I know a mild-mannered reporter for a major metropolitan newspaper who could really use an invulnerable PDA. His PDAs keep getting wrecked by speeding bullets, powerful locomotives, death rays, kryptonite-powered robots, atomic blasts, crushing ocean depths, and the occasional flight through the fiery core of the sun.
Each of the "modern man" traits I cited were also true of "primitives" of 2500 years ago.
We have books older than Lake Vida. If they'd had the necessary transportation to get there, Confucius, Siddhartha Buddha, Lao-tse, Pythagoras, or Isaiah could have pissed in it before it got frozen over. Wooly mammoths 10 times as old have been found frozen in ice. 2500 years is just barely "a long time" by human historical standards; on a biological or geological scale, it's a blink of an eye. Lake Vida and its ilk are a great scientific opportunity, to be sure, but it's not A.C.Doyle's "Lost World".
"We can test the current tectonic plate models." How? The plates move on timescales of tens of millions of years. This lake is 2500 years old.
But just think of how vast the evolutionary changes of the past 2500 years have been! Compare modern homo sapiens (linguistic centers evolved enough to handle written language, hands prehensile enough to create subtle works of art, brains capable of abstract philosophy and mathematics, sophisticated democratic social systems, etc.) with our primitive hominid ancestors of 2500 years ago. Why, we might not even recognise them as human!
The sun is our root provider of life on Earth, and has been since the dawn of our time; we could not exist without the Sun, and therefore the Sun provides us with life....
You seem to be equating energy with "life". While I can see why that would make sense on a philosophical level, it makes the term far too general to be useful for other purposes. That is, we can't ask "is there life {insert location here}" because the answer would be "obviously, yes". Besides, we already have a useful term for what you're talking about: "energy".
Thanks for a wonderful demonstration of Sophistry.
Them commies don't drill for oil, they respect the environment!
Quite a sophist-icated argument you've got yourself, there.
He wasn't contrasting Capitalism with Commununism, but with Science (i.e. the motivation to own with the motivation to know). You're knocking down a straw man.
True. A significant minority of computer users learn to operate them by rote. They start with cheat sheets written by friends or coworkers telling them to "click Start, click Programs, click Microsoft Office..." Give them a different machine (even one with the same core OS but different configuration) and they're lost. They hate that, and they blame the computer.
Power users can suffer from a similar problem. They might know their OS and apps well enough to operate them blindfolded, and have tweaked them to ultimate efficency. So if the menus are different, or the keyboard shortcuts changed (or worse, not available), then the OS "doesn't work". When I (a DOS/Win user) was required to get familiar with Mac System 6 many years ago, the inability to access pulldown menus with the keyboard led me to dismiss it as deficient. When I started experimenting with Linux, I muttered some very unkind words when I couldn't find anything comparable to AUTOEXEC.BAT (DOS), the Startup submenu (Windows), or Startup Items folder (Mac) folders (just an arcane init system in/etc/rc.d/). When OS X came along (finally fixing the "broken" pulldown menus) I was frustrated that none of the new window-control buttons equated to Maximize. Now, I've mostly gotten past this stuff, by simply accepting that the different OSes I use behave differently, and that I have to give up some reflex-based efficency for versatility. But the obstacle to acceptance was still there; I just got over it.
In other news, Ferrari announced the introduction of a Ferrari that drives just like a Volkswagen. This will allow Volkswagen drivers to feel "right at home" behind the wheel of a Ferrari.
If Linux had a much-coveted reputation for being fun to drive, your analogy might make sense. Instead it has the reputation of handling like a VW microbus, and this is more like someone introducing a conversion package that gives it the look and feel of driving the mainstream, popular Ford Taurus.
The "My Computer" icon shows Tux sitting in front of what could only be... an iMac. Is this somebody's idea of a joke? A peek at Novell/Suse's long-range goals? A rogue OS-X-boosting employee waiting to be slapped down? Inquiring minds....
Will it be back to a world of incompatible filetypes again?
At least the WordPerfect document format is A) stable (WP6 can open documents created by WP11 without any Save As translation), and B) available to software developers.
I've rarely heard of users having difficulties opening WPD files with Word; the only problems I hear about have been going in the other direction... but Corel's gotten pretty good lately at overcoming the fact that Word's DOC format has been neither A nor B. The issue of file-format "incompatibility" is largely a matter of strategic obfuscation and FUD.
The last time I was at peace with the universe was a week I spent backpacking in the wilderness. In some ways it was like being at home (i.e. sleeping alone, almost no human interaction), but the only electronic device I had on me (or within a few days' hike) was my camera. No TV, no computer, no PDA, no phone, no pager, no radio, not even a watch... nada. Just me, the trails, the moose, the lakes, the wolf tracks, and the stars.
"I am reminded at this point of a fellow I used to know who's name was Henry, only to give you an idea of what an individualist he was he spelt it Hen3ry. The 3 was silent, you see." - humorist Tom Lehrer, 1960ish
If you really want to get away from the rest of the world, Pitcairn Island (settled by the mutineers of the Bounty) is the place to go. It's farther from any continents, and has no pesky tourist-bringing airstrip like Easter has. The sexual-abuse trials and the jurisdictional issues with New Zealand are making the legal situation rather awkward there these days. But they do have regular internet access now.
I think I'd be too intimidated to play chess against "the world's most powerful computer." Gosh.:)
My durn G5 whups me into next Tuesday every time I try to play against it. So does my G3 iBook. I like to think that an aptitude for chess is not the sole indicator of intelligence.
While I wholeheartedly disagree with your "one click" philosophy....
I'm more in favor of two, maybe three clicks ("You're about to install KDE; it'll take _ minutes to download on your current connection. Continue?"), but really why shouldn't that be an option, to just let the computer figure out what it needs, where to put it, and Just Do It? Just as not everybody wants and needs a custom-built-from-source system, not everybody cares that much if, say, installing Package A is going to include downloading and installing PHP and MySQL which weren't previously on their system. It's not an optimal way to run a system, but to Aunt Tilly, easy is more important than optimal.
I've tried a lot of options, looking for the perfect combination of attrbutes. There is none. It depends on what your priorities are.
For typability, battery life, and moderate weight, it's hard to beat a Model-T: the 20-year-old TRS-80 model 10x line. The main downside is that its wp app is just a text editor and the display is a quaint pixels-so-big-you-can-measure-them LCD that shows only a few lines at a time. But the keyboard is probably better quality than the one on your desktop. Transferring text files to another machine also takes some work (i.e. RS232 serial).
If size and weight are your main concerns, but you still want something you can type on (and your fingers are fairly slim), I'd recommend something about half that age: the Poqet PC. It's a little longer than a VHS cassette, runs DOS out of ROM, can run a decent wp like WordPerfect 5.1, and you can use certain PCMCIA cards for storage and moving data to a "real" computer. You do need good eyesight, because it squeezes a full 80x25 screen into that little real estate. A couple AAs lasts ages.
The PDAs that Psion used to make (Series5, Revo/Mako) are even smaller, and the keyboards more cramped, but still far more useable for typing than Blackberry-style little dots. The software is on par with anything available today (the wp module frankly has more features than you'd want in a device this small), and they're (obviously) useful for schedule management, and such. File transfer through their docking cradles is easy. I go nowhere without my Revo, so I always have a decent word processor at hand.
Increasingly I find myself using my 12" iBook for portable word processing. It's a bit much to lug around (compared to what I've used previously) but I can run OpenOffice on it, and it has a USB port for my "key drive" so file transfer to my desktop is a piece of cake.
(I've considered trying the AlphaSmart units. Durability compared to a laptop would be a big bonus there. I see them as the 21st century version of the TRS-80 model 100.)
Instead of pissing in the wind with X on Mac, all of the effort should be for the native aqua version. The X version looks horrible and performs horrible.
But it's available now. If they'd insisted on doing a native Aqua port instead of building and maintainging the X11 version first, OpenOffice for OSX would still be vaporware... vaporware that a lot of people would be sitting on the sidelines questioning whether it was ever going to happen.
This way we know that OOo is going get ported to OS X, because it already has. That builds confidence, establishing that OOo is a real cross-platform app, not just a Linux app that's been successfully ported to one other OS.
That's particularly important to me, because it means I can finally run the same wp and work on the book I'm writing (on a USB keydrive) on my iBook out on the front porch, during my lunch break on my Windows machine at work, or in the wee hours on my main desktop running Linux. That's so much more convenient than some kludge importing/exporting files with AppleWorks, and worth putting up with the painfully long launch time of OOo 1.0 on a G3/500 (I leave it running and put the iBook to sleep between uses) and the Win/Lin-looking UI.
It's a damn good thing AppleWorks is coming with it....
Depending on what functions your cousin needs, there are other non-MS apps available for OS X (Nisus Writer, Mariner Write/Calc, FileMaker).
Asking one of these people to "put in X, and then compile OpenOffice".
Compile? 1) Download X11 from Apple.com and run the install package. 2) Download the latest OOo*.dmg file (one for 1.1.1 should be along soon) and run the install package. It may not be fully noob-compatible, but it's not as difficult as you make it out to be.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's the idea that coherence and reason are not necessary parts of a conversation. You're speaking a different language than he is.
I know a mild-mannered reporter for a major metropolitan newspaper who could really use an invulnerable PDA. His PDAs keep getting wrecked by speeding bullets, powerful locomotives, death rays, kryptonite-powered robots, atomic blasts, crushing ocean depths, and the occasional flight through the fiery core of the sun.
"Irony? Naw, we don't get that around here."
Each of the "modern man" traits I cited were also true of "primitives" of 2500 years ago.
We have books older than Lake Vida. If they'd had the necessary transportation to get there, Confucius, Siddhartha Buddha, Lao-tse, Pythagoras, or Isaiah could have pissed in it before it got frozen over. Wooly mammoths 10 times as old have been found frozen in ice. 2500 years is just barely "a long time" by human historical standards; on a biological or geological scale, it's a blink of an eye. Lake Vida and its ilk are a great scientific opportunity, to be sure, but it's not A.C.Doyle's "Lost World".
But in Soviet Russia (and everywhere else), the microbes kill us.
But just think of how vast the evolutionary changes of the past 2500 years have been! Compare modern homo sapiens (linguistic centers evolved enough to handle written language, hands prehensile enough to create subtle works of art, brains capable of abstract philosophy and mathematics, sophisticated democratic social systems, etc.) with our primitive hominid ancestors of 2500 years ago. Why, we might not even recognise them as human!
You seem to be equating energy with "life". While I can see why that would make sense on a philosophical level, it makes the term far too general to be useful for other purposes. That is, we can't ask "is there life {insert location here}" because the answer would be "obviously, yes". Besides, we already have a useful term for what you're talking about: "energy".
Them commies don't drill for oil, they respect the environment!
Quite a sophist-icated argument you've got yourself, there. He wasn't contrasting Capitalism with Commununism, but with Science (i.e. the motivation to own with the motivation to know). You're knocking down a straw man.
Power users can suffer from a similar problem. They might know their OS and apps well enough to operate them blindfolded, and have tweaked them to ultimate efficency. So if the menus are different, or the keyboard shortcuts changed (or worse, not available), then the OS "doesn't work". When I (a DOS/Win user) was required to get familiar with Mac System 6 many years ago, the inability to access pulldown menus with the keyboard led me to dismiss it as deficient. When I started experimenting with Linux, I muttered some very unkind words when I couldn't find anything comparable to AUTOEXEC.BAT (DOS), the Startup submenu (Windows), or Startup Items folder (Mac) folders (just an arcane init system in /etc/rc.d/). When OS X came along (finally fixing the "broken" pulldown menus) I was frustrated that none of the new window-control buttons equated to Maximize. Now, I've mostly gotten past this stuff, by simply accepting that the different OSes I use behave differently, and that I have to give up some reflex-based efficency for versatility. But the obstacle to acceptance was still there; I just got over it.
If Linux had a much-coveted reputation for being fun to drive, your analogy might make sense. Instead it has the reputation of handling like a VW microbus, and this is more like someone introducing a conversion package that gives it the look and feel of driving the mainstream, popular Ford Taurus.
Yes, but you might want to ask Brer Rabbit about what happens if you try to fight one.
Not in the Aristotlean, Lavoisierre, Cantorian, or Roman Catholic senses of the word, but in vernacular English... sure they are.
The "My Computer" icon shows Tux sitting in front of what could only be... an iMac. Is this somebody's idea of a joke? A peek at Novell/Suse's long-range goals? A rogue OS-X-boosting employee waiting to be slapped down? Inquiring minds....
At least the WordPerfect document format is A) stable (WP6 can open documents created by WP11 without any Save As translation), and B) available to software developers.
I've rarely heard of users having difficulties opening WPD files with Word; the only problems I hear about have been going in the other direction... but Corel's gotten pretty good lately at overcoming the fact that Word's DOC format has been neither A nor B. The issue of file-format "incompatibility" is largely a matter of strategic obfuscation and FUD.
RTFpress release. This story's legit.
The last time I was at peace with the universe was a week I spent backpacking in the wilderness. In some ways it was like being at home (i.e. sleeping alone, almost no human interaction), but the only electronic device I had on me (or within a few days' hike) was my camera. No TV, no computer, no PDA, no phone, no pager, no radio, not even a watch... nada. Just me, the trails, the moose, the lakes, the wolf tracks, and the stars.
Many online escort services make house calls. If you promise to tip them nicely, they'll even bring pizza and beer.
"I am reminded at this point of a fellow I used to know who's name was Henry, only to give you an idea of what an individualist he was he spelt it Hen3ry. The 3 was silent, you see." - humorist Tom Lehrer, 1960ish
<pedantic>
- It's "Easter Island". There's only one.
- If you really want to get away from the rest of the world, Pitcairn Island (settled by the mutineers of the Bounty) is the place to go. It's farther from any continents, and has no pesky tourist-bringing airstrip like Easter has. The sexual-abuse trials and the jurisdictional issues with New Zealand are making the legal situation rather awkward there these days. But they do have regular internet access now.
</pedantic>Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms also proscribes double jeopardy. And its back yard is even bigger (if you count the in-ground pool).
My durn G5 whups me into next Tuesday every time I try to play against it. So does my G3 iBook. I like to think that an aptitude for chess is not the sole indicator of intelligence.
I'm more in favor of two, maybe three clicks ("You're about to install KDE; it'll take _ minutes to download on your current connection. Continue?"), but really why shouldn't that be an option, to just let the computer figure out what it needs, where to put it, and Just Do It? Just as not everybody wants and needs a custom-built-from-source system, not everybody cares that much if, say, installing Package A is going to include downloading and installing PHP and MySQL which weren't previously on their system. It's not an optimal way to run a system, but to Aunt Tilly, easy is more important than optimal.
In a word: yes.
He was talking about compile time (not download spead), and yes: a G3/500 is going to be kinda slow at crunching that much code.
For typability, battery life, and moderate weight, it's hard to beat a Model-T: the 20-year-old TRS-80 model 10x line. The main downside is that its wp app is just a text editor and the display is a quaint pixels-so-big-you-can-measure-them LCD that shows only a few lines at a time. But the keyboard is probably better quality than the one on your desktop. Transferring text files to another machine also takes some work (i.e. RS232 serial).
If size and weight are your main concerns, but you still want something you can type on (and your fingers are fairly slim), I'd recommend something about half that age: the Poqet PC. It's a little longer than a VHS cassette, runs DOS out of ROM, can run a decent wp like WordPerfect 5.1, and you can use certain PCMCIA cards for storage and moving data to a "real" computer. You do need good eyesight, because it squeezes a full 80x25 screen into that little real estate. A couple AAs lasts ages.
The PDAs that Psion used to make (Series5, Revo/Mako) are even smaller, and the keyboards more cramped, but still far more useable for typing than Blackberry-style little dots. The software is on par with anything available today (the wp module frankly has more features than you'd want in a device this small), and they're (obviously) useful for schedule management, and such. File transfer through their docking cradles is easy. I go nowhere without my Revo, so I always have a decent word processor at hand.
Increasingly I find myself using my 12" iBook for portable word processing. It's a bit much to lug around (compared to what I've used previously) but I can run OpenOffice on it, and it has a USB port for my "key drive" so file transfer to my desktop is a piece of cake.
(I've considered trying the AlphaSmart units. Durability compared to a laptop would be a big bonus there. I see them as the 21st century version of the TRS-80 model 100.)
But it's available now. If they'd insisted on doing a native Aqua port instead of building and maintainging the X11 version first, OpenOffice for OSX would still be vaporware... vaporware that a lot of people would be sitting on the sidelines questioning whether it was ever going to happen. This way we know that OOo is going get ported to OS X, because it already has. That builds confidence, establishing that OOo is a real cross-platform app, not just a Linux app that's been successfully ported to one other OS.
That's particularly important to me, because it means I can finally run the same wp and work on the book I'm writing (on a USB keydrive) on my iBook out on the front porch, during my lunch break on my Windows machine at work, or in the wee hours on my main desktop running Linux. That's so much more convenient than some kludge importing/exporting files with AppleWorks, and worth putting up with the painfully long launch time of OOo 1.0 on a G3/500 (I leave it running and put the iBook to sleep between uses) and the Win/Lin-looking UI.
It's a damn good thing AppleWorks is coming with it....
Depending on what functions your cousin needs, there are other non-MS apps available for OS X (Nisus Writer, Mariner Write/Calc, FileMaker).
Asking one of these people to "put in X, and then compile OpenOffice".
Compile? 1) Download X11 from Apple.com and run the install package. 2) Download the latest OOo*.dmg file (one for 1.1.1 should be along soon) and run the install package. It may not be fully noob-compatible, but it's not as difficult as you make it out to be.