...you get to see exactly the same error message all over again.
Not here. I'm using OmniWeb 4.1 on MacOS X 10.1.5 and once I clicked on the "To continue using..." link I was able to use the site just fine. Not a single glitch. The site is just coded to make you nervous about using our usual browser in hopes that you'll switch. I'm sure that some browsers may have problems with the site, but that could happen with any browser on any site.
Scott Anguish has an article on stepwise.com that shows you how to build OpenSSH yourself. He also suggests that you use the Apple-supplied "nobody" account for the purposes of privilege separation, as well as doing so in his instructions.
I don't know if Apple configures their update similarly, but I'll bet they do.
I was going to call you some very bad names for being so stupid but the fact that you and your entire nation are probably blissfully unaware of being trounced by Germany in the World Cup today makes up for it all. In fact it must come as a surprise that there is a sports tournament with 'World' in the title and yet foreign teams are allowed to enter.
Yeah, it's like that baseball tournament called the World Series. We would never allow any foreign teams to participate in that, not even the Canadians. They probably don't even have any teams.
What's that, Toronto is in Canada? What, the Toronto Blue Jays won the World Series in 1992 AND in 1993? Man, what is the world coming to?
Hmm, World Cup - that's hockey, right? Damn Canadians have a lock on that too. Oh wait, you say that's the STANLEY Cup? Hmm, so what's the world cup again? Never mind, I'll just go watch some football.
It was some behemoth software computer company who's satellite offices didn't know anything about network security and had some serious backdoors to the net.
You mean you uploaded your software to Microsoft? Man, they are gonna be pissed when they find out...
If God does exist then there must be a place for Him in science - as science looks for truth. But science is not equipped to prove or disprove God.
Science deals w/measurable and repeatable events. God is neither.
I will generally agree with what you are saying, but I think that there needs to be a bit of a clarification.
First of all, the scientific method does not have the ability to prove any hypothesis for certain. Instead, science is only able to show that a hypothesis has held for certain conditions and has not yet been disproven. Therefore, the scientific method is unable to prove any hypothesis concerning the existence of God. Science merely has the potential to show that there is an effect similar to the existence of God, under certain conditions!:)
As far as disproving God, science does have the ability to disprove hypothesis. However, with the subject of God this ability may prove to fall short. Any evidence of the non-existence of God can be neatly explained away as "the mystery of God" and swept under the rug.
And people wonder why science and religion so seldom walk hand-in-hand...
Solar energy is a pratically infinite source of energy, and we have not even begun to tap its potential.
Sooner or later we are gonna run out of oil, and solar is the future. this shows that we dont big ugly solar farms to get the same result
Yes, there is a lot of energy coming from the sun that we can potentially harvest. The main problem is the terrible efficiency at which the current collection methods operate. It turns out that once you add everything up, you come up with a power/pollution ratio for solar energy which is far above that of fossil fuels.
The main factor in this is a combination of the dirty manufacturing processes needed for solar cells, and their terrible return over their operational lifetime. We need develop cheap, long-lasting, efficient solar cells that don't create a lot of pollution during manufacture or else solar energy will remain merely a pipe dream.
One idea which has great promise is for us to put up power satellites. These satellites would collect the more concentrated solar energy outside the Earth's atmosphere, turn it into a microwave beam, and beam it down to collectors on the Earth's surface. Because of the enormous amounts of energy which would be harvested in this manner, it should be far less polluting than almost any other power generation method. The only real pollution would be in the form of heat pollution, but that can be taken care of with reflectors in space to lower the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth in that area, balancing out the heat added by the microwave beam.
With USB 2 out now, why does anyone need Firewire? USB 2 has a max data rate of 480Mbps if I remember correctly.
There are a few good reasons for using Firewire vs USB 2.0
First of all, Firewire allows devices on its bus to talk directly to each other. Thus when transferring data on a bus with a hard drive, computer, and camera the data can go directly from the camera to the hard drive.
With USB each device sends its data first to the host controller, and then back out to the device it was intended to go to. This effectively cuts the bandwidth of the bus in half and also limits the bus to how fast the central controller can handle requests. So using USB in the camera-computer-hard drive combo above, the data would go from the camera to the computer, then back out the computer to the hard drive.
Secondly, Firewire is built to handle streaming data. It handles reserving bandwith much better than USB 2.0 does. This is very important when you are recording from a camera to a hard drive and the data is time-dependant.
Thirdly, Firewire is able to operate much closer to sustaining its theoretical maximum of 400Mbps. USB 2.0's 480Mbps data rate is a burst data rate and cannot come even close to sustaining that rate of transfer. I've heard that your average transfer rates over a Firewire bus is going to be around 75% of theoretical, where USB 2.0 is around 50% of theoretical. These results can vary, but Firewire almost definitely outperforms USB 2.0 for sustained data transfers.
Another big problem is that USB tends to transfer data at the rate of the slowest device on the bus, Firewire does not share this limitation.
Lastly, Firewire is due for a speed bump very soon. Probably late this year you will see Firewire bump up to 800Mbps, a much better rate than the current USB 2.0 rate of 480Mbps.
Now I'm not saying that USB 2.0 is utter crap. It is decent when you only have a couple of devices connected that are not doing sustained transfers. So it should be great for printers, mice, keyboards, etc. However, when it comes to video cameras, hard drives, and other devices that need good sustained transfer rates, I'll stick with Firewire. Not to mention that it is already included with the majority of these devices and USB 2.0 is not.
I would gladly give you as much Au or Ag as you want in exchange for you giving me an equal mass of Pt. Heck, I'll even throw in 30 or 40 pounds of Fe (may be slightly impure and oxidized) to sweeten the deal!
However, my new employer uses mostly Macs with OS 9 (many of our apps don't work in OS X classic mode). I've found that if you're actually using Mac OS and you slap a nice 4 button USB mouse on there, the extra mouse buttons really don't do you much good, since the OS is more-or-less designed for only one button. Hence, there isn't anything for the extra buttons to do.
You can fix that easily. Go to VersionTracker and download USB Overdrive. The link is for the MacOS X version, but there is also one for MacOS 9 and earlier. The MacOS X version still in beta but it works very well and has no bugs that I know of. What it does is it allows you to set each button on a USB mouse or joystick to do one of many different actions such as double clicks, triple clicks, activating things, etc. It's a totally great utility.
That being said, there is really very little reason for non-power users to have more than one button on a Macintosh. You can do everything on the operating system with a one button mouse and even where a right-click would help you, all you have to do is to control-click instead. The main reason I have a different mouse is for the scroll wheel. If Apple came up with a one-button scroll mouse I would probably be very happy just using that.
Personally, I think the mouse should be one of the build-to-order items. Have the standard Apple mouse be the base item and allow the user to upgrade it to different ones like a 3 button with scroll, a trackball, wireless mice, etc. More choice is better in my mind.
It may be just my opinion (as a former chemist turned physicist), but I think that chemists are rather limited. They're (in general) not very well versed in technological issues and the hard science -- I've found that they're usually an "end-user" of other disciplines' accomplishments.
Well, as a former physicist turned chemist I can say that I think you're a bit off here. All professions have these sort of people and these statements you have made are true with physicists as well.
One of the main difference between chemists and physicists is that more chemists tend to be experimentalists and more physicists tend to be theorists. That is, a good deal of chemistry is focused on physical experiments with the end goal of being able to produce physical substances. A much larger percentage of physics is focused on mathematical theory and mathematical constructs. For many more branches of physics than of chemistry the focus is on producing models rather than physical objects.
This doesn't mean that chemists are not versed in physics or math. It's just that for many branches of chemistry the focus on higher-order physics and math is not as necessary. This is just like for physicists the focus is not on higher-order chemistry and biochemistry. Most chemists do have a good understanding of fast fourier transforms and quantum mechanics because these things are integral to the field of chemistry. I wouldn't expect, however, for a chemist to instantly know all there is to know about general or special relativity, or string theory - this are topics not vital to a chemist's job.
Chemists do get a good share of the grant money out there, but don't discount the amounts that physicists get. There are quite a few physics centers out there that pull in the big bucks, such as Kamioka Observatory, CERN, and Fermilab, among others. Sure the total amount of money that all physics projects receive is not as much as the total that all chemistry projects receive, but people are more focused on the quicker fruits that chemistry tends to produce rather than the future fruits that physics tends to produce. This does not diminish the importance of the work of physicists and physicists should not blame chemists for getting the grant money, it's not a horse race for who can get the most cash.
Is it Bondi blue? I thought that was that greenish-blue that the orginal iMacs were made with. The blue in Aqua seems to be more of a pure blue - very little green in it, if any. I'd love to say the color is Aqua blue, but the traditional color aqua is really a blue-green.
Oh well, whatever the name of the color used in Apple's Aqua, I think that the apple.slashdot.com site's colors should be as close to it as possible.
Remember, Microsoft does *NOT* have a monopoly on the console market, and has to claw it's way into contention.
In order to make this statement to be more in line with Microsoft's past strategies in areas where it didn't have market dominance, a few changes will be added:
Remember, Microsoft does *NOT*
YET have a monopoly on the console market, and has to BUY, CHEAT, FUD, AND EMBRACE-AND-EXTEND it's way into contention.
Heh, sorry - it had to be said. We now return you to your regular programming...
Actually, now that you bring up colors, shouldn't the Apple version of Slashdot be blue, not green? I mean Apple's Aqua is a nice blue color, not some greyish-green like the graphics on apple.slashdot.com.
Other than the color I definately like the new graphics. I'd vote to use the green one on the main site, use a blue one for the Apple site, use a red one for the BSD site and to make the Windows site be black text on a black background with completely black graphics!:)
Your example above is an action, not a tool. Making and selling the keys would be illegal. The grinder to make the keys would not be.
Both the action of selling the keys and the possession of the keys would be illegal, assuming that the person selling the keys was telling the buyers that these keys could open the house and that the owner did not authorize the sale of the keys. The keys would be the tool to open the house and owning them under those circumstances would be illegal.
Now the grinder is a different issue. If the grinder was being used to make illegal keys then owning it would also be illegal. This is completely tied to the actions of the owner, however, and has little to do with the tool itself.
Crime is mostly about actions and intent, but in some cases physical objects can be inferred as only having one realistic use and thus can be illegal to possess. We do start treading on thin ice with these sorts of distinctions but they are nonetheless valid.
Tools should not, and generally are not, outlawed simply because they could be used to commit crimes.
While I do agree with most of what you are saying, there are some exceptions to this idea.
For example: if someone was standing outside of someone else's house and that first person was selling keys to that house without the owner's permission, then that would be illegal. This example is very specific and might or might not apply to the DMCA, but it does show that there are possible exceptions to the idea that a tool should not be made illegal to own or distribute.
I do believe that except for very specific and limited cases, tools should not be illegal to own or distribute. Where the line is drawn between legal tools and illegal tools is certainly up for debate.
I'm not saying that XML is perfect, but I do know that Apple's MacOS X uses XML files a lot to store configurations. The file type is a.plist (property list). It works out very well for MacOS X because there are specific graphical editors which hide the implementation from the user. The format is also very human-readable, so you can easily go in by hand and edit the plists if need be.
<!--- Primitive types -->
<!ELEMENT string (#PCDATA)>
<!ELEMENT data (#PCDATA)> <!-- Contents interpreted as Base-64 encoded -->
<!ELEMENT date (#PCDATA)> <!-- Contents should conform to a subset of ISO 8601 (in particular, YYYY '-' MM '-' DD 'T' HH ':' MM ':' SS 'Z'. Smaller units may be omitted with a loss of precision) -->
<!-- Numerical primitives -->
<!ELEMENT true EMPTY> <!-- Boolean constant TRUE -->
<!ELEMENT false EMPTY> <!-- Boolean constant FALSE -->
<!ELEMENT real (#PCDATA)> <!-- Contents should represent a floating point number matching ("+" | "-")? d+ ("."d*)? ("E" ("+" | "-") d+)? where d is a digit 0-9. -->
<!ELEMENT integer (#PCDATA)> <!-- Contents should represent a (possibly signed) integer number in base 10 -->
I think it's pretty clear that the early Sharp (later Zaurus) and Casio BOSS "personal organizers" were early, crude PDAs.
I certainly won't dispute the fact that those early personal organizers were the precursors to modern PDAs, but I believe that they can't be considered to be wholly a part of what we call a PDA.
First of all, it was with the Newton that the term "Personal Digital Assistant" was first coined. Secondly, the Newton contained and helped to standardise many of the features of the modern PDA such as synching with a desktop computer, handwriting recognition, a removable flash card slot, a GUI, and the flexibility to upload new software modules.
While some of the previous organizers may have contained one or more of these features, I don't believe that any of them came close to offering as much versatility as the Newton. The Newton was not just an evolutionary step, it was a revolutionary step and thus I believe it deserves the status as the first true PDA.
I would say that apple did not popularize or even ground break with PDA's
Let's see. Were there PDAs prior to Apple's Newton? No, there weren't. Were there PDAs after the Newton? Yes there were. So therefore it is a reasonable conclusion that Apple did break ground by offering the first PDA.
Also, the Graffiti system of character recognition which is used on every PalmOS PDA was first made for the Newton. There were also many other innovations which were first seen on the Newton. This definitely sounds like the Newton had something to do with popularizing PDAs. Yeah, the Newton was canceled, but it still had a major impact on the PDA world.
Hmm, OK let's see. First of all Apple is helping to foster the interest in programming unix-like systems. With its use of BSD in a commercial system, there can't help but be a percentage of its former mostly-GUI customers that will get interested in programming for unix and open-source. More programmers for open source is a good thing for sure.
Then there's Apple's open-sourcing of Darwin. Yeah you don't get the GUI, but at least they are contributing to open source and allowing you to use their core operating system with whatever GUI you want by way of the many open source GUIs out there.
We also have Quicktime Streaming Server, a completely free and open multimedia server that lets you stream video and audio in most open formats out there. No server tax what so ever, what a joy!
Apple also is championing several efforts to keep fees and licensing issues from affecting the "little guys". They are trying to influence the developing MPEG-4 license so that there will be no streaming fees and they have even taken the stance that they will not release software which uses the MPEG-4 format until the fees have been removed. They also have taken a stance that any patents which are involved with W3C standards should be free of charge for use in the standards instead of requiring royalties, see this article for more information.
Finally, having Apple out there definitely helps innovation. With a company like Apple breaking ground and popularizing technology in areas such as PDAs, USB, Firewire, LCD displays, removal of dead-weight legacy equipment, and even computer form factors, they are helping to drive the industry forward. Lets face it, while Linux is a damn fine operating system it would have a tough time facing down the Microsoft bear alone. All of the alternatives will take their tiny bites out of the giant and together they will work toward keeping the monopolies from gaining total control.
Sure Apple is in it for the money. I think that is true of everyone, not just big corporations. I don't see many people volunteering 100% of their time and not trying to make a buck here or there. On a scale from mega-greedy to handing out bushels of money, I think that Apple falls safely in the middle. They make good, solid products, they seem to put some of their souls into their work, and they make some money off it. Sounds like a decent trade-off to me, and far more than we can say about many corporations out there.
I disagree. Given that the movie is already 3 hours long, and that is probably the upper limit of what it could be, I thought the editorial choices were good ones.
My point is that instead of adding the extra 15 minutes of the battle between Isildur and Sauron and the extra 15 minutes of Gandalf and Sauron, they could have instead done what was done in the book and left them as narrations. They would then have had 20 minutes or so left to keep several of the scenes I mentioned. My main point is they took out scenes with hobbits and replaced them with scenes of wizards and sorcerers in battle. The books were not mainly about wizards and sorcerers, but were instead about the development of the hobbits. The movie seems to diminish this character development in favor of typical Hollywood depictions of blood, gore, and love.
Left out the "whole story" of the Mines of Moria? I don't understand.
In the books it was explained that the mines had actually gone evil long ago and were well-known as being an evil place. This is why everyone was afraid to enter it. The dwarves had recently come back to clean out the mines and re-claim them. This is why Gimli was so eager to go through them, to see how his brethren were doing. In the movie you were left with the impression that Moria was just another Dwarf city and that the evil had recently come to it. In all, the whole Moria scene lacked much of the flavor it had in the original and it brought with it some glaringly obvious problems. For example: if the stairway had collapsed behind the Fellowship then how did the Balrog come after them? After all, it couldn't fly - if it could have then it would have flown out of falling in the crevice with Gandalf.
I think everyone kind of agrees that LOTR was good.
Nope, poor movie, terrible adaptation. I don't think any of the important story points made it onto the screen. Plenty of fight scenes, though so who cares if the plot is mangled?
I couldn't agree with you more. This was like the Reader's Digest version of the original book. I understand that they need to cut books down a bit and introduce a bit more action but what they did in Lord of the Rings is just criminal.
The life was sucked out from this epic adventure. Many of the locations and people that the hobbits met on their journey of discovery were cut out. What replaced them were more battles. The central plot ceased to be the growth and development of the timid hobbits into bold and courageous adventurers and instead it became the battle of humans, elves, wizards, and a sorcerer over power.
Director Peter Jackson has managed to suck most of the original story out of the book. He removed the whole planning of the trip to Rivendell, instead having all the characters just bump into each other and then decide to travel together. He removed the hobbits journey to Buckland, cut out all scenes with Tom Bombadil, and took out most of the events in Bree. He also left out the whole story about the mines of Moria and cut down the journey into Lórien to nothing. He also cuts out just about all interaction between Gimli and Legolas, an important minor theme in the series whose roots rest mainly in the travels through Lórien.
Jackson has replaced these details of an epic journey with a typical Hollywood love story and expanded several short narrations in the book into full scenes on their own - notably the original battle between Sauron and Islidur, and the battle between Gandalf and Saruman. So we see Holywood rearing its ugly head, adding love and war in place of plot and character development. What a shame to see such a wonderful series butchered so badly.
Right now the only thing holding me back from using it all the time is the fact that whatever I code using the Cocoa APIs are going to be MacOS X only.
GNUStep is great but if you notice I was talking about the Cocoa APIs which are NOT part of GNUStep. GNUStep does have many elements in common with Cocoa but the two are not 100% compatible unless I limit myself to a subset of the available classes.
I'll have to agree with ease-of-use and a powerful API. I've just begun programming with Obj-C and Cocoa and I can already see how simple it is to use. When you can make a decent, simple text editing program with about 3 lines of code you know you're in for a treat.
The Project Builder application gives you just about everything you'd need in an IDE. The Interface Builder makes it simple to set up the user interface. It's actually fun to use, it gives you plenty of freedom to lay stuff out as you want but it also offers some great tools to simplify the process.
Right now the only thing holding me back from using it all the time is the fact that whatever I code using the Cocoa APIs are going to be MacOS X only. On the other hand I see MacOS X going far in the next few years so maybe that's so bad.
Slashdot Mirror
Scott Anguish has an article on stepwise.com that shows you how to build OpenSSH yourself. He also suggests that you use the Apple-supplied "nobody" account for the purposes of privilege separation, as well as doing so in his instructions.
I don't know if Apple configures their update similarly, but I'll bet they do.
What's that, Toronto is in Canada? What, the Toronto Blue Jays won the World Series in 1992 AND in 1993? Man, what is the world coming to?
Hmm, World Cup - that's hockey, right? Damn Canadians have a lock on that too. Oh wait, you say that's the STANLEY Cup? Hmm, so what's the world cup again? Never mind, I'll just go watch some football.
First of all, the scientific method does not have the ability to prove any hypothesis for certain. Instead, science is only able to show that a hypothesis has held for certain conditions and has not yet been disproven. Therefore, the scientific method is unable to prove any hypothesis concerning the existence of God. Science merely has the potential to show that there is an effect similar to the existence of God, under certain conditions!
As far as disproving God, science does have the ability to disprove hypothesis. However, with the subject of God this ability may prove to fall short. Any evidence of the non-existence of God can be neatly explained away as "the mystery of God" and swept under the rug.
And people wonder why science and religion so seldom walk hand-in-hand...
The main factor in this is a combination of the dirty manufacturing processes needed for solar cells, and their terrible return over their operational lifetime. We need develop cheap, long-lasting, efficient solar cells that don't create a lot of pollution during manufacture or else solar energy will remain merely a pipe dream.
One idea which has great promise is for us to put up power satellites. These satellites would collect the more concentrated solar energy outside the Earth's atmosphere, turn it into a microwave beam, and beam it down to collectors on the Earth's surface. Because of the enormous amounts of energy which would be harvested in this manner, it should be far less polluting than almost any other power generation method. The only real pollution would be in the form of heat pollution, but that can be taken care of with reflectors in space to lower the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth in that area, balancing out the heat added by the microwave beam.
First of all, Firewire allows devices on its bus to talk directly to each other. Thus when transferring data on a bus with a hard drive, computer, and camera the data can go directly from the camera to the hard drive.
With USB each device sends its data first to the host controller, and then back out to the device it was intended to go to. This effectively cuts the bandwidth of the bus in half and also limits the bus to how fast the central controller can handle requests. So using USB in the camera-computer-hard drive combo above, the data would go from the camera to the computer, then back out the computer to the hard drive.
Secondly, Firewire is built to handle streaming data. It handles reserving bandwith much better than USB 2.0 does. This is very important when you are recording from a camera to a hard drive and the data is time-dependant.
Thirdly, Firewire is able to operate much closer to sustaining its theoretical maximum of 400Mbps. USB 2.0's 480Mbps data rate is a burst data rate and cannot come even close to sustaining that rate of transfer. I've heard that your average transfer rates over a Firewire bus is going to be around 75% of theoretical, where USB 2.0 is around 50% of theoretical. These results can vary, but Firewire almost definitely outperforms USB 2.0 for sustained data transfers.
Another big problem is that USB tends to transfer data at the rate of the slowest device on the bus, Firewire does not share this limitation.
Lastly, Firewire is due for a speed bump very soon. Probably late this year you will see Firewire bump up to 800Mbps, a much better rate than the current USB 2.0 rate of 480Mbps.
Now I'm not saying that USB 2.0 is utter crap. It is decent when you only have a couple of devices connected that are not doing sustained transfers. So it should be great for printers, mice, keyboards, etc. However, when it comes to video cameras, hard drives, and other devices that need good sustained transfer rates, I'll stick with Firewire. Not to mention that it is already included with the majority of these devices and USB 2.0 is not.
I would gladly give you as much Au or Ag as you want in exchange for you giving me an equal mass of Pt. Heck, I'll even throw in 30 or 40 pounds of Fe (may be slightly impure and oxidized) to sweeten the deal!
That being said, there is really very little reason for non-power users to have more than one button on a Macintosh. You can do everything on the operating system with a one button mouse and even where a right-click would help you, all you have to do is to control-click instead. The main reason I have a different mouse is for the scroll wheel. If Apple came up with a one-button scroll mouse I would probably be very happy just using that.
Personally, I think the mouse should be one of the build-to-order items. Have the standard Apple mouse be the base item and allow the user to upgrade it to different ones like a 3 button with scroll, a trackball, wireless mice, etc. More choice is better in my mind.
One of the main difference between chemists and physicists is that more chemists tend to be experimentalists and more physicists tend to be theorists. That is, a good deal of chemistry is focused on physical experiments with the end goal of being able to produce physical substances. A much larger percentage of physics is focused on mathematical theory and mathematical constructs. For many more branches of physics than of chemistry the focus is on producing models rather than physical objects.
This doesn't mean that chemists are not versed in physics or math. It's just that for many branches of chemistry the focus on higher-order physics and math is not as necessary. This is just like for physicists the focus is not on higher-order chemistry and biochemistry. Most chemists do have a good understanding of fast fourier transforms and quantum mechanics because these things are integral to the field of chemistry. I wouldn't expect, however, for a chemist to instantly know all there is to know about general or special relativity, or string theory - this are topics not vital to a chemist's job.
Chemists do get a good share of the grant money out there, but don't discount the amounts that physicists get. There are quite a few physics centers out there that pull in the big bucks, such as Kamioka Observatory, CERN, and Fermilab, among others. Sure the total amount of money that all physics projects receive is not as much as the total that all chemistry projects receive, but people are more focused on the quicker fruits that chemistry tends to produce rather than the future fruits that physics tends to produce. This does not diminish the importance of the work of physicists and physicists should not blame chemists for getting the grant money, it's not a horse race for who can get the most cash.
Is it Bondi blue? I thought that was that greenish-blue that the orginal iMacs were made with. The blue in Aqua seems to be more of a pure blue - very little green in it, if any. I'd love to say the color is Aqua blue, but the traditional color aqua is really a blue-green.
Oh well, whatever the name of the color used in Apple's Aqua, I think that the apple.slashdot.com site's colors should be as close to it as possible.
Actually, now that you bring up colors, shouldn't the Apple version of Slashdot be blue, not green? I mean Apple's Aqua is a nice blue color, not some greyish-green like the graphics on apple.slashdot.com.
:)
Other than the color I definately like the new graphics. I'd vote to use the green one on the main site, use a blue one for the Apple site, use a red one for the BSD site and to make the Windows site be black text on a black background with completely black graphics!
Now the grinder is a different issue. If the grinder was being used to make illegal keys then owning it would also be illegal. This is completely tied to the actions of the owner, however, and has little to do with the tool itself.
Crime is mostly about actions and intent, but in some cases physical objects can be inferred as only having one realistic use and thus can be illegal to possess. We do start treading on thin ice with these sorts of distinctions but they are nonetheless valid.
For example: if someone was standing outside of someone else's house and that first person was selling keys to that house without the owner's permission, then that would be illegal. This example is very specific and might or might not apply to the DMCA, but it does show that there are possible exceptions to the idea that a tool should not be made illegal to own or distribute.
I do believe that except for very specific and limited cases, tools should not be illegal to own or distribute. Where the line is drawn between legal tools and illegal tools is certainly up for debate.
I'm not saying that XML is perfect, but I do know that Apple's MacOS X uses XML files a lot to store configurations. The file type is a .plist (property list). It works out very well for MacOS X because there are specific graphical editors which hide the implementation from the user. The format is also very human-readable, so you can easily go in by hand and edit the plists if need be.
t .dtd">
Here is an example plist:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist SYSTEM "file://localhost/System/Library/DTDs/PropertyLis
<plist version="0.9">
<dict>
<key>Search Node PlugIn Version</key>
<string>Search Node PlugIn Version 0.5</string>
<key>Search Policy</key>
<integer>1</integer>
</dict>
</plist>
Here is the DTD file which shows how the plists are formatted:
<!ENTITY % plistObject "(array | data | date | dict | real | integer | string | true | false )" >
<!ELEMENT plist %plistObject;>
<!ATTLIST plist version CDATA "0.9" >
<!-- Collections -->
<!ELEMENT array (%plistObject;)*>
<!ELEMENT dict (key, %plistObject;)*>
<!ELEMENT key (#PCDATA)>
<!--- Primitive types -->
<!ELEMENT string (#PCDATA)>
<!ELEMENT data (#PCDATA)> <!-- Contents interpreted as Base-64 encoded -->
<!ELEMENT date (#PCDATA)> <!-- Contents should conform to a subset of ISO 8601 (in particular, YYYY '-' MM '-' DD 'T' HH ':' MM ':' SS 'Z'. Smaller units may be omitted with a loss of precision) -->
<!-- Numerical primitives -->
<!ELEMENT true EMPTY> <!-- Boolean constant TRUE -->
<!ELEMENT false EMPTY> <!-- Boolean constant FALSE -->
<!ELEMENT real (#PCDATA)> <!-- Contents should represent a floating point number matching ("+" | "-")? d+ ("."d*)? ("E" ("+" | "-") d+)? where d is a digit 0-9. -->
<!ELEMENT integer (#PCDATA)> <!-- Contents should represent a (possibly signed) integer number in base 10 -->
First of all, it was with the Newton that the term "Personal Digital Assistant" was first coined. Secondly, the Newton contained and helped to standardise many of the features of the modern PDA such as synching with a desktop computer, handwriting recognition, a removable flash card slot, a GUI, and the flexibility to upload new software modules.
While some of the previous organizers may have contained one or more of these features, I don't believe that any of them came close to offering as much versatility as the Newton. The Newton was not just an evolutionary step, it was a revolutionary step and thus I believe it deserves the status as the first true PDA.
Also, the Graffiti system of character recognition which is used on every PalmOS PDA was first made for the Newton. There were also many other innovations which were first seen on the Newton. This definitely sounds like the Newton had something to do with popularizing PDAs. Yeah, the Newton was canceled, but it still had a major impact on the PDA world.
Then there's Apple's open-sourcing of Darwin. Yeah you don't get the GUI, but at least they are contributing to open source and allowing you to use their core operating system with whatever GUI you want by way of the many open source GUIs out there.
We also have Quicktime Streaming Server, a completely free and open multimedia server that lets you stream video and audio in most open formats out there. No server tax what so ever, what a joy!
Apple also is championing several efforts to keep fees and licensing issues from affecting the "little guys". They are trying to influence the developing MPEG-4 license so that there will be no streaming fees and they have even taken the stance that they will not release software which uses the MPEG-4 format until the fees have been removed. They also have taken a stance that any patents which are involved with W3C standards should be free of charge for use in the standards instead of requiring royalties, see this article for more information.
Finally, having Apple out there definitely helps innovation. With a company like Apple breaking ground and popularizing technology in areas such as PDAs, USB, Firewire, LCD displays, removal of dead-weight legacy equipment, and even computer form factors, they are helping to drive the industry forward. Lets face it, while Linux is a damn fine operating system it would have a tough time facing down the Microsoft bear alone. All of the alternatives will take their tiny bites out of the giant and together they will work toward keeping the monopolies from gaining total control.
Sure Apple is in it for the money. I think that is true of everyone, not just big corporations. I don't see many people volunteering 100% of their time and not trying to make a buck here or there. On a scale from mega-greedy to handing out bushels of money, I think that Apple falls safely in the middle. They make good, solid products, they seem to put some of their souls into their work, and they make some money off it. Sounds like a decent trade-off to me, and far more than we can say about many corporations out there.
In the books it was explained that the mines had actually gone evil long ago and were well-known as being an evil place. This is why everyone was afraid to enter it. The dwarves had recently come back to clean out the mines and re-claim them. This is why Gimli was so eager to go through them, to see how his brethren were doing. In the movie you were left with the impression that Moria was just another Dwarf city and that the evil had recently come to it. In all, the whole Moria scene lacked much of the flavor it had in the original and it brought with it some glaringly obvious problems. For example: if the stairway had collapsed behind the Fellowship then how did the Balrog come after them? After all, it couldn't fly - if it could have then it would have flown out of falling in the crevice with Gandalf.
I couldn't agree with you more. This was like the Reader's Digest version of the original book. I understand that they need to cut books down a bit and introduce a bit more action but what they did in Lord of the Rings is just criminal.
The life was sucked out from this epic adventure. Many of the locations and people that the hobbits met on their journey of discovery were cut out. What replaced them were more battles. The central plot ceased to be the growth and development of the timid hobbits into bold and courageous adventurers and instead it became the battle of humans, elves, wizards, and a sorcerer over power.
Director Peter Jackson has managed to suck most of the original story out of the book. He removed the whole planning of the trip to Rivendell, instead having all the characters just bump into each other and then decide to travel together. He removed the hobbits journey to Buckland, cut out all scenes with Tom Bombadil, and took out most of the events in Bree. He also left out the whole story about the mines of Moria and cut down the journey into Lórien to nothing. He also cuts out just about all interaction between Gimli and Legolas, an important minor theme in the series whose roots rest mainly in the travels through Lórien.
Jackson has replaced these details of an epic journey with a typical Hollywood love story and expanded several short narrations in the book into full scenes on their own - notably the original battle between Sauron and Islidur, and the battle between Gandalf and Saruman. So we see Holywood rearing its ugly head, adding love and war in place of plot and character development. What a shame to see such a wonderful series butchered so badly.
Ever heard of GNUStep?
GNUStep is great but if you notice I was talking about the Cocoa APIs which are NOT part of GNUStep. GNUStep does have many elements in common with Cocoa but the two are not 100% compatible unless I limit myself to a subset of the available classes.
I'll have to agree with ease-of-use and a powerful API. I've just begun programming with Obj-C and Cocoa and I can already see how simple it is to use. When you can make a decent, simple text editing program with about 3 lines of code you know you're in for a treat.
The Project Builder application gives you just about everything you'd need in an IDE. The Interface Builder makes it simple to set up the user interface. It's actually fun to use, it gives you plenty of freedom to lay stuff out as you want but it also offers some great tools to simplify the process.
Right now the only thing holding me back from using it all the time is the fact that whatever I code using the Cocoa APIs are going to be MacOS X only. On the other hand I see MacOS X going far in the next few years so maybe that's so bad.
I can see it now:
Und now is de time on Sprockets ven ve dance!
Thank you Mike Myers and Saturday Night Live...