If you read the article, you'll know he means something more complicated than that.
Everyone here really should read this one, the guy mostly writes it himself. It's a really interesting peek at Lucasfilm Computer Division in the 80s -- a bit of movie technology I'd like to hear more about -- and the state of computer music right before everything went fully digital.
The saddest part:
>> "The ASP [LCD's crazy sounding mainframe-driven analog synth] was decommissioned in 1986 and later sold for scrap."
Regarding us greens coming around on Nuclear power: I feel the same way about nuclear power as I always have, only now it's become obvious that opposing nuclear is equivalent to supporting coal. I'm not comfortable with large scale nuclear construction, as it might invest us in a technology that we'd want to be rid of in just a few decades, as new power generation technologies become available.
Regarding the boy who cried wolf problem of 70s environmentalism. The whole movement of and culture of environmentalism was in its youth in the 70s. Science wasn't always given due dilligence. I'm not a climatologist, but through circumstance and an odd set of family connections, I've happened across a lot of them (my dad works in the agricultural end of research bioscience, they're kind of overlapping worlds)
Good old boy, grew up-on-the-farm-in-Georgia red-voting professors of climatology have told me (I usually ask) that they believe in global warming. The data linking average temperature and CO2 content of the atmosphere is ironclad. There's zero doubt that carbon has been entering the atmosphere from outside of the natural cycle We've converted a geologically measurable percentage of the crust's locked carbon into gas -- it's a pretty major feat if you look at the last 200 years fuel consumption as an engineering project.
There's very little doubt that global warming is happening, that it's happening because of carbon, and that it's happening because of human fuel use. Whether depletion of carbon consumers has been a factor is debated -- there's evidence that there's been an ocean algae population explosion in response to deforestation.
The questions are what effects will global warming have, how rapidly will it happen, and can the trend be reversed? There's a lot of debate there, but among the research community the basic fact of carbon emission related global warming is about as debated as evolution is among biologists -- very little.
I'd be wary of discounting global warming just because you disagree with the messengers' political biases. Remember the moral of The Boy who Cried Wolf: that town got eaten by wolves.
Matlab is some beautiful software. Along with Textmate it's pretty much the only commercial software I really crave at the moment, noting that I have access to a media lab with just about any sound / video / image program you could ever want.
I'm not a fanboy, and I don't particularly enjoy using Apple (I made the switch to Debian 6 or 7 years ago and haven't looked back) but I spent a long time doing IT at an art school, and every major OS (server & desktop) rollout went off nearly flawlessly. They've done a great job of making their system compatible with n*x networks while still being stupidly easy to administer if you've got an all-mac shop. Sure, like everyone else, they've got patches and bugfixes, but as far as quality on release day, they're hard to match.
The other side of that coin: Apple expects you to upgrade. Is anyone still using Panther? There's already important software that won't run, and once 10.5 comes out, you might as well be using Windows 3.0. Unlike Oracle and Microsoft, Apple does not view backwards compatibility to be a high-priority, but for the most part their clients know this and anticipate it.
Actually if there's one thing that late 20th century warfare has shown it's that a determined, armed, small group of people (especially in an urban or forrested setting) can effectively resist the control of a heavily armed occupant. You may not be able to fight against an enemy who only wants to see you wiped out, but if they're attempting to impose some sort of order on you, you can fight back very effectively with hit-and-run and guerilla tactics.
If guns are illegal only the police will have guns.
Man, you're really talking out of your ass, aren't you?
Blind people have been using computers since day one. It's only modern GUIs that cause problems. Furthermore, while computer use might seem like a luxury to you, computers are a requirement for nearly every job a blind person could reasonably be expected to do.
I'm sorry about your muscle problems, but leading into your diatribe with them as a way of making your readers think you have some sort of special sympathy for the disabled (and thus we're supposed to be more charitable to your dismissive comments about disabled peoples' needs) is frankly ridiculous. You've been shut out of a small portion of life's opportunities. Major disabilities make finding *any* self-supporting path through life an extreme challenge. I believe the unemployment rate for the blind is somewhere around 80% (though don't quote me on that)
Anyway, you don't know what you're talking about, and you're discounting the hard work and legitimate needs of a lot of people. So kindly, STFU.
I've made a lazy career out of developing. Off and on along with other stuff... construction... being in school... food service...
I haven't been a PC gamer since the graphics cards got more expensive than the games themselves (I only ever purchase 2 or 3 games a year, it just doesn't make any sense) and I just can't participate in PC gaming since the platform has lost the wild creativity of it's heydey (in my mind 486 / Pentium era) what once was a wide platform full of diverse independant studios, is now a homogenized graphics fest focused around a tiny handful of genres, none of which I can play, because I haven't played the 10 or so games that lead up to them (much like I can't play modern fighting games because they all assume a skillset that a new user doesn't have, and I don't have the patience to build). Nintendo has become the only platform I care about, because they seem to be the only company and community of developers dedicated to providing a rich and novel experience to casual gamers who lack twitch reflexes, hundreds of hours a month to commit, and an appetite for l337 d00d fare like vampires and terrorists. Yawn. I'll take my "kid stuff" any day.
I love how many people on one side of this debate (there are more than two) seem to think investing in new technology and researching effective ways of changing consumption patterns amount to "putting our economy on hold." Talk about futurephobia.
If I had a cent to invest, I'd be looking for the intersection for emerging consumer economies (that is, formerly 3rd world countries with rapidly growing middle classes) and alternative energy sources, particularly those that will survive increased international pressure as evidence for climate change caused by human carbon emissions masses (the evidence is already pretty rock solid, but as more amasses, fewer and fewer in the international community will be able to ignore it.) So look for zero carbon (wind looks to be the most promising right now) and carbon-neutral (biofuels, you only release as much carbon as what you grew absorbed in its lifetime - as opposed to burning carbon you dig out of the ground) power solutions in the former 3rd world. Invest across a handful of technologies and markets, and you're pretty sure to do well.
Put our economy on hold? WTF? Things are changing. Economies are always in states of flux. Don't deny science because it might be inconvenient to your pocketbook; reorient your pocketbook to the current situation.
No since they announced the Intel macs, they've been fielding questions about whether or not they'd let other OSes (namely windows, they've always been reasonably friendly to the OSS folks -- well "reasonably" they still occasionally pick hardware manufacturers who don't open up their specs, just look at all the trouble people have been having getting the TiBook Airport Extreme cards working on Linux) and their line has been "we're not going to help you, but we won't stop you either."
Now, I'd be curious to see how that stance changes if Microsoft themselves were to release "Windows for Mac" until then, though, I don't think they have much reason to worry. If it takes geeky custom work, then the vast majority of the market won't be doing dual-boots. Remember, the average user never installs any operating system ever.
Also, I don't think Mac is worried about "mac users start using windows and realize they don't need or want OS X" Windows really does suck compared to every other current OS. It's got good application support, but that's it. But unless you're a gamer or a non-graphics professional, the unsupported applications don't make much of a difference. People who play a lot of PC games (a diminishing and increasingly rarified group, as it now costs hundreds of dollars a year just to keep a minimally sufficient gaming rig current -- gaming has moved to the consoles thanks to EA & others catering almost exclusively to the hardcore on the PC... I'm really pissed about this, I badly miss the mid-90s era of PC gaming... on the other hand, it has made it pretty easy to ditch windows for everything but testing websites) aren't using macs anyway, so this isn't a big potential market loss.
I don't think Microsoft will be making a windows for Mac though. They don't want people trying other OSes. They make their OS for maximum corporate compatibility, and they do a pretty good job of it. It's pretty well manageable, and they have much longer support for outdated products than do Apple or any of the commercial Linuxes. Windows remains popular on the desktop because of cheap hardware and people needing to take work home. However, if their customer base were able to keep compatibility while trying out a mac, they'd be in real danger of losing out to technically superior (in the sense of nice-to-dummies end-user desktop-OS) product.
*I* wouldn't mind a dual-core Mac mini. But It'll be a long time before I drop the money. I think OS X is the most friendly day-to-day OS, but Ubuntu hasn't given me any problems of any kind, and I'm kind of tied to my custom gnome setup now (3 toolbars, 6 workspaces, emacs-like keybindings all over the place)
There's a real quality scale on writable CDs (I haven't messed with DVD-R much at all, but I would guess it's similar) for more money you can get archive quality disks that will last 10 years or so if handled well.
Burn checksums to disk and write on a folder "copy info on 8/12" (for instance, i'd say whenever you're at about 75% of the life of the media)
Obviously if durability of your data is important, you're going to want some sort of redundant magnetic tape system... those will last you decades. If you're working in sound or video, I'd STRONGLY advocate doing a final transfer of anything digital onto analogue. It's worth the money to do a 200 unit pressing of a finished album onto vinyl, and then keep a couple of dozen of those in a couple of safe, dry, places. It's conceivable that in 500 years someone will find a vinyl (or better yet, bakelite or some other harder, "old" plastic, perhapse even the metal die used for pressing) copy of your work, but any digital format will be long since degraded, and even if not, will be in a then meaningless format.
Film is trickier, but if you have a few 16 or 32 mm (no current digital imaging really requires 32mm for archiving) prints, 150 years from now, a careful archivist could probably piece together an original reel from several slightly degraded copies. Storage here is even more important.
I don't know much about high-end printing of digital photographs. Is there a way to get a traditional-media negative printed from a digital image? I don't trust the gussied up inkjets that are used for "photo quality" printing to stick around and be hung in a museum 150 years from now, the way mid-19th century photographs last.
It's become so easy to store data that we don't pay enough attention to making sure that data will outlive us. We could be in the middle of a new dark age as far as future historians are concerned, and not even know it.
Don't worry about it. For all the superior crap you hear from people with "employable" degrees, they only get one a job with a boss, and really, who wants one of those? Start a business and never fill out another resume, you won't look back.
You might wonder why you stuck around and finished college in the first place though. Looking back I have to wonder if the whole point wasn't just to train me to say "yes, sir" for four years.
Slashdot Mirror
If you read the article, you'll know he means something more complicated than that.
Everyone here really should read this one, the guy mostly writes it himself. It's a really interesting peek at Lucasfilm Computer Division in the 80s -- a bit of movie technology I'd like to hear more about -- and the state of computer music right before everything went fully digital.
The saddest part:
>> "The ASP [LCD's crazy sounding mainframe-driven analog synth] was decommissioned in 1986 and later sold for scrap."
It seems very clear to me that the results of research or engineering paid for with public funds should be held in the public domain.
I think ALL government science should be done under some form of BSD license.
1) Fat32 doesn't support partitions above a certain size. However, the installer should catch that.
/etc/apt/sources.list
2) reconfigure
Regarding us greens coming around on Nuclear power: I feel the same way about nuclear power as I always have, only now it's become obvious that opposing nuclear is equivalent to supporting coal. I'm not comfortable with large scale nuclear construction, as it might invest us in a technology that we'd want to be rid of in just a few decades, as new power generation technologies become available.
Regarding the boy who cried wolf problem of 70s environmentalism. The whole movement of and culture of environmentalism was in its youth in the 70s. Science wasn't always given due dilligence. I'm not a climatologist, but through circumstance and an odd set of family connections, I've happened across a lot of them (my dad works in the agricultural end of research bioscience, they're kind of overlapping worlds)
Good old boy, grew up-on-the-farm-in-Georgia red-voting professors of climatology have told me (I usually ask) that they believe in global warming. The data linking average temperature and CO2 content of the atmosphere is ironclad. There's zero doubt that carbon has been entering the atmosphere from outside of the natural cycle We've converted a geologically measurable percentage of the crust's locked carbon into gas -- it's a pretty major feat if you look at the last 200 years fuel consumption as an engineering project.
There's very little doubt that global warming is happening, that it's happening because of carbon, and that it's happening because of human fuel use. Whether depletion of carbon consumers has been a factor is debated -- there's evidence that there's been an ocean algae population explosion in response to deforestation.
The questions are what effects will global warming have, how rapidly will it happen, and can the trend be reversed? There's a lot of debate there, but among the research community the basic fact of carbon emission related global warming is about as debated as evolution is among biologists -- very little.
I'd be wary of discounting global warming just because you disagree with the messengers' political biases. Remember the moral of The Boy who Cried Wolf: that town got eaten by wolves.
I'm sure glad you two will have settled this debate in a few months. Let us know who was right, OK?
Bannerman Smash!
it's a comic book reference... and not a very good one.
"Mankind has always dreamed of destroying the sun."
- Mr. Burns
anyone have a video of the little guy in action?
Hey now!
Look at any 2004 election returns by county map. See that tiny blue due east of Atlanta? That's me!!!
UGA has very fine biology and life sciences departments. You'd be getting rid of some fine scientists.
You know... there was a time where cinemas were pretty much the only place to go for porn.
You know, with XP having been on the market for 5 years now, I think it's likely that almost everyone buying a computer now already has an XP license.
I know I've got 2 or 3, and I don't use the damn thing...
Yeah, but crimping cables cold *SUCKS*
I can't believe we haven't worked out a better way to do that one...
As I sit at my $7 / hour job, I find it hard to have a lot of pity for major MS shareholders.
oh and that was a *joke,* angry libertarians...
we're venturing offtopic here, but man,
Matlab is some beautiful software. Along with Textmate it's pretty much the only commercial software I really crave at the moment, noting that I have access to a media lab with just about any sound / video / image program you could ever want.
Apple.
I'm not a fanboy, and I don't particularly enjoy using Apple (I made the switch to Debian 6 or 7 years ago and haven't looked back) but I spent a long time doing IT at an art school, and every major OS (server & desktop) rollout went off nearly flawlessly. They've done a great job of making their system compatible with n*x networks while still being stupidly easy to administer if you've got an all-mac shop. Sure, like everyone else, they've got patches and bugfixes, but as far as quality on release day, they're hard to match.
The other side of that coin: Apple expects you to upgrade. Is anyone still using Panther? There's already important software that won't run, and once 10.5 comes out, you might as well be using Windows 3.0. Unlike Oracle and Microsoft, Apple does not view backwards compatibility to be a high-priority, but for the most part their clients know this and anticipate it.
The Cherokee were Libertarian?
Actually if there's one thing that late 20th century warfare has shown it's that a determined, armed, small group of people (especially in an urban or forrested setting) can effectively resist the control of a heavily armed occupant. You may not be able to fight against an enemy who only wants to see you wiped out, but if they're attempting to impose some sort of order on you, you can fight back very effectively with hit-and-run and guerilla tactics.
If guns are illegal only the police will have guns.
Man, you're really talking out of your ass, aren't you?
Blind people have been using computers since day one. It's only modern GUIs that cause problems. Furthermore, while computer use might seem like a luxury to you, computers are a requirement for nearly every job a blind person could reasonably be expected to do.
I'm sorry about your muscle problems, but leading into your diatribe with them as a way of making your readers think you have some sort of special sympathy for the disabled (and thus we're supposed to be more charitable to your dismissive comments about disabled peoples' needs) is frankly ridiculous. You've been shut out of a small portion of life's opportunities. Major disabilities make finding *any* self-supporting path through life an extreme challenge. I believe the unemployment rate for the blind is somewhere around 80% (though don't quote me on that)
Anyway, you don't know what you're talking about, and you're discounting the hard work and legitimate needs of a lot of people. So kindly, STFU.
I've made a lazy career out of developing. Off and on along with other stuff... construction... being in school... food service...
I haven't been a PC gamer since the graphics cards got more expensive than the games themselves (I only ever purchase 2 or 3 games a year, it just doesn't make any sense) and I just can't participate in PC gaming since the platform has lost the wild creativity of it's heydey (in my mind 486 / Pentium era) what once was a wide platform full of diverse independant studios, is now a homogenized graphics fest focused around a tiny handful of genres, none of which I can play, because I haven't played the 10 or so games that lead up to them (much like I can't play modern fighting games because they all assume a skillset that a new user doesn't have, and I don't have the patience to build). Nintendo has become the only platform I care about, because they seem to be the only company and community of developers dedicated to providing a rich and novel experience to casual gamers who lack twitch reflexes, hundreds of hours a month to commit, and an appetite for l337 d00d fare like vampires and terrorists. Yawn. I'll take my "kid stuff" any day.
3 days, 3000 men?
I love how many people on one side of this debate (there are more than two) seem to think investing in new technology and researching effective ways of changing consumption patterns amount to "putting our economy on hold." Talk about futurephobia.
If I had a cent to invest, I'd be looking for the intersection for emerging consumer economies (that is, formerly 3rd world countries with rapidly growing middle classes) and alternative energy sources, particularly those that will survive increased international pressure as evidence for climate change caused by human carbon emissions masses (the evidence is already pretty rock solid, but as more amasses, fewer and fewer in the international community will be able to ignore it.) So look for zero carbon (wind looks to be the most promising right now) and carbon-neutral (biofuels, you only release as much carbon as what you grew absorbed in its lifetime - as opposed to burning carbon you dig out of the ground) power solutions in the former 3rd world. Invest across a handful of technologies and markets, and you're pretty sure to do well.
Put our economy on hold? WTF? Things are changing. Economies are always in states of flux. Don't deny science because it might be inconvenient to your pocketbook; reorient your pocketbook to the current situation.
No since they announced the Intel macs, they've been fielding questions about whether or not they'd let other OSes (namely windows, they've always been reasonably friendly to the OSS folks -- well "reasonably" they still occasionally pick hardware manufacturers who don't open up their specs, just look at all the trouble people have been having getting the TiBook Airport Extreme cards working on Linux) and their line has been "we're not going to help you, but we won't stop you either."
Now, I'd be curious to see how that stance changes if Microsoft themselves were to release "Windows for Mac" until then, though, I don't think they have much reason to worry. If it takes geeky custom work, then the vast majority of the market won't be doing dual-boots. Remember, the average user never installs any operating system ever.
Also, I don't think Mac is worried about "mac users start using windows and realize they don't need or want OS X" Windows really does suck compared to every other current OS. It's got good application support, but that's it. But unless you're a gamer or a non-graphics professional, the unsupported applications don't make much of a difference. People who play a lot of PC games (a diminishing and increasingly rarified group, as it now costs hundreds of dollars a year just to keep a minimally sufficient gaming rig current -- gaming has moved to the consoles thanks to EA & others catering almost exclusively to the hardcore on the PC... I'm really pissed about this, I badly miss the mid-90s era of PC gaming... on the other hand, it has made it pretty easy to ditch windows for everything but testing websites) aren't using macs anyway, so this isn't a big potential market loss.
I don't think Microsoft will be making a windows for Mac though. They don't want people trying other OSes. They make their OS for maximum corporate compatibility, and they do a pretty good job of it. It's pretty well manageable, and they have much longer support for outdated products than do Apple or any of the commercial Linuxes. Windows remains popular on the desktop because of cheap hardware and people needing to take work home. However, if their customer base were able to keep compatibility while trying out a mac, they'd be in real danger of losing out to technically superior (in the sense of nice-to-dummies end-user desktop-OS) product.
*I* wouldn't mind a dual-core Mac mini. But It'll be a long time before I drop the money. I think OS X is the most friendly day-to-day OS, but Ubuntu hasn't given me any problems of any kind, and I'm kind of tied to my custom gnome setup now (3 toolbars, 6 workspaces, emacs-like keybindings all over the place)
There's a real quality scale on writable CDs (I haven't messed with DVD-R much at all, but I would guess it's similar) for more money you can get archive quality disks that will last 10 years or so if handled well.
Burn checksums to disk and write on a folder "copy info on 8/12" (for instance, i'd say whenever you're at about 75% of the life of the media)
Obviously if durability of your data is important, you're going to want some sort of redundant magnetic tape system... those will last you decades. If you're working in sound or video, I'd STRONGLY advocate doing a final transfer of anything digital onto analogue. It's worth the money to do a 200 unit pressing of a finished album onto vinyl, and then keep a couple of dozen of those in a couple of safe, dry, places. It's conceivable that in 500 years someone will find a vinyl (or better yet, bakelite or some other harder, "old" plastic, perhapse even the metal die used for pressing) copy of your work, but any digital format will be long since degraded, and even if not, will be in a then meaningless format.
Film is trickier, but if you have a few 16 or 32 mm (no current digital imaging really requires 32mm for archiving) prints, 150 years from now, a careful archivist could probably piece together an original reel from several slightly degraded copies. Storage here is even more important.
I don't know much about high-end printing of digital photographs. Is there a way to get a traditional-media negative printed from a digital image? I don't trust the gussied up inkjets that are used for "photo quality" printing to stick around and be hung in a museum 150 years from now, the way mid-19th century photographs last.
It's become so easy to store data that we don't pay enough attention to making sure that data will outlive us. We could be in the middle of a new dark age as far as future historians are concerned, and not even know it.
Ummm... Apple isn't trying to keep Windows or Linux off of their hardware, you know that right?
Jobs himself has said the company is doing nothing to either aid nor prevent OSes other than X to be configured and installed for new mac hardware.
They're trying to prevent OS X from being installed on non-mac hardware.
Don't worry about it. For all the superior crap you hear from people with "employable" degrees, they only get one a job with a boss, and really, who wants one of those? Start a business and never fill out another resume, you won't look back.
You might wonder why you stuck around and finished college in the first place though. Looking back I have to wonder if the whole point wasn't just to train me to say "yes, sir" for four years.