Geez; you don't have to be like that. Roblimo didn't mean it that way, I'm sure. I'll admit, I take something of an issue with the "old-fashioned girl" bit. But honestly, must you see everything a man says about a women as wrong? Really, let's look at your points, and see how someone else interpreted these things...
Geek girls are incapable of being loving and considerate, and unloving and inconsiderate geek guys have to avoid that.
OK, I have to agree on this one. This was rather poorly worded. I won't say this article couldn't have stood another revision or two.
The ideal woman is one who selflessly meets your every needs.
I assume you're talking about the "old-fashioned girl" thing. I didn't get that read from the passage, though. It looked to me as though Roblimo was saying that geeks need someone who doesn't mind doing this occasionally. There's a corollary behind this: if she does it sometimes, you'll have to do it too.
The proper role for the woman is that of handservant, who considers running your bathwater to be part of a "mutually beneficial" relationship.
What you describe is, I think, more of an abusive relationship than a mutually beneficial one. The point Roblimo was making was this: At any one time, no given relationship is ever truly equal to both sides. It balances out over time, but at any given moment the man might need more, or the woman might. That's where the phrase "give and take" comes from. This is another thing where Roblimo left out something he should have added: geeks need (actually, anyone needs) a partner who doesn't mind being on the giving end of things sometimes. But said geek had better be prepared to do his fair share of giving sometimes too. In the end, a good relationship will balance out.
One way to evaluate a woman is to take off her clothes and makeup.
Oh, please. He was trying to rephrase "people aren't always what they seem at first glance." Besides which, I suppose it is one way to evaluate a woman; not a good way by any means but a way nonetheless.
In bars, the females that are unattainable are called "women" while the ones that you are supposed to go after are called "girls".
Frankly, I find your paranoia more offensive than anything he said in his article. You're talking semantics now. No need for that.
If a woman finds you unattractive, dump her as quickly as possible.
There are more types of attraction than physical, you know. I think this is what Roblimo was trying to get at. If someone doesn't find you attractive in any way (or, to word it a bit better, isn't sttracted to you at all), then you're both wasting time in a relationship. It seems to me that you're more obsessed with the physical aspects of Roblimo is, as evidenced by the next couple of statements...
Grown breasts are worth waiting for. Be nice to geeky looking girls, just in case they grow up and look good.
This wasn't even meant to be advice. He was merely giving an anecdote. The unattractive one is teased by all the boys but one. Then, a few years later, she becomes attractive, and everyone wants her but she is only interested in the one who had been kind to her. The moral of the story: don't be mean to anyone, or your decisions could come back to haunt you.
In spite of all of the above, imperfections are to be overlooked.
Either you're a hypocrite or you had absolutely no clue what you were doing when you wrote this one. It runs quite counter to your argument. You seem to fight the idea of the "ideal woman" and yet you state here that any imperfection should be taken as grounds for avoiding a relationship. I have some news for you: no one is perfect. That's what real love is: you recognize the faults in your partner, but you love him/her anyway.
All women are looking for a man to fill the empty void in their lives.
Um, where'd you even pick this one up? I've looked over the article several times and I still can't find anything that even remotely suggests that one. He does say at one point that there are a lot of women who are looking for a man; statistically this is probably quite true (over three billion women on the planet, after all; even one percent of that is still 30,000,000, and there's probably more than one percent looking).
If you're not having any success, find someone like Roblimo, considers himself an expert at picking up chix and is ready to dispense a handful of advice because he has a pleasant and apparently subservient wife who meets his needs.
Look. Roblimo didn't word everything in the article all that well. He's also new; mistakes are to be expected. Heck; I've been reading Slashdot for four years, my Karma is over 60, and I still word things pretty poorly sometimes. No need to jump all over him for one mistake.
Sandman is easily the best comic series i've read yet. Then again, I should admit that I haven't read very much, but this is still absolutely amazing. The only thing that comes near it is Alan Moore's Watchmen.
As for Princess Mononoke... I've seen the subbed version. I know already that some footage had to be cut in order to keep a PG-13 rating. If anyone can cut footage and still do the original justice, it's Neil. I know he can do it well, and I certainly hope he did.
Never have I been gladder to be out of the public school system. Columbine was a tragedy, but if people actually think that a computer can predict violence, then Columbine will pale in comparison to what will follow.
Such rash inductivism is intolerable when applied to anything more chaotic than raw numbers, and that includes people. I'll use a famous example to illustrate my point. Let's say you see a flock of swans. You notice that all of the swans in the flock are white. Does this mean that all swans are white? Certainly not. Likewise, this Mosaic 2000 (Anyone know if NCSA trademarked Mosaic, by the way? If so I hope they sue) takes what an infintesimal minority of kids have done, found traits, and decided that all kids with these characteristics are evil creatures which must undergo psychatric treatment.
Of course, the real solution to these problems is harder, and no government or school official can actually implement it. It takes parents who realize the full importance of their role as such, who teach their kids right from wrong, fantasy from reality, and above all else to respect all people. Many parents don't seem willing to do that anymore (note that I don't say unable; it's not always easy to do this, and it may involve making sacrifices, but it is always possible and always necessary). Many don't even seem willing to spend enough time with their kids to notice any potential trouble; such was the case with Columbine.
I'm backing the ACLU all the way on this one. Computer programs to analyze people based on what an administrator hears (which is often little more than hearsay and rumor)? The word "abomination" comes to mind.
In any case, this finalizes my decision. If I ever have kids, they'll never set foot in a public school (not as a student, at any rate). The system has simply gone to hell, with so many kludges and quick-fixes tacked onto it that I wonder if anything short of scrapping the current system and completely rebuilding it from scratch is going to fix things.
Actually, this data comes off of Intel's own benchmarks, which rate the G4 at not double, but triple the speed of a P3 at equal clockrate. Though I notice Intel's removed the benchmarks from their Website; guess they decided they couldn't take the heat.
The kinds of things which IPv6 was created to do can be achieved without referencing any kind of unique number that can be tied to a specific computer. The only way to truly achieve privacy is to make certain that addresses cannot be directly traced back to a host without going through a virtual "paper trail." IPv4 can do this, therefore IPv6 must be able to before it can be trusted as a viable Internet protocol.
In other words, all references to a MAC address need to be removed from the IPv6 standard, at least as pertains to network addressing. This can be done, despite what the IANA would have us believe. Verification of the origin of a packet/message/whatever can also be done without resorting to MAC addresses, so it's still possible to have both privacy and security, without letting Big Brother get in the way.
Bringing back the wooly mammoth population is pretty much a statistical impossiblity, even with a subject to clone.
Why? Well, for starters, it's a subject. Without at least one male and one female, there's not going to be much hope for that species.
Let's say we overcome that obstacle, though, and engineer a mammoth of opposite gender to the one that was found. You've still got the problem that the mammoths are essentially twins. Mate them, and you've got a handful of inbred mammoths. Actually, this goes beyond inbreeding, because even among siblings there's some genetic variance; between these mammoths there would be none. Eventually you'd get to the point where no mammoths could survive for very long, and the species goes extinct a second time.
Theoretically you could engineer enough differences into many clones and start the species that way. Just one problem: to do that you have to understand the genome. To understand the genome you need living mammoths, so you're in a chicken-and-egg situation.
Maybe if scientists found a couple hundred more mammoths, then we might have something feasible. But to try with only one specimen simply isn't going to work.
That's what this is. Logicware could easily have made Half-Life for the Mac have total feature-parity with the PC version, or even have added features (as evidence, I give you Westlake Interactive, who has done this with Quake, Unreal, the Tomb Raider series, Shadow Warrior, Unreal Tournament, Total Annhilation, Railroad Tycoon 2, Alpha Centauri, Madden NFL 2000, and others). The fact is, they chose not to.
Why? I don't know for certain, though I have a few suspicions. I do know that Logicware's Andrew Meggs, head of the Half-life project, is very anti-Mac, and has been since his shareware company fell flat after releasing one game. He even says as much if you read the original press release; he's happy to not be working on a Mac project anymore. But hey, why was Sierra dumb enough to put a well-known Mac-loather on the Half-Life team, anyway? That would be like putting John Dvorak on the design team for the next generation of iMac.
Look. None of the reasons Sierra cancelled the project were actually valid, because all of them could have been worked around. Quake/MacOS is compatible with PC mods, so Half-Life (which, last I checked, was based on Quake) has no excuse not to be. Quake/MacOS's networking code works perfectly with its PC counterparts, so Half-life has no excuse there, even with this DirectPlay stuff (if worse comes to worst, networking protocols aren't that tough to decode, especially when you're paid to do it, and since reverse-engineering to achieve compatibility is known to fall under the fair use clause there's no problem there).
Whatever. I won't be buying Sierra or Logicware stuff for a long time because of this. Even though it probably won't happen, I hope that Sierra takes their code to Westlake and pays them to finish it; they'll do it right.
Actually, the metric base unit of time is the second. It's exactly as long as a second in any other system that uses the measure. So in the end there's no real difference.
Re:Dah! Classic case of marketing rushing technolo
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Color Palms Announced
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· Score: 3
It's not really color screens that suck battery power. It's the backlight that drains it the most. Look at Gameboy Color for an example of a color LCD device with a remarkably long battery life.
This will be tricky, though. What Palm will have to do if it wants to keep its battery life long is to use one of the super-reflective displays with a backlight that can be turned on and off, as with the current Palm devices. The backlight will still drain power, of course, but only when it's on (as with the current Palm screens), and thus will have only a minimal impact on bettery life (no more than it currently does).
I'm not sure if this actually possible with the current super-reflective LCD's; the backing might be too opaque to allow for backlights (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong about that, because I hope I am). It's better than the two alternatives, though: a battery-draining handheld or a clip-on light for the non-backlit screen.
I wonder if someone will be offering a trade-in program for Palm III's...
First of all, don't flame me for not expressing sympathy. I do indeed feel a great deal of it, but that's not what this post is about.
It's just that there seem to be a whole lot of strong quakes hitting populated areas this year. Turkey, Taiwan (for the second time now), California... perhaps it's just that they're only getting media attention this year, but it looks to me like there's been an unusual amount of seismic activity over heavily-populated or heavily-industrialized areas.
Honest question: anyone know why this might be (no "it's a sign of the coming Apocalypse" please...)? Or is it just the media deciding that they want to cover lots of earthquakes this year, and the number really isn't unusual?
This is so confusing that I don't know what to think of this anymore. I'd suggest Apple just come out and say exactly what they're planning to do (which, if they're at all concerned about doing The Right Thing, is to reinstate all of those orders except the 500-MHz ones, and even on those to offer a nice big price cut on the 450-MHz models). Enough with all the reversals.
How is Visa to know what the card is being used for? All they can possibly know is what merchant is charging the card and for how much (well, that's all they can possibly know while still maintaining some semblance of legality, at any rate). Last I checked, they bear no respobsibility for what you do with the card. As a matter of fact, since this woman used her "loan" for an illegal purpose of which Visa wasn't aware, you might be able to say she committed fraud.
Sure, credit cards are a form of loans. However, Visa did not lend her the money so she could gamble with it. They did not know what was going on, so I don't think they should be held liable for this in the least. This idiotic woman should have to pay every last cent of that gambling debt. She chose to play, after all, and it's no one's fault but her own that she messed up.
Perhaps it's my own paranoia, but I don't trust MS on this one. They see themselves as having something to gain. My guess is that it's one of two things: 1) They'll finally have a real innovation to their credit (actually they won't, but this looks more like one than anything they've had so far, so more people will be fooled). 2) Like everything else, they already have plans to Embrace and Extend their own protocol. In a way I guess this would be like the Windows hidden API's.
My guess is, it's the second. I suppose I could be simply paranoid as well, but I doubt it; Microsoft has given us no reason to trust it over the years, and plenty of very good reasons not to. So forgive me, Billy, if I take your words with not a grain of salt, but a planeload.
When did I claim to be a Libertarian? I respect the movement, true, but I'd never follow it.
And yeah; I don't like big, intrusive governments. But sometimes there are things that only a government has the resources to do. Keeping juggernauts like Microsoft in line is one of them.
It appears, though, that they've misplaced their brains. This move is simply too obvious. While the diehard Microslaves will be taken in by this trick, I think M$ is probably going to alienate a lot more people (particularly the politicians) with this move. Unless, of course, they can find enough corrupt politicians (heck, Billy himself could throw several million bucks at every single politician in Congress, so I suppose it's possible).
Anyone know of a good MacOS CVS server? I'm running an Open-Source project for MacOS and I'd rather not go through the trouble of BinHexing files if it can possibly be avoided. I know something is out there because Mozilla uses CVS, but its MacOS CVS builds aren't BinHexed and the resource forks still come out fine.
The current CVS offerings I see for MacOS all do CVS clients quite well, but I don't see anything that looks like a server. Perhaps I'm just not looking in the right place. I'll do a Linux server if need be, but I just need something that'll do good CVS for a MacOS-based project.
You got PSX tools? I didn't get any PSX tools (then again, I also have the Academic version).
Did you hear, by the way, that Metrowerks is also doing the compilers for PSX2, Nintendo 64 (I would guess that they'll have Dolphin as well), and Dreamcast?
There are two versions of CodeWarrior for Linux planned, however. The one reviewed here appears to be the GNU edition, which uses the Open-Source compilers. There is also a "Professional Edition," set to come out later this year, which I think will provide its own compiler. Being an avid CodeWarrior user on MacOS, I can't wait to see how the Pro edition comes out.
Get it through your skull: good software takes time to write. Linux was not written in a day, so it's lunacy to believe that OSX could be. Yeah, we joke about all the delays in Microsoft's stuff, but even M$ under the same burden (that is, before they finally decide to skip quality control just to get the product out the door). Better to wait a few more months than to get a buggy piece of crap.
2. Unbundle ATI video
And replace it with... what? You need video, most users can't be bothered to slap a video card into their machines (most users would probably mess it up anyway, as any tech support rep can tell you), ATI still makes some of the best video cards out there (notice I didn't say the best; I don't want to start a flamewar), and no other company is as good when it comes to Mac support.
3. Ship Pro models with Pro keyboard and Pro mouse instead of crappy iMac kbd&mouse.
Agreed, totally. I hate the iMac keyboard. I couldn't care less about the mouse (I use trackballs anyway), but the keyboard is simply too small.
4. Reach MHz/price-parity with Intel.
They're already at price/performance parity, more or less. The G4 is roughly triple the speed of a P3, and this is using Intel's own benchmarks, mind you. We're not talking Bytemarks here, boys and girls, we're talking benchmarks no one dares discredit. MHz-wise, I do see the psychological value of a 600-MHz G4, but please realize that this isn't Apple's fault. Apple doesn't make the chips; all it can sell is what it gets from Motorola and IBM. As for price-parity, why should Apple be forced to charge less than the machine is worth? You get what you pay for, simple as that; Apple deserves a higher price point. The machines are simply better in terms of performance, reliability, ease of upgrading and servicing, and even aesthetics. I might also add that studies show the average Mac to have twice as long of a useful life as the average Intel-based box. It's a question of value, and you get it from a Mac.
5. Fix QT 4.0 and Sherlock UI.
Agreed. At least to the point where you can see the names of stuff in the drawers, and preferably by scrapping the interfaces completely and going back to real MacOS interfaces.
Anyway, I'm not going to buy a G4, but for a totally different reason: I'm satisfied with my beige G3 as it is, at least for the time being. Though I hope they don't end the trade-in programs anytime soon...
Honestly, I'm glad to see Apple listening to its customers. I doubted they could really be stupid enough to pull a stunt like that, and I'm pleased to see I was right.
Let's just hope they keep this idea of listening to the customer going in the future.
I almost wonder if this isn't a hoax. I have a lot of trouble believing that anyone, even Apple, would be this stupid, particularly coming off of something like the G4 ROM block. These machines were actually priced quite well in terms of price/performance before; I'd hate to see Apple lose that.
I'm not even sure it's entirely legal; I think Apple is at least contractually obligated to ship out the orders it's processed. That's another reason I tend to believe this can't really be happenning; class-action lawsuits are the last thing Apple wants right now (and if this is real and I'd bought a G4, I would have joined the lawsuit).
It does, at least, make me glad I didn't get a G4 (or, conversely, that I'd gotten one a lot earlier). When the time comes, I think I'll use that trade-in program and get a 450 for a thousand bucks; that'd be sweet.
If you read my message history you'll see that I'm a pretty staunch Mac defender. But twice in as many months, now, I've seen Apple do something that even I can't defend them for. Then again, I never said I liked Apple, just the machines they make.
Yes the DOJ is trying to indocrinate, but so what? that is what it is there for...
Excuse me, sir, but you seem to have large amounts of wool on your face, particularly over your eyes...
It's canned the Deaprtment of Justice for a reason. Its job is justice. That means law enforcement. It doesn't mean indoctrination. It means that the extent of the DoJ's role in education is to be "this is against the law," not "this is bad." What's more, it has to be this way. Education and indoctrination are two different things. Education -the teaching of facts- is something the government ought to have a hand in, especially as pertains to the law. People need to know certain things to survive in this world, and governments have the resources to allow for this.
Indoctrination -the teaching of values- is another matter entirely, and not one which we can allow the government to interfere with. Governments have a nasty habit of twisting things to their own advantage regardless of the cost. That's rather hard to do with facts (twist 2+2 around all you want; you'll still get 4). Values, however, are different. That's why, in order to be truly free, in the end each individual must decide his values for himself. Ideally, along the way a person will have guidance from parents, friends, and such, but the last step has to be taken alone, something governments hate (too much randomness, meaning too hard to control).
It's not going to work very well. The problem is that each language has its own nuances, and in many cases these don't translate very well into other languages. I'll use Japanese honorifics as an example. The list of them is relatively long ( -san, -sama, -kun, -chan, -sensei, -wa, and others). Simply by attaching one to the end of a person's name, I can make the same sentence express immoderate flattery or extreme derision. This can be translated in an extremely limited fashion to romance languages such as Spanish or French (by using familiar vs. formal form of address, but it's still limited). It doesn't translate into English at all (this is why I prefer subtitled anime; get the general meaning from the subtitles, and actually listen to the Japanese for the nuances). And, of course, you still have the problem of inflection not translating very well into written words. This makes English particularly unsuitable for network communications, actually, since so much meaning is left to inflection. What's the solution? I don't know. There probably isn't one. Even Esperanto isn't immune to this problem of losing meanings in translation. I don't think a "universal meta-language" is going to work, though.
You know, it's interesting. This is going to get me in a lot of trouble on Slashdot, I already know that. But I've noticed a pattern. First, we have pro-choicers saying that fetuses aren't human (whether or not you believe that isn't the point of this post. They might be or might not be; anyone who says they can prove one way or the other is either lying or deluded in one manner or another). Now, we have a college professor (and a new movement that seems to be growing, if slowly) saying that newborns aren't human. What's next, that small children aren't human? Then adolescents? I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this.
I respect the pro-choice movement, though I don't follow it. My main problem with it isn't even abortion itself. My problem is this: it denies humanity to a group (which might or might not be human; current technologies don't seem to be able to prove one way or the other), but then it never defines where or when (or, for that matter, why) humanity begins. There are people who would push that age further and further forward, to justify killing for just about any reason. I see this professor as the first example of that; to kill a human being for selfish reasons, justifying it by saying "but it wasn't really human." There are risks involved in having a child, and if you don't think you can handle the possibilities then you shouldn't be putting yourself in a situation where those risks could come back to bite you.
To kill another being without that being's consent is generally considered a major taboo in just about any culture (sometimes even killing with that person's consent, such as euthanasia, is considered taboo). There's a very good reason for it, though: murder, if allowed, sets a dangerous precedent whereby a person could justify killing anyone he doesn't like. A newborn certainly can't consent to being killed, of course (at least not in any way we can currently understand). That doesn't mean we should try to guess. Ask any disabled person if they've suffered so much as a direct result of their disability that they want to die; I'll guarantee you that nearly all of them will say no. In other words, in most of these euthanasia cases, you would not be doing the child any mercy at all; you would simply be killing a kid because the parents don't want to live up to their newfound responsibilities.
A free culture is not an anarchistic one. It doesn't mean you can do whatever you want; one must always consider others ("the right to swing my fist ends where the next man's nose begins"). Giuliani was out of line with the art exhibit; that's true. He found the exhibit offensive, but that was no fault of the artist or museum. He has no right to deny others the right to see it, whether by overtly ordering the removal of the art exhibit or by using sneaky tricks like cutting public funds. Jesse Ventura wasn't out of line with his comment about religion, but he could certainly have been more tactful (or at least explained why he believed as he did, rather than simply blurted it out). Making an intelligent argument, which implies backing up your statements ("Religion is for the weak-willed and needy, and this is why..."), is within anyone's rights; simple insults ("Religion is for weak-willed and needy people") are not.
But enough of this, or else I'll really go into rant mode. If you don't agree, that's fine; if you want to flame, do it over e-mail.
Slashdot Mirror
Guess I'll have to go scream at the anime club then; looks like they had it wrong. I hate it when they do this... :)
Remind me to go right to the sources more in the future.
Geez; you don't have to be like that. Roblimo didn't mean it that way, I'm sure. I'll admit, I take something of an issue with the "old-fashioned girl" bit. But honestly, must you see everything a man says about a women as wrong? Really, let's look at your points, and see how someone else interpreted these things...
Geek girls are incapable of being loving and considerate, and unloving and inconsiderate geek guys have to avoid that.
OK, I have to agree on this one. This was rather poorly worded. I won't say this article couldn't have stood another revision or two.
The ideal woman is one who selflessly meets your every needs.
I assume you're talking about the "old-fashioned girl" thing. I didn't get that read from the passage, though. It looked to me as though Roblimo was saying that geeks need someone who doesn't mind doing this occasionally. There's a corollary behind this: if she does it sometimes, you'll have to do it too.
The proper role for the woman is that of handservant, who considers running your bathwater to be part of a "mutually beneficial" relationship.
What you describe is, I think, more of an abusive relationship than a mutually beneficial one. The point Roblimo was making was this: At any one time, no given relationship is ever truly equal to both sides. It balances out over time, but at any given moment the man might need more, or the woman might. That's where the phrase "give and take" comes from. This is another thing where Roblimo left out something he should have added: geeks need (actually, anyone needs) a partner who doesn't mind being on the giving end of things sometimes. But said geek had better be prepared to do his fair share of giving sometimes too. In the end, a good relationship will balance out.
One way to evaluate a woman is to take off her clothes and makeup.
Oh, please. He was trying to rephrase "people aren't always what they seem at first glance." Besides which, I suppose it is one way to evaluate a woman; not a good way by any means but a way nonetheless.
In bars, the females that are unattainable are called "women" while the ones that you are supposed to go after are called "girls".
Frankly, I find your paranoia more offensive than anything he said in his article. You're talking semantics now. No need for that.
If a woman finds you unattractive, dump her as quickly as possible.
There are more types of attraction than physical, you know. I think this is what Roblimo was trying to get at. If someone doesn't find you attractive in any way (or, to word it a bit better, isn't sttracted to you at all), then you're both wasting time in a relationship. It seems to me that you're more obsessed with the physical aspects of Roblimo is, as evidenced by the next couple of statements...
Grown breasts are worth waiting for.
Be nice to geeky looking girls, just in case they grow up and look good.
This wasn't even meant to be advice. He was merely giving an anecdote. The unattractive one is teased by all the boys but one. Then, a few years later, she becomes attractive, and everyone wants her but she is only interested in the one who had been kind to her. The moral of the story: don't be mean to anyone, or your decisions could come back to haunt you.
In spite of all of the above, imperfections are to be overlooked.
Either you're a hypocrite or you had absolutely no clue what you were doing when you wrote this one. It runs quite counter to your argument. You seem to fight the idea of the "ideal woman" and yet you state here that any imperfection should be taken as grounds for avoiding a relationship. I have some news for you: no one is perfect. That's what real love is: you recognize the faults in your partner, but you love him/her anyway.
All women are looking for a man to fill the empty void in their lives.
Um, where'd you even pick this one up? I've looked over the article several times and I still can't find anything that even remotely suggests that one. He does say at one point that there are a lot of women who are looking for a man; statistically this is probably quite true (over three billion women on the planet, after all; even one percent of that is still 30,000,000, and there's probably more than one percent looking).
If you're not having any success, find someone like Roblimo, considers himself an expert at picking up chix and is ready to dispense a handful of advice because he has a pleasant and apparently subservient wife who meets his needs.
Look. Roblimo didn't word everything in the article all that well. He's also new; mistakes are to be expected. Heck; I've been reading Slashdot for four years, my Karma is over 60, and I still word things pretty poorly sometimes. No need to jump all over him for one mistake.
Sandman is easily the best comic series i've read yet. Then again, I should admit that I haven't read very much, but this is still absolutely amazing. The only thing that comes near it is Alan Moore's Watchmen.
As for Princess Mononoke... I've seen the subbed version. I know already that some footage had to be cut in order to keep a PG-13 rating. If anyone can cut footage and still do the original justice, it's Neil. I know he can do it well, and I certainly hope he did.
Now, all I have to do is get a ride to Toronto...
Never have I been gladder to be out of the public school system. Columbine was a tragedy, but if people actually think that a computer can predict violence, then Columbine will pale in comparison to what will follow.
Such rash inductivism is intolerable when applied to anything more chaotic than raw numbers, and that includes people. I'll use a famous example to illustrate my point. Let's say you see a flock of swans. You notice that all of the swans in the flock are white. Does this mean that all swans are white? Certainly not. Likewise, this Mosaic 2000 (Anyone know if NCSA trademarked Mosaic, by the way? If so I hope they sue) takes what an infintesimal minority of kids have done, found traits, and decided that all kids with these characteristics are evil creatures which must undergo psychatric treatment.
Of course, the real solution to these problems is harder, and no government or school official can actually implement it. It takes parents who realize the full importance of their role as such, who teach their kids right from wrong, fantasy from reality, and above all else to respect all people. Many parents don't seem willing to do that anymore (note that I don't say unable; it's not always easy to do this, and it may involve making sacrifices, but it is always possible and always necessary). Many don't even seem willing to spend enough time with their kids to notice any potential trouble; such was the case with Columbine.
I'm backing the ACLU all the way on this one. Computer programs to analyze people based on what an administrator hears (which is often little more than hearsay and rumor)? The word "abomination" comes to mind.
In any case, this finalizes my decision. If I ever have kids, they'll never set foot in a public school (not as a student, at any rate). The system has simply gone to hell, with so many kludges and quick-fixes tacked onto it that I wonder if anything short of scrapping the current system and completely rebuilding it from scratch is going to fix things.
Actually, this data comes off of Intel's own benchmarks, which rate the G4 at not double, but triple the speed of a P3 at equal clockrate. Though I notice Intel's removed the benchmarks from their Website; guess they decided they couldn't take the heat.
The kinds of things which IPv6 was created to do can be achieved without referencing any kind of unique number that can be tied to a specific computer. The only way to truly achieve privacy is to make certain that addresses cannot be directly traced back to a host without going through a virtual "paper trail." IPv4 can do this, therefore IPv6 must be able to before it can be trusted as a viable Internet protocol.
In other words, all references to a MAC address need to be removed from the IPv6 standard, at least as pertains to network addressing. This can be done, despite what the IANA would have us believe. Verification of the origin of a packet/message/whatever can also be done without resorting to MAC addresses, so it's still possible to have both privacy and security, without letting Big Brother get in the way.
Bringing back the wooly mammoth population is pretty much a statistical impossiblity, even with a subject to clone.
Why? Well, for starters, it's a subject. Without at least one male and one female, there's not going to be much hope for that species.
Let's say we overcome that obstacle, though, and engineer a mammoth of opposite gender to the one that was found. You've still got the problem that the mammoths are essentially twins. Mate them, and you've got a handful of inbred mammoths. Actually, this goes beyond inbreeding, because even among siblings there's some genetic variance; between these mammoths there would be none. Eventually you'd get to the point where no mammoths could survive for very long, and the species goes extinct a second time.
Theoretically you could engineer enough differences into many clones and start the species that way. Just one problem: to do that you have to understand the genome. To understand the genome you need living mammoths, so you're in a chicken-and-egg situation.
Maybe if scientists found a couple hundred more mammoths, then we might have something feasible. But to try with only one specimen simply isn't going to work.
That's what this is. Logicware could easily have made Half-Life for the Mac have total feature-parity with the PC version, or even have added features (as evidence, I give you Westlake Interactive, who has done this with Quake, Unreal, the Tomb Raider series, Shadow Warrior, Unreal Tournament, Total Annhilation, Railroad Tycoon 2, Alpha Centauri, Madden NFL 2000, and others). The fact is, they chose not to.
Why? I don't know for certain, though I have a few suspicions. I do know that Logicware's Andrew Meggs, head of the Half-life project, is very anti-Mac, and has been since his shareware company fell flat after releasing one game. He even says as much if you read the original press release; he's happy to not be working on a Mac project anymore. But hey, why was Sierra dumb enough to put a well-known Mac-loather on the Half-Life team, anyway? That would be like putting John Dvorak on the design team for the next generation of iMac.
Look. None of the reasons Sierra cancelled the project were actually valid, because all of them could have been worked around. Quake/MacOS is compatible with PC mods, so Half-Life (which, last I checked, was based on Quake) has no excuse not to be. Quake/MacOS's networking code works perfectly with its PC counterparts, so Half-life has no excuse there, even with this DirectPlay stuff (if worse comes to worst, networking protocols aren't that tough to decode, especially when you're paid to do it, and since reverse-engineering to achieve compatibility is known to fall under the fair use clause there's no problem there).
Whatever. I won't be buying Sierra or Logicware stuff for a long time because of this. Even though it probably won't happen, I hope that Sierra takes their code to Westlake and pays them to finish it; they'll do it right.
Actually, the metric base unit of time is the second. It's exactly as long as a second in any other system that uses the measure. So in the end there's no real difference.
It's not really color screens that suck battery power. It's the backlight that drains it the most. Look at Gameboy Color for an example of a color LCD device with a remarkably long battery life.
This will be tricky, though. What Palm will have to do if it wants to keep its battery life long is to use one of the super-reflective displays with a backlight that can be turned on and off, as with the current Palm devices. The backlight will still drain power, of course, but only when it's on (as with the current Palm screens), and thus will have only a minimal impact on bettery life (no more than it currently does).
I'm not sure if this actually possible with the current super-reflective LCD's; the backing might be too opaque to allow for backlights (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong about that, because I hope I am). It's better than the two alternatives, though: a battery-draining handheld or a clip-on light for the non-backlit screen.
I wonder if someone will be offering a trade-in program for Palm III's...
First of all, don't flame me for not expressing sympathy. I do indeed feel a great deal of it, but that's not what this post is about.
It's just that there seem to be a whole lot of strong quakes hitting populated areas this year. Turkey, Taiwan (for the second time now), California... perhaps it's just that they're only getting media attention this year, but it looks to me like there's been an unusual amount of seismic activity over heavily-populated or heavily-industrialized areas.
Honest question: anyone know why this might be (no "it's a sign of the coming Apocalypse" please...)? Or is it just the media deciding that they want to cover lots of earthquakes this year, and the number really isn't unusual?
This is so confusing that I don't know what to think of this anymore. I'd suggest Apple just come out and say exactly what they're planning to do (which, if they're at all concerned about doing The Right Thing, is to reinstate all of those orders except the 500-MHz ones, and even on those to offer a nice big price cut on the 450-MHz models). Enough with all the reversals.
How is Visa to know what the card is being used for? All they can possibly know is what merchant is charging the card and for how much (well, that's all they can possibly know while still maintaining some semblance of legality, at any rate). Last I checked, they bear no respobsibility for what you do with the card. As a matter of fact, since this woman used her "loan" for an illegal purpose of which Visa wasn't aware, you might be able to say she committed fraud.
Sure, credit cards are a form of loans. However, Visa did not lend her the money so she could gamble with it. They did not know what was going on, so I don't think they should be held liable for this in the least. This idiotic woman should have to pay every last cent of that gambling debt. She chose to play, after all, and it's no one's fault but her own that she messed up.
Perhaps it's my own paranoia, but I don't trust MS on this one. They see themselves as having something to gain. My guess is that it's one of two things:
1) They'll finally have a real innovation to their credit (actually they won't, but this looks more like one than anything they've had so far, so more people will be fooled).
2) Like everything else, they already have plans to Embrace and Extend their own protocol. In a way I guess this would be like the Windows hidden API's.
My guess is, it's the second. I suppose I could be simply paranoid as well, but I doubt it; Microsoft has given us no reason to trust it over the years, and plenty of very good reasons not to. So forgive me, Billy, if I take your words with not a grain of salt, but a planeload.
When did I claim to be a Libertarian? I respect the movement, true, but I'd never follow it.
And yeah; I don't like big, intrusive governments. But sometimes there are things that only a government has the resources to do. Keeping juggernauts like Microsoft in line is one of them.
Well, you've got to admit, they've got guts.
It appears, though, that they've misplaced their brains. This move is simply too obvious. While the diehard Microslaves will be taken in by this trick, I think M$ is probably going to alienate a lot more people (particularly the politicians) with this move. Unless, of course, they can find enough corrupt politicians (heck, Billy himself could throw several million bucks at every single politician in Congress, so I suppose it's possible).
Anyone know of a good MacOS CVS server? I'm running an Open-Source project for MacOS and I'd rather not go through the trouble of BinHexing files if it can possibly be avoided. I know something is out there because Mozilla uses CVS, but its MacOS CVS builds aren't BinHexed and the resource forks still come out fine.
The current CVS offerings I see for MacOS all do CVS clients quite well, but I don't see anything that looks like a server. Perhaps I'm just not looking in the right place. I'll do a Linux server if need be, but I just need something that'll do good CVS for a MacOS-based project.
You got PSX tools? I didn't get any PSX tools (then again, I also have the Academic version).
Did you hear, by the way, that Metrowerks is also doing the compilers for PSX2, Nintendo 64 (I would guess that they'll have Dolphin as well), and Dreamcast?
There are two versions of CodeWarrior for Linux planned, however. The one reviewed here appears to be the GNU edition, which uses the Open-Source compilers. There is also a "Professional Edition," set to come out later this year, which I think will provide its own compiler. Being an avid CodeWarrior user on MacOS, I can't wait to see how the Pro edition comes out.
I just wish it would run on LinuxPPC...
1. Ship Mac OS X already!
Get it through your skull: good software takes time to write. Linux was not written in a day, so it's lunacy to believe that OSX could be. Yeah, we joke about all the delays in Microsoft's stuff, but even M$ under the same burden (that is, before they finally decide to skip quality control just to get the product out the door). Better to wait a few more months than to get a buggy piece of crap.
2. Unbundle ATI video
And replace it with... what? You need video, most users can't be bothered to slap a video card into their machines (most users would probably mess it up anyway, as any tech support rep can tell you), ATI still makes some of the best video cards out there (notice I didn't say the best; I don't want to start a flamewar), and no other company is as good when it comes to Mac support.
3. Ship Pro models with Pro keyboard and Pro mouse instead of crappy iMac kbd&mouse.
Agreed, totally. I hate the iMac keyboard. I couldn't care less about the mouse (I use trackballs anyway), but the keyboard is simply too small.
4. Reach MHz/price-parity with Intel.
They're already at price/performance parity, more or less. The G4 is roughly triple the speed of a P3, and this is using Intel's own benchmarks, mind you. We're not talking Bytemarks here, boys and girls, we're talking benchmarks no one dares discredit. MHz-wise, I do see the psychological value of a 600-MHz G4, but please realize that this isn't Apple's fault. Apple doesn't make the chips; all it can sell is what it gets from Motorola and IBM.
As for price-parity, why should Apple be forced to charge less than the machine is worth? You get what you pay for, simple as that; Apple deserves a higher price point. The machines are simply better in terms of performance, reliability, ease of upgrading and servicing, and even aesthetics. I might also add that studies show the average Mac to have twice as long of a useful life as the average Intel-based box. It's a question of value, and you get it from a Mac.
5. Fix QT 4.0 and Sherlock UI.
Agreed. At least to the point where you can see the names of stuff in the drawers, and preferably by scrapping the interfaces completely and going back to real MacOS interfaces.
Anyway, I'm not going to buy a G4, but for a totally different reason: I'm satisfied with my beige G3 as it is, at least for the time being. Though I hope they don't end the trade-in programs anytime soon...
(besides FIRST POST! that is :) )
Honestly, I'm glad to see Apple listening to its customers. I doubted they could really be stupid enough to pull a stunt like that, and I'm pleased to see I was right.
Let's just hope they keep this idea of listening to the customer going in the future.
I almost wonder if this isn't a hoax. I have a lot of trouble believing that anyone, even Apple, would be this stupid, particularly coming off of something like the G4 ROM block. These machines were actually priced quite well in terms of price/performance before; I'd hate to see Apple lose that.
I'm not even sure it's entirely legal; I think Apple is at least contractually obligated to ship out the orders it's processed. That's another reason I tend to believe this can't really be happenning; class-action lawsuits are the last thing Apple wants right now (and if this is real and I'd bought a G4, I would have joined the lawsuit).
It does, at least, make me glad I didn't get a G4 (or, conversely, that I'd gotten one a lot earlier). When the time comes, I think I'll use that trade-in program and get a 450 for a thousand bucks; that'd be sweet.
If you read my message history you'll see that I'm a pretty staunch Mac defender. But twice in as many months, now, I've seen Apple do something that even I can't defend them for. Then again, I never said I liked Apple, just the machines they make.
Yes the DOJ is trying to indocrinate, but so what? that is what it is there for...
Excuse me, sir, but you seem to have large amounts of wool on your face, particularly over your eyes...
It's canned the Deaprtment of Justice for a reason. Its job is justice. That means law enforcement. It doesn't mean indoctrination. It means that the extent of the DoJ's role in education is to be "this is against the law," not "this is bad." What's more, it has to be this way. Education and indoctrination are two different things. Education -the teaching of facts- is something the government ought to have a hand in, especially as pertains to the law. People need to know certain things to survive in this world, and governments have the resources to allow for this.
Indoctrination -the teaching of values- is another matter entirely, and not one which we can allow the government to interfere with. Governments have a nasty habit of twisting things to their own advantage regardless of the cost. That's rather hard to do with facts (twist 2+2 around all you want; you'll still get 4). Values, however, are different. That's why, in order to be truly free, in the end each individual must decide his values for himself. Ideally, along the way a person will have guidance from parents, friends, and such, but the last step has to be taken alone, something governments hate (too much randomness, meaning too hard to control).
It's not going to work very well. The problem is that each language has its own nuances, and in many cases these don't translate very well into other languages. I'll use Japanese honorifics as an example. The list of them is relatively long ( -san, -sama, -kun, -chan, -sensei, -wa, and others). Simply by attaching one to the end of a person's name, I can make the same sentence express immoderate flattery or extreme derision. This can be translated in an extremely limited fashion to romance languages such as Spanish or French (by using familiar vs. formal form of address, but it's still limited). It doesn't translate into English at all (this is why I prefer subtitled anime; get the general meaning from the subtitles, and actually listen to the Japanese for the nuances). And, of course, you still have the problem of inflection not translating very well into written words. This makes English particularly unsuitable for network communications, actually, since so much meaning is left to inflection. What's the solution? I don't know. There probably isn't one. Even Esperanto isn't immune to this problem of losing meanings in translation. I don't think a "universal meta-language" is going to work, though.
You know, it's interesting. This is going to get me in a lot of trouble on Slashdot, I already know that. But I've noticed a pattern. First, we have pro-choicers saying that fetuses aren't human (whether or not you believe that isn't the point of this post. They might be or might not be; anyone who says they can prove one way or the other is either lying or deluded in one manner or another). Now, we have a college professor (and a new movement that seems to be growing, if slowly) saying that newborns aren't human. What's next, that small children aren't human? Then adolescents? I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this.
I respect the pro-choice movement, though I don't follow it. My main problem with it isn't even abortion itself. My problem is this: it denies humanity to a group (which might or might not be human; current technologies don't seem to be able to prove one way or the other), but then it never defines where or when (or, for that matter, why) humanity begins. There are people who would push that age further and further forward, to justify killing for just about any reason. I see this professor as the first example of that; to kill a human being for selfish reasons, justifying it by saying "but it wasn't really human." There are risks involved in having a child, and if you don't think you can handle the possibilities then you shouldn't be putting yourself in a situation where those risks could come back to bite you.
To kill another being without that being's consent is generally considered a major taboo in just about any culture (sometimes even killing with that person's consent, such as euthanasia, is considered taboo). There's a very good reason for it, though: murder, if allowed, sets a dangerous precedent whereby a person could justify killing anyone he doesn't like. A newborn certainly can't consent to being killed, of course (at least not in any way we can currently understand). That doesn't mean we should try to guess. Ask any disabled person if they've suffered so much as a direct result of their disability that they want to die; I'll guarantee you that nearly all of them will say no. In other words, in most of these euthanasia cases, you would not be doing the child any mercy at all; you would simply be killing a kid because the parents don't want to live up to their newfound responsibilities.
A free culture is not an anarchistic one. It doesn't mean you can do whatever you want; one must always consider others ("the right to swing my fist ends where the next man's nose begins"). Giuliani was out of line with the art exhibit; that's true. He found the exhibit offensive, but that was no fault of the artist or museum. He has no right to deny others the right to see it, whether by overtly ordering the removal of the art exhibit or by using sneaky tricks like cutting public funds. Jesse Ventura wasn't out of line with his comment about religion, but he could certainly have been more tactful (or at least explained why he believed as he did, rather than simply blurted it out). Making an intelligent argument, which implies backing up your statements ("Religion is for the weak-willed and needy, and this is why..."), is within anyone's rights; simple insults ("Religion is for weak-willed and needy people") are not.
But enough of this, or else I'll really go into rant mode. If you don't agree, that's fine; if you want to flame, do it over e-mail.