Alright, lets apply your "What does speeding get you in 'the real world'?" question to my recent road trip.
Your speed: 15 hours
My speed: 10 hours
OK, so I think it is time somebody pointed out the difference between uncongested freeway driving, where your point is fairly compelling (and where
the speed limits are often lower than they could
reasonably be), and driving in traffic, where you still see 20 mph differentials in driving speeds
just so some yutz can be first in line at the next traffic light. In many of those
cases, the big speed differential when moving adds up to almost nothing in practice. (You and the moron all stop at the same red lights by the time the each one of them turns green.) Well, okay, the speeder does get the chance to run the red light and get hit by the guy over there jumping the green...
Re:Software Compatability is the key, not OS
on
AMD's 64-Bit Chip
·
· Score: 2
Who the hell needs a DESKTOP system to be 64 bit? How many people's desktops have (and actually use) 2 gig of ram (or more) right now? Or will in the near future?
One word: Matlab.:-)
OK, that explains the lust for extreme amounts
of memory and the possibility of insane floating
point performance if Mathworks would well support
the architecture, at this moment. The truth is,
presumably absurd amounts of computing hardware power have *always* spawned software that uses
everything that's there plus 20%. I think the
interesting comparison here is to video card technology, which has jumped from 8 bit to 128-bit (or more?) architectures in the past decade. I
can remember at every step of this progression that somebody (including me, a couple of times) wondered who the heck could possibly need all of
that bandwidth... Or raw memory, for that matter.
I'm about to buy a computer whose cheapest and cheesiest video card comes with 32 megs of memory;
hey, the screen resolution might only have 2 million pixels, and even at 4 bytes per pixel, you're over by a factor of four. But, of course,
that kind of thinking is now hopelessly naive.
And so it will also be when truly 64-bit architectures really take off.
In other words chap 11 basically lets you strip off all the debt (or a huge percentage of it). It also lets you out of any long term contracts (to buy or sell!) that you didn't like, makes it easier to fire people. Oh, and they can "un lease" a building by taking all their stuff out of it and saying "no, were are not paying" to the landlord.
So "too much debt" is no longer WCOMs problem. It is the problem of banks that loaned money, and supplyers that sent goods on purchase orders.
Companies operating under chapter 11 do enjoy
many interesting abilities, but the key aspect
of the filing is the re-organization plan, which
has to be agreed to by the creditors.
This is not always an easy thing to arrange, and
at some point creditors (as a group or individually) are allowed to fill their own plans
for the reorganization, or request outright liquidation of the firm (chapter 7). Furthermore,
Worldcom is or will soon be operating under debtor-in-possession (DIP) financing, which might
also place severe restrictions on what they will
be allowed to do. This is *not* going to be pleasant for anybody, especially Worldcom. The story at this point is that the company thinks they can use debt service savings to repay the banks (who are first in line) and get the bondholders to take equity, but if I'm a bondholder in this deal, I think I would
have to insist that they cancel the existing common stock at the very least, which I curiously
have *not* seen mentioned yet. And it's not clear
that the bondholders could not do better in an
outright liquidation scenario. Plus, there is the amusing prospect of serious litigation and criminal proceedings throughtout... I really don't see how this could go as quickly as the current leadership at Worldcom thinks it will, but maybe they really do have all their ducks lined up this
time. We shall see.
I think it was first by Robyn Dawes...anyway,
a very similar technique was used in what was
a brilliant design for a study on sexual behavior
during the perceived height of the AIDS epidemic
in this country. In a nutshell, we were faced
with an epidemic spread by sexual contact, but
did not really know what the base rates for any
of the more (or less) dangerous activities were,
or if they had ever been tried.
Asking people right out "Hey, did you have unprotected anal sex on your casual encounter?"
was found to be not a particularly good way to
elicit truthful answers. So what you do is give
people a fair coin (or the equivalent) and have
them flip the coin for each question. If the coin lands heads, they answer "yes". If the coin lands tails, they answer *truthfully*. Looking over an answer sheet, you have no idea which "yes" answers are real and which are not, and subject did feel like nobody really could "get" any personal information off their answer sheet. In the statistical aggregate, however, you could get perfectly useful average rates for a given population. (Basically, you just adjust for the
"yes answer background".)
A great idea, but its use in a wide-range study of this type was axed, I believe, when the study itself was blasted by certain members of congress...but that's another story.
you can get a brand new retail inkjet printer for less than the upgrade price of $129. Maybe you want a new printer and not the upgrade. Buying a more compatible one this time around should save you headaches down the road.
Actually, 10.2 does fix USB printing as has now been pointed out. But I don't want to get a brand new printer since the old one works just fine, was a Mac-compatible (recommended even!) USB printer,
and worked perfectly under Mac OS 9. Unless the CUPS stuff is also made available under 10.1.5, though, the only Apple-blessed way to get USB print sharing working again will be to upgrade, and probably upgrade both boxes. Which is the
source of my pain...
Jaguar offers several major improvements in USB printing. The largest is the ability to do USB printer sharing as you can do under OS 9.x, but there are numerous others (e.g., CUPS, PostScript transparency) as well.
Excellent. I was actually getting really annoyed that straight-ahead printing stuff didn't get fixed,
since it wasn't listed as a headline "feature" even though it was a fix for a show-stopping "lack of feature", as it were. I could have dug a bit
deeper into the Apple site and found this out, but the ol' cable modem seemed remarkably slow this morning for some odd reason...
Huh? Where's that number coming from? Isn't it going to cost $128 for the full OS, and less for OSX.1->OSX.2 Updates?
That's how Apple's always done it before...
The update cost is $129, and there are two Macs in the house; I'm guessing that for Rendezvous to work, both computers would need to be running 10.2.
2*$129 = $258.
...of course, that ignores the cost of the new
printer that will be Rendezvous-aware.
And, alas, it *does* look like this update will
cost $129 even for user OS X 10.1 users, unless
they change their upgrade policy. What they are
aiming for here is a couple of million folks going
along, getting them $258 million in cash and a
huge profit margin.
Your experience is not typical. I work with many Macs, all running 10.1.4 or 10.1.5, and I don't see the ``spinning beachball'' problem that you're describing. It used to happen in 10.0.n, but I haven't seen it for a long time.
Clearly 10.1.5 is vastly improved over 10.0.anything, not to mention the Public "Beta",
but there is no doubt that beachball spinning does
still occur. Not that often, mind you, but I think the problem here is that you, the user cannot predict when you'll do
something that will put you into the "spin cycle".
With older versions of the OS, it wasn't tough to
know when you'd see the watch cursor or why.
My anecdotal evidence is that beachball sightings
are much more common with G3 than G4 computers,
and much more likely if you have less than 512MB
of RAM.
Frankly, it doesn't bug me that much, but I can't
call the phenomenon "atypical".
Alas, you are correct. It looks like they still have not fixed all the printing bugs.
Seriously, my USB-connected printer was hugely more functional under Mac OS 9. Rendezvous sounds wonderful, but it apparently won't do much for my
current HP inkjet.
Yes, there are hacks to get USB printing working
under the current OS, and I'll have to go with
one of those, since spending $258 to upgrade the
OS this year is...not going to happen very quickly. My most likely course of action now is
to defer upgrading or purchasing any Apple stuff
until 2003, which I fear is the opposite of what
they were looking for here.
No, the PB doesn't have USB 2, it doesn't need it. I have yet to see a device where USB 2 really makes sense. Firewire is a much more elegant solution with none of the drawbacks since it is peerable and supports asynchronus and isochronus tansfers.
There is one advantage that USB2 has over 1394, though: price of the peripherals that use it.
Seriously, I was recently shopping for a Firewire hard disk and a CD-RW and such, and the USB2 prices were consistently much lower for comparable
hardware. Very annoying. I ended up getting a
Pyro 1394 enclosure and a naked drive of my choice.
They might not really need it, but I wouldn't be
totally surprised if upcoming Apple hardware started to come with USB2 ports. Guess we'll see
next Wednesday.:-)
Wal-Mart's loading Linux on their dirt-cheap PCs for the masses
Replacing their no-OS computers...
But the key point here is that this is Wal*Mart we
are talking about, and what this move really means is that Wal*Mart might be doing something to Microsoft that they do to every other supplier
in their supply chain: squeezing every dollar out of them they can. Seriously,
Wal*Mart has (I believe) quarterly meetings with
all of their suppliers whose sole real purpose is to find ways to get Wal*Mart the product they
want to sell more cheaply. When the product is PCs, however, the discussion pretty quickly hits the brick wall of MS licensing fees, which I don't think can ever be made cheap enough for the Behemoth from Bentonville.
It is pretty clear (to me, anyway) that Wal*Mart
is exactly the kind of company that could really
do serious damage to Microsoft if their market share in PCs through Wal*Mart and Sam's Club stores turns it up a notch. At some point, you will see then *insisting* that (say) HP ditch Windows on the systems they sell, and use some cheap combination of Linux, StarOffice, and a browser like Mozilla to squeeze out an extra $50
or $100 on the cost. Grandma will then fire up
the PC she got from Sam's, and the browser will work just fine as will the email and the simple
word processor thingie. And that should be the
moment when MS first knows genuine fear.
Anti-trust violations are *nothing* compared to the pain you can suffer at the hands of Wal*Mart.
If Ballmer and company are lucky, they will have by that time
retreated to the role of permanent leech on the
corporate desktop and cable broadcaster. Not
horrible businesses, but world domination will
not be in the cards.
Anyone interested in a Moz party in the St. Louis, MO USA area?
Won't everybody be heading out to Columbia instead?
OK, so everybody who wants to come, send email to the MLUG
mailing list, and maybe something will happen.:-)
It took the guy an entire year to rehab a single nightclub, and he's still moaning about the long Mozilla release schedule?
Well, Mozilla may or may not have faced roadblocks
of their own devising (I wasn't there, so I won't pretend to know. The DNA Lounge, though, famously
faced
roadblocks made of red tape and paper trails.
Heck, I don't know if you could every permit you would need to run a nightclub in my wimpy little
city in any kind of reasonable timeframe...
So there you have a Dual P3 1.13 ghz, 1 gig of ram, 62 gigs of SCSI hard disk, dual 10/100 ethernet plus a gigabit ethernet. Explain to me again how this can't compare with apple's steaming pile of feces? It tops apple in every single category except for memory speed, but since Apple's memory isn't ECC, it's not server-ready anyhow.
I know I'd probably take this gateway box over the Apple (certainly if it were Dell), but there
are some issues. The 72 gig of disk is nice, but
you only have 2 disks, so you're limited to RAIDO,
RAID1 or RAIDO1 if that's important to you (and
if it ain't, you should ditch the RAID controller). It also only has one Gigabit ethernet port while Apple has two; maybe not very
important in some set-ups, but I've been shopping
around for stuff recently and had the annoyance
of not finding out how hard it can be to get that
second gigE in the configuration. Lack of ECC
memory might be a deal-breaker for the Apple as
you note. Frankly, the *big* interesting features of the XServe only become visible when
you move off the bottom of the line-up. Most of
the low-end PIII servers out there will top out
at less than 300 gig of disk, and to get there costs a *ton* more money. For the same cash outlay for an XServe, you can get your 480 gig of
disk, and have money left to buy more (non-Apple)
RAM and your tape-back up. There are people out there (me) who would love to have much more disk
for huge files (I'm datasets, not databases) in
non-commercial situations and already have a Mac
or two around; that's the real target market I believe.
Personally, I write "GNU/Linux" in order to distinguish it (the generic Linux-based GNU OS), from "Linux" (the kernel), "GNU/Hurd" (the generic HURD-based GNU OS), and Linux-based non-GNU systems (IIRC, there are a few).
You make an important point here about when and
why we would choose to use a compound name for
something that "looks like" one object. More specific names are not used merely because they exist, but because their use helps distinguish or disambiguate among alternatives.
The irony here is that one reason why GNU/Linux
probably sounds wrong is precisely because there
isn't much need to distinguish that variant from
the others, since they are essentially not as well
known. It is precisely because the GNU toolset
is by far the most common one to be used with Linux that it will be tough to get anybody to use
the term GNU/Linux. Now, if using Linux with a
BSD-derived (or Solaris-derived or whatever) toolset became more popular, then you'd have a chance for ambiguity, and very possibly you'd
use a compound term of some kind.
An additional problem, though, is that GNU/Linux
will always seem clunky because it does not follow
usual conventions for compounding. In particular,
if you show this to the average person the street,
I'd expect a number of them to think that whatever
it was you were talking about was *either* GNU *or* Linux. Stallman clearly doesn't mean this, however. The problem is that the term you could use ("GNU Linux") emphatically makes GNU the "adjective" (specifier if you're that kind of person) that modifies the meaning of whatever Linux is. I don't think that is what the FSF would like people to think, either. But I'm pretty sure that BSD Linux and GNU Linux (for example) are the terms people would use to make
the distinction between two systems with the obvious (to a hacker) properties. Fighting that is going to be very tough.
An additional real problem with the GNU/Linux formulation is that it suffers from what I'll call the "hyphenation problem". We all know married
couples who, instead of keeping separate names or
having one take the name of the other, choose to
hyphenate their names. So far, so good. But we
also know that this solution to solving an identity problem really only works for one generation. If Montgomery-Smith marries Johnson-Laird, then things go down hill pretty fast if they want to hyphenate. A similar problem
happens with any system that relies on Linux, a GNU toolset, XFree86, and some substantial bundle
of applications and desktop stuff (like KDE or Gnome). At one level, you could see how mentioning them all could be useful in a few contexts, but in practice, nobody is going to do this. In this particular case, people probably
choose to mention only that which cannot be assumed as background. So if you mention "Gnome",
it's not very likely (yet) that you're running
on anything other than XFree86. It's possible
that you could be using BSD rather than Linux.
The tools used to compile the thing and/or the
shell used are very possibly not relevent in context. So, here, you can predict that people
will talk about Linux Gnome or BSD Gnome or something similar *if* they choose to mention the
kernel at all.
To wrap this up, I think the big problem is that even if you agreed with RMS on principle, you'd
be fighting the language and its speakers. In
the end, I don't see how this is going to work
out happily for anybody with a specific agenda that conflicts with how natural languages work.
That's good. I rejected RMS and FSF from *my* certification many years ago when they called for a boycott of Apple (but not Microsoft) for not releasing their source code.
Actually, this is NOT why the FSF asked for a boycott of Apple. What the FSF was disgusted by was Apple's lawsuit against Microsoft (and previously others) asserting copyright violations for appropriating the Macintosh's "Look and Feel".
This issue really went deep to the heart of what
the FSF was/is all about, since if you could prevent people from writing code (from scratch) that implemented a particular kind of interface (in this case a UI, but think about MS's relationship with Samba these days...) because somebody asserted a copyright/IP claim similar to Apple's, then the whole free and open software communities were at grave risk.
I think some people were annoyed by the FSF stand against Apple (but pretty silent on MS) because
they believed that MS was or would be the greater
threat to free and open computing in the future.
(And it would probably be tough to argue that it
wasn't using today's hindsight.) But while mere
software hording and embrace/extend were not going
to win MS any friends at the FSF, at least they weren't filing lawsuits whose success could only lead to big problems for almost all free software.
I know that Octave is not quite Matlab, but it's definitely enough for all the assignments an average student gets.
Octave is a wonderful piece of software, but there are still many features that it lacks which, alas,
tend to be just the ones I find myself needing more often. Weirdly enough, I don't really mind
paying for Matlab, either. But I *do* find the
#@!$!#@# license manager deal to be a COMPLETE
lose. Smart people work there; surely they can
come up with a better plan than the one they have.:-(
OK, so I was really about to lose hope over this...
Mac hardware was really looking like the Right Thing
for all of my needs *except* for the fact that there was no Matlab available for OS X. I would have to believe that Apple was made very aware of how killer it would be to have this happen, and that they may have had to toss in some cash to bankroll this on the front end. Does anybody know if this is the way it worked?
I think the very same news item has this listed as in the next OSX.
OK, so I just did notice the passing reference to CUPS; I guess I figured they would make a bigger
deal about this...
Airport software basestation support
Um, have you looked under the Air Port menu icon recently? Specifically at "Create Network..."?
OK, so I guess I'm missing something. I just did (like yesterday) upgrade to 10.1.4, but I didn't
see/hear anything about this. Of course, I went out and got me a Linksys BEFW11S4 some time back,
so maybe I wasn't looking hard enough...
The question is: why aren't they moving? The answers I've most often heard are:
Not enough applications on X yet.
Not enough hardware drivers on X yet.
Don't like the UI
I guess this relates to your Points 1 and 2, but the biggest real problems I've seen are actually
Printing (especially to shared USB printers)
Airport software basestation support
Classic butchers lots of kid's educational
software written for older versions of Mac OS.
They just *have* to fix printing and need to think
seriously about doing more to fix Classic if they
want to continue competing in the educational market.
Incidentally, what Steve described is exactly how I'm set up right now. I've got about 12 GB of MP3s on my iMac (most of 'em ripped by me from my collection of 200+ CDs) and I stream 'em over AirPort to my other Macs, including the iBook I'm using to write this. The only difference is that I'm not using iTunes to serve streams, obviously, because it doesn't do that yet.
OK, so *now* you're talking.:-) The problem I
face is that I've got a boatload of our CDs ripped to iTunes, but then noticed the problem that you
just mentioned. So the real question is: can you
pluck tracks out of the iTunes db, or do you re-rip stuff and serve it using (what, exactly)?
Can you use iTunes as a client for this in any way?
Would this be a story on here if it was, say, GE lightbulbs, instead of Oracle?
Well, if there were, then at least this would be
a topical joke:
Q. How many California state workers would it take to screw in a surplus GE lightbulb?
A. Presumably just two, but they would have to be really tiny and breathe argon, or else the resulting workmen's compensation case would be a complete nightmare...
There's an East-West line that coincides with county lines. Cut the state in two at that line. California may have grown too large to be effectively governed. And it may be the best way to avoid a civil war between Hollywood and Silicon Valley.
First, I assume you mean a line that runs east/west that would split California into NoCal
and SoCal; that was repeatedly mentioned when I
used to live there.
I agree that California is becoming increasingly
ungovernable in its current configuration, not
because it is necessarily too big per se, but because it is actually missing a level of useful
and independent government between the 30 million+ state level, and the (generally) very
local city and municipal level. Alas, it does
not neatly correspond to county lines, either.
So there are problems that are specific to the
Bay area or to LA or to the more rural agricultural areas that fall between the cracks.
LA the city is a fairly meaningless entity, but
LA County isn't much better now that Greater LA (as it were) also includes big chunks of Ventura, Orange, and San Bernadino counties as well. Of
course, those counties don't want to be "dominated" politically by LA, where they have no
direct voting rights, but they need to have some involvement in the decision-making process in LA
since it so clearly affects them. Right now, there isn't anything suitable, and the only way
any reasonable regional government can happen in
LA is if the entire rest of the state is dragged
along kicking and screaming. But the problem with
that solution is completely obvious by now, too.
And the problem I have with making two states out of California is that I don't see it really curing
the LA vs. the rest problem in the "southern" state, or the Bay area versus the more rural area
problems in the "northern state". California is so *non*-monolithic that it would take more than
two states to deal with the deeper problems. It
might be easier to make an argument for as many
as five states (e.g., San Diego, LA, Bay area,
Central Valley and eastwards, far northern California) as it is to argue for 2.
But in particular, the two-state solution is very
unlikely to work because of presidential politics, of all things. Democrats are unlikely to want to
split it up at this point, while Republicans might be afraid to split it (although that would perhaps
be a long-term win for them). So you get the status quo, and the bizarre state of California.
I can see the results of this paper clearly. People tend to associate with people at their level; thus, they tend to think of themselves as "average" or even "above average" no matter where they are in actual relation to the general population. Around my friends, for instance, I'm clearly _below average_ and I know it.
I guess I should congratulate you on your above-average ability to admit your inferiority.:-)
More seriously, people tend to over-estimate their relative ability across a wide range of populations (from "everybody" down to at least "everybody in my class"). Where you are probably
least likely to run into this bias is a situation
where the group is very small, know each other well, and can go along with a group consensus of
what the ranking really is. It also helps, of course, if the field is one with very objective standards. So it is impossible to believe you
are a faster than average sprinter *in your gym
class* if everybody knows everybody else's times,
and yours is well down the ranks. But it's sooo easy and convenient to say something like "Yeah, but they really concentrate on running at this place; if you included all the other schools, I'd probably be doing just fine".
I could go on...but I'm sure that most experts out there could do a better job of explaining this than I could.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
OK, so I think it is time somebody pointed out the difference between uncongested freeway driving, where your point is fairly compelling (and where the speed limits are often lower than they could reasonably be), and driving in traffic, where you still see 20 mph differentials in driving speeds just so some yutz can be first in line at the next traffic light. In many of those cases, the big speed differential when moving adds up to almost nothing in practice. (You and the moron all stop at the same red lights by the time the each one of them turns green.) Well, okay, the speeder does get the chance to run the red light and get hit by the guy over there jumping the green...
One word: Matlab. :-)
OK, that explains the lust for extreme amounts of memory and the possibility of insane floating point performance if Mathworks would well support the architecture, at this moment. The truth is, presumably absurd amounts of computing hardware power have *always* spawned software that uses everything that's there plus 20%. I think the interesting comparison here is to video card technology, which has jumped from 8 bit to 128-bit (or more?) architectures in the past decade. I can remember at every step of this progression that somebody (including me, a couple of times) wondered who the heck could possibly need all of that bandwidth... Or raw memory, for that matter. I'm about to buy a computer whose cheapest and cheesiest video card comes with 32 megs of memory; hey, the screen resolution might only have 2 million pixels, and even at 4 bytes per pixel, you're over by a factor of four. But, of course, that kind of thinking is now hopelessly naive.
And so it will also be when truly 64-bit architectures really take off.
Companies operating under chapter 11 do enjoy many interesting abilities, but the key aspect of the filing is the re-organization plan, which has to be agreed to by the creditors. This is not always an easy thing to arrange, and at some point creditors (as a group or individually) are allowed to fill their own plans for the reorganization, or request outright liquidation of the firm (chapter 7). Furthermore, Worldcom is or will soon be operating under debtor-in-possession (DIP) financing, which might also place severe restrictions on what they will be allowed to do. This is *not* going to be pleasant for anybody, especially Worldcom. The story at this point is that the company thinks they can use debt service savings to repay the banks (who are first in line) and get the bondholders to take equity, but if I'm a bondholder in this deal, I think I would have to insist that they cancel the existing common stock at the very least, which I curiously have *not* seen mentioned yet. And it's not clear that the bondholders could not do better in an outright liquidation scenario. Plus, there is the amusing prospect of serious litigation and criminal proceedings throughtout... I really don't see how this could go as quickly as the current leadership at Worldcom thinks it will, but maybe they really do have all their ducks lined up this time. We shall see.
Asking people right out "Hey, did you have unprotected anal sex on your casual encounter?" was found to be not a particularly good way to elicit truthful answers. So what you do is give people a fair coin (or the equivalent) and have them flip the coin for each question. If the coin lands heads, they answer "yes". If the coin lands tails, they answer *truthfully*. Looking over an answer sheet, you have no idea which "yes" answers are real and which are not, and subject did feel like nobody really could "get" any personal information off their answer sheet. In the statistical aggregate, however, you could get perfectly useful average rates for a given population. (Basically, you just adjust for the "yes answer background".)
A great idea, but its use in a wide-range study of this type was axed, I believe, when the study itself was blasted by certain members of congress...but that's another story.
Actually, 10.2 does fix USB printing as has now been pointed out. But I don't want to get a brand new printer since the old one works just fine, was a Mac-compatible (recommended even!) USB printer, and worked perfectly under Mac OS 9. Unless the CUPS stuff is also made available under 10.1.5, though, the only Apple-blessed way to get USB print sharing working again will be to upgrade, and probably upgrade both boxes. Which is the source of my pain...
Excellent. I was actually getting really annoyed that straight-ahead printing stuff didn't get fixed, since it wasn't listed as a headline "feature" even though it was a fix for a show-stopping "lack of feature", as it were. I could have dug a bit deeper into the Apple site and found this out, but the ol' cable modem seemed remarkably slow this morning for some odd reason...
The update cost is $129, and there are two Macs in the house; I'm guessing that for Rendezvous to work, both computers would need to be running 10.2.
2*$129 = $258.
And, alas, it *does* look like this update will cost $129 even for user OS X 10.1 users, unless they change their upgrade policy. What they are aiming for here is a couple of million folks going along, getting them $258 million in cash and a huge profit margin.
That's where my numbers came from.
Clearly 10.1.5 is vastly improved over 10.0.anything, not to mention the Public "Beta", but there is no doubt that beachball spinning does still occur. Not that often, mind you, but I think the problem here is that you, the user cannot predict when you'll do something that will put you into the "spin cycle". With older versions of the OS, it wasn't tough to know when you'd see the watch cursor or why.
My anecdotal evidence is that beachball sightings are much more common with G3 than G4 computers, and much more likely if you have less than 512MB of RAM.
Frankly, it doesn't bug me that much, but I can't call the phenomenon "atypical".
Alas, you are correct. It looks like they still have not fixed all the printing bugs.
Seriously, my USB-connected printer was hugely more functional under Mac OS 9. Rendezvous sounds wonderful, but it apparently won't do much for my current HP inkjet.
Yes, there are hacks to get USB printing working under the current OS, and I'll have to go with one of those, since spending $258 to upgrade the OS this year is...not going to happen very quickly. My most likely course of action now is to defer upgrading or purchasing any Apple stuff until 2003, which I fear is the opposite of what they were looking for here.
Got that folks? If not, here's the clarification:
You can never watch too much porn when you are operating a nuclear reactor.
(God I miss the glory days of Saturday night live...)
There is one advantage that USB2 has over 1394, though: price of the peripherals that use it. Seriously, I was recently shopping for a Firewire hard disk and a CD-RW and such, and the USB2 prices were consistently much lower for comparable hardware. Very annoying. I ended up getting a Pyro 1394 enclosure and a naked drive of my choice.
They might not really need it, but I wouldn't be totally surprised if upcoming Apple hardware started to come with USB2 ports. Guess we'll see next Wednesday. :-)
But the key point here is that this is Wal*Mart we are talking about, and what this move really means is that Wal*Mart might be doing something to Microsoft that they do to every other supplier in their supply chain: squeezing every dollar out of them they can. Seriously, Wal*Mart has (I believe) quarterly meetings with all of their suppliers whose sole real purpose is to find ways to get Wal*Mart the product they want to sell more cheaply. When the product is PCs, however, the discussion pretty quickly hits the brick wall of MS licensing fees, which I don't think can ever be made cheap enough for the Behemoth from Bentonville.
It is pretty clear (to me, anyway) that Wal*Mart is exactly the kind of company that could really do serious damage to Microsoft if their market share in PCs through Wal*Mart and Sam's Club stores turns it up a notch. At some point, you will see then *insisting* that (say) HP ditch Windows on the systems they sell, and use some cheap combination of Linux, StarOffice, and a browser like Mozilla to squeeze out an extra $50 or $100 on the cost. Grandma will then fire up the PC she got from Sam's, and the browser will work just fine as will the email and the simple word processor thingie. And that should be the moment when MS first knows genuine fear.
Anti-trust violations are *nothing* compared to the pain you can suffer at the hands of Wal*Mart. If Ballmer and company are lucky, they will have by that time retreated to the role of permanent leech on the corporate desktop and cable broadcaster. Not horrible businesses, but world domination will not be in the cards.
Won't everybody be heading out to Columbia instead? OK, so everybody who wants to come, send email to the MLUG mailing list, and maybe something will happen. :-)
Well, Mozilla may or may not have faced roadblocks of their own devising (I wasn't there, so I won't pretend to know. The DNA Lounge, though, famously faced roadblocks made of red tape and paper trails. Heck, I don't know if you could every permit you would need to run a nightclub in my wimpy little city in any kind of reasonable timeframe...
I know I'd probably take this gateway box over the Apple (certainly if it were Dell), but there are some issues. The 72 gig of disk is nice, but you only have 2 disks, so you're limited to RAIDO, RAID1 or RAIDO1 if that's important to you (and if it ain't, you should ditch the RAID controller). It also only has one Gigabit ethernet port while Apple has two; maybe not very important in some set-ups, but I've been shopping around for stuff recently and had the annoyance of not finding out how hard it can be to get that second gigE in the configuration. Lack of ECC memory might be a deal-breaker for the Apple as you note. Frankly, the *big* interesting features of the XServe only become visible when you move off the bottom of the line-up. Most of the low-end PIII servers out there will top out at less than 300 gig of disk, and to get there costs a *ton* more money. For the same cash outlay for an XServe, you can get your 480 gig of disk, and have money left to buy more (non-Apple) RAM and your tape-back up. There are people out there (me) who would love to have much more disk for huge files (I'm datasets, not databases) in non-commercial situations and already have a Mac or two around; that's the real target market I believe.
You make an important point here about when and why we would choose to use a compound name for something that "looks like" one object. More specific names are not used merely because they exist, but because their use helps distinguish or disambiguate among alternatives.
The irony here is that one reason why GNU/Linux probably sounds wrong is precisely because there isn't much need to distinguish that variant from the others, since they are essentially not as well known. It is precisely because the GNU toolset is by far the most common one to be used with Linux that it will be tough to get anybody to use the term GNU/Linux. Now, if using Linux with a BSD-derived (or Solaris-derived or whatever) toolset became more popular, then you'd have a chance for ambiguity, and very possibly you'd use a compound term of some kind.
An additional problem, though, is that GNU/Linux will always seem clunky because it does not follow usual conventions for compounding. In particular, if you show this to the average person the street, I'd expect a number of them to think that whatever it was you were talking about was *either* GNU *or* Linux. Stallman clearly doesn't mean this, however. The problem is that the term you could use ("GNU Linux") emphatically makes GNU the "adjective" (specifier if you're that kind of person) that modifies the meaning of whatever Linux is. I don't think that is what the FSF would like people to think, either. But I'm pretty sure that BSD Linux and GNU Linux (for example) are the terms people would use to make the distinction between two systems with the obvious (to a hacker) properties. Fighting that is going to be very tough.
An additional real problem with the GNU/Linux formulation is that it suffers from what I'll call the "hyphenation problem". We all know married couples who, instead of keeping separate names or having one take the name of the other, choose to hyphenate their names. So far, so good. But we also know that this solution to solving an identity problem really only works for one generation. If Montgomery-Smith marries Johnson-Laird, then things go down hill pretty fast if they want to hyphenate. A similar problem happens with any system that relies on Linux, a GNU toolset, XFree86, and some substantial bundle of applications and desktop stuff (like KDE or Gnome). At one level, you could see how mentioning them all could be useful in a few contexts, but in practice, nobody is going to do this. In this particular case, people probably choose to mention only that which cannot be assumed as background. So if you mention "Gnome", it's not very likely (yet) that you're running on anything other than XFree86. It's possible that you could be using BSD rather than Linux. The tools used to compile the thing and/or the shell used are very possibly not relevent in context. So, here, you can predict that people will talk about Linux Gnome or BSD Gnome or something similar *if* they choose to mention the kernel at all.
To wrap this up, I think the big problem is that even if you agreed with RMS on principle, you'd be fighting the language and its speakers. In the end, I don't see how this is going to work out happily for anybody with a specific agenda that conflicts with how natural languages work.
Actually, this is NOT why the FSF asked for a boycott of Apple. What the FSF was disgusted by was Apple's lawsuit against Microsoft (and previously others) asserting copyright violations for appropriating the Macintosh's "Look and Feel". This issue really went deep to the heart of what the FSF was/is all about, since if you could prevent people from writing code (from scratch) that implemented a particular kind of interface (in this case a UI, but think about MS's relationship with Samba these days...) because somebody asserted a copyright/IP claim similar to Apple's, then the whole free and open software communities were at grave risk.
I think some people were annoyed by the FSF stand against Apple (but pretty silent on MS) because they believed that MS was or would be the greater threat to free and open computing in the future. (And it would probably be tough to argue that it wasn't using today's hindsight.) But while mere software hording and embrace/extend were not going to win MS any friends at the FSF, at least they weren't filing lawsuits whose success could only lead to big problems for almost all free software.
Octave is a wonderful piece of software, but there are still many features that it lacks which, alas, tend to be just the ones I find myself needing more often. Weirdly enough, I don't really mind paying for Matlab, either. But I *do* find the #@!$!#@# license manager deal to be a COMPLETE lose. Smart people work there; surely they can come up with a better plan than the one they have. :-(
OK, so I was really about to lose hope over this... Mac hardware was really looking like the Right Thing for all of my needs *except* for the fact that there was no Matlab available for OS X. I would have to believe that Apple was made very aware of how killer it would be to have this happen, and that they may have had to toss in some cash to bankroll this on the front end. Does anybody know if this is the way it worked?
OK, so I just did notice the passing reference to CUPS; I guess I figured they would make a bigger deal about this...
OK, so I guess I'm missing something. I just did (like yesterday) upgrade to 10.1.4, but I didn't see/hear anything about this. Of course, I went out and got me a Linksys BEFW11S4 some time back, so maybe I wasn't looking hard enough...
Thanks for the pointers.
I guess this relates to your Points 1 and 2, but the biggest real problems I've seen are actually
They just *have* to fix printing and need to think seriously about doing more to fix Classic if they want to continue competing in the educational market.
OK, so *now* you're talking. :-) The problem I
face is that I've got a boatload of our CDs ripped to iTunes, but then noticed the problem that you
just mentioned. So the real question is: can you
pluck tracks out of the iTunes db, or do you re-rip stuff and serve it using (what, exactly)?
Can you use iTunes as a client for this in any way?
Well, if there were, then at least this would be a topical joke:
First, I assume you mean a line that runs east/west that would split California into NoCal and SoCal; that was repeatedly mentioned when I used to live there.
I agree that California is becoming increasingly ungovernable in its current configuration, not because it is necessarily too big per se, but because it is actually missing a level of useful and independent government between the 30 million+ state level, and the (generally) very local city and municipal level. Alas, it does not neatly correspond to county lines, either. So there are problems that are specific to the Bay area or to LA or to the more rural agricultural areas that fall between the cracks. LA the city is a fairly meaningless entity, but LA County isn't much better now that Greater LA (as it were) also includes big chunks of Ventura, Orange, and San Bernadino counties as well. Of course, those counties don't want to be "dominated" politically by LA, where they have no direct voting rights, but they need to have some involvement in the decision-making process in LA since it so clearly affects them. Right now, there isn't anything suitable, and the only way any reasonable regional government can happen in LA is if the entire rest of the state is dragged along kicking and screaming. But the problem with that solution is completely obvious by now, too.
And the problem I have with making two states out of California is that I don't see it really curing the LA vs. the rest problem in the "southern" state, or the Bay area versus the more rural area problems in the "northern state". California is so *non*-monolithic that it would take more than two states to deal with the deeper problems. It might be easier to make an argument for as many as five states (e.g., San Diego, LA, Bay area, Central Valley and eastwards, far northern California) as it is to argue for 2.
But in particular, the two-state solution is very unlikely to work because of presidential politics, of all things. Democrats are unlikely to want to split it up at this point, while Republicans might be afraid to split it (although that would perhaps be a long-term win for them). So you get the status quo, and the bizarre state of California.
I guess I should congratulate you on your above-average ability to admit your inferiority. :-)
More seriously, people tend to over-estimate their relative ability across a wide range of populations (from "everybody" down to at least "everybody in my class"). Where you are probably least likely to run into this bias is a situation where the group is very small, know each other well, and can go along with a group consensus of what the ranking really is. It also helps, of course, if the field is one with very objective standards. So it is impossible to believe you are a faster than average sprinter *in your gym class* if everybody knows everybody else's times, and yours is well down the ranks. But it's sooo easy and convenient to say something like "Yeah, but they really concentrate on running at this place; if you included all the other schools, I'd probably be doing just fine".
I could go on...but I'm sure that most experts out there could do a better job of explaining this than I could. :-)