What is this global warming?
So 100 studies say there are no problems. And 100 say there are problems.
Well, it's not exactly like global warming. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/570 2/1686 Between 1993 and 2003, there were 928 peer reviewed articles on climate change. 75% explicitly or implicitly supported the model that global warming is real. 25% made no conclusion on whether or not global warming is real. The model that we aren't experiencing global warming was supported by 0%. Let me type that again in all caps: ZERO PERCENT.
The controversy over the existance of global warming is a political construct. There is a word for people who believe this is still under scientific debate. That word is "chump".
If Stephenson doesn't have a personal issue with "gay" people, fine, but he doesn't have to turn his books into an advertisement for homosexuality.
Man, you said it. It's about time people writing so called "literature" quit wasting my time with junk like character development and multiple layers of contextual meaning. And authors who use so-called art to present their views of the world? What a yawner!
And I totally agree on how his books overdo the sexuality politics. I mean do you know how much effort was wasted pushing the heterosexual agenda in Cryptonomicon? Page after page of "Randy" getting worked up over some chick in a wetsuit. And that WAY too descriptive het-sex in the car scene. Imperial Pint?!? YUCK! Too much information!
I sure as hell don't want to have to think too hard about why they do stuff. Just hurry up and get to the good parts where they wire routers and blow stuff up.
I'm amazed at how much floor space in the "music" stores is dedicated to DVDs. When you read about other types of retail, the mantra is "Placement. Placement. Placement." For products sold at the grocery store, being on an eye-levelshelf vs down by the floor can have huge impacts on sales. Cola companies are eternally at war with each other for shelf space. It would be interesting to do a survey of how much retail space CDs have lost relative to overall reduction in sales.
Of course, there's a chicken and egg problem... Did flagging CD sales force music stores to bring in more DVDs or did increasing sales in DVDs push the stores to dedicate more space to them. My hunch is the later has had a much bigger influence, but I don't have any data to show that.
Looks like Karey Kirkpatrick might be a pretty good choice for this projct since Adams is, well, unavailable. IMDB shows that Kirkpatrick has writing credits on some good films:
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005)
Laws of Attraction (2004) (post-production)
The Little Vampire (2000)
Chicken Run (2000)
Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves (1997)
James and the Giant Peach (1996)
Rescuers Down Under, The (1990)
Especially notable is James and the Giant Peach, a great film which did a great job of capturing the intent of Rohl Dahl, an author with a lot of similarities to Douglas Adams. As for Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves, well everybody has to pay the bills.
Plus (you've got to love IMDB), his brother wrote the theme song to the TV series "America's Dumbest Criminals".
it'll be dominated with folks that just spend more money being the more powerful people in the game.
This didn't seem to hurt Wizards of the Coast's "Magic: The Gathering". When I was playing a lot five years ago, that game was entirely dominated by people who could aford to buy the powerful rare cards. None the less it was the most popular game around, in both the hard core and casual circles.
John Baez's Crackpot Index is a great way to quantify your ad hominem atacks in physics.
http://www.math.ucr.edu/home/baez/
The Crackpot Index
A simple method for rating potentially revolutionary contributions to physics:
A -5 point starting credit.
1 point for every statement that is widely agreed on to be false.
2 points for every statement that is clearly vacuous.
3 points for every statement that is logically inconsistent.
5 points for each such statement that is adhered to despite careful correction.
5 points for using a thought experiment that contradicts the results of a widely accepted real experiment.
5 points for each word in all capital letters (except for those with defective keyboards).
5 points for each mention of "Einstien", "Hawkins" or "Feynmann".
10 points for each claim that quantum mechanics is fundamentally misguided (without good evidence).
10 points for pointing out that you have gone to school, as if this were evidence of sanity.
10 points for beginning the description of your theory by saying how long you have been working on it.
10 points for mailing your theory to someone you don't know personally and asking them not to tell anyone else about it, for fear that your ideas will be stolen.
10 points for offering prize money to anyone who proves and/or finds any flaws in your theory.
10 points for each new term you invent and use without properly defining it.
10 points for each statement along the lines of "I'm not good at math, but my theory is conceptually right, so all I need is for someone to express it in terms of equations".
10 points for arguing that a current well-established theory is "only a theory", as if this were somehow a point against it.
10 points for arguing that while a current well-established theory predicts phenomena correctly, it doesn't explain "why" they occur, or fails to provide a "mechanism".
10 points for each favorable comparison of yourself to Einstein, or claim that special or general relativity are fundamentally misguided (without good evidence).
10 points for claiming that your work is on the cutting edge of a "paradigm shift".
20 points for emailing me and complaining about the crackpot index, e.g. saying that it "suppresses original thinkers" or saying that I misspelled "Einstein" in item 8.
20 points for suggesting that you deserve a Nobel prize.
20 points for each favorable comparison of yourself to Newton or claim that classical mechanics is fundamentally misguided (without good evidence).
20 points for every use of science fiction works or myths as if they were fact.
20 points for defending yourself by bringing up (real or imagined) ridicule accorded to your past theories.
20 points for each use of the phrase "hidebound reactionary".
20 points for each use of the phrase "self-appointed defender of the orthodoxy".
30 points for suggesting that a famous figure secretly disbelieved in a theory which he or she publicly supported. (E.g., that Feynman was a closet opponent of special relativity, as deduced by reading between the lines in his freshman physics textbooks.)
30 points for suggesting that Einstein, in his later years, was groping his way towards the ideas you now advocate.
30 points for claiming that your theories were developed by an extraterrestrial civilization (without good evidence).
30 points for allusions to a delay in your work while you spent time in an asylum, or references to the psychiatrist who tried to talk you out of your theory.
40 points for comparing those who argue against your ideas to Nazis, stormtroopers, or brownshirts.
40 points for claiming that the "scientific establishment" is engaged in a "conspiracy" to prevent your work from gaining its well-deserved fame, or suchlike.
So is anyone starting up companies that specifically do consulting on how to migrate away from SCO?
One of the open source mantras is that the profit isn't in the code itself, it's in consulting, customizing and tech support. So this one seems like a no brainer. Get a bunch of specialists who understand what keeps SCO's current customers in the SCO fold. Put together specific GNU/Linux packages to match those needs and sell "migration consulting services". Best of all, one could write 2 tier contracts. One tier is just a migration plan analysis. The second centers around the work to be done to implement it if (sorry, when) SCO implodes.
This seems like a business model with considerably better fundatmentals than selling 50lb bags of dogfood over the internet.
Plus doing the sales calls could be fun: "Your chief technology supplier currently has a market cap of X million dollars. They are in a legal fight with IBM, which has a market cap of Y billion dollars. IBM has stated that they have no plan to settle before the damage wrought by their lawyers can be seen from orbit. For Z hundred thousand dollars we can show you how to not be collateral damage."
"Our target is fixed at $0.20," said Coffa, who expects no major technological difficulties in going from prototypes to mass-produced commercial products.
Big statement for a group that doesn't have prototypes in hand. STMicroelectronics isn't exactly a backyard shop, but someone should remind them of the old saying, "The difference between theory and practice is that in theory there is no difference."
You could put in rechargable NMi batteries (and you would probably want to)
If you don't want to be dealing with your mouse and keyboard dying all the time, you might want to avoid using NiMH batteries in them, at least those that don't come with a charging dock. NiMH batteries loose about 1% of their charge every day whether you use them or not. Doesn't matter for things like digicams, where you recharge them every time you use them. But it makes them a bad choice for applications where want months of use between battery changes.This is also why they suck for remote controls. Consider alternate chemistries if you want rechargable for these applications.
He's been doing things that would be very easy for him to get away with and that no one would really care about all that much. Instead of getting away with it, Adrian made a decision a long time ago to become a hacker martyr.
Among other things, Macki also points out that that the lead link you gave, FreeAdrian.com, was registered over a year ago.
The excellent Groklaw site now has a copy of the subpoena IBM served SCO with on August 28. Short interpritation:
Find every computer and filing cabinet SCO has ever owned. Make a copy of every document or file in each of those computers or filing cabinets (as approriate). Give those files to us... and do it by Wednesday.
This is called an "open letter to the open source community". But it full of flaws, evasions and omissions that are painfully obvious to members of that community. Therefore, it seems much more likely that this letter is intended as a prop to point to while claiming they made some sort of good faith effort with the open source community. This is would explain all the "let's pull together" language in the final paragraphs. This text was written for judges, juries, the press and investors, none of whom are expected to read it closely.
For example:
"In copyright law, ownership cannot be transferred without express, written authority of a copyright holder. Some have claimed that, because SCO software code was present in software distributed under the GPL, SCO has forfeited its rights to this code. Not so - SCO never gave permission, or granted rights, for this to happen."
Notice the slick mis-quote of a core anti-SCO argument. It is infuriatingly obvious to "community members" that our complaint isn't that this (claimed but unverifiable) million lines of code was distributed under the GPL. It's the fact that this code was distributed under the GPL specifically and actively by SCO, and that by doing so they appear to have specifically given the "written authority" of which they speak.
The core of the argument has clearly been ignored. It has been replaced by a strawman with a few of the same keywords. But this strawman makes it the equivelent of someone buying a boxed copy of Microsoft Office, slapping a GPL sticker on it, selling it on eBay and then claiming Microsofts ownership of Office has been magically removed.
In court, both sides will claim they have acted in good faith. This is SCO pitifully pretending to meet that requirement. Here's hoping it fails with those whom it's aimmed at.
DEMAND paper ballots! Demand that votes be counted and posted AT THE POLL
I wish I could disagree with this. But elections here in San Francisco are so "irregular" that it doesn't even phase us when pieces of ballot boxes start washing ashore.
Agreed with all you said. Additionally, if this had really been an intentional leak, then this is the only thing they should have "let slip". It would leave the techies slobbering, but wouldn't steal any of the fun from Job's presentation.
I now understand why IBM has been so slow to act in this case
"...they can afford to move so fucking slow, man, they'll wait years and years. Give you a whole life, just so you'll have more to lose when they come and take it away. Patient like a spider. Zen spiders."
William Gibson
Neuromancer
Be VERY cautious about risking a lot of cash selling short. Some who sold short at the start of this mess might already be in trouble since the stock has resolutely failed to respond to our view of reality.
The repo man does not care whether all the geeks on slashdot were ABSOLUTELY sure the price would drop.
After the dot com 'boom' settled down a bit, and I was no longer required to work 80 hrs a week, I decided that after ten years of being absent I would go back to school and finish up that elusive CS degree.
OK, Here's a simple observation. Remeber how that dot com 'boom' was going to reinvent the fundamentals of business? Remember how well that worked?
Most of the online university stuff was bleed over from that. A lot of hernest but hopelessly optimistic people tossing around buzz words and convincing themselves that they were inventing a glorious new future. As with the comercial side of things, a few good nuggets emerged. But the vast majority of what was built is crap.
No, not at all. You start with 1 bacteria which does not carry immunity. Let the bacteria reproduce for a while, then apply the selection. Some bacteria will survive using immunity that was NOT present in the orignial bacteria's genetic makeup. Alterations/mistakes/mutations (whatever you wish to call them) which arrise through very well understood processes will have generated new genetic makeups that will turn out to be advantageous in the new environment.
I'd be very impressed if Microsoft actually came out with a command-line only version. The fact that "it's a very tangled subsystem" makes me wonder how possible that would be
You're not thinking like a propper bloatware author.
Sure, one usually thinks of a GUI sitting on top of a CLI. But why should we be limited? Having a command line doesn't ABSOLUTELY mean that the user gets lower level access. Why not write a command line interface that sits on top of, and manipulates, the GUI? The user opens a terminal window and types a command to move a file to a new folder. In the background, the pointer opens and navigates some windows then drags the file over.
My first job was as a stock boy for a small Apple dealer back in the Apple ][ and ][+ days. Was one of those early stereotype situations where we had a staff of professional sales people who were always running to the back to ask technical questions from the 14 year old kid who was stacking boxes (but spent his breaks reading manuals & playing with the hardware). Anyway, we sold Apple ][+, VisiCalc & a printer packages in what we felt were huge numbers. Dozens per week! About half went to homes and half went to business. There were no school sales in those early days because schools didn't have computers or computer education. Our business sales were fairly evenly split between small (owner/operator) businesses and big firm accountants who were buying them privately, then "sneaking" them into the office for an extra edge. Remember the competition of the time was TRS-80s, CP/M machines, Commodore PETS and then Commodore-64s (but those got labeled game machines due to the cartridge slot).
similar to loch ness monster "flipper pic"
on
SOHO Strikes Back
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
These things always remind me of the "enhanced" pictures of the Loch Ness Monster's flipper. Believed 'em at the time, but hey, I was five.
To quote monster hunter Robert Rines, "This picture we enhanced and it shows a flipper some two to three feet across and six to eight feet long."
quote: "a bigger keyboard would be a great feature"
Ugh! The keyboard on the current 15" Ti powebooks is already full size. Just measured mine and the horizontal keyspacing is exactly the same as the desktop keyboard (from Dell) sitting right next to it (15.2cm from the left edge of the A key to the left edge of the L key). If the 17" Powerbook uses the same size keyboard as the old 15" (caution, assumption), then making it bigger would make it worse, not better.
Based on Apple's adverts of "seamless" we told people they'd be able to browse my organization's full list of local windows servers from MacOsX10.2's [Connect to Server] command. As stated in the linked article, it quickly became clear that browsing using active directory only works for severs on the local subnet. Fortunately, if you already know the name or address of the machine you're trying to connect to, you can log on directly by entering:
. So far, this has worked just fine on non-local subnets.
So for my org, it's a mixed review. It's a long way from "seamless", but it's a LOT better connectivity than MacOS has ever had before. If Apple had advertised what they actually delivered ("Now you can log onto a windows server"), we'd be thrilled.
Ambrosia Software, a Mac shareware company, recently released a game creation kit called ColdStone. It's able to compile free standing games which run on Mac or Windows.
Ambrosia released there own RPG called Pillars of Garendall which was built entirely with this construction set.
Slashdot Mirror
What is this global warming?
0 2/1686 Between 1993 and 2003, there were 928 peer reviewed articles on climate change. 75% explicitly or implicitly supported the model that global warming is real. 25% made no conclusion on whether or not global warming is real. The model that we aren't experiencing global warming was supported by 0%. Let me type that again in all caps: ZERO PERCENT.
So 100 studies say there are no problems. And 100 say there are problems.
Well, it's not exactly like global warming. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/57
The controversy over the existance of global warming is a political construct. There is a word for people who believe this is still under scientific debate. That word is "chump".
And I totally agree on how his books overdo the sexuality politics. I mean do you know how much effort was wasted pushing the heterosexual agenda in Cryptonomicon? Page after page of "Randy" getting worked up over some chick in a wetsuit. And that WAY too descriptive het-sex in the car scene. Imperial Pint?!? YUCK! Too much information!
I sure as hell don't want to have to think too hard about why they do stuff. Just hurry up and get to the good parts where they wire routers and blow stuff up.
I'm amazed at how much floor space in the "music" stores is dedicated to DVDs. When you read about other types of retail, the mantra is "Placement. Placement. Placement." For products sold at the grocery store, being on an eye-levelshelf vs down by the floor can have huge impacts on sales. Cola companies are eternally at war with each other for shelf space. It would be interesting to do a survey of how much retail space CDs have lost relative to overall reduction in sales.
Of course, there's a chicken and egg problem... Did flagging CD sales force music stores to bring in more DVDs or did increasing sales in DVDs push the stores to dedicate more space to them. My hunch is the later has had a much bigger influence, but I don't have any data to show that.
Looks like Karey Kirkpatrick might be a pretty good choice for this projct since Adams is, well, unavailable. IMDB shows that Kirkpatrick has writing credits on some good films:
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005)
Laws of Attraction (2004) (post-production)
The Little Vampire (2000)
Chicken Run (2000)
Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves (1997)
James and the Giant Peach (1996)
Rescuers Down Under, The (1990)
Especially notable is James and the Giant Peach, a great film which did a great job of capturing the intent of Rohl Dahl, an author with a lot of similarities to Douglas Adams. As for Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves, well everybody has to pay the bills.
Plus (you've got to love IMDB), his brother wrote the theme song to the TV series "America's Dumbest Criminals".
John Baez's Crackpot Index is a great way to quantify your ad hominem atacks in physics. http://www.math.ucr.edu/home/baez/
The Crackpot Index A simple method for rating potentially revolutionary contributions to physics: A -5 point starting credit.
1 point for every statement that is widely agreed on to be false.
2 points for every statement that is clearly vacuous.
3 points for every statement that is logically inconsistent.
5 points for each such statement that is adhered to despite careful correction.
5 points for using a thought experiment that contradicts the results of a widely accepted real experiment.
5 points for each word in all capital letters (except for those with defective keyboards).
5 points for each mention of "Einstien", "Hawkins" or "Feynmann".
10 points for each claim that quantum mechanics is fundamentally misguided (without good evidence).
10 points for pointing out that you have gone to school, as if this were evidence of sanity.
10 points for beginning the description of your theory by saying how long you have been working on it.
10 points for mailing your theory to someone you don't know personally and asking them not to tell anyone else about it, for fear that your ideas will be stolen.
10 points for offering prize money to anyone who proves and/or finds any flaws in your theory.
10 points for each new term you invent and use without properly defining it.
10 points for each statement along the lines of "I'm not good at math, but my theory is conceptually right, so all I need is for someone to express it in terms of equations".
10 points for arguing that a current well-established theory is "only a theory", as if this were somehow a point against it.
10 points for arguing that while a current well-established theory predicts phenomena correctly, it doesn't explain "why" they occur, or fails to provide a "mechanism".
10 points for each favorable comparison of yourself to Einstein, or claim that special or general relativity are fundamentally misguided (without good evidence).
10 points for claiming that your work is on the cutting edge of a "paradigm shift".
20 points for emailing me and complaining about the crackpot index, e.g. saying that it "suppresses original thinkers" or saying that I misspelled "Einstein" in item 8.
20 points for suggesting that you deserve a Nobel prize.
20 points for each favorable comparison of yourself to Newton or claim that classical mechanics is fundamentally misguided (without good evidence).
20 points for every use of science fiction works or myths as if they were fact.
20 points for defending yourself by bringing up (real or imagined) ridicule accorded to your past theories.
20 points for each use of the phrase "hidebound reactionary".
20 points for each use of the phrase "self-appointed defender of the orthodoxy".
30 points for suggesting that a famous figure secretly disbelieved in a theory which he or she publicly supported. (E.g., that Feynman was a closet opponent of special relativity, as deduced by reading between the lines in his freshman physics textbooks.)
30 points for suggesting that Einstein, in his later years, was groping his way towards the ideas you now advocate.
30 points for claiming that your theories were developed by an extraterrestrial civilization (without good evidence).
30 points for allusions to a delay in your work while you spent time in an asylum, or references to the psychiatrist who tried to talk you out of your theory.
40 points for comparing those who argue against your ideas to Nazis, stormtroopers, or brownshirts.
40 points for claiming that the "scientific establishment" is engaged in a "conspiracy" to prevent your work from gaining its well-deserved fame, or suchlike.
40 points for comp
So is anyone starting up companies that specifically do consulting on how to migrate away from SCO?
One of the open source mantras is that the profit isn't in the code itself, it's in consulting, customizing and tech support. So this one seems like a no brainer. Get a bunch of specialists who understand what keeps SCO's current customers in the SCO fold. Put together specific GNU/Linux packages to match those needs and sell "migration consulting services". Best of all, one could write 2 tier contracts. One tier is just a migration plan analysis. The second centers around the work to be done to implement it if (sorry, when) SCO implodes.
This seems like a business model with considerably better fundatmentals than selling 50lb bags of dogfood over the internet.
Plus doing the sales calls could be fun: "Your chief technology supplier currently has a market cap of X million dollars. They are in a legal fight with IBM, which has a market cap of Y billion dollars. IBM has stated that they have no plan to settle before the damage wrought by their lawyers can be seen from orbit. For Z hundred thousand dollars we can show you how to not be collateral damage."
Permalink from BoingBoing Guest Blog Among other things, Macki also points out that that the lead link you gave, FreeAdrian.com, was registered over a year ago.
For example:
Notice the slick mis-quote of a core anti-SCO argument. It is infuriatingly obvious to "community members" that our complaint isn't that this (claimed but unverifiable) million lines of code was distributed under the GPL. It's the fact that this code was distributed under the GPL specifically and actively by SCO, and that by doing so they appear to have specifically given the "written authority" of which they speak.
The core of the argument has clearly been ignored. It has been replaced by a strawman with a few of the same keywords. But this strawman makes it the equivelent of someone buying a boxed copy of Microsoft Office, slapping a GPL sticker on it, selling it on eBay and then claiming Microsofts ownership of Office has been magically removed.
In court, both sides will claim they have acted in good faith. This is SCO pitifully pretending to meet that requirement. Here's hoping it fails with those whom it's aimmed at.
DEMAND paper ballots! Demand that votes be counted and posted AT THE POLL
2 002/01/07/MN185094.DTL
I wish I could disagree with this. But elections here in San Francisco are so "irregular" that it doesn't even phase us when pieces of ballot boxes start washing ashore.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/
"The world's fastest personal computer."
Agreed with all you said. Additionally, if this had really been an intentional leak, then this is the only thing they should have "let slip". It would leave the techies slobbering, but wouldn't steal any of the fun from Job's presentation.
I now understand why IBM has been so slow to act in this case
."
"...they can afford to move so fucking slow, man, they'll wait years and years. Give you a whole life, just so you'll have more to lose when they come and take it away. Patient like a spider. Zen spiders
William Gibson
Neuromancer
Be VERY cautious about risking a lot of cash selling short. Some who sold short at the start of this mess might already be in trouble since the stock has resolutely failed to respond to our view of reality.
The repo man does not care whether all the geeks on slashdot were ABSOLUTELY sure the price would drop.
After the dot com 'boom' settled down a bit, and I was no longer required to work 80 hrs a week, I decided that after ten years of being absent I would go back to school and finish up that elusive CS degree.
OK, Here's a simple observation. Remeber how that dot com 'boom' was going to reinvent the fundamentals of business? Remember how well that worked?
Most of the online university stuff was bleed over from that. A lot of hernest but hopelessly optimistic people tossing around buzz words and convincing themselves that they were inventing a glorious new future. As with the comercial side of things, a few good nuggets emerged. But the vast majority of what was built is crap.
"the majority of viruses written attack Microsoft products."
Well if that's the problem, the solution is simple.
1) Tell the new team to write viruses to attack non-Microsoft products.
2) Advertise that 90% of viruses attack non-Microsoft products.
3) Profit!
Note, that order might be slightly mixed up.
No, not at all. You start with 1 bacteria which does not carry immunity. Let the bacteria reproduce for a while, then apply the selection. Some bacteria will survive using immunity that was NOT present in the orignial bacteria's genetic makeup. Alterations/mistakes/mutations (whatever you wish to call them) which arrise through very well understood processes will have generated new genetic makeups that will turn out to be advantageous in the new environment.
I'd be very impressed if Microsoft actually came out with a command-line only version. The fact that "it's a very tangled subsystem" makes me wonder how possible that would be
You're not thinking like a propper bloatware author.
Sure, one usually thinks of a GUI sitting on top of a CLI. But why should we be limited? Having a command line doesn't ABSOLUTELY mean that the user gets lower level access. Why not write a command line interface that sits on top of, and manipulates, the GUI? The user opens a terminal window and types a command to move a file to a new folder. In the background, the pointer opens and navigates some windows then drags the file over.
Trust me, the suits will love it!
My first job was as a stock boy for a small Apple dealer back in the Apple ][ and ][+ days. Was one of those early stereotype situations where we had a staff of professional sales people who were always running to the back to ask technical questions from the 14 year old kid who was stacking boxes (but spent his breaks reading manuals & playing with the hardware). Anyway, we sold Apple ][+, VisiCalc & a printer packages in what we felt were huge numbers. Dozens per week! About half went to homes and half went to business. There were no school sales in those early days because schools didn't have computers or computer education. Our business sales were fairly evenly split between small (owner/operator) businesses and big firm accountants who were buying them privately, then "sneaking" them into the office for an extra edge. Remember the competition of the time was TRS-80s, CP/M machines, Commodore PETS and then Commodore-64s (but those got labeled game machines due to the cartridge slot).
These things always remind me of the "enhanced" pictures of the Loch Ness Monster's flipper. Believed 'em at the time, but hey, I was five.
p hs.html
To quote monster hunter Robert Rines, "This picture we enhanced and it shows a flipper some two to three feet across and six to eight feet long."
Debunked at: http://www.loch-ness.org/files/underwaterphotogra
quote: "a bigger keyboard would be a great feature"
Ugh! The keyboard on the current 15" Ti powebooks is already full size. Just measured mine and the horizontal keyspacing is exactly the same as the desktop keyboard (from Dell) sitting right next to it (15.2cm from the left edge of the A key to the left edge of the L key). If the 17" Powerbook uses the same size keyboard as the old 15" (caution, assumption), then making it bigger would make it worse, not better.
Based on Apple's adverts of "seamless" we told people they'd be able to browse my organization's full list of local windows servers from MacOsX10.2's [Connect to Server] command. As stated in the linked article, it quickly became clear that browsing using active directory only works for severs on the local subnet. Fortunately, if you already know the name or address of the machine you're trying to connect to, you can log on directly by entering: . So far, this has worked just fine on non-local subnets.
So for my org, it's a mixed review. It's a long way from "seamless", but it's a LOT better connectivity than MacOS has ever had before. If Apple had advertised what they actually delivered ("Now you can log onto a windows server"), we'd be thrilled.
Ambrosia Software, a Mac shareware company, recently released a game creation kit called ColdStone. It's able to compile free standing games which run on Mac or Windows.
Ambrosia released there own RPG called Pillars of Garendall which was built entirely with this construction set.
http://www.AmbrosiaSW.com/games/coldstone/
http://www.AmbrosiaSW.com/games/pog/