Re:Brita filters aren't just physical filters
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Hacking Vodka
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· Score: 1
Whups, the last link that I meant to have in there didn't work for some reason. Here it is:
Here is a write-up of the benefits of doing a "polishing" step just like the guys in the Slashdot article. It's an interesting read.
Re:Brita filters aren't just physical filters
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Hacking Vodka
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· Score: 1
If that stuff's reactive, what's it going to do with 35% ethanol/water solution? It might react with the ethanol, or even/dissolve/ in the ethanol. You could be drinking all sorts of nasty chemicals dissolved in the resulting fluid.
The stuff is not reactive at all. What Brita uses is a mix of granular activated carbon and a man-made zeolite. I know this because I am a chemist who worked with Brita in developing and improving their water filtration systems.
There is nothing dangerous about those filters and running ethanol through them is not likely to cause any problems. In fact, the alcohol industry uses basically the same system to purify grain alcohol, but on an industrial scale.
Here is a write-up of the benefits of doing a "polishing" step just like the guys in the Slashdot article. It's an interesting read.
Re:Brita filters aren't just physical filters
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Hacking Vodka
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· Score: 1
What might be good, would be to use what's known as an "Extruded" carbon cartridge like the ones you get in the water treatment industry. Essentially a porous solid block that has 5 micron holes in it. Hacking one of these together might be a good idea for a college project. Hmm.
Heh, I was one of the chemists who worked on developing extruded carbon cartridges. They really are extruded - no need to use the quotes.
Without going into too much detail because there are all sorts of trade secrets, patents, and contractual agreements that I would be breaking, I can tell you that an extruded filter is simply granular activated carbon mixed with some sort of binder and then passed through an extrusion die while it is still malleable. The trick is the size of the carbon particles, the type of binder, and the amount of pressure needed to extrude the blocks of carbon.
IIRC when I left that company (about 5 years ago) we were making something like 75% of the extruded activated carbon filters on the market. It was all OEM, we were selling to Brita, Ecowater, PUR, Doulton, Apec, and many other companies that would re-package and resell the filters as their own.
You can read a bit more on the technology behind the production of extruded carbon filters at the company website.
When browsing through songs, click and hold the selector button for a couple of seconds, and the song will flash. This adds the song to your on-the-go playlist.
Not only that but also when you sync your iPod back up with iTunes the On-The-Go playlist is automatically copied back to iTunes as an iTunes playlist with a default name. This saves the On-The-Go playlist for you. It then changes the current On-The-Go playlist on the iPod to the same default name as under iTunes and makes way for a new On-The-Go playlist.
Try this scenario. You and I both wake up in the early AM to the sound of someone rustling through the respective kitchens of our country home (many miles from the nearest sherrif). I grab my gun from the nightstand drawer and crouch in a corner. You just crouch in a corner. The rustling continues. ...
I shoot my bed and yell, "If you don't get the hell out of my house your balls are next!!!"
Well I have a safeguard against just that situation. I have two dogs, a Labrador and a Dalmatian. If someone is in the house that isn't supposed to be there then you can be sure that they are going to be reacting. There is no way to mistake the way they would react to an intruder. I probably won't even need to use my gun because most criminals will take off at the first sound of these two. However, if the intruder persists then I will use my weapon when I have to.
Now this doesn't mean that you shoot blindly or wildly. Always be as sure as possible about your target. DO NOT shoot into your bed, the metal in the bed can deflect your round causing it to ricochet into someone or something you care about. Not only that but also a mattress is not exactly built for stopping a bullet, there is always the chance that the round will pass right through the bed and then through a wall or the floor, again hitting unexpected targets.
If you take an NRA gun safety course (required in most, if not all, places before you can get a gun license) then they will tell you all of these things. They cover what to do in these sort of situations and they not only tell you how to shoot but also when NOT to shoot. Even if you don't plan on owning a gun I would still recommend that you take the NRA course. It will really get you thinking about safety and how to protect yourself in case of an intruder.
Arlo knew about Dashboard (as an OS X tester) before Apple formally announced it. Likely he announced the Windows port shortly after learning it would be cloned in Tiger.
At that point in time no one had been seeded developer previews of Tiger and Apple kept very quiet about the features. It is certainly possible that Arlo found out early about Dashboard somehow, but it's not probable that he did.
Anyway, it's his right to complain about it but there is nothing he can gain from doing so except making himself look like a whiner. He has just got to move on, port over to Windows and/or make a better product than Apple's stuff.
If someone breaks into my house, going after them with a gun does not seem like an intelligent option. In fact it seems like an incredibly stupid option, and one likely to incite violence.
Of course it is going to incite violence! That's what the gun is for!
If you have a gun you're just inviting people to try and shoot you first.
If a criminal knows that a house has a gun then they are more likely to look for another target. If they think that there is a good chance that robbing a place will get themselves shot then they are going to look for another line of work.
When you say 'take direct action and neutralize the threat', do you actually mean 'get into a firefight with a criminal'? Or do you just mean 'brandish the gun in a frightening way'?
Never, ever ever ever, take a gun out and brandish it. That's just the absolute dumbest thing to do. That's like the movies where the criminal mastermind ties someone up and then uses some complicated way to kill them, giving the victim a chance to get away.
If you pull out a gun, use it. Don't brandish it, don't shoot to warn, don't shoot to maim, SHOOT TO KILL! If you were in enough fear for your life to pull out the gun then shoot. If you are not going to shoot then leave the gun where it was, hesitation just gives the criminal a chance to kill you first. When facing a gun a criminal's fear for his own life will probably push him to violence much more readily than he would have originally. Don't let him have the chance, if he has a weapon and you think that your life is in danger then grab the gun and shoot him. Aim for the upper chest, it's a bigger target than the head and less protected. A hit there is more likely to stop him than a hit anywhere else.
If you can't be sure that you will shoot to kill when you need to then don't bother even buying a gun. Part of gun ownership is the willingness to use it. The other part of the gun is responsible ownership. Train to use it, keep it maintained, always know where it is and its status (loaded, round chambered, etc), keep it handy, and take all possible precautions against someone using it without your consent.
Responsible, trained, conscientious gun owners are not a problem. The problem with guns are with the sloppy, untrained, careless gun owners and the criminals who use guns. Banning guns is not a solution either. Unless you can be 100% certain that criminals can't get guns then by banning them all you are assuring is that honest citizens don't have guns. The criminals will always be able to find a gun somehow, somewhere.
We'll have to fix them. Dude! I know! We'll port the product to Windows!
Konfabulator coming to Windows is old. old news. In fact, that announcement on December 16, 2003 predates the Apple Dashboardannouncement on June 28, 2004 by over 6 months. Konfabulator for Windows was even already in beta form at the time of its announcement, so the idea of porting it is definitely older than 6 months before any word from Apple.
It comes down to this: Arlo Rose was porting Konfabulator over to Windows way before Apple even announced Dashboard. The port has very little to do about Apple coming out with a product similar to Konfabulator, it's more about Arlo Rose wanting to tap into the large Windows market.
That's not to say that Arlo Rose is not bitter about the whole thing - he has made a lot of snide comments on the matter - but the fact is that "little desktop applications" have been a part of Mac OS ever since it first came out. Apple has always had Desktop Applications, small applications that take up minimal RAM and do one small thing well, such as a note pad, a calculator, a clock, etc. If anything it is likely that Rose was inspired by Apple, not the other way around.
I'm in the habit of using ditto under Mac OS X simply because it can't hurt. The only time I use cp or some other tool that doesn't preserve metadata is if I know that the filesystem that I'm copying the file to doesn't use metadata and where it might be a bad idea to blindly copy the metadata also.
After all, it's only a couple of extra characters to type:
It's not that first time such 'backup' tool is available, and it's also not the first time Apple found ways to neutralize such tool by way of a new version.
Under Mac OS X Apple includes a free way to back up the music on your iPod. Just run Terminal.app and enter this line:
Folders named like "F00", "F01", "F02" will be placed on your Desktop, drag them into iTunes and you are all set.
I'm sure that you can do the same thing under Windows and Linux. Hell, knock together a quick script and automate it. That's all these 3rd-party tools are doing.
yes but then all you get is a bunch of random folders with random music in them. if only apple had gone the \artist\album\song directory structure route rather than the ID3 database things would be so much easier, and I could just keep my music synchronized on the file system level.
Just drag the folder into iTunes. iTunes will organize it all and you will be all set. If you go into iTunes Preferences->Advanced and check "Keep iTunes Music folder organized" then iTunes will store the songs in a "\artist\album\song directory structure" for you automatically.
After experimenting with OS X i've found that there is a bunch of stuff you have to play the upgrade game on and you have to be smart about which "old" hardware is supported.
IE a Pentium 2/3 CPU with enough memory runs XP just fine - i expected an appropriately configed G3 to do the same with OS X - and i was wrong.
Oh I don't know, I have quite a few iMac G3 350 mHz with 320 MB of RAM (I run several computer labs) and they run quite fine under Mac OS X 10.2.8 and Mac OS X 10.3.5. Yeah, they're not going to be great at running extremely processor-intensive tasks but they have no problems with surfing the web, running Word, Excel, etc.
My sister also has an iBook G3 366 mHz with 320 MB of RAM running Mac OS X 10.3.5 and it also has no problems at all with everyday tasks.
I'm betting that your "Pentium 2/3" systems will run similarly to these Mac G3 models. If you have had problems with one system or another it was probably due to some other factor (such as bad RAM or a flaky hard drive) rather than the CPU/OS combination.
The iPod will read files anywhere. But in order for it to know about those files, a database must be created on the iPod telling it all this information. Contrary to the sibling's post, this database is *not* XML, but a binary format that has been pretty well documented at this point.
Whups, you are right it's not XML. I got mixed up on that because practically every preference and database document that Apple uses is XML. (Actually Apple calls their flavor of XML a Property List, or PLIST)
I believe that iTunes uses a PLIST but the iPod uses a binary format for the database files. Either way you are perfectly correct that there are programs other than iTunes out there that know how to format the database properly, you just have to poke around on the internet a bit to find them.
Will the iPod read files that aren't in those particular directories? (ie, is it just iTunes that picks them randomly, or does the iPod itself require it to have the names that iTunes picks for it)
iTunes and the iPod both use XML database files to locate the music that they contain. When songs are put onto the iPod those songs are added to the database, along with most of the information in the ID3 tags. If the song isn't in the database then the iPod doesn't know it's there.
This is done mainly to make the iPod more efficient. Instead of having to go through each file and read its ID3 tags every time the iPod opens up a file directory, the iPod can instead read through a simple, ordered file. This saves on time spent spinning the hard drive. Because of this the iPod is not only more responsive, but it also uses less power.
So basically it comes down to the fact that if you want to use the music playing capabilities of the iPod you need to use software to manage the music on it. This doesn't stop you from putting music files on it that you don't intend to play, or from taking any and all files off the iPod by way of software other than iTunes.
I thought they had to have some kind of anyi-piracy thing so you couldn't give your mp3s away to people when you plugged into their PC. I guess I spoke without knowing on that part...
The software which manages the music is iTunes. iTunes will only let you synch your iPod with one machine, if you change the iPod to synch with a different machine then iTunes will tell you it will replace the songs on your iPod with the songs on the new machine. So you can't use iTunes to transfer songs from one machine, to an iPod, to another machine.
This doesn't stop you from doing the copying through some other application, such as the application that normally handles files on your machine. The only roadblock to that is that when iTunes places music on your iPod it puts all of its songs and database information in a hidden directory. It's just the normal hidden bit though, so it's easy to get around. Most file copy programs will allow you to see hidden files easily.
Like most concessions that Apple has made to the music industry in order to do business with them, these issues are nothing more than speed bumps. By not allowing the iTunes application to easily be used as a music copying device Apple protects itself from lawsuits. Meanwhile, Apple knows that a ton of 3rd party tools will be created to get around these speed bumps. Remember, Steve Jobs was the one who said, "Every security scheme that is based on secrets eventually fails"
True, you can use the iPod for something other than music. That's a bit of a niche market at the moment, kind of a "well, I have an iPod anyway, I may as well use it for X" because if they wanted a real portable drive, they'd get one that didn't need special drivers just to copy files OFF it.
The iPod is a regular, standard, mass-storage device. No drivers are needed, it's just plug it in and start using it as a hard drive. I use mine for just this task all the time and I've never needed any sort of special drivers.
Actually, for the price, it is pretty competitive with equivalently-priced, comparably-sized portable hard drives on the market. Add that on to it's capabilities as a music device and other bells and whistles and you have a nice package.
This is my form of protest. I think the system is flawed. The practice of karma-bombing is fairly well documented, and this is pretty much the only avenue I have left. It prompts a response from people like you, and even if you disagree with my methods, I've at least gotten the chance to tell you how I think the system is broken. Slowly, I might be able to convince more people, and then maybe the Slashdot editors will listen to us.
Unfortunately your whole plan has backfired. You have simply managed to convince me that the current system is correct. Meta moderation (properly used) is the answer for bad moderation. The only remaining problem is bad meta moderators who should be removed from the meta moderation system entirely.
Proper meta moderation will eventually remove bad moderators from the moderation pool. Meta moderation is a tool for creating responsible moderators. By subverting that system all you are doing is making the moderation process worse. You are potentially knocking out good moderators simply because they use the full power of moderation.
It is just as important to Slashdot to lower the score of posts of negative value as it is to raise the score of posts of positive value. Try browsing at -1 sometime. Now imagine if most of those posts remained at 0 or 1, the sheer amount of negative content would essentially negate the value of having any score below 2.
You say you want the editors of Slashdot to be the only ones who knock down negative posts? There are thousands of posts a day and only a dozen or so editors. This would not only flood the editors with a lot of messages to moderate but even worse it would put that moderation in the hands of a few people and their own biases. This would make the potential for abuse much greater as one "bad apple" could do far much more damage when he is one of a dozen than if he is one of a few hundred.
Most of the time, negative mod points are used just because people don't like what's being said, not because what's being said is ACTUALLY flamebait, a troll or overrated. 'Overrated' is way too subjective in any case.
So when a moderator takes the time to moderate down a true troll or flamebait you punish the moderator by meta-moderating it as unfair? To me that just means that you are just being lazy and not checking to see whether or not that was a responsible moderation.
Sometimes trolls are trolls, and flamebaits are flamebaits. Moderators who properly judge those posts should be rewarded in meta. Those who abuse moderation should be punished in meta. That's what meta moderation is for.
If you truly have a problem with the moderation system then take it up with the Slashdot editors and policy makers, not the responsible moderators.
dual booting though. Games are still a Windows domain.
Of course a Wine-like crossover library would be relatively simple once Mac OS X and Windows are both running on the same hardware. You would just need to come up with an abstraction layer that translated a call to one set of APIs into another. Issues such as byte-order and low-level code would be greatly reduced.
Right now if you want to run Windows software under Mac OS X on a PowerPC chip you need to change data from little-endian to big-endian, translate the much longer and complex "x86" processor instructions into the RISC-like instructions of the PowerPC, emulate the hardware of the machine, and emulate the Windows environment. That puts a big bite on the speed of a program running under emulation.
If you could run each OS on the same hardware you would cut down many of those factors greatly, running the game at almost native speed in the operating system of your choice. That's basically what Mac OS X does for Classic Macintosh applications right now and it runs them pretty well.
However, I still don't think that Apple should port Mac OS X over to "x86". Apple makes a good deal of its money on hardware, that would go down the drain if they had to compete head-to-head with the likes of Dell and the Mom-and-Pop shops. Also, many people are not locked into the Wintel hardware but rather the Windows OS itself. Most people would still have Windows on the desktop at work and so most people would run it at home. Just look at Linux, it's free, runs on "x86", can run Windows software, and is has some nice environments but it still isn't really pushing Windows off of the desktop.
Apple owes a lot of its usability, stability, and good reputation to the fact that Macintoshes are fully-integrated experiences. The hardware and software is designed hand-in-hand to work well and be fashionable. Yeah, there's a bit of a premium to getting a Macintosh but with that premium comes enough benefits to make it worthwhile.
Come to think of it, HFS+ might be using inodes to reference to the directories/files in these operations internally.
You are basically correct. HFS (and HFS+) use an inode-like system to keep track of files and aliases to files. You can read more about it here. You can also see some more interesting information about filesystems under Mac OS X here.
Re:Retrospect vs. Acronis TrueImage
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EMC Buying Dantz
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If you're looking at Retrospect, do you know about Acronis? link
One problem with Acronis: no Mac support that I can see.
Retrospect supports both Macintosh and Windows, a definite plus. Especially since this was posted in the Apple section of Slashdot...
But what about harvesting antimatter? Isn't it present in cosmic rays and radiation?
Not really. Very small amounts of antimatter are occasionally created when an energetic particle such as a cosmic ray hits another particle, but the amounts are next to nothing and are extremely rare in nature.
For the time and effort it would take to collect these rare bits of antimatter you would probably be better off going the high-energy route.
During a panel at LACon II in '84, Dr. Forward mentioned that calculations showed that an anti-matter bowling ball wouldn't go up in a blaze of light and gamma, it'd sit on the floor sizzling like a drop of water on a griddle for several minutes. From what I gathered, the matter and anti-matter only interact as they come into contact with each other, and even in a normal Earth atmosphere there's a limit as to how many particles touch at any given time.
Remember that, as far as we can determine, antimatter is equivalent to its regular-matter counterpart.
So a block of antimatter carbon would just sit there and react at the surface. However, a container of antimatter hydrogen being released into the atmosphere would be a much more dangerous situation since it would rise, expand, and mix with the normal-matter gas molecules in the air. This would be a much more rapid and violent reaction.
So it's really not enough to say that you have antimatter, you also have to say what type of antimatter it is and what form is it in.
Assuming that 1 kW-h costs about $0.10 and that you could just put in the exact amount of energy needed to make up 1 gram of matter:
e=mc^2 e=(kg/1000) x 9x10^16 e=9x10^13 J
1 kW-h = 3.6x10^6 J cost = $1/(3.6x10^7 J)
price = e x cost price = $2.5 x 10^6
So 1 gram of antimatter costs about $2.5 million of energy. This is not including the costs of the equipment needed to make it, inefficiencies in its production, or any other concerns such as storage costs. In reality the cost of 1 gram of antimatter is probably in the $100 billion range per milligram, according to NASA. This means that the real price is around $10 trillion per gram.
Slashdot Mirror
The stuff is not reactive at all. What Brita uses is a mix of granular activated carbon and a man-made zeolite. I know this because I am a chemist who worked with Brita in developing and improving their water filtration systems.
There is nothing dangerous about those filters and running ethanol through them is not likely to cause any problems. In fact, the alcohol industry uses basically the same system to purify grain alcohol, but on an industrial scale.
Here is a write-up of the benefits of doing a "polishing" step just like the guys in the Slashdot article. It's an interesting read.
Heh, I was one of the chemists who worked on developing extruded carbon cartridges. They really are extruded - no need to use the quotes.
Without going into too much detail because there are all sorts of trade secrets, patents, and contractual agreements that I would be breaking, I can tell you that an extruded filter is simply granular activated carbon mixed with some sort of binder and then passed through an extrusion die while it is still malleable. The trick is the size of the carbon particles, the type of binder, and the amount of pressure needed to extrude the blocks of carbon.
IIRC when I left that company (about 5 years ago) we were making something like 75% of the extruded activated carbon filters on the market. It was all OEM, we were selling to Brita, Ecowater, PUR, Doulton, Apec, and many other companies that would re-package and resell the filters as their own.
You can read a bit more on the technology behind the production of extruded carbon filters at the company website.
Not only that but also when you sync your iPod back up with iTunes the On-The-Go playlist is automatically copied back to iTunes as an iTunes playlist with a default name. This saves the On-The-Go playlist for you. It then changes the current On-The-Go playlist on the iPod to the same default name as under iTunes and makes way for a new On-The-Go playlist.
Well I have a safeguard against just that situation. I have two dogs, a Labrador and a Dalmatian. If someone is in the house that isn't supposed to be there then you can be sure that they are going to be reacting. There is no way to mistake the way they would react to an intruder. I probably won't even need to use my gun because most criminals will take off at the first sound of these two. However, if the intruder persists then I will use my weapon when I have to.
Now this doesn't mean that you shoot blindly or wildly. Always be as sure as possible about your target. DO NOT shoot into your bed, the metal in the bed can deflect your round causing it to ricochet into someone or something you care about. Not only that but also a mattress is not exactly built for stopping a bullet, there is always the chance that the round will pass right through the bed and then through a wall or the floor, again hitting unexpected targets.
If you take an NRA gun safety course (required in most, if not all, places before you can get a gun license) then they will tell you all of these things. They cover what to do in these sort of situations and they not only tell you how to shoot but also when NOT to shoot. Even if you don't plan on owning a gun I would still recommend that you take the NRA course. It will really get you thinking about safety and how to protect yourself in case of an intruder.
At that point in time no one had been seeded developer previews of Tiger and Apple kept very quiet about the features. It is certainly possible that Arlo found out early about Dashboard somehow, but it's not probable that he did.
Anyway, it's his right to complain about it but there is nothing he can gain from doing so except making himself look like a whiner. He has just got to move on, port over to Windows and/or make a better product than Apple's stuff.
Of course it is going to incite violence! That's what the gun is for!
If a criminal knows that a house has a gun then they are more likely to look for another target. If they think that there is a good chance that robbing a place will get themselves shot then they are going to look for another line of work.
Never, ever ever ever, take a gun out and brandish it. That's just the absolute dumbest thing to do. That's like the movies where the criminal mastermind ties someone up and then uses some complicated way to kill them, giving the victim a chance to get away.
If you pull out a gun, use it. Don't brandish it, don't shoot to warn, don't shoot to maim, SHOOT TO KILL! If you were in enough fear for your life to pull out the gun then shoot. If you are not going to shoot then leave the gun where it was, hesitation just gives the criminal a chance to kill you first. When facing a gun a criminal's fear for his own life will probably push him to violence much more readily than he would have originally. Don't let him have the chance, if he has a weapon and you think that your life is in danger then grab the gun and shoot him. Aim for the upper chest, it's a bigger target than the head and less protected. A hit there is more likely to stop him than a hit anywhere else.
If you can't be sure that you will shoot to kill when you need to then don't bother even buying a gun. Part of gun ownership is the willingness to use it. The other part of the gun is responsible ownership. Train to use it, keep it maintained, always know where it is and its status (loaded, round chambered, etc), keep it handy, and take all possible precautions against someone using it without your consent.
Responsible, trained, conscientious gun owners are not a problem. The problem with guns are with the sloppy, untrained, careless gun owners and the criminals who use guns. Banning guns is not a solution either. Unless you can be 100% certain that criminals can't get guns then by banning them all you are assuring is that honest citizens don't have guns. The criminals will always be able to find a gun somehow, somewhere.
Konfabulator coming to Windows is old. old news. In fact, that announcement on December 16, 2003 predates the Apple Dashboard announcement on June 28, 2004 by over 6 months. Konfabulator for Windows was even already in beta form at the time of its announcement, so the idea of porting it is definitely older than 6 months before any word from Apple.
It comes down to this: Arlo Rose was porting Konfabulator over to Windows way before Apple even announced Dashboard. The port has very little to do about Apple coming out with a product similar to Konfabulator, it's more about Arlo Rose wanting to tap into the large Windows market.
That's not to say that Arlo Rose is not bitter about the whole thing - he has made a lot of snide comments on the matter - but the fact is that "little desktop applications" have been a part of Mac OS ever since it first came out. Apple has always had Desktop Applications, small applications that take up minimal RAM and do one small thing well, such as a note pad, a calculator, a clock, etc. If anything it is likely that Rose was inspired by Apple, not the other way around.
I'm in the habit of using ditto under Mac OS X simply because it can't hurt. The only time I use cp or some other tool that doesn't preserve metadata is if I know that the filesystem that I'm copying the file to doesn't use metadata and where it might be a bad idea to blindly copy the metadata also.
After all, it's only a couple of extra characters to type:as opposed to:The main thing is that you can almost never get into trouble using ditto, whereas there are a ton of cases where cp will hurt you under Mac OS X.
You can toggle the visibility of hidden files easily under Mac OS X with the AppleScript located here.
Under Mac OS X Apple includes a free way to back up the music on your iPod. Just run Terminal.app and enter this line:Folders named like "F00", "F01", "F02" will be placed on your Desktop, drag them into iTunes and you are all set.
I'm sure that you can do the same thing under Windows and Linux. Hell, knock together a quick script and automate it. That's all these 3rd-party tools are doing.
Just drag the folder into iTunes. iTunes will organize it all and you will be all set. If you go into iTunes Preferences->Advanced and check "Keep iTunes Music folder organized" then iTunes will store the songs in a "\artist\album\song directory structure" for you automatically.
Oh I don't know, I have quite a few iMac G3 350 mHz with 320 MB of RAM (I run several computer labs) and they run quite fine under Mac OS X 10.2.8 and Mac OS X 10.3.5. Yeah, they're not going to be great at running extremely processor-intensive tasks but they have no problems with surfing the web, running Word, Excel, etc.
My sister also has an iBook G3 366 mHz with 320 MB of RAM running Mac OS X 10.3.5 and it also has no problems at all with everyday tasks.
I'm betting that your "Pentium 2/3" systems will run similarly to these Mac G3 models. If you have had problems with one system or another it was probably due to some other factor (such as bad RAM or a flaky hard drive) rather than the CPU/OS combination.
Whups, you are right it's not XML. I got mixed up on that because practically every preference and database document that Apple uses is XML. (Actually Apple calls their flavor of XML a Property List, or PLIST)
I believe that iTunes uses a PLIST but the iPod uses a binary format for the database files. Either way you are perfectly correct that there are programs other than iTunes out there that know how to format the database properly, you just have to poke around on the internet a bit to find them.
iTunes and the iPod both use XML database files to locate the music that they contain. When songs are put onto the iPod those songs are added to the database, along with most of the information in the ID3 tags. If the song isn't in the database then the iPod doesn't know it's there.
This is done mainly to make the iPod more efficient. Instead of having to go through each file and read its ID3 tags every time the iPod opens up a file directory, the iPod can instead read through a simple, ordered file. This saves on time spent spinning the hard drive. Because of this the iPod is not only more responsive, but it also uses less power.
So basically it comes down to the fact that if you want to use the music playing capabilities of the iPod you need to use software to manage the music on it. This doesn't stop you from putting music files on it that you don't intend to play, or from taking any and all files off the iPod by way of software other than iTunes.
The software which manages the music is iTunes. iTunes will only let you synch your iPod with one machine, if you change the iPod to synch with a different machine then iTunes will tell you it will replace the songs on your iPod with the songs on the new machine. So you can't use iTunes to transfer songs from one machine, to an iPod, to another machine.
This doesn't stop you from doing the copying through some other application, such as the application that normally handles files on your machine. The only roadblock to that is that when iTunes places music on your iPod it puts all of its songs and database information in a hidden directory. It's just the normal hidden bit though, so it's easy to get around. Most file copy programs will allow you to see hidden files easily.
Like most concessions that Apple has made to the music industry in order to do business with them, these issues are nothing more than speed bumps. By not allowing the iTunes application to easily be used as a music copying device Apple protects itself from lawsuits. Meanwhile, Apple knows that a ton of 3rd party tools will be created to get around these speed bumps. Remember, Steve Jobs was the one who said, "Every security scheme that is based on secrets eventually fails"
The iPod is a regular, standard, mass-storage device. No drivers are needed, it's just plug it in and start using it as a hard drive. I use mine for just this task all the time and I've never needed any sort of special drivers.
Actually, for the price, it is pretty competitive with equivalently-priced, comparably-sized portable hard drives on the market. Add that on to it's capabilities as a music device and other bells and whistles and you have a nice package.
Unfortunately your whole plan has backfired. You have simply managed to convince me that the current system is correct. Meta moderation (properly used) is the answer for bad moderation. The only remaining problem is bad meta moderators who should be removed from the meta moderation system entirely.
Proper meta moderation will eventually remove bad moderators from the moderation pool. Meta moderation is a tool for creating responsible moderators. By subverting that system all you are doing is making the moderation process worse. You are potentially knocking out good moderators simply because they use the full power of moderation.
It is just as important to Slashdot to lower the score of posts of negative value as it is to raise the score of posts of positive value. Try browsing at -1 sometime. Now imagine if most of those posts remained at 0 or 1, the sheer amount of negative content would essentially negate the value of having any score below 2.
You say you want the editors of Slashdot to be the only ones who knock down negative posts? There are thousands of posts a day and only a dozen or so editors. This would not only flood the editors with a lot of messages to moderate but even worse it would put that moderation in the hands of a few people and their own biases. This would make the potential for abuse much greater as one "bad apple" could do far much more damage when he is one of a dozen than if he is one of a few hundred.
So when a moderator takes the time to moderate down a true troll or flamebait you punish the moderator by meta-moderating it as unfair? To me that just means that you are just being lazy and not checking to see whether or not that was a responsible moderation.
Sometimes trolls are trolls, and flamebaits are flamebaits. Moderators who properly judge those posts should be rewarded in meta. Those who abuse moderation should be punished in meta. That's what meta moderation is for.
If you truly have a problem with the moderation system then take it up with the Slashdot editors and policy makers, not the responsible moderators.
Of course a Wine-like crossover library would be relatively simple once Mac OS X and Windows are both running on the same hardware. You would just need to come up with an abstraction layer that translated a call to one set of APIs into another. Issues such as byte-order and low-level code would be greatly reduced.
Right now if you want to run Windows software under Mac OS X on a PowerPC chip you need to change data from little-endian to big-endian, translate the much longer and complex "x86" processor instructions into the RISC-like instructions of the PowerPC, emulate the hardware of the machine, and emulate the Windows environment. That puts a big bite on the speed of a program running under emulation.
If you could run each OS on the same hardware you would cut down many of those factors greatly, running the game at almost native speed in the operating system of your choice. That's basically what Mac OS X does for Classic Macintosh applications right now and it runs them pretty well.
However, I still don't think that Apple should port Mac OS X over to "x86". Apple makes a good deal of its money on hardware, that would go down the drain if they had to compete head-to-head with the likes of Dell and the Mom-and-Pop shops. Also, many people are not locked into the Wintel hardware but rather the Windows OS itself. Most people would still have Windows on the desktop at work and so most people would run it at home. Just look at Linux, it's free, runs on "x86", can run Windows software, and is has some nice environments but it still isn't really pushing Windows off of the desktop.
Apple owes a lot of its usability, stability, and good reputation to the fact that Macintoshes are fully-integrated experiences. The hardware and software is designed hand-in-hand to work well and be fashionable. Yeah, there's a bit of a premium to getting a Macintosh but with that premium comes enough benefits to make it worthwhile.
You are basically correct. HFS (and HFS+) use an inode-like system to keep track of files and aliases to files. You can read more about it here. You can also see some more interesting information about filesystems under Mac OS X here.
One problem with Acronis: no Mac support that I can see.
Retrospect supports both Macintosh and Windows, a definite plus. Especially since this was posted in the Apple section of Slashdot...
Not really. Very small amounts of antimatter are occasionally created when an energetic particle such as a cosmic ray hits another particle, but the amounts are next to nothing and are extremely rare in nature.
For the time and effort it would take to collect these rare bits of antimatter you would probably be better off going the high-energy route.
Remember that, as far as we can determine, antimatter is equivalent to its regular-matter counterpart.
So a block of antimatter carbon would just sit there and react at the surface. However, a container of antimatter hydrogen being released into the atmosphere would be a much more dangerous situation since it would rise, expand, and mix with the normal-matter gas molecules in the air. This would be a much more rapid and violent reaction.
So it's really not enough to say that you have antimatter, you also have to say what type of antimatter it is and what form is it in.
Assuming that 1 kW-h costs about $0.10 and that you could just put in the exact amount of energy needed to make up 1 gram of matter:
e=mc^2
e=(kg/1000) x 9x10^16
e=9x10^13 J
1 kW-h = 3.6x10^6 J
cost = $1/(3.6x10^7 J)
price = e x cost
price = $2.5 x 10^6
So 1 gram of antimatter costs about $2.5 million of energy. This is not including the costs of the equipment needed to make it, inefficiencies in its production, or any other concerns such as storage costs. In reality the cost of 1 gram of antimatter is probably in the $100 billion range per milligram, according to NASA. This means that the real price is around $10 trillion per gram.