Well, first of all, you can't live completely without meat. You need certain proteins that you can't get anywhere else.
Actually, that's not true. By "proteins" you really mean amino acids, of course. And all of the amino acids that we need can be gotten from plants. It's really that animals are a higher-quality source of amino acids than plants. A chunk of meat gives you all of the kinds of amino acids that you need, in about the right balance, while no plant does. You can get all the amino acids you need from various mixtures of plants, such as the common grains+legumes eaten in a lot of cultures. But you have to know a bit to do this, or eat one of the traditional diets of people who have learned by trial and error what's a healthy mixture.
There are also some vitamins that are easier to get from animal sources, though they are all available from the right plants. Similarly, there are vitamins that you can only get from plants.
Nothin like a good steak. Nice NY Strip, medium well....
That's the real reason. Humans are omnivores, and most of us really like the taste of meat. With care and knowledge, a purely vegetarian diet is possible. But it's a bit boring to most people raised on a meaty diet. Meat just tastes so good to critters like us, and it's difficult to persuade people to give up such good-tasting food without very good reason.
It's funny how this can work. We have a couple of pet cockatiels, and the books on caring for your pet bird will tell you that cockatiels are strictly seed eaters. Ours didn't read the books. I have a couple of cute pictures of them on the table, next to a piece of steak that outweighed both of them, and they're happily biting into the steak. They especially love the fat. I have this image of a flock of 1000 cockatiels descending on a cow and ripping it to pieces. The cattle growers in Australia should hope that nobody ever teaches the wild ones how tasty beef is. They also like cheese, and if I'm eating a cheeseburger, they'll land on my hand and nibble the meat and cheese, ignoring the bread that's made of their natural grain diet.
Really? They looked like prairies and fields to me. Wait, are they farming grass?
In many cases, that's what they're doing. Ohio has a significant dairy output, and grasses are pretty good food for cows. For half the year, you don't even need to harvest it, you just let the cows out into the field. They mow the grass for you and replace it with lots of fresh fertilizer to grow the next crop. This works with steers, too, though they don't produce milk. (OTOH, you don't have to milk them a couple times a day.)
There's also "fallow" land. (Google it.;-) And some of the land is actually "unused", by humans at least. But in Ohio, that's a lot less area than you might guess by just looking out the window as you drive (or fly) by. There's not much actual wild land in Ohio.
Or has science devolved to the point where we just change the definitions to give us the answers we want, rather than looking at the evidence and following it to where it leads?
Actually, when it comes to terms like "planet", we've pretty much done just that. The original term "planeta" was from the Greek, and meant "wanderer". It was a term that referred to the celestial objects that "wandered" about the firmament, unlike the thousands of fixed stars that stayed in the same position. The list of planets included the sun and moon, but it didn't include the Earth, because from our viewpoint, the Earth doesn't wander about in the night sky.
Eventually people figured out that the Earth wasn't the center of everything, and made a revised heliocentric model. In that model, it was the sun that was stationary at the center, and the Earth became a planet that wandered about in an elliptical orbit. The moon got demoted to a different class at about the same time, because it appeared to orbit the Earth rather than the sun, putting it into a class with the four moons of Jupiter that people could see through telescopes. We went from Earth+planets+stars to sun+planets+moons+stars, and three bodies changed their classification.
So, yes, we did change the definition of "planet" back then to give us the answers we wanted. This was done because the prevailing definition of "planet" only worked for the Earth-centered model, and we'd decided to throw that model out. We didn't discard the term "planet"; we just gave it a new definition that fit the new model (and added "moon" as a classifier for a set that quickly picked up a lot of members).
In any case, there is a certain silliness to the seriousness of a debate over what is really a minor descriptive term that has little actual physical meaning. Thus, it has been pointed out that Titan is much more Earth-like than is Mercury, but Titan is called a moon rather than a planet. Earth's moon is more like Mercury than it is like Titan, including having an orbit about the sun that's nearly circular, leading some astronomers to propose calling the Earth/Luna system a "binary planet" rather than a planet and a moon. This isn't so much a serious suggestion, as it is pointing out the silliness of the argument and the irrelevancy of the terms in question.
Scientists do occasionally revise their definitions of technical terms to fit with the prevailing theories. Sometimes they make up new terms, of course. But sometimes it's easier to just tweak the definitions of the old terms.
Think of the poor, starving artists ...
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Who Owns Software?
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· Score: 1
This is something that artists of various stripes have been pushing for some time. Others have mentioned cases like architects suing a building's owner for making alterations outside the original design. There are also various public works of art (e.g. the giant reflective metal "bean" in downtown Chicago, whose creator has attempted to forbid unlicensed photos).
It could be especially fun to consider the effect of this extension of copyright to literature. It would end such practices as literary criticism and the discussion of literary works in college classrooms. After all, negative criticism and analyses contrary to the author's ideas would be a copyright violation.
Lest anyone thing this is too extreme a concept, I'd point out that I've read Microsoft EULAs which explicitly forbid publishing criticisms or the results of benchmarks that compare the software with other competing products. So far, I haven't actually read of any court decisions on the legality of such restrictions. Anyone know if this use of copyright has been tested in any courts?
Some time back, I read a prediction that here in the US, the First Amendment (which establishes freedom of speech, among other freedoms) will eventually become moot due to the gradual extension of copyright law. It's growing difficult to create a sentence that's not similar to one that has already been "published" somewhere. Now that everything you or I write is copyrighted as soon as we "publish" it (perhaps by posting it to a forum such as/.), it's not all that far out to suggest that eventually everything we say or write will infringe someone else's copyright. Except, of course, for those of us who restrict our speech to only quotations from documents whose copyright has expired.
The stated problem is that ISPs are upset with the P2P traffic because of its heavy load and want to throttle it. The proposed solution is supposed to increase my download speed. This seems to me to sound like exactly what will make my ISP even more upset.
If the ISPs' claims are correct, what would make them happy would be P2P software that throttles itself to a very low transfer rate. The longer it takes me to download (or upload) a file, the less bandwidth I'm using at any given time, and the happier the ISP is.
So why should an ISP be supportive of this proposed "solution"? Yeah, I'd like it. But I'd expect the ISPs to go after it and throttle it to a crawl. Or do as Comcast has been doing, and just outright kill any connections that look like file transfers.
We further show that knowledge of hierarchical structure can be used to predict missing connections in partly known networks with high accuracy,...
It's a scheme for... inferring what links might be missing.
And this is the point where any sensible person would get a distinct paranoid feeling. It's not hard to imagine how this might be misused.
Thus, I have a large number of connections to other software developers. I also have a lot of connections to other musicians. I have a CS degree from the U of Wisconsin, which gives me another large set of links. A close friend in my high school class is CEO of a corporation that everyone here has heard of. My wife and I own a Mini Cooper (great car!), which gives us another growing set of connections. And on and on, for a fair number of unrelated subject areas.
Suppose now that an analysis of the various sets that I'm involved with turns up a close friend of Osama bin Laden in each set. The obvious fear is that the above heirarchical-analysis scheme will fill in the "missing link" between Osama and myself. Since I live in the US, this would make me highly suspect to a lot of people currently in power.
Of course, in a rational world, this scenario would actually show the silliness of attempts to infer such links, as well as the absurdity of imposing a heirarchy on the structure of an unstructured rat's nest of links like the Internet. But we don't really live in a rational world, do we?
I thought OLPC was about using technology to help kids to learn technology so that they can do any number of things that technology can potentially offer them. I though that that was why Free software seemed to make so much sense.
Well, apparently you thought wrong. By "learn technology" they didn't really mean to give the kids the understanding to develop their own computer industry. The technology that the kids are supposed to learn is using Microsoft software, so that their present and future masters will want to hire them in entry-level jobs. No understanding of the underlying computer technology is necessary for this. All they need is how to use the specific Microsoft apps that their employers want to pay for.
Free/open software only makes sense if you want to impart understanding. But it's a threat to the kids future masters, as it would empower them to take control of their own computer systems and develop their own products.
It should come as no surprise that the wealthy folks in any country would eventually notice this, and exert pressure to restrict what the kids can learn with their little computers. Understanding of the computers isn't what's wanted. The ability to use of a small set of commercial apps is what's wanted.
Just because they work the same way doesn't make Linux a copy of UNIX...
Actually, it's pretty well documented that the original linux was an implementation of the POSIX standard. And POSIX was openly based on Sys/V. So they should work the same way. But is this what "copy" means? If I use a published government standard doc, can I really be charged with "copying" whatever that standard was based on?
Darl's claim does raise an interesting question: Is he claiming that SCO owns everything based on POSIX? If the court supports this, then he has successfully destroyed much of the US system of government standards. Every standard based on previous industrial usage is in immediate danger of being proprietary, and anything based on a US standard can lead to huge royalty payments, if his claim is upheld.
So is it legally safe to use the POSIX standard? Can any actual IP lawyer assure us that we can safely base our work on this or any other US government standard, without fear of retroactive royalties in the future?
I once had a friend whose cat was named "Bird". She named it that so that when a (prospective) landl{ord|ady} asked whether she had any pets, she could honestly say "Just my Bird". And I have a pet cockatiel named "Three", but that's a much longer story that would be OT here.
Of course, there are many internets, probably a few thousand of them, but there's only one Internet, whose name is properly capitalized. This is important to the pedants among(st) us.
And I have one of those t-shirts that asks "Does anal retentive have a hyphen?" And yes, I know the correct answer to that one.
Will this new network include IPv6 access, or will./ remain in the 20th Century?
Actually, the main thing that would make for 21st-Century cred is accepting UTF-8 text.
I've had a couple of posts recently on topics where it would have been better to use Chinese or Japanese characters (though not very many of them). I had to settle for pinyin/romaji instead, which isn't really ideal. The ability to correctly include text in non-Western language is of growing importance in the world, even to people whose primary language is English.
Of course, there are somewhat similar sites in other parts of the Web that work in languages other than English. The real problem is the barrier between the English-speaking world and the rest of the world, caused by our ongoing inability to include text in other major languages inside our English text, even as small examples.
Well, in the context of this discussion, that's easy: A "bad" person clearly means anyone who wants to read my files without my permission.
(I could get all political and name various organizations, governments, corportations, etc. that qualify, but it's more fun to leave that as an exercise for the reader.;-)
The law needs to be adapted to allow legally sanctioned actions like the one proposed to happen to fix the problem.
Actually, "the law" doesn't "need" anything. Laws don't need; they just are. They are often written by clueless legislative assistants. And they very often outlive their original intended function.
Here in the US, we still have laws on the books from a century ago that impose speed limits of 5 or 10 mph for motor vehicles, and supposedly one state still has a law on the books requiring that all motor vehicles be preceded by a man on horseback to warn the populace. A while ago, I read of a law supposedly still in effect in Alabama that requires all men to carry a gun or rifle when attending church, to protect the congregation from the "heathen Indians".
The idea that "the law" will handle things such as a computer worm that does a search-and-destroy on another worm is silly in the extreme. It doesn't matter how much we may need such changes in the laws; the chances of such changes being made in any legislature are rather slim. We're talking about politicians here, the same sort of folks who brought us the humor about the Internet being a series of tubes.
The best advice in such cases is probably the obvious: Yes, you should work on such beneficial tools. But you should be just as paranoid as the authors of the malware that you're hunting. Be sure to cover your tracks very carefully, because if "the law" tracks you down, you will be treated as just another evil, virus-writing, computer-hacking nerd. It won't matter in the least that you're a public benefactor. The legal system doesn't (and can't) make such fine distinctions.
Besides using Windows does not prevent a person from using Linux,...
Uh, here in the US, that's often exactly what happens. There have been any number of stories about schools that get Windows machines because they got a very good price on them. Then after they've been delivered and used for a few months, a Microsoft rep shows up and "discovers" non-MS machines, typically Macs or linux boxes. The MS guy points out a clause they hadn't noticed in the sales contract: If any non-MS computers are discovered in the school, the price of the Windows machines doubles. He gives them a choice: Get rid of all the non-MS systems, or pay the full price on their Windows machines. Inevitably, the school administrators order all non-MS computers removed from the school.
So yes, Windows can and does prevent people from using linux, especially in schools.
It's actually 1200x900. I'm not sure where you got your numbers from.
And that's only about 1% different from the screen on the Mac Powerbook that I'm typing this on. So both should be able to display about the same amount of info, right?
On this PB, I have four 90x30 non-overlapping Terminal windows open, with three of them ssh'd to other machines that I'm working on. With the XO, as far as I can tell, I can only get one terminal window at a time, and it's fewer chars than 90x30 (though I don't offhand remember its actual size).
This seriously restricts its use for a lot of things that you'd think the kids would want to do. It's really hard to develop python (or any OO) code in a single window. In OO languages, the info you need to work on code is distributed widely inside different modules, and the only time-efficient way to work on such code is with multiple text (or editor) windows. Yeah, you can do it in one window, but it's slow and frustrating.
It seems clear that part of the intent of the OLPC project is a laptop that can teach kids about computers. This is the main reason for insisting on open-source everything. The kids should be able to study the code and develop their own code. But the Sugar UI seriously cripples this task by restricting what's visible to only one "window" at a time. This isn't necessitated by the small screen; the screen has a lot of pixels and most of those kids have good eyes.
I'd be happy with a UI on the XO that shows me my four terminal windows with chars 1/2 the height and width as on this Mac, because I'd be able to read them without problems (and I'm over 50;-). And I'd be able to use it to get serious work (and learning) done. Maybe I should look into running a real OS (like linux or free/openBSD) on it, and running Sugar as a process that talks to X-Windows. I wonder how I'd learn to do that?
I'm still laughing while typing this response. Thank-you!
Note that we've had any number of slashdot discussions of the scenario: Some time in the near future, people are arrested and prosecuted for walking down the sidewalk while whistling a copyrighted tune. Yeah, it's funny, but it's also only a small stretch from what's been going on in the past few years.
2) How is it bad to teach people what a significant number of people believe? How can you argue against something you don't understand yourself? 3) You're essential argument boils down to (from what I read) "non-scientific = WRONG, therefore should not be taught in any capacity"
Actually, that's not what most of the scientific crowd is arguing. Few of them object to teaching about creationism; they just object to it being taught as science.
A fairly good parallel that doesn't (usually;-) invoke religious attitudes is to look at the teaching of languages. About a billion people speak Mandarin Chinese, which you've gotta admit is a "significant number of people". And Mandarin is becoming sufficiently important that courses in it are appearing in schools all over the world.
However, Mandarin isn't taught in Spanish or French or German or Russian or English classes. That would be obviously wrong; it should be taught in a Mandarin class. It makes no sense to teach languages X and Y together, unless X and Y are closely-related dialects of a single language.
There are interesting cases like French, Spanish and Italian, which are close relatives, and have continuous dialects between them so that there's no natural language borders. But this doesn't mean that you teach all three as a single language (perhaps called "modern Latin";-). Furthermore, you don't let school administrators decide what can be taught in French, Spanish or Italian classes. You give that job to the teachers who understand the languages well, and who are willing to teach the standard dialects of each even when their own native dialect isn't the standard.
This should carry over into subjects like science, math and philosophy. What should be taught in each should be determined by those who are well-educated in each subject area, not by bureaucrats or politicians.
It's clearly understood among scientists that creationism doesn't qualify as science, and can't qualify until someone finds ways to test it scientifically. It does have a place in History of Science classes, as do other conjectures and hypotheses such as phlogiston and the luminiferous aether. (Some physics tests to mention the aether, and point out that Einstein didn't disprove it. He just showed that it wasn't necessary to explain the universe.)
But since creationism hasn't been tested to the usual scientific standards, teaching it in a science class is inappropriate. It would be a lot like teaching Mandarin grammar in a Spanish class. This isn't to say that Mandarin grammar is "wrong"; it's just wrong when you're trying to speak Spanish. Spanish grammar would be equally wrong in a Mandarin class.
Actually, this sort of understanding of right and wrong turns up all the time in the collaboration of science and mathematics. Mathematicians work routinely with "worlds" that can't possibly describe our universe. It's entirely correct to do this within the math arena. Thus, finite non-Abelian groups are an interesting mathematical topic, and a lot of work has been done on them. But if some physicists were to insist that the real universe is a finite non-Abelian group, we'd treat them as nut cases. Unless someone can come up with scientific tests that support such a hypothesis, it has no place in any physics class.
This isn't just an entertaining parallel. There are physicists who argue that String Theory is on a par with religion, and doesn't (yet) deserve a place in serious scientific discussions or classes. When Quantum Mechanics first appeared on the scene, people made similar arguments. With QM, people found ways of testing it, and it passed pretty much all of its tests, so QM is now an accepted part of scientific theory. String Theory isn't there yet. But physicists are trying to find ways to test it.
Now if we could just get the creationists to propose some good, scientific ways of testing their "theory" (which is actually just a hypothesis). If they want scientists to take them seriously, they should be doing this, rather than just trying to poke holes' in other theories. In science, debunking someone else's theory doesn't count as support for your own theory.
Comcast admitted to delaying P2P traffic during peak times, but denied that any file-sharing applications were being completely blocked.
This sounds like the typical "non-denial denial", of the classical "weasel words" variety. For it to be true, all they need to show is that there are some file-sharing apple that are sometimes not outright killed. So, for example, if they kill all file-sharing apps after 10 seconds, and kill all BT apps outright, there would still be a few transfers of very short files that would go through, and the above statement wouldn't be a lie. But they'd still be sending RST packets to terminate most of the file transfers. No linux ISOs would ever get through, for example, despite the fact that they're totally legal.
Are you saying that your manager actually opens the page up in setups different from the one he normally uses to check that it does not display correctly, and gets upset if it does just fine and makes you change it so it breaks?
Yeah; exactly that has happened several times. But usually it's even dumber: The boss discovers on his own machine that when he resizes the window, the contents get redrawn so that they fit the new size. This is is what's unacceptable. He knows what size he wants the window to be, usually because he wants it to fit exactly on the screen with a specific other window. So he wants it to come up at that size exactly. He isn't actually aware that browser windows don't generally resize themselves to fix-size content, and doesn't think of it that way. And he is bothered by the fact that the content adapts to changing window sizes. I suspect that this is from a mental image of a browser as a "page" (because that's what everyone calls it), and real (i.e., paper) pages don't rearrange their content when you change their size (via scissors). So that behavior is unnerving. He wants the page to behave like pages are supposed to behave.
But maybe I'm over-analyzing it all. Another theory is that it's just dumbness at work. If you've ever worked on any significant corporate projects, you've seen lots of requirements that make no sense at all to the techies in the labs. This is just one of them.
On some projects, I have been able to sneakily remove all the size constraints after the whole thing was working, and nobody noticed that the web pages adjusted dynamically to window size again. If they do notice, I just say "Oops!" and change it back for a while. You know how easy it is to lose track of such things as irrelevant size constraints when you're working on a lot of changes, and it's easy to "forget" to test those details in the rush to market.
Re:You know the lawyers at RIAA are insane...
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RIAA Sues Homeless Man
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Actually, the writers at the Onion have been known to make the same complaint that other satirists in the past have made: Their job is constantly made difficult by the way that real people keep doing things far more bizarre and funny than anything they'd dare to publish.
The Onion may have some of the best satirists around right now, but that doesn't make their job any easier. Not with our current crop of politicians and corporate managers that are competing to outdo the Onion's writers with stories like this.
And it seems that even some judges are taking part in the competition...
A desktop distro is far different from a server distro in many cases and thus it may not be economically feasible for many companies to do both at the same time in the same distro.
This is something I've long been puzzled by. What I'd like is a machine that functions as a server (web, email, whatever), and also runs X-Windows on a nice big screen and talks to a keyboard and mouse. The desktop/server dichotomy seems to say that I can have one or the other, but not both. This makes no sense at all. Why would having the usual KVM video system interfere with running backrouhg servers? It seems obvious to me that if one of the servers is having problems, it'd be really handy to be able to log in via a full-screen GUI to diagnose and fix things.
And if I want both in one machine, what's an easy way to do it? The various distros sites never seem to mention this. They just give me an unexplained choice between "desktop" and "server" distros. So where do I go to get both?
What I've been doing is installing the "desktop" distro, then downloading each of the servers I want and installing them as separate operations. I suppose this might be best, because it means I have to know what I'm doing, and I tend to get exactly what I want. My servers are compiled on their machine, for example, which is probably good for performance.
But the terminology leaves me feeling that there's something important that I've missed.
On any number of projects where I've provided a web interface, I've been told in no uncertain words that I was to make pages that were tailored for exactly the browser and screen that the project's manager uses.
Thus, I've often been told that the pages must be forced via things like width= attributes to be exactly N pixels wide, even when there's nothing in a page that is dependent on any particular width. I've been ordered to present some data in pictorial form, even when simple text data was easier to understand and took less screen space.
So very often, managers explicitly order their developers to produce web pages that are inaccessible to anyone other than people exactly like them.
There are some ways that one can fight this. In a few cases, I've found that I can "go over the boss's head" by showing a higher-up something that they find useful. I happen to know that they have a Blackberry or a Treo that they love and use all the time, and my boss's declared page structure won't work on their machine, so eventually orders come down to make the web interface usable on the higher-ups' favorite little handheld gadget. While doing this, I can also sneak in things that make it more accessible to the disabled.
But this is a passive-resistance approach, and it's not always successful. I like to also try to get across the idea that you, yes you, may find yourself handicapped by this time next week, in a way that you can't predict. The sensible thing would be to guarantee that your minions' efforts are usable even after that accident or medical emergency has left you restricted in what you can see or read.
But few managers are willing to take such a long-term view of the situation. So all too often, my pages aren't as accessible as I know how to make them.
It would be nice to learn of other ways that we developers can fight such management intransigence.
Gee, I thought this kind of notion about "primitiveness" of certain language had long been abandoned. Apparently, I was wrong.
Yeah; you were wrong.;-) It has only been abandoned by linguists. The idea is alive and well in the media and the general population, and doing pretty well among "arm-chair" linguists that you find pontificating in public fora such as this one.
It's still fairly conventional among people teaching intro linguistics courses to set a goal of disabusing the students of the idea of a "primitive" language. Those who understand quickly are encouraged to dig deeper into the subject. Those who don't accept this negative lesson at all are quietly encouraged to sample other subject that may be more to their liking.
It's a lot like the way that intro biological courses have as a major goal the eradication of the concept of "purpose" from their students' speech. Some students understand the reason fairly quickly, and they can go on to become biologists (or knowledgeable laypeople). The rest are encouraged to go into subjects that may be more amenable to their world view, such as politics or management or the ministry.
(One of the very useful ways of teaching students what "primitive" languages are like is to include a few exercises on the syntax of some of the remaining Australian aborigines' languages. Students who survive this with the idea that "primitive" means "simple" are dismissed as hopeless. Unless you've looked at some of those languages, you have no idea how complex a human language can be.;-)
Basically they were speaking in "features", chaining them together, which resulted in either isolating languages (words have no inflection and are immutable, syntactic structure gives a sentence meaning "This apple is. This red is." Chinese works this way)...
You should be careful of such claims, because when they're as far off base as this example, it sorta discredits your other claims.
The obvious to say "this apple is red" in Mandarin Chinese is to say "zhe4 ping2 hong2". The three words translate literally as "This apple red". There is a word "shi4" for forms of "be", but it's not necessary in such a sentence. Similarly, the familiar slogan "The East is red" is "dong1 fang1 hong2". This is a bit difficult to translate literally due to no single good English word for the "fang1". The closest might be "east direction red". But "dong1fang1" is a common term for the eastern part of Asia, so "east area red" might be a better translation.
I'm curious where you got that "This apple is. This red is." My Mandarin isn't rather "minimal", and perhaps it does translate back to something sensible. Could you say what the original Chinese was? "Zhe4 ping2 shi4 zhe4 hong2 shi4" just doesn't make sense to me, and I'm curious as to what it could have been. I don't think you can post Chinese characters to/., so you'd probably have to use pinyin.
It's well-established in our cartoons and such that neanderthals often use the objective "me" rather than nominative "I", i.e. "me doug". Looks like the verb of being wasn't invented yet, either...
Hey, the Hebrew language also lacks a present-tense form of "be", and as we all know, Hebrew is (or was) God's language. It's us dummies that speak language like English, French or German that require such a verb. There are many languages whose speakers are bright enough to realize that they don't need it. Or, like Russians, if you ask them for their word for "am", they won't be able to tell you, because they've never heard such a word, and see no need for one.
And there are other languages (such as Spanish) whose speakers don't see the need of including pronouns as subjects when the pronoun is obvious. But we English speakers aren't bright enough to handle such defaults, so we have to actually say words like "I", "you" or "they" out loud for others to understand us.
By that standard, Mac also isn't ready for the desktop.
If you wander into an Apple store and look around, you'll see that Apple seems to agree with this. They're pushing "laptops", not "desktops". You hardly see any "desktop" systems, though laptops are right out front and center for you to drool over. And if you look in the corners for their non-laptop systems, you'll see that they are basically marketed as servers of various sorts. Especially the Apple TVs, which are designed as wired/wireless comm centers serving files to all the portable stuff in your house (and driving the big screen in the living room). But even the Mac Mini is essentially sold as a server that just happens to have a Mac GUI and a small footprint. Maybe the Mac is sold here and there as a "desktop" system, but I haven't seen much marketing for that.
In the business world, I've seen lots of Mac laptops of all kinds, but I've hardly ever seen a Mac "desktop" box outside of labs. The only places I've seen using those that you'd call a "business" are things like sound/audio studios, where the most of the crowd stopped even looking at Microsoft systems a decade ago.
I get the impression that Apple gave up on colonizing the Microsoft "desktop" world years ago. They sell not to companies so much as to individuals with the sense to go for something for their own personal use that's better than the lowest-quality product with the crappiest support. And these days, that mostly means a laptop. They've figured out that you can't sell something to most businesses unless it is a 110% compatible drop-in replacement for a Microsoft system. It doesn't matter that the Mac's GUI is better than MS Windows; all that means to most businessmen is "It's different; you'll have to retrain your employees to use it." The fact that they'll also have to retrain their employees to use new systems from Microsoft isn't considered in this calculation.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, first of all, you can't live completely without meat. You need certain proteins that you can't get anywhere else.
Actually, that's not true. By "proteins" you really mean amino acids, of course. And all of the amino acids that we need can be gotten from plants. It's really that animals are a higher-quality source of amino acids than plants. A chunk of meat gives you all of the kinds of amino acids that you need, in about the right balance, while no plant does. You can get all the amino acids you need from various mixtures of plants, such as the common grains+legumes eaten in a lot of cultures. But you have to know a bit to do this, or eat one of the traditional diets of people who have learned by trial and error what's a healthy mixture.
There are also some vitamins that are easier to get from animal sources, though they are all available from the right plants. Similarly, there are vitamins that you can only get from plants.
Nothin like a good steak. Nice NY Strip, medium well....
That's the real reason. Humans are omnivores, and most of us really like the taste of meat. With care and knowledge, a purely vegetarian diet is possible. But it's a bit boring to most people raised on a meaty diet. Meat just tastes so good to critters like us, and it's difficult to persuade people to give up such good-tasting food without very good reason.
It's funny how this can work. We have a couple of pet cockatiels, and the books on caring for your pet bird will tell you that cockatiels are strictly seed eaters. Ours didn't read the books. I have a couple of cute pictures of them on the table, next to a piece of steak that outweighed both of them, and they're happily biting into the steak. They especially love the fat. I have this image of a flock of 1000 cockatiels descending on a cow and ripping it to pieces. The cattle growers in Australia should hope that nobody ever teaches the wild ones how tasty beef is. They also like cheese, and if I'm eating a cheeseburger, they'll land on my hand and nibble the meat and cheese, ignoring the bread that's made of their natural grain diet.
In many cases, that's what they're doing. Ohio has a significant dairy output, and grasses are pretty good food for cows. For half the year, you don't even need to harvest it, you just let the cows out into the field. They mow the grass for you and replace it with lots of fresh fertilizer to grow the next crop. This works with steers, too, though they don't produce milk. (OTOH, you don't have to milk them a couple times a day.)
There's also "fallow" land. (Google it.
Or has science devolved to the point where we just change the definitions to give us the answers we want, rather than looking at the evidence and following it to where it leads?
Actually, when it comes to terms like "planet", we've pretty much done just that. The original term "planeta" was from the Greek, and meant "wanderer". It was a term that referred to the celestial objects that "wandered" about the firmament, unlike the thousands of fixed stars that stayed in the same position. The list of planets included the sun and moon, but it didn't include the Earth, because from our viewpoint, the Earth doesn't wander about in the night sky.
Eventually people figured out that the Earth wasn't the center of everything, and made a revised heliocentric model. In that model, it was the sun that was stationary at the center, and the Earth became a planet that wandered about in an elliptical orbit. The moon got demoted to a different class at about the same time, because it appeared to orbit the Earth rather than the sun, putting it into a class with the four moons of Jupiter that people could see through telescopes. We went from Earth+planets+stars to sun+planets+moons+stars, and three bodies changed their classification.
So, yes, we did change the definition of "planet" back then to give us the answers we wanted. This was done because the prevailing definition of "planet" only worked for the Earth-centered model, and we'd decided to throw that model out. We didn't discard the term "planet"; we just gave it a new definition that fit the new model (and added "moon" as a classifier for a set that quickly picked up a lot of members).
In any case, there is a certain silliness to the seriousness of a debate over what is really a minor descriptive term that has little actual physical meaning. Thus, it has been pointed out that Titan is much more Earth-like than is Mercury, but Titan is called a moon rather than a planet. Earth's moon is more like Mercury than it is like Titan, including having an orbit about the sun that's nearly circular, leading some astronomers to propose calling the Earth/Luna system a "binary planet" rather than a planet and a moon. This isn't so much a serious suggestion, as it is pointing out the silliness of the argument and the irrelevancy of the terms in question.
Scientists do occasionally revise their definitions of technical terms to fit with the prevailing theories. Sometimes they make up new terms, of course. But sometimes it's easier to just tweak the definitions of the old terms.
This is something that artists of various stripes have been pushing for some time. Others have mentioned cases like architects suing a building's owner for making alterations outside the original design. There are also various public works of art (e.g. the giant reflective metal "bean" in downtown Chicago, whose creator has attempted to forbid unlicensed photos).
/.), it's not all that far out to suggest that eventually everything we say or write will infringe someone else's copyright. Except, of course, for those of us who restrict our speech to only quotations from documents whose copyright has expired.
It could be especially fun to consider the effect of this extension of copyright to literature. It would end such practices as literary criticism and the discussion of literary works in college classrooms. After all, negative criticism and analyses contrary to the author's ideas would be a copyright violation.
Lest anyone thing this is too extreme a concept, I'd point out that I've read Microsoft EULAs which explicitly forbid publishing criticisms or the results of benchmarks that compare the software with other competing products. So far, I haven't actually read of any court decisions on the legality of such restrictions. Anyone know if this use of copyright has been tested in any courts?
Some time back, I read a prediction that here in the US, the First Amendment (which establishes freedom of speech, among other freedoms) will eventually become moot due to the gradual extension of copyright law. It's growing difficult to create a sentence that's not similar to one that has already been "published" somewhere. Now that everything you or I write is copyrighted as soon as we "publish" it (perhaps by posting it to a forum such as
The stated problem is that ISPs are upset with the P2P traffic because of its heavy load and want to throttle it. The proposed solution is supposed to increase my download speed. This seems to me to sound like exactly what will make my ISP even more upset.
If the ISPs' claims are correct, what would make them happy would be P2P software that throttles itself to a very low transfer rate. The longer it takes me to download (or upload) a file, the less bandwidth I'm using at any given time, and the happier the ISP is.
So why should an ISP be supportive of this proposed "solution"? Yeah, I'd like it. But I'd expect the ISPs to go after it and throttle it to a crawl. Or do as Comcast has been doing, and just outright kill any connections that look like file transfers.
What am I missing here?
And this is the point where any sensible person would get a distinct paranoid feeling. It's not hard to imagine how this might be misused.
Thus, I have a large number of connections to other software developers. I also have a lot of connections to other musicians. I have a CS degree from the U of Wisconsin, which gives me another large set of links. A close friend in my high school class is CEO of a corporation that everyone here has heard of. My wife and I own a Mini Cooper (great car!), which gives us another growing set of connections. And on and on, for a fair number of unrelated subject areas.
Suppose now that an analysis of the various sets that I'm involved with turns up a close friend of Osama bin Laden in each set. The obvious fear is that the above heirarchical-analysis scheme will fill in the "missing link" between Osama and myself. Since I live in the US, this would make me highly suspect to a lot of people currently in power.
Of course, in a rational world, this scenario would actually show the silliness of attempts to infer such links, as well as the absurdity of imposing a heirarchy on the structure of an unstructured rat's nest of links like the Internet. But we don't really live in a rational world, do we?
I thought OLPC was about using technology to help kids to learn technology so that they can do any number of things that technology can potentially offer them. I though that that was why Free software seemed to make so much sense.
Well, apparently you thought wrong. By "learn technology" they didn't really mean to give the kids the understanding to develop their own computer industry. The technology that the kids are supposed to learn is using Microsoft software, so that their present and future masters will want to hire them in entry-level jobs. No understanding of the underlying computer technology is necessary for this. All they need is how to use the specific Microsoft apps that their employers want to pay for.
Free/open software only makes sense if you want to impart understanding. But it's a threat to the kids future masters, as it would empower them to take control of their own computer systems and develop their own products.
It should come as no surprise that the wealthy folks in any country would eventually notice this, and exert pressure to restrict what the kids can learn with their little computers. Understanding of the computers isn't what's wanted. The ability to use of a small set of commercial apps is what's wanted.
Just because they work the same way doesn't make Linux a copy of UNIX ...
Actually, it's pretty well documented that the original linux was an implementation of the POSIX standard. And POSIX was openly based on Sys/V. So they should work the same way. But is this what "copy" means? If I use a published government standard doc, can I really be charged with "copying" whatever that standard was based on?
Darl's claim does raise an interesting question: Is he claiming that SCO owns everything based on POSIX? If the court supports this, then he has successfully destroyed much of the US system of government standards. Every standard based on previous industrial usage is in immediate danger of being proprietary, and anything based on a US standard can lead to huge royalty payments, if his claim is upheld.
So is it legally safe to use the POSIX standard? Can any actual IP lawyer assure us that we can safely base our work on this or any other US government standard, without fear of retroactive royalties in the future?
The elephant's proper name is not "Elephant".
Maybe your elephant isn't named "Elephant".
I once had a friend whose cat was named "Bird". She named it that so that when a (prospective) landl{ord|ady} asked whether she had any pets, she could honestly say "Just my Bird". And I have a pet cockatiel named "Three", but that's a much longer story that would be OT here.
Of course, there are many internets, probably a few thousand of them, but there's only one Internet, whose name is properly capitalized. This is important to the pedants among(st) us.
And I have one of those t-shirts that asks "Does anal retentive have a hyphen?" And yes, I know the correct answer to that one.
Will this new network include IPv6 access, or will ./ remain in the 20th Century?
Actually, the main thing that would make for 21st-Century cred is accepting UTF-8 text.
I've had a couple of posts recently on topics where it would have been better to use Chinese or Japanese characters (though not very many of them). I had to settle for pinyin/romaji instead, which isn't really ideal. The ability to correctly include text in non-Western language is of growing importance in the world, even to people whose primary language is English.
Of course, there are somewhat similar sites in other parts of the Web that work in languages other than English. The real problem is the barrier between the English-speaking world and the rest of the world, caused by our ongoing inability to include text in other major languages inside our English text, even as small examples.
Define "bad people", please.
;-)
Well, in the context of this discussion, that's easy: A "bad" person clearly means anyone who wants to read my files without my permission.
(I could get all political and name various organizations, governments, corportations, etc. that qualify, but it's more fun to leave that as an exercise for the reader.
The law needs to be adapted to allow legally sanctioned actions like the one proposed to happen to fix the problem.
Actually, "the law" doesn't "need" anything. Laws don't need; they just are. They are often written by clueless legislative assistants. And they very often outlive their original intended function.
Here in the US, we still have laws on the books from a century ago that impose speed limits of 5 or 10 mph for motor vehicles, and supposedly one state still has a law on the books requiring that all motor vehicles be preceded by a man on horseback to warn the populace. A while ago, I read of a law supposedly still in effect in Alabama that requires all men to carry a gun or rifle when attending church, to protect the congregation from the "heathen Indians".
The idea that "the law" will handle things such as a computer worm that does a search-and-destroy on another worm is silly in the extreme. It doesn't matter how much we may need such changes in the laws; the chances of such changes being made in any legislature are rather slim. We're talking about politicians here, the same sort of folks who brought us the humor about the Internet being a series of tubes.
The best advice in such cases is probably the obvious: Yes, you should work on such beneficial tools. But you should be just as paranoid as the authors of the malware that you're hunting. Be sure to cover your tracks very carefully, because if "the law" tracks you down, you will be treated as just another evil, virus-writing, computer-hacking nerd. It won't matter in the least that you're a public benefactor. The legal system doesn't (and can't) make such fine distinctions.
Besides using Windows does not prevent a person from using Linux, ...
Uh, here in the US, that's often exactly what happens. There have been any number of stories about schools that get Windows machines because they got a very good price on them. Then after they've been delivered and used for a few months, a Microsoft rep shows up and "discovers" non-MS machines, typically Macs or linux boxes. The MS guy points out a clause they hadn't noticed in the sales contract: If any non-MS computers are discovered in the school, the price of the Windows machines doubles. He gives them a choice: Get rid of all the non-MS systems, or pay the full price on their Windows machines. Inevitably, the school administrators order all non-MS computers removed from the school.
So yes, Windows can and does prevent people from using linux, especially in schools.
And that's only about 1% different from the screen on the Mac Powerbook that I'm typing this on. So both should be able to display about the same amount of info, right?
On this PB, I have four 90x30 non-overlapping Terminal windows open, with three of them ssh'd to other machines that I'm working on. With the XO, as far as I can tell, I can only get one terminal window at a time, and it's fewer chars than 90x30 (though I don't offhand remember its actual size).
This seriously restricts its use for a lot of things that you'd think the kids would want to do. It's really hard to develop python (or any OO) code in a single window. In OO languages, the info you need to work on code is distributed widely inside different modules, and the only time-efficient way to work on such code is with multiple text (or editor) windows. Yeah, you can do it in one window, but it's slow and frustrating.
It seems clear that part of the intent of the OLPC project is a laptop that can teach kids about computers. This is the main reason for insisting on open-source everything. The kids should be able to study the code and develop their own code. But the Sugar UI seriously cripples this task by restricting what's visible to only one "window" at a time. This isn't necessitated by the small screen; the screen has a lot of pixels and most of those kids have good eyes.
I'd be happy with a UI on the XO that shows me my four terminal windows with chars 1/2 the height and width as on this Mac, because I'd be able to read them without problems (and I'm over 50
"Singing is Costing RIAA. . ."
I'm still laughing while typing this response. Thank-you!
Note that we've had any number of slashdot discussions of the scenario: Some time in the near future, people are arrested and prosecuted for walking down the sidewalk while whistling a copyrighted tune. Yeah, it's funny, but it's also only a small stretch from what's been going on in the past few years.
2) How is it bad to teach people what a significant number of people believe? How can you argue against something you don't understand yourself?
;-). Furthermore, you don't let school administrators decide what can be taught in French, Spanish or Italian classes. You give that job to the teachers who understand the languages well, and who are willing to teach the standard dialects of each even when their own native dialect isn't the standard.
3) You're essential argument boils down to (from what I read) "non-scientific = WRONG, therefore should not be taught in any capacity"
Actually, that's not what most of the scientific crowd is arguing. Few of them object to teaching about creationism; they just object to it being taught as science.
A fairly good parallel that doesn't (usually;-) invoke religious attitudes is to look at the teaching of languages. About a billion people speak Mandarin Chinese, which you've gotta admit is a "significant number of people". And Mandarin is becoming sufficiently important that courses in it are appearing in schools all over the world.
However, Mandarin isn't taught in Spanish or French or German or Russian or English classes. That would be obviously wrong; it should be taught in a Mandarin class. It makes no sense to teach languages X and Y together, unless X and Y are closely-related dialects of a single language.
There are interesting cases like French, Spanish and Italian, which are close relatives, and have continuous dialects between them so that there's no natural language borders. But this doesn't mean that you teach all three as a single language (perhaps called "modern Latin"
This should carry over into subjects like science, math and philosophy. What should be taught in each should be determined by those who are well-educated in each subject area, not by bureaucrats or politicians.
It's clearly understood among scientists that creationism doesn't qualify as science, and can't qualify until someone finds ways to test it scientifically. It does have a place in History of Science classes, as do other conjectures and hypotheses such as phlogiston and the luminiferous aether. (Some physics tests to mention the aether, and point out that Einstein didn't disprove it. He just showed that it wasn't necessary to explain the universe.)
But since creationism hasn't been tested to the usual scientific standards, teaching it in a science class is inappropriate. It would be a lot like teaching Mandarin grammar in a Spanish class. This isn't to say that Mandarin grammar is "wrong"; it's just wrong when you're trying to speak Spanish. Spanish grammar would be equally wrong in a Mandarin class.
Actually, this sort of understanding of right and wrong turns up all the time in the collaboration of science and mathematics. Mathematicians work routinely with "worlds" that can't possibly describe our universe. It's entirely correct to do this within the math arena. Thus, finite non-Abelian groups are an interesting mathematical topic, and a lot of work has been done on them. But if some physicists were to insist that the real universe is a finite non-Abelian group, we'd treat them as nut cases. Unless someone can come up with scientific tests that support such a hypothesis, it has no place in any physics class.
This isn't just an entertaining parallel. There are physicists who argue that String Theory is on a par with religion, and doesn't (yet) deserve a place in serious scientific discussions or classes. When Quantum Mechanics first appeared on the scene, people made similar arguments. With QM, people found ways of testing it, and it passed pretty much all of its tests, so QM is now an accepted part of scientific theory. String Theory isn't there yet. But physicists are trying to find ways to test it.
Now if we could just get the creationists to propose some good, scientific ways of testing their "theory" (which is actually just a hypothesis). If they want scientists to take them seriously, they should be doing this, rather than just trying to poke holes' in other theories. In science, debunking someone else's theory doesn't count as support for your own theory.
Comcast admitted to delaying P2P traffic during peak times, but denied that any file-sharing applications were being completely blocked.
This sounds like the typical "non-denial denial", of the classical "weasel words" variety. For it to be true, all they need to show is that there are some file-sharing apple that are sometimes not outright killed. So, for example, if they kill all file-sharing apps after 10 seconds, and kill all BT apps outright, there would still be a few transfers of very short files that would go through, and the above statement wouldn't be a lie. But they'd still be sending RST packets to terminate most of the file transfers. No linux ISOs would ever get through, for example, despite the fact that they're totally legal.
Are you saying that your manager actually opens the page up in setups different from the one he normally uses to check that it does not display correctly, and gets upset if it does just fine and makes you change it so it breaks?
Yeah; exactly that has happened several times. But usually it's even dumber: The boss discovers on his own machine that when he resizes the window, the contents get redrawn so that they fit the new size. This is is what's unacceptable. He knows what size he wants the window to be, usually because he wants it to fit exactly on the screen with a specific other window. So he wants it to come up at that size exactly. He isn't actually aware that browser windows don't generally resize themselves to fix-size content, and doesn't think of it that way. And he is bothered by the fact that the content adapts to changing window sizes. I suspect that this is from a mental image of a browser as a "page" (because that's what everyone calls it), and real (i.e., paper) pages don't rearrange their content when you change their size (via scissors). So that behavior is unnerving. He wants the page to behave like pages are supposed to behave.
But maybe I'm over-analyzing it all. Another theory is that it's just dumbness at work. If you've ever worked on any significant corporate projects, you've seen lots of requirements that make no sense at all to the techies in the labs. This is just one of them.
On some projects, I have been able to sneakily remove all the size constraints after the whole thing was working, and nobody noticed that the web pages adjusted dynamically to window size again. If they do notice, I just say "Oops!" and change it back for a while. You know how easy it is to lose track of such things as irrelevant size constraints when you're working on a lot of changes, and it's easy to "forget" to test those details in the rush to market.
Actually, the writers at the Onion have been known to make the same complaint that other satirists in the past have made: Their job is constantly made difficult by the way that real people keep doing things far more bizarre and funny than anything they'd dare to publish.
...
The Onion may have some of the best satirists around right now, but that doesn't make their job any easier. Not with our current crop of politicians and corporate managers that are competing to outdo the Onion's writers with stories like this.
And it seems that even some judges are taking part in the competition
A desktop distro is far different from a server distro in many cases and thus it may not be economically feasible for many companies to do both at the same time in the same distro.
This is something I've long been puzzled by. What I'd like is a machine that functions as a server (web, email, whatever), and also runs X-Windows on a nice big screen and talks to a keyboard and mouse. The desktop/server dichotomy seems to say that I can have one or the other, but not both. This makes no sense at all. Why would having the usual KVM video system interfere with running backrouhg servers? It seems obvious to me that if one of the servers is having problems, it'd be really handy to be able to log in via a full-screen GUI to diagnose and fix things.
And if I want both in one machine, what's an easy way to do it? The various distros sites never seem to mention this. They just give me an unexplained choice between "desktop" and "server" distros. So where do I go to get both?
What I've been doing is installing the "desktop" distro, then downloading each of the servers I want and installing them as separate operations. I suppose this might be best, because it means I have to know what I'm doing, and I tend to get exactly what I want. My servers are compiled on their machine, for example, which is probably good for performance.
But the terminology leaves me feeling that there's something important that I've missed.
On any number of projects where I've provided a web interface, I've been told in no uncertain words that I was to make pages that were tailored for exactly the browser and screen that the project's manager uses.
Thus, I've often been told that the pages must be forced via things like width= attributes to be exactly N pixels wide, even when there's nothing in a page that is dependent on any particular width. I've been ordered to present some data in pictorial form, even when simple text data was easier to understand and took less screen space.
So very often, managers explicitly order their developers to produce web pages that are inaccessible to anyone other than people exactly like them.
There are some ways that one can fight this. In a few cases, I've found that I can "go over the boss's head" by showing a higher-up something that they find useful. I happen to know that they have a Blackberry or a Treo that they love and use all the time, and my boss's declared page structure won't work on their machine, so eventually orders come down to make the web interface usable on the higher-ups' favorite little handheld gadget. While doing this, I can also sneak in things that make it more accessible to the disabled.
But this is a passive-resistance approach, and it's not always successful. I like to also try to get across the idea that you, yes you, may find yourself handicapped by this time next week, in a way that you can't predict. The sensible thing would be to guarantee that your minions' efforts are usable even after that accident or medical emergency has left you restricted in what you can see or read.
But few managers are willing to take such a long-term view of the situation. So all too often, my pages aren't as accessible as I know how to make them.
It would be nice to learn of other ways that we developers can fight such management intransigence.
Gee, I thought this kind of notion about "primitiveness" of certain language had long been abandoned. Apparently, I was wrong.
;-) It has only been abandoned by linguists. The idea is alive and well in the media and the general population, and doing pretty well among "arm-chair" linguists that you find pontificating in public fora such as this one.
;-)
Yeah; you were wrong.
It's still fairly conventional among people teaching intro linguistics courses to set a goal of disabusing the students of the idea of a "primitive" language. Those who understand quickly are encouraged to dig deeper into the subject. Those who don't accept this negative lesson at all are quietly encouraged to sample other subject that may be more to their liking.
It's a lot like the way that intro biological courses have as a major goal the eradication of the concept of "purpose" from their students' speech. Some students understand the reason fairly quickly, and they can go on to become biologists (or knowledgeable laypeople). The rest are encouraged to go into subjects that may be more amenable to their world view, such as politics or management or the ministry.
(One of the very useful ways of teaching students what "primitive" languages are like is to include a few exercises on the syntax of some of the remaining Australian aborigines' languages. Students who survive this with the idea that "primitive" means "simple" are dismissed as hopeless. Unless you've looked at some of those languages, you have no idea how complex a human language can be.
Basically they were speaking in "features", chaining them together, which resulted in either isolating languages (words have no inflection and are immutable, syntactic structure gives a sentence meaning "This apple is. This red is." Chinese works this way) ...
/., so you'd probably have to use pinyin.
You should be careful of such claims, because when they're as far off base as this example, it sorta discredits your other claims.
The obvious to say "this apple is red" in Mandarin Chinese is to say "zhe4 ping2 hong2". The three words translate literally as "This apple red". There is a word "shi4" for forms of "be", but it's not necessary in such a sentence. Similarly, the familiar slogan "The East is red" is "dong1 fang1 hong2". This is a bit difficult to translate literally due to no single good English word for the "fang1". The closest might be "east direction red". But "dong1fang1" is a common term for the eastern part of Asia, so "east area red" might be a better translation.
I'm curious where you got that "This apple is. This red is." My Mandarin isn't rather "minimal", and perhaps it does translate back to something sensible. Could you say what the original Chinese was? "Zhe4 ping2 shi4 zhe4 hong2 shi4" just doesn't make sense to me, and I'm curious as to what it could have been. I don't think you can post Chinese characters to
It's well-established in our cartoons and such that neanderthals often use the objective "me" rather than nominative "I", i.e. "me doug". Looks like the verb of being wasn't invented yet, either...
Hey, the Hebrew language also lacks a present-tense form of "be", and as we all know, Hebrew is (or was) God's language. It's us dummies that speak language like English, French or German that require such a verb. There are many languages whose speakers are bright enough to realize that they don't need it. Or, like Russians, if you ask them for their word for "am", they won't be able to tell you, because they've never heard such a word, and see no need for one.
And there are other languages (such as Spanish) whose speakers don't see the need of including pronouns as subjects when the pronoun is obvious. But we English speakers aren't bright enough to handle such defaults, so we have to actually say words like "I", "you" or "they" out loud for others to understand us.
By that standard, Mac also isn't ready for the desktop.
If you wander into an Apple store and look around, you'll see that Apple seems to agree with this. They're pushing "laptops", not "desktops". You hardly see any "desktop" systems, though laptops are right out front and center for you to drool over. And if you look in the corners for their non-laptop systems, you'll see that they are basically marketed as servers of various sorts. Especially the Apple TVs, which are designed as wired/wireless comm centers serving files to all the portable stuff in your house (and driving the big screen in the living room). But even the Mac Mini is essentially sold as a server that just happens to have a Mac GUI and a small footprint. Maybe the Mac is sold here and there as a "desktop" system, but I haven't seen much marketing for that.
In the business world, I've seen lots of Mac laptops of all kinds, but I've hardly ever seen a Mac "desktop" box outside of labs. The only places I've seen using those that you'd call a "business" are things like sound/audio studios, where the most of the crowd stopped even looking at Microsoft systems a decade ago.
I get the impression that Apple gave up on colonizing the Microsoft "desktop" world years ago. They sell not to companies so much as to individuals with the sense to go for something for their own personal use that's better than the lowest-quality product with the crappiest support. And these days, that mostly means a laptop. They've figured out that you can't sell something to most businesses unless it is a 110% compatible drop-in replacement for a Microsoft system. It doesn't matter that the Mac's GUI is better than MS Windows; all that means to most businessmen is "It's different; you'll have to retrain your employees to use it." The fact that they'll also have to retrain their employees to use new systems from Microsoft isn't considered in this calculation.