A "controlled descent" is one where the craft is actively de-orbited. In short thrusters fire to slow the vehicle, it drops lower, encounters increasing amounts of atmosphere and eventually comes down completely.
This sort of descent is well-understood and very reliable. Indeed controlled descents happen with some regularity. Comparing this to uncontrolled descents where the object either had no contact with a ground control or has no means of adjusting it's attitude is about the same as comparing a car driven down a road to a car where the driver has bailed out at high speed. Mir!=Skylab.
Things can't just be "dropped into the Sun". Getting out of Earth orbit takes a LOT of energy and these craft don't have that kind of thrust. If Mir had even a fraction of a percentage of that kind of thrust then it would just be pushed out to a parking orbit and saved as a museum piece.
The area off Australia was picked precisely because there won't be a population nearby or shipping/fishing/cruise ships around. Furthermore they'll all be warned well ahead of time. Go get a globe and actually take a look at where Mir will come down - nothing much there or even nearby. The Pacific Ocean is a b-i-g place and space-junk gets dropped there regularly.
Mir won't likely come down in a single chunk but in a clutter of debris. Unless one of those debris were to land directly on or really close to you or your building they probably wouldn't cause much problem. Again, there's nothing much out in this part of the Pacific to worry about - it's not even very biologically active below the waters & the small additionial amount of material from Mir won't be a big deal compared to the natural rate of meteoric material raining down.
The mold is of earthly origin - it's nothing special. Short of completely sterilizing every object that goes into Mir (neither desired nor practical as folks carry a lot of biological-baggage with them) this is to be expected. Consider mold & mildew to be the rats & mice of space.
Finally it is sad to see this chapter of space history close. On one hand Mir succeeded wildly beyond anyone's dreams, on the other it's now becoming increasingly unreliable & unsafe & it's country can no longer continue to support both it & their other space committments. The folks who designed/built/supported/lived-in Mir are to be commended and all have learnt from their skills and courage, now it is time to move on to the next step.
I'm not going to waste my time listing the stuff Stallman's done or how much of the code on your box was either written by him or responsible in some way to him.
I am going to point out what a jerkoff you come across as, one of those creepy little freaks who feels some sort of instinctive need to badmouth anyone else accomplishing anything because their own dicks are too small to amount to much.
Bust me the moderation points, I don't need 'em anyway and everyone once in awhile it feels good to blast a few of these dungflies that are starting to hang out around here.
There are no standards. Some places use high-tech electronic voting systems, others use an "X" on a slip of paper counted by legions of elderly women (I don't know why elderly women, they just seem to be the overwhelming majority of counters.)
State Electoral Commissions oversee (in some places) County State Electoral Commissions oversee (in some places) Municipal Electoral Commissions. Voting technology can be specified at any level & are most often left to the local areas.
Results are generally tabulated & reported via telephone calls by designated offficials to specified telephone numbers using pre-agreed-upon passwords to identify themselves with call-backs to confirm authenticity. This also varies widely with computer-based systems becoming more common but the call/password/call-back is cheap, established & reliable.
The Press & Campaigns are notified via two methods - either they'll have a person on site at the Election Commission Office or they'll also use the call-in method using passwords.
Furthermore as most should know by now (it's a standard news story that gets dusted off & rerun every year) a vote for US President doesn't actually mean a vote-for-the-president. Instead there's an Electoral College making sure your Vader2000 write-ins don't go anywhere. Finally not all places use Simple Majority for local elections, for example Cambridge, Mass. uses Proportional Representation for it's local candidates.
Many of the "perks" depreciated by the folks polled are actually management-strategy tools.
Getting folks to work together smoothly & efficiently is more then sticking them in a series of nearby workspaces and forcing them to attend the same meetings. Rather it involves a series of techniques that include lubricating the social processes that lead to effective group brainstorming, problem-resolution, pride-in-product & esprit de corps. With these in place management can expect greater creativity, less conflict, higher productivity, improved quality and less staff turnover. Without these social underpinnings the opposite occurs.
Table-Tennis (forbid we ever call it "Ping-Pong"!) , Nerf shoot-outs & the occasionial game of pick-up basketball offer the staff opportunities to interact together in fun ways that both reward them with pleasurable/refreshing breaks from their work & opportunities to improve their interpersonal relationships. Research has consistantly shown that folks who play well together work well together & are happier about it.
That these are seen as "perks" is interesting but ultimately irrelevant. They're not supplied in order to reward individual employeees but rather to constructively improve the overall work environment. If it wasn't games & toys supplied it would be other team-building activities like shared challenges, unusual situations or other joint social activities (preferably involving groups eating together - shared meals are a powerful bonding activity.)
If all of this sounds rather calculating and artificial remember it's no more then so then the company evaluating your worth, loyalty, other opportunities, etc. & determining how much of a bonus to give you. It also the same calculation staff use when deciding to jump ship or not.
Indeed it many cases this engineering should be appreciated. Most folks can recount unpleasent experiences with workplaces where folks didn't function well together & stress became excessive, relationships were unpleasent & the general tenor was not one they enjoyed. If some effort is taken to promote a positive workplace then all benefit from it; employer & employees alike.
By the way, this isn't all squishy HR-drivel. I'm a Tech Manager who long ago learned that keeping staff happy & productive is more then giving them clear direction & hot toys but also making sure their jobs are rewarding & the environment convivial. If it comes down to my buying a half-dozen folks the latest cellphone-du-jure or a office pinball machine they can all bang on, singly & together then I'm going for the most good (for the company) for the greatest number. The phones would make a few happy for a short while when they're off-site. The pinball gets more of them involved with eachother & out of their cubes for some cobweb-clearing sessions that just might become brainstorming sessions.
Take two headphones, budphones are best. Drape them a foot or so so they hang freely from eachother. Watch what happens.
They're magnets. Powerful ones.
Now imagine the size of a typical backpack & stuff going in & out, getting churned around. What are the odds of a floppy & a set of earphones coming with several inches of eachother over the course of a week?
About 100%. Even if they're in separate sections they're likely to cross paths going in, out, when the pack is folder over, whatever.
So, no, you're no expert on speakers, apparently not even familier with them at all. You're not even very strong on the relative strength of the Earth's field relative to that of your hypothetical speaker in close proximity.
Floppies are cheap, floppies are ubiquitous, floppies are the ASCII of storage in today's world.
Floppies are also fragile, VERY fragile. Left alone in the best circumstances they'll often bitrot in a few months. In the chaotic rough-n-tumble treatment of a students life they'll often last mere weeks reliably.
Number one killer of floppies by students? Headphones.
Particularly headphones dumped in the same backpack. HELLO - these are MAGNETS!!!! (Yes,/.'ers are rolling they're eyes but you wouldn't believe how many hs/college students have no idea of this & are shocked when told.)
Number two killer? Abused out-of-alignment floppy drives.
Particularly common on school computers these beaten-up drives caked full-o-crud are a disaster. US$5 mechanisms reading cheap warped floppies covered in crap, spending years filtering dust into their mechanisms, only to have a floppy get stuck inside and then pried out with the ungentle aid of some improvised tools & a panicking user. Machine A will write something that Machine B can't read but Machine D has a 50% of reading. It gets worse from there.
Third most common killer? Simple physical abuse of the floppy.
Repeated physical shocks. Detritus sifting in through the shutter while at the bottom of the 'pack. Being left in a sunny place to cook, dumped in a cold car trunk to freeze. Then of course there's the classic "Pepsi Syndrome".
So, what are the alternatives?
Super-High-density floppies have come & gone for several cycles. None have caught on, none likely will. Their limitations are all of the floppies limitations and their limited distribution doesn't make up for their extra capacity. Most folks don't care if you can save 4 or 50 meg on a floppy if you can't use it anywhere else.
Zip drives are all of the worst qualities of a floppy (slow, unreliable, same media but more fragile mechanism.) They're poorly built & at the end of their technology lifecycle anyhow. Many corporations are rueing the days they rolled them out en masse and are now banning their use for any critical material.
Orb drives? Sort of an "ultra-Zip" built by the refugees from SyQuest they've distinguished themselves with a delayed rollout, expensive media, and poor drivers. They're faster then the Zips but suffer all of the same media problems along with even less distribution.
Burnable CD's are less fragile but the burner costs more and in the hands of the unwary can often create "coasters" (don't interfere excessively with their disk access!) There's software available that does packet-writing to the CD and thus it appears to be simply another mounted drive (albeit a slow one) but it can be unstable itself & produces disks that aren't universally readable.
Portable hard drives were one idea for awhile. There was even a "DriveBay" spec that was floated. Unfortunately nobody ever really got behind it and it's died. One can still retrofit PC's with a similar sort of chassis to slot-load drives but they'll only accept certain designs.
SCSI drives are a long-time favorite of the Mac & publishing communities but with Apple's move from SCSI they too have waned. USB drives were popular for a week 'till folks discovered how painfully s-l-o-w they are. Firewire/1394/iLink (all different names for the same high-speed serial bus) have potential but their drives command a hefty newtech surcharge.
IBM makes an incredible line of microdrives ranging from 340 MB to 1 GB. These can be mounted in PCMCIA/Credit Card devices and slipped into laptops (& retrofitted desktops) but they also cost a bucket.
Unfortunately all of these drives share something in common - they're hard drives and to a great extent share their limitations. Abuse them a bit & they'll fail catastrophically. Even the ruggedized ones made for laptops have limitations that are daily exceeded in a student's life.
Solid State. The future of storage. It'll also require you to mortgage your future to buy. If you're gonna require folks shell out US$50-$200 for a chip it should hold enough to make it through the semester. Unfortunately that's not true of solid-state, not at today's prices and with MS Word files bloating to 20 MB each for a sigle major paper.
So, what to do?
Well, as you've seen once you abandon the floppy the choices are all either just-as-fragile, more expensive, and much less universal. Folks are using floppies 'cause they have them at home, in the dorm, at their off-campus jobs, etc. This won't work for exotic tech like the ones listed above. They all require significant costs to retrofit each campus machine plus each student must purchase the media for it and then it's pretty much useless or at least a major pain off campus...
As many, many folks have pointed out: Dump the media almost altogether.
Install a few central servers easily network-accessible and well maintained. Put a few well-maintained floppy drive equipped machines in each cluster of computers but otherwise drop support for them. Give all of the students a card detailing how to access them from both on-campus or from off-campus (home, work, other institutions, etc.) Teach all of the faculty how to accept material electronically. Set up special time-stamping directories with automated receipts so there's no "I emailed my assignment on time but you didn't get it" problems. Make sure the student's directories on the server's really are trivially accessible once they've gone through the password challenge, again both on & off campus. Support Windows networking, AppleShare IP, FTP, simple web-based access & WEBDAV, etc.
Novell Netware is fantastic at supporting large communities of users like this & has great educational pricing. Windows NT is popular for it's ubiquity & commonality with other installed systems on the campus. Linux is of course cheapest & infinitely flexible. Talk to your neighboring institutions to see what they're using & their experiences, attend a few conferences, you'll quickly get a good feel for where the trends are heading and what tools you really want to look into.
Wean folks from the physical-media habit. Yes, this will require a new set of skills on their part and things like passwords, encryption, & network security will now become much more important. On the other hand that all needed to be done anyway & in the long run is probably cheaper the supporting all of those floppy drives and their fried floppies.
The benefits - USB is on lots of platforms, almost all OS's that support USB support USB drives (abstraction is a good thing) and USB is idiot-proof & non-complex.
On the other hand...
SCSI drives are FAST.
The negatives are that SCSI drives can cost a bit more, SCSI cabling & termination can become a black art requiring sacrifices (standard chicken/goat/virgin progression applies) and it's slightly complex the first time out. On the plus side every OS supports SCSI, it's (again) much faster then USB and it's a much more common thing to do / better supported / better documented.
Look, I know speed isn't everything but USB is like using an old tape drive. It was meant as a low-speed universal serial bus for things like keyboards & mice. Supporting scanners, webcams & speakers pushes it to it's maximum, running a HD off of it is doable but oh-so-painful. Since FireWire/1394/iLink (USB's high-speed cousin) drives still command an exotique-tech surcharge they're probably out of your market so go with the older spec for this stuff: SCSI.
BitMan listed a good set of resources and a better set of baselines to work from. With those you can get up & running quickly & correctly.
"A staffer for Rep. Dan Miller (R-Fla.) was summarily dismissed today after shooting his mouth off to the NYT. Currently Congresscritter Dan Miller is in panic damage-control mode & was last seem hiding under his desk."
Personally I don't see how this li'l drone plans to get his hands on the raw Census data - he's talking out his ass. There have been many assurances, many committments on this & I don't imagine they'll get broken, particularly in an election season.
While one will get X working under MacOS X it doesn't work under Quartz.
Running X on MacOS X isn't terribly impressive - it's been doable on MacOS X's progenitor Darwin for quite some time.
What folks want is an X that can run under MacOS X's Quartz/Aqua environment. Then one could simultanuosly run Classic, Carbon, Cocoa, Java & X applications at the same time. To date this is only doable using the "lame commercial binary".
The article is about cobbling together VNC to talk to X under MacOS X. This is *not* the same as firing up X on one's Mac monitor and getting a plays-well-with-other X window (which is what the "lame commercial binary" does.)
Will there be a retraction this time or will it slide?
Rather, it's gonna have to happen as a series of foggy-areas gradually coalescing into local showers.
Why? First there's complacency. All of the problems with IPv4 have been patchable, work-aroundable, or otherwise resolvable. There's no screaming need for IPv6 right now. There are theoretical benefits and additional features built in but no absolute pressing need for it today, tomorrow, next quarter or next year.
Second there's the additional cost. Developing, testing, deploying, and supporting IPv6 is gonna cost. Apple & Stanford both did massive IP renumberings a few years ago; they cost millions and that's much less difficult then switching IP stacks and network infrastructure. Anybody that rolls out IPv6 in a big way is gonna have to spend a LOT of money doing so and frankly I know of few budgets with that kind of slosh in them.
Software compatibility. Applications and utilities across the board are hard-coded to use IPv4. From word-processors to chat clients to multi-tier ERP applications they all expect IPv4 and burp & spit-up when fed IPv6. Yes there are work arounds and alternatives and all of that but it quickly turns into a rats-nest of slightly different applications and idiosyncratic configurations and the whole set-up just gums up.
Hardware support isn't there yet either. Few products support IPv6 yet. Fewer still do so well. Of those almost none do so optimally. From NICS to routers to management systems to contracts and manuals the boxes aren't ready yet. Sure for a lab or two, even a floor or two on a research building but the minute you start plugging in the obsolete, the unusual, the critical stuff you start running into problems.
That million-dollar super-printer downstairs? No go. The fancy networked building security system? Locks up solid. The black-box encryption system for routing email to our overseas branches? We don't know what happened but now all of the LEDs glow solid and we can't get it to reset.
IPv6 is deep and untested waters. IS/IT/MIS/etc. is complex enough these days without throwing in a giant wild variable like IPv6.
Furthermore we've been burnt before. Remember when OSI was going to rule the world? Then ATM was gonna take over. Now IPv6 is the heir apparent. Frankly until it's out there and in significant quantities that it's a standard order most folks aren't gonna touch it. Oh there will be the occasional test and we'll have a favored techie bone up on it as a cookie/insurance-policy but nobody is taking it seriously.
Even in the wireless phone world IPv6 is finding it hard to roll-out. The equipment is expensive, tolerances are tight, and the requirements are brutal. These are telephony folks - they still have the old tight-ass conservative Bell-ways trained into them even in the wild-'n-woolly new age of wireless. They want many-9's of reliability, flawless interoperability, and the ability to scale quickly and massively before they'll commit.
IPv6 looks great when you're hacking around on your home box. But when it comes to signing the check for a couple million dollars or more (mebbe much more) for hardware, support, training etc. and you know that this will have significant repercussions on your career it suddenly looks much less appealing. IS/IT/MIS/etc. executives aren't cowards, but to get where they are they have to be survivors. Right now & for the foreseeable future IPv6 doesn't look like a good bet to be making.
Finally - what are Cisco, Nortel, 3Com, etc. using internally? Ipv4? Uh huh. If it's so great why aren't the darn manufacturers "eating their own dogfood"? Perhaps even with all of the support in-house they know it's not worth running yet, even for the bragging rights.
-- Michael
ps On the other hand for students, developers, and the ilk - bone up, design-with-this-in-mind, this could be a sea-change that will make your fortune.
They reprint press releases almost verbatim, presenting them as their own reporting. Ever wonder why so many times the exact same phrase or even whole paragraph shows up on 3 or 4 sites? Now you know why.
They use reporters insufficiently familier with the areas they're reporting on & unwilling or unable to do sufficient research into the topic. Thus we get incredibly credulous stories rarely ever noting somethings potential problems, context or competition.
Feedback mechanisms are simply seen as a way of increasing a website's 'stickyness' and not as an integral part of the content. ZDNET's, CNET's, etc. 10-most-recent comments on their stories (generally saying "/whatever/ sux") are a pale shadow of the interactivity/. & other sites offer.
OK, now lets look at this the other way./. refuses to acknowledge that folks really REALLY want to discuss the problems/. is facing but as one can see, lots of people are disagreeing & doing so anyway.
/. needs to grow up a bit and try for some more quality in it's production & presentation. Spelling errors, poor grammer, redundant stories are fine when you're some small-time site, not when you're a big player.
Some editorial checking has to go into the process. Too many stories are slipping through innacurately presented or just completely missing the point. This is why other organizations have more then one set of eyes go over every story and do a quick reality-check on them.
There needs to be some sort of 'phrase filter' that users can select to use. Something that would use phrases from a standard/. 'abused' dictioniary eg "Natalie Portman", "First Post", etc. Those interested could then set/. to omit those flagged postings from our view.
SoloTrek XFV is a brand new kind of flying machine that you step on, strap on, and fly. This ultra-compact aircraft lets you takeoff vertically, dash to your destination, then land literally anywhere. Using ordinary 87-octane gasoline, SoloTrek can hover for up to 3 hours, reach speeds of up to 70 knots, and traverse distances of up to 150 nautical miles. SoloTrek has been designed to be safe, easy to fly, and easy to maintain.
No notes on airbags, Bewulf clusterability, onboard mp3 players or OnStar buttons (in case of problem press & scream - quickly!)
Most (all?) US State Public Utilities Commissions (the folks who are supposed to regulate your local phone company) have mandated special low-cost phone services. These services are generally intended for low-income persons who require a phone in their home in case of an emergency yet who could not otherwise afford the usual residential service.
These special low-cost services are generally limited in a number of ways; oftentimes not being able to call beyond the local area, being unlisted, or unable to receive incoming calls. In short, perfect for second-line or modem-line services. Generally it seems there are no qualifiers for these services (income tests etc.) rather they apparently rely on obscurity.
If you're a cell-phone household like mine then this may well be your low-cost answer, assuming your ISP / Tivo / Replay / whomever have a number within your local area. If you're someone who needs a second line just for modem service this may well save you some cumulative bucks too.
To find out if such a service is available in your area I'd try calling your local phone company & grilling them on this (they clearly don't advertise it much) or contacting your State P.U.C. directly.
One of the interesting points the article makes (I submitted it also) is the suggestion that Open Source be created & required by the US Federal Agencies paying a large portion of the bills.
The arguement was since one agency is co-funding so many projects that it require the projects use a common software base and then the vendors build their hardware to support the software. The advantage would be no longer would NYC / LA / Boston / Chicago / SF / Etc. all keep reinventing the wheel nor paying vendors to reinvent (or resell) the wheel but rather one wheel be defined and used (with local variations) as needed.
The plusses are obvious: Municipal transit systems could cut their software costs. A larger common pool of code would distribute development & debugging costs. Hardware could become standardized. Bidding would become easier as systems would be more similar. Features developed for one municipality would become easily availiable to all, in return they would be reviewed & debugged, possibly being extended in turn.
Of course there are negatives too: Asking some some sort of board to come up with standards...
This could also lead to less-well built systems. While the core system may be standardized it'll have to interact with legacy systems for up to another 30 or 40 years in some cases. Those will all be unique or semi-unique ones and of course building bridges to them will have to be done locally.
Furthermore any common code base will have to be flexible enough to support the myriad local pecularities across the systems. It need not directly include support for these specific features but it'll require the hooks & robustness to accomodate them.
Finally this all reflects the competing free-market/governments-standards issues in the US. Presumably by letting various vendors freely compete they'll come out with better products faster & cheaper then any centrally organized government-run body could. That is official US doctrine.
"The computer [G4]is extremely sluggish compared to a $300 box I have win2k on". Your $300 (I assume US) Win2K box is faster then your Apple G4? Somehow I don't believe that statement, not at least as you've told it.
"I have never had any problems installing a program like Office on any of my computers, whether Mac or Windows." *You* may have never had problems installing programs like Office on your machines, but clearly you've never worked in a large environment. Out in the big world we have lots of problems with application installs on Windows we don't see on Macs (mostly 'cause Mac programs tend not to litter the OS with bits of themselves.) We don't generally see these problems with virgin installs but with what I described: Upgrading from one version to the next. It's quite common for some part of a previous version to hang around & cause problems down the road.
"Windows has a much less cumersome GUI". By what measure?
"The computers [Windows] comes on are cheaper": Not always. When one compares a bare-bones no-name PC to a Mac sure they don't match but when one compares a name brand product like a Dell or a HP with a NIC, soundcard, decent monitor (Apple uses the high-quality Sony ones), FireWire/1394/iLink, etc. to a Mac then the margin is much closer. Apple is almost never cheaper but it's usually competitive.
"Crashes a lot less". They both do. You can fight this back & forth but for uptime neither is great.
"Even if you a die-hard Mac user use a PC for a week, they will complain that Windows is slow, ugly, and crashed more then Mac OS 9." I'm not a "die-hard Mac user" rather I'm an IS professionial who uses Mac, Windows boxes & a variety of other systems on a regular basis now & for the past 14 years. I like Mac sure, for some folks they're a great solution. I also manage 5000 Windows boxes and they're good at what they're used for. The same as there's no one-model-suits-all car there's no universal-PC-solution. I do agree that the default Windows interface is butt-ugly though.
"a) People buy Macs because they are "cute" b) People buy Macs because they are the "fastest" c) People buy Macs because they are "easy to use". I think we blew away the "cute" point earlier. Faster, sure, for some things like PhotoShop, and easier to use, great! I see folks all day, intelligent people who use computers as integral to their jobs who can barely use their WinPCs. Yeah, I'll agree that Macs are somewhat easier to pick up if one's never seen a computer before. Tougher if one is used to Windows conventions but even then when going back & forth many folks do tend to prefer the Mac.
Finally, most Mac users would understand the value of proof-reading, grammer-checking, formatting text for legibility, and of course how-to-spell-check. Consider learning how to do this on your $300 Win2k box.
(set flamers on low, please) (I am not a Lawyer nor do I play one on TV)
MAPS is likening itself, correctly in my opinion, to a Reviewer. The same as one voluntarily buys a copy of/localpaper/ and then reads the reviews, deciding whether or not the Reviewer sounds reasonable, MAPS is voluntary and no one is bound to follow their opinion.
However Reviewers have been successfully sued in the past. One cannot simply publish "It stinks!" (or "It's spam!") without having some sort of objective basis. Courts can & have walked this fine line between free speech and defamation.
Thus the question can move from "Does MAPS have a right to do this?" to "Is MAPS being fair in it's labelling?". This is where the MAPS folks might run into difficulty defending to the Court how they determine what is "spam" (or "Unsolicited-Commercial-Email") and what is not.
If (and this is a big "If") Network Ice can demonstrate that MAPS could be inaccurately labelling some sites as spam sites, specifically Network Ice, then MAPS could have problems.
-- Michael
ps MAPS is based in California, USA & Network Ice is from New Hampshire, USA.
This was a large object, much of it's internal material was unaffected by passage through the atmosphere. Sure the leading edge(s) were vaporized, and likely the following meter or so was pretty well cooked but the inside probably never warmed up significantly. Indeed it's this thermal stress that probably caused it to shatter low in the atmosphere.
The pieces came to rest on the surface of a frozen lake. That's a pretty pristine area. That they didn't melt through directly indicates they were fairly cool when they landed. Thus we have relatively cool objects that aren't heavily contaminated, particularly on their insides where the local bugs wouldn't have had much opportunity to penetrate.
As to their being unaffected during their time in space - likely they did go through changes, changes that leave evidence.
Finally, the burned organic material you're familiar with leaves carbon residues because it's organic in nature, which hereabouts is carbon-based. Burn a bit of sulphur though & you don't magically get carbon, you get sulphur & oxygen decomposition products. Burning generally means "oxidizing" which implies you'll get whatever + oxygen products, not whatever + oxygen = carbon.
Burning a random hunk of metal or stone such as most meteoric material is made of won't magically get you carbon either. It has to come from someplace & this object is interesting because it's got lots of carbon & it's in long-chain forms (not the sort of short-chains one gets from burning anyhow.)
Personally I suggest you signing up at your local Community College, perhaps for a basic course in Geology & another basic course in Chemistry. While you're at it you might consider Rhetoric (so you'll understand how to construct an argument) and Social Skills so you won't come off such an ass.
Man that is so wrong & I'm so sick of hearing geeks say that as if it was received wisdom.
iMacs don't sell 'cause they're 'cute'. Yeah, good design probably does enter into the equation (if you've gotta plunk down a couple grand for something that's gonna be in your living space would you prefer it look like a Singer sewing machine in it's case circa 1965 or something a bit more attractive?) but bang-for-the-buck they're decent machines.
Whoa now, DON'T go spitting up MHz or bus speeds or any of that - that only matters to hardware jockeys & game freaks. To the average customer the iMac is an accessible, reasonably powerful computer running the popular Mac OS at a reasonably affordable price. That's what it offers and that's why they've been selling like hotcakes.
It's not some damn Barbie clone walking into the store & squealing out "It's cuuute! I want one!" Nor is it Serge the designer saying "You must buy ze iMac - it goes with the Feng Shu of your home." At ~US$1500 a pop neither's a big market & it would have been exhausted long ago.
You want an iMac customer? Take my Dad: Prof. Mike Maggard, if you ever study business odds are you'll use his textbook in OM, he's one of the guys who pioneered computers in business. Dad's got an iMac on his desk at home. Why? 'Cause it does what he wants. Reads his email, browse the net, look at the occasional Word or Excel file, low maintenance, always on, and luggable enough he can drag it to the summer house with no hassle.
Problems with his iMac? None. It sits there quietly on it's table waiting to be used, when he moves the mouse it wakes up & is ready for action. Training to use it? None. At the university he has a WinNT PC and only wishes it was as reliable as his Mac.
Installed MS Office 2001 the other day - what was involved? Insert CD with Office 2001. Drag old Office 98 folder to Trash. Drag new Office 2001 folder from CD to HD. Double-click on any app, answer a few questions, import email, all done. Repeat: ALL DONE. No installer app crap, no hassle, 1 minute (longest part was copying from the CD) and he's cleanly upgraded his entire primary applications suite. Do that in NT? Do that in Linux? Thought not. Folks who want their computing experience to be this frictionless like Mac & the tutti-frutti colors are a bonus.
Basic sales problem: How to communicate to a customer that the Whizbang2000 is faster then then the competing MegaFooFoo2000?
Answer: Use a number that does in some vague way represent a speed difference and sounds really sexy, MHz. The more MHz you got the faster you are baby!
Sure your neighbor has a 700 MHz box but for only a couple grand you can buy this new 1.2 *GHz* box and wipe him off of the map! We sold you cars this way, why not computers? Reality - pshaw - who cares? Joe Sixpack knows thay want "MHz" and MHz we'll sell him.
AMD tried convincing folks their 300 MHZ was just as fast as Intel's 400 MHz chips (or whatever the exact speeds were.) Didn't work, "Processor Class" went away & when AMD surged in speeds they never looked back. Apple tries to convince everyone that their 500 MHz PowerPC is comparable to a 700 MHz Intel PIII and while it may well be no one cares - columnist after columnist sneers at Apple for it's poky 500 MHz (or dual 500 MHz) chips.
Big-iron folks know, mini-folks know, workstation folks know, but the general computer buyer doesn't know that there's a dozen or so variables that affect the speed of a consumer box & CPU speed is only one of them. Motherboard speed, RAM speed, cache size & speed, hard drive speed, so many basic issues affect the 'speed' of a computer but are ignored for the MHz rating.
So know you want to communicate this information to Joe Sixpack who just wants to come into the store, drop a few grand to get a fast box tricked out with today's must-have technology and be back home in an hour? Or to Savvy Shopper who's bought a dozen geek mags in the past week, read over every one yet still has no clue of what any term means & will want the 19 year-old community college part-time clerk to try & explain it all?
No slams here but it aint gonna happen. Folks know MHz, they understand MHz are faster, they want MHz (or now GHz.) Sure they might buy a 1.2 GHz machine with crappy slow RAM & a 5400 RPM hard drive but it's gonna be FAST 'cause it's *1.2* *GHz*!
"It goes to *11*, man! Not just "10" like everyone else but to *11*!"
The rest of us roll our eyes but hell, that's the way the world works. You're not going to find another intrinsic value that communicates the speed of a computer to the general public better then MHz and there's no chance of getting everyone to agree to an artificial one.
No, Apple didn't have a 3D Finder, at least that was ever publically released but they did (or better put, one of their then many many blue-sky R&D folks) did come up with a 3D visualization/navigation tool (read 'plug-in') for web-spaces. There was even a version of Yahoo that demonstrated the project, allowing one to fly amongst the subject catagories. This was in Fall '96.
In practice one saw a black window (space) full of many colored lozanges each with a node's name. One could then 'fly' around them, zooming in (& into) them to locate information. Apparently the idea was one could index information in such a way that like material was located nearby in 3D space. Frankly it wasn't worth the effort though it had potential.
Like so many other kewl Apple projects this got dumped when the company realized it was bleeding money it couldn't afford out every pore & started killing projects without short-term potential. As I recall the developer left & went to a start-up that quickly sank from sight.
I've seached a few times for the plug-in but it's lost to the winds of time.
Get a cellphone with SMS capability, then route your messages through this.
The simplest way to handle the human-side of this is to create a "mypager@someisp.net" address and forward it through to your real address, thus making it clear what kind of message is appropriate while also hiding your cellphone number.
If you've a box on the net you can do fun things to make it all much more flexible. The easiest/most effactive is adding a sequence number to each message so you can tell if you've missed any. Another nice one is the ability to redirect messages (based on their sequence number) to a handy fax machine. Finally of course there's the good old web interface for all of them.
Tricks like this got me down from 3 pagers & a mondo cellphone to a single small phone. No longer need I fear shorting out in a rainstorm, plus the whole Batbelt look was so 90's.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually 15 or so years ago I stopped by his office around 3am, had an excellent cup of tea and an interesting conversation.
As to your homophobia - grow up. Besides, last I heard he was hetero.
I am going to point out what a jerkoff you come across as, one of those creepy little freaks who feels some sort of instinctive need to badmouth anyone else accomplishing anything because their own dicks are too small to amount to much.
Bust me the moderation points, I don't need 'em anyway and everyone once in awhile it feels good to blast a few of these dungflies that are starting to hang out around here.
What about the BSDs, Apple's Darwin, and a dozen or so other OS's depending on the usage of "free"?
State Electoral Commissions oversee (in some places) County State Electoral Commissions oversee (in some places) Municipal Electoral Commissions. Voting technology can be specified at any level & are most often left to the local areas.
Results are generally tabulated & reported via telephone calls by designated offficials to specified telephone numbers using pre-agreed-upon passwords to identify themselves with call-backs to confirm authenticity. This also varies widely with computer-based systems becoming more common but the call/password/call-back is cheap, established & reliable.
The Press & Campaigns are notified via two methods - either they'll have a person on site at the Election Commission Office or they'll also use the call-in method using passwords.
Furthermore as most should know by now (it's a standard news story that gets dusted off & rerun every year) a vote for US President doesn't actually mean a vote-for-the-president. Instead there's an Electoral College making sure your Vader2000 write-ins don't go anywhere. Finally not all places use Simple Majority for local elections, for example Cambridge, Mass. uses Proportional Representation for it's local candidates.
"Push&l t;/a>" anyone?
Getting folks to work together smoothly & efficiently is more then sticking them in a series of nearby workspaces and forcing them to attend the same meetings. Rather it involves a series of techniques that include lubricating the social processes that lead to effective group brainstorming, problem-resolution, pride-in-product & esprit de corps. With these in place management can expect greater creativity, less conflict, higher productivity, improved quality and less staff turnover. Without these social underpinnings the opposite occurs.
Table-Tennis (forbid we ever call it "Ping-Pong"!) , Nerf shoot-outs & the occasionial game of pick-up basketball offer the staff opportunities to interact together in fun ways that both reward them with pleasurable/refreshing breaks from their work & opportunities to improve their interpersonal relationships. Research has consistantly shown that folks who play well together work well together & are happier about it.
That these are seen as "perks" is interesting but ultimately irrelevant. They're not supplied in order to reward individual employeees but rather to constructively improve the overall work environment. If it wasn't games & toys supplied it would be other team-building activities like shared challenges, unusual situations or other joint social activities (preferably involving groups eating together - shared meals are a powerful bonding activity.)
If all of this sounds rather calculating and artificial remember it's no more then so then the company evaluating your worth, loyalty, other opportunities, etc. & determining how much of a bonus to give you. It also the same calculation staff use when deciding to jump ship or not.
Indeed it many cases this engineering should be appreciated. Most folks can recount unpleasent experiences with workplaces where folks didn't function well together & stress became excessive, relationships were unpleasent & the general tenor was not one they enjoyed. If some effort is taken to promote a positive workplace then all benefit from it; employer & employees alike.
By the way, this isn't all squishy HR-drivel. I'm a Tech Manager who long ago learned that keeping staff happy & productive is more then giving them clear direction & hot toys but also making sure their jobs are rewarding & the environment convivial. If it comes down to my buying a half-dozen folks the latest cellphone-du-jure or a office pinball machine they can all bang on, singly & together then I'm going for the most good (for the company) for the greatest number. The phones would make a few happy for a short while when they're off-site. The pinball gets more of them involved with eachother & out of their cubes for some cobweb-clearing sessions that just might become brainstorming sessions.
They're magnets. Powerful ones.
Now imagine the size of a typical backpack & stuff going in & out, getting churned around. What are the odds of a floppy & a set of earphones coming with several inches of eachother over the course of a week?
About 100%. Even if they're in separate sections they're likely to cross paths going in, out, when the pack is folder over, whatever.
So, no, you're no expert on speakers, apparently not even familier with them at all. You're not even very strong on the relative strength of the Earth's field relative to that of your hypothetical speaker in close proximity.
Floppies are also fragile, VERY fragile. Left alone in the best circumstances they'll often bitrot in a few months. In the chaotic rough-n-tumble treatment of a students life they'll often last mere weeks reliably.
Number one killer of floppies by students? Headphones.
Particularly headphones dumped in the same backpack. HELLO - these are MAGNETS!!!! (Yes, /.'ers are rolling they're eyes but you wouldn't believe how many hs/college students have no idea of this & are shocked when told.)
Number two killer? Abused out-of-alignment floppy drives.
Particularly common on school computers these beaten-up drives caked full-o-crud are a disaster. US$5 mechanisms reading cheap warped floppies covered in crap, spending years filtering dust into their mechanisms, only to have a floppy get stuck inside and then pried out with the ungentle aid of some improvised tools & a panicking user. Machine A will write something that Machine B can't read but Machine D has a 50% of reading. It gets worse from there.
Third most common killer? Simple physical abuse of the floppy.
Repeated physical shocks. Detritus sifting in through the shutter while at the bottom of the 'pack. Being left in a sunny place to cook, dumped in a cold car trunk to freeze. Then of course there's the classic "Pepsi Syndrome".
So, what are the alternatives?
Super-High-density floppies have come & gone for several cycles. None have caught on, none likely will. Their limitations are all of the floppies limitations and their limited distribution doesn't make up for their extra capacity. Most folks don't care if you can save 4 or 50 meg on a floppy if you can't use it anywhere else.
Zip drives are all of the worst qualities of a floppy (slow, unreliable, same media but more fragile mechanism.) They're poorly built & at the end of their technology lifecycle anyhow. Many corporations are rueing the days they rolled them out en masse and are now banning their use for any critical material.
Orb drives? Sort of an "ultra-Zip" built by the refugees from SyQuest they've distinguished themselves with a delayed rollout, expensive media, and poor drivers. They're faster then the Zips but suffer all of the same media problems along with even less distribution.
Burnable CD's are less fragile but the burner costs more and in the hands of the unwary can often create "coasters" (don't interfere excessively with their disk access!) There's software available that does packet-writing to the CD and thus it appears to be simply another mounted drive (albeit a slow one) but it can be unstable itself & produces disks that aren't universally readable.
Portable hard drives were one idea for awhile. There was even a "DriveBay" spec that was floated. Unfortunately nobody ever really got behind it and it's died. One can still retrofit PC's with a similar sort of chassis to slot-load drives but they'll only accept certain designs.
SCSI drives are a long-time favorite of the Mac & publishing communities but with Apple's move from SCSI they too have waned. USB drives were popular for a week 'till folks discovered how painfully s-l-o-w they are. Firewire/1394/iLink (all different names for the same high-speed serial bus) have potential but their drives command a hefty newtech surcharge.
IBM makes an incredible line of microdrives ranging from 340 MB to 1 GB. These can be mounted in PCMCIA/Credit Card devices and slipped into laptops (& retrofitted desktops) but they also cost a bucket.
Unfortunately all of these drives share something in common - they're hard drives and to a great extent share their limitations. Abuse them a bit & they'll fail catastrophically. Even the ruggedized ones made for laptops have limitations that are daily exceeded in a student's life.
Solid State. The future of storage. It'll also require you to mortgage your future to buy. If you're gonna require folks shell out US$50-$200 for a chip it should hold enough to make it through the semester. Unfortunately that's not true of solid-state, not at today's prices and with MS Word files bloating to 20 MB each for a sigle major paper.
So, what to do?
Well, as you've seen once you abandon the floppy the choices are all either just-as-fragile, more expensive, and much less universal. Folks are using floppies 'cause they have them at home, in the dorm, at their off-campus jobs, etc. This won't work for exotic tech like the ones listed above. They all require significant costs to retrofit each campus machine plus each student must purchase the media for it and then it's pretty much useless or at least a major pain off campus...
As many, many folks have pointed out: Dump the media almost altogether.
Install a few central servers easily network-accessible and well maintained. Put a few well-maintained floppy drive equipped machines in each cluster of computers but otherwise drop support for them. Give all of the students a card detailing how to access them from both on-campus or from off-campus (home, work, other institutions, etc.) Teach all of the faculty how to accept material electronically. Set up special time-stamping directories with automated receipts so there's no "I emailed my assignment on time but you didn't get it" problems. Make sure the student's directories on the server's really are trivially accessible once they've gone through the password challenge, again both on & off campus. Support Windows networking, AppleShare IP, FTP, simple web-based access & WEBDAV, etc.
Novell Netware is fantastic at supporting large communities of users like this & has great educational pricing. Windows NT is popular for it's ubiquity & commonality with other installed systems on the campus. Linux is of course cheapest & infinitely flexible. Talk to your neighboring institutions to see what they're using & their experiences, attend a few conferences, you'll quickly get a good feel for where the trends are heading and what tools you really want to look into.
Wean folks from the physical-media habit. Yes, this will require a new set of skills on their part and things like passwords, encryption, & network security will now become much more important. On the other hand that all needed to be done anyway & in the long run is probably cheaper the supporting all of those floppy drives and their fried floppies.
The benefits - USB is on lots of platforms, almost all OS's that support USB support USB drives (abstraction is a good thing) and USB is idiot-proof & non-complex.
On the other hand...
SCSI drives are FAST.
The negatives are that SCSI drives can cost a bit more, SCSI cabling & termination can become a black art requiring sacrifices (standard chicken/goat/virgin progression applies) and it's slightly complex the first time out. On the plus side every OS supports SCSI, it's (again) much faster then USB and it's a much more common thing to do / better supported / better documented.
Look, I know speed isn't everything but USB is like using an old tape drive. It was meant as a low-speed universal serial bus for things like keyboards & mice. Supporting scanners, webcams & speakers pushes it to it's maximum, running a HD off of it is doable but oh-so-painful. Since FireWire/1394/iLink (USB's high-speed cousin) drives still command an exotique-tech surcharge they're probably out of your market so go with the older spec for this stuff: SCSI.
BitMan listed a good set of resources and a better set of baselines to work from. With those you can get up & running quickly & correctly.
Personally I don't see how this li'l drone plans to get his hands on the raw Census data - he's talking out his ass. There have been many assurances, many committments on this & I don't imagine they'll get broken, particularly in an election season.
While one will get X working under MacOS X it doesn't work under Quartz.
Running X on MacOS X isn't terribly impressive - it's been doable on MacOS X's progenitor Darwin for quite some time.
What folks want is an X that can run under MacOS X's Quartz/Aqua environment. Then one could simultanuosly run Classic, Carbon, Cocoa, Java & X applications at the same time. To date this is only doable using the "lame commercial binary".
Will there be a retraction this time or will it slide?
Rather, it's gonna have to happen as a series of foggy-areas gradually coalescing into local showers.
Why? First there's complacency. All of the problems with IPv4 have been patchable, work-aroundable, or otherwise resolvable. There's no screaming need for IPv6 right now. There are theoretical benefits and additional features built in but no absolute pressing need for it today, tomorrow, next quarter or next year.
Second there's the additional cost. Developing, testing, deploying, and supporting IPv6 is gonna cost. Apple & Stanford both did massive IP renumberings a few years ago; they cost millions and that's much less difficult then switching IP stacks and network infrastructure. Anybody that rolls out IPv6 in a big way is gonna have to spend a LOT of money doing so and frankly I know of few budgets with that kind of slosh in them.
Software compatibility. Applications and utilities across the board are hard-coded to use IPv4. From word-processors to chat clients to multi-tier ERP applications they all expect IPv4 and burp & spit-up when fed IPv6. Yes there are work arounds and alternatives and all of that but it quickly turns into a rats-nest of slightly different applications and idiosyncratic configurations and the whole set-up just gums up.
Hardware support isn't there yet either. Few products support IPv6 yet. Fewer still do so well. Of those almost none do so optimally. From NICS to routers to management systems to contracts and manuals the boxes aren't ready yet. Sure for a lab or two, even a floor or two on a research building but the minute you start plugging in the obsolete, the unusual, the critical stuff you start running into problems.
That million-dollar super-printer downstairs? No go. The fancy networked building security system? Locks up solid. The black-box encryption system for routing email to our overseas branches? We don't know what happened but now all of the LEDs glow solid and we can't get it to reset.
IPv6 is deep and untested waters. IS/IT/MIS/etc. is complex enough these days without throwing in a giant wild variable like IPv6.
Furthermore we've been burnt before. Remember when OSI was going to rule the world? Then ATM was gonna take over. Now IPv6 is the heir apparent. Frankly until it's out there and in significant quantities that it's a standard order most folks aren't gonna touch it. Oh there will be the occasional test and we'll have a favored techie bone up on it as a cookie/insurance-policy but nobody is taking it seriously.
Even in the wireless phone world IPv6 is finding it hard to roll-out. The equipment is expensive, tolerances are tight, and the requirements are brutal. These are telephony folks - they still have the old tight-ass conservative Bell-ways trained into them even in the wild-'n-woolly new age of wireless. They want many-9's of reliability, flawless interoperability, and the ability to scale quickly and massively before they'll commit.
IPv6 looks great when you're hacking around on your home box. But when it comes to signing the check for a couple million dollars or more (mebbe much more) for hardware, support, training etc. and you know that this will have significant repercussions on your career it suddenly looks much less appealing. IS/IT/MIS/etc. executives aren't cowards, but to get where they are they have to be survivors. Right now & for the foreseeable future IPv6 doesn't look like a good bet to be making.
Finally - what are Cisco, Nortel, 3Com, etc. using internally? Ipv4? Uh huh. If it's so great why aren't the darn manufacturers "eating their own dogfood"? Perhaps even with all of the support in-house they know it's not worth running yet, even for the bragging rights.
-- Michael
ps On the other hand for students, developers, and the ilk - bone up, design-with-this-in-mind, this could be a sea-change that will make your fortune.
They reprint press releases almost verbatim, presenting them as their own reporting. Ever wonder why so many times the exact same phrase or even whole paragraph shows up on 3 or 4 sites? Now you know why.
They use reporters insufficiently familier with the areas they're reporting on & unwilling or unable to do sufficient research into the topic. Thus we get incredibly credulous stories rarely ever noting somethings potential problems, context or competition.
Feedback mechanisms are simply seen as a way of increasing a website's 'stickyness' and not as an integral part of the content. ZDNET's, CNET's, etc. 10-most-recent comments on their stories (generally saying "/whatever/ sux") are a pale shadow of the interactivity /. & other sites offer.
OK, now lets look at this the other way. /. refuses to acknowledge that folks really REALLY want to discuss the problems /. is facing but as one can see, lots of people are disagreeing & doing so anyway.
Some editorial checking has to go into the process. Too many stories are slipping through innacurately presented or just completely missing the point. This is why other organizations have more then one set of eyes go over every story and do a quick reality-check on them.
There needs to be some sort of 'phrase filter' that users can select to use. Something that would use phrases from a standard /. 'abused' dictioniary eg "Natalie Portman", "First Post", etc. Those interested could then set /. to omit those flagged postings from our view.
From their site:
No notes on airbags, Bewulf clusterability, onboard mp3 players or OnStar buttons (in case of problem press & scream - quickly!)These special low-cost services are generally limited in a number of ways; oftentimes not being able to call beyond the local area, being unlisted, or unable to receive incoming calls. In short, perfect for second-line or modem-line services. Generally it seems there are no qualifiers for these services (income tests etc.) rather they apparently rely on obscurity.
If you're a cell-phone household like mine then this may well be your low-cost answer, assuming your ISP / Tivo / Replay / whomever have a number within your local area. If you're someone who needs a second line just for modem service this may well save you some cumulative bucks too.
To find out if such a service is available in your area I'd try calling your local phone company & grilling them on this (they clearly don't advertise it much) or contacting your State P.U.C. directly.
The arguement was since one agency is co-funding so many projects that it require the projects use a common software base and then the vendors build their hardware to support the software. The advantage would be no longer would NYC / LA / Boston / Chicago / SF / Etc. all keep reinventing the wheel nor paying vendors to reinvent (or resell) the wheel but rather one wheel be defined and used (with local variations) as needed.
The plusses are obvious: Municipal transit systems could cut their software costs. A larger common pool of code would distribute development & debugging costs. Hardware could become standardized. Bidding would become easier as systems would be more similar. Features developed for one municipality would become easily availiable to all, in return they would be reviewed & debugged, possibly being extended in turn.
Of course there are negatives too: Asking some some sort of board to come up with standards...
This could also lead to less-well built systems. While the core system may be standardized it'll have to interact with legacy systems for up to another 30 or 40 years in some cases. Those will all be unique or semi-unique ones and of course building bridges to them will have to be done locally.
Furthermore any common code base will have to be flexible enough to support the myriad local pecularities across the systems. It need not directly include support for these specific features but it'll require the hooks & robustness to accomodate them.
Finally this all reflects the competing free-market/governments-standards issues in the US. Presumably by letting various vendors freely compete they'll come out with better products faster & cheaper then any centrally organized government-run body could. That is official US doctrine.
(set flamers on low, please)
(I am not a Lawyer nor do I play one on TV)
MAPS is likening itself, correctly in my opinion, to a Reviewer. The same as one voluntarily buys a copy of /localpaper/ and then reads the reviews, deciding whether or not the Reviewer sounds reasonable, MAPS is voluntary and no one is bound to follow their opinion.
However Reviewers have been successfully sued in the past. One cannot simply publish "It stinks!" (or "It's spam!") without having some sort of objective basis. Courts can & have walked this fine line between free speech and defamation.
Thus the question can move from "Does MAPS have a right to do this?" to "Is MAPS being fair in it's labelling?". This is where the MAPS folks might run into difficulty defending to the Court how they determine what is "spam" (or "Unsolicited-Commercial-Email") and what is not.
If (and this is a big "If") Network Ice can demonstrate that MAPS could be inaccurately labelling some sites as spam sites, specifically Network Ice, then MAPS could have problems.
-- Michael
ps MAPS is based in California, USA & Network Ice is from New Hampshire, USA.
(Snotty comments deserve snotty replies)
This was a large object, much of it's internal material was unaffected by passage through the atmosphere. Sure the leading edge(s) were vaporized, and likely the following meter or so was pretty well cooked but the inside probably never warmed up significantly. Indeed it's this thermal stress that probably caused it to shatter low in the atmosphere.
The pieces came to rest on the surface of a frozen lake. That's a pretty pristine area. That they didn't melt through directly indicates they were fairly cool when they landed. Thus we have relatively cool objects that aren't heavily contaminated, particularly on their insides where the local bugs wouldn't have had much opportunity to penetrate.
As to their being unaffected during their time in space - likely they did go through changes, changes that leave evidence.
Finally, the burned organic material you're familiar with leaves carbon residues because it's organic in nature, which hereabouts is carbon-based. Burn a bit of sulphur though & you don't magically get carbon, you get sulphur & oxygen decomposition products. Burning generally means "oxidizing" which implies you'll get whatever + oxygen products, not whatever + oxygen = carbon.
Burning a random hunk of metal or stone such as most meteoric material is made of won't magically get you carbon either. It has to come from someplace & this object is interesting because it's got lots of carbon & it's in long-chain forms (not the sort of short-chains one gets from burning anyhow.)
Personally I suggest you signing up at your local Community College, perhaps for a basic course in Geology & another basic course in Chemistry. While you're at it you might consider Rhetoric (so you'll understand how to construct an argument) and Social Skills so you won't come off such an ass.
iMacs don't sell 'cause they're 'cute'. Yeah, good design probably does enter into the equation (if you've gotta plunk down a couple grand for something that's gonna be in your living space would you prefer it look like a Singer sewing machine in it's case circa 1965 or something a bit more attractive?) but bang-for-the-buck they're decent machines.
Whoa now, DON'T go spitting up MHz or bus speeds or any of that - that only matters to hardware jockeys & game freaks. To the average customer the iMac is an accessible, reasonably powerful computer running the popular Mac OS at a reasonably affordable price. That's what it offers and that's why they've been selling like hotcakes.
It's not some damn Barbie clone walking into the store & squealing out "It's cuuute! I want one!" Nor is it Serge the designer saying "You must buy ze iMac - it goes with the Feng Shu of your home." At ~US$1500 a pop neither's a big market & it would have been exhausted long ago.
You want an iMac customer? Take my Dad: Prof. Mike Maggard, if you ever study business odds are you'll use his textbook in OM, he's one of the guys who pioneered computers in business. Dad's got an iMac on his desk at home. Why? 'Cause it does what he wants. Reads his email, browse the net, look at the occasional Word or Excel file, low maintenance, always on, and luggable enough he can drag it to the summer house with no hassle.
Problems with his iMac? None. It sits there quietly on it's table waiting to be used, when he moves the mouse it wakes up & is ready for action. Training to use it? None. At the university he has a WinNT PC and only wishes it was as reliable as his Mac.
Installed MS Office 2001 the other day - what was involved? Insert CD with Office 2001. Drag old Office 98 folder to Trash. Drag new Office 2001 folder from CD to HD. Double-click on any app, answer a few questions, import email, all done. Repeat: ALL DONE. No installer app crap, no hassle, 1 minute (longest part was copying from the CD) and he's cleanly upgraded his entire primary applications suite. Do that in NT? Do that in Linux? Thought not. Folks who want their computing experience to be this frictionless like Mac & the tutti-frutti colors are a bonus.
Answer: Use a number that does in some vague way represent a speed difference and sounds really sexy, MHz. The more MHz you got the faster you are baby!
Sure your neighbor has a 700 MHz box but for only a couple grand you can buy this new 1.2 *GHz* box and wipe him off of the map! We sold you cars this way, why not computers? Reality - pshaw - who cares? Joe Sixpack knows thay want "MHz" and MHz we'll sell him.
AMD tried convincing folks their 300 MHZ was just as fast as Intel's 400 MHz chips (or whatever the exact speeds were.) Didn't work, "Processor Class" went away & when AMD surged in speeds they never looked back. Apple tries to convince everyone that their 500 MHz PowerPC is comparable to a 700 MHz Intel PIII and while it may well be no one cares - columnist after columnist sneers at Apple for it's poky 500 MHz (or dual 500 MHz) chips.
Big-iron folks know, mini-folks know, workstation folks know, but the general computer buyer doesn't know that there's a dozen or so variables that affect the speed of a consumer box & CPU speed is only one of them. Motherboard speed, RAM speed, cache size & speed, hard drive speed, so many basic issues affect the 'speed' of a computer but are ignored for the MHz rating.
So know you want to communicate this information to Joe Sixpack who just wants to come into the store, drop a few grand to get a fast box tricked out with today's must-have technology and be back home in an hour? Or to Savvy Shopper who's bought a dozen geek mags in the past week, read over every one yet still has no clue of what any term means & will want the 19 year-old community college part-time clerk to try & explain it all?
No slams here but it aint gonna happen. Folks know MHz, they understand MHz are faster, they want MHz (or now GHz.) Sure they might buy a 1.2 GHz machine with crappy slow RAM & a 5400 RPM hard drive but it's gonna be FAST 'cause it's *1.2* *GHz*!
"It goes to *11*, man! Not just "10" like everyone else but to *11*!"
The rest of us roll our eyes but hell, that's the way the world works. You're not going to find another intrinsic value that communicates the speed of a computer to the general public better then MHz and there's no chance of getting everyone to agree to an artificial one.
In practice one saw a black window (space) full of many colored lozanges each with a node's name. One could then 'fly' around them, zooming in (& into) them to locate information. Apparently the idea was one could index information in such a way that like material was located nearby in 3D space. Frankly it wasn't worth the effort though it had potential.
Like so many other kewl Apple projects this got dumped when the company realized it was bleeding money it couldn't afford out every pore & started killing projects without short-term potential. As I recall the developer left & went to a start-up that quickly sank from sight.
I've seached a few times for the plug-in but it's lost to the winds of time.
The simplest way to handle the human-side of this is to create a "mypager@someisp.net" address and forward it through to your real address, thus making it clear what kind of message is appropriate while also hiding your cellphone number.
If you've a box on the net you can do fun things to make it all much more flexible. The easiest/most effactive is adding a sequence number to each message so you can tell if you've missed any. Another nice one is the ability to redirect messages (based on their sequence number) to a handy fax machine. Finally of course there's the good old web interface for all of them.
Tricks like this got me down from 3 pagers & a mondo cellphone to a single small phone. No longer need I fear shorting out in a rainstorm, plus the whole Batbelt look was so 90's.