My girlfriend just got me into D & D (I would never touch it in high school, as tabletop games were too nerdy for computer gamers to touch), and it's been fun.
Agreed. To get 80% native speed out of a just-in-time compiler, I argue that you need two things:
1. A bytecode that is conducive to such a conversion and 2. An on-the-fly optimizing runtime system, like the newer versions of the JVM.
You could, in theory, have a cross-compiling assembler that turns PPC code into x86 code ahead of time, but this isn't really practical for emulating an entire OS. (I know, I have written about four emulators for class, although without getting into the optimization part of it. So I know what's involved in the tranlsation).
The reason these claims won't work, though, is that even *if* you somehow managed to build the most impressive bit of virtual machine translator with better optimizations than the best that Sun's ever made (and theirs is translating a language that was actually designed to be translated), you still have to emulate the rest of the mac. The HFS+ storage system will have to be mapped somehow, as well as the handling of the different i/o ports. You can pass that off to your own hardware quite a bit, but it still takes a huge toll. (One of the processes for speeding up Virtual PC's emulation is to disable any and all unused virtual hardware).
Combine these factors, and they've got to be smoking something to think that they can get 80% of native speed with this kind of a system. If they have, I'll be properly impressed by some fine engineering. I might even buy the thing for testing (80% of my desktop PC is significantly faster than my 2-year-old mac laptop). But I really don't think it's likely.
There's no way you can emulate even a stripped-down PPC instruction set on x86 at 80% speed, let alone Altivec. The best I've seen any commercial editor come close to is a third, or maybe a half.
This'd be running an equivalent 2.7 ghz G4 on your top-of-the-line PentiumIV. They can't come close to that in hardware, there's no way they can touch it in software.
You can easily lock up the brakes using your own leg power alone. Power brakes are just a vacuum booster, to make it way-easy to lock up the brakes. Without power, you just have to press harder. But it certainly is far from being impossibly difficult. And in any case, the vacuum ramains in the booster for some period of time. Just try it the brakes in your garage with the engine off, and you'll get a feeling for it.
Indeed. I drove a dump truck at work that never should have been certified for commercial use, as it would stall at idle quite randomly. If I can stop a 27,000 lb loaded dump truck rolling down a hill without the power brakes, pretty much anyone can handle a normal car. You've just got to grab onto the wheel and try to drive your foot through the floor.
Of course, I was scared shitless the entire time and praying I would be able to stop, but the thing did eventually stop moving.
Yes, because comparing ourselves to a monarchal system from 200 years ago is a great way to make progress.
Despite what the current state of american public schooling may lead you to believe, there have been quite a few new systems of democracy since we separated ourselves from Jolly Old England. It just *might* be possible we could learn something from some of them.
The way PR bullshit is phrased is a good part of how I judge a leader.
There are obviously things someone running for office can't say, and you expect them to dance around it. However, if they attempt to give a meaningful answer beside all of their limitations, then maybe they're worth looking into further.
The most impressive thing a candidate can say to a question is "I don't know how to solve that, but here's the steps I'm going to take to find out how to solve it." Honesty combined with leadership can make for a couple times when there isn't a nice answer to a question.
I've seen that behavior in firefox (I haven't used camino for a few versions), but after tabs stop fitting into the window, safari stops shrinking them. It puts a pop-down menu on the far right that contains any that didn't fit into the window.
Whether you think that's a better solution or not, it's what it actually does. Personally, I find it annoying for numbers of tabs slightly over what will fit, but much nicer if I grab a whole page of of thumbnails and open them at once. Firefox makes the tabs so small you're lucky to click on one.
Agreed.
I'm so sick of this "anyone but Bush" bullshit. Almost everyone I know who voted for Bush voted because they were absolutely sick of anything to do with Clinton. Isn't it wonderful how that worked out.
If we continue to support mediocre candidates simply because they aren't as bad, we'll continue to be fed mediocre candidates. Seriously, what person in his right mind could listen to John McCain and George W Bush talk for five minutes and think that Bush was a better candidate for president.
The problem is, how do I know if my kid gets a book I don't approve of at the school library? Maybe he reads it there and doesn't bring it home so I'll never find out.
You get over it, and realize that like every parent in history, any attempt you make to shelter your child will FAIL MISERABLY.
What you do have control over is making them able to analyze what's in the book properly so that they aren't damaged by it, and can make their own decisions about what they want to read.
A friend of mine had his room raided at college for running a similar hub. They had a warrant anc confiscated thousands of dollars in computer equipment, but made no arrests or charges.
Technically, they're supposed to give his stuff back after a few weeks since he was never charged with a crime, but he has to go ask for it.. and he's mostly pretty happy he didn't get arrested or kicked out of college.
It's a completely intimidation/ guilty until you prove yourself innocent sort of thing, and it really ticks me off that the city police were willing to do that.
I think they've done a damn good job of keeping war from these parties off our soil.
Yes, because both Germany and Japan were SO close to landing on US soil. At least, the US soil that most people consider ours, and not the Phillipines and other such protectorates that we had recently taken through our own foreign invasions.
By the time we bombed those cities, the effect on Germany was negligible, and Japan was no longer a threat to our mainland. The largest civilian bombings in German were carried out mostly because the generals who planned them didn't want to stop their plan early. "Defense" indeed.
Are you really trying to propose that you can put a price on human life?
Of course. It's a necessary sacrifice of those who rule, that some will die no matter choice is made.
But more importantly, you make it sound as though we go to war to save lives. We've fought for freedom, for money, for land, for allies, for democracy, and for whatever crazed powers ruled our government at the time, but we've never fought to save lives. If we had, we'd have invaded cambodia instead of Vietnam, was well as a few african countries with their own genocides. We invaded Germany to protect our allies' way of life and our own investments in those allied countries.
Our military defends *our* interests, as interpreted by those *we* put in power, if you have any belief that we can or ever have controlled who gets elected. If you feel that they don't represent your interests, vote for someone else. I plan on it.
And just to bring this round to the original topic, I agree that the invasion of Iraq was a horribly misguided personal misuse of our nation's money and soldier's lives, just as the last ten+ years of our Iraqi foreign policy have been. However, I still believe that building a strong support and interest in our military power, and its necessity, is in our best interests in general. Putting armless children and crying mothers into a video game isn't going to help anything.
Yes, and firebombing Tokyo and Dresden were therefore purely defensive actions?
We didn't enter World War II because of Pearl Harbor, just as we didn't invade Iraq because of 9/11. Both events were catalysts that allowed those in power to do what they had wanted to do all along.
While I agree completely that World War II was more directly in our best interests (Iraq, vietnam, and afghanistan was just a dumb thing to drag ourselves into), saying we shouldn't attack anyone who hasn't launched an amphibious assault on New Jersey is a completely arbitrary method of deciding foreign policy.
To throw out another argument, though, at what point does "our soil" have to do with it? If americans have billions of dollars invested in a foreign nation, I'd that that the safety of those dollars matters as much to them as, say, the independence of one of our random territories. The military exists to back up our nation's best interests with force. I claim that, as repulsive as it sounds to me, if that includes my.5 acre of land then it also includes some CEO's 5 billion dollars of investments.
In short, what our country needs is a nice lesson on foreign politics, not more "war is bad if they aren't attacking us" emotion.
And then we'll all have a wonderful time when some other country, say, China, has gone the military route and decides that, hey, we don't need to listen to these american jerkoffs anymore, we can just *take* their stuff.
As much as I would love world peace as much as the next person, the survival of our way of life requires some sort of military. And for the US, since "our way of life" includes being the richest nation in the world, preserving it requires a huge military. At the very least, big enough that no one wants to mess with us in a way that actually matters.
No amount of well-wishing is going to change that. Its been a hard, cruel fact of survival from the dawn of time, and I'd rather we encourage people to be prepared for it and deal with the harsh necessities when they have to.
Finally, the only way you can show someone the horrors of war is to toss them into one. No matter how disgusting an image of war on television or a computer screen is, it's just a picture. Something far away, and therefore, only somewhat real. And since the best reason for fighting is to make it so most people never have to see that...
o make war trivial and fun is an incredible disservice to all who actually have to fight.
This has been a requirement of all militaristic societies. War has always been glorified; look at the Illiad, or the Song of Roland. War stories and songs have been around for ages before war movies and war games.
Don't try to point this as any sort of modern warfare, our current government is evil sort of scheme. The gap between civilian knowledge of warfare and the horrible reality has been a constant factor in the ability of any nation to wage war.
This is just adapting the old ways to a new medium. And to be honest, I'd rather have kids who might go into combat getting that propaganda from something that encourages real teamwork and somewhat useful training than glorious tales of a single man killing hundreds. Any little thing that forces their mindset into something more useful is an improvement.
You're right; anyone who thinks these games approximate the emotional impact of battle is fooling themselves. However, helping mental preparation never hurt anyone.
Considering I've received tech support calls that started with "My ipod isn't working" and ended with "You have a Sony Minidisc player" I agree with you 100 percent.
Oh, I can agree that some guys can be complete dorks about women. How would they know how to act, when they've never actually *worked with* a woman. Not that that justifies behavior, it just explains it.
As for interviews, every job I've been to they completely grilled me in every way to test my knowledge of any random part of the job they were hiring me for. I expect it, and I come out volunteering that kind of information. I think it's a weird part of being a guy, I mean, trying to go to extreme lengths to appear competent. I'm not saying it isn't part of being a girl, too; I bet it is. I just *know* personally that it's part of whatever complexes comprise my "masculinity."
As for lifting in tech jobs; if its part of the job, it's a consideration you have make when you apply for it. I volunteered at my school helping two female tech's, and most of the work they did was moving and setup. They would have done it without me without any complaints, too. You do the work you signed up for.
And just to counter your final piece about "family-unfriendly" industry, how do you think every father in our "male-dominated" society has felt about missing his little girl's first five years of life because he had to work late at the office to pay for her future. Being away from family sucks, having to work when your pregnant or when the woman you love is pregnant is horrible, but it's a sacrifice that someone has to make for their children. Whoever makes it, they need to deal with it.
On a personal note, my girlfriend and I have agreed that one of us will stay home with any children we have, and work on some open source project in their spare time:) Who that is is dependent entirely on who has the best job offer. So far... she's interning and I'm working construction. Looks like I'm going to have to get used to changing diapers.
Because there aren't enough computer nerd-girls in high school.
Everyone I know in college in CS who's any good at it has been coding or tinkering with his system for at least five or six years now. It intimidates me for crying out loud, and I'm one of them! When you're sitting in on your first real programming class and guys are talking about the security work they've been doing at Sun for five years (and the guy was maybe one year older than I am) you're going to be intimidated.
Why does this affect girls more? Because society doesn't encourage girls to be social outcasts. Guys, for their entire lives, are encouraged to find a few things that they like and do them to obsession. So in high school you have jocks and nerds and car guys, etc. Now, the nerds KNOW that they're social outcasts, but they've chosen that path, and gain a feeling of personal worth and justification in being GOOD at what they do. And since they generally have no girls to be wasting their time with, they do it a lot and become very good at it.
I've never noticed girls, as a group, creating that same sort of rebel identity, based on ability. I've worked a lot with high schoolers who are going into engineering this year, including a lot of girls, and none of them have seemed to have the "the world hates us but it doesn't matter, because we're damn good at what we do" mentality.
So, when anyone looks at going into CS at college, they see the average person going into it as someone who already knows about half of what they're going to be teaching. They're cocky and confident in their abilities. Of course anyone's going to be intimidated. And, by the structure of our high school society, it is more likely for someone on the intimidated side to be a girl.
My girlfriend's a CS major, too. She's an excellent programmer, and I've never seen someone get as excited as she does about her code working for the first time. She says she's never minded not having more girls in the classes; girls are silly and illogical, or something like that. However, she *has* expressed her concern on multiple occasions that the raw background experience of everyone in our classes makes her feel like she's completely out of her league.
It's a tough situation. I don't see an easy way out of it, unfortunately, since the problems tend to go all the way back to middle school or earlier.
1. Open Market 2. More companies developing. More competition => lower margins => 3. Cheaper computers 4. More customers etc etc.
It isn't any more expensive to develop games or periphrials for mac, there is just a smaller audience so you get less possible returns for your investment. And PC's aren't cheaper because of their open architecture; Everything in a mac box is made of the same materials except for the motherboard. They're cheaper because every random company drops their prices, forcing companies to sell hardware at a minimum of a profit.
There's definitely a feedback loop, but your connection between the open market and cheaper development is incorrect.
You don't need an Albook running at full speed to play a DVD, whereas on an old Tibook that was a possibility (although I can run mine in low processor speed for it fine).
What's really sucking your battery, though, is that lovely 15" screen. My personal experience: watching a dvd with screen at full brightness gets a little under 3 hours of life. Watching at half brightness (an almost unnoticeable difference unless you're in direct sunlight or something) gives me almost 5 while watching movies.
The backlight on the LCD just sucks power like crazy.
1. Administration. Macs don't play well with PC networks, even with OS X on them. As we are implelmenting things like Active Directory, hard-drive-based backup of network storage, web caching and filtering, and the like, we're having to jump through hoops to get our Macs to work with these new systems. Instead of hiring three Mac specialists to maintain the machines, it's cheaper to move to an all-PC environment.
Wow, macs don't play well with PC networks. That's because it's a PC network. Try getting your PC to support appletalk. Doesn't work, oh wow.
How about using open standards that both systems support instead of getting upset because the macs don't integrate perfectly with a closed windows system. Personally, I've had a much easier time getting SMB working on my powerbook than any of my friend's PC's.
2. Administration again. We've implemented RIS of all PC machines that can PXE boot, which is most of the ones on campus. If a machine is acting funky, we just PXE boot and walk away, and two hours later, all of the OS components and applications are restored to their original state -- the hard drive has been wiped clean and redone. Macs just can't do this. Every time a Mac is acting funky, we need to spend several hours of our valuable IT time redoing it and reinstalling apps. We can't afford that.
That's just ignorant. Macs have done this for years, without any extra Norton utilities. It's called disk doctor. You can even set things up to automatically revert the things every night, or on a server command. Impossible? Every apple store does it; that's why you have complete access to every system in the store; they know it'll be fine the next morning.
Your other points have more merit, but the second of these especially is just wrong.
Don't think of these as OS X applications. What a portage tree does, or X11 on OS X does, is give a mac box almost all the strengths of a linux box with all the strengths of a mac box. you don't lose anything; you can still use only mac programs, with nice installers and GUI's (and I, personally, prefer to whenever possible).
However, it gives you the option of having just as nice of a package management system and a huge list of open source tools that *aren't* available with a nice GUI as well. It's the best of both worlds, with no requirement of dealing with either. *That's* what's so exciting.
I was in the audience at the taping college Jeopardy last year at OSU. In between shows, Trebek would walk around answering questions from the audience.
One frat boy in the back yelled out "Do sean connery!"
I thought Trebek would pull out some standard boring answer about parodies or something. Instead, he looked at the guy and said loud and clear in an excellent accent:
"Suck it, Trebek. Suck it long and suck it hard."
He seemed a bit of a goof on TV, but damn is he funny off screen.
I wasn't really talking about LotR specifically, but of epics in general, and lamenting the lack of more series with a cohesive story arc.
Since LotR, there's been a surge of new fantasy-based movies. I think it would be really neat to see some other classics on film, but most of them just couldn't fit into a good movie; you lose too much of the massive scope of the plot. A series could really do them justice.
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My girlfriend just got me into D & D (I would never touch it in high school, as tabletop games were too nerdy for computer gamers to touch), and it's been fun.
This video, however, is all too true.
No, if you look at it that way, I bet they *are* telling the truth. It probably runs OS X about as well as you can on a native Pentium 4 2.4ghz :)
Of course, that means not at all, but oh well...
Agreed. To get 80% native speed out of a just-in-time compiler, I argue that you need two things:
1. A bytecode that is conducive to such a conversion and
2. An on-the-fly optimizing runtime system, like the newer versions of the JVM.
You could, in theory, have a cross-compiling assembler that turns PPC code into x86 code ahead of time, but this isn't really practical for emulating an entire OS. (I know, I have written about four emulators for class, although without getting into the optimization part of it. So I know what's involved in the tranlsation).
The reason these claims won't work, though, is that even *if* you somehow managed to build the most impressive bit of virtual machine translator with better optimizations than the best that Sun's ever made (and theirs is translating a language that was actually designed to be translated), you still have to emulate the rest of the mac. The HFS+ storage system will have to be mapped somehow, as well as the handling of the different i/o ports. You can pass that off to your own hardware quite a bit, but it still takes a huge toll. (One of the processes for speeding up Virtual PC's emulation is to disable any and all unused virtual hardware).
Combine these factors, and they've got to be smoking something to think that they can get 80% of native speed with this kind of a system. If they have, I'll be properly impressed by some fine engineering. I might even buy the thing for testing (80% of my desktop PC is significantly faster than my 2-year-old mac laptop). But I really don't think it's likely.
There's no way you can emulate even a stripped-down PPC instruction set on x86 at 80% speed, let alone Altivec. The best I've seen any commercial editor come close to is a third, or maybe a half.
This'd be running an equivalent 2.7 ghz G4 on your top-of-the-line PentiumIV. They can't come close to that in hardware, there's no way they can touch it in software.
Sounds like a poorly-planned scam to me.
Indeed. I drove a dump truck at work that never should have been certified for commercial use, as it would stall at idle quite randomly. If I can stop a 27,000 lb loaded dump truck rolling down a hill without the power brakes, pretty much anyone can handle a normal car. You've just got to grab onto the wheel and try to drive your foot through the floor.
Of course, I was scared shitless the entire time and praying I would be able to stop, but the thing did eventually stop moving.
Yes, because comparing ourselves to a monarchal system from 200 years ago is a great way to make progress.
Despite what the current state of american public schooling may lead you to believe, there have been quite a few new systems of democracy since we separated ourselves from Jolly Old England. It just *might* be possible we could learn something from some of them.
The way PR bullshit is phrased is a good part of how I judge a leader.
There are obviously things someone running for office can't say, and you expect them to dance around it. However, if they attempt to give a meaningful answer beside all of their limitations, then maybe they're worth looking into further.
The most impressive thing a candidate can say to a question is "I don't know how to solve that, but here's the steps I'm going to take to find out how to solve it." Honesty combined with leadership can make for a couple times when there isn't a nice answer to a question.
You mean camino and firefox, right?
I've seen that behavior in firefox (I haven't used camino for a few versions), but after tabs stop fitting into the window, safari stops shrinking them. It puts a pop-down menu on the far right that contains any that didn't fit into the window.
Whether you think that's a better solution or not, it's what it actually does. Personally, I find it annoying for numbers of tabs slightly over what will fit, but much nicer if I grab a whole page of of thumbnails and open them at once. Firefox makes the tabs so small you're lucky to click on one.
Agreed. I'm so sick of this "anyone but Bush" bullshit. Almost everyone I know who voted for Bush voted because they were absolutely sick of anything to do with Clinton. Isn't it wonderful how that worked out. If we continue to support mediocre candidates simply because they aren't as bad, we'll continue to be fed mediocre candidates. Seriously, what person in his right mind could listen to John McCain and George W Bush talk for five minutes and think that Bush was a better candidate for president.
You get over it, and realize that like every parent in history, any attempt you make to shelter your child will FAIL MISERABLY.
What you do have control over is making them able to analyze what's in the book properly so that they aren't damaged by it, and can make their own decisions about what they want to read.
It's a pretty standard scare tactic, this.
A friend of mine had his room raided at college for running a similar hub. They had a warrant anc confiscated thousands of dollars in computer equipment, but made no arrests or charges.
Technically, they're supposed to give his stuff back after a few weeks since he was never charged with a crime, but he has to go ask for it.. and he's mostly pretty happy he didn't get arrested or kicked out of college.
It's a completely intimidation/ guilty until you prove yourself innocent sort of thing, and it really ticks me off that the city police were willing to do that.
I think they've done a damn good job of keeping war from these parties off our soil.
Yes, because both Germany and Japan were SO close to landing on US soil. At least, the US soil that most people consider ours, and not the Phillipines and other such protectorates that we had recently taken through our own foreign invasions.
By the time we bombed those cities, the effect on Germany was negligible, and Japan was no longer a threat to our mainland. The largest civilian bombings in German were carried out mostly because the generals who planned them didn't want to stop their plan early. "Defense" indeed.
Are you really trying to propose that you can put a price on human life?
Of course. It's a necessary sacrifice of those who rule, that some will die no matter choice is made.
But more importantly, you make it sound as though we go to war to save lives. We've fought for freedom, for money, for land, for allies, for democracy, and for whatever crazed powers ruled our government at the time, but we've never fought to save lives. If we had, we'd have invaded cambodia instead of Vietnam, was well as a few african countries with their own genocides. We invaded Germany to protect our allies' way of life and our own investments in those allied countries.
Our military defends *our* interests, as interpreted by those *we* put in power, if you have any belief that we can or ever have controlled who gets elected. If you feel that they don't represent your interests, vote for someone else. I plan on it.
And just to bring this round to the original topic, I agree that the invasion of Iraq was a horribly misguided personal misuse of our nation's money and soldier's lives, just as the last ten+ years of our Iraqi foreign policy have been. However, I still believe that building a strong support and interest in our military power, and its necessity, is in our best interests in general. Putting armless children and crying mothers into a video game isn't going to help anything.
Yes, and firebombing Tokyo and Dresden were therefore purely defensive actions?
.5 acre of land then it also includes some CEO's 5 billion dollars of investments.
We didn't enter World War II because of Pearl Harbor, just as we didn't invade Iraq because of 9/11. Both events were catalysts that allowed those in power to do what they had wanted to do all along.
While I agree completely that World War II was more directly in our best interests (Iraq, vietnam, and afghanistan was just a dumb thing to drag ourselves into), saying we shouldn't attack anyone who hasn't launched an amphibious assault on New Jersey is a completely arbitrary method of deciding foreign policy.
To throw out another argument, though, at what point does "our soil" have to do with it? If americans have billions of dollars invested in a foreign nation, I'd that that the safety of those dollars matters as much to them as, say, the independence of one of our random territories. The military exists to back up our nation's best interests with force. I claim that, as repulsive as it sounds to me, if that includes my
In short, what our country needs is a nice lesson on foreign politics, not more "war is bad if they aren't attacking us" emotion.
And then we'll all have a wonderful time when some other country, say, China, has gone the military route and decides that, hey, we don't need to listen to these american jerkoffs anymore, we can just *take* their stuff.
As much as I would love world peace as much as the next person, the survival of our way of life requires some sort of military. And for the US, since "our way of life" includes being the richest nation in the world, preserving it requires a huge military. At the very least, big enough that no one wants to mess with us in a way that actually matters.
No amount of well-wishing is going to change that. Its been a hard, cruel fact of survival from the dawn of time, and I'd rather we encourage people to be prepared for it and deal with the harsh necessities when they have to.
Finally, the only way you can show someone the horrors of war is to toss them into one. No matter how disgusting an image of war on television or a computer screen is, it's just a picture. Something far away, and therefore, only somewhat real. And since the best reason for fighting is to make it so most people never have to see that...
This has been a requirement of all militaristic societies. War has always been glorified; look at the Illiad, or the Song of Roland. War stories and songs have been around for ages before war movies and war games.
Don't try to point this as any sort of modern warfare, our current government is evil sort of scheme. The gap between civilian knowledge of warfare and the horrible reality has been a constant factor in the ability of any nation to wage war.
This is just adapting the old ways to a new medium. And to be honest, I'd rather have kids who might go into combat getting that propaganda from something that encourages real teamwork and somewhat useful training than glorious tales of a single man killing hundreds. Any little thing that forces their mindset into something more useful is an improvement.
You're right; anyone who thinks these games approximate the emotional impact of battle is fooling themselves. However, helping mental preparation never hurt anyone.
I know Marathon had live voice chat back in 1994. I'm sure there's something prior even to that.
Considering I've received tech support calls that started with "My ipod isn't working" and ended with "You have a Sony Minidisc player" I agree with you 100 percent.
Oh, I can agree that some guys can be complete dorks about women. How would they know how to act, when they've never actually *worked with* a woman. Not that that justifies behavior, it just explains it.
:) Who that is is dependent entirely on who has the best job offer. So far... she's interning and I'm working construction. Looks like I'm going to have to get used to changing diapers.
As for interviews, every job I've been to they completely grilled me in every way to test my knowledge of any random part of the job they were hiring me for. I expect it, and I come out volunteering that kind of information. I think it's a weird part of being a guy, I mean, trying to go to extreme lengths to appear competent. I'm not saying it isn't part of being a girl, too; I bet it is. I just *know* personally that it's part of whatever complexes comprise my "masculinity."
As for lifting in tech jobs; if its part of the job, it's a consideration you have make when you apply for it. I volunteered at my school helping two female tech's, and most of the work they did was moving and setup. They would have done it without me without any complaints, too. You do the work you signed up for.
And just to counter your final piece about "family-unfriendly" industry, how do you think every father in our "male-dominated" society has felt about missing his little girl's first five years of life because he had to work late at the office to pay for her future. Being away from family sucks, having to work when your pregnant or when the woman you love is pregnant is horrible, but it's a sacrifice that someone has to make for their children. Whoever makes it, they need to deal with it.
On a personal note, my girlfriend and I have agreed that one of us will stay home with any children we have, and work on some open source project in their spare time
Because there aren't enough computer nerd-girls in high school.
Everyone I know in college in CS who's any good at it has been coding or tinkering with his system for at least five or six years now. It intimidates me for crying out loud, and I'm one of them! When you're sitting in on your first real programming class and guys are talking about the security work they've been doing at Sun for five years (and the guy was maybe one year older than I am) you're going to be intimidated.
Why does this affect girls more? Because society doesn't encourage girls to be social outcasts. Guys, for their entire lives, are encouraged to find a few things that they like and do them to obsession. So in high school you have jocks and nerds and car guys, etc. Now, the nerds KNOW that they're social outcasts, but they've chosen that path, and gain a feeling of personal worth and justification in being GOOD at what they do. And since they generally have no girls to be wasting their time with, they do it a lot and become very good at it.
I've never noticed girls, as a group, creating that same sort of rebel identity, based on ability. I've worked a lot with high schoolers who are going into engineering this year, including a lot of girls, and none of them have seemed to have the "the world hates us but it doesn't matter, because we're damn good at what we do" mentality.
So, when anyone looks at going into CS at college, they see the average person going into it as someone who already knows about half of what they're going to be teaching. They're cocky and confident in their abilities. Of course anyone's going to be intimidated. And, by the structure of our high school society, it is more likely for someone on the intimidated side to be a girl.
My girlfriend's a CS major, too. She's an excellent programmer, and I've never seen someone get as excited as she does about her code working for the first time. She says she's never minded not having more girls in the classes; girls are silly and illogical, or something like that. However, she *has* expressed her concern on multiple occasions that the raw background experience of everyone in our classes makes her feel like she's completely out of her league.
It's a tough situation. I don't see an easy way out of it, unfortunately, since the problems tend to go all the way back to middle school or earlier.
But your points are off.
1. Open Market
2. More companies developing. More competition => lower margins =>
3. Cheaper computers
4. More customers
etc etc.
It isn't any more expensive to develop games or periphrials for mac, there is just a smaller audience so you get less possible returns for your investment. And PC's aren't cheaper because of their open architecture; Everything in a mac box is made of the same materials except for the motherboard. They're cheaper because every random company drops their prices, forcing companies to sell hardware at a minimum of a profit.
There's definitely a feedback loop, but your connection between the open market and cheaper development is incorrect.
Don't use the DVD playback mode, simply enough :)
You don't need an Albook running at full speed to play a DVD, whereas on an old Tibook that was a possibility (although I can run mine in low processor speed for it fine).
What's really sucking your battery, though, is that lovely 15" screen. My personal experience: watching a dvd with screen at full brightness gets a little under 3 hours of life. Watching at half brightness (an almost unnoticeable difference unless you're in direct sunlight or something) gives me almost 5 while watching movies.
The backlight on the LCD just sucks power like crazy.
That's just ignorant. Macs have done this for years, without any extra Norton utilities. It's called disk doctor. You can even set things up to automatically revert the things every night, or on a server command. Impossible? Every apple store does it; that's why you have complete access to every system in the store; they know it'll be fine the next morning.
Your other points have more merit, but the second of these especially is just wrong.
Don't think of these as OS X applications. What a portage tree does, or X11 on OS X does, is give a mac box almost all the strengths of a linux box with all the strengths of a mac box. you don't lose anything; you can still use only mac programs, with nice installers and GUI's (and I, personally, prefer to whenever possible).
However, it gives you the option of having just as nice of a package management system and a huge list of open source tools that *aren't* available with a nice GUI as well. It's the best of both worlds, with no requirement of dealing with either. *That's* what's so exciting.
I was in the audience at the taping college Jeopardy last year at OSU. In between shows, Trebek would walk around answering questions from the audience.
One frat boy in the back yelled out "Do sean connery!"
I thought Trebek would pull out some standard boring answer about parodies or something. Instead, he looked at the guy and said loud and clear in an excellent accent:
"Suck it, Trebek. Suck it long and suck it hard."
He seemed a bit of a goof on TV, but damn is he funny off screen.
I wasn't really talking about LotR specifically, but of epics in general, and lamenting the lack of more series with a cohesive story arc.
Since LotR, there's been a surge of new fantasy-based movies. I think it would be really neat to see some other classics on film, but most of them just couldn't fit into a good movie; you lose too much of the massive scope of the plot. A series could really do them justice.