Owning or using a SUV in a city as tightly packed as London *should* be an offence (though perhaps not a capital one). There is no reason to drive oversized, fuel-inefficient personal monster trucks in a city which has narrow streets and perfectly usable public transport. At the very least, those who choose to do so out of personal choice should pay some extra tax to offset the inconvenience and increased pollution they are imposing on the other people they share a city with.
Not only that, but the US Government (i.e., the FBI and Department of Homeland Security) are exempted from EU data protection legislation, and have direct access to such information on any UK government system. Which, of course, they need, because of all the radicalised Muslims in the UK who may support al-Qaeda, and they promise not to abuse, so that's OK.
I thought that near/Middle Eastern Jews were known as Mizrahi, and "Sephardic" meant only those originally from Spain/Portugal.
Re:Being good-looking isn't the only issue
on
Tokyo's Geek Ghetto
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· Score: 1
Also, being good looking gives you a certain non-fakable confidence about yourself that is hard to get any other way.
So does not giving a fsck.
Or, as Leonard Cohen said, "we are ugly but we have the music". For music, substitute witty repartee, artistic talent, or the vague collection of attributes known as "personality" or "charm", or whatever (with the usual life-skills/social skills to sustain things, of course). Or, of course, being filthy rich, if you don't mind golddigging Anna Nicole Smith types.
Competition in physical attractiveness is one niche; if you're not naturally cut out for that niche, and can't afford/don't wish to technically change this, there are others. Given that women are (on average) less visually-inclined when choosing mates, those interested in women have more of these niches to choose from.
Being good-looking isn't the only issue
on
Tokyo's Geek Ghetto
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· Score: 2, Insightful
You'd be surprised how many "ugly"-looking men are attractive enough to women who can hold their own in the dating marketplace.
So good looks aren't everything; there are also basic social skills, not talking in a monotone, making eye contact, basic personal hygiene, and being able to hold a conversation about things outside of one's narrow field of specialisation (be it microprogramming, football, the history of punk rock or whatever). And, of course, the skills that come from repeated social interaction with people who don't necessarily share one's interests shouldn't be ignored.
They have to keep their feet planted in hardware. Expect the Apple x86 machines to differ from their PPC machines only in CPU and chipset.
The CPU and chipset were the only technological differences between the PPC machines and x86 PCs; the rest (ATA disks, USB/IEE1394 interfaces, PCI cards) has been identical to PC technology for a decade or so.
(Granted, Macs are better designed/engineered than most PCs, but that's not the point.)
By the average Mac user, I mean their core market of media professionals, who want a computer that efficiently does what they need (i.e., editing video, producing music, authoring for the web), and otherwise is not partisan in the OS debate. These people have been Mac users because the Mac was a superior platform (or maintained the image of one). Now that the Mac will run on Intel hardware much as PCs, a lot of this image is eroded.
Sure, OSX is a better OS, though is it sufficiently better to beat the convenience of Windows' greater software base, especially when your hardware will run either? For most people, who are not techies or OS enthusiasts, the answer would be no.
Fast-forward a few years, when a distinct Mac hardware platform is a distant memory (by computer-industry standards); those Macs that didn't end up kept fondly as museum pieces are landfill, and OSX runs on the same kinds of Intel boxes as Longhorn, which looks just as slick.
Some advocate MacOS X because it's better designed, has fewer security issues, and because Apple have a cooler image than Microsoft. The majority, as always, want something that will play The Sims 2010 and their latest Windows Media movie downloads. This applies to aspiring musicians and film-makers as well, so by moving FCP and Logic to Windows, Apple's market share from these products will increase greatly. (Remember how few people bought iPods back when they were a Mac-only product?) After that, the economic benefits of maintaining OSX as a standalone OS, rather than as a suite of enhancements running over Windows, are dubious.
On PC hardware, OSX will have the same disadvantages BeOS had.
If Apple move to machines which can also run Windows, then OSX is doomed.
Consider this reasoning: most software runs on Windows. The average Mac user who's not a paid-up Penguin Jedi doesn't care about OSX being technically better than Windows; they'd care even less than about the PowerPC being better than x86.
The average person who wants to use a video/music/graphics package on x86 hardware will not want to reboot to OSX every time they wish to use the package. (This has been tried before; the DJing software Final Scratch was first launched for Linux, and proved unpopular for this reason.) And with most things still running on Windows first, only a few users would move permanently to OSX.
One part of Apple's business is selling professional software, such as Shake, FCP and Logic. With their own PPC hardware, this software was incentive to sell Macs; if OSX runs on generic hardware, the software becomes its own concern. And if it runs only on Apple's weird (but advanced) OS, it'll be at a convenience disadvantage to rivals which run on ordinary, everyday Windows.
I predict that, within five years, OSX will be "reinvented" as a compatibility layer on top of Windows. This layer will come "out of the box" with copies of Apple's software (be it iTunes or Final Cut Pro), and users won't even need to know it's there. UNIX purists and techies will cringe, but that's not where the money is.
What's the highest-performance CPU in the ARM line? How much would an ARM architecture lend itself to making high-end workstation CPUs (on a par with the PowerPC 970)?
IIRC, Apple own AltiVec, and could graft that into a desktop-grade ARM. Also, given how compact ARMs are, putting multiple cores on a die may be reasonably easy. Perhaps the goal is to build multiple ARM cores, with extensions, into a Cell-style multiple processor?
(Which, of course, is fairly wild speculation, though, IMHO, it'd make marginally more sense than Apple moving to a x86-based architecture.)
Or the Pentium DRM, which presumably Intel aren't willing to license to IBM or Apple by itself.
Perhaps Hollywood have Apple over a barrel, forcing them to do something desperate, like make an inconvenient switch to a less efficient and more expensive platform in order to get valuable content.
I'm sure the incentive for Blair to comply isn't purely financial; there is probably a stick to go with that carrot. Shortly after he was inaugurated as Prime Minister, he was undoubtedly summoned to the US embassy in Grosvenor Square for a briefing, which would have included an outline of the benefits of being tight with the US and the consequences of non-compliance. (And I don't mean that the US would bomb Britain if it disobeyed or anything; given the degree of US investment in Britain, the economic consequences of disinvestment could be devastating on their own.)
The fact that shortly after his election, Blair, an ostensible socialist, personally bent the rules to allow Wal-Mart to buy supermarket chain Asda, speaks for itself.
I don't think anyone's forcing anything. Just because something comes up for legislative discussion doesn't mean it will pass, and just because you don't agree with the outcome doesn't mean it was achieved by sinister means.
Much as happened with Iraq, or Star Wars 2, you mean?
The UK has no real sovereignty to speak of. The UK signed over its sovereignty on economic and geopolitical issues to Washington in return for the massive aid required to resist Nazi conquest during WW2; as such, British policy has been effectively dictated from Washington since 1945 (well, in all the instances Washington could care about).
Witness, for example, the UK's assent to Bush's "Star Wars 2" missile bases on its soil, without any sort of parliamentary debate or public discussion. Or the fact that the UK's nuclear arsenal is under US control (the missiles are leased from US defense contractors and operated by US technicians; it is safe to say that Washington would have veto power over their use). Or, indeed, the way the British government bent over backwards, forging evidence as needed, to send troops to Iraq as ordered whilst frantically maintaining the illusion that it was acting independently.
There will be a three-line whip on this issue, which means that any government MP who votes against it or abstains faces expulsion from the Labour Party. Would your MP sacrifice their parliamentary perks for such an issue, especially when it's so easy for them to hold their nose and convince themselves that it's for the public good?
In the USSR, political troublemakers and opponents of the regime were often diagnosed as mentally ill, committed to mental institutions, drugged and locked up. The diagnoses were based on the assumption that opposing the system was, in itself, an insane act.
The definition of ODD above, a "mental disorder" characterised by opposition and defiance, sounds uncomfortably like something out of Soviet social psychiatry.
Not all men are considered equally fit by women as partners; if the number of available heterosexual men were to decrease due to war/increased homosexuality/a resurgence in monasticism/whatever, the effect of the decreased supply of a low-fitness male's ability to score would be marginal at best. The alphas would still get more chicks than they could handle and the epsilons would still go without even if they were the only males left. And if the loss in single straight males occurs uniformly from across the fitness levels, the effect will be negligible.
As such, improving one's personal fitness (and how competitive one appears in individual comparisons) will always give one a greater advantage than any sort of Y-chromosome apocalypse.
would be a script which downloads and installs a rootkit and/or IRC-controlled spam relay.
Re:Ok, M$ is bad, but Google is heading the same w
on
Gates on Google
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· Score: 1
The guy who runs google-watch.org is a crank who set up web sites with information about various celebrities and got angry with Google because they didn't give his sites first listing for searches on those celebrities' names.
Slashdot Mirror
Owning or using a SUV in a city as tightly packed as London *should* be an offence (though perhaps not a capital one). There is no reason to drive oversized, fuel-inefficient personal monster trucks in a city which has narrow streets and perfectly usable public transport. At the very least, those who choose to do so out of personal choice should pay some extra tax to offset the inconvenience and increased pollution they are imposing on the other people they share a city with.
The tabloids will surely pick it up and run with it when there is a shortage of other sensational news.
Then again. the British tabloids also run pictures of naked women on page 3, so they may not go as far with it as they would in the US Red States.
Not only that, but the US Government (i.e., the FBI and Department of Homeland Security) are exempted from EU data protection legislation, and have direct access to such information on any UK government system. Which, of course, they need, because of all the radicalised Muslims in the UK who may support al-Qaeda, and they promise not to abuse, so that's OK.
Actually, IIRC, it's a Communist term. It came either from the Leninist/Stalinist USSR or Maoist China.
I thought that near/Middle Eastern Jews were known as Mizrahi, and "Sephardic" meant only those originally from Spain/Portugal.
Also, being good looking gives you a certain non-fakable confidence about yourself that is hard to get any other way.
So does not giving a fsck.
Or, as Leonard Cohen said, "we are ugly but we have the music". For music, substitute witty repartee, artistic talent, or the vague collection of attributes known as "personality" or "charm", or whatever (with the usual life-skills/social skills to sustain things, of course). Or, of course, being filthy rich, if you don't mind golddigging Anna Nicole Smith types.
Competition in physical attractiveness is one niche; if you're not naturally cut out for that niche, and can't afford/don't wish to technically change this, there are others. Given that women are (on average) less visually-inclined when choosing mates, those interested in women have more of these niches to choose from.
You'd be surprised how many "ugly"-looking men are attractive enough to women who can hold their own in the dating marketplace.
So good looks aren't everything; there are also basic social skills, not talking in a monotone, making eye contact, basic personal hygiene, and being able to hold a conversation about things outside of one's narrow field of specialisation (be it microprogramming, football, the history of punk rock or whatever). And, of course, the skills that come from repeated social interaction with people who don't necessarily share one's interests shouldn't be ignored.
They have to keep their feet planted in hardware. Expect the Apple x86 machines to differ from their PPC machines only in CPU and chipset.
The CPU and chipset were the only technological differences between the PPC machines and x86 PCs; the rest (ATA disks, USB/IEE1394 interfaces, PCI cards) has been identical to PC technology for a decade or so.
(Granted, Macs are better designed/engineered than most PCs, but that's not the point.)
By the average Mac user, I mean their core market of media professionals, who want a computer that efficiently does what they need (i.e., editing video, producing music, authoring for the web), and otherwise is not partisan in the OS debate. These people have been Mac users because the Mac was a superior platform (or maintained the image of one). Now that the Mac will run on Intel hardware much as PCs, a lot of this image is eroded.
Sure, OSX is a better OS, though is it sufficiently better to beat the convenience of Windows' greater software base, especially when your hardware will run either? For most people, who are not techies or OS enthusiasts, the answer would be no.
Can you rule out Apple, a few years down the track, inking a deal with, say, Sony or Acer to let OSX run on specific prestige models of theirs?
Fast-forward a few years, when a distinct Mac hardware platform is a distant memory (by computer-industry standards); those Macs that didn't end up kept fondly as museum pieces are landfill, and OSX runs on the same kinds of Intel boxes as Longhorn, which looks just as slick.
Some advocate MacOS X because it's better designed, has fewer security issues, and because Apple have a cooler image than Microsoft. The majority, as always, want something that will play The Sims 2010 and their latest Windows Media movie downloads. This applies to aspiring musicians and film-makers as well, so by moving FCP and Logic to Windows, Apple's market share from these products will increase greatly. (Remember how few people bought iPods back when they were a Mac-only product?) After that, the economic benefits of maintaining OSX as a standalone OS, rather than as a suite of enhancements running over Windows, are dubious.
On PC hardware, OSX will have the same disadvantages BeOS had.
If Apple move to machines which can also run Windows, then OSX is doomed.
Consider this reasoning: most software runs on Windows. The average Mac user who's not a paid-up Penguin Jedi doesn't care about OSX being technically better than Windows; they'd care even less than about the PowerPC being better than x86.
The average person who wants to use a video/music/graphics package on x86 hardware will not want to reboot to OSX every time they wish to use the package. (This has been tried before; the DJing software Final Scratch was first launched for Linux, and proved unpopular for this reason.) And with most things still running on Windows first, only a few users would move permanently to OSX.
One part of Apple's business is selling professional software, such as Shake, FCP and Logic. With their own PPC hardware, this software was incentive to sell Macs; if OSX runs on generic hardware, the software becomes its own concern. And if it runs only on Apple's weird (but advanced) OS, it'll be at a convenience disadvantage to rivals which run on ordinary, everyday Windows.
I predict that, within five years, OSX will be "reinvented" as a compatibility layer on top of Windows. This layer will come "out of the box" with copies of Apple's software (be it iTunes or Final Cut Pro), and users won't even need to know it's there. UNIX purists and techies will cringe, but that's not where the money is.
What's the highest-performance CPU in the ARM line? How much would an ARM architecture lend itself to making high-end workstation CPUs (on a par with the PowerPC 970)?
IIRC, Apple own AltiVec, and could graft that into a desktop-grade ARM. Also, given how compact ARMs are, putting multiple cores on a die may be reasonably easy. Perhaps the goal is to build multiple ARM cores, with extensions, into a Cell-style multiple processor?
(Which, of course, is fairly wild speculation, though, IMHO, it'd make marginally more sense than Apple moving to a x86-based architecture.)
Or the Pentium DRM, which presumably Intel aren't willing to license to IBM or Apple by itself.
Perhaps Hollywood have Apple over a barrel, forcing them to do something desperate, like make an inconvenient switch to a less efficient and more expensive platform in order to get valuable content.
Of course, the 2% of applications that, for some reason, don't get fat binaries will still be a problem; enough of one to annoy users.
If QuickTransit doesn't somehow manage a miracle and get usably fast PowerPC emulation, that could be a big problem.
.se == Sweden, not the UK.
I'm sure the incentive for Blair to comply isn't purely financial; there is probably a stick to go with that carrot. Shortly after he was inaugurated as Prime Minister, he was undoubtedly summoned to the US embassy in Grosvenor Square for a briefing, which would have included an outline of the benefits of being tight with the US and the consequences of non-compliance. (And I don't mean that the US would bomb Britain if it disobeyed or anything; given the degree of US investment in Britain, the economic consequences of disinvestment could be devastating on their own.)
The fact that shortly after his election, Blair, an ostensible socialist, personally bent the rules to allow Wal-Mart to buy supermarket chain Asda, speaks for itself.
I don't think anyone's forcing anything. Just because something comes up for legislative discussion doesn't mean it will pass, and just because you don't agree with the outcome doesn't mean it was achieved by sinister means.
Much as happened with Iraq, or Star Wars 2, you mean?
The UK has no real sovereignty to speak of. The UK signed over its sovereignty on economic and geopolitical issues to Washington in return for the massive aid required to resist Nazi conquest during WW2; as such, British policy has been effectively dictated from Washington since 1945 (well, in all the instances Washington could care about).
Witness, for example, the UK's assent to Bush's "Star Wars 2" missile bases on its soil, without any sort of parliamentary debate or public discussion. Or the fact that the UK's nuclear arsenal is under US control (the missiles are leased from US defense contractors and operated by US technicians; it is safe to say that Washington would have veto power over their use). Or, indeed, the way the British government bent over backwards, forging evidence as needed, to send troops to Iraq as ordered whilst frantically maintaining the illusion that it was acting independently.
There will be a three-line whip on this issue, which means that any government MP who votes against it or abstains faces expulsion from the Labour Party. Would your MP sacrifice their parliamentary perks for such an issue, especially when it's so easy for them to hold their nose and convince themselves that it's for the public good?
In the USSR, political troublemakers and opponents of the regime were often diagnosed as mentally ill, committed to mental institutions, drugged and locked up. The diagnoses were based on the assumption that opposing the system was, in itself, an insane act.
The definition of ODD above, a "mental disorder" characterised by opposition and defiance, sounds uncomfortably like something out of Soviet social psychiatry.
Not all men are considered equally fit by women as partners; if the number of available heterosexual men were to decrease due to war/increased homosexuality/a resurgence in monasticism/whatever, the effect of the decreased supply of a low-fitness male's ability to score would be marginal at best. The alphas would still get more chicks than they could handle and the epsilons would still go without even if they were the only males left. And if the loss in single straight males occurs uniformly from across the fitness levels, the effect will be negligible.
As such, improving one's personal fitness (and how competitive one appears in individual comparisons) will always give one a greater advantage than any sort of Y-chromosome apocalypse.
Those fiends at Microsoft are stealing open protocols? Goodness, what will they stoop to next?
would be a script which downloads and installs a rootkit and/or IRC-controlled spam relay.
The guy who runs google-watch.org is a crank who set up web sites with information about various celebrities and got angry with Google because they didn't give his sites first listing for searches on those celebrities' names.