So, by your argument, as the government builds up its military might, the public should be allowed to build up a comparable military might as well. Given the current american military strength, under that guideline it seems appropriate to allow the ownership of small rocket launchers and armor-piercing bullets to anyone who qualifies for a simple handweapon.
I personally don't believe ytou need weapons to get rid of a government you don't like. All you need is to stop obeying the leadership on a sufficiently large scale. Yes, people die, but then people die during violent uprisings as well. There is enough evidence in history to prove conclusively non-violent revolutions are perfectly achievable, even on very large scales.
We are already as sanitized to the violence, pain, and suffering of others. Just so long as it doesn't happin "on our soil".
But it did happen. A little event called 9/11. People don't draw the connection however between things like invading iraq and events like 9/11. They invert the causality, thinking iraq is the response to things like 9/11, while in reality 9/11 is the response to things like iraq.
That's not to say I'm one of the "america deserved 9/11" crowd, but if you kick a hornet's nest, you're going to get stung.
Modern democracy is not rule by the people, but rule by consent of the people. The majority of people consent to the bush administration's make up and policies, so they are a democratic government. Even those who hate him consider the bush presidency and its actions an inevitable toil that needs to be suffered through. What would have happened had Ghandi said "oh, those british, they're too powerful, we'll just wait until they leave by themselves"?
Well, lets see... Who is it that actually LIVES in nature, grows the food you eat and mines the resources for your daily living. Who breathes fresh air and toils to make an honest living?
You do know that food production and mining in the US are inherently and inescapably unprofitable when in direct competition with other regions in the world and survive only by the subsidies given to you by those "city slickers", don't you? A little gratitude to them for preserving your way of life would be in order I think.
Freeloader I will grant you, but thief and immoral I don't see substantiated in the mere act of piracy.
Being a thief implies you're depriving someone of something. If you pirate a product that you weren't otherwise going to buy, there is no depriving of anything happening, and as a result, you're not technically being a thief (though I'm sure the pirated will argue differently). Ofcourse, the tricky thing is that you wouldn't have otherwise purchased the product had you not been able to pirate it. Most people who pirate do it with stuff they would pay for if they had to.
Same basic argument for immoral. An act is only immoral if it harms people. Piracy doesn't necessarily harm anyone.
What happens when all the ATMs in town are owned by one bank?
I guess I'm lucky to live in a country where banks are required by law to operate a certain number of non-bank-specific atm's, so that it doesn't matter what bank you're with, you can always withdraw cash in your town.
Don't use it? What about when it's my freaking bank?
So, switch banks to one that is more clued in. There's no reason for activex to be involved with online banking other than laziness, and the last thing I want from my bank is laziness when it comes to handling my money.
Aesthetic appeal for it's own sake shouldn't be your top priority, your top priority is to convey the information you want to convey in the clearest and most concise way, as this is the purpose of giving a presentation.
It depends on what kind of presentation you're giving. If you're presenting a paper or a set of research results to a technical audience, then yes, you would be exactly right. For sales presentations however, form over function can be a lot more preferable. The people who make purchase decisions tend to have to make a lot of them. They don't have time to know everything about everything, so they go by what their gut tells them. Information will sway them, but a smooth and sharply looking presentation, however light on details it may be, will sway them as well. The point is making them feel good about your product, and that can be done with pretty pictures.
Especially when your product is not the best product in a market, your sales presentations need to look extremely attractive. After all, in such a situation you can't sell based on information, since information will tell a potential customer he should go to your competitor.
Mac OS X IS a Unix OS Mr VAXGeek, and it's wonderful that an X11 server is now included with it. Now, if only it was installed by default... I'll be keeping my fingers crossed for that to happen with Tiger.:-)
Why does a unix need to have X11?
The unix model is that of separate but interlocking parts. If you can build a better gui part than X, why not?
AFAIK, the X11 server is provided for compatibilty with existing unix apps, not to be any sort of alternative for quartz.
Why do Macintosh users feel this compulsion to say bad things about Linux and X11?
People on the linux side want a system that is EXACTLY the way they want it. Since everyone is different, no such system exists, and linux desktops tend to be good starting points from where you spend considerably time tweaking the system to be exactly as you want.
People on the apple side want a system that "just works". Something that lets them do their job quickly and efficiently, with minimal initial effort. This does not mean a system that forbids tweaking, since there are many ways to tweak a mac desktop. But it does mean system that does not require tweaking if you're willing to learn its way of working once, and just once. Since linux desktops are just a loose collection of apps without much in the way of common workflows, they see the effort required in learning/tweaking them as prohibitive, and slam them as "badly designed".
Now, the reason mac users are so vocal is because they see how much quicker you can get to work with a mac and then they see all the time linux users have to invest in tweaking their desktop, and they just feel sorry for linux desktop users, and wish to help them reach "enlightenment". They don't understand that for linux desktop users the tweaking isn't a burden, but a pleasure. As a result, the linux people feel the mac people are elitist, and the mac people feel the linux people are misguided.
If you want to, say, use an old Mac as an X terminal, you'll probably not want to tunnel it through ssh if you're on a local-only network. An old Mac can make a fine X terminal, running NetBSD or something similar. You'll bog it down badly by forcing it to encrypt all traffic to the machine running the X clients.
First of all, you can turn off encryption in ssh. That just keeps the tunneling aspect, and forgets about the encryption aspect (on the command-line the argument is -cnone. Secondly, there are faster algorithms for encryption than the default. Just switching from idea or 3des to blowfish makes a big difference. I've served up evolution (a recent version) from a pII/233 across the internet in a blowfish encrypted ssh tunnel and managed a large mail archive with it, and it ended up bandwidth-bound, constantly saturating the cable internet feed on the remote end (which is capped at 24KB/s upload). It was also quite usable, as long as you didn't use drag and drop.
Secondly, I have my doubts about the usefulness of an SE/30 as an X terminal. Most SE/30's have stock graphics, meaning 1 bit 512*384. I own one as well, and the screen is very tiny. The OS7-era native apps fit on it well, but they were designed for a screen that small. Most apps nowadays are designed for screens almost twice the size running 16bit color at least. They might not even be usable on a screen that small.
I rather like how the instructions talk about how to run X11 remotely, and the first thing they do is tell how to do it over ssh, with simple, easy to understand directions on how to do it. That is how "how to" manuals should be written.
Really, tunneling X through ssh IS the easiest way to run it remotely. That it happens to be secure is a nice coincidence, but even without the encryption it would still be the preferred way of doing things.
Any guide on remote X that starts out with xhost explanations is horribly outdated.
The amusing thing is that with ssh compression turned on I get better performance running an X session across the internet than if I do it without any tunneling at all, despite the overhead of the encryption.
Sadly it's not that easy, being that Adobe has not and likely will not release the source to the Solaris/X11 version.
I think the idea of the original submitter was that you would have a solaris box running framemaker, and export the solaris session's display to the X server running on your OS X box.
No rebuilding of the framemaker binary necessary in that case.
I know the '1.0' refer's to the fact that it's *Apple's* 1.0, but can someone who spends more time with X than I do explain the significance of X11R6?
X11 is two things, a standard for windowing systems, and a series of implementations of that standard. X11, the standard, is developed by the X.org foundation, at www.x.org. The current base version of that is version 11, release 6, X11R6. Don't let the version 11 thing fool you though, X has been at version 11 since 1987, and likely will never get to version 12, which is why everyone just calls it X11.
As for the implementations... originally it was simply X11, developed by the X consortium. However, since they were slow to adapt to new platforms or technologies (notably the x86 platform becoming powerful enough to run unix), a spin-off project called XFree86 evolved (it's a bit more complicated, but then who needs details). They became the de-facto reference implementation of X11, even if they didn't have the honor of owning any of the X consortium IP (like trademarks and so on). However, the leadership of the XFree86 project a while ago decided that they would change the license in ways the community did not like. As a result, the last truly free version of XFree86 is 4.3, which is the code that Apple's X11 1.0 is based on. X.org was founded around the same timeframe to step into the void left by the XFree86 project's implosion, and they now develop the official reference implementation (currently X.Org X11R6.8.1). Likely, in the future, apple's X11 will be based on the X.Org code.
The problem, plain and simple, is that whatever market you're in as a software developer, most likely the vast majority of potential clients will not care about usability. Oh, don't get me wrong, they'll want usability, as long as they don't have to pay extra for it.
The software products I develop at my day job suffer from this. There are major usability issues, but little to no manpower gets assigned to fixing them, because the customers ask for features, but they don't ask for a "nicer" form (or if they do, it's really low priority).
That's not to say there isn't a niche market that WILL pay for usability. The mac is proof positive of this. Even when the mac pretty much only had usability as a positive trait, people still paid exorbitant amounts for the apple goods, just because they actually were designed in compliance with usability guidelines. The thing is, the niche market is very much niche, and unless your product is purposefully niche as well, it's not big enough for you.
What I really wish would happen is someone would turn my cell phone, pda, and iPod into 1 good product that doesn't require me to take out a loan.
Motorola is working with apple to produce a cellphone/ipod combination. Let's see what it turns into.
I can't help you with the 1 product or the not taking out a loan aspect of what you want. But if you want the combined functionality in an easy to carry way, your best bet is probably an ipod mini and a htc typhoon platform cellphone. Still two devices, and rather on the pricy side of things, but they won't make your clothes sag or bulge from carrying them.
Well, that or adding some sort of microdrive to a pda. Something like a HTC magician combined with a hard drive SD card would work pretty nicely. Battery life would suck ass, and it wouldn't play itunes-bought music, but you can't have it all.
Replacable batteries are a mixed selling point - I, like many others, do not want to feed the battery-eating gods. The down side is, of course, that you have a limited life away from a power supply. Both are substantial drawbacks.
Actually, I think rechargeable batteries are FAR preferable above replaceable batteries. Since if your players does not support recharging its batteries just by plugging it in, you can't add that feature later on, but most players DO support adding aftermarket battery packs to the outside.
The ipod has many clip-on battery packs. If you need it to last more than 12 hours, you can have it, as many hours as you want (some of those packs use regular AA batteries).
Besides, I don't want to feed the thing tons of batteries either. I think the whole replaceable battery thing is a red herring. It has never mattered to anyone I know who owns an ipod.
There's also no *right* to be able to use their seed on terms unacceptable to Monsanto. Don't like the terms, don't buy 'em.
I've got a better idea: just stop eating. If you don't eat, you don't have to worry about accidentally ingesting engineered seeds. Problem gone.
OK, you may brand me as silly, but this is what it's going to turn into. Over time, ALL seeds will be engineered and patented, because they are genetically superior to regular seeds, and natural selection will do its work. There will be no non-GM food.
Don't like it? Grow natural soy beans. Mother Nature's patent expired a long time ago.;)
You make it sound like what monsanto did was some amazing feat. They did not engineer a new species of soybean from the ground up. Nobody has yet to do that for anything but single-celled organisms. What they did was akin to crossbreeding, only more high tech. These patents aren't about custom made genes, they are patents on existing biological code made by nature, applied to a different species. All you have to do is document what a gene does, and you've got a patent. That's not novel at all. And might I remind you that all that genetic code is are building plans. If monsanto can patent DNA, then architects should be able to patent room shapes (even if the room shapes existed prior to their patenting, but had never been used in a building like the one the architect is designing).
But even that aside, it shouldn't be possible to patent life, regardless of its origins. I know it seems harmless, but what is becoming obvious is that these patented seeds will displace regular seeds, until there's a tax on life itself, paid yearly to monsanto. That's immoral, because it damages society greatly without providing a comparable benefit.
Ofcourse, I don't believe anything should be patentable, because I have yet to see conclusive evidence that patents are a net benefit to society at all (everything I've seen points to them being a leech on society). But if you must have patents (for whatever insane reason), life should be the VERY LAST thing they should be able to cover.
If you want to see something like the original series, but updated with modern effects, you'll be disappointed. They reinvented everything about the battlestar galactica universe. Now, I personally think this series is FAR better than the original series, even if you strip out the excellent special effects. But there are people who liked the original series just as it was, and feel offended by this new series basically saying that TOS sucked ass and nothing good could be done storywise with it in a new series.
If you like technobabble, cool futuristic technology, outlandish sci-fi concepts (like otherdimensional beings, time travel, and so on...), then you won't like this series. The galactica is ancient tech, think wired phonelines, simple CRT screens, and dated, low-tech, fighter spacecraft. It's even suffering from metal fatigue, being scheduled for decommissioning when it is forced into being the ill-equipped defender of what's left of humanity. This is on purpose. The humans are the centerpoint of the show, and the show deals primarily with humanity. The humans can't find a "technological" solution to their problems, and it's their humanity that in the end has to save them, not how well they can use tachyon particles. So, although there is FTL drive, it is in the series only because in space you can't get around without it, and is employed very sparingly (first episode excepted). There are no food generators, no transporters, no force fields, and no advanced particle weapons (they use regular bullet-spewing guns and rockets). If you need the sci-fi to be really sci, you won't enjoy this at all.
If however, you like a show with characters that aren't completely one dimensional and experience some small modicum of personal growth, a plot that isn't totally obvious or contrived, and a general focus on humanity on the brink of destruction/salvation, involving faith and love as core elements of the plot, then you'll like this show, as I do.
Watch the first episode. If it draws you in and makes you jump to the edge of your seat every time the 33 minutes are up, then you'll enjoy the rest of the season. If it doesn't do anything for you, don't bother with the rest.
Mac mini has a ATI Radeon 9200 card with 32MB video RAM. Not a great card, but not too shabby. Plus Apple does a really good job at making things look really pretty with even the most minimal hardware. OSX has historially run better/faster on the same hardware each new release. So I'd expect Tiger to run even better on Mac Mini than Panther (the current default OS).
From what I've read, the 9200 doesn't support shaders 2.0, so coreimage won't be able to use it for acceleration, thereby assuring you'll miss out on a lot of the graphical goodness that tiger is supposed to bring. Ofcourse, you'll likely still have a faster and better looking system, so I'm not arguing with that, just saying that there won't be that much visual improvement from going to tiger on a mac mini.
I'm still buying a mini though. I don't care that much about how flashy the gui effects are.
Incidentally, longhorn will require a shaders 2.0 card too for the graphical tricks, and likely when X.org gets support for that kind of gui acceleration, they'll have the same minimum requirement.
Excellent point. I know an electrician who had gotten his first broadband subscription, and a new PC running XP to go along with it. After only a few days, he had me drop by. His system was damaged beyond repair by viruses and malware. I told him to take it back to the store and have them reinstall the OS. And I told him: "next time, buy a mac."
I've heard over and over from people who buy a PC and a broadband subscription, and end up spending a ton of money "learning" that windows and broadband internet are not friends at all.
I understand. You're a tweaker. You perceive time spent tweaking and optimizing the system for yourself to be of positive value. You like it when you get a construction kit, and you get to assemble it just the way you want it, which isn't necessarily the way focus testing would suggest it should be.
Most people (myself included) have the reverse position. They consider time spent tweaking to be of negative value, or time lost. They want someone to do all the hard work of figuring out the most easy to use and/or efficient way, and then providing them with a system that does just that. Apple excels at this, and it's the reason my next system will be a mac.
Slashdot Mirror
As the snopes people point out, it's actually a picture from 1985, not 1983.
So, by your argument, as the government builds up its military might, the public should be allowed to build up a comparable military might as well. Given the current american military strength, under that guideline it seems appropriate to allow the ownership of small rocket launchers and armor-piercing bullets to anyone who qualifies for a simple handweapon.
I personally don't believe ytou need weapons to get rid of a government you don't like. All you need is to stop obeying the leadership on a sufficiently large scale. Yes, people die, but then people die during violent uprisings as well. There is enough evidence in history to prove conclusively non-violent revolutions are perfectly achievable, even on very large scales.
We are already as sanitized to the violence, pain, and suffering of others. Just so long as it doesn't happin "on our soil".
But it did happen. A little event called 9/11. People don't draw the connection however between things like invading iraq and events like 9/11. They invert the causality, thinking iraq is the response to things like 9/11, while in reality 9/11 is the response to things like iraq.
That's not to say I'm one of the "america deserved 9/11" crowd, but if you kick a hornet's nest, you're going to get stung.
Modern democracy is not rule by the people, but rule by consent of the people. The majority of people consent to the bush administration's make up and policies, so they are a democratic government. Even those who hate him consider the bush presidency and its actions an inevitable toil that needs to be suffered through. What would have happened had Ghandi said "oh, those british, they're too powerful, we'll just wait until they leave by themselves"?
Well, lets see... Who is it that actually LIVES in nature, grows the food you eat and mines the resources for your daily living. Who breathes fresh air and toils to make an honest living?
You do know that food production and mining in the US are inherently and inescapably unprofitable when in direct competition with other regions in the world and survive only by the subsidies given to you by those "city slickers", don't you? A little gratitude to them for preserving your way of life would be in order I think.
You're immoral, a freeloader and a thief!
Freeloader I will grant you, but thief and immoral I don't see substantiated in the mere act of piracy.
Being a thief implies you're depriving someone of something. If you pirate a product that you weren't otherwise going to buy, there is no depriving of anything happening, and as a result, you're not technically being a thief (though I'm sure the pirated will argue differently). Ofcourse, the tricky thing is that you wouldn't have otherwise purchased the product had you not been able to pirate it. Most people who pirate do it with stuff they would pay for if they had to.
Same basic argument for immoral. An act is only immoral if it harms people. Piracy doesn't necessarily harm anyone.
What happens when all the ATMs in town are owned by one bank?
I guess I'm lucky to live in a country where banks are required by law to operate a certain number of non-bank-specific atm's, so that it doesn't matter what bank you're with, you can always withdraw cash in your town.
Don't use it? What about when it's my freaking bank?
So, switch banks to one that is more clued in. There's no reason for activex to be involved with online banking other than laziness, and the last thing I want from my bank is laziness when it comes to handling my money.
Aesthetic appeal for it's own sake shouldn't be your top priority, your top priority is to convey the information you want to convey in the clearest and most concise way, as this is the purpose of giving a presentation.
It depends on what kind of presentation you're giving. If you're presenting a paper or a set of research results to a technical audience, then yes, you would be exactly right. For sales presentations however, form over function can be a lot more preferable. The people who make purchase decisions tend to have to make a lot of them. They don't have time to know everything about everything, so they go by what their gut tells them. Information will sway them, but a smooth and sharply looking presentation, however light on details it may be, will sway them as well. The point is making them feel good about your product, and that can be done with pretty pictures.
Especially when your product is not the best product in a market, your sales presentations need to look extremely attractive. After all, in such a situation you can't sell based on information, since information will tell a potential customer he should go to your competitor.
Mac OS X IS a Unix OS Mr VAXGeek, and it's wonderful that an X11 server is now included with it. Now, if only it was installed by default... I'll be keeping my fingers crossed for that to happen with Tiger. :-)
Why does a unix need to have X11?
The unix model is that of separate but interlocking parts. If you can build a better gui part than X, why not?
AFAIK, the X11 server is provided for compatibilty with existing unix apps, not to be any sort of alternative for quartz.
Why do Macintosh users feel this compulsion to say bad things about Linux and X11?
People on the linux side want a system that is EXACTLY the way they want it. Since everyone is different, no such system exists, and linux desktops tend to be good starting points from where you spend considerably time tweaking the system to be exactly as you want.
People on the apple side want a system that "just works". Something that lets them do their job quickly and efficiently, with minimal initial effort. This does not mean a system that forbids tweaking, since there are many ways to tweak a mac desktop. But it does mean system that does not require tweaking if you're willing to learn its way of working once, and just once. Since linux desktops are just a loose collection of apps without much in the way of common workflows, they see the effort required in learning/tweaking them as prohibitive, and slam them as "badly designed".
Now, the reason mac users are so vocal is because they see how much quicker you can get to work with a mac and then they see all the time linux users have to invest in tweaking their desktop, and they just feel sorry for linux desktop users, and wish to help them reach "enlightenment". They don't understand that for linux desktop users the tweaking isn't a burden, but a pleasure. As a result, the linux people feel the mac people are elitist, and the mac people feel the linux people are misguided.
If you want to, say, use an old Mac as an X terminal, you'll probably not want to tunnel it through ssh if you're on a local-only network. An old Mac can make a fine X terminal, running NetBSD or something similar. You'll bog it down badly by forcing it to encrypt all traffic to the machine running the X clients.
First of all, you can turn off encryption in ssh. That just keeps the tunneling aspect, and forgets about the encryption aspect (on the command-line the argument is -cnone. Secondly, there are faster algorithms for encryption than the default. Just switching from idea or 3des to blowfish makes a big difference. I've served up evolution (a recent version) from a pII/233 across the internet in a blowfish encrypted ssh tunnel and managed a large mail archive with it, and it ended up bandwidth-bound, constantly saturating the cable internet feed on the remote end (which is capped at 24KB/s upload). It was also quite usable, as long as you didn't use drag and drop.
Secondly, I have my doubts about the usefulness of an SE/30 as an X terminal. Most SE/30's have stock graphics, meaning 1 bit 512*384. I own one as well, and the screen is very tiny. The OS7-era native apps fit on it well, but they were designed for a screen that small. Most apps nowadays are designed for screens almost twice the size running 16bit color at least. They might not even be usable on a screen that small.
See halfway down this page. The fan doesn't look like your typical el cheapo fan. Maybe someone recognizes it?
I rather like how the instructions talk about how to run X11 remotely, and the first thing they do is tell how to do it over ssh, with simple, easy to understand directions on how to do it. That is how "how to" manuals should be written.
Really, tunneling X through ssh IS the easiest way to run it remotely. That it happens to be secure is a nice coincidence, but even without the encryption it would still be the preferred way of doing things.
Any guide on remote X that starts out with xhost explanations is horribly outdated.
The amusing thing is that with ssh compression turned on I get better performance running an X session across the internet than if I do it without any tunneling at all, despite the overhead of the encryption.
Sadly it's not that easy, being that Adobe has not and likely will not release the source to the Solaris/X11 version.
I think the idea of the original submitter was that you would have a solaris box running framemaker, and export the solaris session's display to the X server running on your OS X box.
No rebuilding of the framemaker binary necessary in that case.
I know the '1.0' refer's to the fact that it's *Apple's* 1.0, but can someone who spends more time with X than I do explain the significance of X11R6?
... originally it was simply X11, developed by the X consortium. However, since they were slow to adapt to new platforms or technologies (notably the x86 platform becoming powerful enough to run unix), a spin-off project called XFree86 evolved (it's a bit more complicated, but then who needs details). They became the de-facto reference implementation of X11, even if they didn't have the honor of owning any of the X consortium IP (like trademarks and so on). However, the leadership of the XFree86 project a while ago decided that they would change the license in ways the community did not like. As a result, the last truly free version of XFree86 is 4.3, which is the code that Apple's X11 1.0 is based on. X.org was founded around the same timeframe to step into the void left by the XFree86 project's implosion, and they now develop the official reference implementation (currently X.Org X11R6.8.1). Likely, in the future, apple's X11 will be based on the X.Org code.
X11 is two things, a standard for windowing systems, and a series of implementations of that standard. X11, the standard, is developed by the X.org foundation, at www.x.org. The current base version of that is version 11, release 6, X11R6. Don't let the version 11 thing fool you though, X has been at version 11 since 1987, and likely will never get to version 12, which is why everyone just calls it X11.
As for the implementations
The problem, plain and simple, is that whatever market you're in as a software developer, most likely the vast majority of potential clients will not care about usability. Oh, don't get me wrong, they'll want usability, as long as they don't have to pay extra for it.
The software products I develop at my day job suffer from this. There are major usability issues, but little to no manpower gets assigned to fixing them, because the customers ask for features, but they don't ask for a "nicer" form (or if they do, it's really low priority).
That's not to say there isn't a niche market that WILL pay for usability. The mac is proof positive of this. Even when the mac pretty much only had usability as a positive trait, people still paid exorbitant amounts for the apple goods, just because they actually were designed in compliance with usability guidelines. The thing is, the niche market is very much niche, and unless your product is purposefully niche as well, it's not big enough for you.
What I really wish would happen is someone would turn my cell phone, pda, and iPod into 1 good product that doesn't require me to take out a loan.
Motorola is working with apple to produce a cellphone/ipod combination. Let's see what it turns into.
I can't help you with the 1 product or the not taking out a loan aspect of what you want. But if you want the combined functionality in an easy to carry way, your best bet is probably an ipod mini and a htc typhoon platform cellphone. Still two devices, and rather on the pricy side of things, but they won't make your clothes sag or bulge from carrying them.
Well, that or adding some sort of microdrive to a pda. Something like a HTC magician combined with a hard drive SD card would work pretty nicely. Battery life would suck ass, and it wouldn't play itunes-bought music, but you can't have it all.
Replacable batteries are a mixed selling point - I, like many others, do not want to feed the battery-eating gods. The down side is, of course, that you have a limited life away from a power supply. Both are substantial drawbacks.
Actually, I think rechargeable batteries are FAR preferable above replaceable batteries. Since if your players does not support recharging its batteries just by plugging it in, you can't add that feature later on, but most players DO support adding aftermarket battery packs to the outside.
The ipod has many clip-on battery packs. If you need it to last more than 12 hours, you can have it, as many hours as you want (some of those packs use regular AA batteries).
Besides, I don't want to feed the thing tons of batteries either. I think the whole replaceable battery thing is a red herring. It has never mattered to anyone I know who owns an ipod.
There's also no *right* to be able to use their seed on terms unacceptable to Monsanto. Don't like the terms, don't buy 'em.
I've got a better idea: just stop eating. If you don't eat, you don't have to worry about accidentally ingesting engineered seeds. Problem gone.
OK, you may brand me as silly, but this is what it's going to turn into. Over time, ALL seeds will be engineered and patented, because they are genetically superior to regular seeds, and natural selection will do its work. There will be no non-GM food.
Think about the consequences that would have.
Don't like it? Grow natural soy beans. Mother Nature's patent expired a long time ago. ;)
You make it sound like what monsanto did was some amazing feat. They did not engineer a new species of soybean from the ground up. Nobody has yet to do that for anything but single-celled organisms. What they did was akin to crossbreeding, only more high tech. These patents aren't about custom made genes, they are patents on existing biological code made by nature, applied to a different species. All you have to do is document what a gene does, and you've got a patent. That's not novel at all. And might I remind you that all that genetic code is are building plans. If monsanto can patent DNA, then architects should be able to patent room shapes (even if the room shapes existed prior to their patenting, but had never been used in a building like the one the architect is designing).
But even that aside, it shouldn't be possible to patent life, regardless of its origins. I know it seems harmless, but what is becoming obvious is that these patented seeds will displace regular seeds, until there's a tax on life itself, paid yearly to monsanto. That's immoral, because it damages society greatly without providing a comparable benefit.
Ofcourse, I don't believe anything should be patentable, because I have yet to see conclusive evidence that patents are a net benefit to society at all (everything I've seen points to them being a leech on society). But if you must have patents (for whatever insane reason), life should be the VERY LAST thing they should be able to cover.
Is this show any good?
It depends.
If you want to see something like the original series, but updated with modern effects, you'll be disappointed. They reinvented everything about the battlestar galactica universe. Now, I personally think this series is FAR better than the original series, even if you strip out the excellent special effects. But there are people who liked the original series just as it was, and feel offended by this new series basically saying that TOS sucked ass and nothing good could be done storywise with it in a new series.
If you like technobabble, cool futuristic technology, outlandish sci-fi concepts (like otherdimensional beings, time travel, and so on...), then you won't like this series. The galactica is ancient tech, think wired phonelines, simple CRT screens, and dated, low-tech, fighter spacecraft. It's even suffering from metal fatigue, being scheduled for decommissioning when it is forced into being the ill-equipped defender of what's left of humanity. This is on purpose. The humans are the centerpoint of the show, and the show deals primarily with humanity. The humans can't find a "technological" solution to their problems, and it's their humanity that in the end has to save them, not how well they can use tachyon particles. So, although there is FTL drive, it is in the series only because in space you can't get around without it, and is employed very sparingly (first episode excepted). There are no food generators, no transporters, no force fields, and no advanced particle weapons (they use regular bullet-spewing guns and rockets). If you need the sci-fi to be really sci, you won't enjoy this at all.
If however, you like a show with characters that aren't completely one dimensional and experience some small modicum of personal growth, a plot that isn't totally obvious or contrived, and a general focus on humanity on the brink of destruction/salvation, involving faith and love as core elements of the plot, then you'll like this show, as I do.
Watch the first episode. If it draws you in and makes you jump to the edge of your seat every time the 33 minutes are up, then you'll enjoy the rest of the season. If it doesn't do anything for you, don't bother with the rest.
Mac mini has a ATI Radeon 9200 card with 32MB video RAM. Not a great card, but not too shabby. Plus Apple does a really good job at making things look really pretty with even the most minimal hardware. OSX has historially run better/faster on the same hardware each new release. So I'd expect Tiger to run even better on Mac Mini than Panther (the current default OS).
From what I've read, the 9200 doesn't support shaders 2.0, so coreimage won't be able to use it for acceleration, thereby assuring you'll miss out on a lot of the graphical goodness that tiger is supposed to bring. Ofcourse, you'll likely still have a faster and better looking system, so I'm not arguing with that, just saying that there won't be that much visual improvement from going to tiger on a mac mini.
I'm still buying a mini though. I don't care that much about how flashy the gui effects are.
Incidentally, longhorn will require a shaders 2.0 card too for the graphical tricks, and likely when X.org gets support for that kind of gui acceleration, they'll have the same minimum requirement.
Excellent point. I know an electrician who had gotten his first broadband subscription, and a new PC running XP to go along with it. After only a few days, he had me drop by. His system was damaged beyond repair by viruses and malware. I told him to take it back to the store and have them reinstall the OS. And I told him: "next time, buy a mac."
I've heard over and over from people who buy a PC and a broadband subscription, and end up spending a ton of money "learning" that windows and broadband internet are not friends at all.
I understand. You're a tweaker. You perceive time spent tweaking and optimizing the system for yourself to be of positive value. You like it when you get a construction kit, and you get to assemble it just the way you want it, which isn't necessarily the way focus testing would suggest it should be.
Most people (myself included) have the reverse position. They consider time spent tweaking to be of negative value, or time lost. They want someone to do all the hard work of figuring out the most easy to use and/or efficient way, and then providing them with a system that does just that. Apple excels at this, and it's the reason my next system will be a mac.