Firstly- people have generated amino acids in test tubes without _too_ much trouble. Secondly- huh? (admittedly not the most intelligent reaction.) By who? Did they get any data on it, like take a photo or something? Thirdly- uh. Actually there have been lots of changes... Fourthly- sure! I'd buy that:) To sum it up- I'm honestly very puzzled that on the one hand you postulate a something that created life and continues to act on it, and then on the other hand you insist that it actually _isn't_ acting on life and hasn't been for years, and presumably is finished. I'd beg to disagree- this is effectively stating that God is Dead and no longer has any input to add into the world. I consider that a shocking belief, and think that it's much more plausible that God (whatever God is) came up with evolution, in much the way that programmers came up with compilers and makefiles rather than typing in each binary bit one at a time. If you ever heard of quantum mechanics, you'd realize that on some levels everything and nothing is random- and so evolution isn't really random chance, but the workings of a world-sized mechanism incomprehensibly too complex for any human to grasp. Adding evolution to the mechanism, so that it is self-maintaining and modifies itself, clearly makes it that much more complicated and difficult. It appears that you believe God cannot cope with such a complexity, so you limit your view of God to something that can manage complexities _you_ can understand. I consider this sad but understandable- it's disconcerting to contemplate the idea of a God that not only knows better than us, but is on such a higher level as to be almost incomprehensible him, her or itself. However, limiting your God to be an entity that we humans can understand is an injustice.... (weirding out slashdotters for fun and profit:) )
This sort of thing has long been observed in a-life experiments. Ever heard of Danny Hillis's 'ramps'? What happens is this- populations will appear to stagnate in extended plateaus of development. A great deal of change is going on at lower levels, but none of it 'sticks'. For instance, obGiraffeNeck, this is not one gene but an entire complex involving neck length, bone structure, a stronger heart, the amazing system of valves that keep the animal from immediately fainting when rapidly moving its head from high to low positions or vice versa... and all of this was churning around in the genetic populations, until some of the animals lucked out with all the right features to be effective giraffes- not as _extremely_ developed as current giraffes, but with all the primary characteristics. At this point the new giraffes basically outcompeted all the previous ones in that niche, and the seemingly new species was off and running (on long spindly legs, but not as long as the future giraffes would have). The genes are present in populations, but only when they come together in the right populations does the world change. It's not an abrupt jump or rapid evolving, it's the coming together of lots of little evolvings and mutations into a cohesive whole that's abruptly more effective than the previous populations. I, personally, subscribe to the view that there's some force that could just as well be called God as called anything else. I can't say as I understand it all that well- I doubt I ever will. However, my image of it, applied to the 'punctuated equilibrium' evolution, is of a Gardener God, caring for growing things, perhaps helping them along, understanding them deeply and trying to create beauty despite infestations of aphids;) It's extremely tiresome to be confronted with people who insist on a Puppetmaster God- effectively a much cruder sort of God who never works with anything, but only lays down orders and makes or breaks stuff and won't admit to the slightest interplay with His creations. Artists and creators who are any good are willing to sense what a creation is trying to become, like a sculptor trying to feel what shapes a rock wants to have- in many ways, the harmony of this is a lot more beautiful than just picking a big rock and laser-carving it into a prearranged shape with no interplay at all. In effect, this total rejection of evolution is the insistence on a total Luser God- and I reject it, preferring the idea of a Gardener God or Michaelangelo God that is creatively interested in all the raw materials, in which every sparrow that falls isn't some meaningless decree but a thing observed, accepted, perhaps even worked into the continuing act of creation. Having now professed to a belief in God, I will cheerfully allow myself to be mocked by a bunch of clever unbeliever Slashdotter kids;) but not, I think, by all Slashdotters, because there are all sorts out there, and I think some of them will appreciate what I'm trying to convey.
_I_ have a Power Mac 9500 running linuxppc! Coooool:):):) Getting one will cost you under a grand, somewhat more to trick it out with lots of RAM and stuff. Is it upgraded with, say, a 200Mhz 604e like mine, or is it the original 132mhz 604 running it? 9500 has 12 ram slots, 6 PCI slots, and two entire plain SCSI busses built right in. Whee! Now if I had lots more drives I could actually start using it to its capacities. I take it the linux 9500 has been handling slashdotting gracefully? That's very interesting to know. Final note- the power supply on these kicks ass. I've had brownouts knock my (separate, wall-wart powered) modem offline and make the monitor hiccup and not even cause the powermac to blink. So the linux box up against W2K is probably even better at being hit by lightning;)
My guess is, it's an upset Microsoftie trying to get revenge by DoSing Slashdot. Funny... we're still here... The pathetic thing about all this is how clear it's becoming that NT+IIS, even in the most _relentlessly_ protected environments with a firewall cutting off everything but http, will still crash and burn in a matter of hours at the whims of teenaged script kiddies. Most of the damage wasn't done by the heavy guys. It's all the teens going, "Okay- I'll ask it for the page 'GHIGBDBWDBFJHJHWIGHFKJHbkjbKJGBihsdgifijfhfijhjif hidfijfijhhtmhtmhtm.htm.htm.htm.htm' which killed it. And no one particular garbage-request did it, either- the thing just started wobbling and went _down_. I don't think the MS people even _know_ what failed. There is no joy in Redmond. Nobody won the contest according to their rules... but they surely expected a server _that_ shielded to stay _up_. And it just isn't. Moral of the story? Don't bother trying to break MS stuff with cleverness. Just swamp it and it'll fall over...
I call my Powermac 9500 'Tigger'. Because, due to running only IBM fast/wide SCSI drives off the internal narrow SCSI bus, one for MacOS and one for LinuxPPC, I have to boot it with a press on the power button and then immediately a hard reset to get the nonstandard drives to register, so I have to 'bounce' Tigger to get it to boot. But, with a 200mhz 604e and 192M of ram, it is at least 'bouncy bouncy bouncy bouncy funfunfunfunfun!';):) Linux side runs Window Maker with menu commands for animated desktops w. xlockmore taken from Afterstep, and uses all my fancy XPMs and desktop pictures, and also furnishes storage space for the entire USGS DEM series:) whee!
Bungie designed _all_ of it. If you want to be disrespectful of theme and mood and general game design, I hope you also have nasty words for Ion Storm;) Now, if you have a problem PC, that's understandable. We're quite aware that PCs can blow at any seam, and it speaks well for Bungie that they did eventually fix things for you, since most people seem to have not had your particular problems. (snipe snipe snipe, vid vid vid) The point is, you're kind of outnumbered, and there's a lot of evidence to suggest that Bungie are generally terrific enough to compensate for not being total masters of the Windows PC. And that's what you're complaining about- Myth II was causing problems with advanced hardware under _windows_. Are you _sure_ that they'd find Linux that forbidding and impossible to code for? They've been coding for Macs for years, and Macs are well known to be totally subject to extensions madness, sort of the Mac version of all Linux boxes being randomly different and customised. This indicates a history of being ready to cope with more personalised boxes- it is _not_ necessary to assume a generic 'standardized' computer just to make good software, and the Linux movement will test that assumption severely- and I think Bungie will do well in its new environment. So there;) oh, you call tech support?;) *hehehe*
(!!!!) You're evidently not an old Bungie hand. blam is the secret word associated with the new game Bungie just demoed at Macworld. Not Myth III, not Oni- the one beyond _that_. I've seen a video clip of it running. It's astonishing. Could this mean that they will port Halo to Linux? You guys don't know Bungie like us macsters do. They have games still producing fans and newsgroup traffic (alt.games.marathon- one of the few such newsgroups created just by reader demand) years after the game's release. They have tighter security than Apple, or the heyday of the Politburo- but they _tease_... and there have been hints of 'blam' for YEARS. It's gonna be big- it's been demoed finally- and this looks a lot like it's going to support Linux. Bungie _rule_. It doesn't surprise me at all that they're gearing up to give Linux the serious commercial support it deserves in gaming. They are bestsellers, really heavy hitters, and they don't do anything in a halfassed way. It looks like Linux is going to get equal status with Mac and Windows from Bungie. That's pretty big news. Me, I'm just tickled that Myth II supports _LinuxPPC_... I'd never held out much hope for people doing that. I'm happy even just hearing about it.:)
The problem here is what people can get used to- and the potential of that to cause damage. Maybe you personally don't object to deleting spam. I, myself, don't especially mind sorting known-good email into special mailboxes and then having the inbox be the spamtrap, sometimes meaning that cmd-A delete is all I need to do. I've discarded good messages because I thought they were spam, a couple times, and it didn't cause me too much trouble, just a bit of ribbing from my boss who'd got his message deleted by mistake. However, I fully support these draconian measures against spammers, because the problem is the 'I could do that' factor. There are a certain number of new spammers every day, and many of them noisily advocate spamming to others, and some of the spams are themselves for spam tools. It's a recipe for 'meltdown'. Even a fairly humble linux box can saturate a T1. If any concessions are made to spamming, and it gains any sort of acceptability, it's a 'tragedy of the commons' situation but will happen so fast it'll make your head spin- and suddenly, the networks will be saturated, ISPs and backbones collapsing under the weight of one person in a hundred, or one in ten, deciding that 'it doesn't cost anything' to send their advertising note to, well, heck, how about sending it to everybody? There's this neat program a spam pointed them to, and it can run 24/7... I get spams authored in Frontpage using some non-English language that might be Japanese or some 2-byte language. I've been getting quite a few of those, more and more. Why be restricted to 'customers' who can read your language? Why not just send email to everybody on the internet and then those who can't understand it should just throw it away- or 'opt out'? Let's _everybody_ do that. Then each of us will only have to throw away 1 email/day from everybody in the world. No, that's silly, call it one in a thousand. So each of us will only have to throw away or opt out of several million spams a day... Hell with that. RBL 'em. The net is not necessarily a safe place. In particular, spammers don't have rights to network access, and have no reason to expect fairness.
"Most likely, in an effort to maintain their status, they will become geeks (or try like hell, or fake it, or something) as well as the philanderers, cutthroats, etc. that they already are. That is, if that's what it takes to continue their 'ascent to power'." No: they'll hire geeks. It'll be like scientists of bygone days- when the article says 'speeding gazelle' what it's really saying is: How fast can you get certain types of information? If you had to know what a plausible Vermont salary for a Silicon Valley job would be, where would you look? If you're attaching a new video card to your computer where do you go to find the undocumented setup guidelines the vendor won't give you? Where do you go to be the first to hear about the HP activeX controls installed at the factory which are major security holes? Some of you are already nodding about those ActiveX controls and have a URL which you're sharing with friends of yours who are HP owners with recent machines. Those who have already heard about this: _you_ are the Net set, _you_ are the sort who will be drowned in gold by rich people who want not only the fine wines, fancy cars- they want power, they want to be the first to know, but they cannot themselves learn what they'd need- and so they'll buy _people_ to do that for them. Those bought people are the Net Set, as it'll actually happen. They won't be primary sources of wealth (ha- as if the rich people sit at home knitting Krugerrands), but they will be _secondary_ rich people, minstrels/wizards of the modern age- status symbols but also capable of being incredibly useful from time to time. It's not so much the greedy little lines of MCSEs whose question is 'what's in it for me?' who'll become this type of new wizard- those people have a curiosity limited to their arms' reach, and a real unwillingness to be bothered with thinking about problems that are 'beneath' them. Instead it's the hardcore geeks who will end up with wealthy patrons- rich people asking, "Well, now, Morton, got any thoughts on my Atlantic Records stock? I hear they have invented a totally new compression scheme, think that's worth investing in them?". In such a situation, Morton is apt to laugh in Mr. Rich Guy's face, and then have to explain why, for instance, MS is backing another thing and then there's mp3 and so the (fictional) Atlantic scheme hasn't got a chance in hell- thus saving Mr. Rich Guy far more than he could possibly pay his trophy geek, who still thinks it's amazing that he has a blank check for any and all computer equipment, consoles etc. he wants. Rich Guy lives in a mansion and has a cottage on the Riviera. Trophy Geek lives in the basement of the mansion, rent-free, and rarely leaves his techno-toys except to go to trade shows. It's a symbiotic relationship. That's what'll happen. Knowledge is power- but the way things are shaping up, the people most able to wield this knowledge are not primarily interested in power, just in more knowledge, and techie toys to play with. This is dirt cheap even if it seems phenomenally generous to Trophy Geek. Dare I say it- start grabbing Trophy Geeks now, rich folk! If you're too slow, you'll be stuck getting advice from some MCSE or other, and you'll lose the big chances because you didn't snatch up and become the patron to a Trophy Geek when you could!;) Don't look at me- I figure I'd qualify for that job but I'm looking to industry for my patron- I intend to be trophy geek to a nonprofit organization that gives great resources to other nonprofits, and so my patron would simply be the huge corporations which give grants to the nonprofits like us. I figure we'll be able to earn all the grants we want because we're genuinely committed to service, so I won't actually need a rich-guy patron. But it would still be kinda cool, wouldn't it?:)
IMO, TCP/IP isn't so much a TLA as a FLA, FWIW, but it's not worth a LART really, so never mind, HTH, HAND:) -jinx_tigr, bastard kitty of the scary devil monastery
Asimov Apple II disk image archive Yay- Choplifter! Now, if only we had some stuff like Opcode's original (system 6, monochrome) version of Musicshop- that sort of thing, effective but really old programs on the Mac side, because currently I can't legally make Pluses and Classics into little MIDI sequencers and give them away as such...
Now that he's literally advocating the stalking of children at movie houses, we need another poll. I've never seen such a broad uprising against this man as I saw over this article, combining as it did arrogance, seriously perverse values, disrespect for parents' choices _and_ the advocating of accosting random children at the movie houses. Suddenly the people who've been angry at Katz all along were joined by outraged parents and the occasional pissed-off genuine libertarian. It's time to take that vote again- unless the ballot box is stuffed, he _will_ lose this time. He does not have the support of most Slashdotters, nor should he, nor should he have story posting access.
I quite agree. Sorry, I got carried away a little. Bill Gates is a powermad psychopath and only _as_ appropriate as Katz for posting stories and personal essays and crusades to Slashdot. He is not _more_ appropriate than Katz, and I retract the implication. >:)
He has no idea what anarchy is, and he sure as _hell_ has no idea what being libertarian is (and I'm not even a libertarian, and I can figure that out). He's claiming all those banners and then equating them all to the classic 'me generation' cry of 'meeeeeeeee!'. He's _only_ interested in himself. He's _only_ interested in Slashdot to the extent that it can magnify his own influence. He's _only_ interested in geeks in the sense of a power base and doesn't even _care_ about us otherwise. He's _only_ interested in the children he claims to want to liberate to the extent that he can assume they all have exactly the same desires and values as he has, which is disgusting as he is horribly bland and doesn't seem to really have a thought in his head deeper than 'meeeeee'. Let him go do his own thing.... somewhere else! Almost _anybody_ else would be more suitable as a story poster. Hell, Bill Gates has more in common with us- at least he's a _geek_ even though he's a powermad psychopath. Why do we have a story poster who is less appropriate for Slashdot that Gates would be?
Absolutely. It's an absolute slap in the face to be confronted with this sort of thing on Slashdot. It's hardly new to get it from Katz, but as of late the man has become messianic, and it's only funny to the extent that it's not maddening: I'm not ready to assume that there's no value to having a degree of cluefulness for story posters, or (God help us) _authors_ who will inevitably come off as official Slashdot party line definers, whether or not that is the intent. Jon Katz _demands_ followers now. He wants a crusade. I'm not a Slashdot power figure, I'm just a reader, but I demand this: better writers. I don't care how many silly articles are _pointed_ to on the net- it's always interesting to see Slashdotter reactions to some weird concept- but I rebel, not against movie theaters as Katz demands I do, but against Katz's value system, and against the notion that he is at all appropriate for producing articles for Slashdot. For God's sake, we are now watching a pitched battle between AOL and Microsoft over internet messaging that could leave the WHOLE FIELD completely immobilized in patents and litigation, as well as balkanizing it- and it's possible that only Slashdotters (and their ilk) can truly see where this leads, and why it is so horribly wrong no matter _who_ 'wins' each battle- and we're supposed to 'crack' into MOVIES? I could make a damned good argument that Katz is a MOLE for this sort of thing, intentionally dissipating and confusing the most public web Nerd meeting place at the behest of some powerful industry force. I don't care that he's presumably just a fool- get rid of him!
This is _the_ most absurd thing I've seen on Slashdot for months- possibly the most absurd thing I've _ever_ seen here! Jon, go home- you're turning into unintentional self-parody and _wasting_ our time, and totally diluting our credibility. "This could be an annual event in the new Geek Nation!" Oh _joy_ be unconfined! Who's selling the tickets to the ticket-sleazing event? I've got a great idea, let's replace the role of Linux Installfests, of talking politics and tech with other geek, with SNEAKING INTO MOVIE THEATRES. Why, that could change the world! Adults! Get really used to lying your ass off for genuinely stupid and meaningless reasons! Who needs justification? It's an evil invention of those wicked authority figures that made dope illegal! Kids! Hang out by the video games and wait for your chance! God forbid you should hang out at _home_ hacking or READING or LEARNING something actually interesting. You have a RIGHT to meaningless entertainment! It's your RIGHT as a geek to have no values different from those of everybody else! You too can be a brainless conformist hanging out at the mall or video arcade or movie theater! You don't _have_ to act different, or think, or give something to society- the same society which is repressing your important rights to publically view stupid movies! And you, yes YOU, can ignore everything you really are, and redefine yourself as a total passive consumer, and claim your rights to consume anything you want! Why would you ever want to do anything else? What kind of _nerd_ would sit around coding on Linux or even VB or something, when they could be watching movies? *ack* go AWAY, Jon... you're NOT HELPING...
I'm not a bit surprised that Katz would turn himself into a hero by lying and cheating. At the same time I'm not a bit disturbed by the Mom letting her kids see South Park. If there was a lesson there, I prefer the Mom's. She extended trust under the assumption that her kids would place the comedy movie in its proper perspective. Katz's lesson was that if an authority figure was annoying you, the proper thing to do is sleaze around it, make up stories, and then manipulate the situation to 'win'. I'd have liked him better if he said, "Okay. I am going to walk these kids into the theater, and I'll be looking in on them every half hour or so. Deal with it. I'm a journalist and a responsible person, and you have my word that I'll keep an eye on them, though I think it's ludicrous." Instead he spun a whole line of sleazy boomer *bleeeeep* and expects us to consider this _laudable!_ This is supposed to signify his becoming libertarian. His _refusal_ to make a stand on the matter is supposed to signify the depth of his committment. Well, it does. You can't have it both ways. He preferred to play games. He could have done a number of things, among them returning his tickets and asking for his money back- but noooooo, Jon wants to be the rebel, Jon will play a trick on the mean nasty authority figures less than half his age. *feh* Next time we have an article on this, can it be from somebody who actually took a _stand_ on the matter instead of playing little games with it?
The First Computer Person Maybe not incredibly technical (this is a _story_ not a proposal), but the idea isn't unheard of. It's a question of being able to make use of a vast number of extra gates- very much a neural net problem rather than a Von Neumann architecture. I suspect the 'maybe logic' I went on about in the story might be as important a concept: it fascinates me that in _all_ the digital circuits we depend on, there's the capacity for non-boolean logic values. This simply depends on analog characteristics of the digital circuits, which in some cases is quite predictable and in other cases not- but the resolution is phenomenal and there's no delay time for calculating relationships- I've been meaning to torture some random CMOS logic chips with non-logic values and see what comes out the output. Has anybody done this? So far I only know that inverters are relatively linear, which is hardly surprising:)
This is a beautiful example of why the most frothingly rabid Free Software advocacy is good and proper. Look at instant messaging- sort of like the cell phones of the Internet, annoying but some people absolutely love it- but guess what? There are major security lapses in established products, there's no way to audit the code or have anybody audit the code to track such security holes, and the proprietary vendors are fighting each other to death without caring a tinker's damn about their customers. It's a complete power game and has nothing to do with providing value to customers. Next thing you know, they'll have the whole field tied up in patents and nothing will be compatible with anything else. This is horrible. It's disgusting, and it's hopeless to expect these large corporate companies to act any other way. MS is inciting people to ignore AOL's TOS. AOL is churning their messaging format to break the MS client. They're not going to stop- internet messaging is going to remain a battleground. MS is probably going to behave more like a good guy in this situation- but can you put a price tag on having a choke-hold on internet messaging? They're not in it for their health, and they're damned well not it in for benefitting customers. It's a vitally important leverage point for controlling information flow, and they will capture it (all of it) at any cost- to use as leverage for controlling even more. To hell with all of them. Use the situation to highlight how pathetically little freedom the mainstream computer consumer actually has. If you go with the commercial sector, you have less and less power over your own fate- things are shaping up to really turn the screws. Picture it: "Oh yeah? Well, we'll revise AIM so _only_ the newest clients can use it!" "Oh, you think you're tough? We'll have IE install _our_ client by _automatic_ _update_." "Bastards! We'll put strong encryption on ours and sue you for enticing our customers to violate our TOS!" "Ha, nice try- we'll make our stuff require a _PIII_ with the serialization turned on, and have our clients reference a database at microsoft.com to guard against anyone stealing our users' identities." "Oh yeah? We'll require the PIII too, and patent all variations of our method..." This is a good direction to be moving in?
Actually, this makes sense. If you're a geek but want an Apple laptop, you'd be wanting a Powerbook, not an iMac-ized consumerbook. The Powerbooks are gray, and a heck of a lot more powerful than the orange and blue thingies:) They are also more expensive by a substantial margin- if you're an alpha geek, you can buy what you like anyway:)
*install* *boot* *choose Linux from graphical BootX utility* *linux*
What's not to like? Linux on Mac hardware is delightful, and what with the old A/UX and the new OSX, MacOS and its utilities intentionally coexist with Unix. There are utilities to read back and forth between the OSes (always a good rule of thumb to read foreign, write natively) and lots of MacOS application support for Unix file operations. MacGzip, tar, bzip, ability to easily save text files with the correct line endings, to make all the xpms you'd like, plus MacOS is at least as good as Windows for those wizzy digital audio applications or nonlinear video that Windows people hassle you about not having, if not better at it. What's not to like? Any linux problem is easy if you can boot into MacOS and get help on newsgroups using MT-Newswatcher (open source software), browse the web using iCab (no more Netscape, death to IE), and continue to be connected in general. Linux on a Mac _is_ easy.
I have a username, sir, and you're a damned fool. The reason you are a fool is this: there is absolutely no correlation between service and unregulated capitalist victory. None. Nada. Zero. You're pretending there is, and that's extremely stupid. If you seriously believe that, go take figure skating lessons from Nancy Kerrigan, and I'll hang out around the corner with the nunchaku. You are a _damned_ fool to correlate service with success, and overlook the plain and obvious fact that crime pays. If crime did not pay, there would not be any of it. If crime was service, it wouldn't be called 'crime'. Crime is breaking the kneecaps of the Mom and Pop store in any of a vast number of ways. The goal is no longer 'how can I enhance services to win more business from these people?', instead it becomes 'how can I slash their tires more cheaply than I could win business, thereby getting their business by default?'. If this tireslashing requires temporary inconvenience, well, one just has to take the long view, doesn't one? This approach _beats_ ordinary service, in an unregulated environment. Every time. That's the whole reason we even have government at all!! Crime pays. It's cheaper to garrotte your competitor's best salesman than it is to find one of your own (and pay him). And so, over thousands of years, human beings have struggled to find governments that would keep the tireslashing to a minimum. Sure, it's awkward, but the natural way sucks- everybody's tires end up slashed, the products suck, and nobody's willing to do actual work because any gains will only result in the winner getting mugged. This breeds a peasant mentality, and the rulers end up being muggers and bandits. This record is repeated over and over through history. Ethics is a positive-sum game. The point of it is to establish an environment where people feel justified in working hard and contributing, knowing that they're not just gonna get 'mugged' for their trouble. You want to throw away all that, because you're a damned fool and don't even know what you're suggesting. AMD is getting mugged already. They're losing a lot of money, and the amount of energy and virtuosity they've shown suggests that in a balanced market with many vendors, they would be pushing 50% maybe- they can do inexpensive, they can do a pretty decent yield, they can even do high performance, they can do PR, they can get vendors: what's not to like? Instead, they're being mugged- they are slammed into horrible losses not by virtue of them sucking that badly, but simply because they are up against a quiet monopolist. Yes, if Intel decided to ignore antitrust, AMD would be a coat of paint on the wall in weeks- but they are _still_ getting mugged, just more slowly. For what they're doing, normally one would expect the company to make even a small amount of profit. I'm not convinced they can, whatever they do. That's not capitalism, that's protectionism. You're merely protecting the _trust_ rather than the little guy, but you're arguing protectionism. You're saying 'because Intel is big enough to mug smaller companies, therefore this ability must be protected'. And you're fool enough to call that capitalism rather than the feudalism it is- which is why you're a damned fool.
"Antitrust law has never been intended to "fix" market failures; it has always been intended to help politically connected firms who can't compete in the market." Are you totally out of your mind? That's the weirdest perspective on Standard Oil, big steel, and the abuses of the fledgling Industrial Revolution that I've ever seen. Ever heard of a 'company town'? It sounds like your 'homework' is entirely the result of blindly accepting the information of pseudo-libertarian web sites (read some _books_ man) which are, very likely, told what to say by Microsoft spin control experts- 'astroturf' libertarians. It's quite another thing to claim that antitrust law _fails_ to fix market failures- I would argue that this claim puts the standard of 'fixing' arbitrarily high and doesn't allow for real world stupidity and awkwardness- but to claim what you do is outright madness, and as worthy of ridicule as the most crazed 'black helicopters' Microsoft ranting. Don't post websites, read some history books. In particular, check out where the labor movement came from. You're free to argue that Labor is simply wrong and evil, but it might give you some perspective on that and on trusts to check out the powers really big economic forces can exert when unchecked. Quite 1984-esque, really. It's basically the ability to supplant and outright replace the government- it's a sort of feudalism, where the company is way more important than the government to its subjects but can't be voted on or altered in any way- insta-peasants! Yes, my liege, of course I wanted every possession of mine to be acquired only through _your_ channels at extortionate prices- it's the American Way! Antitrust law is merely the awkward attempt to represent American citizens even in situations this desperate. Of _course_ it looks stupid: it's _law_. But it's not about helping any firms except in that said firms would be composed of citizens being denied a fair shot at American business. It's mostly about the peasants created by trusts. Anytime a business concern gets so powerful that its interests are _more_ important to its subjects than the government's interests- you're going to have the government becoming very interested and trying to stop it, because business concerns traditionally don't even operate on the level of government and policy, and trusts are completely able to supplant the government in their areas of control- see 'company town'. Deal with it. That's not going to change, so you might as well adjust to it. You're not ever, ever going to persuade any government to let itself be marginalised by a business concern, are you? If so, are you really that expert in political science to demonstrate that the feudalism you're advocating is genuinely preferable, or are you simply illustrating blind and stupid faith in abstract concepts that fail in real life?
We sure will not take second place to California on grounds of hill beauty;) I've had friends visit from _Canada_ who were captivated by the beauty of Vermont and bitched about how, with the aid of a glacier, we stole all their good topsoil and deciduous trees;) I have a friend who's been looking for an at least three-bedroom house, that has to be nice and not need much work. Her price range is pushing $100K, not $600K. I'm not 'pro' yet: and Vermont takes good care of its people- I'm taking advantage of low income housing and such things. I have a third-floor apartment, freshly painted, I don't pay heat in the Vermont winter and I don't pay hot water and the security deposit was negotiable. I have a bedroom almost three times the size of a queen bed to fit my twin-bed into, and a living room twice the size of that, and a view of the sunset over the mountain, and I'm right in town (for fairly humble values of 'town'.) The rent is $396 a month total, of which housing assistance is helping with most of that. My own yearly income is almost, but not quite, _eight_ thousand a year, and I'm not homeless. There's some chance that I can turn pro and start making some sort of a geek salary- possibly many times my eight thousand a year. It's very humorous and gratifying to me that geek salaries are normally supposed to be these outlandish figures- here in Vermont, you could buy whole towns with that. I'll stay here, thanks- even if I could only earn a max of 50K or something. Hell, the _luxury_ apartments here with a view of the river are only pushing $900 a month, and those are three times the size of my whole apartment, which is already twice the size of urban studios. o_O It _is_ hot: this is July. It's pushing 90 degrees these days. We're more known for cold;) if you can't handle serious cold, don't even come here in the winter. On the other hand, you might like to come here for the skiing, for which we're also famous:) Come to Vermont... you know you want to...green mountains, fresh air, a more relaxed, human pace...;)
Slashdot Mirror
Firstly- people have generated amino acids in test tubes without _too_ much trouble. :) :) )
Secondly- huh? (admittedly not the most intelligent reaction.) By who? Did they get any data on it, like take a photo or something?
Thirdly- uh. Actually there have been lots of changes...
Fourthly- sure! I'd buy that
To sum it up- I'm honestly very puzzled that on the one hand you postulate a something that created life and continues to act on it, and then on the other hand you insist that it actually _isn't_ acting on life and hasn't been for years, and presumably is finished. I'd beg to disagree- this is effectively stating that God is Dead and no longer has any input to add into the world. I consider that a shocking belief, and think that it's much more plausible that God (whatever God is) came up with evolution, in much the way that programmers came up with compilers and makefiles rather than typing in each binary bit one at a time.
If you ever heard of quantum mechanics, you'd realize that on some levels everything and nothing is random- and so evolution isn't really random chance, but the workings of a world-sized mechanism incomprehensibly too complex for any human to grasp. Adding evolution to the mechanism, so that it is self-maintaining and modifies itself, clearly makes it that much more complicated and difficult. It appears that you believe God cannot cope with such a complexity, so you limit your view of God to something that can manage complexities _you_ can understand. I consider this sad but understandable- it's disconcerting to contemplate the idea of a God that not only knows better than us, but is on such a higher level as to be almost incomprehensible him, her or itself. However, limiting your God to be an entity that we humans can understand is an injustice....
(weirding out slashdotters for fun and profit
This sort of thing has long been observed in a-life experiments. Ever heard of Danny Hillis's 'ramps'? What happens is this- populations will appear to stagnate in extended plateaus of development. A great deal of change is going on at lower levels, but none of it 'sticks'. For instance, obGiraffeNeck, this is not one gene but an entire complex involving neck length, bone structure, a stronger heart, the amazing system of valves that keep the animal from immediately fainting when rapidly moving its head from high to low positions or vice versa... and all of this was churning around in the genetic populations, until some of the animals lucked out with all the right features to be effective giraffes- not as _extremely_ developed as current giraffes, but with all the primary characteristics. At this point the new giraffes basically outcompeted all the previous ones in that niche, and the seemingly new species was off and running (on long spindly legs, but not as long as the future giraffes would have). ;) ;) but not, I think, by all Slashdotters, because there are all sorts out there, and I think some of them will appreciate what I'm trying to convey.
The genes are present in populations, but only when they come together in the right populations does the world change. It's not an abrupt jump or rapid evolving, it's the coming together of lots of little evolvings and mutations into a cohesive whole that's abruptly more effective than the previous populations.
I, personally, subscribe to the view that there's some force that could just as well be called God as called anything else. I can't say as I understand it all that well- I doubt I ever will. However, my image of it, applied to the 'punctuated equilibrium' evolution, is of a Gardener God, caring for growing things, perhaps helping them along, understanding them deeply and trying to create beauty despite infestations of aphids
It's extremely tiresome to be confronted with people who insist on a Puppetmaster God- effectively a much cruder sort of God who never works with anything, but only lays down orders and makes or breaks stuff and won't admit to the slightest interplay with His creations. Artists and creators who are any good are willing to sense what a creation is trying to become, like a sculptor trying to feel what shapes a rock wants to have- in many ways, the harmony of this is a lot more beautiful than just picking a big rock and laser-carving it into a prearranged shape with no interplay at all.
In effect, this total rejection of evolution is the insistence on a total Luser God- and I reject it, preferring the idea of a Gardener God or Michaelangelo God that is creatively interested in all the raw materials, in which every sparrow that falls isn't some meaningless decree but a thing observed, accepted, perhaps even worked into the continuing act of creation.
Having now professed to a belief in God, I will cheerfully allow myself to be mocked by a bunch of clever unbeliever Slashdotter kids
_I_ have a Power Mac 9500 running linuxppc! :) :) :) ;)
Coooool
Getting one will cost you under a grand, somewhat more to trick it out with lots of RAM and stuff. Is it upgraded with, say, a 200Mhz 604e like mine, or is it the original 132mhz 604 running it?
9500 has 12 ram slots, 6 PCI slots, and two entire plain SCSI busses built right in. Whee! Now if I had lots more drives I could actually start using it to its capacities.
I take it the linux 9500 has been handling slashdotting gracefully? That's very interesting to know.
Final note- the power supply on these kicks ass. I've had brownouts knock my (separate, wall-wart powered) modem offline and make the monitor hiccup and not even cause the powermac to blink. So the linux box up against W2K is probably even better at being hit by lightning
My guess is, it's an upset Microsoftie trying to get revenge by DoSing Slashdot.f hidfijfijhhtmhtmhtm.htm.htm.htm.htm' which killed it. And no one particular garbage-request did it, either- the thing just started wobbling and went _down_. I don't think the MS people even _know_ what failed.
Funny... we're still here...
The pathetic thing about all this is how clear it's becoming that NT+IIS, even in the most _relentlessly_ protected environments with a firewall cutting off everything but http, will still crash and burn in a matter of hours at the whims of teenaged script kiddies. Most of the damage wasn't done by the heavy guys. It's all the teens going, "Okay- I'll ask it for the page 'GHIGBDBWDBFJHJHWIGHFKJHbkjbKJGBihsdgifijfhfijhji
There is no joy in Redmond. Nobody won the contest according to their rules... but they surely expected a server _that_ shielded to stay _up_. And it just isn't.
Moral of the story? Don't bother trying to break MS stuff with cleverness. Just swamp it and it'll fall over...
I call my Powermac 9500 'Tigger'. Because, due to running only IBM fast/wide SCSI drives off the internal narrow SCSI bus, one for MacOS and one for LinuxPPC, I have to boot it with a press on the power button and then immediately a hard reset to get the nonstandard drives to register, so I have to 'bounce' Tigger to get it to boot. But, with a 200mhz 604e and 192M of ram, it is at least 'bouncy bouncy bouncy bouncy funfunfunfunfun!' ;) :) :) whee!
Linux side runs Window Maker with menu commands for animated desktops w. xlockmore taken from Afterstep, and uses all my fancy XPMs and desktop pictures, and also furnishes storage space for the entire USGS DEM series
Bungie designed _all_ of it. If you want to be disrespectful of theme and mood and general game design, I hope you also have nasty words for Ion Storm ;) Now, if you have a problem PC, that's understandable. We're quite aware that PCs can blow at any seam, and it speaks well for Bungie that they did eventually fix things for you, since most people seem to have not had your particular problems. (snipe snipe snipe, vid vid vid) ;) oh, you call tech support? ;) *hehehe*
The point is, you're kind of outnumbered, and there's a lot of evidence to suggest that Bungie are generally terrific enough to compensate for not being total masters of the Windows PC. And that's what you're complaining about- Myth II was causing problems with advanced hardware under _windows_. Are you _sure_ that they'd find Linux that forbidding and impossible to code for? They've been coding for Macs for years, and Macs are well known to be totally subject to extensions madness, sort of the Mac version of all Linux boxes being randomly different and customised. This indicates a history of being ready to cope with more personalised boxes- it is _not_ necessary to assume a generic 'standardized' computer just to make good software, and the Linux movement will test that assumption severely- and I think Bungie will do well in its new environment.
So there
(!!!!) :)
You're evidently not an old Bungie hand. blam is the secret word associated with the new game Bungie just demoed at Macworld. Not Myth III, not Oni- the one beyond _that_. I've seen a video clip of it running. It's astonishing.
Could this mean that they will port Halo to Linux?
You guys don't know Bungie like us macsters do. They have games still producing fans and newsgroup traffic (alt.games.marathon- one of the few such newsgroups created just by reader demand) years after the game's release. They have tighter security than Apple, or the heyday of the Politburo- but they _tease_... and there have been hints of 'blam' for YEARS. It's gonna be big- it's been demoed finally- and this looks a lot like it's going to support Linux.
Bungie _rule_. It doesn't surprise me at all that they're gearing up to give Linux the serious commercial support it deserves in gaming. They are bestsellers, really heavy hitters, and they don't do anything in a halfassed way. It looks like Linux is going to get equal status with Mac and Windows from Bungie. That's pretty big news.
Me, I'm just tickled that Myth II supports _LinuxPPC_... I'd never held out much hope for people doing that. I'm happy even just hearing about it.
The problem here is what people can get used to- and the potential of that to cause damage.
Maybe you personally don't object to deleting spam. I, myself, don't especially mind sorting known-good email into special mailboxes and then having the inbox be the spamtrap, sometimes meaning that cmd-A delete is all I need to do. I've discarded good messages because I thought they were spam, a couple times, and it didn't cause me too much trouble, just a bit of ribbing from my boss who'd got his message deleted by mistake.
However, I fully support these draconian measures against spammers, because the problem is the 'I could do that' factor. There are a certain number of new spammers every day, and many of them noisily advocate spamming to others, and some of the spams are themselves for spam tools. It's a recipe for 'meltdown'.
Even a fairly humble linux box can saturate a T1. If any concessions are made to spamming, and it gains any sort of acceptability, it's a 'tragedy of the commons' situation but will happen so fast it'll make your head spin- and suddenly, the networks will be saturated, ISPs and backbones collapsing under the weight of one person in a hundred, or one in ten, deciding that 'it doesn't cost anything' to send their advertising note to, well, heck, how about sending it to everybody? There's this neat program a spam pointed them to, and it can run 24/7...
I get spams authored in Frontpage using some non-English language that might be Japanese or some 2-byte language. I've been getting quite a few of those, more and more. Why be restricted to 'customers' who can read your language? Why not just send email to everybody on the internet and then those who can't understand it should just throw it away- or 'opt out'? Let's _everybody_ do that. Then each of us will only have to throw away 1 email/day from everybody in the world. No, that's silly, call it one in a thousand. So each of us will only have to throw away or opt out of several million spams a day...
Hell with that. RBL 'em. The net is not necessarily a safe place. In particular, spammers don't have rights to network access, and have no reason to expect fairness.
The only restriction on GPL is that you can't close it again once opened. It doesn't have 'political' clauses like this, nor should it.
"Most likely, in an effort to maintain their status, they will become geeks (or try like hell, or fake it, or something) as well as the philanderers, cutthroats, etc. that they already are. That is, if that's what it takes to continue their 'ascent to power'." ;) :)
No: they'll hire geeks. It'll be like scientists of bygone days- when the article says 'speeding gazelle' what it's really saying is: How fast can you get certain types of information? If you had to know what a plausible Vermont salary for a Silicon Valley job would be, where would you look? If you're attaching a new video card to your computer where do you go to find the undocumented setup guidelines the vendor won't give you? Where do you go to be the first to hear about the HP activeX controls installed at the factory which are major security holes?
Some of you are already nodding about those ActiveX controls and have a URL which you're sharing with friends of yours who are HP owners with recent machines. Those who have already heard about this: _you_ are the Net set, _you_ are the sort who will be drowned in gold by rich people who want not only the fine wines, fancy cars- they want power, they want to be the first to know, but they cannot themselves learn what they'd need- and so they'll buy _people_ to do that for them.
Those bought people are the Net Set, as it'll actually happen. They won't be primary sources of wealth (ha- as if the rich people sit at home knitting Krugerrands), but they will be _secondary_ rich people, minstrels/wizards of the modern age- status symbols but also capable of being incredibly useful from time to time.
It's not so much the greedy little lines of MCSEs whose question is 'what's in it for me?' who'll become this type of new wizard- those people have a curiosity limited to their arms' reach, and a real unwillingness to be bothered with thinking about problems that are 'beneath' them. Instead it's the hardcore geeks who will end up with wealthy patrons- rich people asking, "Well, now, Morton, got any thoughts on my Atlantic Records stock? I hear they have invented a totally new compression scheme, think that's worth investing in them?".
In such a situation, Morton is apt to laugh in Mr. Rich Guy's face, and then have to explain why, for instance, MS is backing another thing and then there's mp3 and so the (fictional) Atlantic scheme hasn't got a chance in hell- thus saving Mr. Rich Guy far more than he could possibly pay his trophy geek, who still thinks it's amazing that he has a blank check for any and all computer equipment, consoles etc. he wants. Rich Guy lives in a mansion and has a cottage on the Riviera. Trophy Geek lives in the basement of the mansion, rent-free, and rarely leaves his techno-toys except to go to trade shows. It's a symbiotic relationship.
That's what'll happen. Knowledge is power- but the way things are shaping up, the people most able to wield this knowledge are not primarily interested in power, just in more knowledge, and techie toys to play with. This is dirt cheap even if it seems phenomenally generous to Trophy Geek.
Dare I say it- start grabbing Trophy Geeks now, rich folk! If you're too slow, you'll be stuck getting advice from some MCSE or other, and you'll lose the big chances because you didn't snatch up and become the patron to a Trophy Geek when you could!
Don't look at me- I figure I'd qualify for that job but I'm looking to industry for my patron- I intend to be trophy geek to a nonprofit organization that gives great resources to other nonprofits, and so my patron would simply be the huge corporations which give grants to the nonprofits like us. I figure we'll be able to earn all the grants we want because we're genuinely committed to service, so I won't actually need a rich-guy patron. But it would still be kinda cool, wouldn't it?
IMO, TCP/IP isn't so much a TLA as a FLA, FWIW, but it's not worth a LART really, so never mind, HTH, HAND :)
-jinx_tigr, bastard kitty of the scary devil monastery
Asimov Apple II disk image archive
Yay- Choplifter! Now, if only we had some stuff like Opcode's original (system 6, monochrome) version of Musicshop- that sort of thing, effective but really old programs on the Mac side, because currently I can't legally make Pluses and Classics into little MIDI sequencers and give them away as such...
Now that he's literally advocating the stalking of children at movie houses, we need another poll. I've never seen such a broad uprising against this man as I saw over this article, combining as it did arrogance, seriously perverse values, disrespect for parents' choices _and_ the advocating of accosting random children at the movie houses. Suddenly the people who've been angry at Katz all along were joined by outraged parents and the occasional pissed-off genuine libertarian. It's time to take that vote again- unless the ballot box is stuffed, he _will_ lose this time. He does not have the support of most Slashdotters, nor should he, nor should he have story posting access.
I quite agree. Sorry, I got carried away a little. Bill Gates is a powermad psychopath and only _as_ appropriate as Katz for posting stories and personal essays and crusades to Slashdot. He is not _more_ appropriate than Katz, and I retract the implication. >:)
He has no idea what anarchy is, and he sure as _hell_ has no idea what being libertarian is (and I'm not even a libertarian, and I can figure that out).
He's claiming all those banners and then equating them all to the classic 'me generation' cry of 'meeeeeeeee!'. He's _only_ interested in himself. He's _only_ interested in Slashdot to the extent that it can magnify his own influence. He's _only_ interested in geeks in the sense of a power base and doesn't even _care_ about us otherwise. He's _only_ interested in the children he claims to want to liberate to the extent that he can assume they all have exactly the same desires and values as he has, which is disgusting as he is horribly bland and doesn't seem to really have a thought in his head deeper than 'meeeeee'.
Let him go do his own thing.... somewhere else! Almost _anybody_ else would be more suitable as a story poster. Hell, Bill Gates has more in common with us- at least he's a _geek_ even though he's a powermad psychopath. Why do we have a story poster who is less appropriate for Slashdot that Gates would be?
Absolutely. It's an absolute slap in the face to be confronted with this sort of thing on Slashdot. It's hardly new to get it from Katz, but as of late the man has become messianic, and it's only funny to the extent that it's not maddening: I'm not ready to assume that there's no value to having a degree of cluefulness for story posters, or (God help us) _authors_ who will inevitably come off as official Slashdot party line definers, whether or not that is the intent.
Jon Katz _demands_ followers now. He wants a crusade. I'm not a Slashdot power figure, I'm just a reader, but I demand this: better writers. I don't care how many silly articles are _pointed_ to on the net- it's always interesting to see Slashdotter reactions to some weird concept- but I rebel, not against movie theaters as Katz demands I do, but against Katz's value system, and against the notion that he is at all appropriate for producing articles for Slashdot.
For God's sake, we are now watching a pitched battle between AOL and Microsoft over internet messaging that could leave the WHOLE FIELD completely immobilized in patents and litigation, as well as balkanizing it- and it's possible that only Slashdotters (and their ilk) can truly see where this leads, and why it is so horribly wrong no matter _who_ 'wins' each battle- and we're supposed to 'crack' into MOVIES? I could make a damned good argument that Katz is a MOLE for this sort of thing, intentionally dissipating and confusing the most public web Nerd meeting place at the behest of some powerful industry force. I don't care that he's presumably just a fool- get rid of him!
This is _the_ most absurd thing I've seen on Slashdot for months- possibly the most absurd thing I've _ever_ seen here! Jon, go home- you're turning into unintentional self-parody and _wasting_ our time, and totally diluting our credibility.
"This could be an annual event in the new Geek Nation!" Oh _joy_ be unconfined! Who's selling the tickets to the ticket-sleazing event? I've got a great idea, let's replace the role of Linux Installfests, of talking politics and tech with other geek, with SNEAKING INTO MOVIE THEATRES. Why, that could change the world!
Adults! Get really used to lying your ass off for genuinely stupid and meaningless reasons! Who needs justification? It's an evil invention of those wicked authority figures that made dope illegal!
Kids! Hang out by the video games and wait for your chance! God forbid you should hang out at _home_ hacking or READING or LEARNING something actually interesting. You have a RIGHT to meaningless entertainment! It's your RIGHT as a geek to have no values different from those of everybody else! You too can be a brainless conformist hanging out at the mall or video arcade or movie theater! You don't _have_ to act different, or think, or give something to society- the same society which is repressing your important rights to publically view stupid movies! And you, yes YOU, can ignore everything you really are, and redefine yourself as a total passive consumer, and claim your rights to consume anything you want! Why would you ever want to do anything else? What kind of _nerd_ would sit around coding on Linux or even VB or something, when they could be watching movies?
*ack*
go AWAY, Jon... you're NOT HELPING...
I'm not a bit surprised that Katz would turn himself into a hero by lying and cheating. At the same time I'm not a bit disturbed by the Mom letting her kids see South Park.
If there was a lesson there, I prefer the Mom's. She extended trust under the assumption that her kids would place the comedy movie in its proper perspective. Katz's lesson was that if an authority figure was annoying you, the proper thing to do is sleaze around it, make up stories, and then manipulate the situation to 'win'.
I'd have liked him better if he said, "Okay. I am going to walk these kids into the theater, and I'll be looking in on them every half hour or so. Deal with it. I'm a journalist and a responsible person, and you have my word that I'll keep an eye on them, though I think it's ludicrous."
Instead he spun a whole line of sleazy boomer *bleeeeep* and expects us to consider this _laudable!_ This is supposed to signify his becoming libertarian. His _refusal_ to make a stand on the matter is supposed to signify the depth of his committment.
Well, it does. You can't have it both ways. He preferred to play games. He could have done a number of things, among them returning his tickets and asking for his money back- but noooooo, Jon wants to be the rebel, Jon will play a trick on the mean nasty authority figures less than half his age. *feh*
Next time we have an article on this, can it be from somebody who actually took a _stand_ on the matter instead of playing little games with it?
The First Computer Person :)
Maybe not incredibly technical (this is a _story_ not a proposal), but the idea isn't unheard of. It's a question of being able to make use of a vast number of extra gates- very much a neural net problem rather than a Von Neumann architecture.
I suspect the 'maybe logic' I went on about in the story might be as important a concept: it fascinates me that in _all_ the digital circuits we depend on, there's the capacity for non-boolean logic values. This simply depends on analog characteristics of the digital circuits, which in some cases is quite predictable and in other cases not- but the resolution is phenomenal and there's no delay time for calculating relationships- I've been meaning to torture some random CMOS logic chips with non-logic values and see what comes out the output. Has anybody done this? So far I only know that inverters are relatively linear, which is hardly surprising
This is a beautiful example of why the most frothingly rabid Free Software advocacy is good and proper.
Look at instant messaging- sort of like the cell phones of the Internet, annoying but some people absolutely love it- but guess what? There are major security lapses in established products, there's no way to audit the code or have anybody audit the code to track such security holes, and the proprietary vendors are fighting each other to death without caring a tinker's damn about their customers. It's a complete power game and has nothing to do with providing value to customers.
Next thing you know, they'll have the whole field tied up in patents and nothing will be compatible with anything else.
This is horrible. It's disgusting, and it's hopeless to expect these large corporate companies to act any other way. MS is inciting people to ignore AOL's TOS. AOL is churning their messaging format to break the MS client. They're not going to stop- internet messaging is going to remain a battleground. MS is probably going to behave more like a good guy in this situation- but can you put a price tag on having a choke-hold on internet messaging? They're not in it for their health, and they're damned well not it in for benefitting customers. It's a vitally important leverage point for controlling information flow, and they will capture it (all of it) at any cost- to use as leverage for controlling even more.
To hell with all of them. Use the situation to highlight how pathetically little freedom the mainstream computer consumer actually has. If you go with the commercial sector, you have less and less power over your own fate- things are shaping up to really turn the screws. Picture it: "Oh yeah? Well, we'll revise AIM so _only_ the newest clients can use it!" "Oh, you think you're tough? We'll have IE install _our_ client by _automatic_ _update_." "Bastards! We'll put strong encryption on ours and sue you for enticing our customers to violate our TOS!" "Ha, nice try- we'll make our stuff require a _PIII_ with the serialization turned on, and have our clients reference a database at microsoft.com to guard against anyone stealing our users' identities." "Oh yeah? We'll require the PIII too, and patent all variations of our method..."
This is a good direction to be moving in?
Actually, this makes sense. If you're a geek but want an Apple laptop, you'd be wanting a Powerbook, not an iMac-ized consumerbook. The Powerbooks are gray, and a heck of a lot more powerful than the orange and blue thingies :) :)
They are also more expensive by a substantial margin- if you're an alpha geek, you can buy what you like anyway
*install*
*boot*
*choose Linux from graphical BootX utility*
*linux*
What's not to like? Linux on Mac hardware is delightful, and what with the old A/UX and the new OSX, MacOS and its utilities intentionally coexist with Unix. There are utilities to read back and forth between the OSes (always a good rule of thumb to read foreign, write natively) and lots of MacOS application support for Unix file operations. MacGzip, tar, bzip, ability to easily save text files with the correct line endings, to make all the xpms you'd like, plus MacOS is at least as good as Windows for those wizzy digital audio applications or nonlinear video that Windows people hassle you about not having, if not better at it. What's not to like? Any linux problem is easy if you can boot into MacOS and get help on newsgroups using MT-Newswatcher (open source software), browse the web using iCab (no more Netscape, death to IE), and continue to be connected in general. Linux on a Mac _is_ easy.
I have a username, sir, and you're a damned fool.
The reason you are a fool is this: there is absolutely no correlation between service and unregulated capitalist victory. None. Nada. Zero. You're pretending there is, and that's extremely stupid. If you seriously believe that, go take figure skating lessons from Nancy Kerrigan, and I'll hang out around the corner with the nunchaku.
You are a _damned_ fool to correlate service with success, and overlook the plain and obvious fact that crime pays. If crime did not pay, there would not be any of it. If crime was service, it wouldn't be called 'crime'. Crime is breaking the kneecaps of the Mom and Pop store in any of a vast number of ways. The goal is no longer 'how can I enhance services to win more business from these people?', instead it becomes 'how can I slash their tires more cheaply than I could win business, thereby getting their business by default?'. If this tireslashing requires temporary inconvenience, well, one just has to take the long view, doesn't one?
This approach _beats_ ordinary service, in an unregulated environment. Every time. That's the whole reason we even have government at all!! Crime pays. It's cheaper to garrotte your competitor's best salesman than it is to find one of your own (and pay him). And so, over thousands of years, human beings have struggled to find governments that would keep the tireslashing to a minimum. Sure, it's awkward, but the natural way sucks- everybody's tires end up slashed, the products suck, and nobody's willing to do actual work because any gains will only result in the winner getting mugged. This breeds a peasant mentality, and the rulers end up being muggers and bandits. This record is repeated over and over through history.
Ethics is a positive-sum game. The point of it is to establish an environment where people feel justified in working hard and contributing, knowing that they're not just gonna get 'mugged' for their trouble. You want to throw away all that, because you're a damned fool and don't even know what you're suggesting.
AMD is getting mugged already. They're losing a lot of money, and the amount of energy and virtuosity they've shown suggests that in a balanced market with many vendors, they would be pushing 50% maybe- they can do inexpensive, they can do a pretty decent yield, they can even do high performance, they can do PR, they can get vendors: what's not to like? Instead, they're being mugged- they are slammed into horrible losses not by virtue of them sucking that badly, but simply because they are up against a quiet monopolist. Yes, if Intel decided to ignore antitrust, AMD would be a coat of paint on the wall in weeks- but they are _still_ getting mugged, just more slowly. For what they're doing, normally one would expect the company to make even a small amount of profit. I'm not convinced they can, whatever they do.
That's not capitalism, that's protectionism. You're merely protecting the _trust_ rather than the little guy, but you're arguing protectionism. You're saying 'because Intel is big enough to mug smaller companies, therefore this ability must be protected'. And you're fool enough to call that capitalism rather than the feudalism it is- which is why you're a damned fool.
"Antitrust law has never been intended to "fix" market failures; it has always been intended to help politically connected firms who can't compete in the market."
Are you totally out of your mind? That's the weirdest perspective on Standard Oil, big steel, and the abuses of the fledgling Industrial Revolution that I've ever seen. Ever heard of a 'company town'? It sounds like your 'homework' is entirely the result of blindly accepting the information of pseudo-libertarian web sites (read some _books_ man) which are, very likely, told what to say by Microsoft spin control experts- 'astroturf' libertarians.
It's quite another thing to claim that antitrust law _fails_ to fix market failures- I would argue that this claim puts the standard of 'fixing' arbitrarily high and doesn't allow for real world stupidity and awkwardness- but to claim what you do is outright madness, and as worthy of ridicule as the most crazed 'black helicopters' Microsoft ranting.
Don't post websites, read some history books. In particular, check out where the labor movement came from. You're free to argue that Labor is simply wrong and evil, but it might give you some perspective on that and on trusts to check out the powers really big economic forces can exert when unchecked. Quite 1984-esque, really. It's basically the ability to supplant and outright replace the government- it's a sort of feudalism, where the company is way more important than the government to its subjects but can't be voted on or altered in any way- insta-peasants! Yes, my liege, of course I wanted every possession of mine to be acquired only through _your_ channels at extortionate prices- it's the American Way!
Antitrust law is merely the awkward attempt to represent American citizens even in situations this desperate. Of _course_ it looks stupid: it's _law_. But it's not about helping any firms except in that said firms would be composed of citizens being denied a fair shot at American business. It's mostly about the peasants created by trusts. Anytime a business concern gets so powerful that its interests are _more_ important to its subjects than the government's interests- you're going to have the government becoming very interested and trying to stop it, because business concerns traditionally don't even operate on the level of government and policy, and trusts are completely able to supplant the government in their areas of control- see 'company town'. Deal with it. That's not going to change, so you might as well adjust to it. You're not ever, ever going to persuade any government to let itself be marginalised by a business concern, are you? If so, are you really that expert in political science to demonstrate that the feudalism you're advocating is genuinely preferable, or are you simply illustrating blind and stupid faith in abstract concepts that fail in real life?
We sure will not take second place to California on grounds of hill beauty ;) I've had friends visit from _Canada_ who were captivated by the beauty of Vermont and bitched about how, with the aid of a glacier, we stole all their good topsoil and deciduous trees ;) ;) if you can't handle serious cold, don't even come here in the winter. On the other hand, you might like to come here for the skiing, for which we're also famous :) ;)
I have a friend who's been looking for an at least three-bedroom house, that has to be nice and not need much work. Her price range is pushing $100K, not $600K.
I'm not 'pro' yet: and Vermont takes good care of its people- I'm taking advantage of low income housing and such things. I have a third-floor apartment, freshly painted, I don't pay heat in the Vermont winter and I don't pay hot water and the security deposit was negotiable. I have a bedroom almost three times the size of a queen bed to fit my twin-bed into, and a living room twice the size of that, and a view of the sunset over the mountain, and I'm right in town (for fairly humble values of 'town'.)
The rent is $396 a month total, of which housing assistance is helping with most of that. My own yearly income is almost, but not quite, _eight_ thousand a year, and I'm not homeless. There's some chance that I can turn pro and start making some sort of a geek salary- possibly many times my eight thousand a year. It's very humorous and gratifying to me that geek salaries are normally supposed to be these outlandish figures- here in Vermont, you could buy whole towns with that. I'll stay here, thanks- even if I could only earn a max of 50K or something. Hell, the _luxury_ apartments here with a view of the river are only pushing $900 a month, and those are three times the size of my whole apartment, which is already twice the size of urban studios. o_O
It _is_ hot: this is July. It's pushing 90 degrees these days. We're more known for cold
Come to Vermont... you know you want to...green mountains, fresh air, a more relaxed, human pace...