I was going to mark funny, but then decided to answer instead.
I use Opera on Mac for a long while, but then when I started using more Google stuff, I went back to FF for most things. But I've been disappointed with FF because I remember when FF's goal was to make a lighter, faster Mozilla. Well now it seems to gobble up more ram and system resources than ever and Opera loads most webpages faster.
Still I have keep a PC around because there are some webapps I use in development that are still MSIE only.
This what I observed over the past 6 - 7 years that I worked as a consultant to smaller videographer/video production shops.
When it comes to professional video editing. There is Avid and...well...Avid. That is still the defacto standard for most of Hollywood and TV Broadcast land. You want a job in broadcast/movie editing, you had better learn Avid.
FCP, Vegas, and Premiere are all basically DV editing tools, although FCP and Premiere can handle 2k/4k film as well and I havn't messed with Vegas much so...
They all compete for business of individual videographers and small production shops. In that arena, especially among WEVA members, FCP is the standard. About 5 years ago when OS 10.2 had most of the transitional bugs worked out and Final Cut Pro 3 was starting to attract a lot of attention. (I had been a loyal Premiere 5.x guy on Windows 2000 at the time). Adobe released Premiere 6 and it sucked. It crashed repeatedly on us in the small shop I was working in at the time. I was already sold on Unix (having used Linux/FreeBSD as a server/desktop platform) and was excited to try the Macs. We did and found FCP 3 had most of the features we needed. Then FCP 4 came around and a couple years later we were a 100% mac shop ditching our old Alpha's (for Lightwave) and PC's for FCP & Shake.
What did Adobe do when they lost the DV editing wars? They cut off Premiere for Mac.
If Apple has any reason to ponder buying Adobe it's because Adobe now holds all the bread and butter apps that many Mac users use to make a living, at least that's not video related. And Adobe has been irked by Apple before (Remember when PS/Pagemaker/et al were all Apple first apps?) and with Apple developing more and more applications that could compete with Adobe, Apple risks Adobe saying one day: "Well now that everyone is on Intel, we are going to develop for Windows only. You mac users can dual boot or whatever."
I had a philosophy and technology class years ago where the professor had been involved in the early days of the Hypertext theory, since the late 1970's and through out the 1980's, and explained to us the idea of how the "World Wide Web" was supposed to be like. It was very similar to the old BBC "Connections" series (Well it was TLC when I was a kid) where you would read a web page, and it would contain links to other pages about related materials. You want find out how it connects to XYZ, click the link, read, learn.
For academic pursuits, Wiki is far from a good source for a number of reasons, but as a casual read, it can be interesting to read the other articles that are linked to it and sometimes those trivia section herald some of the most interesting tidbits of information.
Then you get parts of the Wikipedia community saying, "We aim to be the sum of all knowledge." Where are other people are going, "No we're an online encyclopedia." Well you know what. Make up your freaking minds and post in big bold letters on the frontpage: "We are A not b." (Forgive my dualistic approach, but right now it's trying to be both and nobody's on the same page.)
I miss the days when WoW meant Week of War at the gaming Zone. But alas, the space fighter combat sim game genre seems to have passed with the end of the last Millennium. Same with flight sims too it seems. I mean look at the companies that are no longer around. Origin's gone, with it Wing Commander, Dymanix is gone and with it the Aces series of games. Volitition & Interplay, both gone and with it Freespace (although the code is out in OSS land and there are couple projects like Beyond the Red Line worth noting.)
I haven't heard much from Totally Games, Lawance Holland the creator of the Xwings series, since Bridge Commander.
One of the problems with Wikipedia is that the content can change and change rapidly. Today an article may say "XYZ". Tomorrow it maybe, "AQY". So if I went to check the figure or fact a student placed in a paper...
Do professors do this? I don't know, I'm only a TA, most of the time the answer is no. I don't go check every fact and figure, but rather check that they cited the fact or figure. Everyonce in a while a student turns something up that's interesting. That catches my eye, usually because it may have some relavance to something I am working on, and will go and verify the sources.
Even if the student cites a questionable source/study/number, if I can go check it and I say, yeah that's where they got the numbers/information from. With print articles, I can go and retrieve the article and check to make sure the student isn't just making something up.
With Wikipedia, yeah I can go and look it up, but will it be the same as it was when the student looked at it? On most things, yeah, probably, but on some subjects....
Really the same goes for the internet as a whole. Back when I was an undergrad, most profs let us cite at most two sources from the internet for the same reasons. It used to tick me off being a techie-geek back then, but six years later when I went back for a masters, it makes a lot more sense.
You don't make it public. You arrange a sting of obvious and unfortunate "accidents" or people simply disappear. Do it enough and people generally take the hint.
This doesn't surprise me. Go around any college campus and just about everybody has Photoshop. Very few actually paid for it. (Granted I've heard the argument from one of their own campus reps that they didn't mind it as much on college campuses because then we go out into the work world and buy the upgrades or the businesses we work for buy the products)
However, what about days like yesterday. We had a line of thunderstorms with high straight line winds that snapped a few of the poles around my house. I was without DSL most of the day. Since I still had power, I could work offline with Photoshop CS and still productive. If the application was online, yesterday would have been a bust. Or I would have been driving around town on my laptop (a 1.25Ghz G4 Powerbook with 512MB of ram, getting a new MBP when 10.5 ships), which might run the application. (Hopefully it will be FF friendly. I keep a Windows based machine around because sometimes....)
Well, the Europeans and Chinese will be more than happy to pay out the bribes as well as any number of other firms to gain the contract. If there's money to be made, someone will jump in.
I second that. I shuddered when hearing thousands of SW fanboys scream out in horror as their hopes for a KOTOR III suddenly fades into nothingness....
we know the answer: It's the Applications stupid! (All apologies to Bill Clinton)
The reason why I switched, and a lot of other Linux folks several years ago, to Macintosh OSX was I was tired of fighting trying to get hardware to work (I know, not as big of an issue today) and I could use MS Office, Photoshop, Quickbooks, Dreamweaver as well as develop in a UAMP environment. Furthermore I got into video editing which is now dominated by Final Cut in most small/medium sized shops.
Goes back to the chicken and the egg, especially in the business world, that people won't use linux on the desktop until the application support it there. Software publishers aren't going to release Linux apps until the demand is there. My classic example is Maya. A lot of folks in the CGI industry were already on IRIX and Linux has supplanted IRIX in many shops. So there is a version of Maya for Linux. Ditto on the rendering engine for lightwave also runs on Linux for renderfarms. There was a demand for those products on the linux platform. Hell, even Apple has kept the Linux version of Shake around. (Although cheaper to get a Mac and Shake than to buy the Linux version last time I checked)
As far as the "Peer-reviewed" and more secure code. I call bullshit. The great thing about linux is that any one can contribute. The bad thing about Linux is that any one can contribute. That means everyone from professional programmers to 12 year old kids. The theory is that when bugs are found, they can be patched quicker, but I'm not so sure just how much code in the Linux domain is security audited by others. Especially given the sheer number of distros and configs out there. (Another reason why a lot of software developers avoid Linux). The only folks I know that really go through and security audit code are the OpenBSD folks.
For those who don't want to read AFA here is the short version: More copies of Halo for Mac have been pirated than sold. Mostly out of spite from mac fan boys for the fact that originally Halo was to be a Mac first title (some say Mac-only, but...) before Microsoft bought Bungie and had it developed as the "killer app". I generally assumed that enough of geekdom around here knew the story...
Investigating major crimes. I started working on my masters this fall, part-time as I still work, and one of the classes I've been taking is on Security & Foriegn policy. I can make a case that the entire security structure in the United States needs a complete overhaul. The existing agencies have fogotten what their mission is: to protect US national security interests at home and abroad, and become intrenched beltway beurcracies.
Let's go back to the beginning. The DOD have never gotten along with the CIA. Now the major reason was that the Generals have always felt that they should be the ones controlling the reigns of intelligence. So the DOD created the DIA and has traditionally kept the NSA under quazi military control. (I have couple relatives who are Air Force liguists who work at Ft. Meade. Doesn't take a genius to figure where on Ft. Meade they work...) Traditionally the State Department and the CIA have had a very close working relationship. One of the students in the class is a former US Marine who worked at various Embassy's around the world during his 8 years in the service. Depending on the posting, he estimated that half - if not more - of the Embassy staff were really Company employees, as he put it.
After 9/11 we decided, "Hey let's give counter-terrorism to the FBI." Big mistake. FBI culture is dominated by the reactive field agents that carry the guns. In order to be effective in counter-terrorism you need to be proactive. And that means you need nerds with PhD.'s looking at the information collected by the boys with guns in the field trying to figure out what happens next. The current FBI culture treats the annalists, those not carrying a gun, as any other support staff. To "The Boys with Guns" (As one of the profs in the department that spent from 2001 - 2004 working as an analyst at the FBI while doing post doctoral work at Georgetown), the Nerds in Suits with PhD.'s were no different than janitors and secretaries in their world view. And that's not being effective.
One of the professors in our department is a former FBI counter-terrorism anayist. He quit in 2004 because "The boys with the guns wouldn't listen to the nerds with the PhD's in Middle Eastern studies." Further more, the professor's parents were from Pakistan/India (it was still one region when they came to the US in the late 1940's), so since he looked like "them" the FBI culture tended not to listen to him and his colleagues.
My solution would be to adopt the British model. The FBI plays New Scotland Yard, NSA continues on as GCHQ, the CIA becomes MI6, and we create a domestic spying agency similar to MI5.
Hell, I'd even vote for Clinton and her Universal Healthcare (like the NIH). After all if that works for the Brits et. al. than domestic spying will work for us too!
If you aren't using any graphic intensive apps and can live with the Intel 950GMA, or if you travel a lot on airplanes, the MacBook is a nice option. I generally suggest buying from MacMall.com as they sell and support units with both OSX and XP preinstalled side by side. I highly recommend getting 2GB of Ram if you plan to use both Windows and MacOSX. (Get Parallels it's a $10 option and you can then boot windows from Mac OS and run windows the way it was meant to be run....in a window!
If you can afford it, then the MacBook Pro is the way to go. I had a PowerBook Titanium up until last spring when I sold it and purchased a MacBook Pro. (I'm in video production and a 1Ghz G4 wasn't going to cut it for FCP 6.) I got a model on closeout for $1300. It only had an 80GB HDD and 512MB of ram, but considering that a 320GB external HDD and 1GB of Ram set me back an extra $330, not a bad deal. I boot XP Pro off an external via Parallels when I need to use Windows, say to export a model from 3D Studio Max to something usable in Lightwave.
Now you are going to pay the Apple premium, but I haven't had many problems with Apple products unless it's a first Gen product. (I had a 1st gen snow white iBook G3 as my first Mac...there is a reason why I refuse to buy an iPhone at the moment...well that and ATT coverage in this area sucks.)
A) Already has nuclear power plants & atomic bombs
B) Has never directly threatened to use nuclear weapons first*
The exception being a full out armored assault on West Europe...but even then...
The president of Iran, who is really just a figure heads, it's the Imam's behind him that have th real power, is the one saying openly: "If we had 'em, we'd use them against Israel. Now much of that statement is likely just rhetoric because nuclear weapons are a zero-sum game: everybody looses. But given what I've read about the current brand of Shia Islam built around the return of the Madhi...those folks are as bad as the "end of the world" fundamentalist Christians sitting around waiting for the return of Christ...you can't really dismiss that they say what they believe.
More likely is they would say that the taxes are used for providing networks to those folks, maybe provide them, then 20 years from now when the taxes are STILL on the book, take the money and borrow against it to fund "Pet Project of the term" stuff. Or they skip the 20 years, place an IOU in that tax account and use the money for general funds.
I remember the argument when the gaming boats came to Missouri that their funds would create "300 Million in new revenue a year for education in the state". (Not sure what the exact numbers were.) Well before the state was funding about 1Billion a year in education. After the gaming boats came the state continued to fund education at 1Billion a year. What they did was used the 300M from the boats to offset 300M they were funding in education and used elsewhere for other things.
It's because of stunts like that I believe that they should place a ban on the taxes (even a permanant ban can be made unpermanent at a later date with a new law), but every new tax law should have a sunshine date no longer than 7 years when it takes effect. Then at least we can debate whether or how taxes are spent on a regular basis...but I know that's just wishful thinking.
I do the technical coding for a couple web designers (they make it look pretty and I make it work). Typically their clients have done enough research to have heard some buzz words so a typical conversation goes like this:
Client: "We'd like our site/new site to be Web 2.0 with AJAX and Rails and....
Web Designer: "This is the layout I've created with new logo, etc."
Client: "Ohhh, that's pretty, but I don't like that shade of >, could you make it >, maybe a couple shades darker, but brighter...you know what I mean?"
Web Desiger: "Sure"
Me: "Okay now what are you looking for the site to do?"
Client: "We want our site to be Search Engine Optimized, with built in Web 2.0 features."
Me: "Okay, SEO is not a problem, we have a professional copy writer on staff that handles the ad copy for the pages. What keywords you you like to target in search engines?"
Client: "Um...I want my page to be on the top of Google when they search for it..."
Me: "Okay, is your site E-commerce: meaning your actually going to be selling goods from it?"
Client: "No, just about our XYZ business. But it needs a Web 2.0 contact form so clients can email us from the web page and we can send them back a quote."
Me: Okay, so you need a contact form (standard feature on just about every site we do). What else?"
Client: "Well I need to be able to update upcoming events on a calender and news items."
Web Designer: "We can use Joomla for that."
Me: "Or we can find a news page script in Perl or PHP for that page with a nice easy to use backend. Same with an events calender. Then you can design your nice tabled based pages in Photoshop/Dreamweaver and I won't have to spend a week converting them to a CSS based Joomla template."
Client: "PERL? PHP? That's not Web 2.0. It's suppose to be Ajax and something called Ruby on Rails! That is what > says about having your web site designed!"
Me: *hands client copy of Cult Of Amateurs* And then i WANT TO SAY "Here read this and then get back to me about web 2.0. The short version: there is no such thing, it's a fancy buzzword no different than Dotcom ten years ago. Now we could everything you wanted on your site back then with CGI/PERL and now PHP and it will work.
Instead I say, with a smile: "We can make it work."
It will probably be military funding that carries out the research. After all, we've mastered creating an uncontrolled, none contained fusion reaction: please see Hydrogen Bombs, Thermonuclear Weapons, fission-fusion weapons, etc.. The holy grail in Weapons research is the true 4th Generation Thermonuclear bomb that uses some method to trigger the reaction other than a fission weapon. (Personally I like to call them Fusion bombs because most people don't know the difference between a nuclear and thermonuclear reaction...all they hear is "nuclear")
And if you can use this technology to jump start a sustainable fusion reaction for power, you can use it as a trigger in a Thermonuclear weapon. And why would the military like such a weapon? Because it gives you all the power of an Atomic weapon without all the nasty radioactive side effects. A pure Fusion bomb releases a burst of X-ray's and Gamma Rays at the initial detonation, but those don't cause fall out. It is possible the Neutron Flux might cause some elements to turn into radio active isotopes, but this is going to be limited. However you still get all the bang from the resulting over pressure wave followed by the Thermo Radiation (Also known as Heat).
Now you actually have a nuclear weapon that could be deployed tactically, i.e. on the battlefield, without all the baggage of current fission-fusion weapons due to the lack of fallout. Also it would create a bunker buster the ability to destroy bio-chem weapons caches if needed as well. (Not many organisms and chemicals are going to survive that inferno). Again all the bang, none of the radio active fall out problems. So you also then have fusion weapons that will likely be used in combat operations. They would have been useful in places like Tora Bora. (Although the real reason Bin Laden is still alive....the price on his head is what? USD 24M. What is a poor member of the Bin Laden clan worth? $500M? Gee you kill Osama, whether a merc/traitor/or POTUS, you really think there is a place on this planet you can hide from that kind of wealth and power?)
I hereby await the gasps from the slashdot crowd followed by where I got the physics wrong (Sorry the last Physics class I had was AP over a decade ago, so this is to the best of my remembering/understanding)...
The company I still work with, as a part-time consultant instead of full time employee these days as I am in Grad School, will not be going to wireless anytime soon. One reason is security. They are a video production company and post house that sometimes does sub-contracting work on TV and Film. There are some big fines in there if it was ever proven that materials were ever leaked by our people.
Secondly, we run ScreamernetII & Qmaster/Xgrid on every single machine in the building. That is one reason why in 2005 they elected to go 100% Mac. The front office people work on iMacs and when they go home at night, the spare G5 CPU cycles are turned over to rendering Shake, Final Cut, Compressor, or Lightwave projects.
That takes bandwidth. Lots of bandwidth and quite a few of our units are linked via Fiber as gigabit Ethernet isn't fast enough. (Especially when dealing with 400GB HDV files).
Now for the average business, especially small business, going wireless is already the way to go. It's cheap to network up to 50 PC's together without having to have cabling installed. If you grow and expand it's pretty easy to add more access points.
Again I guess it depends on where you are and what you are using it for.
Yeah, on PC I'd probably pick OO over Office, but on Mac...different story. I was surprised (after having some bad experiences with the Office XP beta and final releases) at how much better the Mac version of Office was after that initial 2 week period of getting used to the bloody interface. OO on Mac is clunky, requires X11, and extremely slow compared to Office 2004 for Mac.
Now if there was a plug-in that would read docx on the mac version of office i'd be set. instead I have to remind clients to please resave documents in Office 2003/XP/2000 format.
When your country does something wrong -- and when your country is a democracy, in which the leaders are theoretically responsible to the people -- it is good and right to be ashamed. Being ashamed isn't enough, of course; you should also do something to change it. Which, in the civilized world, includes bitching loudly and publicly. The idea that we should keep our mouths shut except to parrot platitudes of support for our Glorious Leaders is repulsive.
(Bolding mine)
Yeah, thank god the country I live in isn't a democracy. We are a Federal Republic or Consitutional Republic not a Democracy. Go back and read the US Army Field Manuals from the 1930's. Generally they say: Democracy is a really bad form of government. Hell Plato and a few others have said the exact same thing. (Tyranny of the Majority I believe was Plato's term loosely translated)
So enough with this "The United States is a democracy" bullshit. We aren't a democracy and never were. Now it'd be nice if the speech writers remembered that when they go preaching the Gospel of "bringing Democracy to the world"....
Cult of Amateurs is an interesting read if you go look at the current affairs section of any book store. I work with small businesses and web designers as a technical consultant. Primarily web designers these days that know how to make websites pretty, but when it comes to the back-end. (Which also helps me as I have clients that need a new site design and I have no artistic skills).
Found the book to be an interesting take, especially when he talks about an experience at an O'Reiley event with folks talking about "Web 2.0" and how it was going to change everything.
At any rate, I hear a lot about "We want a web 2.0 website" without people having a clue what that means. Some get damned irate when I say, "That's just a buzz word, what do you want it to do?" Most of the time their idea of web 2.0 is going from an HTML static site to one based around Joomla or some other CMS or they need some type of support ticket solution installed.
I don't tend to get into buzz words, my question is always straight forward: "What the hell are you trying to accomplish?" Then, "Okay. Here is Option A, B, C. My recommendation is A because:..."
And the spelling errors are the lack of coffee at 6AM after going to bed around 1AM after grading quizzes last night over things like referendums. In fact, if I teach this class next semester or next year, I am going to going to hold a referendum on whether to give the quiz. If more than half the class doesn't know what a referendum is, we're having a quiz every class...
Slashdot Mirror
I use Opera on Mac for a long while, but then when I started using more Google stuff, I went back to FF for most things. But I've been disappointed with FF because I remember when FF's goal was to make a lighter, faster Mozilla. Well now it seems to gobble up more ram and system resources than ever and Opera loads most webpages faster.
Still I have keep a PC around because there are some webapps I use in development that are still MSIE only.
When it comes to professional video editing. There is Avid and...well...Avid. That is still the defacto standard for most of Hollywood and TV Broadcast land. You want a job in broadcast/movie editing, you had better learn Avid.
FCP, Vegas, and Premiere are all basically DV editing tools, although FCP and Premiere can handle 2k/4k film as well and I havn't messed with Vegas much so...
They all compete for business of individual videographers and small production shops. In that arena, especially among WEVA members, FCP is the standard. About 5 years ago when OS 10.2 had most of the transitional bugs worked out and Final Cut Pro 3 was starting to attract a lot of attention. (I had been a loyal Premiere 5.x guy on Windows 2000 at the time). Adobe released Premiere 6 and it sucked. It crashed repeatedly on us in the small shop I was working in at the time. I was already sold on Unix (having used Linux/FreeBSD as a server/desktop platform) and was excited to try the Macs. We did and found FCP 3 had most of the features we needed. Then FCP 4 came around and a couple years later we were a 100% mac shop ditching our old Alpha's (for Lightwave) and PC's for FCP & Shake.
What did Adobe do when they lost the DV editing wars? They cut off Premiere for Mac.
If Apple has any reason to ponder buying Adobe it's because Adobe now holds all the bread and butter apps that many Mac users use to make a living, at least that's not video related. And Adobe has been irked by Apple before (Remember when PS/Pagemaker/et al were all Apple first apps?) and with Apple developing more and more applications that could compete with Adobe, Apple risks Adobe saying one day: "Well now that everyone is on Intel, we are going to develop for Windows only. You mac users can dual boot or whatever."
For academic pursuits, Wiki is far from a good source for a number of reasons, but as a casual read, it can be interesting to read the other articles that are linked to it and sometimes those trivia section herald some of the most interesting tidbits of information.
Then you get parts of the Wikipedia community saying, "We aim to be the sum of all knowledge." Where are other people are going, "No we're an online encyclopedia." Well you know what. Make up your freaking minds and post in big bold letters on the frontpage: "We are A not b." (Forgive my dualistic approach, but right now it's trying to be both and nobody's on the same page.)
I haven't heard much from Totally Games, Lawance Holland the creator of the Xwings series, since Bridge Commander.
Do professors do this? I don't know, I'm only a TA, most of the time the answer is no. I don't go check every fact and figure, but rather check that they cited the fact or figure. Everyonce in a while a student turns something up that's interesting. That catches my eye, usually because it may have some relavance to something I am working on, and will go and verify the sources.
Even if the student cites a questionable source/study/number, if I can go check it and I say, yeah that's where they got the numbers/information from. With print articles, I can go and retrieve the article and check to make sure the student isn't just making something up.
With Wikipedia, yeah I can go and look it up, but will it be the same as it was when the student looked at it? On most things, yeah, probably, but on some subjects....
Really the same goes for the internet as a whole. Back when I was an undergrad, most profs let us cite at most two sources from the internet for the same reasons. It used to tick me off being a techie-geek back then, but six years later when I went back for a masters, it makes a lot more sense.
You don't make it public. You arrange a sting of obvious and unfortunate "accidents" or people simply disappear. Do it enough and people generally take the hint.
However, what about days like yesterday. We had a line of thunderstorms with high straight line winds that snapped a few of the poles around my house. I was without DSL most of the day. Since I still had power, I could work offline with Photoshop CS and still productive. If the application was online, yesterday would have been a bust. Or I would have been driving around town on my laptop (a 1.25Ghz G4 Powerbook with 512MB of ram, getting a new MBP when 10.5 ships), which might run the application. (Hopefully it will be FF friendly. I keep a Windows based machine around because sometimes....)
Well, the Europeans and Chinese will be more than happy to pay out the bribes as well as any number of other firms to gain the contract. If there's money to be made, someone will jump in.
I second that. I shuddered when hearing thousands of SW fanboys scream out in horror as their hopes for a KOTOR III suddenly fades into nothingness....
The reason why I switched, and a lot of other Linux folks several years ago, to Macintosh OSX was I was tired of fighting trying to get hardware to work (I know, not as big of an issue today) and I could use MS Office, Photoshop, Quickbooks, Dreamweaver as well as develop in a UAMP environment. Furthermore I got into video editing which is now dominated by Final Cut in most small/medium sized shops.
Goes back to the chicken and the egg, especially in the business world, that people won't use linux on the desktop until the application support it there. Software publishers aren't going to release Linux apps until the demand is there. My classic example is Maya. A lot of folks in the CGI industry were already on IRIX and Linux has supplanted IRIX in many shops. So there is a version of Maya for Linux. Ditto on the rendering engine for lightwave also runs on Linux for renderfarms. There was a demand for those products on the linux platform. Hell, even Apple has kept the Linux version of Shake around. (Although cheaper to get a Mac and Shake than to buy the Linux version last time I checked)
As far as the "Peer-reviewed" and more secure code. I call bullshit. The great thing about linux is that any one can contribute. The bad thing about Linux is that any one can contribute. That means everyone from professional programmers to 12 year old kids. The theory is that when bugs are found, they can be patched quicker, but I'm not so sure just how much code in the Linux domain is security audited by others. Especially given the sheer number of distros and configs out there. (Another reason why a lot of software developers avoid Linux). The only folks I know that really go through and security audit code are the OpenBSD folks.
Linky: http://macslash.org/article.pl?sid=04/02/05/174217
For those who don't want to read AFA here is the short version: More copies of Halo for Mac have been pirated than sold. Mostly out of spite from mac fan boys for the fact that originally Halo was to be a Mac first title (some say Mac-only, but...) before Microsoft bought Bungie and had it developed as the "killer app". I generally assumed that enough of geekdom around here knew the story...
We can actually go out and buy legal copies of Halo for Mac now?
Let's go back to the beginning. The DOD have never gotten along with the CIA. Now the major reason was that the Generals have always felt that they should be the ones controlling the reigns of intelligence. So the DOD created the DIA and has traditionally kept the NSA under quazi military control. (I have couple relatives who are Air Force liguists who work at Ft. Meade. Doesn't take a genius to figure where on Ft. Meade they work...) Traditionally the State Department and the CIA have had a very close working relationship. One of the students in the class is a former US Marine who worked at various Embassy's around the world during his 8 years in the service. Depending on the posting, he estimated that half - if not more - of the Embassy staff were really Company employees, as he put it.
After 9/11 we decided, "Hey let's give counter-terrorism to the FBI." Big mistake. FBI culture is dominated by the reactive field agents that carry the guns. In order to be effective in counter-terrorism you need to be proactive. And that means you need nerds with PhD.'s looking at the information collected by the boys with guns in the field trying to figure out what happens next. The current FBI culture treats the annalists, those not carrying a gun, as any other support staff. To "The Boys with Guns" (As one of the profs in the department that spent from 2001 - 2004 working as an analyst at the FBI while doing post doctoral work at Georgetown), the Nerds in Suits with PhD.'s were no different than janitors and secretaries in their world view. And that's not being effective.
One of the professors in our department is a former FBI counter-terrorism anayist. He quit in 2004 because "The boys with the guns wouldn't listen to the nerds with the PhD's in Middle Eastern studies." Further more, the professor's parents were from Pakistan/India (it was still one region when they came to the US in the late 1940's), so since he looked like "them" the FBI culture tended not to listen to him and his colleagues.
My solution would be to adopt the British model. The FBI plays New Scotland Yard, NSA continues on as GCHQ, the CIA becomes MI6, and we create a domestic spying agency similar to MI5.
Hell, I'd even vote for Clinton and her Universal Healthcare (like the NIH). After all if that works for the Brits et. al. than domestic spying will work for us too!
If you can afford it, then the MacBook Pro is the way to go. I had a PowerBook Titanium up until last spring when I sold it and purchased a MacBook Pro. (I'm in video production and a 1Ghz G4 wasn't going to cut it for FCP 6.) I got a model on closeout for $1300. It only had an 80GB HDD and 512MB of ram, but considering that a 320GB external HDD and 1GB of Ram set me back an extra $330, not a bad deal. I boot XP Pro off an external via Parallels when I need to use Windows, say to export a model from 3D Studio Max to something usable in Lightwave.
Now you are going to pay the Apple premium, but I haven't had many problems with Apple products unless it's a first Gen product. (I had a 1st gen snow white iBook G3 as my first Mac...there is a reason why I refuse to buy an iPhone at the moment...well that and ATT coverage in this area sucks.)
A) Already has nuclear power plants & atomic bombs
B) Has never directly threatened to use nuclear weapons first*
The exception being a full out armored assault on West Europe...but even then...
The president of Iran, who is really just a figure heads, it's the Imam's behind him that have th real power, is the one saying openly: "If we had 'em, we'd use them against Israel. Now much of that statement is likely just rhetoric because nuclear weapons are a zero-sum game: everybody looses. But given what I've read about the current brand of Shia Islam built around the return of the Madhi...those folks are as bad as the "end of the world" fundamentalist Christians sitting around waiting for the return of Christ...you can't really dismiss that they say what they believe.
In soviet russia our space stations lasted 5 years beyond their firm end date....
I remember the argument when the gaming boats came to Missouri that their funds would create "300 Million in new revenue a year for education in the state". (Not sure what the exact numbers were.) Well before the state was funding about 1Billion a year in education. After the gaming boats came the state continued to fund education at 1Billion a year. What they did was used the 300M from the boats to offset 300M they were funding in education and used elsewhere for other things.
It's because of stunts like that I believe that they should place a ban on the taxes (even a permanant ban can be made unpermanent at a later date with a new law), but every new tax law should have a sunshine date no longer than 7 years when it takes effect. Then at least we can debate whether or how taxes are spent on a regular basis...but I know that's just wishful thinking.
Client: "We'd like our site/new site to be Web 2.0 with AJAX and Rails and....
Web Designer: "This is the layout I've created with new logo, etc."
Client: "Ohhh, that's pretty, but I don't like that shade of >, could you make it >, maybe a couple shades darker, but brighter...you know what I mean?"
Web Desiger: "Sure"
Me: "Okay now what are you looking for the site to do?"
Client: "We want our site to be Search Engine Optimized, with built in Web 2.0 features."
Me: "Okay, SEO is not a problem, we have a professional copy writer on staff that handles the ad copy for the pages. What keywords you you like to target in search engines?"
Client: "Um...I want my page to be on the top of Google when they search for it..."
Me: "Okay, is your site E-commerce: meaning your actually going to be selling goods from it?"
Client: "No, just about our XYZ business. But it needs a Web 2.0 contact form so clients can email us from the web page and we can send them back a quote."
Me: Okay, so you need a contact form (standard feature on just about every site we do). What else?"
Client: "Well I need to be able to update upcoming events on a calender and news items."
Web Designer: "We can use Joomla for that."
Me: "Or we can find a news page script in Perl or PHP for that page with a nice easy to use backend. Same with an events calender. Then you can design your nice tabled based pages in Photoshop/Dreamweaver and I won't have to spend a week converting them to a CSS based Joomla template."
Client: "PERL? PHP? That's not Web 2.0. It's suppose to be Ajax and something called Ruby on Rails! That is what > says about having your web site designed!"
Me: *hands client copy of Cult Of Amateurs* And then i WANT TO SAY "Here read this and then get back to me about web 2.0. The short version: there is no such thing, it's a fancy buzzword no different than Dotcom ten years ago. Now we could everything you wanted on your site back then with CGI/PERL and now PHP and it will work.
Instead I say, with a smile: "We can make it work."
And if you can use this technology to jump start a sustainable fusion reaction for power, you can use it as a trigger in a Thermonuclear weapon. And why would the military like such a weapon? Because it gives you all the power of an Atomic weapon without all the nasty radioactive side effects. A pure Fusion bomb releases a burst of X-ray's and Gamma Rays at the initial detonation, but those don't cause fall out. It is possible the Neutron Flux might cause some elements to turn into radio active isotopes, but this is going to be limited. However you still get all the bang from the resulting over pressure wave followed by the Thermo Radiation (Also known as Heat).
Now you actually have a nuclear weapon that could be deployed tactically, i.e. on the battlefield, without all the baggage of current fission-fusion weapons due to the lack of fallout. Also it would create a bunker buster the ability to destroy bio-chem weapons caches if needed as well. (Not many organisms and chemicals are going to survive that inferno). Again all the bang, none of the radio active fall out problems. So you also then have fusion weapons that will likely be used in combat operations. They would have been useful in places like Tora Bora. (Although the real reason Bin Laden is still alive....the price on his head is what? USD 24M. What is a poor member of the Bin Laden clan worth? $500M? Gee you kill Osama, whether a merc/traitor/or POTUS, you really think there is a place on this planet you can hide from that kind of wealth and power?)
I hereby await the gasps from the slashdot crowd followed by where I got the physics wrong (Sorry the last Physics class I had was AP over a decade ago, so this is to the best of my remembering/understanding)...
Secondly, we run ScreamernetII & Qmaster/Xgrid on every single machine in the building. That is one reason why in 2005 they elected to go 100% Mac. The front office people work on iMacs and when they go home at night, the spare G5 CPU cycles are turned over to rendering Shake, Final Cut, Compressor, or Lightwave projects.
That takes bandwidth. Lots of bandwidth and quite a few of our units are linked via Fiber as gigabit Ethernet isn't fast enough. (Especially when dealing with 400GB HDV files).
Now for the average business, especially small business, going wireless is already the way to go. It's cheap to network up to 50 PC's together without having to have cabling installed. If you grow and expand it's pretty easy to add more access points.
Again I guess it depends on where you are and what you are using it for.
Now if there was a plug-in that would read docx on the mac version of office i'd be set. instead I have to remind clients to please resave documents in Office 2003/XP/2000 format.
(Bolding mine)
Yeah, thank god the country I live in isn't a democracy. We are a Federal Republic or Consitutional Republic not a Democracy. Go back and read the US Army Field Manuals from the 1930's. Generally they say: Democracy is a really bad form of government. Hell Plato and a few others have said the exact same thing. (Tyranny of the Majority I believe was Plato's term loosely translated)
So enough with this "The United States is a democracy" bullshit. We aren't a democracy and never were. Now it'd be nice if the speech writers remembered that when they go preaching the Gospel of "bringing Democracy to the world"....
Found the book to be an interesting take, especially when he talks about an experience at an O'Reiley event with folks talking about "Web 2.0" and how it was going to change everything.
At any rate, I hear a lot about "We want a web 2.0 website" without people having a clue what that means. Some get damned irate when I say, "That's just a buzz word, what do you want it to do?" Most of the time their idea of web 2.0 is going from an HTML static site to one based around Joomla or some other CMS or they need some type of support ticket solution installed.
I don't tend to get into buzz words, my question is always straight forward: "What the hell are you trying to accomplish?" Then, "Okay. Here is Option A, B, C. My recommendation is A because:..."
Royalties kill the internet radio star....
And the spelling errors are the lack of coffee at 6AM after going to bed around 1AM after grading quizzes last night over things like referendums. In fact, if I teach this class next semester or next year, I am going to going to hold a referendum on whether to give the quiz. If more than half the class doesn't know what a referendum is, we're having a quiz every class...