I wasn't using a Mac during the last time Apple allowed clones, but several people I knew at the time all claimed that their clones were generally faster than the machines Apple sold. So now that I us OS X, I'd like some Intel clones... but not from these clowns. They sound like the SCO of cloners.
"Why? Simple- I spend too much time already (in my job) staring at a screen, paper's a refreshing and healthy way of getting the news when you're sick of the TFT. "
I don't think you're as alone in this view as you might believe. Computers and the Internet are wonderful and they've revolutionized information for the better. But, like books themselves, they're never going to completely replace newspapers, for a number of reasons. You've nailed one of those reasons right off... we spend a significant amount of our lives in front of a keyboard already. If you're like me, and you work in IT, no matter how much you like your job, you want a break from computer screens. I could get all my news, and even all of my literature, from a computer screen. But I'd never be able to leave my desk except to shower, eat, and sleep. And that sucks.
What I think you're going to see is a dramatic culling of the industry. Many small and mid-size cities will lose their home papers outright. For the future of papers, you might look to the model USA Today uses. I imagine some smaller states will have a single "state" newspapers, with different sections for different areas of the state.
I think you'll see two"national" papers, and that'll be it. USA Today, the Wall Street Journal... maybe the NY Times, but I doubt it. I think the NY Times isn't long for this world as a "national" paper anymore. They're one of the outlets that are bleeding red ink. IIRC, USAT was the only newspaper that actually saw its circulation increase rather than decrease, and the WSJ had only a.001 % decline in circulation. All other major cities papers have started declining, some in double digits.
The WSJ is the only newspaper I read regularly now, even if it's a day or two old. Everyone gets immediate news from the Web. That's not what you read a newspaper for anymore. You go to a newspaper for depth on the story, to sit back and get a deeper take, And that's where being able to pick up a newspaper and read it on a bench somewhere is nice. Even the kids that try to read everything on a Kindle or a netbook right now will probably change their habits eventually. Tactile feel of paper is a pleasure unto itself, and I'm confident even young kids will eventually tire of reading an electronic screen all the time.
Precisely. +1 Insightful. We don't need objective papers; we need biased papers with citizens reading both, and reaching their own conclusions. (In most cases the truth is probably in the middle.)
I disagree with that. I think we need all three... we need mainstream papers that hew to a point of view, and we need some papers that strenuously try to be unbiased and objective. You're not always going to succeed, but people will give you credit and trust your word if you consistently show as a journalist that objective, clear reporting is your overriding goal.
The problem is that the US is heading for the kind of press system Britain has... nothing but right wing or left wing media, and nothing in between. What you get is a shouting match, not informed debate, and I'd argue that it hasn't served Britain very well, and it won't serve America very well either. I'm under no illusion that you can ever have perfect objectivity, but we'd all be better served if someone out there would actually try.
Just check out the pancreatic cancer survival stats. It's something like 10% survival one year after diagnosis, 4% five years afrer diagnosis. Detection almost always at latter stages when surgery not an option. Very nasty and fast cancer.
Jobs has classic symptoms - wasting away, losing weight.
My own father perished five weeks after diagnosis (stage iv). My father in law died nine months after diagnosis (stage ii).
There are basically two kinds of pancreatic cancer, one with an almost 95 percent morbidity rate, and one that's very curable, but much more rare. Unless Jobs has been lying all these years (and it's been several years since the surgery), he had the lesser cancer. When he was first diagnosed, he was told to go home and get his things in order. Then the refined diagnosis came in, and showed that he had the survivable type. Supposedly, one of the technicians running the test wept with relief and happiness for Jobs. Guess he was an Apple user.
The only thing the iPod is really lacking is the ability to play more file types (ie ogg) and the ability to something other than iTunes without having to worry about something breaking.
For me, it's the simple act of leaving out an FM radio that has prevented me from buying an iPod. Virtually every other competitor includes one, and it boggles my mind why most iPods haven't had them from the start. It's not like including a radio adds to the expense or makes the unit bulkier. My Sandisk Sansa has one, and is no bigger than comparible iPods. Lots of people still listen to the radio, you know. Yes, I know you can buy add-on equipment to give it radio capability, but you shouldn't have to.
. Pudge is the hero of dumb fat fucks everywhere - in one of his journals he talks about how Obama has the least amount of experience of any candidate in 70 years, obviously forgetting who's in the White House right now.
Bush was a two term governor of a large state before he was elected.
I can understand something like the.XXX tld, for the purpose of openly idenfitying what a site is (and ease in blocking porn sites in school LAN's and such), but otherwise, creating this raft of tld's is a really silly idea. We've just now gotten to the point where most users don't think everything ends in "dot com". The proposed system of hyper-classification won't be a boon to anyone but domain squatters and con artists. And for the non-technical public, it'll be just plain confusing.
Even as quickly as it was thrown together, the concepts of the internet were relatively simple, commonsense, and workable, if not always elegant. We should keep it that way with a minimum of monkeying around. No more.aero's, or.biz's, or.tel's.
Well, the grievance crowd was sure to come to gaming sooner or later. And you Hentai fans that like your young asian porn, you're probably next on the hit parade of incorrect behavior.
Greenpeace, despite their name, is a pretty radical group, often just a notch inside that line that groups like the Animal Liberation Front often cross. Greenpeace is just Earth First with more money and better publicity. Getting attacked by Greenpeace is a lot like getting attacked by PETA... sometimes, the public sympathizes with you precisely because a radical group is targeting you.
Is this actually going to stop anyone from buying an Apple? No, it's just free publicity for Apple. I bet every time PETA pulls one of their lamebrain stunts, steakhouse profits go up. Same thing here.
There's already a treatment guaranteed to prevent the expression of these symptoms: abortion.
I know I'm violating Godwin's Law here, but in this case, to hell with Godwin. Nice answer there, Mein Heir; tell us, what are your exacting standards for the rest of humanity? Who else gets the axe in your perfect world?
Who the hell are you to tell people what kind of contribution they can make in this world? Who the hell are you to determine who gets to live and who has to die without even a chance for life? I've never in my 40 years met a family that regretted their Downs child. I've never met a family that didn't consider those children a blessing.
These kids may not be capable of everything we are, but every Downs kid I've ever met is a far better human than you are. You're a rotten little man.
"They never promised to lower taxes across the board"
He promised a tax cut to 95 percent of the population, even though close to 40 percent don't actually even pay federal income taxes.
"or that health care would be free or unlimited"
He promised universal coverage, and free coverage below a certain income level.
"retirement would be bulletproof"
He promised not to touch Social Security, regardless of the looming financial train wreck it's becoming.
"or energy would be free or unlimited either."
Free energy is precisely what he promised with his pledge to spend billions of tax dollars on "free" energy sources, wind and solar. He also made the highly dubious promise to get us completely off of foreign oil within a decade.
When I said "Windows does NOT run a ship of war", I referred to active ships. The USS Yorktown (CG 48) was decommissioned, and therefore is no longer an active ship of war. We evolved past using NT4.0.
The new Gerald Ford class aircraft carriers will be controlled by a variant of Windows Server 2003. And Windows OS's are creeping into other weapons projects as well. I have a friend that does work on the clusterfsck that is the Marine's new EFV, and he tells me that it's also run on a variant of W2K3. The military is standardizing on Windows for everything from vehicle control to C3 systems. And that's very bad news.
And BTW, I used to be a sailor, waayyy back in the day.
Chuck Windows, and adopt Unix. I realize there are some possible implications of using Linux because of the GPL, but then use BSD. There are bright Comp Sci guys in the military and DOD. Customize a military Unix, and use it throughout all the services. In fact, I think it's long past time DOD did this. With the computerization of everything from planes to ships, now's a smart time to do it. There's no way Windows should be running a ship of war.
The NSA doesn't really recruit anyone. Most people working at the NSA are military.
One, they do recruit civilians, quite heavily, and two, there are a large number of military people in their ranks. But those military people are pretty bright, too.
I went to a military academy (USAFA) and while we started young at 18, we didn't graduate until 22 at the earliest. We had a few prior-enlisted cadets at 22 or so, but you could enroll up to around 24/25 yrs old.
But even with that early start, if Star Trek follows naval ranks (I'm not a ST geek), then you have to understand that a young captain is a very very odd thing. That's just below an Admiral in rank, could you imagine seeing a general or an admiral at age 30?
Yup. I'm ex-Navy, and a 30 year old captain would be a strange sight. That's an 0-6, comparable to a full colonel. Shatner was 35 when he took the role, and even that's a little young, though not implausible.
Keep in mind that in naval tradition, all commanding officers at sea are called "captain", whether or not they actually hold the o-6 rank. The Captain is the CO of the vessel, but depending on the size of the ship, he could be anywhere from a lieutenant commander to a full captain. Smaller ships like frigates tend to have CO's that are 04's or 05's, while bigger ones like cruisers and carriers and ballistic missile subs tend to have full captains.
So, it's not completely implausible that, say, a 30 year old could be a CO of a starship, and her captain. But it would probably be a really small ship. The Enterprise has been Starfleet's flagship throughout most of the iterations of the Star Trek franchise, and I have a hard time believing that they'd assign the command of their flagship to anything less than a full captain.
Boycotting Card
on
Ender in Exile
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· Score: 2, Insightful
"I believe an important part of growing up is taking the bigger picture into account, and deciding who and what we support based on more than just our immediate personal result."
You realize, of course, that you're basically making the same argument that the social conservatives you so loathe are making... that there can be no co-existence with the other side, and the only answer is to boycott and blacklist their work.
Cawley does get it. On a shoestring budget, he's making better Star Trek than Hollywood with a budget of 100+ million dollars. The difference is that Cawley respects the series. Abrams and Paramount simply see Kirk and Spock as just the latest way to sell a summer action flick to the MySpace generation.
Yes he did. So either Abrams suddenly has the Enterprise so damn massive that you can see it from Iowa, or he has Kirk growing up in San Franciso. Except that in the trailer, San Francisco sure looks like the midwest.
Not to mention "A Piece of the Action" showed us that even years later, Kirk hadn't learned to drive a car like that (and why would he?). I fear the makers of this movie haven't done their homework on Trek nearly as much as they promised they would.
I think it's become apparent to everyone that Abrams doesn't give a rat's ass about the history of the Star Trek universe, and just made it up as he went along.
Riker one-upped Kirk in one regard... not only did he horndog real women, he horndogged virtual women as well. Whenever he was aroused by a woman and couldn't have her, what did he do? "Bridge, Riker; I'll be in Holodeck Seven". You knew what he was doing.... going for a holosex spank-session with a hologram of the woman he was just lusting after.
"Is it a reboot if the new version comes from a time traveler from the old version going back and changing the past?"
I don't know if it's a reboot, but it's certainly lame.
"Speaking of which, why did they bother to bring in J.J. Abrams if he's going to recycle all the old lame Bermanesque plot gimmicks?"
I think JJ Abrams may be ready to knock M. Knight Shymalan off his throne as the most overhyped writer in Hollywood. Shymalan and Abrams both share a similar trait... they're both one-trick ponies. Shymalan does one thing only... plot twist movies. Abrams also does one thing only... take an interesting idea that's good for maybe a single TV episode, and stretch an entire TV series or feature film out of it. Lost has stretched that small, interesting idea into 3 seasons of repetitive television, and Cloverfield was supposed to bring a revolutionary approach to the giant-monster genre. The monster wasn't even interesting. Hell, the speculative giant-whale-beast fan art was actually more interesting than the real monster in the movie.
Abrams took an intriguing concept... Kirk and Spock when they were young... and turned it into a teenaged soap opera aimed at the MTV crowd more than actual Star Trek fans.
Yes, the Suck is strong with this one
on
New Star Trek Trailer
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Hmmmmm, Scotty, Kirk, McCoy, Spock, Uhuru, Sulu and Checkov all at the academy at the same time despite the differences in age. Yeah, this is gonna' suck.
Yup, it's becoming more and more apparent that Abrams has no regard whatsoever for the history of the series. McCoy was older than both Kirk and Spock (so was Scotty, but not by much), and Sulu, Uhura, and especially Chekov were all younger than Kirk... Chekov was a freakin' ensign, and didn't even join the series until year two. Now Abrams has them all at the academy at the same time?
"Mac's are sluggish. There are plenty of theories as to why"
I honestly don't know, so I guess I'm looking for an informed opinion on this... but could the kernel be the problem? Part of the kernel is Mach-based, no? Supposedly Steve Jobs insisted on Mach way back in the NeXT-day as it was cutting edge, and Steve is all about cutting edge. But Mach has always had a horrible reputation for performance... it's promise has never quite lived up to the reality. And yet, IIRC, Darwin still has Mach code at it's core, with some userland stuff taken from BSD and grafted on. And again, IIRC, the Mach stuff is still the 2.0 or 3.0 stuff, and not the updated 4.0 version that the University of Utah developed.
If all this is true, it begs the question, why does Apple still use the Mach code then? I'm certainly not ripping on OS X... I'm typing this on my eMac. Now, I think it runs slow sometimes, but I always assumed that was because of old G4 cpu (which despite Apple's advertising to the contrary, really was outclassed by even the Pentiums of the day). Are you telling me that your Macs, which I assume are Intel-based, are still sluggish?
Slashdot Mirror
I wasn't using a Mac during the last time Apple allowed clones, but several people I knew at the time all claimed that their clones were generally faster than the machines Apple sold. So now that I us OS X, I'd like some Intel clones... but not from these clowns. They sound like the SCO of cloners.
"Why? Simple- I spend too much time already (in my job) staring at a screen, paper's a refreshing and healthy way of getting the news when you're sick of the TFT. "
I don't think you're as alone in this view as you might believe. Computers and the Internet are wonderful and they've revolutionized information for the better. But, like books themselves, they're never going to completely replace newspapers, for a number of reasons. You've nailed one of those reasons right off... we spend a significant amount of our lives in front of a keyboard already. If you're like me, and you work in IT, no matter how much you like your job, you want a break from computer screens. I could get all my news, and even all of my literature, from a computer screen. But I'd never be able to leave my desk except to shower, eat, and sleep. And that sucks.
What I think you're going to see is a dramatic culling of the industry. Many small and mid-size cities will lose their home papers outright. For the future of papers, you might look to the model USA Today uses. I imagine some smaller states will have a single "state" newspapers, with different sections for different areas of the state.
I think you'll see two"national" papers, and that'll be it. USA Today, the Wall Street Journal... maybe the NY Times, but I doubt it. I think the NY Times isn't long for this world as a "national" paper anymore. They're one of the outlets that are bleeding red ink. IIRC, USAT was the only newspaper that actually saw its circulation increase rather than decrease, and the WSJ had only a .001 % decline in circulation. All other major cities papers have started declining, some in double digits.
The WSJ is the only newspaper I read regularly now, even if it's a day or two old. Everyone gets immediate news from the Web. That's not what you read a newspaper for anymore. You go to a newspaper for depth on the story, to sit back and get a deeper take, And that's where being able to pick up a newspaper and read it on a bench somewhere is nice. Even the kids that try to read everything on a Kindle or a netbook right now will probably change their habits eventually. Tactile feel of paper is a pleasure unto itself, and I'm confident even young kids will eventually tire of reading an electronic screen all the time.
Precisely. +1 Insightful. We don't need objective papers; we need biased papers with citizens reading both, and reaching their own conclusions. (In most cases the truth is probably in the middle.)
I disagree with that. I think we need all three... we need mainstream papers that hew to a point of view, and we need some papers that strenuously try to be unbiased and objective. You're not always going to succeed, but people will give you credit and trust your word if you consistently show as a journalist that objective, clear reporting is your overriding goal.
The problem is that the US is heading for the kind of press system Britain has... nothing but right wing or left wing media, and nothing in between. What you get is a shouting match, not informed debate, and I'd argue that it hasn't served Britain very well, and it won't serve America very well either. I'm under no illusion that you can ever have perfect objectivity, but we'd all be better served if someone out there would actually try.
Just check out the pancreatic cancer survival stats. It's something like 10% survival one year after diagnosis, 4% five years afrer diagnosis. Detection almost always at latter stages when surgery not an option. Very nasty and fast cancer.
Jobs has classic symptoms - wasting away, losing weight.
My own father perished five weeks after diagnosis (stage iv). My father in law died nine months after diagnosis (stage ii).
There are basically two kinds of pancreatic cancer, one with an almost 95 percent morbidity rate, and one that's very curable, but much more rare. Unless Jobs has been lying all these years (and it's been several years since the surgery), he had the lesser cancer. When he was first diagnosed, he was told to go home and get his things in order. Then the refined diagnosis came in, and showed that he had the survivable type. Supposedly, one of the technicians running the test wept with relief and happiness for Jobs. Guess he was an Apple user.
That is why the technically superior Zune was such a hit!
Nah, it's because Barack Obama uses them.
The only thing the iPod is really lacking is the ability to play more file types (ie ogg) and the ability to something other than iTunes without having to worry about something breaking.
For me, it's the simple act of leaving out an FM radio that has prevented me from buying an iPod. Virtually every other competitor includes one, and it boggles my mind why most iPods haven't had them from the start. It's not like including a radio adds to the expense or makes the unit bulkier. My Sandisk Sansa has one, and is no bigger than comparible iPods. Lots of people still listen to the radio, you know. Yes, I know you can buy add-on equipment to give it radio capability, but you shouldn't have to.
Maybe Steve just doesn't find radio fashionable.
. Pudge is the hero of dumb fat fucks everywhere - in one of his journals he talks about how Obama has the least amount of experience of any candidate in 70 years, obviously forgetting who's in the White House right now.
Bush was a two term governor of a large state before he was elected.
Who is the dumb fat fuck now?
... government dollars come with government strings attached.
I can understand something like the .XXX tld, for the purpose of openly idenfitying what a site is (and ease in blocking porn sites in school LAN's and such), but otherwise, creating this raft of tld's is a really silly idea. We've just now gotten to the point where most users don't think everything ends in "dot com". The proposed system of hyper-classification won't be a boon to anyone but domain squatters and con artists. And for the non-technical public, it'll be just plain confusing.
Even as quickly as it was thrown together, the concepts of the internet were relatively simple, commonsense, and workable, if not always elegant. We should keep it that way with a minimum of monkeying around. No more .aero's, or .biz's, or .tel's.
Well, the grievance crowd was sure to come to gaming sooner or later. And you Hentai fans that like your young asian porn, you're probably next on the hit parade of incorrect behavior.
Greenpeace, despite their name, is a pretty radical group, often just a notch inside that line that groups like the Animal Liberation Front often cross. Greenpeace is just Earth First with more money and better publicity. Getting attacked by Greenpeace is a lot like getting attacked by PETA... sometimes, the public sympathizes with you precisely because a radical group is targeting you.
Is this actually going to stop anyone from buying an Apple? No, it's just free publicity for Apple. I bet every time PETA pulls one of their lamebrain stunts, steakhouse profits go up. Same thing here.
There's already a treatment guaranteed to prevent the expression of these symptoms: abortion.
I know I'm violating Godwin's Law here, but in this case, to hell with Godwin. Nice answer there, Mein Heir; tell us, what are your exacting standards for the rest of humanity? Who else gets the axe in your perfect world?
Who the hell are you to tell people what kind of contribution they can make in this world? Who the hell are you to determine who gets to live and who has to die without even a chance for life? I've never in my 40 years met a family that regretted their Downs child. I've never met a family that didn't consider those children a blessing.
These kids may not be capable of everything we are, but every Downs kid I've ever met is a far better human than you are. You're a rotten little man.
"They never promised to lower taxes across the board"
He promised a tax cut to 95 percent of the population, even though close to 40 percent don't actually even pay federal income taxes.
"or that health care would be free or unlimited"
He promised universal coverage, and free coverage below a certain income level.
"retirement would be bulletproof"
He promised not to touch Social Security, regardless of the looming financial train wreck it's becoming.
"or energy would be free or unlimited either."
Free energy is precisely what he promised with his pledge to spend billions of tax dollars on "free" energy sources, wind and solar. He also made the highly dubious promise to get us completely off of foreign oil within a decade.
When I said "Windows does NOT run a ship of war", I referred to active ships. The USS Yorktown (CG 48) was decommissioned, and therefore is no longer an active ship of war. We evolved past using NT4.0.
The new Gerald Ford class aircraft carriers will be controlled by a variant of Windows Server 2003. And Windows OS's are creeping into other weapons projects as well. I have a friend that does work on the clusterfsck that is the Marine's new EFV, and he tells me that it's also run on a variant of W2K3. The military is standardizing on Windows for everything from vehicle control to C3 systems. And that's very bad news.
And BTW, I used to be a sailor, waayyy back in the day.
Chuck Windows, and adopt Unix. I realize there are some possible implications of using Linux because of the GPL, but then use BSD. There are bright Comp Sci guys in the military and DOD. Customize a military Unix, and use it throughout all the services. In fact, I think it's long past time DOD did this. With the computerization of everything from planes to ships, now's a smart time to do it. There's no way Windows should be running a ship of war.
The NSA doesn't really recruit anyone. Most people working at the NSA are military.
One, they do recruit civilians, quite heavily, and two, there are a large number of military people in their ranks. But those military people are pretty bright, too.
I went to a military academy (USAFA) and while we started young at 18, we didn't graduate until 22 at the earliest. We had a few prior-enlisted cadets at 22 or so, but you could enroll up to around 24/25 yrs old.
But even with that early start, if Star Trek follows naval ranks (I'm not a ST geek), then you have to understand that a young captain is a very very odd thing. That's just below an Admiral in rank, could you imagine seeing a general or an admiral at age 30?
Yup. I'm ex-Navy, and a 30 year old captain would be a strange sight. That's an 0-6, comparable to a full colonel. Shatner was 35 when he took the role, and even that's a little young, though not implausible.
Keep in mind that in naval tradition, all commanding officers at sea are called "captain", whether or not they actually hold the o-6 rank. The Captain is the CO of the vessel, but depending on the size of the ship, he could be anywhere from a lieutenant
commander to a full captain. Smaller ships like frigates tend to have CO's that are 04's or 05's, while bigger ones like cruisers and carriers and ballistic missile subs tend to have full captains.
So, it's not completely implausible that, say, a 30 year old could be a CO of a starship, and her captain. But it would probably be a really small ship. The Enterprise has been Starfleet's flagship throughout most of the iterations of the Star Trek franchise, and I have a hard time believing that they'd assign the command of their flagship to anything less than a full captain.
"I believe an important part of growing up is taking the bigger picture into account, and deciding who and what we support based on more than just our immediate personal result."
You realize, of course, that you're basically making the same argument that the social conservatives you so loathe are making... that there can be no co-existence with the other side, and the only answer is to boycott and blacklist their work.
Cawley does get it. On a shoestring budget, he's making better Star Trek than Hollywood with a budget of 100+ million dollars. The difference is that Cawley respects the series. Abrams and Paramount simply see Kirk and Spock as just the latest way to sell a summer action flick to the MySpace generation.
And he grew up in Iowa.
Yes he did. So either Abrams suddenly has the Enterprise so damn massive that you can see it from Iowa, or he has Kirk growing up in San Franciso. Except that in the trailer, San Francisco sure looks like the midwest.
Not to mention "A Piece of the Action" showed us that even years later, Kirk hadn't learned to drive a car like that (and why would he?). I fear the makers of this movie haven't done their homework on Trek nearly as much as they promised they would.
I think it's become apparent to everyone that Abrams doesn't give a rat's ass about the history of the Star Trek universe, and just made it up as he went along.
" even TNG had commander "horndog" riker."
Riker one-upped Kirk in one regard... not only did he horndog real women, he horndogged virtual women as well. Whenever he was aroused by a woman and couldn't have her, what did he do? "Bridge, Riker; I'll be in Holodeck Seven". You knew what he was doing.... going for a holosex spank-session with a hologram of the woman he was just lusting after.
"Is it a reboot if the new version comes from a time traveler from the old version going back and changing the past?"
I don't know if it's a reboot, but it's certainly lame.
"Speaking of which, why did they bother to bring in J.J. Abrams if he's going to recycle all the old lame Bermanesque plot gimmicks?"
I think JJ Abrams may be ready to knock M. Knight Shymalan off his throne as the most overhyped writer in Hollywood. Shymalan and Abrams both share a similar trait... they're both one-trick ponies. Shymalan does one thing only... plot twist movies. Abrams also does one thing only... take an interesting idea that's good for maybe a single TV episode, and stretch an entire TV series or feature film out of it. Lost has stretched that small, interesting idea into 3 seasons of repetitive television, and Cloverfield was supposed to bring a revolutionary approach to the giant-monster genre. The monster wasn't even interesting. Hell, the speculative giant-whale-beast fan art was actually more interesting than the real monster in the movie.
Abrams took an intriguing concept... Kirk and Spock when they were young... and turned it into a teenaged soap opera aimed at the MTV crowd more than actual Star Trek fans.
Hmmmmm, Scotty, Kirk, McCoy, Spock, Uhuru, Sulu and Checkov all at the academy at the same time despite the differences in age. Yeah, this is gonna' suck.
Yup, it's becoming more and more apparent that Abrams has no regard whatsoever for the history of the series. McCoy was older than both Kirk and Spock (so was Scotty, but not by much), and Sulu, Uhura, and especially Chekov were all younger than Kirk... Chekov was a freakin' ensign, and didn't even join the series until year two. Now Abrams has them all at the academy at the same time?
This isn't Star Trek. It's Starfleet 90210.
"Mac's are sluggish. There are plenty of theories as to why"
I honestly don't know, so I guess I'm looking for an informed opinion on this... but could the kernel be the problem? Part of the kernel is Mach-based, no? Supposedly Steve Jobs insisted on Mach way back in the NeXT-day as it was cutting edge, and Steve is all about cutting edge. But Mach has always had a horrible reputation for performance... it's promise has never quite lived up to the reality. And yet, IIRC, Darwin still has Mach code at it's core, with some userland stuff taken from BSD and grafted on. And again, IIRC, the Mach stuff is still the 2.0 or 3.0 stuff, and not the updated 4.0 version that the University of Utah developed.
If all this is true, it begs the question, why does Apple still use the Mach code then? I'm certainly not ripping on OS X... I'm typing this on my eMac. Now, I think it runs slow sometimes, but I always assumed that was because of old G4 cpu (which despite Apple's advertising to the contrary, really was outclassed by even the Pentiums of the day). Are you telling me that your Macs, which I assume are Intel-based, are still sluggish?