Following this reasoning is Sun going to pound Apple next for allowing Java access to Cocoa Frameworks? Or do compiled binaries out of ProjectBuilder run in a JVM?
If, on the other hand, you want a toy that can run a fractal program really fast (perhaps povray too) and don't have a real application then this Mac cluster is probably what you need.
What like Maya rendering? Wonder if they've thought of this at Pixar? Imagine that a made to order RENDERFARM! No, no one would want to do that.
Huh. Did anyone else notice that they didn't mention anything about UMA like they hyped up on their O2? I wonder if they ditched UMA for something closer to the rest of the PC world. If so I'm sorry, UMA was a pretty neat idea.
So... how many processors can you fit into a standard 44U enclosure now? If they've got an integral Ethernet switch do you get a gigabit uplink out? This would actually be really cool for Universities/Government Agencies to build insanely great clusters with small floor space. Still if you want insanely great maybe you should cluster a few briQ's together.
Really. Most of the programming I do is in PERL, and I had the same problem. There are TONS of ways to convert POD to other formats. Hell The PERL Cookbook was written in POD with some TROFF markup.
It has always bothered me when people confuse justice and the law. Justice is a subjective concept, something that takes into account emotional ideas and uses subjective deduction to arrive at a conclusion. For the most part the United State's 'Justice' system does little more than interpret laws with a disregard for 'justice'. The legislators have enacted laws that severely restrict Judge's ability to prescribe just punishments or awards for nearly any case that comes before them. How many of you think casual drug law violators should be sent to prison for years? How many think that 'hackers' should be held without bond? These are examples of our 'Justice' system turning a blind eye towards the true meaning of the very word that defines it.
To assume that an AI could distribute justice, is akin to assuming that an AI could teach, or parent. Yes, and AI can help, but the true responsibility should ALWAYS remain with a judge, a human being that can weigh the subjective circumstances and look at the whole picture, not just that that is shown in their courtroom.
Dah... the iPod uses HFS(+?) and is mountable under Linux. You can get at the MP3 files (they're in/Volumes/iPod/iPod Control/Music in OS X)
All that crap about not being able to copy from one machine to another with an iPod? FUD. It's easy. find . -name '*.mp3' -exec cp {} \Users\Shared\Music.
I'm not saying that there photos aren't faked. Let's think about what this could mean though.
I got an iPod for christmas, and I'm already using it quite a bit. Both as an MP3 player, as well as for shuttling files from work the home and back. It's great for that type of thing. Download the latest patches at work and take them home on the iPod.
One thing i did try, was exporting my wife's addressbook to LDIF and transferring it to my iBook. I wasn't all that successful, but it got me thinking. I've already got this cool stripped down iTunes, wouldn't it be cool to be able to take the whole address book thing with me in a form factor the size of the iPod?
That's why the iWalk is so appealing. You can fit a 5 GB drive in that space, along with a decent tft display, with enough cache battery life should be good. If they could squeeze a low power 802.11 chip in there....
This could be something like what PDA's SHOULD be like. The microdrive and low power 802.11 could revolutionize the whole industry. And just think it (would|could) be all built on top of a BSD kernel.
I dearly hope that Apple decides to do something like this. With the iPod they've shown us how an MP3 player SHOULD work. Easy, quick, and with a decent memory. The iPod IS insanely great, despite what others will say to drag it down. Something like the iWalk would just continue that tradition.
Well, looks like the site is already slashdotted, so I haven't read the article yet, but let me shed some light on a few things.
I'm a UNIX person. I've run Linux, Solaris X86, IRIX (yes I had an Indy) at home. I like UNIX. It's what I do for a living, I'm a SysAdmin.
I LOVE OS X. 10.0.4 blew dogs. It's what came with the new iBook I bought this year. 10.1 is prime time, if not ready for the masses. I recently started a new job and was given my choice between a 500 MHz Intel machine running Linux or a G3 at 350MHz running OS X. No brainer dude. Aqua is hands down the best window manager I've ever seen (I never saw a NeXT machine.) Rendering everything in PDF is just mind blowing, and the ease of application development in Cocoa is equally dope.
Here's the thing though. If you're a hardware hacker it's not for you. Plain and simple, neither was the Indy, or the NeXT, or an Ultra Sparc. There are things you just can't do with workstation class machines that you can with desktops.
However, if you're like me and could give a rip about the hardware and tweeking the hell out of it, well Mac OS X is SWEET! It reminds me of the early days of Linux when I'd download something and actually HAVE TO COMPILE IT! Hehehehe, yes i compiled bash, and the fileutils, and even vim on OS X, no problem at all. And since I can't fiddle with the WindowManager I'm not going insane trying to get the current version of Enlightenment (heh a one word oxymoron there) and all it's assinine libraries to compile. I was always partial to WindowMaker anyway, and here's the upgrade!
I'm sorry to say it, maybe I'm a pessimist, but when things have come this far that you hear that people are trying to move you out, it's time to move on.
You can try to talk to the HR Manager, if you feel that you can trust h(im|er) I'd do that. HR Managers that are worth their salt aren't just hire, fire, and benefits people. I've personally always had very good relations with HR Managers. The best ones are honest upstanding people that will tell you that 'yes get out of here on the first boat sailing.'
I know it's tough looking around in this economic climet, believe me I know it's like the party's over and we're left paying the check. If you're as good as you say you are though it shouldn't be too bad, just expect some tough times while you transition and don't expect to find anything local.
Don't expect to find another job that is equal to what you have though. You're spot on that there's descrimination against young people of your age. I can't believe that you've got a 4 year degree at your age, or even a 2 year degree. See the recent discussion about quick college degree's here.
No one is going to believe that you're a SysAdmin god at 20 with no college and no tech school and only a year of experience. Unless maybe you're Evi Nemeth's grandson.
My personal suggestion would be to find a company that needs a Jr. SysAdmin, and find a mentor. No one wants to one-man-band things, and wether you think so or not a mentor is always a good thing. If you're as good as you say you are you'll learn new and interesting things faster than you can imagine, which will prepare you for your next job as a SA, believe me there will be more.
EXCUSE ME?!?! Have you ever seen an O3000? Where you can add disk, or processor, or memory just by buying the appropriate Brick? The really cool stuff just hasn't tickled down to the desktop level yet, but it sounds like the new Octane will share some of these features.
Even with three providers that doesn't assure the absence of a single point of failure. Even assuming that the telco dmarc's are located in different parts of the building, do those com lines come in from the same central office? Or do they eventually take a identical path somewhere?
Company I worked for used to have 5 different providers that came into their data center at different points and they called this good redundancy. Until the day when a barge clipped all 5 lines going under a bridge on the Mississippi.
Yeah, very nice. However if you're big enough to house servers there you should be big enough to have servers in multiple smaller/less available locations and have Akamai or some other internet wide distributed provider load balance between them.
Looks like a big basket to me. Would you put all your eggs there?
I can understand the desire to have a degree, there are institutions that really want you to have that piece of paper that says you're in debt to a student loan processing center. I personally am in a similar situation with only a two year degree (electronics) and 7 years of IT experience. Here's my question though? Why do you want a CS Degree? Really, most employers are looking for *A* degree, it doesn't usually have to be a CS degree perse, especially with your experience.
If you're looking to advance your current career I'd say an MIS Degree (Management of Information Systems) would look better on your resume than a CS Degree.
It's been my experience that CS programs teach people to be programmers. How many CIO's and IT Directors are there that have come from the programming pool? Less than 1/2? Yes, programming is one road into an IT Career, but it certainly isn't the only one, or even the road that is the quickest.
All that said... a Degree isn't like an MCSE, you have to put in some time to get that piece of paper, but it'll be worth the time. Take the three years and learn something that will stick with you, rather than the current flavor of the day programming language.
1. Unless Motorola (ha!) or IBM (more likely, but still... ha!) can close the performance gap with commodity x86 hardware, the scientific computing market will stick with the bang for the buck that the beige box world provides.
Ummm have you seen the price of an iMac lately? I'd say the gap is closed. Now if all you're talking about is MHz and processing power tell me why companies are replacing 64 processor Sun E10K's with 24 Processor IBM S80's. Those S80's run the same PowerPC core as a Mac G4. (They're actually the POWER4 derivitive.) MHz isn't everything.
2. Neither Linux (currently technically incapable) or OS X (incompatible hardware) are in a position to challenge MS for the commodity desktop. This situation is not likely to change any time soon.
If Microsoft keeps raising prices on their OS who knows?
3. OS X will/never/ be ported to x86.
Excuse me? Darwin has been ported to X86. The layers above Darwin haven't been ported. This argument is analogus to saying RedHat will never be ported to PPC.
Porting OS X to x86 would be very very similar to porting a Linux distribution to a different architecture. You're not talking about the majority of developers haveing to make a large painfull move. That is what the Carbon/Cocoa move is. Moving to a different architecture should be trivial for all but device driver developers, and that probably wouldn't be as bad as you think, most of the work has been done in the *BSD community.
Apple does make their money on hardware, just like Sun does, but have you really looked at Apple hardware recently? The iMac might as well be an eMachine with different processor and a design engineer that has a clue about style. It runs an ATA Hard drive, regular ol DRAM DIMMS, identical USB to PeeCee's. Hell the only thing different about it is the built in antenna for the AirPort (oh sorry that's just standard 802.11B/Orinoco) and the Firewire ports.
And I constantly try to ctrl-click in windows, hit Alt-q (apple-q) to quit, and try to navigate in word using vi commands. This is a non-point. You will always have this when hopping between OS's and even Apps. Just because the microsoft way to do things is what most users know does not mean that all other OS's/Apps should do things the Microsoft way.
I would have to humbly suggest that if you really like the CLI that much you check out the new EMACSOS. That's right you can learn obscure commands and syntax, write your own services, hell probably even serve web pages all without leaving the comfortable enclave of EMACS.
I'm a vim user can you tell?
Seriously though, I'm a SysAdmin who takes care of both Windoze and Solaris boxen, and I must say that I love my PowerMac. I'm in the shell all day (bash) editing source code (vim) in my language of choice (perl). All those tools that you think are missing? They're available from ftp.gnu.org, and compile rather nicely on MacOS X. You do know how to./configure make and make install don't you?
Do you have any idea how far $42k/yr goes in Rural Washington? If it's anything like rural Iowa I'd say he's doing pretty well. All people seem to see is $$$$, but when you get down to brass tacks and realize what the cost of living is in more remote areas, (and the fewer headaches associated with working on a smaller scale) it usually pays more to take a lower paying job in an out of the way place. What actually buys you more and provides a better quality of life $42k in rural washington or $90k in Boulder Colorado?
Ok, now that I've actually read through all of it... Ummm could someone please tell the reporter that General and Special relativity don't have much to do with particle physics?
General and Special relativity are theories of the large, describing gravity and the warping of space/time due to gravity.
Quantum Mechanics is the theory of the small, at the particle and sub-atomic level and it's a nasty dirty theory that has all kinds of exceptions and sepcial rules.
The problem in particle physics today is that you can't join Relativity and Quantum Mechanics without some nasty consequences, infinities, zeros and things that don't make much sense. Not that physisits haven't tried. The current merger of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics is the Standard Model. Which works but doesn't expain WHY it works.
The String theorists have a theory that does merge Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, and solves the problems of inifinities and zeros, however current string theory is only an approximation and isn't refined enough for experimentation yet. That is predictions from String Theory can't be tested in the lab at the energies that are available. Who knows you may only be able to test string theory with a big bang, and then look out everything starts over again.
Again, I'd be interested to see a piece on this in Scientific American or some other Science journal that can delve a little deeper into the solid-state theory and see where it fits between the Standard Model and String Theory.
I do wonder if the solid-staters look at things in 10 or 11 dimensions do they start looking like strings?
All I can say is well DUH! I'm not expert, but I have read a few things about super string theory and have to say that it really is more elegant than the standard model, the theory that particle physists use. Just fom a cursory glance at this article it sounds like the solid-state folks are proposing something similar to the super stringers. That particles are at their root a function of space and how it vibrates.
What I'd really like to see is some comparison between this new theory and string theory (it could be in there I didn't read past what was posted here)
Ummm yes, there are those of us that have decided that a full featured next generation desktop over a UNIX underbelly is a good thing, especially when it's married to some of the best hardware in the PC world. Show me a Linux distribution with a Window manager based on PDF and support for Adobe applications and I'll switch.
It would be difficult because Office v. X looks to be built in Cocoa, the widget set it completely different than GTK or KDE, and it's probably dependant on Quartz to do rendering. So... If someone were to port Quartz and Aqua to *BSD then yes it would be portable. However I don't think Apple will be doing that anytime soon.
They can have my old monster IBM clicky keyboard when they pry it from my cold dead fingers, besides you can't bludgeon co-workers to death with this thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Following this reasoning is Sun going to pound Apple next for allowing Java access to Cocoa Frameworks? Or do compiled binaries out of ProjectBuilder run in a JVM?
If, on the other hand, you want a toy that can run a fractal program really fast (perhaps povray too) and don't have a real application then this Mac cluster is probably what you need.
What like Maya rendering? Wonder if they've thought of this at Pixar? Imagine that a made to order RENDERFARM! No, no one would want to do that.
Huh. Did anyone else notice that they didn't mention anything about UMA like they hyped up on their O2? I wonder if they ditched UMA for something closer to the rest of the PC world. If so I'm sorry, UMA was a pretty neat idea.
You'll be working with stuff that's had to evolve in a much more Darwinian environment
Am I the only one who finds this troll ironic? After all Darwin's native development environment is Apple supplied PPC systems.
So... how many processors can you fit into a standard 44U enclosure now? If they've got an integral Ethernet switch do you get a gigabit uplink out? This would actually be really cool for Universities/Government Agencies to build insanely great clusters with small floor space. Still if you want insanely great maybe you should cluster a few briQ's together.
Really. Most of the programming I do is in PERL, and I had the same problem. There are TONS of ways to convert POD to other formats. Hell The PERL Cookbook was written in POD with some TROFF markup.
Think about it, build Gnustep over Darwin x86 and you have... A Frankenstein's monster version of Mac OS X for x86.
It has always bothered me when people confuse justice and the law. Justice is a subjective concept, something that takes into account emotional ideas and uses subjective deduction to arrive at a conclusion. For the most part the United State's 'Justice' system does little more than interpret laws with a disregard for 'justice'. The legislators have enacted laws that severely restrict Judge's ability to prescribe just punishments or awards for nearly any case that comes before them. How many of you think casual drug law violators should be sent to prison for years? How many think that 'hackers' should be held without bond? These are examples of our 'Justice' system turning a blind eye towards the true meaning of the very word that defines it.
To assume that an AI could distribute justice, is akin to assuming that an AI could teach, or parent. Yes, and AI can help, but the true responsibility should ALWAYS remain with a judge, a human being that can weigh the subjective circumstances and look at the whole picture, not just that that is shown in their courtroom.
Dah... the iPod uses HFS(+?) and is mountable under Linux. You can get at the MP3 files (they're in /Volumes/iPod/iPod Control/Music in OS X)
All that crap about not being able to copy from one machine to another with an iPod? FUD. It's easy. find . -name '*.mp3' -exec cp {} \Users\Shared\Music.
I'm not saying that there photos aren't faked. Let's think about what this could mean though.
I got an iPod for christmas, and I'm already using it quite a bit. Both as an MP3 player, as well as for shuttling files from work the home and back. It's great for that type of thing. Download the latest patches at work and take them home on the iPod.
One thing i did try, was exporting my wife's addressbook to LDIF and transferring it to my iBook. I wasn't all that successful, but it got me thinking. I've already got this cool stripped down iTunes, wouldn't it be cool to be able to take the whole address book thing with me in a form factor the size of the iPod?
That's why the iWalk is so appealing. You can fit a 5 GB drive in that space, along with a decent tft display, with enough cache battery life should be good. If they could squeeze a low power 802.11 chip in there....
This could be something like what PDA's SHOULD be like. The microdrive and low power 802.11 could revolutionize the whole industry. And just think it (would|could) be all built on top of a BSD kernel.
I dearly hope that Apple decides to do something like this. With the iPod they've shown us how an MP3 player SHOULD work. Easy, quick, and with a decent memory. The iPod IS insanely great, despite what others will say to drag it down. Something like the iWalk would just continue that tradition.
Well, looks like the site is already slashdotted, so I haven't read the article yet, but let me shed some light on a few things.
I'm a UNIX person. I've run Linux, Solaris X86, IRIX (yes I had an Indy) at home. I like UNIX. It's what I do for a living, I'm a SysAdmin.
I LOVE OS X. 10.0.4 blew dogs. It's what came with the new iBook I bought this year. 10.1 is prime time, if not ready for the masses. I recently started a new job and was given my choice between a 500 MHz Intel machine running Linux or a G3 at 350MHz running OS X. No brainer dude. Aqua is hands down the best window manager I've ever seen (I never saw a NeXT machine.) Rendering everything in PDF is just mind blowing, and the ease of application development in Cocoa is equally dope.
Here's the thing though. If you're a hardware hacker it's not for you. Plain and simple, neither was the Indy, or the NeXT, or an Ultra Sparc. There are things you just can't do with workstation class machines that you can with desktops.
However, if you're like me and could give a rip about the hardware and tweeking the hell out of it, well Mac OS X is SWEET! It reminds me of the early days of Linux when I'd download something and actually HAVE TO COMPILE IT! Hehehehe, yes i compiled bash, and the fileutils, and even vim on OS X, no problem at all. And since I can't fiddle with the WindowManager I'm not going insane trying to get the current version of Enlightenment (heh a one word oxymoron there) and all it's assinine libraries to compile. I was always partial to WindowMaker anyway, and here's the upgrade!
I'm sorry to say it, maybe I'm a pessimist, but when things have come this far that you hear that people are trying to move you out, it's time to move on.
You can try to talk to the HR Manager, if you feel that you can trust h(im|er) I'd do that. HR Managers that are worth their salt aren't just hire, fire, and benefits people. I've personally always had very good relations with HR Managers. The best ones are honest upstanding people that will tell you that 'yes get out of here on the first boat sailing.'
I know it's tough looking around in this economic climet, believe me I know it's like the party's over and we're left paying the check. If you're as good as you say you are though it shouldn't be too bad, just expect some tough times while you transition and don't expect to find anything local.
Don't expect to find another job that is equal to what you have though. You're spot on that there's descrimination against young people of your age. I can't believe that you've got a 4 year degree at your age, or even a 2 year degree. See the recent discussion about quick college degree's here.
No one is going to believe that you're a SysAdmin god at 20 with no college and no tech school and only a year of experience. Unless maybe you're Evi Nemeth's grandson.
My personal suggestion would be to find a company that needs a Jr. SysAdmin, and find a mentor. No one wants to one-man-band things, and wether you think so or not a mentor is always a good thing. If you're as good as you say you are you'll learn new and interesting things faster than you can imagine, which will prepare you for your next job as a SA, believe me there will be more.
1. Lack of extensibility.
EXCUSE ME?!?! Have you ever seen an O3000? Where you can add disk, or processor, or memory just by buying the appropriate Brick? The really cool stuff just hasn't tickled down to the desktop level yet, but it sounds like the new Octane will share some of these features.
Even with three providers that doesn't assure the absence of a single point of failure. Even assuming that the telco dmarc's are located in different parts of the building, do those com lines come in from the same central office? Or do they eventually take a identical path somewhere?
Company I worked for used to have 5 different providers that came into their data center at different points and they called this good redundancy. Until the day when a barge clipped all 5 lines going under a bridge on the Mississippi.
Yeah, very nice. However if you're big enough to house servers there you should be big enough to have servers in multiple smaller/less available locations and have Akamai or some other internet wide distributed provider load balance between them.
Looks like a big basket to me. Would you put all your eggs there?
I can understand the desire to have a degree, there are institutions that really want you to have that piece of paper that says you're in debt to a student loan processing center. I personally am in a similar situation with only a two year degree (electronics) and 7 years of IT experience. Here's my question though? Why do you want a CS Degree? Really, most employers are looking for *A* degree, it doesn't usually have to be a CS degree perse, especially with your experience.
If you're looking to advance your current career I'd say an MIS Degree (Management of Information Systems) would look better on your resume than a CS Degree.
It's been my experience that CS programs teach people to be programmers. How many CIO's and IT Directors are there that have come from the programming pool? Less than 1/2? Yes, programming is one road into an IT Career, but it certainly isn't the only one, or even the road that is the quickest.
All that said... a Degree isn't like an MCSE, you have to put in some time to get that piece of paper, but it'll be worth the time. Take the three years and learn something that will stick with you, rather than the current flavor of the day programming language.
1. Unless Motorola (ha!) or IBM (more likely, but still ... ha!) can close the performance gap with commodity x86 hardware, the scientific computing market will stick with the bang for the buck that the beige box world provides.
/never/ be ported to x86.
Excuse me? Darwin has been ported to X86. The layers above Darwin haven't been ported. This argument is analogus to saying RedHat will never be ported to PPC.
Ummm have you seen the price of an iMac lately? I'd say the gap is closed. Now if all you're talking about is MHz and processing power tell me why companies are replacing 64 processor Sun E10K's with 24 Processor IBM S80's. Those S80's run the same PowerPC core as a Mac G4. (They're actually the POWER4 derivitive.) MHz isn't everything.
2. Neither Linux (currently technically incapable) or OS X (incompatible hardware) are in a position to challenge MS for the commodity desktop. This situation is not likely to change any time soon.
If Microsoft keeps raising prices on their OS who knows?
3. OS X will
Porting OS X to x86 would be very very similar to porting a Linux distribution to a different architecture. You're not talking about the majority of developers haveing to make a large painfull move. That is what the Carbon/Cocoa move is. Moving to a different architecture should be trivial for all but device driver developers, and that probably wouldn't be as bad as you think, most of the work has been done in the *BSD community.
Apple does make their money on hardware, just like Sun does, but have you really looked at Apple hardware recently? The iMac might as well be an eMachine with different processor and a design engineer that has a clue about style. It runs an ATA Hard drive, regular ol DRAM DIMMS, identical USB to PeeCee's. Hell the only thing different about it is the built in antenna for the AirPort (oh sorry that's just standard 802.11B/Orinoco) and the Firewire ports.
And I constantly try to ctrl-click in windows, hit Alt-q (apple-q) to quit, and try to navigate in word using vi commands. This is a non-point. You will always have this when hopping between OS's and even Apps. Just because the microsoft way to do things is what most users know does not mean that all other OS's/Apps should do things the Microsoft way.
I would have to humbly suggest that if you really like the CLI that much you check out the new EMACSOS. That's right you can learn obscure commands and syntax, write your own services, hell probably even serve web pages all without leaving the comfortable enclave of EMACS.
./configure make and make install don't you?
I'm a vim user can you tell?
Seriously though, I'm a SysAdmin who takes care of both Windoze and Solaris boxen, and I must say that I love my PowerMac. I'm in the shell all day (bash) editing source code (vim) in my language of choice (perl). All those tools that you think are missing? They're available from ftp.gnu.org, and compile rather nicely on MacOS X. You do know how to
Do you have any idea how far $42k/yr goes in Rural Washington? If it's anything like rural Iowa I'd say he's doing pretty well. All people seem to see is $$$$, but when you get down to brass tacks and realize what the cost of living is in more remote areas, (and the fewer headaches associated with working on a smaller scale) it usually pays more to take a lower paying job in an out of the way place. What actually buys you more and provides a better quality of life $42k in rural washington or $90k in Boulder Colorado?
Ok, now that I've actually read through all of it... Ummm could someone please tell the reporter that General and Special relativity don't have much to do with particle physics?
General and Special relativity are theories of the large, describing gravity and the warping of space/time due to gravity.
Quantum Mechanics is the theory of the small, at the particle and sub-atomic level and it's a nasty dirty theory that has all kinds of exceptions and sepcial rules.
The problem in particle physics today is that you can't join Relativity and Quantum Mechanics without some nasty consequences, infinities, zeros and things that don't make much sense. Not that physisits haven't tried. The current merger of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics is the Standard Model. Which works but doesn't expain WHY it works.
The String theorists have a theory that does merge Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, and solves the problems of inifinities and zeros, however current string theory is only an approximation and isn't refined enough for experimentation yet. That is predictions from String Theory can't be tested in the lab at the energies that are available. Who knows you may only be able to test string theory with a big bang, and then look out everything starts over again.
Again, I'd be interested to see a piece on this in Scientific American or some other Science journal that can delve a little deeper into the solid-state theory and see where it fits between the Standard Model and String Theory.
I do wonder if the solid-staters look at things in 10 or 11 dimensions do they start looking like strings?
All I can say is well DUH! I'm not expert, but I have read a few things about super string theory and have to say that it really is more elegant than the standard model, the theory that particle physists use. Just fom a cursory glance at this article it sounds like the solid-state folks are proposing something similar to the super stringers. That particles are at their root a function of space and how it vibrates.
What I'd really like to see is some comparison between this new theory and string theory (it could be in there I didn't read past what was posted here)
Ummm yes, there are those of us that have decided that a full featured next generation desktop over a UNIX underbelly is a good thing, especially when it's married to some of the best hardware in the PC world. Show me a Linux distribution with a Window manager based on PDF and support for Adobe applications and I'll switch.
It would be difficult because Office v. X looks to be built in Cocoa, the widget set it completely different than GTK or KDE, and it's probably dependant on Quartz to do rendering. So... If someone were to port Quartz and Aqua to *BSD then yes it would be portable. However I don't think Apple will be doing that anytime soon.
They can have my old monster IBM clicky keyboard when they pry it from my cold dead fingers, besides you can't bludgeon co-workers to death with this thing.