Bzzt, you lose. It's a totally different corporation. ZERO Halliburton is part of Zero Corperation which has nothing to do with the Halliburton of Vice President Dick Cheney fame.
The strange thing is their claim that after dog bites these "cancer cells clog up the jaw, and the poor animals die of starvation".
That's the cancer that affects tasmanian devils, not not the cancer that is affecting dogs. The dog version apparently is very rarely fatal to the dogs that contract it.
Also, professionally-run prisons do face problems with guards using their position to torment people. You're a bit naive if you assume that, because they went through screening and training, there is no gleeful cruelty there.
Which is why I said:
That's not to say that a professionally-run prison can't exibit some of the problems shown in the experiment, but this experiment is not a useful predictor of how an actual prison would be run.
The problem with an "experiment" such as this is that no reasonable conclusion can be drawn due to the small sample size and the lack of controls. Who is to say if the 9 people chosen as guards weren't, by some quirk of randomness, particularly sadistic. Who is to say if the 9 prisoners weren't somehow especially good at provoking the guards into being cruel.
In addition to this, the proctors of this "experiment" added in additional factors which may or may not have been proper for this kind of study. For example they dressed the prisoners not in typical prison uniforms but in garments similar to hospital dressing gowns. They also shackled the prisoners at all times, even when they were locked in their cells. The proctors claim they did this in order to compensate for other factors that were lacking in their simulation but who is to say that they were correct in doing this? Did they do other experiments without these factors to see what effects they had on this experiment?
It is true that sociology isn't as "hard" of a science as chemistry. (By "hard" I don't mean more difficult but rather the definition given here.) This doesn't mean that sociology gets a pass on the scientific method, but rather that it must be even more careful in experimental design and analysis. By conducting "hand-waving" experiments and justifying "what we already know" we do more disservice to knowledge than advance it.
Remember that there are tons of past social experiments that were poorly run and used as justification for atrocities. Historically there have been sociologists who have justified racial segregation, slavery, and even genocide on various occasions. With chemistry, physics, mathematics the experiments can be relatively simple because the variables are easily controlled and the conclusions are much more directly obtained. With sociology, psychology, anthropology the experiments must be much more carefully crafted due to the difficulty of determining independent variables and drawing meaningful, provable conclusions.
Zimbardo's experiment was a sloppy example of an experiment and therefore it is difficult to draw any meaningful conclusions from it other than the obvious "people were mean". It was an interesting idea for a social experiment and if properly run might have provided valuable insights into human behavior.
I'm one of the people who see the implications of the Zimbardo prison experiment in everyday situations
Out of curiousity I looked up the experiment you had mentioned, since I had never heard of it before. I'm shocked to see that anyone would treat that "experiment" seriously. It seems to me that it has zero basis for simulating any sort of professional law enforcement agency.
First of all, this was hardly a good experiment in a scientific sense. There were 9 guards and 9 prisoners, no where near enough for a adequately-sized sample. There was no control group and as one professor said, "what's the independent variable in this study?". The participants are just random people picked off the street, they bear no resemblence to real guards or real prisoners. For example, real prison guards are psychologically evaluated and professionally trained prior to their hiring. Real criminals often have performed murders, evaded authorities, have drug dependancies, have intense ties to other criminal elements, and have deep personality disorders.
At best this discribes what happens when one random mob gets control over another random group. I don't think that this "experiment" can be assumed to have any relevancy over a proper and professionally-run prison. That's not to say that a professionally-run prison can't exibit some of the problems shown in the experiment, but this experiment is not a useful predictor of how an actual prison would be run.
Personally, as a scientist (I am a chemist), I am sickened by these sort of sloppy methodologies. These so-called experiments set science back because it leads people to believe that you can just throw a situation together and call it an experiment. A true experiment is a carefully crafted set of controlled variables such that you can isolate each dependant variable and determine its relationship to the independant variables. The Zimbardo Prison Experiment seems to be a poor example of a true scientific experiment.
Er, you sure you replied to the correct person? I'm not the one who remapped the keys, it's the person I was replying to who did that. Just setting you straight.:)
I agree that remapping keys is probably the wrong approach. Instead of trying to make a Mac into a Windows machine it would probably be better to try the Mac way of doing things. Not that it's necessarily a lot better or worse than the Windows way but it would present less complications when operating the Mac.
To understand applications on the Mac, you need to know one thing -- applications need to be stored in the Apps folder.
Actually under Mac OS applications can be stored just about anywhere and they will still work. The only reason for the Applications folder is to have a common, easily accessible location for applications.
And finally for the Control Click selects and opening a dozen files. You, sir, have found one of my biggest annoyances. I've actually complained about this to a friend at Apple that oversees some of the finders developement as its a pain in the ass, not very forgiving, and not intuative -- even for advanced users. I don't know how many times I go to select something and a slip means a dozen apps are opening up at once.
I mentioned this in another post but I still don't completely understand what it is that you are doing to trigger this. There are only 3 common ways of opening a file or an application through the Finder:
double-clicking
selecting and hitting command-O (or using the menu option File -> Open)
control-clicking and selecting "Open" from the contextual menu
Since you mention control-clicking I must assume that what you are doing is control-clicking a bunch of selected files and then accidently choosing "Open" from the contextual menu.
There is no reason to be control-clicking files unless you want to bring up the contextual menu for them. All file selection under Mac OS is done using the shift and command keys, the control key is not used at all. If you are accidently opening files then you are unintentionally using one of the valid methods for opening those files. There's no voodoo to it, you just have to avoid control-clicking or double-clicking while you are making a selection. Other than that I can't begin to imagine how you'd be opening these files by accident.
I've still got three dmg's mounted on my machine that complain whenever I try to unmount them. This is a serious question - I don't know how to get rid of these things.
If you can't close a disk image it's because of some file on the image that is in-use. You either opened a file on the disk or ran an application from the disk. Try closing open applications that may be the culprit. If that doesn't work then restart the machine.
Not allowing you to eject a disk that is in-use is safer than allowing you to eject a disk with an open file. This helps to avoid file and disk corruption.
let's try renaming a file under OSX. How do you do it? Click the file name, then click it *again* (but not too fast, mind you, or you'll open it!) and hold for 2 seconds.
Select the file, hit the return key, type in the new name. It's pretty simple and quick to do. The problem is under Windows hitting the return key OPENS the file so you probably never thought of trying this.
had to select about 50 QuickTime files, then un-select about 10 of them peppered throughout the list. I have my command key mapped to control (to stay consistent between my Mac and PC), so I did a shift-select, then a ctrl-select to de-select the files I didn't want. Easy on Windows. Of course, try this on Mac and if you click the wrong place on the filename, you end up trying to simultaneously open 50 different QuickTime files.
I'm unable to duplicate your problem. I shift-selected a ton of files and then went back and command-clicked on the ones I didn't want selected (I'm using the standard key settings for a Mac here). At no point did my selection changes open any files no matter where I clicked. You say you re-mapped your keyboard, maybe whatever you used to do that messed around with something. The control key on a Mac usually simulates a right-click when used in combination with a left-click, perhaps in remapping things you managed to provoke some sort of odd behavior.
As both a Mac and a PC user I find the Mac interface to overall be more intuitive to use. However, this can be completely different if you are ingrained in your old PC habits and ideas. Old PC habits are hard to change and that can turn the Mac experience into something you are fighting against daily.
Take a look at ants. Ants have lived exponentially longer on this planet than us. Their lifespan is shorter, and in the same period of time, they have more generations than us. And they outnumber us.
Ants have complex societies and even war with each other. Yet, despite the fact that there are TONS more ants on the earth than humans, and the number of generations of ants in all of history, they never evolved to have art or culture.
First of all, what makes you think that ants don't have art or culture? Maybe they do have it and it's just not the type that humans can understand or appreciate.
Secondly, the theory of evolution is that as time goes on the individuals of a species who are most successful at surviving and breeding are the ones that pass on their traits. Thus the traits that are best for surviving and breeding tend to persist in the species. This doesn't mean that other traits don't come into being. For example, many animals enjoy alcohol or herbs that produce euphoria, such as catnip. These are traits that can't be directly linked to survival or breeding and yet they persist simply because of quirks of biology.
Sometimes even traits that have no obvious and immediate bearing on survival or breeding develop into a necessary trait for a species. There is no good reason for a male peacock's tail being so large and colorful but the females have developed a preference for it being that way. Why is that so? Again, quirks of biology and society.
Whether or not you think that there is some sort of "guiding hand" in the creation of the universe and everything in it, you shouldn't use the excuse of "something is unique" to justify your point of view. There are lots of unique things that could be used to justify anything, such as doing 5 coin flips and getting 5 tails in a row and claiming that you can control coin flips with your mind. Maybe you can, maybe you can't, but there is no direct and evident connection between the two.
The theory of evolution goes a long way toward explaining how species have changed over time and why some traits tend to carry on in a group. It does not explain every little detail of a species and it probably never will, there are just too many factors for there to be a simple explaination for these matters. This doen't invalidate the theory of evolution, it just means that we need to understand its limitations and boundaries.
Thom at OSNews also posted his opinion on an editorial published yesterday:
here
In that editorial he compares people killed for expressing their opinions to Apple suing "non-professional" journalists over exposing trade secrets. This is an absurd comparison. Apple has sued both professional and "non-professional" journalists for exposing trade secrets, they don't discriminate.
What these journalists are doing is illegal, individuals and corporations have the right to protect their own internal products and research and when these journalists get inside information and publish it without checking the source then they take the risk of getting sued. Don't want to get sued? Shoot off a message to Apple and verify that the information was obtained legally.
Comparing getting sued to getting killed is just absurd. This sort of grandstanding should be a big sign to all that this gentleman is NOT a serious journalist. Serious journalists adhere to The Journalism Code of Ethics
Last time I tried this it worked. I was able to use iDVD to browse any mountable file system and play a ripped DVD movie from wherever it was located, on a network share, local drive, or on DVD.
I'm not 100% sure about Front Row but I'm willing to bet that it works also.
Right, minus the space in the word "Calculator" Damn Slashcode for breaking up long lines like that.:)
This basically runs one copy and backgrounds it (detaches it from a terminal session) and then does the same to a second.
I did find out that the second didn't launch until I had brought the first one into the foreground through the GUI. I just ran the first command, selected the calculator in the dock, and then ran the second command. Worked like a charm.
It's not a matter of working with you or against you, it's a matter of it's a different paradigm so you may have to work a little differently.
Under Windows you open up a new instance of a program when you want to open a new task such as browsing a website. You can then do stuff in each different instance.
Under Mac OS you open a new window (using the menu option File -> New or the keystroke command-N) instead of running a new instance of the program. The new window works almost exactly the same as a new instance of the program.
The main difference is resource usage. A single program with 5 windows open is most likely going to use up less memory and processor time than 5 programs with 1 window open each. There is also the benefits of organization. Generally when you are working in a program you want to view all the documents of that program easily. With Mac OS if you activate a program all of the program's documents come to the front. You can also activate each document individually if you want to.
So yes, it makes perfect sense. Just remember that if you are switching desktops not everything will be a complete one-to-one translation. There are many different ways of doing things and whenever you change you need to be flexible enough to change a little. Who knows, the changes might even make you MORE efficient once you get used to them.
Inconsistencies in the Mac UI? The most obvious one is that you double click to launch applications from the finder but single click them from the dock. Double click isn't always safe, because sometimes it'll launch two copies.
Under the Mac OS Finder you can't launch 2 copies of anything, no matter how many times you click on the Dock. Every click just keeps activating the same single instance of the application. Give it a try, you can click once, twice, ten times. You'll never get more than one instance of an application to launch.
The only easy way to launch an application multiple times under the Mac OS Finder is to make a separate copy of the application on your hard drive and launch that. If you don't want to do that then there are ways through the terminal that you can launch multiple instances of an application from one copy on the disk but honestly it's almost never needed. This is a feature of Mac OS by the way, not a limitation. Mac OS is set up for one instance of an application being able to handle the jobs of multiple instances of applications, to simplify the launching and handling of apps.
Another is that some configuration dialogs have `OK' or similar buttons, while others take effect immediately, while others take effect when they are dismissed.
One of the main ideas of the Mac OS UI is that there are hardly any buttons that say "OK". They are pretty much all verbs that describe what is going to happen when you press the button. For example in save dialogs the buttons are usually "Cancel" and "Save". For the most part you always know what action will be taken when you press a button. This is true of all the programs written by Apple and most third party developers follow this UI convention also. I'm willing to bet any confusion in buttons that you see is a third party application, not an Apple one.
File System: Journaled HFS+
Journal size 8192 k at offset 0x19b000
Owners: Disabled
Partition Type: Apple_HFS
Bootable: Is bootable
Media Type: Generic
Protocol: FireWire
SMART Status: Not Supported
UUID: ABCE2833-786C-44E6-D935-9C1A207162B3
Total Size: 18.6 GB
Free Space: 3.7 GB
Read Only: No
Ejectable: Yes
As you can see, it is Journaled HFS+ by default.
Journaling doesn't totally prevent corruption on a drive but it does help identify and correct problems when they occur. It doesn't really slow things down that much because journaling only really matters when you are writing information to the disk not when you are reading from it. Most of the times that you need quick disk access its for reading, not writing and journaling doesn't really get in the way of reading quickly.
Getting three years out of a Mac isn't extraordinary, it's average.
In my experience, ONLY getting three years out of a Mac IS extraordinary. I typically see three years as the minimum length of service for a Mac, typical is more like 5 years. I know plenty of people who are using Macs from 7 or 8 years ago and they work just great for everyday tasks such as word processing, web, and e-mail. So well, in fact, there is almost no pressure to upgrade unless you are doing cutting edge games, programming, data crunching, video, or 3D work.
The thing is, a Jedi uses the Force to meld the parts, but they don't need melded to be for the saber to work. It's just that they work far more efficiently like that. (While I'm guessing based on almost no information, I'd say an unmelded Lightsaber probably couldn't cut metal or deflect blaster bolts - it'd be more like a modern-day laser scalpel)
The lore is that the focusing crystals used in making the lightsabers are extremely difficult to align properly, due to their internal structure and properties. Jedi learn early on how to sense the proper alignment of the crystals to make powerful lightsabers with the crystals. Other people can make lightsabers also but they rarely get the alignment 100% right and they end up with a much weaker blade.
As far as the use of the lightsaber, anyone can use it. However you are dealing with a thin, light weapon with very little inertia that can cut through practically anything it hits so you have almost no tactile feedback during its use. To use a device like this without cutting your own leg off would take a lot of skill, training, and intuition. Jedi are best at it due to their force-increased senses and agility. Not only that but they also can use the force to sense and predict where the opponent will be and where he will be attacking, whether it is with bullets, blaster bolts, or another lightsaber.
Lightsabers essentially become extensions of a Jedi whereas with a normal person they are just a very dangerous double-edged (infinite-edged?) sword!
Not to mention AIFF (the format the music COMES to you on the CD), WAV, Audible, and AAC (both with and WITHOUT Apple's DRM)...
Re:What does "rebuilding the desktop" mean?
on
Hacking Mac OS X
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· Score: 3, Informative
What does "rebuilding the desktop" mean? I'm not joking, I don't know what it means and I'd like to know.
I get the impression that I'm missing a whole dimension to this discussion by not knowing what "rebuilding the desktop" means.
The Mac OS Finder has an internal database which stores meta information on files. It mostly handles what creator types and file types map to certain applications, but it performs other duties as well. The idea is that each file has a 4 byte creator type which says what application created it and a 4 byte file type which classifies what type of data is contained within the file. When you open a file the Finder does a lookup to find out how the file should be treated and what application should be notified of the action.
Occasionally this database would get out of date, would require compacting, or would be come corrupted. To rebuild it all you needed to do was to get the Finder to restart and then hold down the option and command keys. The Finder would then take a few seconds to recreate the database and clear up any issues.
Rebuilding the desktop fixed most of the problems that Mac OS was prone to. The rest of the problems were either bad preferences, a bad system extension, or bad hardware. Typically the first step in diagnosing a Mac OS problem was to first rebuild the desktop database, then reset the PRAM (a set of preferences retained between reboots), then test to see if there was corrupt preferences, then system extensions, then hardware. Overall you usually caught problems quickly and they were easy to correct.
You can read a bit more about rebuilding the desktop here
Currently under Mac OS X the desktop database is much more advanced. It uses different methods to keep track of files and auto-corrects problems that used to hang up the Finder. Thus you do not have to worry about rebuilding the desktop database under Mac OS X. In fact the entire Mac OS X operating system is much more stable than the pre-Mac OS X systems.
I also seem to remember reading someplace that Tiger will have rsrc fork support for cp & mv.
There are already versions of cp and mv that support resource forks and file metadata. They are installed as part of the Apple Developer Tools and are named CpMac and MvMac. They get installed in the/Developer/Tools/ directory.
I don't know if Apple will be making modifications to the normal cp and mv commands to add this type of functionality to future versions of Mac OS but I wouldn't doubt it.
It gets worse. Here's a line from a script I wrote (although I believe this particular line was copy-pasted from some others script). It sets a variable itunesRunning to true if iTunes is running:
set itunesRunning to ((application processes whose name is equal to "iTunes") count) is greater than 0
Honestly the way you formatted the statement is what is confusing, you could also have done:
set itunesRunning to false if (count of (application processes whose name is "iTunes")) is greater than 0 then set itunesRunning to true
This better follows natural English without sacrificing any functionality and that is one of the major goals of Applescript. It's pretty simple to read through a properly formatted Applescript because it reads fairly close to English. Yes Applescript is still a scripting language so it has its quirks but overall it is very easy to learn and master. It is well-worth trying out for those quick "I want to add up the first 100 numbers which have a 3 as one of their digits" kind of problems.*
Re:Brita filters aren't just physical filters
on
Hacking Vodka
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· Score: 1
I'm impressed that something so simple manages to scrub so much dissolved calcium carbonate out of the water, then. How does that work? Merely curious - but do have at least 'A' level chemistry, for what it's worth...
If you go to the site on zeolites that I linked to then you can see an explaination there:
In common with other zeolites, clinoptilolite has a cage-like structure consisting of SiO4 and AlO4 tetrahedra joined by shared oxygen atoms. The negative charges of the AlO4 units are balanced by the presence of exchangeable cations - notably calcium, magnesium, sodium, potassium and iron. These ions can be readily displaced by other substances, for example heavy metals and ammonium ions. This phenomenon is known as cation exchange, and it is the very high cation exchange capacity of clinoptilolite which provides many of its very useful properties.
Think of it like an egg carton. Suppose you remove the eggs from the carton, you would then have all these spots where objects of the proper size and shape could fit into and stick.
What you generally do with a zeolite (either natural or man-made) is you treat it with an agent that opens up those "holes", typically a concentrated solution of ordinary salt (sodium chloride). This is because sodium takes the place of the calcium and magnesium ions in the zeolite matrix (the high concentration "forces" the sodium ions to replace the other ions). Those sodium ions are less tightly held and can be replaced by calcium and magnesium the next time you run hard water through the zeolite. The sodium ions that get released produce less "hardness" than the calcium or magnesium ions would have.
Slashdot Mirror
Bzzt, you lose. It's a totally different corporation. ZERO Halliburton is part of Zero Corperation which has nothing to do with the Halliburton of Vice President Dick Cheney fame.
That's the cancer that affects tasmanian devils, not not the cancer that is affecting dogs. The dog version apparently is very rarely fatal to the dogs that contract it.
Which is why I said:
The problem with an "experiment" such as this is that no reasonable conclusion can be drawn due to the small sample size and the lack of controls. Who is to say if the 9 people chosen as guards weren't, by some quirk of randomness, particularly sadistic. Who is to say if the 9 prisoners weren't somehow especially good at provoking the guards into being cruel.
In addition to this, the proctors of this "experiment" added in additional factors which may or may not have been proper for this kind of study. For example they dressed the prisoners not in typical prison uniforms but in garments similar to hospital dressing gowns. They also shackled the prisoners at all times, even when they were locked in their cells. The proctors claim they did this in order to compensate for other factors that were lacking in their simulation but who is to say that they were correct in doing this? Did they do other experiments without these factors to see what effects they had on this experiment?
It is true that sociology isn't as "hard" of a science as chemistry. (By "hard" I don't mean more difficult but rather the definition given here.) This doesn't mean that sociology gets a pass on the scientific method, but rather that it must be even more careful in experimental design and analysis. By conducting "hand-waving" experiments and justifying "what we already know" we do more disservice to knowledge than advance it.
Remember that there are tons of past social experiments that were poorly run and used as justification for atrocities. Historically there have been sociologists who have justified racial segregation, slavery, and even genocide on various occasions. With chemistry, physics, mathematics the experiments can be relatively simple because the variables are easily controlled and the conclusions are much more directly obtained. With sociology, psychology, anthropology the experiments must be much more carefully crafted due to the difficulty of determining independent variables and drawing meaningful, provable conclusions.
Zimbardo's experiment was a sloppy example of an experiment and therefore it is difficult to draw any meaningful conclusions from it other than the obvious "people were mean". It was an interesting idea for a social experiment and if properly run might have provided valuable insights into human behavior.
Out of curiousity I looked up the experiment you had mentioned, since I had never heard of it before. I'm shocked to see that anyone would treat that "experiment" seriously. It seems to me that it has zero basis for simulating any sort of professional law enforcement agency.
First of all, this was hardly a good experiment in a scientific sense. There were 9 guards and 9 prisoners, no where near enough for a adequately-sized sample. There was no control group and as one professor said, "what's the independent variable in this study?". The participants are just random people picked off the street, they bear no resemblence to real guards or real prisoners. For example, real prison guards are psychologically evaluated and professionally trained prior to their hiring. Real criminals often have performed murders, evaded authorities, have drug dependancies, have intense ties to other criminal elements, and have deep personality disorders.
At best this discribes what happens when one random mob gets control over another random group. I don't think that this "experiment" can be assumed to have any relevancy over a proper and professionally-run prison. That's not to say that a professionally-run prison can't exibit some of the problems shown in the experiment, but this experiment is not a useful predictor of how an actual prison would be run.
Personally, as a scientist (I am a chemist), I am sickened by these sort of sloppy methodologies. These so-called experiments set science back because it leads people to believe that you can just throw a situation together and call it an experiment. A true experiment is a carefully crafted set of controlled variables such that you can isolate each dependant variable and determine its relationship to the independant variables. The Zimbardo Prison Experiment seems to be a poor example of a true scientific experiment.
Er, you sure you replied to the correct person? I'm not the one who remapped the keys, it's the person I was replying to who did that. Just setting you straight. :)
I agree that remapping keys is probably the wrong approach. Instead of trying to make a Mac into a Windows machine it would probably be better to try the Mac way of doing things. Not that it's necessarily a lot better or worse than the Windows way but it would present less complications when operating the Mac.
Actually under Mac OS applications can be stored just about anywhere and they will still work. The only reason for the Applications folder is to have a common, easily accessible location for applications.
I mentioned this in another post but I still don't completely understand what it is that you are doing to trigger this. There are only 3 common ways of opening a file or an application through the Finder:
Since you mention control-clicking I must assume that what you are doing is control-clicking a bunch of selected files and then accidently choosing "Open" from the contextual menu.
There is no reason to be control-clicking files unless you want to bring up the contextual menu for them. All file selection under Mac OS is done using the shift and command keys, the control key is not used at all. If you are accidently opening files then you are unintentionally using one of the valid methods for opening those files. There's no voodoo to it, you just have to avoid control-clicking or double-clicking while you are making a selection. Other than that I can't begin to imagine how you'd be opening these files by accident.
If you can't close a disk image it's because of some file on the image that is in-use. You either opened a file on the disk or ran an application from the disk. Try closing open applications that may be the culprit. If that doesn't work then restart the machine.
Not allowing you to eject a disk that is in-use is safer than allowing you to eject a disk with an open file. This helps to avoid file and disk corruption.
Select the file, hit the return key, type in the new name. It's pretty simple and quick to do. The problem is under Windows hitting the return key OPENS the file so you probably never thought of trying this.
I'm unable to duplicate your problem. I shift-selected a ton of files and then went back and command-clicked on the ones I didn't want selected (I'm using the standard key settings for a Mac here). At no point did my selection changes open any files no matter where I clicked. You say you re-mapped your keyboard, maybe whatever you used to do that messed around with something. The control key on a Mac usually simulates a right-click when used in combination with a left-click, perhaps in remapping things you managed to provoke some sort of odd behavior.
As both a Mac and a PC user I find the Mac interface to overall be more intuitive to use. However, this can be completely different if you are ingrained in your old PC habits and ideas. Old PC habits are hard to change and that can turn the Mac experience into something you are fighting against daily.
First of all, what makes you think that ants don't have art or culture? Maybe they do have it and it's just not the type that humans can understand or appreciate.
Secondly, the theory of evolution is that as time goes on the individuals of a species who are most successful at surviving and breeding are the ones that pass on their traits. Thus the traits that are best for surviving and breeding tend to persist in the species. This doesn't mean that other traits don't come into being. For example, many animals enjoy alcohol or herbs that produce euphoria, such as catnip. These are traits that can't be directly linked to survival or breeding and yet they persist simply because of quirks of biology.
Sometimes even traits that have no obvious and immediate bearing on survival or breeding develop into a necessary trait for a species. There is no good reason for a male peacock's tail being so large and colorful but the females have developed a preference for it being that way. Why is that so? Again, quirks of biology and society.
Whether or not you think that there is some sort of "guiding hand" in the creation of the universe and everything in it, you shouldn't use the excuse of "something is unique" to justify your point of view. There are lots of unique things that could be used to justify anything , such as doing 5 coin flips and getting 5 tails in a row and claiming that you can control coin flips with your mind. Maybe you can, maybe you can't, but there is no direct and evident connection between the two.
The theory of evolution goes a long way toward explaining how species have changed over time and why some traits tend to carry on in a group. It does not explain every little detail of a species and it probably never will, there are just too many factors for there to be a simple explaination for these matters. This doen't invalidate the theory of evolution, it just means that we need to understand its limitations and boundaries.
In that editorial he compares people killed for expressing their opinions to Apple suing "non-professional" journalists over exposing trade secrets. This is an absurd comparison. Apple has sued both professional and "non-professional" journalists for exposing trade secrets, they don't discriminate.
What these journalists are doing is illegal, individuals and corporations have the right to protect their own internal products and research and when these journalists get inside information and publish it without checking the source then they take the risk of getting sued. Don't want to get sued? Shoot off a message to Apple and verify that the information was obtained legally.
Comparing getting sued to getting killed is just absurd. This sort of grandstanding should be a big sign to all that this gentleman is NOT a serious journalist. Serious journalists adhere to The Journalism Code of Ethics
Upon re-reading this I realize I meant the DVD Player application not the iDVD application.
Mea culpa...
Last time I tried this it worked. I was able to use iDVD to browse any mountable file system and play a ripped DVD movie from wherever it was located, on a network share, local drive, or on DVD.
I'm not 100% sure about Front Row but I'm willing to bet that it works also.
It's also billionth:
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/billionth
Perhaps:
Talking Trash-80
Man the lengths a lot of the TRS-80 guys would go to say their system was the most elite system in existence...
Actually Mac OS X does have a "Hibernate" mode, it's called "Safe Sleep"
o w-to-safe-sleep-your-mac/
It's fully enabled on the newest PowerBooks but you need to fiddle around a bit to get it enabled on previous models.
Here's a guide on how to do it: http://www.andrewescobar.com/archive/2005/11/11/h
Right, minus the space in the word "Calculator" Damn Slashcode for breaking up long lines like that. :)
This basically runs one copy and backgrounds it (detaches it from a terminal session) and then does the same to a second.
I did find out that the second didn't launch until I had brought the first one into the foreground through the GUI. I just ran the first command, selected the calculator in the dock, and then ran the second command. Worked like a charm.
It's not a matter of working with you or against you, it's a matter of it's a different paradigm so you may have to work a little differently.
Under Windows you open up a new instance of a program when you want to open a new task such as browsing a website. You can then do stuff in each different instance.
Under Mac OS you open a new window (using the menu option File -> New or the keystroke command-N) instead of running a new instance of the program. The new window works almost exactly the same as a new instance of the program.
The main difference is resource usage. A single program with 5 windows open is most likely going to use up less memory and processor time than 5 programs with 1 window open each. There is also the benefits of organization. Generally when you are working in a program you want to view all the documents of that program easily. With Mac OS if you activate a program all of the program's documents come to the front. You can also activate each document individually if you want to.
So yes, it makes perfect sense. Just remember that if you are switching desktops not everything will be a complete one-to-one translation. There are many different ways of doing things and whenever you change you need to be flexible enough to change a little. Who knows, the changes might even make you MORE efficient once you get used to them.
Under the Mac OS Finder you can't launch 2 copies of anything, no matter how many times you click on the Dock. Every click just keeps activating the same single instance of the application. Give it a try, you can click once, twice, ten times. You'll never get more than one instance of an application to launch.
The only easy way to launch an application multiple times under the Mac OS Finder is to make a separate copy of the application on your hard drive and launch that. If you don't want to do that then there are ways through the terminal that you can launch multiple instances of an application from one copy on the disk but honestly it's almost never needed. This is a feature of Mac OS by the way, not a limitation. Mac OS is set up for one instance of an application being able to handle the jobs of multiple instances of applications, to simplify the launching and handling of apps.
One of the main ideas of the Mac OS UI is that there are hardly any buttons that say "OK". They are pretty much all verbs that describe what is going to happen when you press the button. For example in save dialogs the buttons are usually "Cancel" and "Save". For the most part you always know what action will be taken when you press a button. This is true of all the programs written by Apple and most third party developers follow this UI convention also. I'm willing to bet any confusion in buttons that you see is a third party application, not an Apple one.
Journaling doesn't totally prevent corruption on a drive but it does help identify and correct problems when they occur. It doesn't really slow things down that much because journaling only really matters when you are writing information to the disk not when you are reading from it. Most of the times that you need quick disk access its for reading, not writing and journaling doesn't really get in the way of reading quickly.
In my experience, ONLY getting three years out of a Mac IS extraordinary. I typically see three years as the minimum length of service for a Mac, typical is more like 5 years. I know plenty of people who are using Macs from 7 or 8 years ago and they work just great for everyday tasks such as word processing, web, and e-mail. So well, in fact, there is almost no pressure to upgrade unless you are doing cutting edge games, programming, data crunching, video, or 3D work.
The lore is that the focusing crystals used in making the lightsabers are extremely difficult to align properly, due to their internal structure and properties. Jedi learn early on how to sense the proper alignment of the crystals to make powerful lightsabers with the crystals. Other people can make lightsabers also but they rarely get the alignment 100% right and they end up with a much weaker blade.
As far as the use of the lightsaber, anyone can use it. However you are dealing with a thin, light weapon with very little inertia that can cut through practically anything it hits so you have almost no tactile feedback during its use. To use a device like this without cutting your own leg off would take a lot of skill, training, and intuition. Jedi are best at it due to their force-increased senses and agility. Not only that but they also can use the force to sense and predict where the opponent will be and where he will be attacking, whether it is with bullets, blaster bolts, or another lightsaber.
Lightsabers essentially become extensions of a Jedi whereas with a normal person they are just a very dangerous double-edged (infinite-edged?) sword!
Not to mention AIFF (the format the music COMES to you on the CD), WAV, Audible, and AAC (both with and WITHOUT Apple's DRM)...
The Mac OS Finder has an internal database which stores meta information on files. It mostly handles what creator types and file types map to certain applications, but it performs other duties as well. The idea is that each file has a 4 byte creator type which says what application created it and a 4 byte file type which classifies what type of data is contained within the file. When you open a file the Finder does a lookup to find out how the file should be treated and what application should be notified of the action.
Occasionally this database would get out of date, would require compacting, or would be come corrupted. To rebuild it all you needed to do was to get the Finder to restart and then hold down the option and command keys. The Finder would then take a few seconds to recreate the database and clear up any issues.
Rebuilding the desktop fixed most of the problems that Mac OS was prone to. The rest of the problems were either bad preferences, a bad system extension, or bad hardware. Typically the first step in diagnosing a Mac OS problem was to first rebuild the desktop database, then reset the PRAM (a set of preferences retained between reboots), then test to see if there was corrupt preferences, then system extensions, then hardware. Overall you usually caught problems quickly and they were easy to correct.
You can read a bit more about rebuilding the desktop here
Currently under Mac OS X the desktop database is much more advanced. It uses different methods to keep track of files and auto-corrects problems that used to hang up the Finder. Thus you do not have to worry about rebuilding the desktop database under Mac OS X. In fact the entire Mac OS X operating system is much more stable than the pre-Mac OS X systems.
There are already versions of cp and mv that support resource forks and file metadata. They are installed as part of the Apple Developer Tools and are named CpMac and MvMac. They get installed in the
I don't know if Apple will be making modifications to the normal cp and mv commands to add this type of functionality to future versions of Mac OS but I wouldn't doubt it.
Honestly the way you formatted the statement is what is confusing, you could also have done:This better follows natural English without sacrificing any functionality and that is one of the major goals of Applescript. It's pretty simple to read through a properly formatted Applescript because it reads fairly close to English. Yes Applescript is still a scripting language so it has its quirks but overall it is very easy to learn and master. It is well-worth trying out for those quick "I want to add up the first 100 numbers which have a 3 as one of their digits" kind of problems.*
If you go to the site on zeolites that I linked to then you can see an explaination there:
Think of it like an egg carton. Suppose you remove the eggs from the carton, you would then have all these spots where objects of the proper size and shape could fit into and stick.
What you generally do with a zeolite (either natural or man-made) is you treat it with an agent that opens up those "holes", typically a concentrated solution of ordinary salt (sodium chloride). This is because sodium takes the place of the calcium and magnesium ions in the zeolite matrix (the high concentration "forces" the sodium ions to replace the other ions). Those sodium ions are less tightly held and can be replaced by calcium and magnesium the next time you run hard water through the zeolite. The sodium ions that get released produce less "hardness" than the calcium or magnesium ions would have.