Whether or not we find the asteroids, there's nothing we can do it about them if one is going to hit us.
I don't buy this for a second. In fact, I suspect that if the resources of the entire planet were committed, over a number of years, it would probably be possible to put a breeding population of humans on another planet, with at least a small chance of surviving and propagating the species. Or of digging deep subterranean caves and squirreling away some people down there, etc. Or of blowing the incoming asteroid up with nuclear weapons, deflecting it with some sort of propulsion unit / system of complex mirrors / etc.
In short, I really don't think there's any particular reason why we couldn't ensure our own survival, if we (a) really wanted to, and (b) knew about the impending problem long enough in advance. While funding NASA's search would do nothing about problem (a), it would do a whole lot about (b). Which, to me, puts us about 50% closer to surviving than if neither (a) nor (b) are true.
In my opinion, all NASA needs to do is present congress with a scientific statistic claim with percent confidence of global destruction. If we have craters on our planet & there are bones of things that shouldn't have died lying all around, I'm guessing they could place something like a 1% chance of a decent sized asteroid hitting us within a couple thousand years. Given that information, $1 billion may not seem like a bad idea considering most of us employ smoke detectors with even less risk of harm/loss to us.
This sounds like an entirely rational, sensible argument. As a result, I predict that it will have absolutely zero effect on anyone in Congress.
As an alternative, I suggest you come up with some "evidence" suggesting that an asteroid impact would transform their children into mutants, preferably homosexual ones; or, that the asteroids are a Arab Terrorist Plot. Double points if the asteroid is Mexican.
Seems like a questionable assumption to me. There's quite a bit we could possibly do about it, if we knew long enough in advance. It's only if we only knew about it a few weeks or months in advance, that it would probably be a bend-over-and-pucker-up moment.
There is a whole lot of ingenuity (and a whole lot of explosives) spread across the globe as a whole; assuming that people got together and decided that the continued survival of the human species is a Good Idea, I suspect we could probably figure out a way to annihilate or deflect a rock, given enough lead time.
I have a better idea. Just rig up a RSS feed of the latest Gallup poll, a choke chain, a small free-running servomotor, and a pulse oximeter. Set up a feedback loop so that the politician's blood-oxygen level is kept, via the servo and choke-chain, at the same level as their job-approval rating. (Okay, I suppose we could plant a chip in their head, if that's easier. But I really think that the choke chain would make more compelling TV. And please, they're politicians -- it's not like they have souls, or feelings. I don't think they even feel pain; they're really more like plants.)
To be fair, I'd give them the option of retiring from office anytime they felt like it.
I certainly doubt that many of our illustrious leaders would have the same commitment to their ideals, were they the ones dying as a result of it.
Plus, aren't governments supposed to be afraid of their people?
I'm definitely with you, philosophically at least, about the need for greater simplicity.
I don't know whether XML+CSS is it, because I'm honestly not that familiar with CSS and XML (when I stopped paying attention to web stuff, HTML was a fairly simple text-markup language), but it seems like there ought to be some middle ground between plain ASCII text and the massive complexity of the competing XML office-document formats.
While certainly ODF is a step in the right direction away from proprietary binary blobs, I'm made slightly nervous about enshrining a requirement to use it into law, because it might well be that, absent the spectre of Microsoft's formats making positively anything else look like a great idea by comparison, ODF might not be the "best way" to solve the problem.
It might, in fact, be that there are simpler formats that would suit most people's needs, particularly looking forward into a future where online and on-screen publication of data across various devices and platforms is more important than printed layouts. (You see this happening already: if you format your resume to look brilliant on the printed page, but don't give a thought to how it's going to look when someone does a Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V to it, and dumps the text into a web form, you're a fool, because that's how most HR people at large organizations are going to read it.)
I've recently become quite taken with the idea of lightweight markup languages ('languages' is a bit of a stretch; 'conventions' might be a better term) like MarkDown and MultiMarkDown. Both of them provide ways of taking a document containing only ASCII or Unicode text with standard "plaintext markup" (you know, things like *this* or _this_ for emphasis), and transforming it into well-formatted XHTML, which can then in turn be converted to other formats (LaTeX, PDF, RTF, MS Word, etc.). It's really pretty slick. But the interesting point is that it derives its power and flexibility not by the format itself, but by the fact that the format is relatively lightweight, and is parsed into a well-understood intermediate format: XHTML.
If mandating ODF is the only way we can possibly break free of Microsoft's proprietary binary formats, then so be it: mandate away. The current situation is untenable, and might in the long run be disastrous, if a single company can essentially charge everyone in the country a 'head tax,' in order to read documents produced by their government, which they can only ignore at their own peril (or at least, competitive disadvantage; c.f. the case of government contracts being given out only to those who could go to an IE-only site and read DOC documents). I'd rather that the government just mandate JPEG scans of paper documents, or nothing but 7-bit ASCII, or hell, stone tablets with Egyptian hieroglyphs, than effectively hand control of such a large part of our society's creative output to one company.
A 600-page open format is better than what we've got, but I still think that it may be 599 pages too long for some uses.
perhaps m$ just needs to buy out the Webster and Oxford English dictionary
Done and done. If that's all it takes for them to conquer the English language, boy, are we in trouble.
(Although, more seriously, did you know that Microsoft has its own dictionary? They haven't quite figured out how to embrace, extend, and extinguish those other, legacy dictionaries, but I'm sure they're working on it.)
When I was at uni all our e-mail was on a VMS system and I had to actually go onto the campus site and access it through a VT100 terminal. If I wanted to read my e-mail at home I had take it home on paper after printing it out on a dot matrix line printer that normally had about 2 days worth of jobs queued up ahead of me.
I'm not sure how many weeks of having to check my email through a communal Windows box in some campus library it would take me to be pining for a VT100, but I bet it wouldn't be a lot.
Dumb terminals were dumb, but to be frank I'd take them every day over some spyware-ridden econo-box PC. At least with the VT100, you know all your data is tucked away on a machine that was probably designed with some modicum of intelligence and forethought, and running an OS that doesn't have to be restored from a bare-metal image on a regular basis just to stay usable, as most multi-user Windows kiosks do.
And besides which, most places running mainframes that I worked at, usually had a modem bank around somewhere that you could dial into, if you knew the right person to ask and what kind of beer they preferred.
I'd take my email through a text-based console and like it, before I'd submit to this "Windows Live Messenger" garbage.
To be honest, I think your best bet is to get the kit and the "manual" separately.
A few years ago I had the opportunity to tutor an absolutely prodigal young kid, who happened to be 'into' electricity that season. I couldn't find any electricial kits that seemed up to snuff in both the hardware and manuals departments, so instead I ended up taking one of the bigger Radioshack kits, and then using some of the Forrest M. Mims III books as project guides. Why they don't have that guy do the manuals for the kits I have no idea, because he's really quite good.
For the few projects we wanted to do where the board didn't have the right parts, I just hacked them on, either in place of parts that I thought were trivial (resistors, etc.), or just by drilling a new hole in the board surface and adding it in.
Any markup format should do the job, as long as it's well documented, implemented on several architectures/platforms/softwares *including FLOSS* and patent free (or with patents that specifically allow FLOSS implementations).
At least for basic purposes, Markdown fits the bill nicely.
Every once in a while, I dream of a time when Slashdot might implement Markdown, or one of its cousins like MultiMarkDown or Markdown with Smartypants, since they can be easily and quickly translated to HTML with a few lines of Perl (or Python), but are much more user-friendly than typing the raw HTML itself. But then the drugs wear off, and I remember that this is Slashdot.
Of course much of that is due to the fact that TeX has been around for so long without any significant changes and, given enough time, XML formats will likely settle toward the same level of quality from different implementations. Still, TeX's consistency is impressive.
It's like that by design. IIRC, Knuth is very concerned with the stability of TeX, in terms of producing predictable output from a given input file. I've read that the plan is to completely freeze the codebase when he dies -- I think he described it as a point when "all remaining bugs will become features" -- and although others will be able to be free to take the code and produce some other typesetting engine from it, "TeX" itself will be set in stone, so you'll always be able to take a TeX document and get the same output from it. This is represented by current version numbers that asymptotically approach pi (e.g. version 3.14, 3.141, 3.1415...) with each bugfix, where the final version will be marked by changing the version "number" to \pi itself. I think METAFONT approaches e in the same way.
I've always thought that this represented a pretty forward-thinking view. Not too many people really think too hard about what will become of their software after they die. But what do you expect from a guy who thinks that this is a stop-the-presses, call-your-sysadmin "dramatic improvement"? Now that's attention to detail. (Or, how about his taxonomy of diamond-shaped road signs?)
This definitely brings with it some possibilities, but I think that the technology is available right now to allow any determined person to sneak data past all but the most intensive biomedical screenings.
You can fit an awful lot of data in something the size of a Tylenol gel-cap, and aside from the unpleasant recovery aspect, nothing less than a X-ray is going to detect that (maybe not even an X-ray, if you were careful about the components used). Of course, your digestive system only gives you a window of opportunity measured in (at most) days; if you wanted to go longer than that, you're talking about implants. But that would get you through most transit checkpoints.
I'm not really even sure this is a new development: spies and other folks with resources have had microfiche and microdots for years. Cement one of those to your nether regions, or swallow one, and it would take a pretty determined search to turn one up. Or if you wanted, you could probably even sprinkle them over an unwitting mule's clothes, and then recover one on the opposite end.
It doesn't seem like data theft is really something that you can realistically try to stop at any border, anymore. If someone has the data in a format that they can load on their person and take to the border, it's gone. If you can get a person across, you can get data across. Certainly if you are allowed to take any type of electronics, it should be considered information-porus; there are so many ways to disguise information using steganography, that it's not practical to try and sanitize it.
Certainly by the time that biological information storage becomes widely practical, all but the most backwards nations and companies will have realized that stopping the flow of information with physical checkpoints at the border is a losing game. At best, you might be able to make it a little easier or harder, but real information security depends on limiting hostile parties' access to information in the first place, not trying to limit their transportation of it afterwards.
I agree. I don't understand what's so controversial about releasing a paper via multiple routes. The onus would be on the researchers; if they release via a peer-reviewed journal, while also publishing some other way, and then it's rejected during the peer review, well, they'd look pretty stupid then, no?
That's not very "controversial." It's ballsy, and arguably arrogant and stupid, but I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with it. Personally, I'd like to see more science be published outside expensive peer-reviewed journals, where regular folks can have access to it without going through complicated databases. At the same time, I understand the purpose that peer-review serves, and we don't want to eliminate that along the way.
I'm particularly galled by journals that demand exclusivity agreements in order to accept papers for publication, or have gag rules that quash discussion of papers that are being reviewed. That seems contrary to the collaborative nature of science and generally counterproductive (as well as just generally creepy and fascist; I don't much like the idea of anyone telling me that I can't talk about stuff, particularly if I were someone who'd just spend years working on it).
The only thing I think is a little controversial -- and I'm not even sure I'd choose that word, maybe just "inadvisable" -- is that Nature seems to be going ahead and running the non-reviewed version, even though they could just wait and see a little longer, and make sure that it doesn't get rejected. If a flaw is discovered during the peer review, now it's not just the researchers that are going to look dumb, but anyone who printed the un-reviewed version.
To say that there's "controversy" about the way they released the article seems to imply that there's tension between peer-reviewed and standard modes of publication, and I think that tension is mostly manufactured or artificial. There's no reason why both modes of publication can't co-exist and compliment each other.
Seems like there's a possibility there, but I'm not sure I'd want to pump water in there. Water has this nasty tendency to try and take up more space when you heat it than it does when it's cold, so I'd be concerned that in trying to reduce the pressure down there, we'd pump a few gallons of HOH in, and suddenly the pressure would increase as it all tries to become steam and escape. Obviously, the boiling point depends on the pressure, but you'd want to be very sure of what was going to happen before you did it. (You wouldn't want your high pressure steam to suddenly find a path that leads to a lower-pressure area...)
Maybe there's some other liquid we could use, one that would have a boiling point high enough to not have to worry about de-liquefaction. (How about those metal coolants they use in nuclear reactor cores? NaK is one, I think...oops,, it explodes on contact with air or water. Probably not a good choice either.)
Maybe the CompUSA near me doesn't gouge as badly, because it has a lot of nearby competition (in the general area) from MicroCenter, Radioshack, and the big box stores. I don't know.
But I went in there a few days ago to get an internal IDE drive cable, and they had a whole bunch of them, ranging from the usual flat grey ones for $5ish, up to fairly long round ones for $12 or $14, after instant rebates. And then there were some generic/house-brand USB cables for under $10. I'd guess that all of them were probably 25% to 100% more than you'd pay on NewEgg for the same item (and the USB and ribbon cables I can sometimes find 3-for-$1 at hamfests) and I have no doubt the profit margin on them is enormous, but all substantially less than Best Buy, if you could find anything at BB.
A cable that's three days away has very little value to me. A cable in my hand, today, has a lot. So I'm willing to pay substantially more than mail-order for the convenience of being able to get something right the hell now. So comparing their prices on small items to mail-order houses isn't particularly useful, IMHO, because they're not the sort of items I'd probably order online. That's the sort of stuff I always went down to Best Buy for; not big purchases that I was willing to plan out and wait for a mail-order place for, but when I was right in the middle of a project and just happened to need something.
I noticed that they don't have the in-store prices for a lot of stuff that I've seen in the local store on their website, which makes me think that perhaps they vary the prices on items a lot, store by store. It could be that in areas where they don't think they have a lot of competition, they've been trying to screw people more than they have been at my local joint. If that's the case -- and it seems likely -- then I'd blame that attitude for their failure, since they're essentially damaging their own brand name. Geographic price discrimination in excess of the cost of transportation to different areas just isn't sustainable anymore, at least on anything but the smallest items, because people will just go online and have it shipped to them from a cheaper locale. If they didn't figure that out, they're in big trouble.
I know a guy who worked as an examiner at the patent office. It's basically like working on a factory assembling line. Everything is based off of how many applications you can process. I think that new examiners are expected to do 2 or 3 patents a week, if you want to stay ahead and get promoted. Don't do your quota, you don't get promoted, and maybe eventually you get fired (but it's a government operation so let's not get too ridiculous here).
But basically, 2 or 3 patents need to cross your desk a week, and either be accepted or sent back. That means you can give each one maybe two days. That's two days to do all the research, and look for all the prior art, and make a judgment call. That's nothing on some of these patents, which can be hugely technical, particularly when the people filing them can take all the time they want to obfuscate their intentions and tweak the language to make them as broad as possible.
And here's the best part: if an examiner rejects a patent and sends it back to the applicant, and then the applicant sends it back in with updates, that updated application doesn't count towards the examiner's quota. So there's an obvious advantage towards accepting applications, because that's the absolutely sure way of getting it off your desk and making sure that it's not going to come back to haunt you later.
While I understand the nervousness, I think that a more performance-centric compensation system would work pretty well. I'm not going to put words in Dada21's mouth, but I don't think that it would just replace the Sonys and EMIs with somebody else. In fact, I don't really see how it could.
If the standard distribution model for music was all about building buzz and promoting live shows, it would be tougher for middlemen to step in between the bands and the consumers. Right now, when a band signs with a label, they basically sign over the right to their recordings, and the label then takes these recordings and sells them (or attempts to, anyway) for great profit. If the band members don't like the arrangement, tough; they are effectively irrelevant, except insofar as they're required to eventually record more music for another CD, and to do promotions in order to sell more copies of the CD. And then they can try to do shows to make money for themselves.
But the point is, this system allows the record company to get between the producers and consumers of the music, and inject themselves, and control the 'supply' of music in order to create a false scarcity and reap large profits.
An alternative model might have most of the revenue coming from shows, and less of it from recordings. Here, bands would record and distribute the recordings, not expecting much of a direct profit (not hard for them, since they themselves don't get much right now from it anyway), but in order to promote live shows. The band themselves, now, are the real revenue generator, and not the recordings of them. This makes it much more difficult for a record label to interject itself and abscond with the profits, because if the band really doesn't like its label/manager/whatever, it can leave -- but then the manager is left with nothing, and the band can continue to tour and make money. In short, the band itself becomes the asset, instead of the band's "intellectual property" being the real thing of value.
By making the bands the real asset, instead of their recordings, you've made it much harder for someone to do in the future what the labels have managed over the past half-century or so. (Plus, the awareness in hindsight of what happened to the music industry the first time around ought to make people more cautious, although that may be assuming an intelligence on the part of a group where it doesn't exist.)
Does anyone know if there's a directory of venues like that, for other areas? I admit, I haven't really gone to a lot of concerts or live shows recently, although I'm in what I can only assume is a pretty choice demographic (male, professional, no kids = lots of money for hobbies / entertainment, relative to earlier periods in my life). But unless you "follow the scene," and invest a lot of time and effort which I don't really have the freedom to do, it's hard to find shows that you know are going to be worth going to, at venues that aren't going to be unbelievably dodgy. (And I'm not a stranger to somewhat sketchy locales, but I draw the line at places that are obviously hazardous.)
It seems, to a casual observer, that you have on one end, well-known bands at big venues, with very high ticket prices; on the other hand you have a plethora of college bands giving free shows at bars. Not to totally disparage the latter category, because I'm sure there are some awesome college bands out there, but there's a lot of rank amateurs, too. I'm looking for bands somewhere in the middle; groups that are actually into doing it as something like a career, and have CDs and the hope of future music out of them, but not some label-sponsored supergroup.
A place that plays original music with some minimum stanards, with a low ticket price (say under $10), in a venue that didn't make you feel like you needed to go through a hazardous-materials decontamination on walking out of it, would be pretty nice to have around. Particularly if they weren't gouging for the food or beer, I could see myself going to such a place fairly regularly, just as a way of finding new music to listen to and an alternative to the usual bar scene. There are a lot of 20- and 30-somethings looking for things to do as a "night out" that's somewhere in that grey area of cultural edginess north of going to a movie, but south of bad free-verse poetry readings in college coffee shops. This market seems poorly capitalized-on.
An online directory of places like that, perhaps even one that showed what bands would be performing when, would be a great way to develop community and attract fans. (It'd also be nice for people like me who travel; I spend a lot of time going to various cities, and I've always found that it's difficult to figure out what the local scene is like when you're only going to be there a few nights, occasionally to the point where it's like it's being intentionally hidden.) If it doesn't already exist, it seems like it could be a revenue (or at least venture-cap!) generator, for somebody.
Between its crummy customer service, bad sales people that make Frys employees look like geniuses, terrible prices and even worse selection, does ANYONE actually shop at CompUSA anymore?
Yeah, I do. I don't know what they must have done to the store in your area, but the one near me isn't like that. Yeah, it has a TV section in it somewhere, but it's small relative to everything else. They have a big (compared to other B&M stores) selection of parts, including barebones systems, cases, power supplies, etc.
Their employees weren't geniuses, but they weren't too bad either. When I've gone in and asked "where are your hard drives?" they've generally been able to gesture and mutter in such a way as to convey to me the general location in the store where I might find hard drives, which is pretty much all I ask from retail-store workers anymore. (This is superior to Best Buy, who, I am convinced, have attempted some sort of cost-savings by taking on the least trainable residents of local State-run mental health facilities and setting them to work on the sales floor.) They've also accepted returns without a huge hassle.
My local store still has an "Apple corner" with a measly selection of software, and some Mac-specific hardware, which I occasionally have got stuff from. They seem to move their fair share of Apple CPUs, particularly around the beginning of the school year, although I assume their business has been hit hard by the Apple Store nearby. I guess I wouldn't blame them if they cut back on the Mac stuff (but then again, I don't fault Apple for going ahead with the standalone stores either, since I always did question CompUSA's commitment to that particular venture).
A typical trip to CompUSA for me happened a few weeks ago, when the power supply on my SO's Dell (thank God it was one of the ones with regular ATX supplies) blew. I went down, picked up a new 400W supply for $29.95 (after 'instant rebate'), and the computer was back up and running inside of an hour. With a mail-order place, she would have been out of a computer for most of a week, and I don't even know if Best Buy or the other places of its ilk sell power supplies. (I'd prefer not to find out, since the lighting in the place just makes me ill.)
It's not a real 'computer store' in the sense that I'd really like to shop at -- some sort of small independent place with a bin full of parts that I could paw through -- but those places basically don't exist in the suburban strip-mall hellhole that's my neck of the woods, at least that I've ever found. They were about the closest thing to one.
There are a lot of things I could say about CompUSA, but in general, I'd sum them up as being reliably inoffensive. They weren't great, but they didn't make me want to set fire to the place in the same way that Best Buy does.
It's better than paying $29.95 for a cable worth $5 at a big box store. Cables seem to be right behind extended warranties and printer ink in the retail cash cow category.
I think the point was that CompUSA was one of the few retail stores that didn't gouge like that. Sure, they weren't as cheap as mail-order, but they didn't try to screw you the same way that Best Buy, Staples, and the rest of them do.
I have a very nice CompUSA down the street from me, and I tend to go there whenever I need something that I either don't want to wait for, or don't want to pay the shipping on. I've gotten some great bargains off of their clearance table over the years, too. I'll really miss them if the store closes.
For me, if I want a cable, going down to CompUSA and paying $8 and having it in my hand immediately is a no-brainer, compared to having to order it online, pay perhaps a dollar or two less when you factor in shipping, and waiting three days, or going to Best Buy, being assaulted by the noise and idiot salesdroids there, and paying $30 for a sub-$1 part.
If they go under, at least I still have a MicroCenter in my area, which is decent, but it's a heck of a drive.
There is a market for a store that's in between the Best Buy big-box stores, and the mail order IT supply houses, so if CompUSA fails, I think something must have been wrong with their management.
Yes, but what I'm questioning is whether the Dow Jones' computers really had anything to do with this whole market movement at all. At most, all they did was slow down, so that the DJI lagged behind the real world for a while, and then suddenly caught up when their backup system went on-line and took over.
I think that it's more of a symptom and less of a cause. The cause of the market movement was in Asia; that made people sell, people selling caused the DJIs computers to suck. Now, perhaps the DJIs computer slowdown, and consequent large jump when they fixed the problem and got the backup running, caused more people to sell, but this seems specious. The slump was already in progress by the time that the computer slowdown occurred, because the slowdown was driven by high trade volume.
So my point is mostly that I don't see how it matters, really. People are looking towards computer glitches as the cause for the 3% drop in the market (or whatever it was), and that's just not true. The computer glitch might have made the drop look worse, or more precipitous, than it actually was at one point during the day, but it didn't cause or really drive it in any significant way. Even if the DJI folks' computers had worked perfectly, the market would still be sucking. In fact, computerization and the consequent flow of information is what links markets; it's only in the last few decades that the Asian and US markets have felt each other's pain so closely, so in a way, you can blame the computers for working too well in general, when you get these domino-effect deflations.
I wonder how much of this load is due to low volume day trader movement?
I would guess, virtually none, since they're by definition low-volume?
This blaming it on computers seems mostly a red herring. The markets in Asia (particularly Shanghai) tanked, and as a result, the markets in the US tanked, because companies in the US are heavily invested in China.
I think the only lesson here, in case there was anyone left who didn't get it, is that we all float or sink together. For better or worse, the US has tied itself pretty tightly to the Asian markets, and if they collapse, we're going to be seriously hurting.
Is upstart based at all on Apple / MacOS X's launchd? They created that basically to speed up OS X's boot time, and it did so dramatically. I believe that it's Apache (or BSD?) licensed and Apple was hopeful that it would be included in other systems and become the standard way of doing things, although there was a lot of cynicism that the mainstream Linux/UNIX community would never give up init and rc, regardless of the technical merits of any replacements. Granted, it doesn't give you the System V-like multiple runlevels, but I'm not sure that most desktop users are ever going to care. They're either going to use the computer normally, or boot into some sort of low level recovery mode from the boot prompt if things go pear-shaped. The idea of multiple runlevels is more confusing than anything for non-technical users.
FWIW, I was initially skeptical of launchd and launchctl after upgrading my Mac to 10.4, but I've since learned to really appreciate the design of both of them. Some serious thought went into both, and I think they both represent a rethinking of some processes that have just been carried over in other UNIX-based OSes from the days of minis and mainframes to desktops, and aren't necessarily the best way of doing things.
I think it's natural that in the future we're going to see more differentiation between desktop Linux distros and server ones, besides the amount of software that's installed. Fast-boot systems like launchd would be one welcome addition to desktop distros (although their utility might be more questionable on servers that are rarely restarted and where the dynamic launching of services on an as-needed basis might be a misfeature).
WoW runs very well under Cedega, and probably/possibly regular WINE as well. Cedega worked well with Ubuntu Dapper, and I haven't heard anything that would suggest that it's broken since then. I have a vague recollection that there was a WINE release recently, where they claimed full WoW support, but I have no idea how WINE compares to Cedega for ease of install and use.
Basically, you just want to install Ubuntu, and then before you change anything too far from the defaults or otherwise mess with things, install Cedega; then install WoW.
Before I got a Mac that was fast enough to handle WoW, I played it on a 1.9GHz P4 with a fairly unimpressive NVidia Quadro NVS card (64MB, maybe?), and it was entirely playable, although the FPS dropped to what you'd expect given that setup, in the more crowded areas. I assume with better hardware that you'd be all set.
Slashdot Mirror
Whether or not we find the asteroids, there's nothing we can do it about them if one is going to hit us.
I don't buy this for a second. In fact, I suspect that if the resources of the entire planet were committed, over a number of years, it would probably be possible to put a breeding population of humans on another planet, with at least a small chance of surviving and propagating the species. Or of digging deep subterranean caves and squirreling away some people down there, etc. Or of blowing the incoming asteroid up with nuclear weapons, deflecting it with some sort of propulsion unit / system of complex mirrors / etc.
In short, I really don't think there's any particular reason why we couldn't ensure our own survival, if we (a) really wanted to, and (b) knew about the impending problem long enough in advance. While funding NASA's search would do nothing about problem (a), it would do a whole lot about (b). Which, to me, puts us about 50% closer to surviving than if neither (a) nor (b) are true.
In my opinion, all NASA needs to do is present congress with a scientific statistic claim with percent confidence of global destruction. If we have craters on our planet & there are bones of things that shouldn't have died lying all around, I'm guessing they could place something like a 1% chance of a decent sized asteroid hitting us within a couple thousand years. Given that information, $1 billion may not seem like a bad idea considering most of us employ smoke detectors with even less risk of harm/loss to us.
This sounds like an entirely rational, sensible argument. As a result, I predict that it will have absolutely zero effect on anyone in Congress.
As an alternative, I suggest you come up with some "evidence" suggesting that an asteroid impact would transform their children into mutants, preferably homosexual ones; or, that the asteroids are a Arab Terrorist Plot. Double points if the asteroid is Mexican.
There is nothing we can do about it anyway.
Seems like a questionable assumption to me. There's quite a bit we could possibly do about it, if we knew long enough in advance. It's only if we only knew about it a few weeks or months in advance, that it would probably be a bend-over-and-pucker-up moment.
There is a whole lot of ingenuity (and a whole lot of explosives) spread across the globe as a whole; assuming that people got together and decided that the continued survival of the human species is a Good Idea, I suspect we could probably figure out a way to annihilate or deflect a rock, given enough lead time.
I have a better idea. Just rig up a RSS feed of the latest Gallup poll, a choke chain, a small free-running servomotor, and a pulse oximeter. Set up a feedback loop so that the politician's blood-oxygen level is kept, via the servo and choke-chain, at the same level as their job-approval rating. (Okay, I suppose we could plant a chip in their head, if that's easier. But I really think that the choke chain would make more compelling TV. And please, they're politicians -- it's not like they have souls, or feelings. I don't think they even feel pain; they're really more like plants.)
To be fair, I'd give them the option of retiring from office anytime they felt like it.
I certainly doubt that many of our illustrious leaders would have the same commitment to their ideals, were they the ones dying as a result of it.
Plus, aren't governments supposed to be afraid of their people?
I'm definitely with you, philosophically at least, about the need for greater simplicity.
I don't know whether XML+CSS is it, because I'm honestly not that familiar with CSS and XML (when I stopped paying attention to web stuff, HTML was a fairly simple text-markup language), but it seems like there ought to be some middle ground between plain ASCII text and the massive complexity of the competing XML office-document formats.
While certainly ODF is a step in the right direction away from proprietary binary blobs, I'm made slightly nervous about enshrining a requirement to use it into law, because it might well be that, absent the spectre of Microsoft's formats making positively anything else look like a great idea by comparison, ODF might not be the "best way" to solve the problem.
It might, in fact, be that there are simpler formats that would suit most people's needs, particularly looking forward into a future where online and on-screen publication of data across various devices and platforms is more important than printed layouts. (You see this happening already: if you format your resume to look brilliant on the printed page, but don't give a thought to how it's going to look when someone does a Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V to it, and dumps the text into a web form, you're a fool, because that's how most HR people at large organizations are going to read it.)
I've recently become quite taken with the idea of lightweight markup languages ('languages' is a bit of a stretch; 'conventions' might be a better term) like MarkDown and MultiMarkDown. Both of them provide ways of taking a document containing only ASCII or Unicode text with standard "plaintext markup" (you know, things like *this* or _this_ for emphasis), and transforming it into well-formatted XHTML, which can then in turn be converted to other formats (LaTeX, PDF, RTF, MS Word, etc.). It's really pretty slick. But the interesting point is that it derives its power and flexibility not by the format itself, but by the fact that the format is relatively lightweight, and is parsed into a well-understood intermediate format: XHTML.
If mandating ODF is the only way we can possibly break free of Microsoft's proprietary binary formats, then so be it: mandate away. The current situation is untenable, and might in the long run be disastrous, if a single company can essentially charge everyone in the country a 'head tax,' in order to read documents produced by their government, which they can only ignore at their own peril (or at least, competitive disadvantage; c.f. the case of government contracts being given out only to those who could go to an IE-only site and read DOC documents). I'd rather that the government just mandate JPEG scans of paper documents, or nothing but 7-bit ASCII, or hell, stone tablets with Egyptian hieroglyphs, than effectively hand control of such a large part of our society's creative output to one company.
A 600-page open format is better than what we've got, but I still think that it may be 599 pages too long for some uses.
perhaps m$ just needs to buy out the Webster and Oxford English dictionary
Done and done. If that's all it takes for them to conquer the English language, boy, are we in trouble.
(Although, more seriously, did you know that Microsoft has its own dictionary? They haven't quite figured out how to embrace, extend, and extinguish those other, legacy dictionaries, but I'm sure they're working on it.)
When I was at uni all our e-mail was on a VMS system and I had to actually go onto the campus site and access it through a VT100 terminal. If I wanted to read my e-mail at home I had take it home on paper after printing it out on a dot matrix line printer that normally had about 2 days worth of jobs queued up ahead of me.
I'm not sure how many weeks of having to check my email through a communal Windows box in some campus library it would take me to be pining for a VT100, but I bet it wouldn't be a lot.
Dumb terminals were dumb, but to be frank I'd take them every day over some spyware-ridden econo-box PC. At least with the VT100, you know all your data is tucked away on a machine that was probably designed with some modicum of intelligence and forethought, and running an OS that doesn't have to be restored from a bare-metal image on a regular basis just to stay usable, as most multi-user Windows kiosks do.
And besides which, most places running mainframes that I worked at, usually had a modem bank around somewhere that you could dial into, if you knew the right person to ask and what kind of beer they preferred.
I'd take my email through a text-based console and like it, before I'd submit to this "Windows Live Messenger" garbage.
To be honest, I think your best bet is to get the kit and the "manual" separately.
A few years ago I had the opportunity to tutor an absolutely prodigal young kid, who happened to be 'into' electricity that season. I couldn't find any electricial kits that seemed up to snuff in both the hardware and manuals departments, so instead I ended up taking one of the bigger Radioshack kits, and then using some of the Forrest M. Mims III books as project guides. Why they don't have that guy do the manuals for the kits I have no idea, because he's really quite good.
For the few projects we wanted to do where the board didn't have the right parts, I just hacked them on, either in place of parts that I thought were trivial (resistors, etc.), or just by drilling a new hole in the board surface and adding it in.
Any markup format should do the job, as long as it's well documented, implemented on several architectures/platforms/softwares *including FLOSS* and patent free (or with patents that specifically allow FLOSS implementations).
At least for basic purposes, Markdown fits the bill nicely.
Every once in a while, I dream of a time when Slashdot might implement Markdown, or one of its cousins like MultiMarkDown or Markdown with Smartypants, since they can be easily and quickly translated to HTML with a few lines of Perl (or Python), but are much more user-friendly than typing the raw HTML itself. But then the drugs wear off, and I remember that this is Slashdot.
Of course much of that is due to the fact that TeX has been around for so long without any significant changes and, given enough time, XML formats will likely settle toward the same level of quality from different implementations. Still, TeX's consistency is impressive.
It's like that by design. IIRC, Knuth is very concerned with the stability of TeX, in terms of producing predictable output from a given input file. I've read that the plan is to completely freeze the codebase when he dies -- I think he described it as a point when "all remaining bugs will become features" -- and although others will be able to be free to take the code and produce some other typesetting engine from it, "TeX" itself will be set in stone, so you'll always be able to take a TeX document and get the same output from it. This is represented by current version numbers that asymptotically approach pi (e.g. version 3.14, 3.141, 3.1415...) with each bugfix, where the final version will be marked by changing the version "number" to \pi itself. I think METAFONT approaches e in the same way.
I've always thought that this represented a pretty forward-thinking view. Not too many people really think too hard about what will become of their software after they die. But what do you expect from a guy who thinks that this is a stop-the-presses, call-your-sysadmin "dramatic improvement"? Now that's attention to detail. (Or, how about his taxonomy of diamond-shaped road signs?)
This definitely brings with it some possibilities, but I think that the technology is available right now to allow any determined person to sneak data past all but the most intensive biomedical screenings.
You can fit an awful lot of data in something the size of a Tylenol gel-cap, and aside from the unpleasant recovery aspect, nothing less than a X-ray is going to detect that (maybe not even an X-ray, if you were careful about the components used). Of course, your digestive system only gives you a window of opportunity measured in (at most) days; if you wanted to go longer than that, you're talking about implants. But that would get you through most transit checkpoints.
I'm not really even sure this is a new development: spies and other folks with resources have had microfiche and microdots for years. Cement one of those to your nether regions, or swallow one, and it would take a pretty determined search to turn one up. Or if you wanted, you could probably even sprinkle them over an unwitting mule's clothes, and then recover one on the opposite end.
It doesn't seem like data theft is really something that you can realistically try to stop at any border, anymore. If someone has the data in a format that they can load on their person and take to the border, it's gone. If you can get a person across, you can get data across. Certainly if you are allowed to take any type of electronics, it should be considered information-porus; there are so many ways to disguise information using steganography, that it's not practical to try and sanitize it.
Certainly by the time that biological information storage becomes widely practical, all but the most backwards nations and companies will have realized that stopping the flow of information with physical checkpoints at the border is a losing game. At best, you might be able to make it a little easier or harder, but real information security depends on limiting hostile parties' access to information in the first place, not trying to limit their transportation of it afterwards.
I agree. I don't understand what's so controversial about releasing a paper via multiple routes. The onus would be on the researchers; if they release via a peer-reviewed journal, while also publishing some other way, and then it's rejected during the peer review, well, they'd look pretty stupid then, no?
That's not very "controversial." It's ballsy, and arguably arrogant and stupid, but I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with it. Personally, I'd like to see more science be published outside expensive peer-reviewed journals, where regular folks can have access to it without going through complicated databases. At the same time, I understand the purpose that peer-review serves, and we don't want to eliminate that along the way.
I'm particularly galled by journals that demand exclusivity agreements in order to accept papers for publication, or have gag rules that quash discussion of papers that are being reviewed. That seems contrary to the collaborative nature of science and generally counterproductive (as well as just generally creepy and fascist; I don't much like the idea of anyone telling me that I can't talk about stuff, particularly if I were someone who'd just spend years working on it).
The only thing I think is a little controversial -- and I'm not even sure I'd choose that word, maybe just "inadvisable" -- is that Nature seems to be going ahead and running the non-reviewed version, even though they could just wait and see a little longer, and make sure that it doesn't get rejected. If a flaw is discovered during the peer review, now it's not just the researchers that are going to look dumb, but anyone who printed the un-reviewed version.
To say that there's "controversy" about the way they released the article seems to imply that there's tension between peer-reviewed and standard modes of publication, and I think that tension is mostly manufactured or artificial. There's no reason why both modes of publication can't co-exist and compliment each other.
Seems like there's a possibility there, but I'm not sure I'd want to pump water in there. Water has this nasty tendency to try and take up more space when you heat it than it does when it's cold, so I'd be concerned that in trying to reduce the pressure down there, we'd pump a few gallons of HOH in, and suddenly the pressure would increase as it all tries to become steam and escape. Obviously, the boiling point depends on the pressure, but you'd want to be very sure of what was going to happen before you did it. (You wouldn't want your high pressure steam to suddenly find a path that leads to a lower-pressure area...)
Maybe there's some other liquid we could use, one that would have a boiling point high enough to not have to worry about de-liquefaction. (How about those metal coolants they use in nuclear reactor cores? NaK is one, I think...oops,, it explodes on contact with air or water. Probably not a good choice either.)
Maybe the CompUSA near me doesn't gouge as badly, because it has a lot of nearby competition (in the general area) from MicroCenter, Radioshack, and the big box stores. I don't know.
But I went in there a few days ago to get an internal IDE drive cable, and they had a whole bunch of them, ranging from the usual flat grey ones for $5ish, up to fairly long round ones for $12 or $14, after instant rebates. And then there were some generic/house-brand USB cables for under $10. I'd guess that all of them were probably 25% to 100% more than you'd pay on NewEgg for the same item (and the USB and ribbon cables I can sometimes find 3-for-$1 at hamfests) and I have no doubt the profit margin on them is enormous, but all substantially less than Best Buy, if you could find anything at BB.
A cable that's three days away has very little value to me. A cable in my hand, today, has a lot. So I'm willing to pay substantially more than mail-order for the convenience of being able to get something right the hell now. So comparing their prices on small items to mail-order houses isn't particularly useful, IMHO, because they're not the sort of items I'd probably order online. That's the sort of stuff I always went down to Best Buy for; not big purchases that I was willing to plan out and wait for a mail-order place for, but when I was right in the middle of a project and just happened to need something.
I noticed that they don't have the in-store prices for a lot of stuff that I've seen in the local store on their website, which makes me think that perhaps they vary the prices on items a lot, store by store. It could be that in areas where they don't think they have a lot of competition, they've been trying to screw people more than they have been at my local joint. If that's the case -- and it seems likely -- then I'd blame that attitude for their failure, since they're essentially damaging their own brand name. Geographic price discrimination in excess of the cost of transportation to different areas just isn't sustainable anymore, at least on anything but the smallest items, because people will just go online and have it shipped to them from a cheaper locale. If they didn't figure that out, they're in big trouble.
I know a guy who worked as an examiner at the patent office. It's basically like working on a factory assembling line. Everything is based off of how many applications you can process. I think that new examiners are expected to do 2 or 3 patents a week, if you want to stay ahead and get promoted. Don't do your quota, you don't get promoted, and maybe eventually you get fired (but it's a government operation so let's not get too ridiculous here).
But basically, 2 or 3 patents need to cross your desk a week, and either be accepted or sent back. That means you can give each one maybe two days. That's two days to do all the research, and look for all the prior art, and make a judgment call. That's nothing on some of these patents, which can be hugely technical, particularly when the people filing them can take all the time they want to obfuscate their intentions and tweak the language to make them as broad as possible.
And here's the best part: if an examiner rejects a patent and sends it back to the applicant, and then the applicant sends it back in with updates, that updated application doesn't count towards the examiner's quota. So there's an obvious advantage towards accepting applications, because that's the absolutely sure way of getting it off your desk and making sure that it's not going to come back to haunt you later.
Anyone see anything wrong here?
While I understand the nervousness, I think that a more performance-centric compensation system would work pretty well. I'm not going to put words in Dada21's mouth, but I don't think that it would just replace the Sonys and EMIs with somebody else. In fact, I don't really see how it could.
If the standard distribution model for music was all about building buzz and promoting live shows, it would be tougher for middlemen to step in between the bands and the consumers. Right now, when a band signs with a label, they basically sign over the right to their recordings, and the label then takes these recordings and sells them (or attempts to, anyway) for great profit. If the band members don't like the arrangement, tough; they are effectively irrelevant, except insofar as they're required to eventually record more music for another CD, and to do promotions in order to sell more copies of the CD. And then they can try to do shows to make money for themselves.
But the point is, this system allows the record company to get between the producers and consumers of the music, and inject themselves, and control the 'supply' of music in order to create a false scarcity and reap large profits.
An alternative model might have most of the revenue coming from shows, and less of it from recordings. Here, bands would record and distribute the recordings, not expecting much of a direct profit (not hard for them, since they themselves don't get much right now from it anyway), but in order to promote live shows. The band themselves, now, are the real revenue generator, and not the recordings of them. This makes it much more difficult for a record label to interject itself and abscond with the profits, because if the band really doesn't like its label/manager/whatever, it can leave -- but then the manager is left with nothing, and the band can continue to tour and make money. In short, the band itself becomes the asset, instead of the band's "intellectual property" being the real thing of value.
By making the bands the real asset, instead of their recordings, you've made it much harder for someone to do in the future what the labels have managed over the past half-century or so. (Plus, the awareness in hindsight of what happened to the music industry the first time around ought to make people more cautious, although that may be assuming an intelligence on the part of a group where it doesn't exist.)
That's pretty cool.
Does anyone know if there's a directory of venues like that, for other areas? I admit, I haven't really gone to a lot of concerts or live shows recently, although I'm in what I can only assume is a pretty choice demographic (male, professional, no kids = lots of money for hobbies / entertainment, relative to earlier periods in my life). But unless you "follow the scene," and invest a lot of time and effort which I don't really have the freedom to do, it's hard to find shows that you know are going to be worth going to, at venues that aren't going to be unbelievably dodgy. (And I'm not a stranger to somewhat sketchy locales, but I draw the line at places that are obviously hazardous.)
It seems, to a casual observer, that you have on one end, well-known bands at big venues, with very high ticket prices; on the other hand you have a plethora of college bands giving free shows at bars. Not to totally disparage the latter category, because I'm sure there are some awesome college bands out there, but there's a lot of rank amateurs, too. I'm looking for bands somewhere in the middle; groups that are actually into doing it as something like a career, and have CDs and the hope of future music out of them, but not some label-sponsored supergroup.
A place that plays original music with some minimum stanards, with a low ticket price (say under $10), in a venue that didn't make you feel like you needed to go through a hazardous-materials decontamination on walking out of it, would be pretty nice to have around. Particularly if they weren't gouging for the food or beer, I could see myself going to such a place fairly regularly, just as a way of finding new music to listen to and an alternative to the usual bar scene. There are a lot of 20- and 30-somethings looking for things to do as a "night out" that's somewhere in that grey area of cultural edginess north of going to a movie, but south of bad free-verse poetry readings in college coffee shops. This market seems poorly capitalized-on.
An online directory of places like that, perhaps even one that showed what bands would be performing when, would be a great way to develop community and attract fans. (It'd also be nice for people like me who travel; I spend a lot of time going to various cities, and I've always found that it's difficult to figure out what the local scene is like when you're only going to be there a few nights, occasionally to the point where it's like it's being intentionally hidden.) If it doesn't already exist, it seems like it could be a revenue (or at least venture-cap!) generator, for somebody.
Between its crummy customer service, bad sales people that make Frys employees look like geniuses, terrible prices and even worse selection, does ANYONE actually shop at CompUSA anymore?
Yeah, I do. I don't know what they must have done to the store in your area, but the one near me isn't like that. Yeah, it has a TV section in it somewhere, but it's small relative to everything else. They have a big (compared to other B&M stores) selection of parts, including barebones systems, cases, power supplies, etc.
Their employees weren't geniuses, but they weren't too bad either. When I've gone in and asked "where are your hard drives?" they've generally been able to gesture and mutter in such a way as to convey to me the general location in the store where I might find hard drives, which is pretty much all I ask from retail-store workers anymore. (This is superior to Best Buy, who, I am convinced, have attempted some sort of cost-savings by taking on the least trainable residents of local State-run mental health facilities and setting them to work on the sales floor.) They've also accepted returns without a huge hassle.
My local store still has an "Apple corner" with a measly selection of software, and some Mac-specific hardware, which I occasionally have got stuff from. They seem to move their fair share of Apple CPUs, particularly around the beginning of the school year, although I assume their business has been hit hard by the Apple Store nearby. I guess I wouldn't blame them if they cut back on the Mac stuff (but then again, I don't fault Apple for going ahead with the standalone stores either, since I always did question CompUSA's commitment to that particular venture).
A typical trip to CompUSA for me happened a few weeks ago, when the power supply on my SO's Dell (thank God it was one of the ones with regular ATX supplies) blew. I went down, picked up a new 400W supply for $29.95 (after 'instant rebate'), and the computer was back up and running inside of an hour. With a mail-order place, she would have been out of a computer for most of a week, and I don't even know if Best Buy or the other places of its ilk sell power supplies. (I'd prefer not to find out, since the lighting in the place just makes me ill.)
It's not a real 'computer store' in the sense that I'd really like to shop at -- some sort of small independent place with a bin full of parts that I could paw through -- but those places basically don't exist in the suburban strip-mall hellhole that's my neck of the woods, at least that I've ever found. They were about the closest thing to one.
There are a lot of things I could say about CompUSA, but in general, I'd sum them up as being reliably inoffensive. They weren't great, but they didn't make me want to set fire to the place in the same way that Best Buy does.
How's that for a eulogy?
office supply story
Once upon a time, there was a brave little stapler, who was running low on staples...
It's better than paying $29.95 for a cable worth $5 at a big box store. Cables seem to be right behind extended warranties and printer ink in the retail cash cow category.
I think the point was that CompUSA was one of the few retail stores that didn't gouge like that. Sure, they weren't as cheap as mail-order, but they didn't try to screw you the same way that Best Buy, Staples, and the rest of them do.
I have a very nice CompUSA down the street from me, and I tend to go there whenever I need something that I either don't want to wait for, or don't want to pay the shipping on. I've gotten some great bargains off of their clearance table over the years, too. I'll really miss them if the store closes.
For me, if I want a cable, going down to CompUSA and paying $8 and having it in my hand immediately is a no-brainer, compared to having to order it online, pay perhaps a dollar or two less when you factor in shipping, and waiting three days, or going to Best Buy, being assaulted by the noise and idiot salesdroids there, and paying $30 for a sub-$1 part.
If they go under, at least I still have a MicroCenter in my area, which is decent, but it's a heck of a drive.
There is a market for a store that's in between the Best Buy big-box stores, and the mail order IT supply houses, so if CompUSA fails, I think something must have been wrong with their management.
Yes, but what I'm questioning is whether the Dow Jones' computers really had anything to do with this whole market movement at all. At most, all they did was slow down, so that the DJI lagged behind the real world for a while, and then suddenly caught up when their backup system went on-line and took over.
I think that it's more of a symptom and less of a cause. The cause of the market movement was in Asia; that made people sell, people selling caused the DJIs computers to suck. Now, perhaps the DJIs computer slowdown, and consequent large jump when they fixed the problem and got the backup running, caused more people to sell, but this seems specious. The slump was already in progress by the time that the computer slowdown occurred, because the slowdown was driven by high trade volume.
So my point is mostly that I don't see how it matters, really. People are looking towards computer glitches as the cause for the 3% drop in the market (or whatever it was), and that's just not true. The computer glitch might have made the drop look worse, or more precipitous, than it actually was at one point during the day, but it didn't cause or really drive it in any significant way. Even if the DJI folks' computers had worked perfectly, the market would still be sucking. In fact, computerization and the consequent flow of information is what links markets; it's only in the last few decades that the Asian and US markets have felt each other's pain so closely, so in a way, you can blame the computers for working too well in general, when you get these domino-effect deflations.
I wonder how much of this load is due to low volume day trader movement?
I would guess, virtually none, since they're by definition low-volume?
This blaming it on computers seems mostly a red herring. The markets in Asia (particularly Shanghai) tanked, and as a result, the markets in the US tanked, because companies in the US are heavily invested in China.
I think the only lesson here, in case there was anyone left who didn't get it, is that we all float or sink together. For better or worse, the US has tied itself pretty tightly to the Asian markets, and if they collapse, we're going to be seriously hurting.
Is upstart based at all on Apple / MacOS X's launchd? They created that basically to speed up OS X's boot time, and it did so dramatically. I believe that it's Apache (or BSD?) licensed and Apple was hopeful that it would be included in other systems and become the standard way of doing things, although there was a lot of cynicism that the mainstream Linux/UNIX community would never give up init and rc, regardless of the technical merits of any replacements. Granted, it doesn't give you the System V-like multiple runlevels, but I'm not sure that most desktop users are ever going to care. They're either going to use the computer normally, or boot into some sort of low level recovery mode from the boot prompt if things go pear-shaped. The idea of multiple runlevels is more confusing than anything for non-technical users.
FWIW, I was initially skeptical of launchd and launchctl after upgrading my Mac to 10.4, but I've since learned to really appreciate the design of both of them. Some serious thought went into both, and I think they both represent a rethinking of some processes that have just been carried over in other UNIX-based OSes from the days of minis and mainframes to desktops, and aren't necessarily the best way of doing things.
I think it's natural that in the future we're going to see more differentiation between desktop Linux distros and server ones, besides the amount of software that's installed. Fast-boot systems like launchd would be one welcome addition to desktop distros (although their utility might be more questionable on servers that are rarely restarted and where the dynamic launching of services on an as-needed basis might be a misfeature).
WoW runs very well under Cedega, and probably/possibly regular WINE as well. Cedega worked well with Ubuntu Dapper, and I haven't heard anything that would suggest that it's broken since then. I have a vague recollection that there was a WINE release recently, where they claimed full WoW support, but I have no idea how WINE compares to Cedega for ease of install and use.
Basically, you just want to install Ubuntu, and then before you change anything too far from the defaults or otherwise mess with things, install Cedega; then install WoW.
Before I got a Mac that was fast enough to handle WoW, I played it on a 1.9GHz P4 with a fairly unimpressive NVidia Quadro NVS card (64MB, maybe?), and it was entirely playable, although the FPS dropped to what you'd expect given that setup, in the more crowded areas. I assume with better hardware that you'd be all set.
but I'm fairly sure that there are bigger birds out there that wouldn't have a problem with it.
I've always wanted an Atomic Turkey.