Related to this is that if the northwest passage opens up and Canada claims it, then many nations will expect Canada to put up the maintanaince. i.e. having something like the US coast guard in quantities to handle the new traffic.
However with probably trillions of dollars at stake, I have a feeling Canada will lose this battle. Canada simply doesn't have the power to back up their desires in this matter. And the nations wanting the passage to be international will include basically every nation on the planet other than Canada.
Canada could, of course, react by stopping support for the region and also not providing free navigational information as it does at present.
The Canadian Department of Environment also has regular updates and warnings about icebergs and the like. Presumably were the northwest passage to open up they'd track it. (I admit I'm a bit leery of trusting the prediction - but who knows) I suspect that, baring continued war in the mid-east, the United States military would be involved as well. Admittedly it is less of an issue now that the cold war is over. But they have had quite a bit of monitoring of the arctic sea in the past.
Canada and the United States map all iceberg activity by satellites and by aerial surveys. So they know where the icebergs are, their movement and so forth. So while it is a danger, with modern GPS equipment and modern communications and mapping it is a managed danger.
For existing oil rigs they use the above, plus will actually tow large icebergs out of the way of oil rigs and the like.
A lot of the advanced tracking has actually only come on the last few years. NASA put up a satellite back in I think '98 that started tracking a lot of icebergs. This helped eliminate the problem of losing icebergs when they were being tracked by plane and ship based radar/sonar.
If the northwest passage opens up that will be a huge benefit for shipping. Not to downplay the other problems to the environment, but the west has wanted the northwest passage ever since Columbus first sailed the ocean blue.
Actually O'Reilly had a set of instructions for putting together something like a.Mac server quite a while ago. Admittedly it wasn't as comprehensive in mimicking.mac as this article is. But a lot of the functionality was the same.
The fact is that a lot of people want.Mac functionality but with a little bit more control on their part. I think that Apple may initially fight this but eventually will be forced to allow user controlled.Mac servers. Hell, perhaps they'll see it as an opportunity and sell a XServe.Mac.
Dude you don't even have a clue what you are talking about. Joseph Smith was assassinated long before the Mormons went to Utah.
I mean if you think Mormons are wrong - fine. That's your perogative. However at least be fair to what you are criticizing and get the basic facts right.
I agree. However the original poster suggested that religion spreads because of the ignorant and stupid.
I don't want to turn this into a religious thread. I just think that the bias some have against religion in general is a bit tiring. It for one suggests that the reasons people are religious is irrational and that religion itself is irrational. This is simply an ignorant view of religion.
I'm not suggesting that the "most likely" rational choice is any particular religion. However the assumption that all religions (including Mormonism) is irrational is itself a rather strong siren song of ideology.
Look, as everybody else has said, if someone's going to steal your car, they're going to steal it. If they're going to break into it, they're going to break into it.
That's what I say. That's why I have my truck rigged with C4 tied to the custom made car alarm based off an old 486 portable computer motherboard. It plays a recorded MP3 of me laughing and then BOOM.
Admittedly I'm a little worried about liability. But I figure I'll just claim that it was some assassin trying to rig my car to explode.
BTW - you do realize that there are many very educated and thoughtful Mormons, right? I'm not sure the "Bad memes spread easily amoung the uneducated" comment ought to be tied to Mormons. I agree with the general thrust, but not the backhand. . .
In my opinion we ought to have the Luddites believing things like the moon landings are fake. It makes it easier to keep track of them. That way their more subtle goofy beliefs like "irradiating meat causes cancer" don't creep into society as easily. When those groups have these sorts of obviously goofy beliefs it shows them for what they are to society at large.
Sort of akin to wanting the far right or far left to hold onto their weird beliefs so that they don't contaminate more moderate groups.
You do know that Canada has been producing tidal power in the Bay of Fundy for quite a few years, right? It has been putting power in the Nova Scotian grid for some time. They keep talking about making more but nothing ever comes of it.
If someone is copying 1000 files, chances are they don't have resource forks. The point is that the Finder is doing something odd that is taking the extra time.
Re:I don't find it at all slow
on
Is Mac OS X Slow?
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· Score: 3, Informative
Whoops. Sorry for not hitting preview and screwing up the link.
Java 1.4.1 for OSX
Note that you must be a ADC member. But registration is free. To register go to
Apple Developer
Anyway Apple has been working hard to improve the speed of Swing.
Apple was holding off with JDK 1.4 because of (reportedly) many bugs. Further it was updating Swing and many UI display issues with Java on OSX. So it was going to wait for 1.4.1.
BTW - unless some goofy professor decided to stick you with an assignment that uses 1.4, why would you be using such a recently released version of Java? Especially with all the problems that have been widely reported?
Re:The Finder still needs work
on
Is Mac OS X Slow?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
You should only use UFS with directories you KNOW are going to be for Unix apps only. (Say a directory for Apache, for instance) While HFS+ has many problems, that isn't the problem.
Here's a simple test. Copy a directory of 1000 files in the Finder and then do it with the shell. In theory the same actual OS operations are going on. However the Finder will be dramatically slower. Of course intellectually copying that many files with a GUI is silly to begin with. But we'll ignore that for now.
Copying, while dramatically better than 10.0 and 10.1, is still the achilles heel of the Finder. It also doesn't play nice with displaying directories with large number of files either. Under 10.1 this was enough to keep me from developing under OSX. It was simply too slow to switch between the Finder and my compiler. Under older versions I'm not sure that copying was multithreaded either. Which honestly was an egregious error and I'm surrpised it took so long to fix.
With the current Finder things are markedly better. Not perfect, mind you. As I mentioned elsewhere, programmers and Unix geeks ought to try Path Finder, which is a Finder replacement. I've not run speed tests on copying, so I can't speak to that. However it has many features that the Finder doesn't.
Personally though if you are playing with large numbers of files you should learn the shell. Copying files using wildcards and the like is frequently far more efficient and speedy.
Re:The Finder still needs work
on
Is Mac OS X Slow?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
That is an old wives tale. The fact is that the Finder is slower for copying or displaying files like that. Extra memory helps a lot though. As everyone has been saying 512M is pretty much a bare minimum for an enjoyable experience. With current prices, I'd suggest everyone have at least 1G Ram.
BTW, if you want a better finder check out Path Finder.
Anyway, back to the original point, Carbon apps are not slower than Cocoa apps. Best example? All the recent (and SLOW) iApps are written in Cocoa. The best iApp is iTunes which is written in Carbon. Carbon has some downsides, such as not being able to make use of Services. Further up until recently many OSX interface features weren't really supported by Carbon. (i.e. drawers) Apple has been working at unifying the features of both frameworks. This will hopefully eliminate differences between apps, such as in terms of how Open/Save dialog boxes work.
Arguing regarding speed is simply silly though. The problem is bad programming. And yes, until 10.2, the Finder was horrible. (IMO)
Re:Chimera is still slow
on
Is Mac OS X Slow?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The speed difference between 0.5 and 0.6 is very dramatic. I was very wishy-washy about 0.5 and preferred OmniWeb. However 0.6 is at least as fast as anything on Windows.
I did have some problems with some pages, but that appears to be a problem with the Flash plug-in for OSX. Download the latest one from Macromedia and that problem goes away.
Re:I find Mozilla on OS X slow
on
Is Mac OS X Slow?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Try Chimera. It is damn fast, uses the same rendering engine Mozilla does, but has a basic Cocoa wrapper around it. It has tabs, but not as many other functions as Mozilla. Of course I think Mozilla is bloatware, but that's me.
It is still missing some features I like and is obviously still under development. But the recently released 0.6 version is pretty amazing.
OSX is a memory hog - even worse that XP. So if you are running it with less that 3/4 of a Gig of memory, invest in the memory. I think you'll change your opinion on speed then.
It still isn't as fast as Linux or XP (IMO), but has enough polish that I still prefer using it. There are some things that count more than speed. I think OSX does well on those.
I must ask though why these rather generic OSX discussions keep coming up on Slashdot. They seem more appropriate for some forum rather than "news for geeks." Don't get me wrong, I love OSX. I can't wait for 10.3 which will probably be the final reason to pick it over other OSes. But does it really justify all these topics?
You miss the whole question of why existing laws aren't enforced. That takes some serious reworking of the structure of our organizations and the beurocracy.
If you are of the mindset (as sadly many are) that "action" entails merely new laws, then you are right. However many changes (such as reworking existing organizations, improving communication, etc.) still require a lot of support from the congress. Something that they don't appear to really care that much about.
Right now the changes to air travel are largely silly and often counterproductive. The DNS still is basically emasculated. The borders are so porus it isn't funny. And monitoring of incoming shipments is still woeful. (Although admittedly there is a lot more going on there than the public really knows about)
My big qualm is why we have SO many different law enforcement agencies all of which compete with each other. For instance in the so called drug war we have Customs, DEA, ATF, FBI, and other organizations all duplicating efforts and often competing with each other. The competition also tends to mean that one organization won't share information with the others in an effective fashion. This was criticized heavily long before 9/11 but not enough has been done since 9/11.
Like I said, if you REALLY think that everything was rosey before 9/11 and 9/11 WASN'T a wakeup call, that's fine. You've made your decision. However if you do think 9/11 was a wakeup call then the question is what needs done?
This is something that the government needs feedback on. Just leaving it to others won't cut it. I for one am thankful for the feedback of the NSA. Obviously not everyone here will agree on where the lines ought to be drawn. But hopefully most will agree that we ought to discuss it!
How about you do a google on Echelon. After you filter out all the crackpots, it is clear they are monitoring all the people you say they aren't. One of the better sources is the official European Parliment study on this.
Note that I'm not opposed to this, although I think we as citizens need to think carefully about how the information is used and dissiminated.
I think, for instance, that it would be wrong to give this information to American businesses. (As some suggested a few years ago)
The worry is that information intelligence agencies gained can be used against minor crimes like someone with a secret drug habit, or speeding, or whatever.
I'm very much for privacy as a basic civil right. But I think we have to ask the difficult question of what privacy is. And that hasn't been asked.
Have you heard about Huey Long back in the 30's? Probably the greatest threat to individual liberty there was and was very popular amongst the electorate. Don't assume that voters think about things the way we do.
The mere fact that campaign finance reform was necessary tells us that people are so ill informed and so easy to manipulate that the amount of money spent on ads controls how people vote.
The way the NSA and other organizations get around the rules against domistic spying is to enter into agreements with the Canadians, British and so forth for information sharing and analysis. So some other government is "monitoring" American citizens here and requests the NSA to help them analyze their data.
I'm not saying that is intrinsically bad. And the fact that you frequently have such competition amongst government organizations limits how the information can be used. (i.e. it is unlikely the NSA would share such information with your local police department)
However the problem with the current terrorist thread is that the line between "outside" and "inside" becomes blurry and following traditional approaches doesn't work well. Further the idea that we can make a clear separation between "domestical criminal" and "foreign soldier/terrorist" is naive at best. We have to rethink these issues while trying to protect the basic views that the founding fathers gave us with our approach to individual liberty.
Just a note, even though this thread is rather old. The problem isn't dragging files, it is the kind of file that Omniweb drags. If you drag and drop a picture rather than dragging it as a PICT, GIF, or JPG it creates a link to the picture. This still happens with the latest version.
I still like Omniweb better than Chimera - but Chimera 0.6 is a speed demon and is rather nice. It definitely renders better. It also doesn't have this problem.
Slashdot Mirror
However with probably trillions of dollars at stake, I have a feeling Canada will lose this battle. Canada simply doesn't have the power to back up their desires in this matter. And the nations wanting the passage to be international will include basically every nation on the planet other than Canada.
Canada could, of course, react by stopping support for the region and also not providing free navigational information as it does at present.
Artic Information
The Canadian Department of Environment also has regular updates and warnings about icebergs and the like. Presumably were the northwest passage to open up they'd track it. (I admit I'm a bit leery of trusting the prediction - but who knows) I suspect that, baring continued war in the mid-east, the United States military would be involved as well. Admittedly it is less of an issue now that the cold war is over. But they have had quite a bit of monitoring of the arctic sea in the past.
Department of Environment
For existing oil rigs they use the above, plus will actually tow large icebergs out of the way of oil rigs and the like.
A lot of the advanced tracking has actually only come on the last few years. NASA put up a satellite back in I think '98 that started tracking a lot of icebergs. This helped eliminate the problem of losing icebergs when they were being tracked by plane and ship based radar/sonar.
If the northwest passage opens up that will be a huge benefit for shipping. Not to downplay the other problems to the environment, but the west has wanted the northwest passage ever since Columbus first sailed the ocean blue.
The fact is that a lot of people want .Mac functionality but with a little bit more control on their part. I think that Apple may initially fight this but eventually will be forced to allow user controlled .Mac servers. Hell, perhaps they'll see it as an opportunity and sell a XServe.Mac.
I mean if you think Mormons are wrong - fine. That's your perogative. However at least be fair to what you are criticizing and get the basic facts right.
www.mormon.org
I don't want to turn this into a religious thread. I just think that the bias some have against religion in general is a bit tiring. It for one suggests that the reasons people are religious is irrational and that religion itself is irrational. This is simply an ignorant view of religion.
I'm not suggesting that the "most likely" rational choice is any particular religion. However the assumption that all religions (including Mormonism) is irrational is itself a rather strong siren song of ideology.
That's what I say. That's why I have my truck rigged with C4 tied to the custom made car alarm based off an old 486 portable computer motherboard. It plays a recorded MP3 of me laughing and then BOOM.
Admittedly I'm a little worried about liability. But I figure I'll just claim that it was some assassin trying to rig my car to explode.
BTW - you do realize that there are many very educated and thoughtful Mormons, right? I'm not sure the "Bad memes spread easily amoung the uneducated" comment ought to be tied to Mormons. I agree with the general thrust, but not the backhand. . .
Sort of akin to wanting the far right or far left to hold onto their weird beliefs so that they don't contaminate more moderate groups.
Here's one web page on the subject.
Anyway the tidal power finally line is a bit inappropriate.
If someone is copying 1000 files, chances are they don't have resource forks. The point is that the Finder is doing something odd that is taking the extra time.
Whoops. Sorry for not hitting preview and screwing up the link. Java 1.4.1 for OSX Note that you must be a ADC member. But registration is free. To register go to Apple Developer Anyway Apple has been working hard to improve the speed of Swing.
However Java 1.4.1 has been out for some time on OSX. Check out It is admittedly a beta. But I've been told that as a beta 1.4.1 is still vastly better than 1.4.
BTW - unless some goofy professor decided to stick you with an assignment that uses 1.4, why would you be using such a recently released version of Java? Especially with all the problems that have been widely reported?
Here's a simple test. Copy a directory of 1000 files in the Finder and then do it with the shell. In theory the same actual OS operations are going on. However the Finder will be dramatically slower. Of course intellectually copying that many files with a GUI is silly to begin with. But we'll ignore that for now.
Copying, while dramatically better than 10.0 and 10.1, is still the achilles heel of the Finder. It also doesn't play nice with displaying directories with large number of files either. Under 10.1 this was enough to keep me from developing under OSX. It was simply too slow to switch between the Finder and my compiler. Under older versions I'm not sure that copying was multithreaded either. Which honestly was an egregious error and I'm surrpised it took so long to fix.
With the current Finder things are markedly better. Not perfect, mind you. As I mentioned elsewhere, programmers and Unix geeks ought to try Path Finder, which is a Finder replacement. I've not run speed tests on copying, so I can't speak to that. However it has many features that the Finder doesn't.
Personally though if you are playing with large numbers of files you should learn the shell. Copying files using wildcards and the like is frequently far more efficient and speedy.
BTW, if you want a better finder check out Path Finder.
Anyway, back to the original point, Carbon apps are not slower than Cocoa apps. Best example? All the recent (and SLOW) iApps are written in Cocoa. The best iApp is iTunes which is written in Carbon. Carbon has some downsides, such as not being able to make use of Services. Further up until recently many OSX interface features weren't really supported by Carbon. (i.e. drawers) Apple has been working at unifying the features of both frameworks. This will hopefully eliminate differences between apps, such as in terms of how Open/Save dialog boxes work.
Arguing regarding speed is simply silly though. The problem is bad programming. And yes, until 10.2, the Finder was horrible. (IMO)
I did have some problems with some pages, but that appears to be a problem with the Flash plug-in for OSX. Download the latest one from Macromedia and that problem goes away.
It is still missing some features I like and is obviously still under development. But the recently released 0.6 version is pretty amazing.
It still isn't as fast as Linux or XP (IMO), but has enough polish that I still prefer using it. There are some things that count more than speed. I think OSX does well on those.
I must ask though why these rather generic OSX discussions keep coming up on Slashdot. They seem more appropriate for some forum rather than "news for geeks." Don't get me wrong, I love OSX. I can't wait for 10.3 which will probably be the final reason to pick it over other OSes. But does it really justify all these topics?
If you are of the mindset (as sadly many are) that "action" entails merely new laws, then you are right. However many changes (such as reworking existing organizations, improving communication, etc.) still require a lot of support from the congress. Something that they don't appear to really care that much about.
Right now the changes to air travel are largely silly and often counterproductive. The DNS still is basically emasculated. The borders are so porus it isn't funny. And monitoring of incoming shipments is still woeful. (Although admittedly there is a lot more going on there than the public really knows about)
My big qualm is why we have SO many different law enforcement agencies all of which compete with each other. For instance in the so called drug war we have Customs, DEA, ATF, FBI, and other organizations all duplicating efforts and often competing with each other. The competition also tends to mean that one organization won't share information with the others in an effective fashion. This was criticized heavily long before 9/11 but not enough has been done since 9/11.
Like I said, if you REALLY think that everything was rosey before 9/11 and 9/11 WASN'T a wakeup call, that's fine. You've made your decision. However if you do think 9/11 was a wakeup call then the question is what needs done?
This is something that the government needs feedback on. Just leaving it to others won't cut it. I for one am thankful for the feedback of the NSA. Obviously not everyone here will agree on where the lines ought to be drawn. But hopefully most will agree that we ought to discuss it!
Note that I'm not opposed to this, although I think we as citizens need to think carefully about how the information is used and dissiminated.
I think, for instance, that it would be wrong to give this information to American businesses. (As some suggested a few years ago)
The worry is that information intelligence agencies gained can be used against minor crimes like someone with a secret drug habit, or speeding, or whatever.
I'm very much for privacy as a basic civil right. But I think we have to ask the difficult question of what privacy is. And that hasn't been asked.
The mere fact that campaign finance reform was necessary tells us that people are so ill informed and so easy to manipulate that the amount of money spent on ads controls how people vote.
I'm not saying that is intrinsically bad. And the fact that you frequently have such competition amongst government organizations limits how the information can be used. (i.e. it is unlikely the NSA would share such information with your local police department)
However the problem with the current terrorist thread is that the line between "outside" and "inside" becomes blurry and following traditional approaches doesn't work well. Further the idea that we can make a clear separation between "domestical criminal" and "foreign soldier/terrorist" is naive at best. We have to rethink these issues while trying to protect the basic views that the founding fathers gave us with our approach to individual liberty.
It's been over a year and most of the important changes to the intelligence committees haven't taken place yet. Exactly how long do you want to wait?
While I agree with basic sentiment, the problem is that action is required now.
I still like Omniweb better than Chimera - but Chimera 0.6 is a speed demon and is rather nice. It definitely renders better. It also doesn't have this problem.