IANAPhysicist, but I'm the one complaining about sending spent fuel to the dumps, and I agree with the parent. Remember I wan't complaining about the technology, but about sociopolitical decisions. I would like to see truly safe nuke power (this is a SOCIAL issue people, I just don't trust corporate or its lackey goverment motives on this score) and have the spent material used up instead of waiting for something bad to happen 200 years from now when the dump location is nearly forgotten. Turn it into plutonium and power probes with it, for pete's sake, or something useful and also safe. IANAP or SF writer, so you qualified nerds think of something useful for the stuff.
You completely fail to grasp the real picture, as if you don't understand a definition of risk.
Look, I know we have the technical capacity to keep nuke power safe and minimize risks reasonably, and I'm all for that. I'm saying that the real risk is sociopolitical, and you're failing to both read my post and examine the evidence of past failures.
Chernobyl was primarily a social failure, nyet? Lack of will and budget. Yet the effect of that failure has rarely been truly publicized, as it stretched far beyond the incidence of children with leukemia in Kiev.
I was working/studying in India at the time. The milk that couldn't be sold in Europe or NA markets was being sold in poor countries, and used for baby formula. It was underreported in the rich countries. Put that risk in your bottle and suck it.
A few hundred people get sick from an asbestos-laden building. Millions are at risk, for generations, from bad nuke management. Given the direction of policy and the utilities industries in the States, I don't feel confident that the risks are going to be managed properly. Fix your system, give reasonable regs and checks and balances some longevity, then build away.
P.S. I use the word technocrat in a derogatory sense, as in I have a hammer so that problem must be a nail. What, you've never met engineers who think they can manage a company but are dictatorial bureaucrats at heart with a quasi-techno fix to every problem?
But on the scale of things, being forbidden to look at porn says that she has a reasonably sized problem.
Or, that she teaches Women's Studies at a college, has a reasonable analysis of the nature of the porn industry based on experience and studyl, and doesn't have time to bother investigating erotica to see if it is meeting her high standards, since life is sexy and erotic enough in the short moments between caring for children, chores, and work. So, porn consumption is suspect until proven worthy, fair enough. Erotica is generally ok but... "aren't you getting enough? C'mere" would be a more likely response than forbidding in such a relationship.
Some things just aren't worth the argument. And some whippings make up for other whippings.
[not the g.p. poster, by the way, just chiming in]
I, like many of those in your two-thirds 'statistic,' am not afraid of fission. I'm afraid of idiots who don't know what to do with the products of fission, but take on the job anyway and truck it to some underground facility. I'm afraid of a for-profit utility that cuts corners. I'm afraid of backroom legistlation that looks the other way for the "Mr. Burns" in your town. In other words, the social risks need to be considered, for they are as significant as any technical issue. No different from building a dam upstream; do you want them to bid on the job based on cut-rate concrete? In this issue, the risks are potentially very large and long-lasting, and technology simply isn't enough.
So the fear isn't ridiculous; what's ridiculous is looking at the problem like a technocrat.
My seventh-grade science teacher tried to dig up a dandelion once, to show us
how long their roots are.
This is an example of why an anecdote (sample set of one) is lousy for science, except to provoke further investigation, shame on your teacher. Look, they're EVERYwhere, just go out and dig up a few. I've eaten hundreds, nay, thousands of dandelions, and dug up many more, and I can testify (based on a reasonable sample set) that in a temperate climate the average root depth will be something like two and a half decimeters (under one foot).
If you're too glued to the keyboard and can't verify for yourself that your teacher was misleading you by exhibiting a monstrous sport, at least be nerdly and google for some proxy experience.
Even if you could grow them with the roots suspended in air, a crop of
dandelions is still going to have taproots -- long, straight taproots --
and you have to put them somewhere.
Dandelions will work just lovely in a hydroponic setup, taking only slightly more space than red radishes. You don't grow high-tech hydroponics in soil or water. In fact, some of the h.p. techniques for root vegetables look exactly like they are growing in the air, at first glance. You only need about three feet of vertical to grow dandelions hydroponically.
You want something you can grow in an inch of rich soil, ideally.
You really need to get some dirt under your nails before you can try saying things like that. The only food that will grow happily in an inch of soil is groundcover like purslane, or herbs. Fruiting and leaf crops, however, have very small root arrays in hydroponics, since they don't have to reach for the food. Think a 10 meter tomato vine with a rootball smaller than your head.
Soil is likely to be unwelcome on a cramped mission with exposed delicate equipment. Soil is mostly biomass that's full of an astonishing, nearly uncountable array of organisms, it isn't dirt. You don't want that stuff swimming around up there in zero G air. Anything that messy will have to be well-sealed, so maybe they could have organism-rich aquaponics, but not soil. Hydroponics would be nutrient-bath style.
You'd need soil several meters deep to accommodate the root system
Ah, really? You're a hydroponics specialist? Can't grow root crops without soil, eh?
I've never seen a dandelion with roots more than about two or three decimeters deep, even in really good tilth. You must have some 'a them there one-ton pumpkins in your backyard! Maybe some two-headed squirrels too. Time to move.
You can eat it too. Also, all the generations and careful breeding practices would make it ideal for indoor hydroponic growing in spaceships/domes etc. But does it produce worthwhile atmospheric regulation per foot compared to the candidates they are now studying?
Guess you've never seen or smelled it growing over time. It is a very fast growing plant (especially the far northern varieties) that rather obviously affects the air, far more than any other greenhouse plant I've seen, not just in pungent aroma. (Hey, I used to live in BC, and know plenty of farmers of various specialties, including industrial hemp, ahem.)
The seed is very high in proteins, tasty and nutty--you can buy these at some health food stores as nut butters etc. (local restrictions may apply!). The varieties grown as food/air/fibre crops are not THC laden and some are very short, like their sister varieties grown for stealth hydroponic operations. So despite political opposition to the plant, and the resulting unlikeliness of adequate research on its atmospheric regulation abilities, it isn't such a far-fetched idea.
And they could always do just sprouts, dried grains and seeds are fairly compact and already being mostly dehydrated they are efficient to launch weight wise, and after sprouting they have activated enzymes which make them a lot more nutritous than the mature plant. It's a small window with sprouts, usually about until they get their first real leaves, as opposed to the bud leaves.
I had a personal experiment relating to this: a cross-continent bicycle tour. Since 5 meals a day wasn't really enough, we supplemented with sprouting sunflower and beans right on our bikes. Very cheap efficient energy food and easy to make (just remember to rinse frequently), the result was a strong thumbs-up.
Why does everyone expect thet GE can solve everything?
It's neato and nerdly.
Meanwhile, the world is full of nutritious useful plant species that are not suited to large-scale industrial ag or being promoted as a commodity, so they fall off the proverbial table and are ignored in discussions like this.
People often think there are a dozen varieties of potato because that's what is mass-marketed; when the Incas were invaded, they cultivated thousands of varieties, and thousands more were bred since then, but most of those are now endangered due to being garden crops and not combine-friendly. Local varieties of food plants around the world are bred for all kinds of conditions and growth patterns.
Don't forget that astronauts would be gardeners, not farmers. Different plants need apply.
Then there's the lowly weed. Do people know just how useful and healthful dandelion is? It's pretty damn efficient. Millions spent in a lab to improve on dandelion for applications like this would be hilarious.
The average north american's culinary imagination is sorely stunted by indulgence and an overprocessed food system.
I've often wondered why efforts like this don't design a habitat inside cylindrical tanks of water. Portions of the tank system could be used for aquatic food sources like fish, and part of the reclamation/purification cycle. All of it would serve as reservoir, and potentially an emergency fuel source. Done properly, it could also help with radiation shielding.
It would be perfect for rapid growth, air recycling, and low maintenance. Provides excellent mulch and is nutritious. Sounds efficient and like it would serve multiple functions.
One of the other posters speculated about gene-mod plants being useful for rapid growth and enhanced yield etc. My first reaction was that we ignore many of the useful food plants, call them weeds because they're too successful, and poison ourselves in the process; we should spend millions to reproduce this in the lab?
Weeds are where it's at: nettle, dandelion, mustard, etc. etc. are nutritious and useful in many ways.
Well, it doesn't taste that bad, if you're eating spirulina, considering how damn good it is for you in the right dosages. Sounds sensible to me. I tease my significant other for drinking "pond scum" in her orange juice, but she doesn't mind the taste at all.
If that list is bona fide, I'm surprised soy beans aren't on it.
I'm not. Fava is also a short bushing bean--so it fits the same stacking profile for access to light--and just as versatile with less processing required. Soy is good for large harvesting machines, which has something to do with its ubiquity--it's tied to a large industrial system. Simply boiled fava beans taste better than soy prepared the same way. They have similar nutritious characteristics. Less processing=better nutrition, better energy consumption. Give me a fava plant in the garden over soy any day.
Interesting to note in that story that they mention low-pressure growing environments to reduce structural stresses. If you've ever been up to super-high altitude places like the Andes or Himalayan valleys, you'll see some massive vegetables, because of the strong sun and carefully managed micro-climates. I wonder what the pressure threshold is for typical vegetables to thrive.
The failure was in the fact that the system wasn't balanced very well, and the lifeforms that thrived were the likes of cockcroaches; not the humans that were intended to do scientific experiments there.
In a cup-is-half-full approach to semi-independent systems, you could say that what they had was not an excess of cockroaches but a shortage of chickens. I mean, why waste all those wonderful little packages of proteins and minerals? Turn them into eggs. Cockroaches in themselves can be useful for scavenging detritus in a garden. An excess of anything like that is just a failure to integrate the system and make sure everything's being used in multiple ways.
I wonder if those biosphere folks ever heard of permaculture?
Interesting, and as a gardener with farmers and nutritionists for friends, believable. Where did you obtain this list? (uncited, so not really informative, mods)
Sweet potato is a large plant, lots of beta carotene. A few of these plants are very heavy feeders, but rapid growers. Nettle is a nutritional secret: you can almost live on the stuff alone. Spider plant is a heavy breather. Not many people know that kudzu is good for you, or that dandelion used to be a cultivated staple in european gardens--you use the whole plant.
Catnip, redwood, trumpet vine, and thistle are headscratchers, though. Medicine, wood, and mulch?
They read over the sign, "The Sony Store", they are very swanky and very expensive. Usually in malls, but my home-town did have a stand-alone one about 5-10 years ago (I belive it closed eventually)
I've been in Sony Stores all over Canada (don't ask). Most of them are pretty drab to me, as though someone said 'hey, let's make a boutique' and got stuck just past FutureShop / BestBuy. They have the same feeling fundamental to any store in a mall (even though some of them are on the street)--a kind of dolorous, 'oh, another electronics store' feeling, and then you get closer and realize you can have any design ethic you want as long as it's Sony's, which is even worse.
The one here in Windsor (pop.220K) is in a typical mall and belongs there. As other canucks have attested the staff are much like you'd expect, either clueless university students just trying to make it to sunday, hoping you won't ask them a technical question, or slick jims with greased down hair and a technohungry look; the prices are generally as premium as the brand name would warrant; and they've been here for years. And, they won't deal with the pro line of gear, grrr.
Hey, I like most sony products, I make a living using them by choice. But they got the retail thing wrong, or, well, yawn, in Canada.
I've been using Word since v.1.0 ('85? 86?) came on a 400k mac floppy. For most of its long life, Word has been well-tended on the mac side, and the gp post is correct about it's often better usability on the mac side (v.X, the last version, still has v.5.1 toolbars as an interface option, as a testament to its following).
MS doesn't have that many divisions that rake in the dough, but the Mac business unit is pretty profitable. I think that if their options for leveraging the business desktop away from Linux run out, you'll see some pretty slick versions of Office on Linux in a few years.
I think I could write up a similar chart about Gravity's Rainbow and Cryptonomicon.
Hear, hear. I kept thinking while reading Cryptonomicon; "this is an upgrade of Gravity's Rainbow" -- every bit as fun and wordgeeky, and I was happy to trade the traces of Mystery in Pynchon for the traces of the Future in Stephenson.
English majors (oh wait, do any read/.?) -- there's a paper topic for ya.
I recently developed curriculum for a 3rd year university course titled Digital Media, and while we (team of two) did our best to deal with fundamentals (resolution, file format, etc.), we had to think of
1. hands-on learning of tools in a reasonable amount of time 2. students who want to get jobs with these tools 3. the available training materials outside of the course 4. the equipment in the lab...which turned out to mean that we wound up building the whole course around learning Photoshop, After Effects, Pro Tools, and Final Cut Pro (yeah, Mac platform).
These programs have consistent (enough) interfaces, integrate well, and these tools are what the students demand. Had we been using PC's, it would have been Premiere (shudder).
I kept thinking while doing it... why isn't there open source curriculum to pick up and run with? MIT didn't have anything (at the time) that we could use. Had I more power locally, I would have forced the issue with our course.
Yes, which is my point about these being positioned as iMovie machines. Most 'serious' video apps want to display two video screens (clip and timeline, e.g.), a timeline, and a file browser of some kind. Same issue with iDVD and DVD Studio Pro. Pro apps assume a large display area, because you have a lot of information to manage; the iLife apps manage that information for you, by removing options. Not that they don't work just fine for most of what you would want to do. And, I know people using pro apps on those dinky 12" displays, and they still have all their hair.
After all, 1024x768 is similar or better resolution to NTSC, right?
Well, sorta. NTSC is 525 lines of resolution on a tv monitor, 30 frames per sec, and aspect ratio is 4:3. Well, it's actually 60 fps, since it's interlaced to equal 30. 720x480 and 640x480 or 320x240 are converted to NTSC by your analog video connections. NTSC standard resolution is 648x486. Any details that won't show up at that resolution are lost.
Re:yet more confusion between ibook and powerbook
on
Apple Announces New iBooks
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
You basically *need* a PowerBook for video work.
Yes. Wait, No.
"Need" is one of those funny bendable words. I just helped someone who's fairly broke get a low-end iBook in order to finish postproduction on a major project (12 one-hour training videos). It's working fine, just a little slow switching in and out of Photoshop and FCP (needs more RAM and hasn't started the dual monitor hack yet).
I have friends who are getting short (20+ mins.) films into major festivals using souped-up G3 450's, and I'm busy (ahem,/. aside) running a 1hr. feature through a dual 450. Yes, faster machines make for better render times, but you need to take a break anyway (and need to respect your deadlines well). The real speed comes with knowing what you're doing, and that's wetware not hardware.
Don't believe the hype. Rendering speed is only a major issue when you have to cycle stuff out the door quickly to make the bucks. Otherwise, the interface is responsive enough, and I generally get just as much done on the G4 dual450 as I do on the spanky fast dualG5, if it's basic editing.
Apple still cripples the iBook with mirrored-only video..
I've no idea why they continue do it, but..
Because they're a money-grubbing corporation, like they're supposed to be, and they need reasons for you to go for the larger-margin FryingPan, er PowerBook. Damn you Apple!:-P Try editing video in 1024x768--yuck. They definitely position these as iMovie machines.
That said, the Open Firmware hack to get monitor spanning works well when it works, and is a disaster when things (rarely) go wrong. It also works on some eMacs, too.
Slashdot Mirror
Waste is just that... inefficient, expensive, stupid, and eventually dangerous no matter the claim. Use it all or don't make it, I say.
IANAPhysicist, but I'm the one complaining about sending spent fuel to the dumps, and I agree with the parent. Remember I wan't complaining about the technology, but about sociopolitical decisions. I would like to see truly safe nuke power (this is a SOCIAL issue people, I just don't trust corporate or its lackey goverment motives on this score) and have the spent material used up instead of waiting for something bad to happen 200 years from now when the dump location is nearly forgotten. Turn it into plutonium and power probes with it, for pete's sake, or something useful and also safe. IANAP or SF writer, so you qualified nerds think of something useful for the stuff.
Look, I know we have the technical capacity to keep nuke power safe and minimize risks reasonably, and I'm all for that. I'm saying that the real risk is sociopolitical, and you're failing to both read my post and examine the evidence of past failures.
Chernobyl was primarily a social failure, nyet? Lack of will and budget. Yet the effect of that failure has rarely been truly publicized, as it stretched far beyond the incidence of children with leukemia in Kiev.
I was working/studying in India at the time. The milk that couldn't be sold in Europe or NA markets was being sold in poor countries, and used for baby formula. It was underreported in the rich countries. Put that risk in your bottle and suck it.
A few hundred people get sick from an asbestos-laden building. Millions are at risk, for generations, from bad nuke management. Given the direction of policy and the utilities industries in the States, I don't feel confident that the risks are going to be managed properly. Fix your system, give reasonable regs and checks and balances some longevity, then build away.
P.S. I use the word technocrat in a derogatory sense, as in I have a hammer so that problem must be a nail. What, you've never met engineers who think they can manage a company but are dictatorial bureaucrats at heart with a quasi-techno fix to every problem?
Or, that she teaches Women's Studies at a college, has a reasonable analysis of the nature of the porn industry based on experience and studyl, and doesn't have time to bother investigating erotica to see if it is meeting her high standards, since life is sexy and erotic enough in the short moments between caring for children, chores, and work. So, porn consumption is suspect until proven worthy, fair enough. Erotica is generally ok but... "aren't you getting enough? C'mere" would be a more likely response than forbidding in such a relationship.
Some things just aren't worth the argument. And some whippings make up for other whippings.
[not the g.p. poster, by the way, just chiming in]
I, like many of those in your two-thirds 'statistic,' am not afraid of fission. I'm afraid of idiots who don't know what to do with the products of fission, but take on the job anyway and truck it to some underground facility. I'm afraid of a for-profit utility that cuts corners. I'm afraid of backroom legistlation that looks the other way for the "Mr. Burns" in your town. In other words, the social risks need to be considered, for they are as significant as any technical issue. No different from building a dam upstream; do you want them to bid on the job based on cut-rate concrete? In this issue, the risks are potentially very large and long-lasting, and technology simply isn't enough.
So the fear isn't ridiculous; what's ridiculous is looking at the problem like a technocrat.
This is an example of why an anecdote (sample set of one) is lousy for science, except to provoke further investigation, shame on your teacher. Look, they're EVERYwhere, just go out and dig up a few. I've eaten hundreds, nay, thousands of dandelions, and dug up many more, and I can testify (based on a reasonable sample set) that in a temperate climate the average root depth will be something like two and a half decimeters (under one foot).
If you're too glued to the keyboard and can't verify for yourself that your teacher was misleading you by exhibiting a monstrous sport, at least be nerdly and google for some proxy experience.
Even if you could grow them with the roots suspended in air, a crop of dandelions is still going to have taproots -- long, straight taproots -- and you have to put them somewhere.
Dandelions will work just lovely in a hydroponic setup, taking only slightly more space than red radishes. You don't grow high-tech hydroponics in soil or water. In fact, some of the h.p. techniques for root vegetables look exactly like they are growing in the air, at first glance. You only need about three feet of vertical to grow dandelions hydroponically.
You want something you can grow in an inch of rich soil, ideally.
You really need to get some dirt under your nails before you can try saying things like that. The only food that will grow happily in an inch of soil is groundcover like purslane, or herbs. Fruiting and leaf crops, however, have very small root arrays in hydroponics, since they don't have to reach for the food. Think a 10 meter tomato vine with a rootball smaller than your head.
Soil is likely to be unwelcome on a cramped mission with exposed delicate equipment. Soil is mostly biomass that's full of an astonishing, nearly uncountable array of organisms, it isn't dirt. You don't want that stuff swimming around up there in zero G air. Anything that messy will have to be well-sealed, so maybe they could have organism-rich aquaponics, but not soil. Hydroponics would be nutrient-bath style.
Ah, really? You're a hydroponics specialist? Can't grow root crops without soil, eh?
I've never seen a dandelion with roots more than about two or three decimeters deep, even in really good tilth. You must have some 'a them there one-ton pumpkins in your backyard! Maybe some two-headed squirrels too. Time to move.
Guess you've never seen or smelled it growing over time. It is a very fast growing plant (especially the far northern varieties) that rather obviously affects the air, far more than any other greenhouse plant I've seen, not just in pungent aroma. (Hey, I used to live in BC, and know plenty of farmers of various specialties, including industrial hemp, ahem.)
The seed is very high in proteins, tasty and nutty--you can buy these at some health food stores as nut butters etc. (local restrictions may apply!). The varieties grown as food/air/fibre crops are not THC laden and some are very short, like their sister varieties grown for stealth hydroponic operations. So despite political opposition to the plant, and the resulting unlikeliness of adequate research on its atmospheric regulation abilities, it isn't such a far-fetched idea.
I had a personal experiment relating to this: a cross-continent bicycle tour. Since 5 meals a day wasn't really enough, we supplemented with sprouting sunflower and beans right on our bikes. Very cheap efficient energy food and easy to make (just remember to rinse frequently), the result was a strong thumbs-up.
"Spirulina does actually taste rather unpleasant."
True. I think it could be worse (e.g. extremely bitter), since you can cover it up. The tradeoff of taste / value is worth it, though.
Moral of the story? don't go eating pond scum without oranges.
It's neato and nerdly.
Meanwhile, the world is full of nutritious useful plant species that are not suited to large-scale industrial ag or being promoted as a commodity, so they fall off the proverbial table and are ignored in discussions like this.
People often think there are a dozen varieties of potato because that's what is mass-marketed; when the Incas were invaded, they cultivated thousands of varieties, and thousands more were bred since then, but most of those are now endangered due to being garden crops and not combine-friendly. Local varieties of food plants around the world are bred for all kinds of conditions and growth patterns.
Don't forget that astronauts would be gardeners, not farmers. Different plants need apply.
Then there's the lowly weed. Do people know just how useful and healthful dandelion is? It's pretty damn efficient. Millions spent in a lab to improve on dandelion for applications like this would be hilarious.
The average north american's culinary imagination is sorely stunted by indulgence and an overprocessed food system.
I've often wondered why efforts like this don't design a habitat inside cylindrical tanks of water. Portions of the tank system could be used for aquatic food sources like fish, and part of the reclamation/purification cycle. All of it would serve as reservoir, and potentially an emergency fuel source. Done properly, it could also help with radiation shielding.
"1. Isn't Kudzu an extremely invasive vine?"
It would be perfect for rapid growth, air recycling, and low maintenance. Provides excellent mulch and is nutritious. Sounds efficient and like it would serve multiple functions.
One of the other posters speculated about gene-mod plants being useful for rapid growth and enhanced yield etc. My first reaction was that we ignore many of the useful food plants, call them weeds because they're too successful, and poison ourselves in the process; we should spend millions to reproduce this in the lab?
Weeds are where it's at: nettle, dandelion, mustard, etc. etc. are nutritious and useful in many ways.
And it tastes oh so good!
Well, it doesn't taste that bad, if you're eating spirulina, considering how damn good it is for you in the right dosages. Sounds sensible to me. I tease my significant other for drinking "pond scum" in her orange juice, but she doesn't mind the taste at all.
I'm not. Fava is also a short bushing bean--so it fits the same stacking profile for access to light--and just as versatile with less processing required. Soy is good for large harvesting machines, which has something to do with its ubiquity--it's tied to a large industrial system. Simply boiled fava beans taste better than soy prepared the same way. They have similar nutritious characteristics. Less processing=better nutrition, better energy consumption. Give me a fava plant in the garden over soy any day.
Interesting to note in that story that they mention low-pressure growing environments to reduce structural stresses. If you've ever been up to super-high altitude places like the Andes or Himalayan valleys, you'll see some massive vegetables, because of the strong sun and carefully managed micro-climates. I wonder what the pressure threshold is for typical vegetables to thrive.
In a cup-is-half-full approach to semi-independent systems, you could say that what they had was not an excess of cockroaches but a shortage of chickens. I mean, why waste all those wonderful little packages of proteins and minerals? Turn them into eggs. Cockroaches in themselves can be useful for scavenging detritus in a garden. An excess of anything like that is just a failure to integrate the system and make sure everything's being used in multiple ways.
I wonder if those biosphere folks ever heard of permaculture?
Interesting, and as a gardener with farmers and nutritionists for friends, believable. Where did you obtain this list? (uncited, so not really informative, mods)
Sweet potato is a large plant, lots of beta carotene. A few of these plants are very heavy feeders, but rapid growers. Nettle is a nutritional secret: you can almost live on the stuff alone. Spider plant is a heavy breather. Not many people know that kudzu is good for you, or that dandelion used to be a cultivated staple in european gardens--you use the whole plant.
Catnip, redwood, trumpet vine, and thistle are headscratchers, though. Medicine, wood, and mulch?
I've been in Sony Stores all over Canada (don't ask). Most of them are pretty drab to me, as though someone said 'hey, let's make a boutique' and got stuck just past FutureShop / BestBuy. They have the same feeling fundamental to any store in a mall (even though some of them are on the street)--a kind of dolorous, 'oh, another electronics store' feeling, and then you get closer and realize you can have any design ethic you want as long as it's Sony's, which is even worse.
The one here in Windsor (pop.220K) is in a typical mall and belongs there. As other canucks have attested the staff are much like you'd expect, either clueless university students just trying to make it to sunday, hoping you won't ask them a technical question, or slick jims with greased down hair and a technohungry look; the prices are generally as premium as the brand name would warrant; and they've been here for years. And, they won't deal with the pro line of gear, grrr.
Hey, I like most sony products, I make a living using them by choice. But they got the retail thing wrong, or, well, yawn, in Canada.
I've been using Word since v.1.0 ('85? 86?) came on a 400k mac floppy. For most of its long life, Word has been well-tended on the mac side, and the gp post is correct about it's often better usability on the mac side (v.X, the last version, still has v.5.1 toolbars as an interface option, as a testament to its following).
MS doesn't have that many divisions that rake in the dough, but the Mac business unit is pretty profitable. I think that if their options for leveraging the business desktop away from Linux run out, you'll see some pretty slick versions of Office on Linux in a few years.
Not that that's a good thing, IMHO.
Hear, hear. I kept thinking while reading Cryptonomicon; "this is an upgrade of Gravity's Rainbow" -- every bit as fun and wordgeeky, and I was happy to trade the traces of Mystery in Pynchon for the traces of the Future in Stephenson.
English majors (oh wait, do any read /.?) -- there's a paper topic for ya.
I recently developed curriculum for a 3rd year university course titled Digital Media, and while we (team of two) did our best to deal with fundamentals (resolution, file format, etc.), we had to think of
...which turned out to mean that we wound up building the whole course around learning Photoshop, After Effects, Pro Tools, and Final Cut Pro (yeah, Mac platform).
1. hands-on learning of tools in a reasonable amount of time
2. students who want to get jobs with these tools
3. the available training materials outside of the course
4. the equipment in the lab
These programs have consistent (enough) interfaces, integrate well, and these tools are what the students demand. Had we been using PC's, it would have been Premiere (shudder).
I kept thinking while doing it... why isn't there open source curriculum to pick up and run with? MIT didn't have anything (at the time) that we could use. Had I more power locally, I would have forced the issue with our course.
Yes, which is my point about these being positioned as iMovie machines. Most 'serious' video apps want to display two video screens (clip and timeline, e.g.), a timeline, and a file browser of some kind. Same issue with iDVD and DVD Studio Pro. Pro apps assume a large display area, because you have a lot of information to manage; the iLife apps manage that information for you, by removing options. Not that they don't work just fine for most of what you would want to do. And, I know people using pro apps on those dinky 12" displays, and they still have all their hair.
After all, 1024x768 is similar or better resolution to NTSC, right?
Well, sorta. NTSC is 525 lines of resolution on a tv monitor, 30 frames per sec, and aspect ratio is 4:3. Well, it's actually 60 fps, since it's interlaced to equal 30. 720x480 and 640x480 or 320x240 are converted to NTSC by your analog video connections. NTSC standard resolution is 648x486. Any details that won't show up at that resolution are lost.
Yes. Wait, No.
"Need" is one of those funny bendable words. I just helped someone who's fairly broke get a low-end iBook in order to finish postproduction on a major project (12 one-hour training videos). It's working fine, just a little slow switching in and out of Photoshop and FCP (needs more RAM and hasn't started the dual monitor hack yet).
I have friends who are getting short (20+ mins.) films into major festivals using souped-up G3 450's, and I'm busy (ahem, /. aside) running a 1hr. feature through a dual 450. Yes, faster machines make for better render times, but you need to take a break anyway (and need to respect your deadlines well). The real speed comes with knowing what you're doing, and that's wetware not hardware.
Don't believe the hype. Rendering speed is only a major issue when you have to cycle stuff out the door quickly to make the bucks. Otherwise, the interface is responsive enough, and I generally get just as much done on the G4 dual450 as I do on the spanky fast dualG5, if it's basic editing.
I've no idea why they continue do it, but..
Because they're a money-grubbing corporation, like they're supposed to be, and they need reasons for you to go for the larger-margin FryingPan, er PowerBook. Damn you Apple! :-P Try editing video in 1024x768--yuck. They definitely position these as iMovie machines.
That said, the Open Firmware hack to get monitor spanning works well when it works, and is a disaster when things (rarely) go wrong. It also works on some eMacs, too.