Guys who troll for women who are attracted to expensive cars are welcome to them. Most of the gorgeous intelligent women I know laugh at that shite, for real.
(Of course, being an arts geek as well as a nerd exposes me to a different demographic. Yes I've actually talked to gorgeous women of varying intelligence.)
The nerdly part of me finds intelligence sexy. A gal who yells "sorry about your penis" to a guy in a corvette? That seriously rocks.
Evangelistic religions are then hate speech
on
UN Attacks Free Speech
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
In fact, there have been fundamentalist types who have been prosecuted for hate speech for simply posting anti-homosexual selections from the Bible. They'll just make a post like this: "Homosexuals should read Book of Whatever verse whatever which says [homosexuality is an abomination whatever, homosexuals will go to hell]."
That brings up the case that religious fanatics who label me 'infidel' or 'damned and dangerous' because I am a skeptical pantheist (or transgressive agnostic or whatever) are inciting hate against me, and against others with a contrary creed.
Not all evangelists are like that, mind you. But some fundies (islamist and christian varieties in particular) are definitely promoting hate of those who don't believe like they do. I wonder how that'll come out in the wash.
What a load of hooey, I wasn't trying to finger a group and make people paranoid. Yes I know there are a host of virulent racists reading/. who might take stories like this as 'yellow horde' justification, but is american rhetoric so hopeless that anti-racists have to tiptoe around the idiots all the time? Or did you just want to find someone to flame? You misread my post, anyway.
It doesn't change the fact that N.A. and european intel agencies are confused by running up against a very distributed information flow that relies on the diaspora. And that it's cool and rather funny!
And yes, I did say 'google the issue' because there are simply too many cases to cite in a discussion forum. I don't write things like that just to typecast, or flamebait. That massive distributed intel gathering is a method mostly particular to the Chinese, due to their fairly unique cultural and political situation in the world.
If you actually read my post, you'd see praise and amusement rather than criticism.
the abstract mentions that the attack was done using malwares. Firstly, I expected Chinese hackers (read govt.) smarter than this.
The bulk of Chinese intel is heavily distributed. The world's largest families don't need to rely on 007 agents; they can aggregate huge quantities of data by getting observant volunteers from the chinese diaspora to send bits of info back home through regular channels, like aunt Ping or even uncle James. It's so distributed it doesn't look like spying, and it isn't really, in the traditional sense.
This has driven counterintelligence agencies in 'western' democracies and republics to distraction. There are hardly any spooks to catch, mainly just a giant global gossamer net of informers, and enormous compiling and analysis operations in China. The 'agents', who are barely agents if at all, have strong deniability and can always fall back on complaints of harassment due to ethnic targeting. (Google the issue, it's amusing.)
I think it's brilliant, even if wholly dependent on the chinese sense of family ties. A malware attack is a similar approach: it doesn't look like the work of spies, at first, and it's broadly distributed. So, it's plausible that it could be a chinese intel operation, just from the M.O.
Agreed. A small group of us are just beginning a project called the Digital Poetry Archive of Canada, dedicated to saving analog recordings of poetry that are fading fast as well as obsolescing digital files, and our first order of business is to figure out an enduring archival format.
Rest assured it won't be stone! But it looks to me like we're going to have to take the approach that whatever format we choose is temporary, and instead establish protocol for regular translation into newer formats.
Still, we have to aim for longevity. Standards are a boon here, but are pitted against popularity. It's easy to assume for text: the.txt files will be a good gamble, for instance, though in the case of poetry the visual formatting can be crucial, so hopefully a comprehensive presentation format like pdf (or an alternative! suggestions?) will have some endurance.
Recordings are another matter. Video codecs are in intense flux, and H264 looks like it might hit problems in 10 years. DV is perhaps worse, though it is less lossy. Audio codecs too (spare me the OGGvangelism for the moment), even though AIFF has both popularity and licence-free going for it.
Again, you/they are assuming that all power for everyone will be out for months on end. I'd like to assume that local government would work on restoring food and water services before most other resources. You can specifically target stores and water treatment services when you bring the transformers back online.
Brilliant! Thank you for illustrating the problem.
Most people "would like to assume" that, and there's the rub, the illusion of security. The food system is far more complex than the average person realizes. Regional food security, say county or statewide (district or province where I'm from) is minimal. There are so many interlocking parts, hardly anyone --- military, gov, wholesaler, retailer, chef or consumer --- hardly anyone knows how robust or vulnerable they really are. Those who know more are pessimistic. Very pessimistic. (I was a professional food policy activist for 5 years, and was shocked the more I learned.)
Stores don't really need electricity... except for the perishables. Those are gone in a few days anyway. Pen and paper and kerosene lanterns can suffice to move goods. The problem is varied, things like transport and inventory and packaging and, the worst: stocks --- there just aren't enough in any one region to last very long, and production capacity varies hugely across the country, is seasonal, and concentrated, and extremely energy-and-water-dependent.
So, let's say that you're right, that Indianapolis gets some stores up and running in two weeks. The meat and produce and frozen stuff are all gone: it's potatoes and apples for a while, canned food, flour. Actually, whatever's left after the looting was brought under control. The livestock and feed is already being hoarded. Black markets have sprung up and all kinds of nefarious things are happening... this craziness kicked into gear after the first week. Some shipments are coming in, but not enough; lineups are long, the national guard is having trouble keeping order (if martial law hasn't already started, it will), and authorities are having trouble sourcing any goods, much less communicating with other jurisdictions. Competition of all kinds for these goods is fierce.
The weak are suffering, and they aren't just the poor, they're children and seniors and the generally unprepared; some rich folks will have been raided already and without the cash they're bartering cufflinks for spuds, if they can find them.
This is three weeks in and desperation is in the air. Seriously, go look in peoples' cupboards in Indianapolis, or any mid-size city, and do the math. The problem isn't just NYC.
I think instead of neolithic, which refers to the late stone age and the rise of farming, you meant the paleolithic. Humans are biologically adapted to the paleolithic, I suggest, since it's 99% of our history.
One marker of the onset of farming is the increased average workload. That's the loss of eden: when the hunting is good, the weather cooperative, the food is plentiful and life is easy. Farming depletes bioproductivity, through deforestation and loss of topsoil and displacing wildlife; constant labour is the trade-off for year-round food security.
Longevity estimates of paleolithic life are skewed by risks. If one survived birth (or giving birth), occasional famine (remember longevity's links to low calories), smilodons, malaria or worms or massive infection, being poked by competitors' spears, and genetic diseases, then chances were you were one tough, clever piece of meat, and lasted as long as we do. Certainly the typical diet was healthier in some respects, just not as reliable.
The excellent BBC documentary series Connections begins with the scenario of a prolonged power grid failure, and traces the consequences in NYC.
Food becomes the major issue fairly quickly, due to the just-in-time economy of the cities. After a month, people are getting fairly desperate, and flooding out into the countryside, where considerable social churn ensues.
How many of you have two months worth of food on hand? Few things skew human behaviour more quickly than hunger.
Food security is the basis of sound social planning, and the weak point of any large city.
The dark lighting made it hard to see, and surely was not the only possible way to create a documentary feel.
Worked fine on my TV and computer!
The primary way to get a doc feel was hand-held cameras and cheesy zooms. BSG's lighting was in support of that, but more for emotion and ambience. 'Natural' spot lighting (NOT dark, but very high contrast with lots of dark areas and frequent blown out highlights) and lots of gobos and 'cookie' shade was well used, a technique established in the film noir era, and adds to a grungy, depressing and opressive feeling. If I was working grip or DoP on a production like this I'd probably do the same.
The difference here was that I didn't have to put up with a solid hour of bad lighting and claustrophobic camera work.
You missed out two crucial features of the series: they mostly take place on dingy cramped (or weird robotic) spaceships, and they wanted a documentary feel with 'natural' lighting. Whinging about the stupidity of this aesthetic is kind of ironic.
Angels? You should all be embarrassed.
Well, if you hated it as much as you claim you didn't watch enough to get the clues that the 'god' and 'angel' beings are not judeo-christian, more like advanced (evolved) beings, as hinted at in the early part of the series where the mythology is drawn out more. The suggestion is that 'angel' is a for-lack-of-better-term label, and nearly the last line in the series reinforces that. It also cements the underlying premise that our ancient and modern religions are based on actual events and enormously ancient beings that are historical, more technological than mythical, and that what we evolve into also becomes our origins. So actually, it's one of the more interesting narrative threads.
Go back to bitching about your families pictures being downloaded by random people on the Internet because someone hacked your Facebook account. That makes about as much sense.
Flame on, dude! Glad you actually read FB's ToS as well. But I never complained about google getting info via cookies, did I? In fact my whole post was about how I intentionally left them out of my hosts file (so maybe, just maybe, I'm not the idiot you wish me to be).
They gather info 'in public' about the public, and those of us who are informed can protect ourselves, somewhat. Given their dominant and strategic position, however, I think they have to toe a finer line ethically... caveat emptor just isn't good enough.
I'm concerned about google's aggregating and datamining capabilities. I'm mad about their adsense hijinks and about Latitude, and their browser toolbar(s) and Desktop. These are all legitimate privacy concerns. Now go change your shorts and do a little research about "don't be evil".
Funny how people have monolithic energy sources on the brain. Until we have zero-point energy wristwatches or pocket fusion generators, any futurist can expect that we will be implementing a wide variety of energy sources very soon.
The trick is that each application of energy depends on different kinds of efficiencies and benefits, including whole-cost accounting like moving the energy source around, re-purposed materials (the main benefit in this case), health, aesthetics (e.g. property values + noise), scale, etc.
I'm a cautious supporter of Adbusters, but I actually took google's ads out of my hosts file's filter list.
My reasoning is that I believe, after years of studying media and communications, that advertising can only be ethical if it resembles the directory that you find in a phone book, accompanied by an honest, vetted description. Otherwise, it is rhetorically manipulative and preys on the uninformed.
Now, while google's ads aren't perfect, they hew closer to this ideal than most other forms of advertising. The lack of emotionally manipulative visual imagery helps (I make a living messing with such imagery, BTW).
I don't trust Google, the company. I am opposed to their excessive privacy abuse. However, I balance that against their general model, and find the competition worse.
I won't support adbusters in this campaign, but I don't oppose it either.
It will be worth watching what happens to the documentary RIP: a Remix Manifesto as it pushes the mashup boundaries itself while reporting on the whole mashup phenomenon.
Fortunately it's backed by the National Film Board of Canada and so they aren't completely without some official backing.
If you're curious about mashup culture, or in the legal maneuvering behind it all, or in fact about copyright's entire future, it's worth checking this great film out.
Dreamweaver attempts to do the WYSIWYG which is geared towards those people who don't really know how to code.
DW has its place due to site management and debugging tools, and it doesn't force the wysiwyg. When I use it, it's usually with the mixed text/graphical view, because it is faster to zero in on certain parts of the code graphically by clicking there, then switching to the code pane.
Essentially, it's much faster to scan a picture than text, even if your markup is tidy, and it is nice to see the less-frequent available parameters for CSS in a pane rather than pull all of them from memory. DW's code has improved quite a bit over the years, too, it isn't the ugly mess it once was.
I'd like a tower, but at 2500$ or whatever its too expensive. The mini doesn't have the expandable storage. FW800 might work with external drives, but I'd like lots of ram for photoshop and lightroom.
I am/was in similar shoes, only for video and design rather than photography. The hackintosh I planned didn't pan out, for firewire and audio and cost reasons.
My suggestion: buy a mid-low range 24" iMac with the DVI adaptor, and use your second monitor. Buy RAM from NCIX or Newegg or Crucial and max it out to 8GB. Buy a handful of external firewire cases (vantech's are reasonable value), and some USB for backup, and move your drives from the G4. Sell the G4 with one drive for $225 or so (yeah, that much! it's weird). This is my setup, and it's QUIET and great for anything short of major 3D work or full HD.
You could save money by buying a refurb or last-model iMac, but you'd hit the 4GB RAM ceiling. Mind you, as anyone who's been working in media production for years can tell you, 4GB of RAM was pretty awesome just a short while ago. I regularly work with 100MB tiff files and compositing software and it's fine (sure, 8GB would be better, but not much).
'Twas for me, they had a one day giveaway that I was awake for. Suits my needs perfectly, even playing some games.
Maybe they'll have another giveaway. Worked for me as marketing, now I'm an advocate to my clients who worry about losing their windows apps when they switch.
What's wrong with an iMac with external storage?... The only real downside is that storage is over USB2 or Ethernet (I went with ethernet), neither of which is as fast as internal or external SATA. But if 20MB/s is good enough then it isn't a problem.
For everything but gaming, the graphics on older iMacs was good enough already, including spanning to an eyeboggling 3840 pixels wide with an extra monitor.
You're mistaken about USB or ethernet only. I have 6 external drives. Most of them are on the firewire buses (400 and 800) for video work. Backup and secondary storage is on USB. It works well, though firewire is buggy for some video decks and cameras (outrageous, really).
The only real downside is having a great IPS-quality screen that requires a darkened room because it acts like a freakin' mirror!
The 24" iMac is Good Enough for anyone who isn't a media producer. It's certainly a decent software development machine, although a Mac Pro is better since it can do multiple screens.
I'm a small-scale media producer (modest A/V projects, web, SOHO support, etc.) and after waiting for a couple of years for a headless mid range machine out of Apple (don't really need quad-core Xenons or 8GB RAM for video editing with basic effects), researched a hackintosh. By the time I'd priced out the components I wanted with reliable firewire and audio and a quality monitor, I was $180 short of a refurb 24" imac.
Posting from it now, and yes it can drive a second monitor, so I can get 3840 x 1200 resolution, if I want to splurge for another IPS screen.
The thing is, many people don't want to run a laptop HD in their desktop (mac mini) or want to supply a decent but not huge display of their liking (imac 20 = crappy screen, imac 24 = pricey and big).
The upgrade issue is moot if you're an Apple user, something DIY fanatics don't know. The resale value on used Macs is so high it doesn't make sense to put in components other than RAM: selling it and buying new (or refurb) is wiser.
What do you mean by 'serious'? I've met quite a few people who've published repeatedly before their peers, are well-respected experts or devoted lab rats, and show clear signs of bloody-minded reductionist or even religious dogmatism... at least in public. I rather think it has more to do with funding structures and a human weakness for religious thinking than journalism.
Yes: that wonderful aphorism suggests to me that the simplest explanation is usually that we don't have all the facts that need covering, and even that the few facts that we do have are subtly or grossly misleading, in the end.
My point is that we still interpret the data with minds shaped by our limited perspective... the telescopes may be better than last year's, but there you go assuming a kind of completeness.
Slashdot Mirror
Guys who troll for women who are attracted to expensive cars are welcome to them. Most of the gorgeous intelligent women I know laugh at that shite, for real.
(Of course, being an arts geek as well as a nerd exposes me to a different demographic. Yes I've actually talked to gorgeous women of varying intelligence.)
The nerdly part of me finds intelligence sexy. A gal who yells "sorry about your penis" to a guy in a corvette? That seriously rocks.
In fact, there have been fundamentalist types who have been prosecuted for hate speech for simply posting anti-homosexual selections from the Bible. They'll just make a post like this: "Homosexuals should read Book of Whatever verse whatever which says [homosexuality is an abomination whatever, homosexuals will go to hell]."
That brings up the case that religious fanatics who label me 'infidel' or 'damned and dangerous' because I am a skeptical pantheist (or transgressive agnostic or whatever) are inciting hate against me, and against others with a contrary creed.
Not all evangelists are like that, mind you. But some fundies (islamist and christian varieties in particular) are definitely promoting hate of those who don't believe like they do. I wonder how that'll come out in the wash.
What a load of hooey, I wasn't trying to finger a group and make people paranoid. Yes I know there are a host of virulent racists reading /. who might take stories like this as 'yellow horde' justification, but is american rhetoric so hopeless that anti-racists have to tiptoe around the idiots all the time? Or did you just want to find someone to flame? You misread my post, anyway.
It doesn't change the fact that N.A. and european intel agencies are confused by running up against a very distributed information flow that relies on the diaspora. And that it's cool and rather funny!
And yes, I did say 'google the issue' because there are simply too many cases to cite in a discussion forum. I don't write things like that just to typecast, or flamebait. That massive distributed intel gathering is a method mostly particular to the Chinese, due to their fairly unique cultural and political situation in the world.
If you actually read my post, you'd see praise and amusement rather than criticism.
the abstract mentions that the attack was done using malwares. Firstly, I expected Chinese hackers (read govt.) smarter than this.
The bulk of Chinese intel is heavily distributed. The world's largest families don't need to rely on 007 agents; they can aggregate huge quantities of data by getting observant volunteers from the chinese diaspora to send bits of info back home through regular channels, like aunt Ping or even uncle James. It's so distributed it doesn't look like spying, and it isn't really, in the traditional sense.
This has driven counterintelligence agencies in 'western' democracies and republics to distraction. There are hardly any spooks to catch, mainly just a giant global gossamer net of informers, and enormous compiling and analysis operations in China. The 'agents', who are barely agents if at all, have strong deniability and can always fall back on complaints of harassment due to ethnic targeting. (Google the issue, it's amusing.)
I think it's brilliant, even if wholly dependent on the chinese sense of family ties. A malware attack is a similar approach: it doesn't look like the work of spies, at first, and it's broadly distributed. So, it's plausible that it could be a chinese intel operation, just from the M.O.
Agreed. A small group of us are just beginning a project called the Digital Poetry Archive of Canada, dedicated to saving analog recordings of poetry that are fading fast as well as obsolescing digital files, and our first order of business is to figure out an enduring archival format.
Rest assured it won't be stone! But it looks to me like we're going to have to take the approach that whatever format we choose is temporary, and instead establish protocol for regular translation into newer formats.
Still, we have to aim for longevity. Standards are a boon here, but are pitted against popularity. It's easy to assume for text: the .txt files will be a good gamble, for instance, though in the case of poetry the visual formatting can be crucial, so hopefully a comprehensive presentation format like pdf (or an alternative! suggestions?) will have some endurance.
Recordings are another matter. Video codecs are in intense flux, and H264 looks like it might hit problems in 10 years. DV is perhaps worse, though it is less lossy. Audio codecs too (spare me the OGGvangelism for the moment), even though AIFF has both popularity and licence-free going for it.
Any suggestions would be welcome!
Again, you/they are assuming that all power for everyone will be out for months on end. I'd like to assume that local government would work on restoring food and water services before most other resources. You can specifically target stores and water treatment services when you bring the transformers back online.
Brilliant! Thank you for illustrating the problem.
Most people "would like to assume" that, and there's the rub, the illusion of security. The food system is far more complex than the average person realizes. Regional food security, say county or statewide (district or province where I'm from) is minimal. There are so many interlocking parts, hardly anyone --- military, gov, wholesaler, retailer, chef or consumer --- hardly anyone knows how robust or vulnerable they really are. Those who know more are pessimistic. Very pessimistic. (I was a professional food policy activist for 5 years, and was shocked the more I learned.)
Stores don't really need electricity... except for the perishables. Those are gone in a few days anyway. Pen and paper and kerosene lanterns can suffice to move goods. The problem is varied, things like transport and inventory and packaging and, the worst: stocks --- there just aren't enough in any one region to last very long, and production capacity varies hugely across the country, is seasonal, and concentrated, and extremely energy-and-water-dependent.
So, let's say that you're right, that Indianapolis gets some stores up and running in two weeks. The meat and produce and frozen stuff are all gone: it's potatoes and apples for a while, canned food, flour. Actually, whatever's left after the looting was brought under control. The livestock and feed is already being hoarded. Black markets have sprung up and all kinds of nefarious things are happening... this craziness kicked into gear after the first week. Some shipments are coming in, but not enough; lineups are long, the national guard is having trouble keeping order (if martial law hasn't already started, it will), and authorities are having trouble sourcing any goods, much less communicating with other jurisdictions. Competition of all kinds for these goods is fierce.
The weak are suffering, and they aren't just the poor, they're children and seniors and the generally unprepared; some rich folks will have been raided already and without the cash they're bartering cufflinks for spuds, if they can find them.
This is three weeks in and desperation is in the air. Seriously, go look in peoples' cupboards in Indianapolis, or any mid-size city, and do the math. The problem isn't just NYC.
I think instead of neolithic, which refers to the late stone age and the rise of farming, you meant the paleolithic. Humans are biologically adapted to the paleolithic, I suggest, since it's 99% of our history.
One marker of the onset of farming is the increased average workload. That's the loss of eden: when the hunting is good, the weather cooperative, the food is plentiful and life is easy. Farming depletes bioproductivity, through deforestation and loss of topsoil and displacing wildlife; constant labour is the trade-off for year-round food security.
Longevity estimates of paleolithic life are skewed by risks. If one survived birth (or giving birth), occasional famine (remember longevity's links to low calories), smilodons, malaria or worms or massive infection, being poked by competitors' spears, and genetic diseases, then chances were you were one tough, clever piece of meat, and lasted as long as we do. Certainly the typical diet was healthier in some respects, just not as reliable.
The excellent BBC documentary series Connections begins with the scenario of a prolonged power grid failure, and traces the consequences in NYC.
Food becomes the major issue fairly quickly, due to the just-in-time economy of the cities. After a month, people are getting fairly desperate, and flooding out into the countryside, where considerable social churn ensues.
How many of you have two months worth of food on hand? Few things skew human behaviour more quickly than hunger.
Food security is the basis of sound social planning, and the weak point of any large city.
The dark lighting made it hard to see, and surely was not the only possible way to create a documentary feel.
Worked fine on my TV and computer!
The primary way to get a doc feel was hand-held cameras and cheesy zooms. BSG's lighting was in support of that, but more for emotion and ambience. 'Natural' spot lighting (NOT dark, but very high contrast with lots of dark areas and frequent blown out highlights) and lots of gobos and 'cookie' shade was well used, a technique established in the film noir era, and adds to a grungy, depressing and opressive feeling. If I was working grip or DoP on a production like this I'd probably do the same.
If you were a real fan, you would've written "SF"...
The difference here was that I didn't have to put up with a solid hour of bad lighting and claustrophobic camera work.
You missed out two crucial features of the series: they mostly take place on dingy cramped (or weird robotic) spaceships, and they wanted a documentary feel with 'natural' lighting. Whinging about the stupidity of this aesthetic is kind of ironic.
Angels? You should all be embarrassed.
Well, if you hated it as much as you claim you didn't watch enough to get the clues that the 'god' and 'angel' beings are not judeo-christian, more like advanced (evolved) beings, as hinted at in the early part of the series where the mythology is drawn out more. The suggestion is that 'angel' is a for-lack-of-better-term label, and nearly the last line in the series reinforces that. It also cements the underlying premise that our ancient and modern religions are based on actual events and enormously ancient beings that are historical, more technological than mythical, and that what we evolve into also becomes our origins. So actually, it's one of the more interesting narrative threads.
Go back to bitching about your families pictures being downloaded by random people on the Internet because someone hacked your Facebook account. That makes about as much sense.
Flame on, dude! Glad you actually read FB's ToS as well. But I never complained about google getting info via cookies, did I? In fact my whole post was about how I intentionally left them out of my hosts file (so maybe, just maybe, I'm not the idiot you wish me to be).
They gather info 'in public' about the public, and those of us who are informed can protect ourselves, somewhat. Given their dominant and strategic position, however, I think they have to toe a finer line ethically... caveat emptor just isn't good enough.
I'm concerned about google's aggregating and datamining capabilities. I'm mad about their adsense hijinks and about Latitude, and their browser toolbar(s) and Desktop. These are all legitimate privacy concerns. Now go change your shorts and do a little research about "don't be evil".
Funny how people have monolithic energy sources on the brain. Until we have zero-point energy wristwatches or pocket fusion generators, any futurist can expect that we will be implementing a wide variety of energy sources very soon.
The trick is that each application of energy depends on different kinds of efficiencies and benefits, including whole-cost accounting like moving the energy source around, re-purposed materials (the main benefit in this case), health, aesthetics (e.g. property values + noise), scale, etc.
I'm a cautious supporter of Adbusters, but I actually took google's ads out of my hosts file's filter list.
My reasoning is that I believe, after years of studying media and communications, that advertising can only be ethical if it resembles the directory that you find in a phone book, accompanied by an honest, vetted description. Otherwise, it is rhetorically manipulative and preys on the uninformed.
Now, while google's ads aren't perfect, they hew closer to this ideal than most other forms of advertising. The lack of emotionally manipulative visual imagery helps (I make a living messing with such imagery, BTW).
I don't trust Google, the company. I am opposed to their excessive privacy abuse. However, I balance that against their general model, and find the competition worse.
I won't support adbusters in this campaign, but I don't oppose it either.
It will be worth watching what happens to the documentary RIP: a Remix Manifesto as it pushes the mashup boundaries itself while reporting on the whole mashup phenomenon.
Fortunately it's backed by the National Film Board of Canada and so they aren't completely without some official backing.
If you're curious about mashup culture, or in the legal maneuvering behind it all, or in fact about copyright's entire future, it's worth checking this great film out.
Dreamweaver attempts to do the WYSIWYG which is geared towards those people who don't really know how to code.
DW has its place due to site management and debugging tools, and it doesn't force the wysiwyg. When I use it, it's usually with the mixed text/graphical view, because it is faster to zero in on certain parts of the code graphically by clicking there, then switching to the code pane.
Essentially, it's much faster to scan a picture than text, even if your markup is tidy, and it is nice to see the less-frequent available parameters for CSS in a pane rather than pull all of them from memory. DW's code has improved quite a bit over the years, too, it isn't the ugly mess it once was.
I'd like a tower, but at 2500$ or whatever its too expensive. The mini doesn't have the expandable storage. FW800 might work with external drives, but I'd like lots of ram for photoshop and lightroom.
I am/was in similar shoes, only for video and design rather than photography. The hackintosh I planned didn't pan out, for firewire and audio and cost reasons.
My suggestion: buy a mid-low range 24" iMac with the DVI adaptor, and use your second monitor. Buy RAM from NCIX or Newegg or Crucial and max it out to 8GB. Buy a handful of external firewire cases (vantech's are reasonable value), and some USB for backup, and move your drives from the G4. Sell the G4 with one drive for $225 or so (yeah, that much! it's weird). This is my setup, and it's QUIET and great for anything short of major 3D work or full HD.
You could save money by buying a refurb or last-model iMac, but you'd hit the 4GB RAM ceiling. Mind you, as anyone who's been working in media production for years can tell you, 4GB of RAM was pretty awesome just a short while ago. I regularly work with 100MB tiff files and compositing software and it's fine (sure, 8GB would be better, but not much).
though Crossover isn't free
'Twas for me, they had a one day giveaway that I was awake for. Suits my needs perfectly, even playing some games.
Maybe they'll have another giveaway. Worked for me as marketing, now I'm an advocate to my clients who worry about losing their windows apps when they switch.
What's wrong with an iMac with external storage? ... The only real downside is that storage is over USB2 or Ethernet (I went with ethernet), neither of which is as fast as internal or external SATA. But if 20MB/s is good enough then it isn't a problem.
For everything but gaming, the graphics on older iMacs was good enough already, including spanning to an eyeboggling 3840 pixels wide with an extra monitor.
You're mistaken about USB or ethernet only. I have 6 external drives. Most of them are on the firewire buses (400 and 800) for video work. Backup and secondary storage is on USB. It works well, though firewire is buggy for some video decks and cameras (outrageous, really).
The only real downside is having a great IPS-quality screen that requires a darkened room because it acts like a freakin' mirror!
The 24" iMac is Good Enough for anyone who isn't a media producer. It's certainly a decent software development machine, although a Mac Pro is better since it can do multiple screens.
I'm a small-scale media producer (modest A/V projects, web, SOHO support, etc.) and after waiting for a couple of years for a headless mid range machine out of Apple (don't really need quad-core Xenons or 8GB RAM for video editing with basic effects), researched a hackintosh. By the time I'd priced out the components I wanted with reliable firewire and audio and a quality monitor, I was $180 short of a refurb 24" imac.
Posting from it now, and yes it can drive a second monitor, so I can get 3840 x 1200 resolution, if I want to splurge for another IPS screen.
The thing is, many people don't want to run a laptop HD in their desktop (mac mini) or want to supply a decent but not huge display of their liking (imac 20 = crappy screen, imac 24 = pricey and big).
The upgrade issue is moot if you're an Apple user, something DIY fanatics don't know. The resale value on used Macs is so high it doesn't make sense to put in components other than RAM: selling it and buying new (or refurb) is wiser.
What do you mean by 'serious'? I've met quite a few people who've published repeatedly before their peers, are well-respected experts or devoted lab rats, and show clear signs of bloody-minded reductionist or even religious dogmatism... at least in public. I rather think it has more to do with funding structures and a human weakness for religious thinking than journalism.
Yes: that wonderful aphorism suggests to me that the simplest explanation is usually that we don't have all the facts that need covering, and even that the few facts that we do have are subtly or grossly misleading, in the end.
My point is that we still interpret the data with minds shaped by our limited perspective... the telescopes may be better than last year's, but there you go assuming a kind of completeness.
The map is not the territory.
I stand corrected, I meant the flaw in the way it's used.