I'd like to see you upgrade one of those desk-lamp computers
The only upgradable components in the new iMac are RAM and an AirPort card (and possibly the hard disk but it wouldn't be easy). This is in line with its expected market. The Towers are very expandable.
I buy my PC hardware pre-assembled from a local whole-saler for ridiculously low prices.
You win on this one, assuming you're being truthful. However, your situation is very atypical. Most computer users buy a CompUSA Compaq etc and for them Macs are cost competitive.
unless you are prepared to lick my testicular appendages
"we want a computer we can take apart and fiddle around with. Macs just can't do this."
This is silly. The only Macs that you can't take apart are the low-end stuff. What geek is happy with low-end anyway? The Towers are very easy to open up. For christ's sake, they won *design awards* for how easy they are to open up. Besides the motherboard, there really isn't much that you can't upgrade/fiddle with. Just last week I went to a local computer fair (PC stuff) and bought the cheapest 60GB ATA drive I could find. I stuck it in the slave drive bay and formated it. The whole operation took about 5 minutes. Not many people want to do complete motherboard swaps or want to build their own computer. Please tell me: what do you want to fiddle around with exactly?
I'm trying not to flame here but I'm sick of people making vague comments about why Macs aren't as good as PCs (we need a better name for this, wintel/lintel doesn't cut it). Here are some classics (not saying that you believe all of them):
They're too expensive - show me a comparable *pre-built* PC (ie. Compaq/Dell) with a significantly lower price. The TCO of Macs is actually sometimes lower than PCs. You have to take service/maintenance costs into account as well as the purchase price. Note: that's an Apple link but they didn't do the study.
You can't upgrade them - already answered this one.
No applications - this tends to be a Windows zealot comment. All the good stuff is on the Mac (well the stuff I use anyway:-).
Not open source - Apple has made Mac OS X as open source as they can (Darwin) without loosing money to cheap knock-offs. They can't release the crown jewels, they are a for-profit company.
One button mouse - For once I agree. Apple mice should be two button but, by default, make both buttons do the same thing (left button) to be easy on newbies. The experienced user can "turn on" the right button. "Just buy a 2 button mouse" doesn't help notebook users who don't want stuff hanging off their machine.
I've missed some I'm sure. The Mac has some very real cons (working VNC would be nice, one that actually displays the cursor!), and I don't mind people griping about them but these are just FUD.
So that I'm not completely off topic, the guy that wrote the Mac OS X on Intel article is right. Unless Apple starts becoming a software company, this isn't going to happen. Apple is even more of a hardware company now than it was 5 years ago. Apple is giving away software for free and charging a lot less for Mac OS X than they could.
They seem to be reverting to their pre-system 7 days, where you bought a Mac and all the Apple software was free. IIRC, system 7 was the first MacOS they charged for.
No they didn't. A lot of their code is from FreeBSD, and they're big enough to admit it. They built Mac OS X on NeXT's OS which is a Mach based BSD. They didn't just take FreeBSD and slap a GUI on it. Read their page more carefully.
You are describing Mac OS X's Property list (Plist) format. All Application information (file types etc) and user preferences are stored in.plist files, which are XML. There is easy API for apps to use. Here's the carbon docs for it. The Cocoa plist overview docs still aren't up yet but I can assure you that it's even easier in Cocoa.
You're using the classic excuse: "They control the hardware so of course Macs are easier to configure!"
Name a piece of current (not ISA etc), statndard (not some home built/unknown vendor PCI card) PC harware, other than the motherboard or the processor and it will most likely work on Mac OS X. It may fall back on a generic type (missing some features) but it will most likely work. Macs support: PC133 RAM, ATA hard disks, PCI cards, AGP cards, VGA monitors, USB, IEEE 1394 (FireWire), etc. I think that would be more than 50 types of hardware. Don't confuse the fact that the iMacs are closed with other Mac hardware. The G4 Towers won awards for how easy they are to open up and upgrade. There's a large handle on the side of the case that you pull and that side of the computer lowers down with the motherboard attached to it, giving easy access to all components.
Could it be that Macs are easy to configure because Apple engineers are clever?
Note: I'm ignoring the fact that this article is about software not hardware configuration.
Darwin (the Unix bit of Mac OS X, the kernel of which is called xnu) is mostly based on whatever NeXT's OS was (NeXTSTEP?). If you want to classify it as it is now, it's a Mach 3 based BSD4.4 OS with a lot of the userland stuff taken from NetBSD and FreeBSD and kernel code from all over the place (Apple mentions FreeBSD). Some man pages still say OpenBSD, so I guess it has some of that in it too (or at least the man pages:-).
People keep trying to make out that Apple ripped the entire OS off one of the open source BSDs. Can't people accept that a lot of it is either NeXT derived or from Apple? A lot of it isn't, of course, but the other BSDs copy each other's code all the time. I'm sure the others will start copying Darwin as soon as Apple lifts its non-BSD license (if ever).
We haven't carpet bombed anything in a city in a long time. The GPS guided bombs used heavily in Afghanistan are capable of hitting within 3 metres (10 feet) of the target. Naturally crap goes everywhere but this is really just a function of the power of the explosive. A laser of similar strength will cause similar problems. If we want really localised explosions, we should switch to 250 pound bombs or even smaller. The problem with this is that, as you blow less stuff up, it becomes easier to repair.
Note: we didn't really carpet bomb anything in Afghanistan. Carpet bombing is done by squadron of planes with hundreds (or thousands) of bombs dropped. What we saw was "dropping a long stick" (I think). This is a single plane blowing up a line of ground. Carpet bombing is blowing up closer to a km^2.
Do US Special Ops on a mission always wear uniforms?
If al-Qeida doesn't have a chain of command, why are we targeting "the top lieutenants"?
The US *hasn't* ruled them illegal combatants. They've just *decided* they're illegal combatants. The Geneva Convention states that, if in doubt (as these are), they are POWs until an independant *tribunal* says otherwise (ie. not Bush).
I personally think that they are illegal combatants but the US has hardly followed the proper proceedure. Also, they'd better all be al-Qeida. Taliban fighters are legal combatants. They were defending their government and country from aggressors (that's us). As such they are all POWs (unless they were also al-Qeida of course!).
Confessions to AI priest 2004 What christian would confess to something without a soul? I'm sure the bible says something against that.
AI chatbots indistinguishable from people by 95% of population 2005 Not hard as long as it says "You go girl!" or "Jerry, he's sleeping with my brother!" every second sentence.
First artificial electronic life 2006 A bit vague! It could be argued that this has already happened. Note: It doesn't say anything about intelligence.
Software trained rather than written 2006 They just described a neural net.
All government services delivered electronically 2008 Including road maintenance?
AI models used extensively in business management 2010 As opposed to the current situation, where humans never use a computer model to help them make decisions? What are they defining AI as?
Supercomputer as fast as human brain 2010 At doing what?! This one makes no mention of intelligence so what are they talking about? I don't know about you but I personally can't compete with my computer at doing complex maths or searching for information on the net. I certainly can't draw 10s of millions of triangles a second!
Satellite location devices implanted into pets 2015 Here in Australia we already have compulsory microchipping(sp?) of pets for ID purposes. It isn't much of a stretch to put GPS in while you're at it. I vaguely remember New Scientist talking about doing this for the elderly. This is possible today, sort of.
Full direct brain link 2030
Robots physically and mentally superior to humans 2030 This one falls down. If the first happens, how can the second become true? If we can integrate computers into us (I'm assuming that's what it means) then our intelligence level isn't static anymore. Exo-suits would do something similar for physical strength. I guess it could be argued that then we'd no longer be human, but who really cares?
I think I'll leave it there. Don't get me wrong, I love reading stuff like this. Some people in the past have made wild predictions that people like me have knocked back. Years later, they were proved to be right and the people like me looked like idiots. Oh well.
Darwin (Mac OS X) is still a micro-kernel, it just depends on how you define "micro-kernel".;-)
In Darwin almost everything is a module but when they are loaded, they are loaded into kernel space rather than user space. This solved a lot of the performance problems at the (very minor) expense of some stability (it's still plenty stable though).
I don't know what the difference in latency between Darwin/Linux/W2k is either though. I do know that Apple went through a lot of trouble to make the kernel preemptible and have some realtime support etc. This is why iTunes will almost never skip (at least for me) even under very heavy loads.
Make it in space. Ship the materials up (hey, at least you can do it in pieces!) or get them from asteroids, etc. No said this was practical yet, just possible.
This cable is going to be pretty thick right? It's going to be 1000s of km long right? *You* do the math and tell me how it's going to fit in a shuttle!
I can see a problem with a 300km long, 100km high *wall* on earth. I thought 100km height was the standard definition of space!
At that scale, it must affect the weather. It would act like a giant sail and catch the wind. I know it would be mostly parallel to the West-East winds but 30,000km^2 is a hell of a big sail. It would be a pretty strong force on the side of the wall. If it's tapered, you're going to be deflecting wind upwards. I haven't done the math but this *will* push down on the structure. How much? I don't know. What happens if you get a cyclone (hurricane) in the area?
Also, do we really know the effects of deflecting that much air upwards? Until we *really* understand the weather, we should probably avoid building stuff on a geological scale.
The space elevator, being thin, wouldn't have most of these problems. Has this guy really thought everything through? I'm ignoring the obvious problem of how to get half a million tonnes of diamond.
The spot they picked in New Scientist (maybe sciam?) was on the equator south of India. Naturally it would be an artificial structure (think big oil rig). Lots of empty ocean to fall in. Don't know about tsunamis though.
Actually, it's not that a nuclear rocket would normally release anything radioactive, it's what happens if it blows up. Theoretically, the exhaust is just super heated gas. If you could be sure that the nuclear fuel would survive an accident intact then you could probably use them (convincing Greenpeace would be another matter).
It's not entirely relevant because it's talking about deep space missions but here's an article on nuclear rockets.
Here's a quote from the ADC (Apple Developer Connection) newsletter:
This first installment of Apple's new "Kernel Programming" book delivers high-level information about the Mac OS X core operating-system architecture, as well as background for system programmers and developers of device drivers, file systems, and network extensions.
In short, this is only the first chapter of the book. I like that they're releasing it piecemeal, it's better than waiting for the whole thing to be written. So far they've done the "Is this for you?" bit and have just completed the overview. Apple is pretty good at writing documentation to describe how something works (within reason) rather than just it's API. IMHO, this will probably be a good doc to read when it's finished, even if you prefer a different kernel.
There is a fundamental difference between source code and a physical tool like a cyclotron. If I give you my cyclotron, I can no longer use it. If I give you the source code to a software project, I can still continue with my research. It is similar to the saying (IIRC, I'm paraphrasing) "If we each have an object and we swap then we each have an object. If we each have an idea and we swap then we each have two ideas."
AFAIK, the main reason expensive equipment isn't made open for anyone to use is that it usually already has a full schedule for research. But a software tool can be made open to the public and the researchers can still do their job. There is also the added advantage of external bug fixes.
I think this kind of open code would really speed science along, due to reduced duplicated effort. If there is private source that can't be opened up because it's from a third party then don't release that code. Obviously it won't work with out the closed library but it can still be learned from.
I know that the Mozilla guys want it to be called an application virtual machine. I still don't think that Mozilla is appropriate for this, an ICQ client perhaps but not this. It'd be interesting to see how well OEone has done it. I can't see it being better than a purpose written desktop manager though. IMHO, this is between markets. It's too expensive to be an internet appliance and it's too limited to be desktop PC.
The built-in speakers aren't great, but they never are in low-cost computers.
That's a bit rich considering that the machine this is ripping off (the old style iMac), for the same US$799 price, has Harman Kardon (read: good) speakers.
They proudly boast about how user friendly it is but then talk about using a terminal window to install a simple Office suite?! A web browser for the main interface?! Are they on crack? Why is everyone trying to do everything with a web browser these days. A web browser was designed to browse the web (shock horror).
I love the idea of backing up data to a sever in case you delete the file. Here's a thought: make a copy somewhere else on the hard disk or copy it to a floppy. Who's going to waste their bandwidth? Do you trust them not to look at your files?
I see this crashing and burning. Basically, for the same price you can get a real iMac. I thought rip offs were supposed to be cheaper? That's if Apple legal doesn't kill it first.
The OLE stuff we really need are equations. The Equation Editor that comes with word works really well. No, we cant just export them as gifs or whatever because the are lots of them and we need to be able to edit them. Other than that it sounds like RTF has come along way.
Note: I *don't* want OLE stuff in RTF. In fact I'd like a cleaner, probably XML based document format.
Good suggestion. I think all of these could work for different people. We should tailor our response for each person. If they are real newbies then mine is probably the best. If they don't know what Linux is but understand the whole "Microsoft bad" angle then your suggestion. If they are very knowledgeable then the parent of my original post is probably the best. Overwhelming a newbie won't get you anywhere but neither will patronizing a knowledgeable user.
I don't think that calling Word "a secret proprietary format" (true as it may be) will make much sense to the average Windows user.
Could one accomplish something similar with a message like "I'm sorry but I'm unable to read documents in Microsoft Word format because I use Linux. Please send your document in a format that I can read, such as ASCII Text or PDF."
And you think they'll know what ASCII text or Linux means? I'd tell them to type (or copy/paste) their message into the email and not use attachments. You could probably use the virus reason (something they'll probably have heard of) and not worry them with big words like "Linux".
These messages are hard to make because they have to be completely self explanatory, ie no language. If you actually try for a while you *will* start to pick up a few things. Although it looks like the noise has scrambled the message, the symbols are designed to be very different from one another. A lot of damage has to be done before you can't read the symbols.
At the top it introduces numbers (0-12 then a few others). It shows a number in base 1 (just dots), then in binary, then the symbol they want to use for it, with their symbol for equals in between.
It then goes on to basic math and by looking at the numbers you can figure out what the operator is and its symbol. I make the first one out to be 1+1=2 and the second one (going down) is 1+2=3. Then comes geometry, atoms, spectral lines (?), etc.
The idea of these messages (they really need to be much longer to be useful) is that, by the end, you have an entire working language and can then start telling them stuff. I have a problem with this message because it wastes lots of space on pictures that have meaning to us but probably aren't very interesting to the aliens (case in point: the map of earth). These messages should be long and focus on text (symbols) and diagrams when necessary (the atoms).
For a *decent* article on these messages read Let's learn Lincos on the New Scientist website.
Note: I'm no linguist so If I can read it so can you. Give it another shot!
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The only upgradable components in the new iMac are RAM and an AirPort card (and possibly the hard disk but it wouldn't be easy). This is in line with its expected market. The Towers are very expandable.
You win on this one, assuming you're being truthful. However, your situation is very atypical. Most computer users buy a CompUSA Compaq etc and for them Macs are cost competitive.
No thanks.
Thank you for trying not to flame. I try too ;-)
This is silly. The only Macs that you can't take apart are the low-end stuff. What geek is happy with low-end anyway? The Towers are very easy to open up. For christ's sake, they won *design awards* for how easy they are to open up. Besides the motherboard, there really isn't much that you can't upgrade/fiddle with. Just last week I went to a local computer fair (PC stuff) and bought the cheapest 60GB ATA drive I could find. I stuck it in the slave drive bay and formated it. The whole operation took about 5 minutes. Not many people want to do complete motherboard swaps or want to build their own computer. Please tell me: what do you want to fiddle around with exactly?
I'm trying not to flame here but I'm sick of people making vague comments about why Macs aren't as good as PCs (we need a better name for this, wintel/lintel doesn't cut it). Here are some classics (not saying that you believe all of them):
I've missed some I'm sure. The Mac has some very real cons (working VNC would be nice, one that actually displays the cursor!), and I don't mind people griping about them but these are just FUD.
So that I'm not completely off topic, the guy that wrote the Mac OS X on Intel article is right. Unless Apple starts becoming a software company, this isn't going to happen. Apple is even more of a hardware company now than it was 5 years ago. Apple is giving away software for free and charging a lot less for Mac OS X than they could.
They seem to be reverting to their pre-system 7 days, where you bought a Mac and all the Apple software was free. IIRC, system 7 was the first MacOS they charged for.
I hope that wasn't a flame :-)
No they didn't. A lot of their code is from FreeBSD, and they're big enough to admit it. They built Mac OS X on NeXT's OS which is a Mach based BSD. They didn't just take FreeBSD and slap a GUI on it. Read their page more carefully.
Quick example taken from the above docs:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>t .dtd"><dict>
<!DOCTYPE plist SYSTEM "file://localhost/System/Library/DTDs/PropertyLis
<key>Year Of Birth</key>
<integer>1965</integer>
<key>Pets Names</key>
<array/>
<key>Picture</key>
<data>
PEKBpYGlmYFCPA==
</data>
<key>City of Birth</key>
<string>Springfield</string>
<key>Name</key>
<string>John Doe</string>
<key>Kids Names</key>
<array>
<string>John</string>
<string>Kyra</string>
</array>
</dict>
</plist>
Note: The <array/> tag is specifying an empty array.
Name a piece of current (not ISA etc), statndard (not some home built/unknown vendor PCI card) PC harware, other than the motherboard or the processor and it will most likely work on Mac OS X. It may fall back on a generic type (missing some features) but it will most likely work. Macs support: PC133 RAM, ATA hard disks, PCI cards, AGP cards, VGA monitors, USB, IEEE 1394 (FireWire), etc. I think that would be more than 50 types of hardware. Don't confuse the fact that the iMacs are closed with other Mac hardware. The G4 Towers won awards for how easy they are to open up and upgrade. There's a large handle on the side of the case that you pull and that side of the computer lowers down with the motherboard attached to it, giving easy access to all components.
Could it be that Macs are easy to configure because Apple engineers are clever?
Note: I'm ignoring the fact that this article is about software not hardware configuration.
Check out some more myth debunking.
People keep trying to make out that Apple ripped the entire OS off one of the open source BSDs. Can't people accept that a lot of it is either NeXT derived or from Apple? A lot of it isn't, of course, but the other BSDs copy each other's code all the time. I'm sure the others will start copying Darwin as soon as Apple lifts its non-BSD license (if ever).
If you want more info check out the Darwin project page and the developer site.
Note: we didn't really carpet bomb anything in Afghanistan. Carpet bombing is done by squadron of planes with hundreds (or thousands) of bombs dropped. What we saw was "dropping a long stick" (I think). This is a single plane blowing up a line of ground. Carpet bombing is blowing up closer to a km^2.
I personally think that they are illegal combatants but the US has hardly followed the proper proceedure. Also, they'd better all be al-Qeida. Taliban fighters are legal combatants. They were defending their government and country from aggressors (that's us). As such they are all POWs (unless they were also al-Qeida of course!).
What christian would confess to something without a soul? I'm sure the bible says something against that.
AI chatbots indistinguishable from people by 95% of population 2005
Not hard as long as it says "You go girl!" or "Jerry, he's sleeping with my brother!" every second sentence.
First artificial electronic life 2006
A bit vague! It could be argued that this has already happened. Note: It doesn't say anything about intelligence.
Software trained rather than written 2006
They just described a neural net.
All government services delivered electronically 2008
Including road maintenance?
AI models used extensively in business management 2010
As opposed to the current situation, where humans never use a computer model to help them make decisions? What are they defining AI as?
Supercomputer as fast as human brain 2010
At doing what?! This one makes no mention of intelligence so what are they talking about? I don't know about you but I personally can't compete with my computer at doing complex maths or searching for information on the net. I certainly can't draw 10s of millions of triangles a second!
Satellite location devices implanted into pets 2015
Here in Australia we already have compulsory microchipping(sp?) of pets for ID purposes. It isn't much of a stretch to put GPS in while you're at it. I vaguely remember New Scientist talking about doing this for the elderly. This is possible today, sort of.
Full direct brain link 2030
Robots physically and mentally superior to humans 2030
This one falls down. If the first happens, how can the second become true? If we can integrate computers into us (I'm assuming that's what it means) then our intelligence level isn't static anymore. Exo-suits would do something similar for physical strength. I guess it could be argued that then we'd no longer be human, but who really cares?
I think I'll leave it there. Don't get me wrong, I love reading stuff like this. Some people in the past have made wild predictions that people like me have knocked back. Years later, they were proved to be right and the people like me looked like idiots. Oh well.
In Darwin almost everything is a module but when they are loaded, they are loaded into kernel space rather than user space. This solved a lot of the performance problems at the (very minor) expense of some stability (it's still plenty stable though).
I don't know what the difference in latency between Darwin/Linux/W2k is either though. I do know that Apple went through a lot of trouble to make the kernel preemptible and have some realtime support etc. This is why iTunes will almost never skip (at least for me) even under very heavy loads.
Anyone have any numbers?
Make it in space. Ship the materials up (hey, at least you can do it in pieces!) or get them from asteroids, etc. No said this was practical yet, just possible.
This cable is going to be pretty thick right? It's going to be 1000s of km long right? *You* do the math and tell me how it's going to fit in a shuttle!
At that scale, it must affect the weather. It would act like a giant sail and catch the wind. I know it would be mostly parallel to the West-East winds but 30,000km^2 is a hell of a big sail. It would be a pretty strong force on the side of the wall. If it's tapered, you're going to be deflecting wind upwards. I haven't done the math but this *will* push down on the structure. How much? I don't know. What happens if you get a cyclone (hurricane) in the area?
Also, do we really know the effects of deflecting that much air upwards? Until we *really* understand the weather, we should probably avoid building stuff on a geological scale.
The space elevator, being thin, wouldn't have most of these problems. Has this guy really thought everything through? I'm ignoring the obvious problem of how to get half a million tonnes of diamond.
The spot they picked in New Scientist (maybe sciam?) was on the equator south of India. Naturally it would be an artificial structure (think big oil rig). Lots of empty ocean to fall in. Don't know about tsunamis though.
Actually, it's not that a nuclear rocket would normally release anything radioactive, it's what happens if it blows up. Theoretically, the exhaust is just super heated gas. If you could be sure that the nuclear fuel would survive an accident intact then you could probably use them (convincing Greenpeace would be another matter). It's not entirely relevant because it's talking about deep space missions but here's an article on nuclear rockets.
In short, this is only the first chapter of the book. I like that they're releasing it piecemeal, it's better than waiting for the whole thing to be written. So far they've done the "Is this for you?" bit and have just completed the overview. Apple is pretty good at writing documentation to describe how something works (within reason) rather than just it's API. IMHO, this will probably be a good doc to read when it's finished, even if you prefer a different kernel.
AFAIK, the main reason expensive equipment isn't made open for anyone to use is that it usually already has a full schedule for research. But a software tool can be made open to the public and the researchers can still do their job. There is also the added advantage of external bug fixes.
I think this kind of open code would really speed science along, due to reduced duplicated effort. If there is private source that can't be opened up because it's from a third party then don't release that code. Obviously it won't work with out the closed library but it can still be learned from.
The bottom of the line iMac (similar specs) is $799. Do some research.
I know that the Mozilla guys want it to be called an application virtual machine. I still don't think that Mozilla is appropriate for this, an ICQ client perhaps but not this. It'd be interesting to see how well OEone has done it. I can't see it being better than a purpose written desktop manager though. IMHO, this is between markets. It's too expensive to be an internet appliance and it's too limited to be desktop PC.
That's a bit rich considering that the machine this is ripping off (the old style iMac), for the same US$799 price, has Harman Kardon (read: good) speakers.
They proudly boast about how user friendly it is but then talk about using a terminal window to install a simple Office suite?! A web browser for the main interface?! Are they on crack? Why is everyone trying to do everything with a web browser these days. A web browser was designed to browse the web (shock horror).
I love the idea of backing up data to a sever in case you delete the file. Here's a thought: make a copy somewhere else on the hard disk or copy it to a floppy. Who's going to waste their bandwidth? Do you trust them not to look at your files?
I see this crashing and burning. Basically, for the same price you can get a real iMac. I thought rip offs were supposed to be cheaper? That's if Apple legal doesn't kill it first.
Note: I *don't* want OLE stuff in RTF. In fact I'd like a cleaner, probably XML based document format.
Good suggestion. I think all of these could work for different people. We should tailor our response for each person. If they are real newbies then mine is probably the best. If they don't know what Linux is but understand the whole "Microsoft bad" angle then your suggestion. If they are very knowledgeable then the parent of my original post is probably the best. Overwhelming a newbie won't get you anywhere but neither will patronizing a knowledgeable user.
I thought that rtf couldn't handle embedded pictures, diagrams, equations, etc. Am I wrong? I would exactly call these rare.
Could one accomplish something similar with a message like "I'm sorry but I'm unable to read documents in Microsoft Word format because I use Linux. Please send your document in a format that I can read, such as ASCII Text or PDF."
And you think they'll know what ASCII text or Linux means? I'd tell them to type (or copy/paste) their message into the email and not use attachments. You could probably use the virus reason (something they'll probably have heard of) and not worry them with big words like "Linux".
At the top it introduces numbers (0-12 then a few others). It shows a number in base 1 (just dots), then in binary, then the symbol they want to use for it, with their symbol for equals in between.
It then goes on to basic math and by looking at the numbers you can figure out what the operator is and its symbol. I make the first one out to be 1+1=2 and the second one (going down) is 1+2=3. Then comes geometry, atoms, spectral lines (?), etc.
The idea of these messages (they really need to be much longer to be useful) is that, by the end, you have an entire working language and can then start telling them stuff. I have a problem with this message because it wastes lots of space on pictures that have meaning to us but probably aren't very interesting to the aliens (case in point: the map of earth). These messages should be long and focus on text (symbols) and diagrams when necessary (the atoms).
For a *decent* article on these messages read Let's learn Lincos on the New Scientist website.
Note: I'm no linguist so If I can read it so can you. Give it another shot!