Apple LaserWriter II series: same Canon SX engine as HP LaserJet II, but with PostScript and Ethernet (IIg).
I'm using my LaserWriter IIg with 8MB ram, PostScript and EtherTalk with Linux for years and years now. A few times I've replaced the feeder boot ($15 rubber piece, from the www.printerworks.com) but this thing produces beautiful output at reasonable speed and gets thousands of sheets per toner cartridge.
I've done 40,000+ sheets and we're still going strong. Never had a need to upgrade or replace and the PostScript+Ethernet means that Linux printing is fast and not too resource-intensive.
ON the other hand... I'm on maybe my fifth color InkJet printer.:-( These things die for any number of reasons, including "Thursday landed on 2nd of month" and "Fly came in the east window again." Not too cool...
Linux is like a glorious, complex, idiosyncratic power tool to which a million attachments can be connected. Because it's so flexible and has a million billion parts, you can use it to build a house, polish a gemstone, bake bread or paint masterpieces on canvas, and all for free! The only caveat is that you have to know 1) which attachments do what, 2) which attachments you need for your type of work and 3) how to attach them to the main body of the tool in order to use them.
Windows is like a power saw. It's preconfigured. In fact, you can't really change very much about it. It's very good at cutting wood, which is something many, many tool enthusiasts want to do. It's relatively pricey, but works well and is pretty reliable. It's not that flexible, but hey, most people want to cut wood, right? Bzzzzzz. Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
The point of my analogy: the UNIX philosophy precludes "pull it out of the box and it 'just works'-ism" as a fundamental design goal. Because for the server folks, "just works" means that it doesn't even install a GUI. For the thin client folks, "just works" means minimal X, querying XDMCP sessions. For the desktop folks, "just works" means a full-blown, heavyweight API with interface guidelines and 3D support.
Who are you going to make life harder for? Right now, the balance is pretty good. But there's a growing camp in the Linux/UNIX world who basically want to build a power saw... remove all of the flexibility, or at least hide it so deeply that you need an entirely separate set of tools and several hours to tear it apart if you want to make any modifications. The desktop should be tightly integrated into the operating system. The applications should be limited by strict user interface guidelines. There should be draconian compatibility and backward-compatibility rules and components which don't follow them should be eliminated.
But hide or eliminate the joyous melee of nuts and bolts and you loose the best benefit of Linux and UNIX... the million billion little attachments to do everything from make cheese to cut sheet metal, provided of course that you know what you're doing (see items 1, 2 and 3 in first paragraph). Master Linux and you never need another tool. Master Windows and you'll never need another tool unless you want to do something other than saw wood.
If you're gonna use a pro's operating system, you're going to have to do your homework, get some training, and understand the tools you need to do the job. They're all there in Linux. You just have to attach, mix and match.
But if all you ever want to do is saw some wood in the first place, for God's sake just get a power saw and stop complaining!
Using command-line arguments, Anaconda in previous Red Hat verions can be forced to connect to an X server (using the X11 remote display capability). This way you essentially operate the installer over a network from another PC, in an 800x600 application window. You can then screen grab with ImageMagick, xv, or whatever your favorite X11 utility is.
I can't remember the details, but if you search Google Groups, you willf ind them.
I manage several smallish lab networks on a volunteer basis that make heavy use of the 'thin-client' capabilities of X to offer a room full of computing services to users from a single SMP server machine. These capabilities have reduced cost by an order of magnitude and greatly simplified the administration that I have to do.
X is essentially the number one reason to choose Linux/UNIX over Windows in multi-user computing environments, as far as I'm concerned. If X were ever discontinued, it's likely that in the next upgrade cycle I'd move my labs over to Windows, because without the cost-savings and administration features offered by X, there is no compelling reason to deal with the increased learning curve and driver issues in the Linux world.
Mechanism, not policy. Interface guidelines are the domain of toolkits and environments ala KDE, GNOME, not the domain of the low-level graphics subsystem like X or Fresco.
If by "balance", you mean "equally distribute all wealth among all 6,000,000,000 people", here's another part of the picture you're missing.
If you want that kind of "balance", be prepared to give up air conditioning, your automobile, your paved roads, your heart surgeon, your chemotherapy, your MRI scans, your broadband and 56k modems for a 2400-9600 baud serial line, and a couple of hours a day of electricity.
I won't presume to speak for you, but as for me, I'm not prepared to do that. As a citizen of a Western nation in a capitalist economy, I was born into the top 15% of the planetary socioeconomic pyramid. I like it here. I'm staying here. And I'm willing to pay 20% of my earnings, every year, to the top 1% to keep it that way. (The top 1% currently takes about 40% of those earnings, but that's haggling over price, not a fundamental argument about the principle:)
It's posts like this that make me realize a) why I am a socialist and b) why socialism is such an important movement.
"Let Them Starve" is not an ethical position I would ever want to support. Obviously the same can not be said for you.
My job is my company--I own it and I operate it with the help of a few others--and we have used Linux here since 1993. I'm not taking the "big picture" view because I don't have time to.
I like Linux. We like Linux. It does things for us that Windows just can't. But if some functionality is removed or it costs us money to spend time re-creating advantages that we used to get automatically by choosing Linux, surely you can see how it would not make my day better.
I guess what annoys me is that there is no need for e.g. the travesty of Red Hat's GNOME 2.0 desktop... where nearly any kind of *accessible* configurability is simply gone. Why not just ship with for-your-mother defaults, but at the same time, leave the options and additional software in place and relatively easy to find and use, so that the rest of us can have the Linux that we want in 10 minutes of configuring, rather than six hours of installing and tweaking?
I suppose I just don't understand the attitude that choices harm Linux is some way... that the desktop control panel must be emptied out of options, or 90% of the applications must be removed, just so that we don't scare some beginning user in case he accidentally happens to venture into a settings area.
It would be a shame if Linux were to forget its roots (advanced and technical users) by abandoning them entirely in the quest for market share; I've always thought that one of the best things about KDE and GNOME (well, before 2.0) is that they were essentially *better* solutions than windows in that they could serve novices and advanced users both, instead of requiring that advanced users install TweakUI, then hack the registry to shreds, then install 10 pieces of aftermarket software, just to get a functional system.
But I guess that is the direction we are going with Linux as well...:-/
hat still does not eliminate your ability to download Slackware or Debian and use whatever window manager or shell script you want for the rest of your life
is not true. Red Hat is not my distribution of choice, but we use it here because the software we need is released for Red Hat because Red Hat is the *market leader*.
Take distribution X and desktop Y. If they are released together, chances are they will work well. If they are released separately and you have to install desktop Y by hand, you are likely to be tweaking for several hours and you may still not get it to go in correctly.
Nevermind the question of whether distribution Y development will stay active if the Linux community abandons it, or whether the software you need will be released for X+Y, or whether developers will be working toward new 8.0 standard 'Z' and you'll have to run that to get support...
However, you must avoid making the assumption that anyone who wants "choice" wants it simply for the sake of choice.
Some of us have been using Un*x-like operating systems for many years. We have built entire computing lives out of shell scripts--ways to manage our budgets, ways to manage our contacts... and we have also spent a great deal of time tweaking desktop configurations (which have traditionally been very flexible in open-source GUIs) with focus behaviors and window behaviors that make our computer work more efficient.
It may seem only like a small option here or there is removed when GUIs are "simplified" but if that was the option that *you* depended on, and if removing it makes your computing 50% *less* productive on average, you're going to be upset about it.
I get tired of people assuming that I use feature 'X' in Linux just because I want to be different. The reason feature 'X' exists in the first place is because somebody thought it was needed. When you remove that feature once again, that person has lost a feature in Linux that he or she *needs*. This is not likely to make him or her happy.
I can understand the thought that to lose that one user in order to gain another ten is a good tradeoff in terms of Linux market share, but you certainly can't expect that particular person to be happy that the latest version of his or her favorite operating system has basically left him or her out in the cold.
You're absolutely right. We should instantly switch the entire Internet's root DNS system tomorrow, without delay, to one of the other DNS solutions. Who the hell needs testing? Furthermore, we'll get rid of email *entirely*, allow unencoded, unattached binaries to proliferate in content pages around the Internet, and while we're at it, we'll shake hands with Microsoft and promise them an ongoing monopoloy in browsers and Web servers for today and the forseeable future by pulling Mozilla and Apache off the market.
And of course, the point of your post... we will pull Linux, Solaris, and all Unices OUT of the GUI age completely, to ensure that they are adopted only by those who still own a VT100 at home....or, to put it another way: What exactly are you smoking?
As an anthropologist, I can assure you that there is are entire branches of anthropology which have strong ties to biology. Among them, biological anthropology, medical anthropology and genetic anthropology.
What you are thinking of is my specialization, sociocultural anthropology. However, there are others in my department who spend their days (and months and years) at microscopes and working on genetics problems. The differences are generally that biologists are interested in mechanism (i.e. what can we make genetics do for us) and the present (i.e.what can genetics do for us now) while anthropologists are primarily interested in history (i.e. what do genetics tell us about our past) and demography (i.e. what do genetics tell us about human populations now).
Just how are they supposed to "speak out" when nobody will cover it? My neighbours on either side are Muslim. They cried on 9/11. The whole world cried. Oddly enough, CNN did not show up on their doorstep with a microphone to ask how they felt.
Most of the mosques and Islamic schools around the world issued statements on 9/11. These were in large part issued as press releases or local announcements. Just issuing a press release, however, does not mean that the press actually covers your story. A million press releases a day end up on newsroom floors, ignored, because news organizations don't think that they will get ratings. They run with the stories that will sell.
Nothing sells better to a western audience than hate and controversy. It is lousy business to portray Islamic peoples as peaceful or sympathetic, especially after 9/11. It is smart, profitable business to try to build up the uberstory of the "war of civilizations". In short, the reason people did not hear "most Muslims" expressing sympathy and condolences and revulsion after 9/11 is that nobody was listening to those muslims. People in the west are listening only to messages of hate.
Try reading the news wires instead of the coverate put together by news broadcasters or printers and you'll see what I mean. The world looks like a very different place when you get the chance to see all of the news, and not just what media companies choose to sell to you and advertisers.
Re:Make software, not war!
on
Corporate KDE
·
· Score: 1
You paint this to be a kind of extreme worse-case scenario...
And yet, you shouldn't doubt for a moment that if large corproations could charge you or garnishee your wages simply for getting cancer, they would. I mean, think of how many people get cancer! And by extension, think of the profits! Definitely worth the "investment" in a couple of patents here or there.
This is the world of Ayn Rand. These are the evils of capitalism. The combination of a patent system run amok and technologies which involve human DNA have given us a glimpse into just how evil capitalism can become... it just goes to show that whether you believe in capitalism or not, you must at least be willing ot put checks on it, lest it rise up and own you and your children (literally).
Another person who doesn't understand evolution.
on
Immortal Code
·
· Score: 3, Informative
As an anthropologist, I am always stunned by the misconceptions that some people have about evolution (primarily that it's just a one-time random snowstorm of debris that made man and beast out of nothing but mud).
If you believe, as you seem to, that evolution is about producing something valuable from completely random events and matter, then you obviously have not studied evolution or the theories and hypotheses behind it, but have instead simply been listening to misinformation from the likes of Jerry Fallwell.
Evolution does not function outside of one important context: the environmental context.
Given this simple caveat to your post, we can now see that all programs are actually evolving.
Consider this:
A code snippet is written. But it doesn't function. What happens? It dies -- it is deleted, removed by its environment (i.e. the programmer and project) because it serves no purpose.
Another code snippet is written. It works properly. Wow, it ends up in release 1.0! It has survived! It has a long and happy life on the retail shelf.
But lo, another programmer comes along, sees the original code snippet, and adds to it so that it runs faster. Cool! Though 1.0 was very popular in its time, the 1.0 code snippet is removed and is never heard from again -- it has been out-competed by a new, more efficient snippet which works better.
The new revision is so good, it becomes version 2.0! Soon it's everywhere; 1.0 is hardly ever seen any longer because 2.0 just works better and 1.0 keeps getting wiped and replaced by 2.0.
Voila! Evolution.
This exactly the way that natural selection (and by extension, macroevoluti) work on organic beings in the "real" world. Nature "proposes" a product by the mixing coding ideas (i.e. DNA) from different from individuals (i.e. SEX). If the result doesn't work -- if the code doesn't produce a functioning or an efficient product (i.e. individual) -- then the code dies and is never heard from again. If the code does work, then an efficient, functioning individual is born and survives into adulthood. The code lives! But now new ideas are infused into the code again (i.e. the new individual also has SEX!) and new DNA is born -- another new code snippet in the offspring. And yet again, if the code doesn't produce a viable product (i.e. individual), it eventually dies out -- removing it from the environment -- and it is never heard from again. But if the new code does produce a functioning, efficient individual, voila again! The code lives! Wash, rinse, repeat.
Every time you or anyone else makes a baby, you are writing a new version of the code. Any time two whales mate, they are writing a new version of the code. The DNA is dancing, folks. If the new product works, it finds a place in the marketplace (the environment). It survives. If it happens to work better than anything else out there (Anna Kournikova, Natalie Portman), it dominates the marketplace and everyone wants a piece of it. As the generations pass, products with better code are better at survival -- getting food, getting attention, getting mates (and as a result, the good code doesn't die out).
EVOLUTION.
It's not random at all. It is actually an awful lot like software development.
Easy to install. Very nice looking, some of them. My personal favorite? Light style v.3. Clean, minimal, no shit, better looking than anything else for Windows or Linux. Combine with the iKons icon set for a very, very professional desktop that makes Windows users ask "Is that Windows 2003?" (seriously.)
Yes, but it takes decades and depends on environmental factors.
However, CDs are fragile. This is a bigger issue. Insert a brand new CD into your car stereo, then eject it again and put it back into a slip case. Do this twenty times. Now, look at the back of your CD. Probably you have a small scratch or two already.
Repeat ad infinitum, and you end up with a situation in which your favorite CDs must be replaced or ripped reburned every couple of years or they begin to skip or pop. Of course, ripping and reburning don't work if you've managed to get a really nice scratch in the middle of your favorite song...
As a bunch of people have pointed out, it is unlikely that the/. effect is a matter of "crashing" servers. It is much more likely that most of the "slashdotted" sites on the front page on a given day involve a server which is doing just fine and a bandwidth pipe which is seriously about to burst.
You can saturate most any small-business-affordable pipe with a Pentium classic machine as a Web server. Or to put it another way, there's no point sticking a dual-P4-Xeon Web server with 4GB memory and a RAID-5 on a DSL line.
The computer I'm using right now (a PIII system) could run Apache very nicely in the background and would likely survive quite a hitrate without too much trouble. But if even just a few thousand people were to hit it all at once, there would be a traffic jam, some people wouldn't get served, and the ISP would probably close me down, because I'm only sitting on a 256k pipe.
When you support the enforcement of one LICENSE and cry foul when another is enforced, you lose a lot of credibility.
No, because the licenses are different; if I disagree with the principles in one license but support those in another, and I disagree with the way the law handles intellectual property issues en masse anyway, then I find no inconsistency in supporting the enforcement of good licenses by law while not supporting the enforcement of bad licenses.
The GPL is not about freedom for Linus Torvalds or RMS, it's about freedom for the users. This is the exact opposite of most of the commercial licenses and EULAs, which are designed essentially to make the users screwable in the interest of guaranteeing greatest freedom and profitability for the company.
I owned a Newton OMP (original message pad) and a Newton 2100 later on. There is no comparison!
With my OMP, I used to use the on-screen keyboard because the handwriting recognition was indeed problematic.
With my Newton 2100, I have taken over 200 pages (yes, printed pages) of notes. I have all of my notes from university on it! And all of them were taken using the Rosetta recognition engine (which was not included in the original Newton series). It is both an order of magnitude faster and several orders of magnitude more accurate than the older Newton message pads.
The great thing about the Newton 2100 is not only that it recognizes my handwriting flawlessly; I can also simply write anywhere on the screen, no messy cursor to deal with. Write the address on the line with the "Address" label and the phone number on the line with the "Phone Number" label, etc. And when taking notes in the notepad, scribble anywhere and the Newton will recognize your handwriting at that spot on the virtual note paper.
When combined with the formatting features of the Notes application (nested bullet listing, checkboxing, text drag/drop, etc.) it makes for the best note-taking engine ever, light years ahead of paper and much better than CE applications like HPC Notes (which I've also used). I don't know how I'd have survived university without it!
Slashdot Mirror
Apple LaserWriter II series: same Canon SX engine as HP LaserJet II, but with PostScript and Ethernet (IIg).
:-( These things die for any number of reasons, including "Thursday landed on 2nd of month" and "Fly came in the east window again." Not too cool...
I'm using my LaserWriter IIg with 8MB ram, PostScript and EtherTalk with Linux for years and years now. A few times I've replaced the feeder boot ($15 rubber piece, from the www.printerworks.com) but this thing produces beautiful output at reasonable speed and gets thousands of sheets per toner cartridge.
I've done 40,000+ sheets and we're still going strong. Never had a need to upgrade or replace and the PostScript+Ethernet means that Linux printing is fast and not too resource-intensive.
ON the other hand... I'm on maybe my fifth color InkJet printer.
Linux is like a glorious, complex, idiosyncratic power tool to which a million attachments can be connected. Because it's so flexible and has a million billion parts, you can use it to build a house, polish a gemstone, bake bread or paint masterpieces on canvas, and all for free! The only caveat is that you have to know 1) which attachments do what, 2) which attachments you need for your type of work and 3) how to attach them to the main body of the tool in order to use them.
Windows is like a power saw. It's preconfigured. In fact, you can't really change very much about it. It's very good at cutting wood, which is something many, many tool enthusiasts want to do. It's relatively pricey, but works well and is pretty reliable. It's not that flexible, but hey, most people want to cut wood, right? Bzzzzzz. Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
The point of my analogy: the UNIX philosophy precludes "pull it out of the box and it 'just works'-ism" as a fundamental design goal. Because for the server folks, "just works" means that it doesn't even install a GUI. For the thin client folks, "just works" means minimal X, querying XDMCP sessions. For the desktop folks, "just works" means a full-blown, heavyweight API with interface guidelines and 3D support.
Who are you going to make life harder for? Right now, the balance is pretty good. But there's a growing camp in the Linux/UNIX world who basically want to build a power saw... remove all of the flexibility, or at least hide it so deeply that you need an entirely separate set of tools and several hours to tear it apart if you want to make any modifications. The desktop should be tightly integrated into the operating system. The applications should be limited by strict user interface guidelines. There should be draconian compatibility and backward-compatibility rules and components which don't follow them should be eliminated.
But hide or eliminate the joyous melee of nuts and bolts and you loose the best benefit of Linux and UNIX... the million billion little attachments to do everything from make cheese to cut sheet metal, provided of course that you know what you're doing (see items 1, 2 and 3 in first paragraph). Master Linux and you never need another tool. Master Windows and you'll never need another tool unless you want to do something other than saw wood.
If you're gonna use a pro's operating system, you're going to have to do your homework, get some training, and understand the tools you need to do the job. They're all there in Linux. You just have to attach, mix and match.
But if all you ever want to do is saw some wood in the first place, for God's sake just get a power saw and stop complaining!
Using command-line arguments, Anaconda in previous Red Hat verions can be forced to connect to an X server (using the X11 remote display capability). This way you essentially operate the installer over a network from another PC, in an 800x600 application window. You can then screen grab with ImageMagick, xv, or whatever your favorite X11 utility is.
I can't remember the details, but if you search Google Groups, you willf ind them.
I manage several smallish lab networks on a volunteer basis that make heavy use of the 'thin-client' capabilities of X to offer a room full of computing services to users from a single SMP server machine. These capabilities have reduced cost by an order of magnitude and greatly simplified the administration that I have to do.
X is essentially the number one reason to choose Linux/UNIX over Windows in multi-user computing environments, as far as I'm concerned. If X were ever discontinued, it's likely that in the next upgrade cycle I'd move my labs over to Windows, because without the cost-savings and administration features offered by X, there is no compelling reason to deal with the increased learning curve and driver issues in the Linux world.
Mechanism, not policy. Interface guidelines are the domain of toolkits and environments ala KDE, GNOME, not the domain of the low-level graphics subsystem like X or Fresco.
It's posts like this that make me realize a) why I am a socialist and b) why socialism is such an important movement.
"Let Them Starve" is not an ethical position I would ever want to support. Obviously the same can not be said for you.
I own the retail version of Corel Draw 9 for Linux. It works very well, and was released about the same time as WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux.
Very hard to come by these days, though...
My job is my company--I own it and I operate it with the help of a few others--and we have used Linux here since 1993. I'm not taking the "big picture" view because I don't have time to.
:-/
I like Linux. We like Linux. It does things for us that Windows just can't. But if some functionality is removed or it costs us money to spend time re-creating advantages that we used to get automatically by choosing Linux, surely you can see how it would not make my day better.
I guess what annoys me is that there is no need for e.g. the travesty of Red Hat's GNOME 2.0 desktop... where nearly any kind of *accessible* configurability is simply gone. Why not just ship with for-your-mother defaults, but at the same time, leave the options and additional software in place and relatively easy to find and use, so that the rest of us can have the Linux that we want in 10 minutes of configuring, rather than six hours of installing and tweaking?
I suppose I just don't understand the attitude that choices harm Linux is some way... that the desktop control panel must be emptied out of options, or 90% of the applications must be removed, just so that we don't scare some beginning user in case he accidentally happens to venture into a settings area.
It would be a shame if Linux were to forget its roots (advanced and technical users) by abandoning them entirely in the quest for market share; I've always thought that one of the best things about KDE and GNOME (well, before 2.0) is that they were essentially *better* solutions than windows in that they could serve novices and advanced users both, instead of requiring that advanced users install TweakUI, then hack the registry to shreds, then install 10 pieces of aftermarket software, just to get a functional system.
But I guess that is the direction we are going with Linux as well...
Because this:
hat still does not eliminate your ability to download Slackware or Debian and use whatever window manager or shell script you want for the rest of your life
is not true. Red Hat is not my distribution of choice, but we use it here because the software we need is released for Red Hat because Red Hat is the *market leader*.
Take distribution X and desktop Y. If they are released together, chances are they will work well. If they are released separately and you have to install desktop Y by hand, you are likely to be tweaking for several hours and you may still not get it to go in correctly.
Nevermind the question of whether distribution Y development will stay active if the Linux community abandons it, or whether the software you need will be released for X+Y, or whether developers will be working toward new 8.0 standard 'Z' and you'll have to run that to get support...
You make some good points.
However, you must avoid making the assumption that anyone who wants "choice" wants it simply for the sake of choice.
Some of us have been using Un*x-like operating systems for many years. We have built entire computing lives out of shell scripts--ways to manage our budgets, ways to manage our contacts... and we have also spent a great deal of time tweaking desktop configurations (which have traditionally been very flexible in open-source GUIs) with focus behaviors and window behaviors that make our computer work more efficient.
It may seem only like a small option here or there is removed when GUIs are "simplified" but if that was the option that *you* depended on, and if removing it makes your computing 50% *less* productive on average, you're going to be upset about it.
I get tired of people assuming that I use feature 'X' in Linux just because I want to be different. The reason feature 'X' exists in the first place is because somebody thought it was needed. When you remove that feature once again, that person has lost a feature in Linux that he or she *needs*. This is not likely to make him or her happy.
I can understand the thought that to lose that one user in order to gain another ten is a good tradeoff in terms of Linux market share, but you certainly can't expect that particular person to be happy that the latest version of his or her favorite operating system has basically left him or her out in the cold.
SCSI: Small Computer Systems Interface
descended from
SASI: Shugart & Associates Systems Interface
Heh...
...or, to put it another way: What exactly are you smoking?
You're absolutely right. We should instantly switch the entire Internet's root DNS system tomorrow, without delay, to one of the other DNS solutions. Who the hell needs testing? Furthermore, we'll get rid of email *entirely*, allow unencoded, unattached binaries to proliferate in content pages around the Internet, and while we're at it, we'll shake hands with Microsoft and promise them an ongoing monopoloy in browsers and Web servers for today and the forseeable future by pulling Mozilla and Apache off the market.
And of course, the point of your post... we will pull Linux, Solaris, and all Unices OUT of the GUI age completely, to ensure that they are adopted only by those who still own a VT100 at home.
When I think about this, the fact that this post was modded as "insightful" by someone is perhaps the most frightening thing I've seen in a long time.
As an anthropologist, I can assure you that there is are entire branches of anthropology which have strong ties to biology. Among them, biological anthropology, medical anthropology and genetic anthropology.
What you are thinking of is my specialization, sociocultural anthropology. However, there are others in my department who spend their days (and months and years) at microscopes and working on genetics problems. The differences are generally that biologists are interested in mechanism (i.e. what can we make genetics do for us) and the present (i.e.what can genetics do for us now) while anthropologists are primarily interested in history (i.e. what do genetics tell us about our past) and demography (i.e. what do genetics tell us about human populations now).
Hope this helps.
Just how are they supposed to "speak out" when nobody will cover it? My neighbours on either side are Muslim. They cried on 9/11. The whole world cried. Oddly enough, CNN did not show up on their doorstep with a microphone to ask how they felt.
Most of the mosques and Islamic schools around the world issued statements on 9/11. These were in large part issued as press releases or local announcements. Just issuing a press release, however, does not mean that the press actually covers your story. A million press releases a day end up on newsroom floors, ignored, because news organizations don't think that they will get ratings. They run with the stories that will sell.
Nothing sells better to a western audience than hate and controversy. It is lousy business to portray Islamic peoples as peaceful or sympathetic, especially after 9/11. It is smart, profitable business to try to build up the uberstory of the "war of civilizations". In short, the reason people did not hear "most Muslims" expressing sympathy and condolences and revulsion after 9/11 is that nobody was listening to those muslims. People in the west are listening only to messages of hate.
Try reading the news wires instead of the coverate put together by news broadcasters or printers and you'll see what I mean. The world looks like a very different place when you get the chance to see all of the news, and not just what media companies choose to sell to you and advertisers.
Yea, they're called socialists.
You say this as though it's an insult...?
You paint this to be a kind of extreme worse-case scenario...
And yet, you shouldn't doubt for a moment that if large corproations could charge you or garnishee your wages simply for getting cancer, they would. I mean, think of how many people get cancer! And by extension, think of the profits! Definitely worth the "investment" in a couple of patents here or there.
This is the world of Ayn Rand. These are the evils of capitalism. The combination of a patent system run amok and technologies which involve human DNA have given us a glimpse into just how evil capitalism can become... it just goes to show that whether you believe in capitalism or not, you must at least be willing ot put checks on it, lest it rise up and own you and your children (literally).
As an anthropologist, I am always stunned by the misconceptions that some people have about evolution (primarily that it's just a one-time random snowstorm of debris that made man and beast out of nothing but mud).
If you believe, as you seem to, that evolution is about producing something valuable from completely random events and matter, then you obviously have not studied evolution or the theories and hypotheses behind it, but have instead simply been listening to misinformation from the likes of Jerry Fallwell.
Evolution does not function outside of one important context: the environmental context.
Given this simple caveat to your post, we can now see that all programs are actually evolving.
Consider this:
A code snippet is written. But it doesn't function. What happens? It dies -- it is deleted, removed by its environment (i.e. the programmer and project) because it serves no purpose.
Another code snippet is written. It works properly. Wow, it ends up in release 1.0! It has survived! It has a long and happy life on the retail shelf.
But lo, another programmer comes along, sees the original code snippet, and adds to it so that it runs faster. Cool! Though 1.0 was very popular in its time, the 1.0 code snippet is removed and is never heard from again -- it has been out-competed by a new, more efficient snippet which works better.
The new revision is so good, it becomes version 2.0! Soon it's everywhere; 1.0 is hardly ever seen any longer because 2.0 just works better and 1.0 keeps getting wiped and replaced by 2.0.
Voila! Evolution.
This exactly the way that natural selection (and by extension, macroevoluti) work on organic beings in the "real" world. Nature "proposes" a product by the mixing coding ideas (i.e. DNA) from different from individuals (i.e. SEX). If the result doesn't work -- if the code doesn't produce a functioning or an efficient product (i.e. individual) -- then the code dies and is never heard from again. If the code does work, then an efficient, functioning individual is born and survives into adulthood. The code lives! But now new ideas are infused into the code again (i.e. the new individual also has SEX!) and new DNA is born -- another new code snippet in the offspring. And yet again, if the code doesn't produce a viable product (i.e. individual), it eventually dies out -- removing it from the environment -- and it is never heard from again. But if the new code does produce a functioning, efficient individual, voila again! The code lives! Wash, rinse, repeat.
Every time you or anyone else makes a baby, you are writing a new version of the code. Any time two whales mate, they are writing a new version of the code. The DNA is dancing, folks. If the new product works, it finds a place in the marketplace (the environment). It survives. If it happens to work better than anything else out there (Anna Kournikova, Natalie Portman), it dominates the marketplace and everyone wants a piece of it. As the generations pass, products with better code are better at survival -- getting food, getting attention, getting mates (and as a result, the good code doesn't die out).
EVOLUTION.
It's not random at all. It is actually an awful lot like software development.
P.S...
Voila! Voila! Voila! Voila! Voila!
http://www.kde-look.org
Easy to install. Very nice looking, some of them. My personal favorite? Light style v.3. Clean, minimal, no shit, better looking than anything else for Windows or Linux. Combine with the iKons icon set for a very, very professional desktop that makes Windows users ask "Is that Windows 2003?" (seriously.)
No one has ever made it to my foes list so incredibly quickly as you!
Yes, but it takes decades and depends on environmental factors.
However, CDs are fragile. This is a bigger issue. Insert a brand new CD into your car stereo, then eject it again and put it back into a slip case. Do this twenty times. Now, look at the back of your CD. Probably you have a small scratch or two already.
Repeat ad infinitum, and you end up with a situation in which your favorite CDs must be replaced or ripped reburned every couple of years or they begin to skip or pop. Of course, ripping and reburning don't work if you've managed to get a really nice scratch in the middle of your favorite song...
As a bunch of people have pointed out, it is unlikely that the /. effect is a matter of "crashing" servers. It is much more likely that most of the "slashdotted" sites on the front page on a given day involve a server which is doing just fine and a bandwidth pipe which is seriously about to burst.
You can saturate most any small-business-affordable pipe with a Pentium classic machine as a Web server. Or to put it another way, there's no point sticking a dual-P4-Xeon Web server with 4GB memory and a RAID-5 on a DSL line.
The computer I'm using right now (a PIII system) could run Apache very nicely in the background and would likely survive quite a hitrate without too much trouble. But if even just a few thousand people were to hit it all at once, there would be a traffic jam, some people wouldn't get served, and the ISP would probably close me down, because I'm only sitting on a 256k pipe.
I never provide my real e-mail address to any of these people -- RealPlayer, New York Times, etc. etc.
Just have your SPAM sent to theres.nobody@this.net and be done with it!
When you support the enforcement of one LICENSE and cry foul when another is enforced, you lose a lot of credibility.
No, because the licenses are different; if I disagree with the principles in one license but support those in another, and I disagree with the way the law handles intellectual property issues en masse anyway, then I find no inconsistency in supporting the enforcement of good licenses by law while not supporting the enforcement of bad licenses.
The GPL is not about freedom for Linus Torvalds or RMS, it's about freedom for the users. This is the exact opposite of most of the commercial licenses and EULAs, which are designed essentially to make the users screwable in the interest of guaranteeing greatest freedom and profitability for the company.
I owned a Newton OMP (original message pad) and a Newton 2100 later on. There is no comparison!
With my OMP, I used to use the on-screen keyboard because the handwriting recognition was indeed problematic.
With my Newton 2100, I have taken over 200 pages (yes, printed pages) of notes. I have all of my notes from university on it! And all of them were taken using the Rosetta recognition engine (which was not included in the original Newton series). It is both an order of magnitude faster and several orders of magnitude more accurate than the older Newton message pads.
The great thing about the Newton 2100 is not only that it recognizes my handwriting flawlessly; I can also simply write anywhere on the screen, no messy cursor to deal with. Write the address on the line with the "Address" label and the phone number on the line with the "Phone Number" label, etc. And when taking notes in the notepad, scribble anywhere and the Newton will recognize your handwriting at that spot on the virtual note paper.
When combined with the formatting features of the Notes application (nested bullet listing, checkboxing, text drag/drop, etc.) it makes for the best note-taking engine ever, light years ahead of paper and much better than CE applications like HPC Notes (which I've also used). I don't know how I'd have survived university without it!