
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court more game publishers to convince them to release more games for OSX,
Since almost all PCs (including Macs) these days are x86 based (including x86-64), I'm surprised that game publishers haven't taken to releasing games on bootable discs with their own OS. Would game players really care if they have to boot their PC from the disc to play? Plenty of bootable live-OS examples out there to choose from.
Evolution rate is determined (at the upper limit) by the gene change rate per generation. Whether that's "slow" or "fast" depends on how long a generation is and what niches are available for variant offspring to be more viable in than their progenitors. That latter is why we tend to see rapid speciation some recovery time after extinction events: a lot of niches are left empty by extinct species. (Obviously, though, those niches were temporarily absent or the previous occupiers wouldn't have gone exinct -- extending the definition of niche here a little to include criteria like "not raining flaming death from the skies" ;-) Although clearly, if a critter is well adapted to its environmental niche, mutations away from that optimum are going to be selected against -- which is why we still have critters like crocodiles and sharks (although we have variations of those).
Note that sex -- gene swapping -- greatly accelerates the rate of evolution (in terms of per generation, not necessarily in absolute time) since offspring are then no longer clones of their parents. That probably triggered the Cambrian explosion as much as anything else, although the fact that soft-bodied invertebrates tend not to leave much in the way of fossils may have exaggerated the explosion in the fossil record. I.e, it's not so much that there wasn't a huge diversity of multicellular lifeforms in the precambrian, it's that they were of a sort that tends not to leave easily detected fossils. (Fossil jellyfish, anyone? Or octopus, for that matter.)
What the hell does the cambrian explosion have to do with mammalian evolution? There's a several hundred million year time span between the two, and that's just to the beginning of the mammal line with the synapsids like dimetrodon. Add another hundred million or two before we get to anything that most people would consider mammalian.
Okay, that'll teach me to RTFA. There were two nanoscale images in the article, even if the blurb only mentions the microscale images.
Sigh.
nano-scale artworks. It includes a 15 micron wide badger, a ten micron long guitar (which was actually played) and a 120 micron long New Scientist logo.
This features are all multi-micron in size. That isn't nano-scale, that's micro-scale, a three orders of magnitude difference. Just because it's small doesn't make it "nano". (Perhaps "nano" is the new "turbo" or "extreme"? Oh no wait, that's "HD".)
Come back when the features are nanometer size, like this one, or these.
They couldn't release the code and they couldn't not release the code either.
The solution to that is to stop distributing anything. If you end up with a warehouse full of settop boxes you can't legally (because of copyright) distribute/sell, that's your tough luck for not doing due diligence on your business plan.
Same goes for any successors in interest to the defunct company.
From Wikipedia:
Perhaps he's still trying to live down that rejection. (I seem to recall that he tried more than once to get a job at Microsoft, but I can't readily find a reference.) Mind you, I think anyone who would even apply for that kind of job was probably brain damaged to start with.
So - no, none of the machines I've used linux on in the last 5 years have ever been install and use.
Well, geez, stop messing around with Gentoo and get something like Suse or Ubuntu.
I haven't had to do any of the crap you mention since about 1997, and I've done dozens of different setups, from old Dell and Compaq desktops to white boxes to servers. (Okay, the servers I had to make some manual changes for interface bonding for NIC failover, not exactly something your average user worries about.)
it would be somewhat difficult to throw your entire house out of one of its own windows, wouldn't it?
Read Robert Heinlein's short story "He Built A Crooked House". You could probably do it with that one.
(Basic plot: architect designs and builds house in the form of an unfolded tesseract. An earthquake ends up folding it...)
Subjective severity is irrelevant: once a murder has happened, the victim doesn't care at all.
Considering that Smallville is shot at the studio next door, it's amazing that Kansas doesn't look like British Columbia too. (Not that it necessarily looks like Kansas, either.)
Killing is worse than spamming.
That's arguable. In terms of aggregate life-minutes lost, spamming is probably a lot worse than a couple of killings.
(Take a 75 year lifespan, that's 60*24*365*75 = 39,420,000 minutes. Send enough spam that 10 million people spend 5 minutes each dealing with it, that's 50,000,000 minutes lost. And there's a lot more spam than that.)
learn how many people in Canada where prepared to do anything at all to help prevent global warming from actually happening. If memory serves, it was found that almost nobody ... effectively 0% ... would actually do anything themselves to help reduce the effects of global warming.
And this surprises you? Hey, I used to live in Canada. Canadians are looking forward to global warming. Heck, if they'd done that survey in winter, they'd probably get a negative percentage. This is Canada you're talking about, home of Ottawa, coldest national capital on the planet.
That geneology software gramma bought, the el cheapo card game product they really wanted - it won't work with their machine. Sure there are free alternatives, but it's not the product they chose. And WINE? No guarantees that it'll work.
True, no guarantees, but in my experience that kind of Windows software tends to run better on WINE than the high end packages, because the programmers stuck closer to the most commonly used APIs. Its the high end packages that use some of the obscure API corners that have issues. (OTOH, some of that software is plain buggy even on different versions of Windows - and a lot of the older stuff won't run on Vista.)
It is not ready for your mom or your grandmother or your little sister.
My grandmother (both of them) is dead, you insensitive clod. My mom was programming computers before PCs were invented and my little sister is a software consultant.
Yeah, I think it's ready for them.
If you don't know what you're doing, then no OS is easy and you spend your time trying to figure out how to do the simplest things. Once you've done that, it's not difficult. OTOH, if you do know a bit about the OS (whether Windows or 'nix), it's generally a hell of a lot easier to do simple-but-multi-step things in 'nix than in 'doze.
I wouldn't recommend that somebody who knows nothing about any unix and doesn't know anybody who does should try to install it and figure it out on their own (unless they like that kind of thing). But I'd recommend that over someone who knew nothing about Windows and didn't know anyone who did trying to install and learn Windows on their own. That's the kind of thing that would have them running away with initial bad experiences.
up until the point where they find that they can't play the games that they just bought from their local CompUSA
The average computer user doesn't buy PC games from CompUSA, or much of anywhere else for that matter. If they do games, it'll be PS2 or XBox games they pick up at BestBuy or Walmart.
Or until they try plugging in an arbitrary device and find that it doesn't work.
Out of the box, Linux supports more devices than any other OS. Those that it doesn't are unlikely to be supported by any other OS out of the box -- that's why devices come with driver discs, which if you're really lucky will actually work with whatever version of Windows you have installed, and not clobber some other driver during the install.
Of course, the average computer user doesn't plug in "an arbitrary device" to their computer. They get it set up with a printer, once, then leave it the hell alone. If they want something else plugged in they'll probably call Geek Squad.
Scroll down and check out the "adspoofs" video from Brainshare 2003. They're a hoot -- especially the "instant message" one. Clickies: MPG or OGG.
By the time you reach college you should be self sufficient enough to manage your own affairs.
Maybe where you live. But here, on plant earth, that is not even close to true.
The operative word in the GP is should. You don't think college students should be self-sufficient enough to manage their own affairs? I'll agree that most of them probably aren't (and I'll admit there are things I could have managed better when I was a student), but they're adults, they really ought to be.
If not, perhaps we ought to raise the legal age of adulthood and make sure all these kids have guardians until they graduate?
Oh? That's good news. Still not where we are with e.g. yellow fever.
Introducing mass quantities of corn into the rumen causes the rumen to acidify (normally it is neutral).
Nothing that a little Alka-Seltzer wouldn't cure....
He's right. The various "famines" in Africa in the last decade or three are not due to the overall population exceeding the food supply, they're due to localized shortages due to distribution problems, where the distribution problems are primarily political in nature. (Wars or imposed shortages to drive out "undesirable" populations.)
Then why do so some places only have the 10% ethanol during the winter?
That's to "oxygenate" the fuel, resulting in lower CO (carbon monoxide) emissions from cold engines. There are other compounds sometimes used for this, ethanol is relatively benign.
I think the above poster has it backwards anyway, I think alcohol has a higher vapor pressure than regular gasoline. (This based on experience with how fast spills evaporate, I haven't looked it up.)
I wonder if there's a good way to convert digital video into black and white film (maybe with one frame per color channel) since it's got a proven archival record.
As long as you're not using nitrate based (celluloid) film stock -- a lot of pre-1950s footage has disintegrated. For that matter even acetate-based stocks tend to deteriorate over time.
There are other film types -- and the stuff they use (used to use?) for microfiche is rated in centuries if kept in climate-controlled conditions. Under hot and humid conditions, though, fungus can attack the binder for the silver halide. (The diazo-based fiches only have a nominal 20-year life, although I've got some older than that which are fine.)
My question is "what about the other major mosquito-transmitted illnesses carried by the same type(s)? AKA yellow fever, west nile, etc.?"
We have vaccines against those. One shot and you're good for ten years (at least for yellow fever, although you feel like hell for the first day; not sure on the specs for west nile).
There's no vaccine for malaria, nor will there likely be, since it isn't a virus or bacteria.
Quinine is not expensive.
It's also relatively useless against malaria, and has been for years. Pity, really, I rather enjoy a nice gin'n'tonic in malaria-infested areas. (Tonic water is flavored with quinine.)
About twenty years ago (last time I was in malaria country) the drug of choice was chloroquine -- a quinine derivative, yes, but not quinine. Even then, there were warnings about some areas where chloroquine-resistant malaria was prevalent. That resistance is pretty much everywhere, these days. The effective antimalarials are also pretty rough on the system if you're taking them for more than a couple of months.