A few others have mentioned fountain pens, but all new ones. Older pens, in good condition with decent quality to begin with, will blow away new ones for writing quality. I'm currently making notes (for my latest internet startup) with a red ripple hard rubber waterman 52, ~1924 but pretty much never used until I got my paws on it. It's a heavily flex nib which means I can write with it almost as a needlepoint for fine notes, but can still get bold broad strokes at any time I want for effect and flourish, and for signing funding documents. It's unlike any pen most people under the age of 50 or 60 have seen, and no one tries to borrow it. I can change the ink color any time I want.
Slightly more modern, parker 51s from the silver age of penmaking are widely available, reliable as all get out, and can be had in XF nibs. They're not flexy, though, but once given a good cleaning and possible replacement of rubber parts, will last another 60 years.
BTW, in case anyone wants ACTUALLY to learn egyptian hieroglyphic, Gardiner, as someone mentioned above, is the place to start, despite being 50 years old. All the 'idiot's guide to egyptian' type books, or the dover reprints, are crap and totally obsolete. And fresh from my mailbox, here's Gardiner on super discount (in college, I had to pay $100 for it and go without sunday dinner for a month):
More or less. Turkish is usually used as a parallel for the agglutinative behavior of Sumerian (but n.b. there's no claim of a relationship between the languages -- despite many attempts (often on the fringe) to connect Sumerian with other language groups, it remains a strict isolate). Agglutinative affixes can go before or after the verb root, and vary based on which of the two forms roots come in (hamtu and maru, as defined by the later grammarians writing in Akkadian) as well as on the other parts of speech used in a sentence. Thus you get verbs like this (randomly opening a book on my desk):
ga-am(3)-ma-sig(3)-ge-en-de(3)-en, where 'sig' is the lexical element, the verb root, and the rest are affixes. (The #s indicate, basically, which sign is used of multiple homophonic signs)
This is more or less rendered as 'let us strike them down'
Then two lines down, the same sentence with negative force:
nam-ba-sig(3)-ge-en-de(3)-en
Different affixes used along with the negative affix, and it's not always possible to explain what these mean or why the choices are made. And since so much Sumerian that survives to us was written down when it was already a dead spoken language, it's unclear if the Akkadian-speaking scribes fully understood the verbal paradigms either.
(Source: Gilgamesh & Akka, Dina Katz, lines 8 and 14)
Well, the destruction of antiquities after the American invasion was a crime against humanity -- not just a crime against one people, but against all peoples. This is not meant to be a political statement or belittle what the folks there are trying to do, but a horror all the same.
So, as an archaeologist and historian, I would say:
1) Take nothing, damage nothing. Buy no antiquities -- the black market in looted antiquities has exploded from the war and whenever a tablet is illicitly dug up and sold, it's lost its provenance and a significant part of its value to historians. Remember -- there's a finite amount of archaeological material out there and whenever something is looted, humanity's story is diminished. There are huge amounts that we know about the beginnings of civilization from single fragments. When they're lost, they're gone forever.
2) Tell your comrades to do the same. It's not just the current generation that will thank you.
3) Realize that you are standing on a land older by far than anything we know here in the US. Ur was ancient when Rome was a collection of huts on a hill. And when Ur was built cities around it were already in ruins. Uruk (Unug in Sumerian) nearby was where writing seems to have first originated, and was a metropolis of 40-50,000 people five thousand years ago. And in those very first written texts, so early that they're entirely pictographic and are more encoded bookkeeping documents than language, one of the prominent signs is easily recognizable as the (known later) Sumerian word DUL -- a mound, a ruin -- in these texts, a place unsuitable for planting because it was a city site already, at what we think of as the beginnings of history, old beyond time.
3a) And you'll know the word DUL well. It survives, through Akkadian -> Aramaic -> Arabic, as the word Tell, which you probably hear every day in place names where a site is built on older ruins piled up over the plains.
4) Lastly, when the full moon is out and hangs over the ziqqurat of Ur, whisper a prayer to Nanna (Sin/Suen in Akkadian), the Moon god who was the patron of the place, and whose temple that once was, and beseech him once again to restore peace unto his land and his people.
As a technologist who also reads ancient Egyptian (from college) as well as Akkadian (== Assyrian & Babylonian, with slightly different scripts over the years) and Sumerian, I can fairly readily call shenanigans on this one. The sophistication of translation here is about as deep as the 'your name in hieroglyphs' stuff you find in museum stores and the horrid Dover reprints of Budge's books.
And don't even get me started on Sumerian. Professional Sumerologists still can't render half of the agglutinative morphemes that appear in Sumerian verbs.
As an old-school programmer (20+ years of Fortran, C, various assembly languages, C++ many many years ago), who's spent the last dozen years or so focused almost exclusively on server-side high-performance networking systems (in other words, heavy-duty C/Unix/threading), I've taken my 'spare time' in the last few months to teach myself ObjC/Cocoa, Java, and some of the.NET technologies. I found it unfortunate that Apple deprecated Java + Cocoa in the last XCode release -- not because I particularly enjoyed Java but because it was easier to learn both Java and ObjC at the same time when I could be doing the same things with it.
Comparing ObjC to what MSFT offers nowadays seems to be apples and oranges (no pun intended) and the learning curve is much different -- coming from straight C, ObjC is much cleaner, and I can slide more extensive Cocoaization in as I go. On the other hand, the ObjC syntax is a mess and weird for people who've never done Smalltalk... and I'm guessing the set of people who have is extremely small nowadays.
As for development environments, so far I've _hated_ everything to do with visual * -- it seems to be a monster to use, to customize, and to work with efficiently, at least for this old Unix hack. XCode is far far far from perfect -- I wish the SCM integration were better, that the whole thing were a _lot_ faster, and that they'd release incremental documentation updates rather than 250M batches every couple weeks -- but since it's all wrapped on gcc/g++/gdb/make at the back end, you can entirely do your stuff with vi/emacs/whatever at the command line and never use the GUI much at all, if that's your preference...
As with almost all higher-end mice, these seem aimed at primarily or entirely right-handed use. Left-handed mouse users are almost completely stuck with 2 or 3 button mice that are longitudinally symmetrical and thus work with either hand. I'd love one of the high end logitech laser mice but it's impossible to use in any reasonable fashion with the left hand. Yet I find most left-handed people have given up and just use the mouse with the right hand, which makes very little sense -- mousing with the left hand on a standar keyoard reduces by 3x-4x the distance required to move the arm to change from keyboard to mouse and allows the right hand to use the keypad or other control-type key clusters easily. I chose to use the left hand with the mouse on my first mouse-enabled machine ~18 years ago (I'm not strongly handed either way, but use left for some tasks and right for others) and am amazed that the mouse manufacturers treat 10% of the population this way. Logitech doesn't even answer my emails.
My only reference is that I tried it and it works:) Shut the lid, give it 10 seconds or so for the drive and everything to settle, and swap the batteries. Takes about 10 seconds to swap (since battery 2 can conveniently be used to turn the wheel that locks battery 1). Since the PB, unlike PC laptops, 'suspends' in memory rather than copying the RAM image to a suspend partition on disk, there must be something keeping that memory alive during this operation. But I don't know waht that is or if it would work on the iBook. Try it on your ibook after a boot and after typing 'sync' in a terminal window for good measure -- worst that can happen is an fsck...
I have a PB 15" 1.25 with 2 separate batteries. I had a cross-country flight a couple of days ago, and, with 2 charged batteries:
1) Logged on and did email while stuck on the plane for an hour at the gate, about 45 minutes online via bluetooth -> cell phone (at which point the cell phone battery's about to die).
2) In the air, watched 5 simpsons episodes on DVD. Battery was now at 20%, so I closed and swapped them out (nice that PB 'soft suspend' can handle a battery swap).
3) Watched 2 more episodes on second battery, then landed.
So, first battery gave me about 45 min + (25 * 5) = just under 3 hours to consume 80% of battery, which was all either DVD playing or wireless (bluetooth).
I've been through ~6 Toshiba laptops, from 486s on up to 9100s, all carrying two batteries, and I could never make it across country even using both of them.
I have here on my desk at work (don't ask why) texts of mostly Roman-period artillery manuals (some in Greek, some in Latin), mostly cribbed from earlier, now-lost materials dating back to the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE. Much older than the one referenced, and just as 'technical', to the point where they've been used to reconstruct some of the artillery engines described (stone and bolt throwers powered by twisted ropes and/or metal springs).
Except...the screening process is so random and the security so bad that these accesses are trivially obtainable. All the spammers have them, which is why new domains get mined so fast. Verisign even stopped enforcing the 'IP restrictions' they had on there once, weak an addition though they were, so if you grab an ID, you can use it from anywhere.
But verisign is just running the registry -- it's not like they're a security company or anything...oh, wait...
Why not? The zone files are relatively easy to get, although there might be legal repercussions to 'redistribute' (is random, non-zone-transfer access 'redistribution'?
I could easily set up a local alternate com and net server for our DNS networks based on twice-a-day zone transfer FTPs from, you guessed it, Verisign. Until they yanked my access...
Guess what? Verisign controls the.com and.net REGISTRY, which gets something like $6 per registration per year NO MATTER WHAT REGISTRAR YOU USE. Go ahead and refuse to use verisign as your registRAR -- they'll still get a big chunk of your money because they're the contractual provider for.com and.net.
Luckily, the registry contract can be given to someone else if ICANN and the US Govt were to develop the guts to do so.
Read the RFC. No MX record means you contact the A. And the A points to verisign's IP. So, all mail for any RFC-compliant SMTP MTA that previously would bounce based on a DNS lookup will now go to verisign (any DNS lookup that failed on a 2nd level com or net name, that is).
Null routing this address makes your problems worse, unless you also rewrite/fix the DNS lookups. Why? Because, again, of the email -- if that IP gets null-routed, all email to non-existent domains ends up QUEUED (after a nice timeout) and retried and retried and eventually bounced, 1-3-5 days later. Horrible customer experience -- you mistype a domain and don't know about it until the retry time on your SMTP relay expires. Plus, the ISP relay queues go through the roof.
Now, any good ISP wiz will be doing what my folks are doing right now and rewriting their SMTP servers to handle this address as a special case, and to watch for address changes. But even if you do that for your mail servers, if you run a network, you have to worry about all those people with their own mail servers on your backbone, and their little admins probably aren't rewriting Exchange...
This also traps all mail sent TO a non-existent domain. Since all RFC-compliant mail servers will follow up a negative MX response with an A lookup and connect to that IP, if you send mail to a bogus domain, it goes to verisign's server, which (currently) bounces it. Imagine the fun the federal government can have subpoena'ing those logs.
Also, you'll note the cookies that 'sitefinder' sends out, so they can uniquely track any traffic to that site. Also a fun subpoena opportunity. And did you read the fun terms of service that they claim you agree to by 'choosing to visit' their site?
I doubt this will stand. I certainly know that, as a major ISP executive, we'll be reviewing our business with Verisign.
Really? Netflix has a unique email address for me and I've yet to see that address be distributed to anyone else. But if they had a 'can we share your email address?' button, I'd have turned it OFF.
Plenty of Roman concrete (not 'reinforced' in the modern sense of internal iron structure, but cased with brick on the outside for better wear) survives and survives well. Some of it's still in use. Look at the Pantheon in Rome, which was built in the 2nd century CE with progressively lighter densities of concrete (the top of the dome is primarily pumice), and survives just fine. And unlike things like the Great Wall or the pyramids, Roman concrete architecture was used for everyday living spaces, including multistory apartment buildings, which survive (not quite livable though) in places like Ostia (the port at the old mouth of the Tiber).
All I know is, my CPA never touches my boot sector. I have fixed his computers a few times, though. And he doesn't get me audited and stuck owing the IRS tens of thousands of dollars later on the way TurboTax has done to some of my friends.
Intuit was a great company a few years back. I was proud to partner with them om some things. But everything they've done lately has been pathetic.
Not dumb at all. First, most larger naval vessels have enough room for a large system, more so than a ground-portable defense system. And second, while naval combat is no longer line of sight, defending a multibillion dollar carrier against a less-than-a-million-dollar missile is a major challenge, and most naval vessels now carry the Phalanx close-in system which is basically a last-ditch attempt to take out an inbound missile _right_ before it hits the ship by firing very rapid projectiles at it -- think of it as shrapnel/chaff on megasteroids.
Of course, Trafalgar would have been a lot different if Nelson had had a laser defense system on the Victory that could intercept bullets...:)
I run entirely Solaris and Linux as my desktop environments. My wife has an iBook with OS X (not Jaguar yet). I do most of the administration on it for her, which has been fun since I hadn't used a Mac since 1989...and OS X is the most usable (for me) that I've found. I could almost use it as a workstation...except for screen real estate issues. I'm amazed that there seems to be no default way of running virtual screens in OS X -- which keeps me from being able to work effectively when I have to wade through dozens of terminal sessions on one box (and 'screen' isn't sufficient).
Short of running one of the X11 WMs described, does anyone have a native Aqua virtual window tool?
Slashdot Mirror
This would make Gilgamesh very happy.
An elegant weapon, for a more civilized age...
A few others have mentioned fountain pens, but all new ones. Older pens, in good condition with decent quality to begin with, will blow away new ones for writing quality. I'm currently making notes (for my latest internet startup) with a red ripple hard rubber waterman 52, ~1924 but pretty much never used until I got my paws on it. It's a heavily flex nib which means I can write with it almost as a needlepoint for fine notes, but can still get bold broad strokes at any time I want for effect and flourish, and for signing funding documents. It's unlike any pen most people under the age of 50 or 60 have seen, and no one tries to borrow it. I can change the ink color any time I want.
Slightly more modern, parker 51s from the silver age of penmaking are widely available, reliable as all get out, and can be had in XF nibs. They're not flexy, though, but once given a good cleaning and possible replacement of rubber parts, will last another 60 years.
BTW, in case anyone wants ACTUALLY to learn egyptian hieroglyphic, Gardiner, as someone mentioned above, is the place to start, despite being 50 years old. All the 'idiot's guide to egyptian' type books, or the dover reprints, are crap and totally obsolete. And fresh from my mailbox, here's Gardiner on super discount (in college, I had to pay $100 for it and go without sunday dinner for a month):
~ EIS~~~~NEWSLIST
http://www.eisenbrauns.com/wconnect/wc.dll?ebGate
More or less. Turkish is usually used as a parallel for the agglutinative behavior of Sumerian (but n.b. there's no claim of a relationship between the languages -- despite many attempts (often on the fringe) to connect Sumerian with other language groups, it remains a strict isolate). Agglutinative affixes can go before or after the verb root, and vary based on which of the two forms roots come in (hamtu and maru, as defined by the later grammarians writing in Akkadian) as well as on the other parts of speech used in a sentence. Thus you get verbs like this (randomly opening a book on my desk):
ga-am(3)-ma-sig(3)-ge-en-de(3)-en, where 'sig' is the lexical element, the verb root, and the rest are affixes. (The #s indicate, basically, which sign is used of multiple homophonic signs)
This is more or less rendered as 'let us strike them down'
Then two lines down, the same sentence with negative force:
nam-ba-sig(3)-ge-en-de(3)-en
Different affixes used along with the negative affix, and it's not always possible to explain what these mean or why the choices are made. And since so much Sumerian that survives to us was written down when it was already a dead spoken language, it's unclear if the Akkadian-speaking scribes fully understood the verbal paradigms either.
(Source: Gilgamesh & Akka, Dina Katz, lines 8 and 14)
Well, the destruction of antiquities after the American invasion was a crime against humanity -- not just a crime against one people, but against all peoples. This is not meant to be a political statement or belittle what the folks there are trying to do, but a horror all the same.
So, as an archaeologist and historian, I would say:
1) Take nothing, damage nothing. Buy no antiquities -- the black market in looted antiquities has exploded from the war and whenever a tablet is illicitly dug up and sold, it's lost its provenance and a significant part of its value to historians. Remember -- there's a finite amount of archaeological material out there and whenever something is looted, humanity's story is diminished. There are huge amounts that we know about the beginnings of civilization from single fragments. When they're lost, they're gone forever.
2) Tell your comrades to do the same. It's not just the current generation that will thank you.
3) Realize that you are standing on a land older by far than anything we know here in the US. Ur was ancient when Rome was a collection of huts on a hill. And when Ur was built cities around it were already in ruins. Uruk (Unug in Sumerian) nearby was where writing seems to have first originated, and was a metropolis of 40-50,000 people five thousand years ago. And in those very first written texts, so early that they're entirely pictographic and are more encoded bookkeeping documents than language, one of the prominent signs is easily recognizable as the (known later) Sumerian word DUL -- a mound, a ruin -- in these texts, a place unsuitable for planting because it was a city site already, at what we think of as the beginnings of history, old beyond time.
3a) And you'll know the word DUL well. It survives, through Akkadian -> Aramaic -> Arabic, as the word Tell, which you probably hear every day in place names where a site is built on older ruins piled up over the plains.
4) Lastly, when the full moon is out and hangs over the ziqqurat of Ur, whisper a prayer to Nanna (Sin/Suen in Akkadian), the Moon god who was the patron of the place, and whose temple that once was, and beseech him once again to restore peace unto his land and his people.
As a technologist who also reads ancient Egyptian (from college) as well as Akkadian (== Assyrian & Babylonian, with slightly different scripts over the years) and Sumerian, I can fairly readily call shenanigans on this one. The sophistication of translation here is about as deep as the 'your name in hieroglyphs' stuff you find in museum stores and the horrid Dover reprints of Budge's books.
And don't even get me started on Sumerian. Professional Sumerologists still can't render half of the agglutinative morphemes that appear in Sumerian verbs.
As an old-school programmer (20+ years of Fortran, C, various assembly languages, C++ many many years ago), who's spent the last dozen years or so focused almost exclusively on server-side high-performance networking systems (in other words, heavy-duty C/Unix/threading), I've taken my 'spare time' in the last few months to teach myself ObjC/Cocoa, Java, and some of the .NET technologies. I found it unfortunate that Apple deprecated Java + Cocoa in the last XCode release -- not because I particularly enjoyed Java but because it was easier to learn both Java and ObjC at the same time when I could be doing the same things with it.
... and I'm guessing the set of people who have is extremely small nowadays.
Comparing ObjC to what MSFT offers nowadays seems to be apples and oranges (no pun intended) and the learning curve is much different -- coming from straight C, ObjC is much cleaner, and I can slide more extensive Cocoaization in as I go. On the other hand, the ObjC syntax is a mess and weird for people who've never done Smalltalk
As for development environments, so far I've _hated_ everything to do with visual * -- it seems to be a monster to use, to customize, and to work with efficiently, at least for this old Unix hack. XCode is far far far from perfect -- I wish the SCM integration were better, that the whole thing were a _lot_ faster, and that they'd release incremental documentation updates rather than 250M batches every couple weeks -- but since it's all wrapped on gcc/g++/gdb/make at the back end, you can entirely do your stuff with vi/emacs/whatever at the command line and never use the GUI much at all, if that's your preference...
It sounds very 'tinny'...
As with almost all higher-end mice, these seem aimed at primarily or entirely right-handed use. Left-handed mouse users are almost completely stuck with 2 or 3 button mice that are longitudinally symmetrical and thus work with either hand. I'd love one of the high end logitech laser mice but it's impossible to use in any reasonable fashion with the left hand. Yet I find most left-handed people have given up and just use the mouse with the right hand, which makes very little sense -- mousing with the left hand on a standar keyoard reduces by 3x-4x the distance required to move the arm to change from keyboard to mouse and allows the right hand to use the keypad or other control-type key clusters easily. I chose to use the left hand with the mouse on my first mouse-enabled machine ~18 years ago (I'm not strongly handed either way, but use left for some tasks and right for others) and am amazed that the mouse manufacturers treat 10% of the population this way. Logitech doesn't even answer my emails.
My only reference is that I tried it and it works :) Shut the lid, give it 10 seconds or so for the drive and everything to settle, and swap the batteries. Takes about 10 seconds to swap (since battery 2 can conveniently be used to turn the wheel that locks battery 1). Since the PB, unlike PC laptops, 'suspends' in memory rather than copying the RAM image to a suspend partition on disk, there must be something keeping that memory alive during this operation. But I don't know waht that is or if it would work on the iBook. Try it on your ibook after a boot and after typing 'sync' in a terminal window for good measure -- worst that can happen is an fsck...
I have a PB 15" 1.25 with 2 separate batteries. I had a cross-country flight a couple of days ago, and, with 2 charged batteries:
1) Logged on and did email while stuck on the plane for an hour at the gate, about 45 minutes online via bluetooth -> cell phone (at which point the cell phone battery's about to die).
2) In the air, watched 5 simpsons episodes on DVD. Battery was now at 20%, so I closed and swapped them out (nice that PB 'soft suspend' can handle a battery swap).
3) Watched 2 more episodes on second battery, then landed.
So, first battery gave me about 45 min + (25 * 5) = just under 3 hours to consume 80% of battery, which was all either DVD playing or wireless (bluetooth).
I've been through ~6 Toshiba laptops, from 486s on up to 9100s, all carrying two batteries, and I could never make it across country even using both of them.
I have here on my desk at work (don't ask why) texts of mostly Roman-period artillery manuals (some in Greek, some in Latin), mostly cribbed from earlier, now-lost materials dating back to the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE. Much older than the one referenced, and just as 'technical', to the point where they've been used to reconstruct some of the artillery engines described (stone and bolt throwers powered by twisted ropes and/or metal springs).
No linux mentioned anywhere, I'm afraid.
Except...the screening process is so random and the security so bad that these accesses are trivially obtainable. All the spammers have them, which is why new domains get mined so fast. Verisign even stopped enforcing the 'IP restrictions' they had on there once, weak an addition though they were, so if you grab an ID, you can use it from anywhere.
But verisign is just running the registry -- it's not like they're a security company or anything...oh, wait...
Why not? The zone files are relatively easy to get, although there might be legal repercussions to 'redistribute' (is random, non-zone-transfer access 'redistribution'?
I could easily set up a local alternate com and net server for our DNS networks based on twice-a-day zone transfer FTPs from, you guessed it, Verisign. Until they yanked my access...
Guess what? Verisign controls the .com and .net REGISTRY, which gets something like $6 per registration per year NO MATTER WHAT REGISTRAR YOU USE. Go ahead and refuse to use verisign as your registRAR -- they'll still get a big chunk of your money because they're the contractual provider for .com and .net.
Luckily, the registry contract can be given to someone else if ICANN and the US Govt were to develop the guts to do so.
Read the RFC. No MX record means you contact the A. And the A points to verisign's IP. So, all mail for any RFC-compliant SMTP MTA that previously would bounce based on a DNS lookup will now go to verisign (any DNS lookup that failed on a 2nd level com or net name, that is).
Null routing this address makes your problems worse, unless you also rewrite/fix the DNS lookups. Why? Because, again, of the email -- if that IP gets null-routed, all email to non-existent domains ends up QUEUED (after a nice timeout) and retried and retried and eventually bounced, 1-3-5 days later. Horrible customer experience -- you mistype a domain and don't know about it until the retry time on your SMTP relay expires. Plus, the ISP relay queues go through the roof.
Now, any good ISP wiz will be doing what my folks are doing right now and rewriting their SMTP servers to handle this address as a special case, and to watch for address changes. But even if you do that for your mail servers, if you run a network, you have to worry about all those people with their own mail servers on your backbone, and their little admins probably aren't rewriting Exchange...
This also traps all mail sent TO a non-existent domain. Since all RFC-compliant mail servers will follow up a negative MX response with an A lookup and connect to that IP, if you send mail to a bogus domain, it goes to verisign's server, which (currently) bounces it. Imagine the fun the federal government can have subpoena'ing those logs.
Also, you'll note the cookies that 'sitefinder' sends out, so they can uniquely track any traffic to that site. Also a fun subpoena opportunity. And did you read the fun terms of service that they claim you agree to by 'choosing to visit' their site?
I doubt this will stand. I certainly know that, as a major ISP executive, we'll be reviewing our business with Verisign.
If only the Daleks had been built like this...the universe wouldn't have been saved by a flight of stairs.
Really? Netflix has a unique email address for
me and I've yet to see that address be distributed
to anyone else. But if they had a 'can we share
your email address?' button, I'd have turned it OFF.
Plenty of Roman concrete (not 'reinforced' in the modern sense of internal iron structure, but cased with brick on the outside for better wear) survives and survives well. Some of it's still in use. Look at the Pantheon in Rome, which was built in the 2nd century CE with progressively lighter densities of concrete (the top of the dome is primarily pumice), and survives just fine. And unlike things like the Great Wall or the pyramids, Roman concrete architecture was used for everyday living spaces, including multistory apartment buildings, which survive (not quite livable though) in places like Ostia (the port at the old mouth of the Tiber).
All I know is, my CPA never touches my boot sector. I have fixed his computers a few times, though. And he doesn't get me audited and stuck owing the IRS tens of thousands of dollars later on the way TurboTax has done to some of my friends.
Intuit was a great company a few years back. I was proud to partner with them om some things. But everything they've done lately has been pathetic.
Not dumb at all. First, most larger naval vessels have enough room for a large system, more so than a ground-portable defense system. And second, while naval combat is no longer line of sight, defending a multibillion dollar carrier against a less-than-a-million-dollar missile is a major challenge, and most naval vessels now carry the Phalanx close-in system which is basically a last-ditch attempt to take out an inbound missile _right_ before it hits the ship by firing very rapid projectiles at it -- think of it as shrapnel/chaff on megasteroids.
:)
Of course, Trafalgar would have been a lot different if Nelson had had a laser defense system on the Victory that could intercept bullets...
I run entirely Solaris and Linux as my desktop environments. My wife has an iBook with OS X (not Jaguar yet). I do most of the administration on it for her, which has been fun since I hadn't used a Mac since 1989...and OS X is the most usable (for me) that I've found. I could almost use it as a workstation...except for screen real estate issues. I'm amazed that there seems to be no default way of running virtual screens in OS X -- which keeps me from being able to work effectively when I have to wade through dozens of terminal sessions on one box (and 'screen' isn't sufficient).
Short of running one of the X11 WMs described, does anyone have a native Aqua virtual window tool?