If this is true, then you need to spend $1000 for a Mac Mini with 1 Gb of RAM? You're shitting us right? You made a mistake right?
Just imagine the PC you can build yourself with a thousand bucks. Of course, you wouldn't be at the forefront of fashion and bling. Oh wait, I forgot. We're geeks.
I understand your point that the Mac's cpu is faster than a Celeron for a given clock rate, but a couple of years to wait for an inexpensive Mac is a couple of years too long. Apple is still behind the curve with regards to affordability. Buy a no-name PC with 40 Gb of disk and 256 Mb of RAM and you will get a cpu with at least the throughput as this new Mac, if not more, and possibly for less money. If you build your own on a budget of $500, you can certainly build a more powerful machine than Apple's.
I agree with Cringely's remarks quoted in another post to the effect that this new Mac is overpriced by at least $100.
Frankly, I got a "Troll" rating because Mac users have a magical-religious zeal that prevents them from thinking in terms other than fashion and bling.
We have been here for about 30,000 years. We are not yet extinct. Empirically, the probability of 1 human extinction event within the next 100 years can be crudely calculated as less than (1/30,000) * 100, or about 0.003. this is less than 1/3000. It is crude due to no account being made of any other effects, real or statistical, and because we have never become extinct, so we don't know what the overall probability of that would be.
Anybody who has worked in an environment that requires sterile technique, that is, the need to exterminate all biological contaminants from a work area knows how difficult it would be to wipe out every single human being from the face of the earth within a short period of time.
Did the dinosaurs die within a few years or centuries as some claim, or over a period of hundreds of thousands or even millions of years? Those are two very different scenarios.
Why should we believe this guy? Because:
John Young has flown in space six times -- seven if you count his lunar liftoff. He smuggled a corned beef sandwich aboard a Gemini capsule, walked the moon during Apollo and commanded the maiden voyage of the space shuttle Columbia.
This is celebrity worship, not science. I would prefer a credible argument behind his probability claim. How can we still be around if the probability of extinction is so high? He claims:
The statistical risk of humans getting wiped out in the next 100 years due to a super volcano or asteroid or comet impact is 1 in 455. How does that relate? You're 10 times more likely to get wiped out by a civilization-ending event in the next 100 years than you are getting killed in a commercial airline crash.
These "civilization-ending events" have been around for millions of years, and appear to have only happened a few times in the last billion. Sounds pretty bogus to me.
As a software developer, you are a whore. The customer wants something, he wants it now, and he wants it to feel real good or you can kiss the gig goodbye. You have a certain proclivity and talent towards the job, so you accept money in exchange for satisfying the customer's needs. Sometimes the customer asks for things you don't want to do, but out of professionalism and the need to put food on the table, you do it anyway. As time goes by, you will gradually learn to do well some of the things you previously swore to yourself you would never, ever do, such as Visual Basic, MS Access, and the like. The customer sometimes asks for some wacky, foolish, outrageous, or otherwise ill-advised things, but these are not frequent so you put up with them.
Like any whore, of course, if the customer wants something that will put you or your ability to continue working your profession in serious danger, you will have to decide whether it is time to skip town.
It pays well, though, and can be pretty fun.
Re:Whats so bad about K&R C?
on
Cube Farm
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Whats so bad about K&R C?
Nothing, unless you have a million lines of it with no comments. In that case, you would be fucked backwards and forwards. Bonus points if variable names are less then or equal to 4 characters in length, double your score if they always begin with "a", "b", or "c".
I don't know about WAP, but I will probably be stepping outside periodically to wail and rend my garments. You'll probably be able to hear it throughout Silicon Valley.
That they are. Do you have any to back up your naive argument? Any statistics about how much fewer acts of terror there have been in the world under Bush? How the American Citizen Decapitation Rate has plummeted? How Al Qaeda has been virtually destroyed (not destroyed virtually)? How we can stop worrying about people coming over and blowing something up? How emergency vaccine supplies will be there when needed?
You are right, I'm sad to say. However, this is not a mainstream message so people will judge it as off-the-wall and therefore safe to ignore, thus eloquently illustrating your points.
BTW, I too fear some amount of regional/factional violence after the election regardless of the outcome.
You are wrong. You have believed the preposterous morality play that is being presented to us as reality.
Heve you lived for a year as an Iraqi? Or any other Third World country? It doesn't matter if you are a working-class Iraqi, Latin American, Chinese, African, South Asian, or what-have-you. You will still be fucked for life. I lived for many years in the Third World on a modest public employee salary. I don't need your simple-minded analysis to tell me what's going on.
I presume you used Iraqis as an example because you think we are there to help them somehow. You are a blind man.
I am disappointed with the whole system. Most of the significant actions of our government are driven and often written by highly paid and highly connected lobbyists. If you don't have several lobbying for you, then our democracy is broken for you.
With regards to the two front men who will dominate the presidential vote, all hope of progress seems lost. It would appear that a large fraction of US voters trust one or the other, believe that the speeches will actually correlate with future performance, and generally trust their gut feelings about the candidates' "character" and "values." This is not merely a sad state of affairs, it is a tragedy in progress. Is it so hard to see that these people will say anything to get elected? Can you not see how much money is at stake? Do you believe that our presence in Iraq (essentially supported by both candidates) is something other than international piracy and a huge pork barrel for the defense and petrochemical industries?
Do you fail to see that ours has has become a corrupt, authoritarian, quasi-militarized Third World government? Any of you out there who are of Mexican origin (as I am) or have lived a significant part of your lives in Mexico (as I have) cannot fail to see the style and techniques of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, el PRI, in the US, especially in the Republican party. We Americans will gradually discover that we are the hapless slaves that the vast majority of Mexicans are in their own nation.
I will be voting for Not Bush, but only grudgingly. We are in for a very rough time in the near and medium term. At present, the long term is lost in the fog of the future.
I never say "The Pentagon has all sorts of creepy stuff that they don't tell us about." My claim is that the Pentagon pretends to have all sorts of creepy stuff that they don't tell us about, but a key part is the need to tell us about it.
Not unlike Dr Strangelove yelling at the Russian ambassador over why they didn't tell the world about the existence of the Doomsday Machine. If nobody knew about it, it was worthless. Today, the Pentagon just spews the hype, no need to have an actual weapons system behind it. Knowing the Pentagon, though, it probably doesn't save us any money.
The leak was probably deliberate, in the long and hallowed Pentagon tradition of disseminating disinformation to make gullible Third World generals think the US has awesome Spielbergian weapons systems. How much would it cost to actually produce sufficient weapons grade antimatter to put in a bomb? How would it be stored, transported, and delivered? How do you guard against accidents?
That is also what I want, an electronic notepad that can download stuff to a searchable DB and/or files that can be cut and pasted to the rest of my digital world. I have a Palm m500 with a metal case. It is thin, sturdy, and fits as well as as you could hope in most pants pockets. I am reasonably competent at "graffiti," but it leaves a lot to be desired. Also, there are buttons at the lower corners that are easily pressed by mistake by ring-finger knuckles, thus trashing memo documents.
I don't want cameras, mp3 players, phones, etc. in a PDA either, I want an electronic notebook.
I know it's hard to believe, but business people don't want to dump their database out into tab delimited format and graph their stuff in excel ( or crystal reports or [ insert name here ] )
What!!!
[Rubs eyes in disbelief]
That's all they know how to do! The rest of us get paid to stop them and coerce them into using more reasonable tools. As far as pretty pictures of data go, try Spotfire. It's been around for years, and was never a "Google."
Slashdot Mirror
To them it will resemble a bioterror lab setup. If you can grow yeast, you can grow quite a lot of other things as well.
Just imagine the PC you can build yourself with a thousand bucks. Of course, you wouldn't be at the forefront of fashion and bling. Oh wait, I forgot. We're geeks.
I agree with Cringely's remarks quoted in another post to the effect that this new Mac is overpriced by at least $100.
Frankly, I got a "Troll" rating because Mac users have a magical-religious zeal that prevents them from thinking in terms other than fashion and bling.
Fools believe it is desirable to walk around with 5 Gb of music in their pockets, everyone else reloads their 512 Mb flash RAM every couple of weeks.
Only Mac fans could possibly get excited over this. I bought a headless 1.1 GHz PC for less than that a couple of years ago.
Anybody who has worked in an environment that requires sterile technique, that is, the need to exterminate all biological contaminants from a work area knows how difficult it would be to wipe out every single human being from the face of the earth within a short period of time.
Did the dinosaurs die within a few years or centuries as some claim, or over a period of hundreds of thousands or even millions of years? Those are two very different scenarios.
Why should we believe this guy? Because:
John Young has flown in space six times -- seven if you count his lunar liftoff. He smuggled a corned beef sandwich aboard a Gemini capsule, walked the moon during Apollo and commanded the maiden voyage of the space shuttle Columbia.
This is celebrity worship, not science. I would prefer a credible argument behind his probability claim. How can we still be around if the probability of extinction is so high? He claims:
The statistical risk of humans getting wiped out in the next 100 years due to a super volcano or asteroid or comet impact is 1 in 455. How does that relate? You're 10 times more likely to get wiped out by a civilization-ending event in the next 100 years than you are getting killed in a commercial airline crash.
These "civilization-ending events" have been around for millions of years, and appear to have only happened a few times in the last billion. Sounds pretty bogus to me.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
and of course,
10.
No, just change from English to metric. That ought to do it.
Like any whore, of course, if the customer wants something that will put you or your ability to continue working your profession in serious danger, you will have to decide whether it is time to skip town.
It pays well, though, and can be pretty fun.
Nothing, unless you have a million lines of it with no comments. In that case, you would be fucked backwards and forwards. Bonus points if variable names are less then or equal to 4 characters in length, double your score if they always begin with "a", "b", or "c".
I don't know about WAP, but I will probably be stepping outside periodically to wail and rend my garments. You'll probably be able to hear it throughout Silicon Valley.
That they are. Do you have any to back up your naive argument? Any statistics about how much fewer acts of terror there have been in the world under Bush? How the American Citizen Decapitation Rate has plummeted? How Al Qaeda has been virtually destroyed (not destroyed virtually)? How we can stop worrying about people coming over and blowing something up? How emergency vaccine supplies will be there when needed?
I could go on, but what for?
Not quite. All of the choices are HypnoToad.
BTW, I too fear some amount of regional/factional violence after the election regardless of the outcome.
Heve you lived for a year as an Iraqi? Or any other Third World country? It doesn't matter if you are a working-class Iraqi, Latin American, Chinese, African, South Asian, or what-have-you. You will still be fucked for life. I lived for many years in the Third World on a modest public employee salary. I don't need your simple-minded analysis to tell me what's going on.
I presume you used Iraqis as an example because you think we are there to help them somehow. You are a blind man.
With regards to the two front men who will dominate the presidential vote, all hope of progress seems lost. It would appear that a large fraction of US voters trust one or the other, believe that the speeches will actually correlate with future performance, and generally trust their gut feelings about the candidates' "character" and "values." This is not merely a sad state of affairs, it is a tragedy in progress. Is it so hard to see that these people will say anything to get elected? Can you not see how much money is at stake? Do you believe that our presence in Iraq (essentially supported by both candidates) is something other than international piracy and a huge pork barrel for the defense and petrochemical industries?
Do you fail to see that ours has has become a corrupt, authoritarian, quasi-militarized Third World government? Any of you out there who are of Mexican origin (as I am) or have lived a significant part of your lives in Mexico (as I have) cannot fail to see the style and techniques of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, el PRI, in the US, especially in the Republican party. We Americans will gradually discover that we are the hapless slaves that the vast majority of Mexicans are in their own nation.
I will be voting for Not Bush, but only grudgingly. We are in for a very rough time in the near and medium term. At present, the long term is lost in the fog of the future.
Beat that.
It would burn their fingers like a son-of-a-bitch!
Not unlike Dr Strangelove yelling at the Russian ambassador over why they didn't tell the world about the existence of the Doomsday Machine. If nobody knew about it, it was worthless. Today, the Pentagon just spews the hype, no need to have an actual weapons system behind it. Knowing the Pentagon, though, it probably doesn't save us any money.
Wake up, folks. It's bullshit.
Imagenix has a thumbdrive that may be cool even among non-geeks.
I don't want cameras, mp3 players, phones, etc. in a PDA either, I want an electronic notebook.
What!!!
[Rubs eyes in disbelief]
That's all they know how to do! The rest of us get paid to stop them and coerce them into using more reasonable tools. As far as pretty pictures of data go, try Spotfire. It's been around for years, and was never a "Google."
No, it isn't.