I've read that since the mercury vapor and phosphorous combo in fluorescent lights mostly produce green and blue light (with warm lights adding red phosphors which don't help much,) plants thrive in fluorescent light and fare MUCH better there than they would in incandescent light. Sun light is best, of course, but that's in short supply in your/my case.
Actually, that would work well against plant longevity. Chlorophyll-a and chlorophyll-b have their weakest absorption in the 500-600 nm range, which is the color green. This, obviously, is why plants are green -- because they reflect that light instead of absorbing it. Red and blue is where almost all the energy that plants absorb comes from.
Heh. Sometimes I wonder if people at Slashdot even know what plant IS to keep suggesting mushrooms. Plus, I don't think a musty grey or brown mushroom does much to liven up a darkened space.
It depends on your school. CS, CmpE, and EE are all equally tough where I went to school. Management and IE (aka Imaginary Engineers) got our drop outs. Now THAT's the kind of thing that inspires cynicism in the workforce long before you enter it. All the washouts and losers are going to be your boss!
Of course, we didn't actually have an MIS degree....You know, not being an over-priced community college and all.
First, burning a cross on someone else's property is still quite illegal. It's a violation of their property rights, and property rights have beat 1st Amendment rights in a number of cases. Basically, you can say what you want, but I have the right to toss you out without violating your 1st Amendment rights. The case you are probably speaking of is "Virginia vs. Black," which will be tried this October. It's determining whether or not burning crosses can be outlawed as a means of intimidation. This is completely irrelevant as to whether or not you can do it on someone else's property. You'd only be able to do it in public places or place where you'd been granted permission. Otherwise, you're coming onto their property and making a threat; this is still punishable by law.
I cannot find ANY reference to any court case about vomiting on a painting after half an hour with Google. Could you provide a reference? All I can find is references to a Candadian art student named Jubal Brown who was never taken to trial. After wasting my time with that, I don't even want to TRY to find anything for the 3rd case based on such vague criteria. Lastly, whether or not smoking in public should be protected or banned has little to do with freedom of speech at all. Smokers do not smoke to protest or express an idea, and the side effects of smoking has legitimate harmful effects on bystanders.
May I suppose that you oppose the Supreme Court cases that allow students to wear black armbands in protest of Vietnam? How about the peaceful sit-ins that were part of the Black Rights movement? Would you also support banning the fasting the Gandhi did against the British since it was not speech?
Burning a flag or a cross is meant to convey an idea. It is a powerful means of expressing something that shocks us by hitting deep at our cultural roots. Regardless of the merit of the message and the lack of taste of the method of delivery, it must be protected as a means of expression. Now, burning someone else's cross or flag is another matter entirely, but destroying your own property as a means of expression is no less a means of communication than speaking or writing.
You know, that's a straw man. You're painting him with a stereotype and claiming that he made arguments as part of that stereotype. Then, you're lambasting him for the contradiction that you created.
If it wasn't for cyanobacteria, we'd still have a primarily methane and carbon dioxide atmosphere. Cyanobacteria can be credited with resposibility for the major atmospheric change that occured around 2.5 billion years ago as the first photosyntheic lifeforms.
What more consistent and responsive and well designed gui is there than Aqua?
Let's see... How about Mac OS 9? Do you even understand the basic principles of HCI that made Mac OS 9 so great, or are you too caught up in the eye candy to understand? It does not let users take advantage of muscle memory the same way Mac OS 9 did by constantly moving the standard 3 menu items (File, Edit, View) with each application switch. It throws away the advantages of the inifinite depth of the four corners of a desktop that Mac OS 9 allowed users to exploit. It has an inconsistent Finder that randomly resizes list columns as you move around and that refuses to retain spatial organization of files within folders. Don't even get me started on the Dock. There have been many articles highlighting the numerous flaws of that GUI element that anyone who actually bothered to examine in the Beta days should already know about.
And each release gets faster, Jaguar is a hardware upgrade in a box. The UI speed is amazing.
Amazingly underwhelming. I don't know about you, but the responsiveness on my 400 MHz G4 is terrible compared to Mac OS 9. Windows and X11 are snappy and responsive on my friend's old 233 MHz Pentium II. Plus the Mac OS X scheduler is so poorly written that setting the priority on any process down to its worst value will still not improve GUI responsiveness. If the process wants the CPU constantly, it will get it regardless of priority. I simply cannot believe that you actually think the UI speed is "amazing." Moving around and resizing Windows should be instantaneous on a 400 MHz machine!
Oh, and don't buy the marketing hype. "A hardware upgrade in a box" is a tacit way of admitting that Mac OS X is a sluggish, poorly written OS in the first place. You'll find on other OSes that there's not so much room for improvement anymore.
Oh, and the "%150" claim about PC prices-- that's funny. Apparently, you've not priced a PC lately, or you think a 2GHz processor is twice as fast as a 1GHz processor.
Live in denial, man.
With the exception of their SIMD units, Altivec vs. MMX/SSE, the CPI and instruction throughput advantage on PPC chips ain't what it used to be. I remember back in the day when PPCs were clocked the same as Pentiums AND faster per clock. Those days are long past. AMD chips are on par with PPC chips are the same clock speed for the types of processing that a system will spend 95% of its time using (unless you do nothing but run Photoshop filters).
AMD chips are also clocked 50% faster and cost a third to a fourth the price of a G4. Even P4s, which don't perform quite as well at the same clock speed are clocked twice as fast AND cost much less. Have you actually looked into Macintosh CPU upgrades lately? Upgrading my Celeron system to the fastest PIII-FCPGA available would cost me less than $200, with $120 being a good breaking point. Upgrading my G4 would cost me over $1K to get a chip that performs at 70-80% of a mid-range x86 chip.
Don't buy into the whole claim that G4s are just as fast as P4s. The claim only holds up for certain specialized operations that 90% of the software you run doesn't use. For the general case bread-and-butter integer, floating point, and memory manipulation operations, G4s trail the x86 family. Perhaps this wouldn't be the case Apple could actually use smoe modern memory modules instead of getting half the performance out of an underclocked DDR memory system -- which, I might add, is a recent addition to a family of systems whose high-end systems have been languishing under PC133 for the past 2 years while every non-budget x86 system has moved on DDR or RDRAM.
This is old news. The only thing that can save Apple's hardware is if IBM actually markets that Power4-derived chip for Apple desktops and they crank up the memory bandwidth.
It gets tireing hearing all these complaints about apple from people who either don't understand the technology or are just making stuff up. Apple is kicking ass in all the areas you complain about... wtf?
I'm tired of mindless sheep who think marketing drivel is wisdom from the mountain top. I use Macs and PCs side-by-side, day-by-day. My PC at work is a 600 MHz P3 running Win2k that's of the same generation as my 400 MHz G4. Guess which one processes Genome@Home work units faster? Guess which one I can actually run Genome@Home on without killing the performance of my desktop and making simple window operations unusable? Between my rock-bottom $400 dollar Celeron system with built-in Savage4 graphics and my G4 that has a better graphics card and twice the memory, I'd like you to guess which runs Warcraft III faster.
Unlike you, apparently, I've actually used the Mac since the System 6 days, and I've experienced first-hand the loss of productivity and ease of use that came with Mac OS X. Yes, Mac OS X crashes far, far less often. Yes, cooperative multitasking wasn't that great (but it wasn't that much worse than Darwin's kernel's attempt at preemptive multitasking). However, Mac OS 9 had years of usability studies and HCI research behind it that was all thrown out the window for eye candy. There is absolutely NO reason why the GUI paradigm from Mac OS 9 couldn't be kept, but they preferred to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
All major applications (or quality alternatives) now run native, there is no major slowdown as in 10.0.x, and you get to enjoy all the great things that are exlusive to OS X like Aqua and Unix.
The first two statements are complete BS. Many major software tools have not been ported to Mac OS X -- Max/MSP, Director, QuarkXPress, etc. Much of the software that I use is noticeably slower in Mac OS X 10.1.5 than in Mac OS 9.2.2, including that unworthy abomination that they've passed on the name "Finder" to. About the only GUI apps in Mac OS X that are faster are Java apps and Mozilla. God forbid you want to play any games like Baldur's Gate 2.
As for the last bit, Apple can take Aqua and shove it. I'd rather have a responsive, consistent, and well-designed GUI than the eye-candy lobotomized NeXT crap that Apple pawned off on us with the Aqua "user experience." I used to bleed the Apple rainbow, but with each day I use Mac OS X and each time Apple releases another unimpressive, sluggish system for 150% of what I could pay for a top of the line PC I wonder, "Why do I still bother?"
Using a Macintosh is about the user interface, and today's Apple is killing everything that was once great about the platform.
Do you have to keep a.mac account to use iChat? Oh, just great. Just when I thought I'd get an instant messaging client, I find out it costs $100 a year to use. Forget that.
I think I'll stick with ignoring my email instead of moving to ignoring my instant messages.
It seems to me that the purpose of this article really isn't to ask a question, but instead to be a bully-pulpit to rally against the DeBeers monopoly. I don't know if "Ask Slashdot" is an appropriate place for this.
As for the tagged on question at the end, have you considered your fiance-to-be's birth stone? My grandmother had a beautiful ruby and silver engagement ring. If you're not looking for a ring, then it really depends on how much a traditionalist your girlfriend is. Just whatever you do, if you're going to skip the ring option, don't try to weasel out with something less than the cost of a diamond ring, or it's likely she'll suspect that money was the real motivation.
I can only tell you what I've personally experienced. I and members of my family have occasional precognative dreams. I used to get them about once a month or so when I was a kid and a teenager. They never predicted anything important nor did the future event last for more than 10 seconds. Curiously, I never say or do anything significant in these events -- I'm always playing a passive role, mostly because of the disturbing realization that I've seen these events before in a dream.
A precognative dream feels like having deja vu in reverse. I have a dream, I know at the time that it's a precognative dream, and I wake up in the middle of it feeling strange. It's like you're feeling the same emotion that you will feel when the event plays out in front of your eyes later. After I wake up, I forget about it like all other dreams minutes moments aftewards. (No, I've never successfully been able to keep a dream journal. My dreams fade too quickly.)
Later, some event happens and through the entire event, I realize that I dreamed about it before, and I'm powerless to interfere or do anything different from the dream until the scene has finished playing out.
In my first precognative dream, I was a terrified kindergardener being slammed up against the fence of my school playground by a first grader. This didn't make any sense to me, I remember, because first graders were allowed on the playground at the same time as us to prevent us from being bullied by larger kids. Three days later, they let out some first graders on the playground early or kept us out later, and I ended up accidentally running into one of them while playing. When he got up and I recognized him and the color of his Izod shirt, the dream came back to me, and I was too stunned to do anything to stop being shoved up against the fence a second or two later.
This is one of the few childhood memories from that time period that is still burned on my memory. I remember the emotions involved distinctly and that I asked my mother about such dreams for the first time later that day. It's also one of the few memories where I can remember how small I was as a child instead having to think about it relative to the items around me in the memory. I even remember the little alligator logo on his shirt.
The most recent dream event that I can remember was at a TGI Fridays two years ago. In the dream, I didn't recognize where I was, but I distinctly remembered the red and white checkered table and the plant behind one of my friends. I remember waking up and being puzzled because in the dream, I was dining with two groups of friends that I figured would never meet each other. 2-3 months later, I've forgotten about the dream, and we're all at the restraunt when the conversation from the dream takes place. I was literally biting at the bullet to say something about it, but I couldn't actually interrupt the conversation to say anything until the scene had finished playing out.
I guess nothing I say will convince anyone otherwise, though. Precognative dreaming is something that has to be experienced to be understood. I don't really care if you do call it an "uncritical anecdote." I've been there. I've experienced it. I can tell you however, that when a precognative dream happens, you learn to know it for what it is. I never remember waking up from a dream that never happened, and I don't remember precognative dreams happening until I've cleared the last one. Maybe that's why I haven't had one in a couple of years. Maybe the event hasn't played out yet.
There is no vagueness whatsoever for me in these "premonitions." The events are crystal clear at the time of the dream, for those foggy moments after waking up, and for the duration of the event. This is unusual for me, because I'm not a very visual thinker generally and I tend to rely on intuition more than concrete imagery for memories.
I'm not the only one in my family to experience this. On both my mother's and father's side, I have a few relatives who know exactly what I was talking about when I described it to them. Some of us believe not because of the anecdotes of others but because we've been there.
Not that I'll ask you to do the same on just my "uncritical anecdote," though... <g>
Many poorly dodged questions there.
on
Going Up?
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· Score: 3, Informative
Several times they dodge the questions of weather by saying that they'll simply put it in a place where there are no hurricanes and no thunderstorms. While I don't doubt there are places where these are infrequent, I don't believe for a second that there is anywhere on Earth around the equator where it's impossible to run into bad weather.
If I remember correctly, the reason they don't want to deal with the lightning question is because running a huge electrical charge through a carbon nanotube will make it explode into a cloud of graphite, severing the connection.
So, the question becomes, what do they plan on doing when (not if) bad weather comes for the orbital elevator. Can it be moved?
Another unanswered question is what they plan to do about space debris.
Anyway, I hold my SSN with a death grip, and so far I've had no identity theft problems. So, until that happens, I'm content to sit on my lazy American ass and keep my SSN.
Lucky you. Unfortunately, my college used my SSN as my student number, with which my grades and such were publicly posted. Any one of a few thousand students and any clever con artists who come on campus looking for numbers could have my SSN and name right now, just waiting to exploit it.
IBM has alread licensed Altivec from Motorola as far back as 1998-2000, allegedly to help with the design of the PowerPC variant used in the Gamecube. The PowerPC 405 embedded processor in the Gamecube contains 38 additional instructions for vector FP math (vs. the 162 in Altivec). A glance at this PDF file from the web makes me pretty sure that these aren't just lifted from Altivec. Instead of Altivec's 128-bit 4 32-bit FP vectors, Gecko adds instructions for fitting 2 32-bit FP numbers in a single 64-bit FPU register and working with them. It also adds some odd but interesting MMU features.
Anyway, I know it's been licensed because back in 2000 there was a lot of conspiracy theories that Motorola was preventing IBM from selling faster clocked PPC chips to Apple than they could produce via an obscure clause in that license. Both parties denied it, of course. I don't really believe that was the case. I think it was just bitter rumor-mongering by Mac users who were rightfully angry at Motorola for pissing away the performance (and MHz) advantage that PowerPC had on x86 chips back in the 603/604e and Pentium/PPro days.
Oh, admittedly, the MHz advantage went away as Intel/AMD extended their pipelines for that explicit purpose earning theirselves increased performance penalties for mispredicted branches and requiring increased CPI for many instructions, but I still miss the days when PPCs were faster per clock AND had higher clock rates. Now the clock rate advantage is so extreme that the PowerPCs' better performance per cycle doesn't catch up for the most commonly executed code. Once again, though, I digress.
Power3 and Power4 ARE PowerPC chips
on
PowerPC Goes 64 bit
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· Score: 3, Informative
Welcome to the modern world. POWER as an architecture is dead and no longer implemented. What chips you know are POWER are in fact 64-bit PowerPC implementations. The Power3 chip was also known as the PowerPC 630 and has been used in RS/6000 workstations since 1996. You can find out more about it here, straight from the horse's mouth.
PowerPC was designed from the POWER architecture to replace it, and has been designed from the beginning to support 32-bit and 64-bit versions. The architecture is actually designed from the beginning to be a 64-bit architecture, and the common desktop implementations are only the 32-bit subset of the original design.
Here's some additional background info:
Wikipedia -- a little out of date, but good on history.
Never saw that. Usually, the huge cans of beer were only to be found at convenience stores near the 1L to 1.5L bottles of tea and sports drinks. I actually never saw a vending machine with an alcoholic beverage either. I don't know if they even exist any more. Most of the drink bottles and can were slightly smaller than what you'd expect from an American vending machine, too.
(Oops.)...and, yes, they do top off the drinks with ice too. "Koori ga nai Coca-Cola onegai-simasu," was the best I could figure out for ordering a Coke with no ice in Japan.
Slashdot Mirror
I've read that since the mercury vapor and phosphorous combo in fluorescent lights mostly produce green and blue light (with warm lights adding red phosphors which don't help much,) plants thrive in fluorescent light and fare MUCH better there than they would in incandescent light. Sun light is best, of course, but that's in short supply in your/my case.
Actually, that would work well against plant longevity. Chlorophyll-a and chlorophyll-b have their weakest absorption in the 500-600 nm range, which is the color green. This, obviously, is why plants are green -- because they reflect that light instead of absorbing it. Red and blue is where almost all the energy that plants absorb comes from.
Heh. Sometimes I wonder if people at Slashdot even know what plant IS to keep suggesting mushrooms. Plus, I don't think a musty grey or brown mushroom does much to liven up a darkened space.
It depends on your school. CS, CmpE, and EE are all equally tough where I went to school. Management and IE (aka Imaginary Engineers) got our drop outs. Now THAT's the kind of thing that inspires cynicism in the workforce long before you enter it. All the washouts and losers are going to be your boss!
...You know, not being an over-priced community college and all.
Of course, we didn't actually have an MIS degree.
You're examples are a little flawed.
First, burning a cross on someone else's property is still quite illegal. It's a violation of their property rights, and property rights have beat 1st Amendment rights in a number of cases. Basically, you can say what you want, but I have the right to toss you out without violating your 1st Amendment rights. The case you are probably speaking of is "Virginia vs. Black," which will be tried this October. It's determining whether or not burning crosses can be outlawed as a means of intimidation. This is completely irrelevant as to whether or not you can do it on someone else's property. You'd only be able to do it in public places or place where you'd been granted permission. Otherwise, you're coming onto their property and making a threat; this is still punishable by law.
I cannot find ANY reference to any court case about vomiting on a painting after half an hour with Google. Could you provide a reference? All I can find is references to a Candadian art student named Jubal Brown who was never taken to trial. After wasting my time with that, I don't even want to TRY to find anything for the 3rd case based on such vague criteria. Lastly, whether or not smoking in public should be protected or banned has little to do with freedom of speech at all. Smokers do not smoke to protest or express an idea, and the side effects of smoking has legitimate harmful effects on bystanders.
May I suppose that you oppose the Supreme Court cases that allow students to wear black armbands in protest of Vietnam? How about the peaceful sit-ins that were part of the Black Rights movement? Would you also support banning the fasting the Gandhi did against the British since it was not speech?
Burning a flag or a cross is meant to convey an idea. It is a powerful means of expressing something that shocks us by hitting deep at our cultural roots. Regardless of the merit of the message and the lack of taste of the method of delivery, it must be protected as a means of expression. Now, burning someone else's cross or flag is another matter entirely, but destroying your own property as a means of expression is no less a means of communication than speaking or writing.
You know, that's a straw man. You're painting him with a stereotype and claiming that he made arguments as part of that stereotype. Then, you're lambasting him for the contradiction that you created.
If it wasn't for cyanobacteria, we'd still have a primarily methane and carbon dioxide atmosphere. Cyanobacteria can be credited with resposibility for the major atmospheric change that occured around 2.5 billion years ago as the first photosyntheic lifeforms.
You apparently don't realize that a pizza with anything other than sparsely laid out slices of mozzarella (Florentine style) is an American invention.
Stupid AOL.
Why did using ICQ
Get me so much spam?
Step 1 -- Send haiku
Step 2 -- We must pass over
Step 3 is PROFIT!
Hah. Mojo criollo is both the best spam marinade and topping. Mmmm.... Citrus-garlic pork goodness...
What more consistent and responsive and well designed gui is there than Aqua?
Let's see... How about Mac OS 9? Do you even understand the basic principles of HCI that made Mac OS 9 so great, or are you too caught up in the eye candy to understand? It does not let users take advantage of muscle memory the same way Mac OS 9 did by constantly moving the standard 3 menu items (File, Edit, View) with each application switch. It throws away the advantages of the inifinite depth of the four corners of a desktop that Mac OS 9 allowed users to exploit. It has an inconsistent Finder that randomly resizes list columns as you move around and that refuses to retain spatial organization of files within folders. Don't even get me started on the Dock. There have been many articles highlighting the numerous flaws of that GUI element that anyone who actually bothered to examine in the Beta days should already know about.
And each release gets faster, Jaguar is a hardware upgrade in a box. The UI speed is amazing.
Amazingly underwhelming. I don't know about you, but the responsiveness on my 400 MHz G4 is terrible compared to Mac OS 9. Windows and X11 are snappy and responsive on my friend's old 233 MHz Pentium II. Plus the Mac OS X scheduler is so poorly written that setting the priority on any process down to its worst value will still not improve GUI responsiveness. If the process wants the CPU constantly, it will get it regardless of priority. I simply cannot believe that you actually think the UI speed is "amazing." Moving around and resizing Windows should be instantaneous on a 400 MHz machine!
Oh, and don't buy the marketing hype. "A hardware upgrade in a box" is a tacit way of admitting that Mac OS X is a sluggish, poorly written OS in the first place. You'll find on other OSes that there's not so much room for improvement anymore.
Oh, and the "%150" claim about PC prices-- that's funny. Apparently, you've not priced a PC lately, or you think a 2GHz processor is twice as fast as a 1GHz processor.
Live in denial, man.
With the exception of their SIMD units, Altivec vs. MMX/SSE, the CPI and instruction throughput advantage on PPC chips ain't what it used to be. I remember back in the day when PPCs were clocked the same as Pentiums AND faster per clock. Those days are long past. AMD chips are on par with PPC chips are the same clock speed for the types of processing that a system will spend 95% of its time using (unless you do nothing but run Photoshop filters).
AMD chips are also clocked 50% faster and cost a third to a fourth the price of a G4. Even P4s, which don't perform quite as well at the same clock speed are clocked twice as fast AND cost much less. Have you actually looked into Macintosh CPU upgrades lately? Upgrading my Celeron system to the fastest PIII-FCPGA available would cost me less than $200, with $120 being a good breaking point. Upgrading my G4 would cost me over $1K to get a chip that performs at 70-80% of a mid-range x86 chip.
Don't buy into the whole claim that G4s are just as fast as P4s. The claim only holds up for certain specialized operations that 90% of the software you run doesn't use. For the general case bread-and-butter integer, floating point, and memory manipulation operations, G4s trail the x86 family. Perhaps this wouldn't be the case Apple could actually use smoe modern memory modules instead of getting half the performance out of an underclocked DDR memory system -- which, I might add, is a recent addition to a family of systems whose high-end systems have been languishing under PC133 for the past 2 years while every non-budget x86 system has moved on DDR or RDRAM.
This is old news. The only thing that can save Apple's hardware is if IBM actually markets that Power4-derived chip for Apple desktops and they crank up the memory bandwidth.
It gets tireing hearing all these complaints about apple from people who either don't understand the technology or are just making stuff up. Apple is kicking ass in all the areas you complain about... wtf?
I'm tired of mindless sheep who think marketing drivel is wisdom from the mountain top. I use Macs and PCs side-by-side, day-by-day. My PC at work is a 600 MHz P3 running Win2k that's of the same generation as my 400 MHz G4. Guess which one processes Genome@Home work units faster? Guess which one I can actually run Genome@Home on without killing the performance of my desktop and making simple window operations unusable? Between my rock-bottom $400 dollar Celeron system with built-in Savage4 graphics and my G4 that has a better graphics card and twice the memory, I'd like you to guess which runs Warcraft III faster.
Unlike you, apparently, I've actually used the Mac since the System 6 days, and I've experienced first-hand the loss of productivity and ease of use that came with Mac OS X. Yes, Mac OS X crashes far, far less often. Yes, cooperative multitasking wasn't that great (but it wasn't that much worse than Darwin's kernel's attempt at preemptive multitasking). However, Mac OS 9 had years of usability studies and HCI research behind it that was all thrown out the window for eye candy. There is absolutely NO reason why the GUI paradigm from Mac OS 9 couldn't be kept, but they preferred to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
All major applications (or quality alternatives) now run native, there is no major slowdown as in 10.0.x, and you get to enjoy all the great things that are exlusive to OS X like Aqua and Unix.
The first two statements are complete BS. Many major software tools have not been ported to Mac OS X -- Max/MSP, Director, QuarkXPress, etc. Much of the software that I use is noticeably slower in Mac OS X 10.1.5 than in Mac OS 9.2.2, including that unworthy abomination that they've passed on the name "Finder" to. About the only GUI apps in Mac OS X that are faster are Java apps and Mozilla. God forbid you want to play any games like Baldur's Gate 2.
As for the last bit, Apple can take Aqua and shove it. I'd rather have a responsive, consistent, and well-designed GUI than the eye-candy lobotomized NeXT crap that Apple pawned off on us with the Aqua "user experience." I used to bleed the Apple rainbow, but with each day I use Mac OS X and each time Apple releases another unimpressive, sluggish system for 150% of what I could pay for a top of the line PC I wonder, "Why do I still bother?"
Using a Macintosh is about the user interface, and today's Apple is killing everything that was once great about the platform.
Oh, thank goodness. That's was the impression that I already had before this article started referring to iChat users as ".mac accounts."
Do you have to keep a .mac account to use iChat? Oh, just great. Just when I thought I'd get an instant messaging client, I find out it costs $100 a year to use. Forget that.
I think I'll stick with ignoring my email instead of moving to ignoring my instant messages.
Personally, I'm waiting for elves, orks, street mages, and a dragon to be elected as President before I start comparing the world to Shadowrun.
Now, Neuromancer, on the other hand...
It seems to me that the purpose of this article really isn't to ask a question, but instead to be a bully-pulpit to rally against the DeBeers monopoly. I don't know if "Ask Slashdot" is an appropriate place for this.
As for the tagged on question at the end, have you considered your fiance-to-be's birth stone? My grandmother had a beautiful ruby and silver engagement ring. If you're not looking for a ring, then it really depends on how much a traditionalist your girlfriend is. Just whatever you do, if you're going to skip the ring option, don't try to weasel out with something less than the cost of a diamond ring, or it's likely she'll suspect that money was the real motivation.
I can only tell you what I've personally experienced. I and members of my family have occasional precognative dreams. I used to get them about once a month or so when I was a kid and a teenager. They never predicted anything important nor did the future event last for more than 10 seconds. Curiously, I never say or do anything significant in these events -- I'm always playing a passive role, mostly because of the disturbing realization that I've seen these events before in a dream.
A precognative dream feels like having deja vu in reverse. I have a dream, I know at the time that it's a precognative dream, and I wake up in the middle of it feeling strange. It's like you're feeling the same emotion that you will feel when the event plays out in front of your eyes later. After I wake up, I forget about it like all other dreams minutes moments aftewards. (No, I've never successfully been able to keep a dream journal. My dreams fade too quickly.)
Later, some event happens and through the entire event, I realize that I dreamed about it before, and I'm powerless to interfere or do anything different from the dream until the scene has finished playing out.
In my first precognative dream, I was a terrified kindergardener being slammed up against the fence of my school playground by a first grader. This didn't make any sense to me, I remember, because first graders were allowed on the playground at the same time as us to prevent us from being bullied by larger kids. Three days later, they let out some first graders on the playground early or kept us out later, and I ended up accidentally running into one of them while playing. When he got up and I recognized him and the color of his Izod shirt, the dream came back to me, and I was too stunned to do anything to stop being shoved up against the fence a second or two later.
This is one of the few childhood memories from that time period that is still burned on my memory. I remember the emotions involved distinctly and that I asked my mother about such dreams for the first time later that day. It's also one of the few memories where I can remember how small I was as a child instead having to think about it relative to the items around me in the memory. I even remember the little alligator logo on his shirt.
The most recent dream event that I can remember was at a TGI Fridays two years ago. In the dream, I didn't recognize where I was, but I distinctly remembered the red and white checkered table and the plant behind one of my friends. I remember waking up and being puzzled because in the dream, I was dining with two groups of friends that I figured would never meet each other. 2-3 months later, I've forgotten about the dream, and we're all at the restraunt when the conversation from the dream takes place. I was literally biting at the bullet to say something about it, but I couldn't actually interrupt the conversation to say anything until the scene had finished playing out.
I guess nothing I say will convince anyone otherwise, though. Precognative dreaming is something that has to be experienced to be understood. I don't really care if you do call it an "uncritical anecdote." I've been there. I've experienced it. I can tell you however, that when a precognative dream happens, you learn to know it for what it is. I never remember waking up from a dream that never happened, and I don't remember precognative dreams happening until I've cleared the last one. Maybe that's why I haven't had one in a couple of years. Maybe the event hasn't played out yet.
There is no vagueness whatsoever for me in these "premonitions." The events are crystal clear at the time of the dream, for those foggy moments after waking up, and for the duration of the event. This is unusual for me, because I'm not a very visual thinker generally and I tend to rely on intuition more than concrete imagery for memories.
I'm not the only one in my family to experience this. On both my mother's and father's side, I have a few relatives who know exactly what I was talking about when I described it to them. Some of us believe not because of the anecdotes of others but because we've been there.
Not that I'll ask you to do the same on just my "uncritical anecdote," though... <g>
Several times they dodge the questions of weather by saying that they'll simply put it in a place where there are no hurricanes and no thunderstorms. While I don't doubt there are places where these are infrequent, I don't believe for a second that there is anywhere on Earth around the equator where it's impossible to run into bad weather.
If I remember correctly, the reason they don't want to deal with the lightning question is because running a huge electrical charge through a carbon nanotube will make it explode into a cloud of graphite, severing the connection.
So, the question becomes, what do they plan on doing when (not if) bad weather comes for the orbital elevator. Can it be moved?
Another unanswered question is what they plan to do about space debris.
Anyway, I hold my SSN with a death grip, and so far I've had no identity theft problems. So, until that happens, I'm content to sit on my lazy American ass and keep my SSN.
Lucky you. Unfortunately, my college used my SSN as my student number, with which my grades and such were publicly posted. Any one of a few thousand students and any clever con artists who come on campus looking for numbers could have my SSN and name right now, just waiting to exploit it.
At least the atheists want all religion OUT, instead of wanting theirs IN.
In the case of atheists, that's the same thing.
Once again, someone on Slashdot confuses patents and copyright.
IBM has alread licensed Altivec from Motorola as far back as 1998-2000, allegedly to help with the design of the PowerPC variant used in the Gamecube. The PowerPC 405 embedded processor in the Gamecube contains 38 additional instructions for vector FP math (vs. the 162 in Altivec). A glance at this PDF file from the web makes me pretty sure that these aren't just lifted from Altivec. Instead of Altivec's 128-bit 4 32-bit FP vectors, Gecko adds instructions for fitting 2 32-bit FP numbers in a single 64-bit FPU register and working with them. It also adds some odd but interesting MMU features.
Anyway, I know it's been licensed because back in 2000 there was a lot of conspiracy theories that Motorola was preventing IBM from selling faster clocked PPC chips to Apple than they could produce via an obscure clause in that license. Both parties denied it, of course. I don't really believe that was the case. I think it was just bitter rumor-mongering by Mac users who were rightfully angry at Motorola for pissing away the performance (and MHz) advantage that PowerPC had on x86 chips back in the 603/604e and Pentium/PPro days.
Oh, admittedly, the MHz advantage went away as Intel/AMD extended their pipelines for that explicit purpose earning theirselves increased performance penalties for mispredicted branches and requiring increased CPI for many instructions, but I still miss the days when PPCs were faster per clock AND had higher clock rates. Now the clock rate advantage is so extreme that the PowerPCs' better performance per cycle doesn't catch up for the most commonly executed code. Once again, though, I digress.
PowerPC was designed from the POWER architecture to replace it, and has been designed from the beginning to support 32-bit and 64-bit versions. The architecture is actually designed from the beginning to be a 64-bit architecture, and the common desktop implementations are only the 32-bit subset of the original design.
Here's some additional background info:
Never saw that. Usually, the huge cans of beer were only to be found at convenience stores near the 1L to 1.5L bottles of tea and sports drinks. I actually never saw a vending machine with an alcoholic beverage either. I don't know if they even exist any more. Most of the drink bottles and can were slightly smaller than what you'd expect from an American vending machine, too.
(Oops.) ...and, yes, they do top off the drinks with ice too. "Koori ga nai Coca-Cola onegai-simasu," was the best I could figure out for ordering a Coke with no ice in Japan.