This is hardly the first small PPC server to come out. Terrasoft used to make a rackmounted box called iDitarod that came in a little wheeled rack with G3 or G4 (can't remember) chips in it. It came with Yellow Dog installed and it was yellow, too. But, each box was about 3x the size of this one.
Also, before they were bought by Sun, the Cobalt Qube ran on a PowerPC chip and came with Gnu/Linux installed. Now it contains (I think) a Duron and a Sunified version of Linux, it's still small (7." cubed), blue and cute, though.
Well, the Anonymous Coward who gave the lineage of the various office applications obviously has a better handle on the history of PC office programs than I do. Nice job.
However, I have to take issue with a couple things. First off Word did not win because is was better than WordPerfect. It won because it was given away for free with the operating system that you had to have to run the x86 machines. WordPerfect never decided on it's own that the bullet list that I was writing was an outline so it would change the formatting for me. God that is annoying. If I was working on an outline or with columns, WordPerfect's implementation of these features was far superior to Word's. WordPerfect never arbitrarily changed the font I was using the way Word still does.
I've had to use both Quattro Pro and Excel and I preferred QP. Maybe some people preferred Excel, but not as many did with enough intensity for Excel to completely wipe the other products off the map, as has happened. Again Excel won because it was thrown in for no extra charge with the operating system or, more accurately, the cost of the development of Word and Excel were added to the cost of Windows. OEMs and consumers paid for Word and Excel even if they only wanted Windows, so they might as well use them rather than pay for them, not use them, and then buy and use something else.
Office only had to not suck enough to make people want to pay twice to use their competition. That's no level playing field. And this situation has destroyed the competition and prevented other good products from coming to market because you can't *compete* with that.
People want to see a more level playing field for applications, so variety and innovation will actually have a chance and they can have more choices. So they want the Microsoft monopoly broken, and they cheer development that will further breaking it.
I protest the blatantly ideological moderating that is being done on this topic. Posts about the ill effects of money on politics are moderated down, while posts of similar length and relevance that equate campaign contributions with speech are moderated up.
Slashdot's cannot be an open forum of free debate if the moderators tilt the playing field to benefit their own ideology.
By now it should be clear to even the most dense, libertarian, free-market theologian on slashdot that we in the US do not live in a democracy.
The People overwhelmingly want their privacy protected, business wants it to be defined as a commodity (and one that they own) to be traded. Privacy is not protected.
The People overwhelmingly want to know if their food contains genetically modified ingredients, business doesn't want them to know. There is no labeling for this and the US government is trying to overturn the food-labeling laws in European Union and Japan through challenges at the World Trade Organization.
The People overwhelmingly want health care financing taken away from private insurance companies and a Canadian-style single-payer plan instituted in the US. Business wants to continue to make profits off of people's illness even if that means organized denial of care through HMOs and that 40 million people are without health insurance entirely. Our health care system remains in the hands of private insurance companies.
I could go on all day, but I won't. Face it you all, we live in a plutocracy.
As for your "free market." It doesn't exist. Two years ago the CEO of Archer Daniels Midland said in an interview in Mother Jones Magazine, "There isn't a single product on earth that is traded on a free market."
If you will think back to economics 101 a "free market" isn't just one that is free of government intervention. A free market is one in which no one competitor has market power, defined as the ability to influence prices. A free market only exists where no one competitor, or group of competitors in collusion, in that market is large enough to be able to set the price. This situation probably has never existed anywhere, and it certainly doesn't exist now where mergers and acquisitions have lead most industries to be dominated by a few large concerns.
Through incredibly lax enforcement of anti-trust regulations and through the back door of international trade treaties consolidation proceeds barely and rarely checked in the US.
The Justice Department broke up AT & T in the '80s. But in just the past few years our local phone company US West has been bought by Qwest, which may soon be bought by Deutche Telecom.
As John Dewey said 100 years ago, "Politics is just the shadow cast by business."
Apple will not be porting the Mac OS to x86 for the same reason that Steve Jobs won't allow the smallest bit of GPLed code into Darwin. It would put Apple out of business.
Look folks, Apple is a hardware company. That's were they really make their money. People buy their boxes in order to get the Mac OS. If they could run the Mac OS on cheaper x86 boxes many of them would choose to do so. Of course many people would still buy Titanium PowerBooks and iBooks for other reasons, but fewer.
So don't hold your breath waiting for the chance to run OS X on an Athlon box, it isn't going to happen. If it's speed you crave, just wait for IBM to put their silicon on insulator and.09 micron technologies to work on the PowerPC chip. It'll catch up then.
Given that the BSD license does not require that all derivative works be made freely available as source, Hubbard bringing his tricks to work on OS X won't be a problem for Apple.
Will this be a problem for FreeBSD? The guy has to work somewhere. Torvalds works for Transmeta, why not Hubbard at Apple? I admit that there may be some problem for FreeBSD (besides loss of a talented developer) that I'm overlooking.
Hopefully this will get Apple ready for those hordes of users that.NET and Smart Tags are going to drive to their platform.
You should thank the academic artists for teaching you a valuable lesson: Nothing is accepted in academia until it is dead. It is only then that the Professors can swoop down upon it and nail the dried-up corpse to the wall for veneration.
Others on slashdot, who know better than I, have pointed out that most innovative art forms (photography and collage) and artists (from Cézanne to Tzara) were not accepted by the gatekeepers of art. So take the hint and get the fuck out before they make you as tired and irrelevant as they are.
Oh, and start learning about the world so your stuff will have some content. Art that is about art ("a comment on the form of . ..") has been stale for so long that even the critics are starting to notice the smell.
Mac OS has better multi-language support than Windows (built in control-key use of non-english characters), and the Mac-only application Nisus Writer is widely regarded as being the best multilingual word processor.
But why dual-boot Mac OS X and Linux PPC when OS X will be able to run almost any Unix application on its BSD core?
How about demanding that IBM withdraw their Content Protection of Recordable Media (CPRM) proposal to the ATA specifications body? As Alan Cox and Stallman have both said, this would mean the death of Linux and all Free Software/Open Source.
IBM has a lot of gall to be buddying up to the Linux community, while proposing industry-wide hardware standards that advance the intellectual-property fascist agenda that would obliterate accepted consumer free use practice and basic computer science principles such as file system abstraction. You couldnÕt even backup your hard drive if these standards are implemented!
Sure IBM wants to work with Linux, and Microsoft wants to work with Java. Wake up and demand that IBM back-off this proposal, or the party is over.
Check out the coverage here http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/2/15684.html
As Cox said, ÒWelcome to the United Police State Of America."
Yeah, the US Navy did experiments in the '20s or '30s with the DVORAK keyboard. Once typists learned the new layout, they were faster than they were with the QWERTY keyboard.
Actually the QWERTY was not laid out with speed in mind. In a manual typewriter (and I used one for the first 3 years of my college career), if two keys that are next to each other are pressed in very rapid succession they will stick together at the top of their arc and jam the typewriter. So, the guy who invented QWERTY moved the keys for the most common letters in the alphabet away from each other. Look at the position of the 'e' and the 'o' keys.
Technology soon made this unnecessary, but by then the QWERTY had become standard. And then one runs into the I-use-the-one-that-everyone-uses-because-everyone- uses-it circular problem, In business schools QWERTY is used as the classic example of the first, not the best winning in market economies. Other popular examples are VHS over Beta are Windows over Macintosh (or Amiga).
DVORAK uses the traditional physical keyboard, but the placement of the letters is different. So, you can find programs that will switch the keyboard that you are using to DVORAK. Macintoshes come with the option built-in.
There may not be a discernable difference between a film shot in analog and one shot in digital once both are transferred to video tape. But in the theater there will be. Just as on a cheap stereo there may not seem to be much difference between a record and a CD, but when you get into high-end audio, the analog is much better than digital playback.
Sound and light are continuous waves. Analog media record continuously, and so recored the changes in the waves continuously as they come incontact with the microphone or the camera (within the band of wavelengths that the media are capable of registering). Digital recording takes discrete samples of the wave input. Whatever changes in the waves happen in between the samples will not be recorded. The gaps between the sound will be slurred together by the playback machine and the eyes or ears of the viewer or listener. The closer the samples are together (the higher sampling rate for audio, the number of pixels for video) the better, ÒtruerÓ, more pleasant will be the output.
The problem is, at this moment, the sampling rate of CDs (and the number of pixels in the digital video that IÕve seen) is not high enough. When I listen to CDs the sound seems harder, more brittle, and harsh. A lot of nuance is missed along with the information between the samples.
Somewhere, as the sampling rate approaches infinity, itÕs going to reach a threshold beyond our ability to discern the gaps. At that moment digital audio will be better than analog. Same for video. But weÕre not there yet.
IÕm getting into digital video production soon. A friend of mine just bought a camera and has ordered an iMac and Final Cut Pro. IÕm looking forward to it. ItÕs going to allow us to produce video of good quality (hopefully) with an ease and low cost that we never could have attained with film. Which is fine for the documentary stuff that weÕre going to do, or a George Lucas film. But the work of people like Jan Jost or Akira Kurosawa I want to see on film. I want to hear Charles Mingus and Tortoise on vinyl.
Just because a technology is new doesnÕt make it better for all uses than the previous technologies. ThatÕs why the high-end audio equipment stores are filling up with vacuum tube gear. Excuse me, IÕve got to turn over the record now.
I have been using the iCab browser, almost exclusively, for the past nine months. It has a built-in cookie editing feature. This isnÕt exactly what you described, blocking all third-party cookies, but it works very well for me.
I have the general setting as ÒNever acceptÓ cookies, then there is the option to have exceptions to this. So I never accept cookies, except I Òalways acceptÓ them from Òslashdot.orgÓ and a couple other sites. Doubleclick.com is not among them. So any cookies not hosted by the site I am visiting will not be accepted.
iCab also has a terrific user-configureable image-filtering feature. With this feature you can filter out any image with a path, filename, or URL name that ÒisÓ or ÒcontainsÓ/ad,/advert,/doubleclick,/banner . . . you get the idea. It replaces these images with a small icon of a melita coffee filter. Cute, eh? I have found this feature to be very successful in blocking ads while rarely blocking an image that is part of the content of a page. This has the added benefit of speeding up page-rendering.
Unfortunately, iCab is a Mac-only program. If you are running Windows I recommend the Opera web-browser. It doesnÕt have these options built-in, but it may in the future. I donÕt know about Linux.
Check the resources page of EPICÕs web page. There are some freeware tools that you can add to IE or Netscape to help you manage cookies and ads. I havenÕt had to use them, so I canÕt vouch for their effectiveness, but EPIC wonÕt steer you wrong.
Since when has software development _Not_ been funded by the government? Most of the greatest breakthroughs in computer development began with government funding. Most of the major innovations come from the public sector, because business isnÕt willing to risk investing on unproven technologies. Free from market pressures, the necessity to make a profit, and bosses who squelch good ideas, people in publicly funded institutions lay the ground work and come up with ideas that then catch on. Once something is obviously a good idea business figures it can make a profit on it and moves in.
Some examples: the entire computer industry was nurtured in its infancy by defense contracts when there were as yet no commercial uses for computers (Eniac anyone). The Internet began as Arpanet developed by mostly public Universities with funding from the Department of Defense. BSD Unix; The ÔBÕ stands for Berkely, as in University of California at Berkely, a public University. BSD was mostly developed by grad students on government financial aid or tuition waivers. Mosaic, the first graphical web browser, was developed at the University of Illinois. And the World Wide Web, which was invented by Tim Berners-Lee when he worked at CERN, an institution founded and funded collectively by European governments.
Mostly, it seems to me, business just does cherry-picking.
Pretty skimpy review. And I know that they got a few things wrong about iCab, and I gather from the posts below Opera, as well. Others have mentioned the skins for iCabÕs god-awful basic interface, the cookie management, and that it is still beta. But, I want to add that I think that iCab is pretty damn fast. I havenÕt used another fully-graphcal browser in six months, but I remember when I first tried iCab I noticed that it was much faster than Communicator.
iCabÕs Java support is getting better, and frankly, any page that it canÕt render is too busy anyway. One of the first things I did when I got my new Mac last December was delete IE and Outlook. IÕve kept a stuffed copy of Navigator on my hard drive just in case iCab fails me on a site I really need to read. But I havenÕt had to unpack it yet. Thanks to iCab IÕve been able to keep my computer completely Microsoft-free.
I think the best thing about iCab is the image-filtering. Now my browsing isnÕt slowed down by advertising that I donÕt want to see, but I still get the images that are part of a pageÕs content. Guess itÕs time to come up with another business model, dot-commies. The net will never be the cybermall that you want it to be.
I have no idea why anyone would want an email program integrated into their browser. iCab has a bare-bones send-only e-mail feature in case you click on an email link, but you can also configure it to open your default email program. I think that itÕs too bad that Opera may be going down the bloatware path by adding an fuller email client. Perhaps they could make that optional.
Lately IÕve begun to use the very simple, text-only browser for Mac called Wannabe. Damn this thing is fast. Pages render instantaneously. IÕve begun using it for times (getting more frequent) when IÕm just looking for information on the net and pictures are superfluous. If I come upon a page that has graphics that I want to see Wannabe has a feature that will open it in the browser of your choice available in a menu.
IÕll gladly pay the $30 dollars for the final release version of iCab. But IÕm curious to try Opera for Mac, as well.
"He who would exchange his Liberty for security deserves neither." - Benjamin Franklin
The history of the FBI demonstrates that they will break any laws that restrict them in their surveillance of political dissidents. From the McCarthyite witch hunts to Martin Luther King to CISPES (opposed US government foreign policy in Central America) in the '80s to Waco.
They are no doubt doing so right now. The Seattle coalition against corporate globalization are probably being investigated using illegal wiretaps etc. on the grounds that they are Communi. . . I mean terrorists.
I recommend that anyone interested in a (depressingly) detailed history of FBI violations of citizens' rights and US law read Ward Churchill's the COINTELPRO Papers < http://www.lbbs.org/sep/backl.htm#thecointelpro>
How hard is it to check your goddamn facts? It took me one minute to retreive this AP article and get the basic story.
There is no mention in it of anyone dying. And if someone had died he sure would have been on trial for worse than vandalism and the AP sure would have mentioned it.
Bove tore the roof off of a McDonalds that was still under construction. It had no 28-year-old-women managers. It didn't have ANY managers yet. It wasn't even open.
Knife 31 has no business telling anyone to check their facts. He's got to be an idiot. And now for your enlightenment:
France Big Mac Vandal Trial Begins
The Associated Press Saturday, July 1, 2000; 1:36 p.m. EDT
MILLAU, France ÐÐ A public prosecutor on Saturday recommended that a sheep farmer who has waged a high-profile battle against globalization receive a 10-month suspended sentence for vandalizing a McDonald's restaurant in this southern French town.
Jose Bove was on trial with nine other defendants who attacked the Millau fast food restaurant last August during a wave of protests targeting the fast-food chain as a symbol of American trade "hegemony" and economic globalization.
Prosecutor Alain Durand also recommended that Bove spend 18 months on probation. Bove said he would appeal any sentence and vowed to continue his battle internationally.
"The combat will not stop at France's borders," said Bove, spokesman of the radical Farmers' Confederation union, who made headlines in December when he brought his anti-globalization message to the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle.
Prosecutor Alain Durand requested that the nine other defendants receive suspended sentences of no longer than three months, saying they merely carried out Bove's plans.
After the hearing, about 11,000 supporters gathered to greet the 10 defendants as they left the courtroom.
The Millau court began hearing arguments on Friday as about 15,000 demonstrators gathered to support the defendants. Later that night, a concert to mark the trial drew about 45,000 anti-globalization supporters.
The court is expected to deliver its decision Sept. 13.
Bove's battle began last year when the United States slapped sanctions on food products ranging from Roquefort cheese to foie gras in retaliation for the European Union's decision to ban imports of U.S. hormone-treated beef.
The mustachioed sheep farmer has said his main targets are the World Trade Organization, multinationals and governments that push scientifically engineered food. He says the organizations crush the small-time producers who insist on quality and taste.
Look moron, The McDonalds was under construction. It hadn't opened yet, so it didn't have any managers to kill. And it didn't burn. Get your shit strait. You're on the internet, how hard can it be to look this stuff up before you write?
I'm no "free-market" type, but I think I can clear a few things up for you.
The World Trade Organization (WTO) was created and defined by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) that was negotiated and ratified by 135 countries in 1994 (or thereabouts). It came into effect in 1995. The nations who signed the agreement thereby gave the WTO the right to arbitrate trade disputes among member countries. Under these rules the decisions of the WTO arbitration panels is final and binding.
The rules of the WTO (embodied in a number of trade agreements that it oversees) forbid countries to discriminate against foreign products and services by putting up tariffs (import taxes) as barriers to their entry. It also forbids Ònon-tariff barriers to tradeÓ. This could be almost anything that the WTO panels find was put in place to exclude foreign products or put them at a competitive disadvantage with domestic ones. For instance, if Canada were to ban the importation of wool from sheep raised by guys named ÒBruceÓ, this could be seen as a Ònon-tariff barrierÓ to Australian wool.
Due to pressure from their citizens, the nations of the European Union banned the use of synthetic growth hormones in cattle and the importation of any beef that had been raised using synthetic growth hormones. Europeans think, not without reason, that eating such beef could be unhealthy.
Well the US CattlemenÕs Association loves synthetic growth hormone. And use a lot of it (which may be why we see young girls in the US reaching puberty at ten). The European ban barred most of their product, so the US Cattlemen complained to the Clinton Administration. And the Clinton Administration dragged the European Union before an arbitration panel of the WTO and gave this argument (Well, they say they made this argument. Since the proceedings of WTO arbitration panels are secret, we donÕt know for sure):
ÒThe Euros have banned importing of synthetic hormone-treated beef. We in America all use synthetic hormones. Therefore, the European ban on hormone-treated beef discriminates against US Cattlemen.Ó
The WTO panel bought this argument and ruled against the EU. This shouldnÕt be surprising since, in ever single instance, when any nationÕs environmental, health, safety, or labor protection act has been challenged at the WTO, the protection has been ruled WTO-illegal and overturned. Using the powers granted to it when countries join, the WTO gave the Europeans three choices:
1. Remove your ban on synthetic hormone-treated beef.
2. Pay the US Cattlemen $200 million a year for lost market.
3. Face $200 million (give or take) worth of tariffs on European goods that we will authorize the US government in retaliation for your ban on synthetic hormone-treated beef.
The EU refused to comply by removing the ban or giving the US $200 million a year, so the WTO allowed the US to slap 100% tariffs on a number of European products. I donÕt know how they chose which products. They range from Scottish sweaters (Scots jumpers for you in the UK) to - thatÕs right - French Roquefort cheese. Without WTO authorization the US tariffs would have violated any number of trade treaties and agreements. But one of the WTO rules is, the WTO rules are supreme.
It may seem ironic that the WTO uses tariffs to enforce its market opening rulings. But irony abounds in the world of globalization. The World Bank and the IMF claim that they are fighting poverty by forcing indebted nations to raise interest rates, increase taxes, cut spending on health and education, and attack Labor Unions. All these things increase poverty and the misery of the poor (The IMF and World Bank also force these countries to join the WTO). The WTO forces on nations rules that favor multinational corporations in the developing countries, and calls this ÒFree TradeÓ.
In short, the WTO is an undemocratic body, staffed by international trade lawyers and bureaucrats that has the power to overturn laws made by governments in response to popular pressure. It gives to the countries with poor environmental, health, safety, labor, and economic policy laws tools weaken those protections in other countries.
The Financial Times of London quoted one international trade official as saying, The WTO "is the place where governments collude in private against their domestic pressure groups.Ó (Guy De Jonquieres, "Network Guerillas," Financial Times, April 30, 1998, p. 12). Business groups are in on the negotiations from the beginning, so in this context, by Òdomestic pressure groupsÓ he means the people.
Excellent article Jon Katz! Excellent suggestion. So hereÕs to Jose Bove on this Independence Day. I saw him on the streets of Seattle last November 30, smoking his pipe amidst the tear gas, crowds, and the broken glass of a Niketown store. HereÕs to the destruction of transnational capital that subordinates all human experience to the cash nexus. HereÕs to the Revolution.
Slashdot Mirror
Does anyone have any experience with Mandrake's PPC distribution? I'm curious to hear how it compares with Yellow Dog.
This is hardly the first small PPC server to come out. Terrasoft used to make a rackmounted box called iDitarod that came in a little wheeled rack with G3 or G4 (can't remember) chips in it. It came with Yellow Dog installed and it was yellow, too. But, each box was about 3x the size of this one.
Also, before they were bought by Sun, the Cobalt Qube ran on a PowerPC chip and came with Gnu/Linux installed. Now it contains (I think) a Duron and a Sunified version of Linux, it's still small (7." cubed), blue and cute, though.
Well, the Anonymous Coward who gave the lineage of the various office applications obviously has a better handle on the history of PC office programs than I do. Nice job.
However, I have to take issue with a couple things. First off Word did not win because is was better than WordPerfect. It won because it was given away for free with the operating system that you had to have to run the x86 machines. WordPerfect never decided on it's own that the bullet list that I was writing was an outline so it would change the formatting for me. God that is annoying. If I was working on an outline or with columns, WordPerfect's implementation of these features was far superior to Word's. WordPerfect never arbitrarily changed the font I was using the way Word still does.
I've had to use both Quattro Pro and Excel and I preferred QP. Maybe some people preferred Excel, but not as many did with enough intensity for Excel to completely wipe the other products off the map, as has happened. Again Excel won because it was thrown in for no extra charge with the operating system or, more accurately, the cost of the development of Word and Excel were added to the cost of Windows. OEMs and consumers paid for Word and Excel even if they only wanted Windows, so they might as well use them rather than pay for them, not use them, and then buy and use something else.
Office only had to not suck enough to make people want to pay twice to use their competition. That's no level playing field. And this situation has destroyed the competition and prevented other good products from coming to market because you can't *compete* with that.
People want to see a more level playing field for applications, so variety and innovation will actually have a chance and they can have more choices. So they want the Microsoft monopoly broken, and they cheer development that will further breaking it.
Is that so hard to understand?
They have already been playing through the speaker (singular, unfortunately) on my original edition iBook.
Both Audion and MacAmp support the Ogg format.
I do how moderating works on slashdot. I was talking about this particular moderator's moderating.
I protest the blatantly ideological moderating that is being done on this topic. Posts about the ill effects of money on politics are moderated down, while posts of similar length and relevance that equate campaign contributions with speech are moderated up.
Slashdot's cannot be an open forum of free debate if the moderators tilt the playing field to benefit their own ideology.
Money isn't speech. Money is property.
And giving a public official property in influence their vote is bribery .
I don't care what the professional sophists on the Supreme Court say. They're as much a part of the problem as anyone.
By now it should be clear to even the most dense, libertarian, free-market theologian on slashdot that we in the US do not live in a democracy.
The People overwhelmingly want their privacy protected, business wants it to be defined as a commodity (and one that they own) to be traded. Privacy is not protected.
The People overwhelmingly want to know if their food contains genetically modified ingredients, business doesn't want them to know. There is no labeling for this and the US government is trying to overturn the food-labeling laws in European Union and Japan through challenges at the World Trade Organization.
The People overwhelmingly want health care financing taken away from private insurance companies and a Canadian-style single-payer plan instituted in the US. Business wants to continue to make profits off of people's illness even if that means organized denial of care through HMOs and that 40 million people are without health insurance entirely. Our health care system remains in the hands of private insurance companies.
I could go on all day, but I won't. Face it you all, we live in a plutocracy.
As for your "free market." It doesn't exist. Two years ago the CEO of Archer Daniels Midland said in an interview in Mother Jones Magazine, "There isn't a single product on earth that is traded on a free market."
If you will think back to economics 101 a "free market" isn't just one that is free of government intervention. A free market is one in which no one competitor has market power, defined as the ability to influence prices. A free market only exists where no one competitor, or group of competitors in collusion, in that market is large enough to be able to set the price. This situation probably has never existed anywhere, and it certainly doesn't exist now where mergers and acquisitions have lead most industries to be dominated by a few large concerns.
Through incredibly lax enforcement of anti-trust regulations and through the back door of international trade treaties consolidation proceeds barely and rarely checked in the US.
The Justice Department broke up AT & T in the '80s. But in just the past few years our local phone company US West has been bought by Qwest, which may soon be bought by Deutche Telecom.
As John Dewey said 100 years ago, "Politics is just the shadow cast by business."
Apple will not be porting the Mac OS to x86 for the same reason that Steve Jobs won't allow the smallest bit of GPLed code into Darwin. It would put Apple out of business.
.09 micron technologies to work on the PowerPC chip. It'll catch up then.
Look folks, Apple is a hardware company. That's were they really make their money. People buy their boxes in order to get the Mac OS. If they could run the Mac OS on cheaper x86 boxes many of them would choose to do so. Of course many people would still buy Titanium PowerBooks and iBooks for other reasons, but fewer.
So don't hold your breath waiting for the chance to run OS X on an Athlon box, it isn't going to happen. If it's speed you crave, just wait for IBM to put their silicon on insulator and
Given that the BSD license does not require that all derivative works be made freely available as source, Hubbard bringing his tricks to work on OS X won't be a problem for Apple.
.NET and Smart Tags are going to drive to their platform.
Will this be a problem for FreeBSD? The guy has to work somewhere. Torvalds works for Transmeta, why not Hubbard at Apple? I admit that there may be some problem for FreeBSD (besides loss of a talented developer) that I'm overlooking.
Hopefully this will get Apple ready for those hordes of users that
You should thank the academic artists for teaching you a valuable lesson: Nothing is accepted in academia until it is dead. It is only then that the Professors can swoop down upon it and nail the dried-up corpse to the wall for veneration.
.") has been stale for so long that even the critics are starting to notice the smell.
Others on slashdot, who know better than I, have pointed out that most innovative art forms (photography and collage) and artists (from Cézanne to Tzara) were not accepted by the gatekeepers of art. So take the hint and get the fuck out before they make you as tired and irrelevant as they are.
Oh, and start learning about the world so your stuff will have some content. Art that is about art ("a comment on the form of . .
Mac OS has better multi-language support than Windows (built in control-key use of non-english characters), and the Mac-only application Nisus Writer is widely regarded as being the best multilingual word processor.
But why dual-boot Mac OS X and Linux PPC when OS X will be able to run almost any Unix application on its BSD core?
How about demanding that IBM withdraw their Content Protection of Recordable Media (CPRM) proposal to the ATA specifications body? As Alan Cox and Stallman have both said, this would mean the death of Linux and all Free Software/Open Source.
IBM has a lot of gall to be buddying up to the Linux community, while proposing industry-wide hardware standards that advance the intellectual-property fascist agenda that would obliterate accepted consumer free use practice and basic computer science principles such as file system abstraction. You couldnÕt even backup your hard drive if these standards are implemented!
Sure IBM wants to work with Linux, and Microsoft wants to work with Java. Wake up and demand that IBM back-off this proposal, or the party is over.
Check out the coverage here http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/2/15684.html
As Cox said, ÒWelcome to the United Police State Of America."
Yeah, the US Navy did experiments in the '20s or '30s with the DVORAK keyboard. Once typists learned the new layout, they were faster than they were with the QWERTY keyboard.
- uses-it circular problem, In business schools QWERTY is used as the classic example of the first, not the best winning in market economies. Other popular examples are VHS over Beta are Windows over Macintosh (or Amiga).
Actually the QWERTY was not laid out with speed in mind. In a manual typewriter (and I used one for the first 3 years of my college career), if two keys that are next to each other are pressed in very rapid succession they will stick together at the top of their arc and jam the typewriter. So, the guy who invented QWERTY moved the keys for the most common letters in the alphabet away from each other. Look at the position of the 'e' and the 'o' keys.
Technology soon made this unnecessary, but by then the QWERTY had become standard. And then one runs into the I-use-the-one-that-everyone-uses-because-everyone
DVORAK uses the traditional physical keyboard, but the placement of the letters is different. So, you can find programs that will switch the keyboard that you are using to DVORAK. Macintoshes come with the option built-in.
You, sir, rock. Don't let the morons bring you down.
There may not be a discernable difference between a film shot in analog and one shot in digital once both are transferred to video tape. But in the theater there will be. Just as on a cheap stereo there may not seem to be much difference between a record and a CD, but when you get into high-end audio, the analog is much better than digital playback.
Sound and light are continuous waves. Analog media record continuously, and so recored the changes in the waves continuously as they come incontact with the microphone or the camera (within the band of wavelengths that the media are capable of registering). Digital recording takes discrete samples of the wave input. Whatever changes in the waves happen in between the samples will not be recorded. The gaps between the sound will be slurred together by the playback machine and the eyes or ears of the viewer or listener. The closer the samples are together (the higher sampling rate for audio, the number of pixels for video) the better, ÒtruerÓ, more pleasant will be the output.
The problem is, at this moment, the sampling rate of CDs (and the number of pixels in the digital video that IÕve seen) is not high enough. When I listen to CDs the sound seems harder, more brittle, and harsh. A lot of nuance is missed along with the information between the samples.
Somewhere, as the sampling rate approaches infinity, itÕs going to reach a threshold beyond our ability to discern the gaps. At that moment digital audio will be better than analog. Same for video. But weÕre not there yet.
IÕm getting into digital video production soon. A friend of mine just bought a camera and has ordered an iMac and Final Cut Pro. IÕm looking forward to it. ItÕs going to allow us to produce video of good quality (hopefully) with an ease and low cost that we never could have attained with film. Which is fine for the documentary stuff that weÕre going to do, or a George Lucas film. But the work of people like Jan Jost or Akira Kurosawa I want to see on film. I want to hear Charles Mingus and Tortoise on vinyl.
Just because a technology is new doesnÕt make it better for all uses than the previous technologies. ThatÕs why the high-end audio equipment stores are filling up with vacuum tube gear. Excuse me, IÕve got to turn over the record now.
"Show me the money" is four words.
Sorry, I forgot, Electronic Privacy Information Center
http://epic.org/
I have been using the iCab browser, almost exclusively, for the past nine months. It has a built-in cookie editing feature. This isnÕt exactly what you described, blocking all third-party cookies, but it works very well for me.
/ad, /advert, /doubleclick, /banner . . . you get the idea. It replaces these images with a small icon of a melita coffee filter. Cute, eh? I have found this feature to be very successful in blocking ads while rarely blocking an image that is part of the content of a page. This has the added benefit of speeding up page-rendering.
I have the general setting as ÒNever acceptÓ cookies, then there is the option to have exceptions to this. So I never accept cookies, except I Òalways acceptÓ them from Òslashdot.orgÓ and a couple other sites. Doubleclick.com is not among them. So any cookies not hosted by the site I am visiting will not be accepted.
iCab also has a terrific user-configureable image-filtering feature. With this feature you can filter out any image with a path, filename, or URL name that ÒisÓ or ÒcontainsÓ
Unfortunately, iCab is a Mac-only program. If you are running Windows I recommend the Opera web-browser. It doesnÕt have these options built-in, but it may in the future. I donÕt know about Linux.
Check the resources page of EPICÕs web page. There are some freeware tools that you can add to IE or Netscape to help you manage cookies and ads. I havenÕt had to use them, so I canÕt vouch for their effectiveness, but EPIC wonÕt steer you wrong.
Since when has software development _Not_ been funded by the government? Most of the greatest breakthroughs in computer development began with government funding. Most of the major innovations come from the public sector, because business isnÕt willing to risk investing on unproven technologies. Free from market pressures, the necessity to make a profit, and bosses who squelch good ideas, people in publicly funded institutions lay the ground work and come up with ideas that then catch on. Once something is obviously a good idea business figures it can make a profit on it and moves in.
Some examples: the entire computer industry was nurtured in its infancy by defense contracts when there were as yet no commercial uses for computers (Eniac anyone). The Internet began as Arpanet developed by mostly public Universities with funding from the Department of Defense. BSD Unix; The ÔBÕ stands for Berkely, as in University of California at Berkely, a public University. BSD was mostly developed by grad students on government financial aid or tuition waivers. Mosaic, the first graphical web browser, was developed at the University of Illinois. And the World Wide Web, which was invented by Tim Berners-Lee when he worked at CERN, an institution founded and funded collectively by European governments.
Mostly, it seems to me, business just does cherry-picking.
Pretty skimpy review. And I know that they got a few things wrong about iCab, and I gather from the posts below Opera, as well. Others have mentioned the skins for iCabÕs god-awful basic interface, the cookie management, and that it is still beta. But, I want to add that I think that iCab is pretty damn fast. I havenÕt used another fully-graphcal browser in six months, but I remember when I first tried iCab I noticed that it was much faster than Communicator.
iCabÕs Java support is getting better, and frankly, any page that it canÕt render is too busy anyway. One of the first things I did when I got my new Mac last December was delete IE and Outlook. IÕve kept a stuffed copy of Navigator on my hard drive just in case iCab fails me on a site I really need to read. But I havenÕt had to unpack it yet. Thanks to iCab IÕve been able to keep my computer completely Microsoft-free.
I think the best thing about iCab is the image-filtering. Now my browsing isnÕt slowed down by advertising that I donÕt want to see, but I still get the images that are part of a pageÕs content. Guess itÕs time to come up with another business model, dot-commies. The net will never be the cybermall that you want it to be.
I have no idea why anyone would want an email program integrated into their browser. iCab has a bare-bones send-only e-mail feature in case you click on an email link, but you can also configure it to open your default email program. I think that itÕs too bad that Opera may be going down the bloatware path by adding an fuller email client. Perhaps they could make that optional.
Lately IÕve begun to use the very simple, text-only browser for Mac called Wannabe. Damn this thing is fast. Pages render instantaneously. IÕve begun using it for times (getting more frequent) when IÕm just looking for information on the net and pictures are superfluous. If I come upon a page that has graphics that I want to see Wannabe has a feature that will open it in the browser of your choice available in a menu.
IÕll gladly pay the $30 dollars for the final release version of iCab. But IÕm curious to try Opera for Mac, as well.
"He who would exchange his Liberty for security deserves neither."
- Benjamin Franklin
The history of the FBI demonstrates that they will break any laws that restrict them in their surveillance of political dissidents. From the McCarthyite witch hunts to Martin Luther King to CISPES (opposed US government foreign policy in Central America) in the '80s to Waco.
They are no doubt doing so right now. The Seattle coalition against corporate globalization are probably being investigated using illegal wiretaps etc. on the grounds that they are Communi. . . I mean terrorists.
I recommend that anyone interested in a (depressingly) detailed history of FBI violations of citizens' rights and US law read Ward Churchill's the COINTELPRO Papers < http://www.lbbs.org/sep/backl.htm#thecointelpro>
How hard is it to check your goddamn facts? It took me one minute to retreive this AP article and get the basic story.
There is no mention in it of anyone dying. And if someone had died he sure would have been on trial for worse than vandalism and the AP sure would have mentioned it.
Bove tore the roof off of a McDonalds that was still under construction. It had no 28-year-old-women managers. It didn't have ANY managers yet. It wasn't even open.
Knife 31 has no business telling anyone to check their facts. He's got to be an idiot. And now for your enlightenment:
France Big Mac Vandal Trial Begins
The Associated Press
Saturday, July 1, 2000; 1:36 p.m. EDT
MILLAU, France ÐÐ A public prosecutor on Saturday recommended that a sheep farmer who has waged a high-profile battle against globalization receive a 10-month suspended sentence for vandalizing a McDonald's restaurant in this southern French town.
Jose Bove was on trial with nine other defendants who attacked the Millau fast food restaurant last August during a wave of protests targeting the fast-food chain as a symbol of American trade "hegemony" and economic globalization.
Prosecutor Alain Durand also recommended that Bove spend 18 months on probation. Bove said he would appeal any sentence and vowed to continue his battle internationally.
"The combat will not stop at France's borders," said Bove, spokesman of the radical Farmers' Confederation union, who made headlines in December when he brought his anti-globalization message to the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle.
Prosecutor Alain Durand requested that the nine other defendants receive suspended sentences of no longer than three months, saying they merely carried out Bove's plans.
After the hearing, about 11,000 supporters gathered to greet the 10 defendants as they left the courtroom.
The Millau court began hearing arguments on Friday as about 15,000 demonstrators gathered to support the defendants. Later that night, a concert to mark the trial drew about 45,000 anti-globalization supporters.
The court is expected to deliver its decision Sept. 13.
Bove's battle began last year when the United States slapped sanctions on food products ranging from Roquefort cheese to foie gras in retaliation for the European Union's decision to ban imports of U.S. hormone-treated beef.
The mustachioed sheep farmer has said his main targets are the World Trade Organization, multinationals and governments that push scientifically engineered food. He says the organizations crush the small-time producers who insist on quality and taste.
© Copyright 2000 The Associated Press
Look moron, The McDonalds was under construction. It hadn't opened yet, so it didn't have any managers to kill. And it didn't burn. Get your shit strait. You're on the internet, how hard can it be to look this stuff up before you write?
I'm no "free-market" type, but I think I can clear a few things up for you.
The World Trade Organization (WTO) was created and defined by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) that was negotiated and ratified by 135 countries in 1994 (or thereabouts). It came into effect in 1995. The nations who signed the agreement thereby gave the WTO the right to arbitrate trade disputes among member countries. Under these rules the decisions of the WTO arbitration panels is final and binding.
The rules of the WTO (embodied in a number of trade agreements that it oversees) forbid countries to discriminate against foreign products and services by putting up tariffs (import taxes) as barriers to their entry. It also forbids Ònon-tariff barriers to tradeÓ. This could be almost anything that the WTO panels find was put in place to exclude foreign products or put them at a competitive disadvantage with domestic ones. For instance, if Canada were to ban the importation of wool from sheep raised by guys named ÒBruceÓ, this could be seen as a Ònon-tariff barrierÓ to Australian wool.
Due to pressure from their citizens, the nations of the European Union banned the use of synthetic growth hormones in cattle and the importation of any beef that had been raised using synthetic growth hormones. Europeans think, not without reason, that eating such beef could be unhealthy.
Well the US CattlemenÕs Association loves synthetic growth hormone. And use a lot of it (which may be why we see young girls in the US reaching puberty at ten). The European ban barred most of their product, so the US Cattlemen complained to the Clinton Administration. And the Clinton Administration dragged the European Union before an arbitration panel of the WTO and gave this argument (Well, they say they made this argument. Since the proceedings of WTO arbitration panels are secret, we donÕt know for sure):
ÒThe Euros have banned importing of synthetic hormone-treated beef. We in America all use synthetic hormones. Therefore, the European ban on hormone-treated beef discriminates against US Cattlemen.Ó
The WTO panel bought this argument and ruled against the EU. This shouldnÕt be surprising since, in ever single instance, when any nationÕs environmental, health, safety, or labor protection act has been challenged at the WTO, the protection has been ruled WTO-illegal and overturned. Using the powers granted to it when countries join, the WTO gave the Europeans three choices:
1. Remove your ban on synthetic hormone-treated beef.
2. Pay the US Cattlemen $200 million a year for lost market.
3. Face $200 million (give or take) worth of tariffs on European goods that we will authorize the US government in retaliation for your ban on synthetic hormone-treated beef.
The EU refused to comply by removing the ban or giving the US $200 million a year, so the WTO allowed the US to slap 100% tariffs on a number of European products. I donÕt know how they chose which products. They range from Scottish sweaters (Scots jumpers for you in the UK) to - thatÕs right - French Roquefort cheese. Without WTO authorization the US tariffs would have violated any number of trade treaties and agreements. But one of the WTO rules is, the WTO rules are supreme.
It may seem ironic that the WTO uses tariffs to enforce its market opening rulings. But irony abounds in the world of globalization. The World Bank and the IMF claim that they are fighting poverty by forcing indebted nations to raise interest rates, increase taxes, cut spending on health and education, and attack Labor Unions. All these things increase poverty and the misery of the poor (The IMF and World Bank also force these countries to join the WTO). The WTO forces on nations rules that favor multinational corporations in the developing countries, and calls this ÒFree TradeÓ.
In short, the WTO is an undemocratic body, staffed by international trade lawyers and bureaucrats that has the power to overturn laws made by governments in response to popular pressure. It gives to the countries with poor environmental, health, safety, labor, and economic policy laws tools weaken those protections in other countries.
The Financial Times of London quoted one international trade official as saying, The WTO "is the place where governments collude in private against their domestic pressure groups.Ó (Guy De Jonquieres, "Network Guerillas," Financial Times, April 30, 1998, p. 12). Business groups are in on the negotiations from the beginning, so in this context, by Òdomestic pressure groupsÓ he means the people.
Excellent article Jon Katz! Excellent suggestion. So hereÕs to Jose Bove on this Independence Day. I saw him on the streets of Seattle last November 30, smoking his pipe amidst the tear gas, crowds, and the broken glass of a Niketown store. HereÕs to the destruction of transnational capital that subordinates all human experience to the cash nexus. HereÕs to the Revolution.
Salud