(a) Misconduct, fraud, or corruption on the part of any election official or any member of the canvassing board sufficient to change or place in doubt the result of the election.
This doesn't count, because the election official in charge was a Democrat. There is no reason to believe that it was "misconduct" (a legal term).
(b) Ineligibility of the successful candidate for the nomination or office in dispute
Obviously not an issue.
(c) Receipt of a number of illegal votes or rejection of a number of legal votes sufficient to change or place in doubt the result of the election.
"[R]ejection of a number of legal votes sufficient to change or place in doubt the result of an election" might count, but it could go either way. Given that the political makeup of Palm Beach County is in doubt (sure, liberals win there but that doesn't mean there aren't a large block of ultra-conservatives--political affiliation has yet to be proven communicable or geographically induced, merely correlated), that's very shaky grounds upon which to call the election into doubt.
Note that the Buchanan votes wouldn't even enter into this: only the 19,000 votes that were thrown out because of being punched twice. So unless you can say that somehow those votes were legal but wrongly rejected (the wording doesn't seem to allow for mistakes that invalidate a vote), it probably wouldn't successfully challenge the election.
Interestingly, this would imply that the media calls that would have affected the Panhandle (which is in a later time zone) would not be grounds for challenge.
I think it's time here to accept that humans are human, mistakes were, are, and will be made, and that these mistakes can in fact affect the outcomes of elections, the future of nations, and the direction of mankind, and that these things are just part of life. Were we in a clockwork world, none of this process would be necessary.
As long as the issues are mistakes, and not fraud (*cough*Mayor Daley*cough*) (my dead grandmother better not have voted for Gore), just accept it and take it as an object lesson in why we should do user testing. Who knows what other mistakes were made on other ballots in, say, Iowa or Wisconsin?
> 7. The performance advantages of RISC over Intel-based servers will decline by about 20 percent to 30 percent each year [..]
They mention nothing to back this up, and it just plain doesn't make sense to me
1. Take current trends (intel doing surprisingly well, Moto/IBM having problems with PowerPC chip
2. Extrapolate
3. Ignore possibility that current trends will change
4. Congratulations! You're now a business techologist/forecaster!
Last time I looked, Europe did not have problems with sprawl.
You're kidding me. Have you been to Europe? Low-rise suburbia is the majority of the land use there. It does have more mass transit, because they're more tightly packed--but this is a matter of simple geography, not gas taxes. The environment over there is far more threatened than it is here, because the population pressure per square mile is greater. Add to that the inefficient farming methods they use (that Nader wants us to adopt), and there's precious little natural land left there.
And if you still think we have a problem relative to other countries, please take a trip to Japan. It will be eye-opening.
Sprawl? The phrase that describes how its users want everyone else to live.
Clearly, the rich have access to wonderful legal care on a daily basis, and the poor have no resort. Why is this? Greed. Pure and simple, on the part of lawyers.
It's time to nationalize them. Legal representation is a basic human right which the megacorps have been denying poor people long enough. Well, Hillary has been working on a plan that she'll implement once in the Senate that will deal with this, an only a WTO-loving republican techophobe would oppose:
The country will be divided up into large "Legal Care Organizations" with regional coverage. You can get basic advice, such as "can I sue diz guy" and "for how much?" with only a minor* wait.
Lawyers will have salary caps to a reasonable maximum. Specialists will be trained and deployed only as needed by the Law Care Administration Bureau, to ensure that general practice lawyers are in sufficient supply, especially to underserved communities. A team of doctors will decide what legal salaries should be.
Now, if you go out of your region, you may not have access to full representation. This is to prevent people from trying to take more than their fair share of care by shopping around.
To insure equal representation, private law practice will be outlawed.
Another problem solved by government intervention, and brought to you by Al Gore and Hillary Clinton!
I think the ISVs are not necessarily UNIX programmers, so asking them to port to Obj-C or Java is a stretch right off the bat. It's a good way to get them out of Classic, at which point we whiny Mac users will start bugging them to go to Cocoa;-).
Seriously, the learning curve is bad enough going to Carbon, and Cocoa is much too much. And Carbon apps run pretty well. So in a year there should be few un-Carbonized apps.
> gasohol will remain a relatively untapped technology
...and lets hope it remains that way. Like organic farming, 'gasohol' will take up much more farmland than is currently in use, effectively wiping out all natural land that can be farmed. Goodbye, nature preserves. Wetlands will be drained, forests razed. It's even worse than windpower, otherwise known as "avian quisinart".
In fact, most "alternatives" proposed by environmentalists are only better when done by a tiny minority. The second the entire population starts doing it, their consequences, while slightly different, are equally bad or worse than fossil fuels.
There IS a technology, currently available, that only puts out a few tons per year of waste per plant, is emission-free, doesn't have to be fought for in the Middle East, will easily and feasibly tide us over until fusion power generation is achieved, and already supplies the major power for several industrialized countries that US, British, and German greens don't want you to know about. Whatizit?
Nuclear fission. Don't believe the FUD spread by the Greens, it really is a better solution. No, it's not perfect, but it could provide the power for electric vehicles (though fuel cells are a better technology, and hydrogen gets a bad rap for being unsafe--the Hindenburg's problem would have occurred with or without hydrogen--it was the skin that burned). And the wastes are easily controllable, despite what the NIMBY soccer mom psuedo-environmentalists from GreenPolice, I mean, uh, GreenPiece say.
In addition to what others have said, it's in a narrow valley with major cities several ranges of the Appalachians away--you have to go over five or six ridges, as I recall, from Washington, DC, to get there. That's an awful lot of radio frequency insulation, as anyone who's tried to pick up a TV or radio station in the area can tell you.
That, plus the National Radio Quiet Zone referred to above, make it actually one of the better places in the country for it.
From personal experience, I can heartily recommend it.
It's worth a trip out of your way to take the tour. It is a beautiful area, not far from where I was born, and the tour is really interesting. They take you by the telescope SETI rents, and they have a flag out if they're listening while you're there. Only diesel engines are allowed in the area, because traditional engines generate electronic interference. The area also forbids microwaves or other devices with lots of RF noise. Plus there are cool T-shirts, a must-have for any geek.;-)
I met a former RIAA legal committee lawyer, who lectured me as if I were a neophyte (I have a BA in music and have played and composed professionally). His words were that the artists have "some" raw talent, but it takes a producer with skills to make an album that will sell.
He claimed that this was the investment the companies made that justified the high prices, and contradicted himself by saying that since no one knew what would sell, they had to have high prices in order to make up for all the ones that don't sell.
So, according to him, the music industry is like Microsoft. The artists (programmers) are of secondary importance to the marketers and lawyers to a successful product, and users are the great unwashed to be marketed to.
Essentially, these people view themselves AS the music industry, not the middlemen who frequently just get in between you and the artist because they can. Their contempt for both artists and fans came through palpably.
Re:Does Jobs bugger everything all to hell?
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> Jobs messes up, because he isn't actually that good at the job
Like most posts about Apple on Slashdot, I can see how someone would think that 5 or 10 years ago (you know, before Linux and Windows 95), but read a bloody paper. Have you seen the way Apple runs now? Have you seen their financial statements? Have you seen their stock performance?
When Jobs took over at Apple, I was suspicious that it was the end, but I was proved wrong. What bothers me about this post is that it has been widely reported with data to boot and this guy still isn't aware that not only is the company making money, but it's making a lot of money. Most of that money comes from out-Dell-ing Dell on how to run a computer manufacturing company. Has everything Jobs done been successful? Far from it. But geez, read a freakin' paper.
but grouped together as "Nazi Germany" they did a lot of horrible things.
...because the government through which they expressed themselves was unfettered and individual liberties, such as the right of property (krystallnacht) were unprotected. The flaw in your thinking is that you forget that government is a group, too, and needs controls even tighter.
Actually, by ignoring groups and simply protecting individual liberties very strongly, you accomplish more to prevent groups from doing stupid things than you do by assuming that you can count on the government group to control all the other groups without becoming the problem it's trying to solve.
there are still many places in USia that don't even have electricity yet!
I don't know about USia, but here in the US, we have actually electrified the whole country, and it has been that way for 30 years. There are no doubt shacks in Arkansas that don't have it, but that's not because no one's offered.
As for Europe, if you mean Scandinavia, fine, but remember the rest of Europe? Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Poland, etc? They don't have the gadget penetration of the U.S., let alone Japan.
And why is wireless so big there? It's because the socialist telephone monopolies suck. Their landlines suck and that's why internet adoption has been a fraction of North America. You have a cell phone because that's the one thing that's managed by private companies, you can actually hear the other person on, and you can actually get a phone within a year of applying!!! Try to get a phone in Hungary. Hell, try to get one in the Netherlands!!
> the hood is almost literally welded shut on every Mac
I think I see what you're saying but that statement is FUD. Not only FUD, but 15-year-old FUD.
That's like saying Microsoft OS's are unusable because they don't even have a GUI. Hardware-wise, Macs above the iMac are supremely easy to get to. The iMac just isn't aimed at that market.
Software-wise: Can you see the source code to the OS? No. Can you see the full, complete APIs? Yes. Reams of good documentation, all available for free.
Does the average user see any of this or even have to think about it? No. Is that a problem for a hobbyist developer? Yes. "Hello World" is harder to get to outside of AppleScript. Can that problem be overcome? Yes. Using free tools, you can get to Hello World but it takes some reading and a little motivation. More than Windows using VBS? Yes, probably, though not much. The old HyperCard used to be a much easier ramp-up.
So there are barriers to entry (which will all but disappear with OSX and the optionally installed terminal window). No question. But LOTS and LOTS of hobbyists have developed very usable, high-quality software that they developed by learning on the Mac. Go to VersionTracker.com and check out all the freeware and shareware tools that exist, and sit down at a modern Mac and check a couple of them out. There are some real gems there, not done by pros.
they borrowed a large body of work, but cannot do anything BSD cannot rapidly learn to do, due to the similarity in underlying platform.
Bzzt! Wrong! OS X is NOT a BSD clone. It is BSD-esque in some areas (mainly the microkernal, NOT the upper portions of the OS) and implements the BSD APIs, but it is fundamentally a different beastie. It will NOT be that easy to re-create Aqua on BSD. I know this is tough for Linux users to understand, but Aqua and even the classic MacOS have lots of elements that have nothing to do with look-and-feel but have everything to do with fundamental behaviors. Look-and-feel can be copied in Gnome/KDE/etc, but the functionality cannot without rewriting the system from X-11 on up.
Plus Aqua relies on proprietary technology that no open source initiative will ever license, and Adobe will never ever open source it. Never. Ever. Even if their company dies. I say this not approvingly, but realistically. Warnock won't do it.
Third, BSD (or Linux, at this stage) has no incentive to put the effort and hours into UI research that Apple and, yes, Microsoft have. The desktop market is vastly different from the workstation market as you realize, but the Geeks won't get over themselves (not without some major company doing it in-house and releasing it to the world fully-formed).
Fourth, don't underestimate Apple's engineers. Just because they work on the fruity OS for grandmothers and they aren't working for an open source company, doesn't mean they aren't incredibly talented, smart people. The effort they can put in as a team with a dictator like Jobs to keep them focused is far from trivial and the results hard to steal (I mean, Microsoft has been trying to give you a Mac-like UI for how long and has only gotten it half right and only improved on two or three areas?). BSD and Linux have some very good developers working on it, but it's not always a question of pure talent.
Personally, I think Linux/BSD will reign supreme in the workstation/small-to-lower-huge server markets (with a healthy competition from MacOSX and NT in the workstation/small server markets--never underestimate the power and stupidity of PHBs and people who fear switching OSes). Mac OSX will reign supreme in the graphics/web production/education markets, and probably make inroads on the corporate desktop/secretary/home/small business markets. Windows will still be the largest in those markets, and Linux will have a tiny share (except possibly small-business and education, I see interesting possibilities there), mainly for people who have their Geek son/cousin/friend/lover set up their system for them.
The only solution to the problem is to bill the corporations for the wasted common resources, i.e. tax environment-unfriendly outfits.
That is a solution, but not the only solution.
A better one is to simply give people/corporations ownership of the air/water/soil/etc. This is not that strange a concept, as we already have auctions for parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, which is subject to the same pseudo-tragedy-of-the-commons that air and water have. Certain uses of the spectrum (broadcasting) deny it to others (you can't outshout that broadcaster on that frequency).
So you set up one-time auctions from the government, then let people trade it. The Nature Conservancy and civic groups can then do what they've done with land--band together to buy up allocations of air and require that they not be polluted.
Then people who own air have an incentive to go after polluters, as someone polluting their air infringes on their property rights. The law for that is much simpler. A few tests of air pollution can tell the content. The alleged problem of "non-point source" pollution, i.e., cars, can be assesed by taking the same measures that others have argued for but lacked the legal protections (for both the consumer and the polluter) that random laws did: subject emitters such as cars, gas-powered leaf blowers, etc. to charges for the amount of air they pollute under normal use. Those that receive heavy uses can be taken care of throuh litigation (if your neighbor doesn't maintain his car and it frequently blows nasty smoke across you lawn, you can easily take a few pictures, take some samples, and take him to court).
No, there won't be a withering away of government as radical libertarians expect, but it would be subject to the traditional constraints that it has had in property law--and those aren't there in Al Gore-style command-and-control, top-down enforcement.
Ooof, between you and the PhD computer scientist above, we're going to start to have to give IQ tests before you can use a Mac.
Please. Both of you are bitching about a lack of documentation and help for the Mac? Why not try searching the internet. Did you forget the process of learning you had to do with Linux? Did you think the Mac was so easy you could do everything without even bothering to go through the online documentation (which is usually ignored but copious)? Have you never heard of versiontracker.com (freshmeat before freshmeat or download.com existed)? Macfixit.com? Or the thousands of websites with Mac info, or the free discussion boards on these sites and on usenet that offer? Or did you never bother to visit usenet sites that nobody told you about? Hey, try Sherlock if you're unused to searching the net. Or try Google. But this time, type in "Macintosh". Geez.
My god, the Mac has plenty of bad points without having to say "I wanted it to think for me unlike every other computer in existence and I couldn't be bothered to spend a second learning how to use it because my brain turned off when the startup chime sounded."
And really, if you want to bitch about something, don't bitch about problem solving on the Mac. Yes, you might have to visit a few websites (ever heard of the TIL, the best and most authoritative bugfixing database anywhere, in an obscure website called www.apple.com?), but once you learn it, there are about three things that need to be done to fix a sick mac, and they don't involve reinstalling every application on your computer like with Windows. And if you know what you're doing, it can be with either only one or none 3rd party apps (depends on how much work you want to do).
As for free software, there's tons of it for the Mac. Most of what isn't free is shareware that's on the honor system. So yes, if you believe software development shouldn't be compensated, there are plenty of places for you to free ride, leechlike, on the Mac. And you know what? GraphicConverter, which is honor-based shareware, is a competitor for the Gimp. And if you pay, it's $35. And it has a predictable GUI. In fact, the GUI on almost all free- and share-ware on the Mac is better done than the almost-ready-for-KDE crap you frequently find for Linux. Good functions, terrible interface.
And please, you can't do color matching for any price on Linux, let alone free. Hey, what antialiased font did you just install for free? I have about 230, and I didn't pay for a single one.
I like Linux. I use Linux. I like BSD. I use BSD. I use Windows (I hate Windows). I like Macs. I use Macs. But I don't bitch about not having good color correction or vector drawing tools on Linux, nor do I bitch when my Mac crashes (on a well-tuned Mac, about once a month or less). They are different tools for different jobs. They all have to be learned, and the all have strengths and weaknesses. But get the right ones matched with the right platforms, dammit.
Since your local MSCE changed the root password to "password" and didn't apply any security patches and didn't close unneeded ports. I mean, please, if Corel wants a Linux for Jane Secretary to use, you have to set it up so a moron can install it and be reasonably secure. What is your average accountant or sales rep going to do with an FTP server?
As for SSH and Telnet from your desktop, for free, I have about five different alternatives to do that from the Mac, and yes, they're free-as-in-beer, which is all this article cared about when it came to freedom.
This underscores the stupidity of this shootout. It's only Corel's attempt to claim that their distribution is going to knock out Windoze on the desktop (yeah, right, even Steve Jobs isn't that insane). Servers? Sure, I'll buy it. Workstations? Some competition from OS X, but yeah, I can buy it, given the hardware availability. But desktop?
Desktops are a whole 'nuther way of thinking, one that Microsoft has barely got to work and the Mac invented and, while far from perfect, is still the best out there. Period. BUT ONLY FOR DESKTOPS, which require a different way of thinking (let's see, if the stupid user does X, will it erase the file system?).
So they've got a massive fire that forces them to evacuate the town or be burned to death, and they're worried about radiation that might slightly increase their risk for cancer if it were uncontained, despite every precaution.
Yes, the fire isn't dangerous at all, it's that magical radiation. Yip. Mmmm hmmmm.
until the Open Firmware problem is solved, you'll have to have a Mac OS CD to install a small HFS partition with a stripped down MacOS 8 or 9
Open Firmware ain't no BIOS, it's true. However, I've had it working fine for BeOS and (briefly) LinuxPPC. I think that's more a weakness of the documentation on the distro than of the Mac.
As for OSX, it boots directly on a UFS partition without problems. I have a G3/450 that runs OS X server, and it installed beautifully. I think OS X is going to be the main competition for Linux on the PPC platform, since it has the weight of Apple thrown at it to address the performance issues you mention. Obviously the hardware can do it, since RS/6000s are serious machines.
For a lark, though, I still like the idea of Linux on an iMac or a PowerBook--stylin' and buzzword compliant!
And YES, USB mice like my current Intellimouse Explorer work wonderfully on the Mac!!!!
How amazing OS X is -- well, not *amazing*, but...
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But on the other hand, how amazing is OS X really? AFAICT, it's just NeXT with real pretty graphics.
No, it's more integrated than that...a compatability environment for a Windowsesque range of software for end users, a second compatability environment that lets those apps use some of the *nix features, and then the native BSD/NeXT with a thoroughly integrated GUI AND device drivers.
The comparison between my install of Red Hat 5.2 on an old Dell and installing Mac OS X Server (less guified than OS X) is enlightening. It took me the better part of a day to get everything working except networking on the Dell--the networking never worked. Then screwing around as root (which you Shoult Not Do) messed up the system.
For fun, I tried the same thing on the Mac. It was installed and running in 20 minutes flat. This includes having networking and Apache configured and running. There was zero configuration of device drivers, and very little that you wouldn't do setting up a Windows 9x installation.
In short, this was Unix that an end user could conceivably install. Screwing around as root didn't break things. Basically, what will piss off most Linux/BSD enthusiasts is what will be its strength: it doesn't let you screw yourself too badly. Its saving grace is that you can in fact RTFM and get it to do everything your BSD box does. I could do everything through the GUI, too, though sometimes it was more efficient to use the command line.
OK, is this a slam on Linux/BSD/etc? No, because they have a harder job: support a range of hardware that Apple doesn't. Apple's strength and ease of use has always been because they could control both the hardware and the software, and then they made the system usable (theoretically) by grandma. That's going to be too limiting for almost any distro of Linux/FreeBSD.
However, that's going to keep them from taking over NT's market. They can't install on the current hardware, and few companies are willing to replace client and server hardware and software simultaneously, as much as it might deliver on the promises made by NT. An eventual Linux/thin client combo might, though, if it can be easy enough for the secretary to use.
A college prof of mine was interviewed for a book that discussed the spying activities of the U.S.'s "allies" for commercial advantage (he's an expert on Japanese affairs).
He opens (IIRC) with a description of the French DGSE team out in Washington state woods, using sophisticated radio equipment to intercept telemetry from the early Boeing 767 tests. He basically goes on to say that not only do they do it, but the Koreans, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Germans, Israelis, and just about anyone else you can think of do it.
His argument was that the U.S. should both combat and engage in just the same type of spying. The problem, according to a former CIA employee I once talked to (former head of the intelligence directorate), is that even if you got over the legal restrictions placed by Congress on that type of spying, who do you give the information to? At the time of the French allogations, Boeing still had competitors in the US commercial aviation industry. If you get information on French Telecom's bid on a Brazilian phone system, do you give the information to AT&T, MCI, Southern Bell, etc.?
Just one more argument against nationalized companies, IMO. It helps quell this sort of behavior on all sides.
1. Go to CompUSA or visit your fave online catalog. 2. Order a 5 button scrolling mouse. 3. Wait a bit, receive shipment. 4. Open the box, upack the materials. 5. Install and/or download the drivers. 6. Plug in the mouse. 7. Use the mouse. 8. Quit whining about the state of the mac 10 years ago. Stuff changes.
The last thing in the world that a corporatist wants is free trade.
Yes, this is the first post I've seen that understands what corporatism is. It is not blind worship of Big Corporations (as if small ones were inherently better?), but the use by Big Corporations (and Big Labor) of governmental trade restrictions to entrench their place in the economy by point of gun rather than economic performance or quality of product.
So why are the morons in Seattle attacking the WTO? THere are no corporations represented there. None. Not one. They are all governments. For a change, these governments aren't gathered to make sure that they get to raise taxes on something that competes with McHugeCo but to in fact elimintate restrictions on people to buy what they want, sell what they want, and in general practice freedom.
The protesters don't understand this. They want, well, governments to control trade. This even though they should know that governments are too easily corrupted by the businesses they regulate. If this doesn't make sense to you, join those who actually understand terms such at GATT and comparative advantage.
Katz should have tried learning the history of the WTO, what it is there to do, and what impetus gave rise to it. In fact the only thing the protesters were there for was to insure that freedom -- individual freedom , Katz -- is denied to you and I so that governments can control trade and prevent capitalism from spreading to countries with populations predominantly colored brown, black, or yellow instead of white.
Shame on anybody who praises protesters who are there to keep white power by denying freedom. Fortunately, I think it's from ignorance and a little education for the college age types will cure them. For Katz, well, hopefully he can learn.
I have a PowerTower 180e running 8.6 quite happily 24/7. I'm having to upgrade CD-ROM Toolkit, finally, but that's about it. It is unupgraded in the processor, but has more memory, a second HD, and a Voodoo II card, and as soon as I get around to it, a second Ethernet port (to secure my internal lan w/ my Powerbook 520 and my spiffy new PB G3 Bronze.
That 3 year old machine runs Photoshop 5.5, GoLive, Office 98, and even Mozilla M9 without problems (OK, M9 is forever in starting up, but it's usable). It is also my software router, and churns through SETI@Home in its spare time.
Now that I've learned that upgraded G3s on it run BeOS, I'll probably upgrade to a G4 and turn it into a MacOS/LinuxPPC(or Debian, don't know)/BeOS box for funsies.
Slashdot Mirror
(a) Misconduct, fraud, or corruption on the part of any election official or any member of the canvassing board sufficient to change or place in doubt the result of the election.
This doesn't count, because the election official in charge was a Democrat. There is no reason to believe that it was "misconduct" (a legal term).
(b) Ineligibility of the successful candidate for the nomination or office in dispute
Obviously not an issue.
(c) Receipt of a number of illegal votes or rejection of a number of legal votes sufficient to change or place in doubt the result of the election.
"[R]ejection of a number of legal votes sufficient to change or place in doubt the result of an election" might count, but it could go either way. Given that the political makeup of Palm Beach County is in doubt (sure, liberals win there but that doesn't mean there aren't a large block of ultra-conservatives--political affiliation has yet to be proven communicable or geographically induced, merely correlated), that's very shaky grounds upon which to call the election into doubt.
Note that the Buchanan votes wouldn't even enter into this: only the 19,000 votes that were thrown out because of being punched twice. So unless you can say that somehow those votes were legal but wrongly rejected (the wording doesn't seem to allow for mistakes that invalidate a vote), it probably wouldn't successfully challenge the election.
Interestingly, this would imply that the media calls that would have affected the Panhandle (which is in a later time zone) would not be grounds for challenge.
I think it's time here to accept that humans are human, mistakes were, are, and will be made, and that these mistakes can in fact affect the outcomes of elections, the future of nations, and the direction of mankind, and that these things are just part of life. Were we in a clockwork world, none of this process would be necessary.
As long as the issues are mistakes, and not fraud (*cough*Mayor Daley*cough*) (my dead grandmother better not have voted for Gore), just accept it and take it as an object lesson in why we should do user testing. Who knows what other mistakes were made on other ballots in, say, Iowa or Wisconsin?
> 7. The performance advantages of RISC over Intel-based servers will decline by about 20 percent to 30 percent each year [..]
They mention nothing to back this up, and it just plain doesn't make sense to me
1. Take current trends (intel doing surprisingly well, Moto/IBM having problems with PowerPC chip
2. Extrapolate
3. Ignore possibility that current trends will change
4. Congratulations! You're now a business techologist/forecaster!
Last time I looked, Europe did not have problems with sprawl.
You're kidding me. Have you been to Europe? Low-rise suburbia is the majority of the land use there. It does have more mass transit, because they're more tightly packed--but this is a matter of simple geography, not gas taxes. The environment over there is far more threatened than it is here, because the population pressure per square mile is greater. Add to that the inefficient farming methods they use (that Nader wants us to adopt), and there's precious little natural land left there.
And if you still think we have a problem relative to other countries, please take a trip to Japan. It will be eye-opening.
Sprawl? The phrase that describes how its users want everyone else to live.
This is exactly why we need National Law Care.
Clearly, the rich have access to wonderful legal care on a daily basis, and the poor have no resort. Why is this? Greed. Pure and simple, on the part of lawyers.
It's time to nationalize them. Legal representation is a basic human right which the megacorps have been denying poor people long enough. Well, Hillary has been working on a plan that she'll implement once in the Senate that will deal with this, an only a WTO-loving republican techophobe would oppose:
The country will be divided up into large "Legal Care Organizations" with regional coverage. You can get basic advice, such as "can I sue diz guy" and "for how much?" with only a minor* wait.
Lawyers will have salary caps to a reasonable maximum. Specialists will be trained and deployed only as needed by the Law Care Administration Bureau, to ensure that general practice lawyers are in sufficient supply, especially to underserved communities. A team of doctors will decide what legal salaries should be.
Now, if you go out of your region, you may not have access to full representation. This is to prevent people from trying to take more than their fair share of care by shopping around.
To insure equal representation, private law practice will be outlawed.
Another problem solved by government intervention, and brought to you by Al Gore and Hillary Clinton!
*The wait will be six, max seven years. Trust us.
I think the ISVs are not necessarily UNIX programmers, so asking them to port to Obj-C or Java is a stretch right off the bat. It's a good way to get them out of Classic, at which point we whiny Mac users will start bugging them to go to Cocoa ;-).
Seriously, the learning curve is bad enough going to Carbon, and Cocoa is much too much. And Carbon apps run pretty well. So in a year there should be few un-Carbonized apps.
> gasohol will remain a relatively untapped technology
...and lets hope it remains that way. Like organic farming, 'gasohol' will take up much more farmland than is currently in use, effectively wiping out all natural land that can be farmed. Goodbye, nature preserves. Wetlands will be drained, forests razed. It's even worse than windpower, otherwise known as "avian quisinart".
In fact, most "alternatives" proposed by environmentalists are only better when done by a tiny minority. The second the entire population starts doing it, their consequences, while slightly different, are equally bad or worse than fossil fuels.
There IS a technology, currently available, that only puts out a few tons per year of waste per plant, is emission-free, doesn't have to be fought for in the Middle East, will easily and feasibly tide us over until fusion power generation is achieved, and already supplies the major power for several industrialized countries that US, British, and German greens don't want you to know about. Whatizit?
Nuclear fission. Don't believe the FUD spread by the Greens, it really is a better solution. No, it's not perfect, but it could provide the power for electric vehicles (though fuel cells are a better technology, and hydrogen gets a bad rap for being unsafe--the Hindenburg's problem would have occurred with or without hydrogen--it was the skin that burned). And the wastes are easily controllable, despite what the NIMBY soccer mom psuedo-environmentalists from GreenPolice, I mean, uh, GreenPiece say.
In addition to what others have said, it's in a narrow valley with major cities several ranges of the Appalachians away--you have to go over five or six ridges, as I recall, from Washington, DC, to get there. That's an awful lot of radio frequency insulation, as anyone who's tried to pick up a TV or radio station in the area can tell you.
That, plus the National Radio Quiet Zone referred to above, make it actually one of the better places in the country for it.
From personal experience, I can heartily recommend it.
;-)
It's worth a trip out of your way to take the tour. It is a beautiful area, not far from where I was born, and the tour is really interesting. They take you by the telescope SETI rents, and they have a flag out if they're listening while you're there. Only diesel engines are allowed in the area, because traditional engines generate electronic interference. The area also forbids microwaves or other devices with lots of RF noise. Plus there are cool T-shirts, a must-have for any geek.
I met a former RIAA legal committee lawyer, who lectured me as if I were a neophyte (I have a BA in music and have played and composed professionally). His words were that the artists have "some" raw talent, but it takes a producer with skills to make an album that will sell.
He claimed that this was the investment the companies made that justified the high prices, and contradicted himself by saying that since no one knew what would sell, they had to have high prices in order to make up for all the ones that don't sell.
So, according to him, the music industry is like Microsoft. The artists (programmers) are of secondary importance to the marketers and lawyers to a successful product, and users are the great unwashed to be marketed to.
Essentially, these people view themselves AS the music industry, not the middlemen who frequently just get in between you and the artist because they can. Their contempt for both artists and fans came through palpably.
> Jobs messes up, because he isn't actually that good at the job
Like most posts about Apple on Slashdot, I can see how someone would think that 5 or 10 years ago (you know, before Linux and Windows 95), but read a bloody paper. Have you seen the way Apple runs now? Have you seen their financial statements? Have you seen their stock performance?
When Jobs took over at Apple, I was suspicious that it was the end, but I was proved wrong. What bothers me about this post is that it has been widely reported with data to boot and this guy still isn't aware that not only is the company making money, but it's making a lot of money. Most of that money comes from out-Dell-ing Dell on how to run a computer manufacturing company. Has everything Jobs done been successful? Far from it. But geez, read a freakin' paper.
but grouped together as "Nazi Germany" they did a lot of horrible things.
...because the government through which they expressed themselves was unfettered and individual liberties, such as the right of property (krystallnacht) were unprotected. The flaw in your thinking is that you forget that government is a group, too, and needs controls even tighter.
Actually, by ignoring groups and simply protecting individual liberties very strongly, you accomplish more to prevent groups from doing stupid things than you do by assuming that you can count on the government group to control all the other groups without becoming the problem it's trying to solve.
For a Libertarian critique of the book, try Cybersilly, published in Reason magazine.
there are still many places in USia that don't even have electricity yet!
I don't know about USia, but here in the US, we have actually electrified the whole country, and it has been that way for 30 years. There are no doubt shacks in Arkansas that don't have it, but that's not because no one's offered.
As for Europe, if you mean Scandinavia, fine, but remember the rest of Europe? Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Poland, etc? They don't have the gadget penetration of the U.S., let alone Japan.
And why is wireless so big there? It's because the socialist telephone monopolies suck. Their landlines suck and that's why internet adoption has been a fraction of North America. You have a cell phone because that's the one thing that's managed by private companies, you can actually hear the other person on, and you can actually get a phone within a year of applying!!! Try to get a phone in Hungary. Hell, try to get one in the Netherlands!!
This whole article is FUD.
> the hood is almost literally welded shut on every Mac
I think I see what you're saying but that statement is FUD. Not only FUD, but 15-year-old FUD.
That's like saying Microsoft OS's are unusable because they don't even have a GUI. Hardware-wise, Macs above the iMac are supremely easy to get to. The iMac just isn't aimed at that market.
Software-wise: Can you see the source code to the OS? No. Can you see the full, complete APIs? Yes. Reams of good documentation, all available for free.
Does the average user see any of this or even have to think about it? No. Is that a problem for a hobbyist developer? Yes. "Hello World" is harder to get to outside of AppleScript. Can that problem be overcome? Yes. Using free tools, you can get to Hello World but it takes some reading and a little motivation. More than Windows using VBS? Yes, probably, though not much. The old HyperCard used to be a much easier ramp-up.
So there are barriers to entry (which will all but disappear with OSX and the optionally installed terminal window). No question. But LOTS and LOTS of hobbyists have developed very usable, high-quality software that they developed by learning on the Mac. Go to VersionTracker.com and check out all the freeware and shareware tools that exist, and sit down at a modern Mac and check a couple of them out. There are some real gems there, not done by pros.
they borrowed a large body of work, but cannot do anything BSD cannot rapidly learn to do, due to the similarity in underlying platform.
Bzzt! Wrong! OS X is NOT a BSD clone. It is BSD-esque in some areas (mainly the microkernal, NOT the upper portions of the OS) and implements the BSD APIs, but it is fundamentally a different beastie. It will NOT be that easy to re-create Aqua on BSD. I know this is tough for Linux users to understand, but Aqua and even the classic MacOS have lots of elements that have nothing to do with look-and-feel but have everything to do with fundamental behaviors. Look-and-feel can be copied in Gnome/KDE/etc, but the functionality cannot without rewriting the system from X-11 on up.
Plus Aqua relies on proprietary technology that no open source initiative will ever license, and Adobe will never ever open source it. Never. Ever. Even if their company dies. I say this not approvingly, but realistically. Warnock won't do it.
Third, BSD (or Linux, at this stage) has no incentive to put the effort and hours into UI research that Apple and, yes, Microsoft have. The desktop market is vastly different from the workstation market as you realize, but the Geeks won't get over themselves (not without some major company doing it in-house and releasing it to the world fully-formed).
Fourth, don't underestimate Apple's engineers. Just because they work on the fruity OS for grandmothers and they aren't working for an open source company, doesn't mean they aren't incredibly talented, smart people. The effort they can put in as a team with a dictator like Jobs to keep them focused is far from trivial and the results hard to steal (I mean, Microsoft has been trying to give you a Mac-like UI for how long and has only gotten it half right and only improved on two or three areas?). BSD and Linux have some very good developers working on it, but it's not always a question of pure talent.
Personally, I think Linux/BSD will reign supreme in the workstation/small-to-lower-huge server markets (with a healthy competition from MacOSX and NT in the workstation/small server markets--never underestimate the power and stupidity of PHBs and people who fear switching OSes). Mac OSX will reign supreme in the graphics/web production/education markets, and probably make inroads on the corporate desktop/secretary/home/small business markets. Windows will still be the largest in those markets, and Linux will have a tiny share (except possibly small-business and education, I see interesting possibilities there), mainly for people who have their Geek son/cousin/friend/lover set up their system for them.
The only solution to the problem is to bill the corporations for the wasted common resources, i.e. tax environment-unfriendly outfits.
That is a solution, but not the only solution.
A better one is to simply give people/corporations ownership of the air/water/soil/etc. This is not that strange a concept, as we already have auctions for parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, which is subject to the same pseudo-tragedy-of-the-commons that air and water have. Certain uses of the spectrum (broadcasting) deny it to others (you can't outshout that broadcaster on that frequency).
So you set up one-time auctions from the government, then let people trade it. The Nature Conservancy and civic groups can then do what they've done with land--band together to buy up allocations of air and require that they not be polluted.
Then people who own air have an incentive to go after polluters, as someone polluting their air infringes on their property rights. The law for that is much simpler. A few tests of air pollution can tell the content. The alleged problem of "non-point source" pollution, i.e., cars, can be assesed by taking the same measures that others have argued for but lacked the legal protections (for both the consumer and the polluter) that random laws did: subject emitters such as cars, gas-powered leaf blowers, etc. to charges for the amount of air they pollute under normal use. Those that receive heavy uses can be taken care of throuh litigation (if your neighbor doesn't maintain his car and it frequently blows nasty smoke across you lawn, you can easily take a few pictures, take some samples, and take him to court).
No, there won't be a withering away of government as radical libertarians expect, but it would be subject to the traditional constraints that it has had in property law--and those aren't there in Al Gore-style command-and-control, top-down enforcement.
Ooof, between you and the PhD computer scientist above, we're going to start to have to give IQ tests before you can use a Mac.
Please. Both of you are bitching about a lack of documentation and help for the Mac? Why not try searching the internet. Did you forget the process of learning you had to do with Linux? Did you think the Mac was so easy you could do everything without even bothering to go through the online documentation (which is usually ignored but copious)? Have you never heard of versiontracker.com (freshmeat before freshmeat or download.com existed)? Macfixit.com? Or the thousands of websites with Mac info, or the free discussion boards on these sites and on usenet that offer? Or did you never bother to visit usenet sites that nobody told you about? Hey, try Sherlock if you're unused to searching the net. Or try Google. But this time, type in "Macintosh". Geez.
My god, the Mac has plenty of bad points without having to say "I wanted it to think for me unlike every other computer in existence and I couldn't be bothered to spend a second learning how to use it because my brain turned off when the startup chime sounded."
And really, if you want to bitch about something, don't bitch about problem solving on the Mac. Yes, you might have to visit a few websites (ever heard of the TIL, the best and most authoritative bugfixing database anywhere, in an obscure website called www.apple.com?), but once you learn it, there are about three things that need to be done to fix a sick mac, and they don't involve reinstalling every application on your computer like with Windows. And if you know what you're doing, it can be with either only one or none 3rd party apps (depends on how much work you want to do).
As for free software, there's tons of it for the Mac. Most of what isn't free is shareware that's on the honor system. So yes, if you believe software development shouldn't be compensated, there are plenty of places for you to free ride, leechlike, on the Mac. And you know what? GraphicConverter, which is honor-based shareware, is a competitor for the Gimp. And if you pay, it's $35. And it has a predictable GUI. In fact, the GUI on almost all free- and share-ware on the Mac is better done than the almost-ready-for-KDE crap you frequently find for Linux. Good functions, terrible interface.
And please, you can't do color matching for any price on Linux, let alone free. Hey, what antialiased font did you just install for free? I have about 230, and I didn't pay for a single one.
I like Linux. I use Linux. I like BSD. I use BSD. I use Windows (I hate Windows). I like Macs. I use Macs. But I don't bitch about not having good color correction or vector drawing tools on Linux, nor do I bitch when my Mac crashes (on a well-tuned Mac, about once a month or less). They are different tools for different jobs. They all have to be learned, and the all have strengths and weaknesses. But get the right ones matched with the right platforms, dammit.
Since your local MSCE changed the root password to "password" and didn't apply any security patches and didn't close unneeded ports. I mean, please, if Corel wants a Linux for Jane Secretary to use, you have to set it up so a moron can install it and be reasonably secure. What is your average accountant or sales rep going to do with an FTP server?
As for SSH and Telnet from your desktop, for free, I have about five different alternatives to do that from the Mac, and yes, they're free-as-in-beer, which is all this article cared about when it came to freedom.
This underscores the stupidity of this shootout. It's only Corel's attempt to claim that their distribution is going to knock out Windoze on the desktop (yeah, right, even Steve Jobs isn't that insane). Servers? Sure, I'll buy it. Workstations? Some competition from OS X, but yeah, I can buy it, given the hardware availability. But desktop?
Desktops are a whole 'nuther way of thinking, one that Microsoft has barely got to work and the Mac invented and, while far from perfect, is still the best out there. Period. BUT ONLY FOR DESKTOPS, which require a different way of thinking (let's see, if the stupid user does X, will it erase the file system?).
So they've got a massive fire that forces them to evacuate the town or be burned to death, and they're worried about radiation that might slightly increase their risk for cancer if it were uncontained, despite every precaution.
Yes, the fire isn't dangerous at all, it's that magical radiation. Yip. Mmmm hmmmm.
I swear, sometimes people deserve global warming.
until the Open Firmware problem is solved, you'll have to have a Mac OS CD to install a small HFS partition with a stripped down MacOS 8 or 9
Open Firmware ain't no BIOS, it's true. However, I've had it working fine for BeOS and (briefly) LinuxPPC. I think that's more a weakness of the documentation on the distro than of the Mac.
As for OSX, it boots directly on a UFS partition without problems. I have a G3/450 that runs OS X server, and it installed beautifully. I think OS X is going to be the main competition for Linux on the PPC platform, since it has the weight of Apple thrown at it to address the performance issues you mention. Obviously the hardware can do it, since RS/6000s are serious machines.
For a lark, though, I still like the idea of Linux on an iMac or a PowerBook--stylin' and buzzword compliant!
And YES, USB mice like my current Intellimouse Explorer work wonderfully on the Mac!!!!
But on the other hand, how amazing is OS X really? AFAICT, it's just NeXT with real pretty graphics.
No, it's more integrated than that...a compatability environment for a Windowsesque range of software for end users, a second compatability environment that lets those apps use some of the *nix features, and then the native BSD/NeXT with a thoroughly integrated GUI AND device drivers.
The comparison between my install of Red Hat 5.2 on an old Dell and installing Mac OS X Server (less guified than OS X) is enlightening. It took me the better part of a day to get everything working except networking on the Dell--the networking never worked. Then screwing around as root (which you Shoult Not Do) messed up the system.
For fun, I tried the same thing on the Mac. It was installed and running in 20 minutes flat. This includes having networking and Apache configured and running. There was zero configuration of device drivers, and very little that you wouldn't do setting up a Windows 9x installation.
In short, this was Unix that an end user could conceivably install. Screwing around as root didn't break things. Basically, what will piss off most Linux/BSD enthusiasts is what will be its strength: it doesn't let you screw yourself too badly. Its saving grace is that you can in fact RTFM and get it to do everything your BSD box does. I could do everything through the GUI, too, though sometimes it was more efficient to use the command line.
OK, is this a slam on Linux/BSD/etc? No, because they have a harder job: support a range of hardware that Apple doesn't. Apple's strength and ease of use has always been because they could control both the hardware and the software, and then they made the system usable (theoretically) by grandma. That's going to be too limiting for almost any distro of Linux/FreeBSD.
However, that's going to keep them from taking over NT's market. They can't install on the current hardware, and few companies are willing to replace client and server hardware and software simultaneously, as much as it might deliver on the promises made by NT. An eventual Linux/thin client combo might, though, if it can be easy enough for the secretary to use.
A college prof of mine was interviewed for a book that discussed the spying activities of the U.S.'s "allies" for commercial advantage (he's an expert on Japanese affairs).
The book is Friendly Spies by Peter Schweizer.
He opens (IIRC) with a description of the French DGSE team out in Washington state woods, using sophisticated radio equipment to intercept telemetry from the early Boeing 767 tests. He basically goes on to say that not only do they do it, but the Koreans, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Germans, Israelis, and just about anyone else you can think of do it.
His argument was that the U.S. should both combat and engage in just the same type of spying. The problem, according to a former CIA employee I once talked to (former head of the intelligence directorate), is that even if you got over the legal restrictions placed by Congress on that type of spying, who do you give the information to? At the time of the French allogations, Boeing still had competitors in the US commercial aviation industry. If you get information on French Telecom's bid on a Brazilian phone system, do you give the information to AT&T, MCI, Southern Bell, etc.?
Just one more argument against nationalized companies, IMO. It helps quell this sort of behavior on all sides.
Ask and ye shall receive:
1. Go to CompUSA or visit your fave online catalog.
2. Order a 5 button scrolling mouse.
3. Wait a bit, receive shipment.
4. Open the box, upack the materials.
5. Install and/or download the drivers.
6. Plug in the mouse.
7. Use the mouse.
8. Quit whining about the state of the mac 10 years ago. Stuff changes.
The last thing in the world that a corporatist wants is free trade.
Yes, this is the first post I've seen that understands what corporatism is. It is not blind worship of Big Corporations (as if small ones were inherently better?), but the use by Big Corporations (and Big Labor) of governmental trade restrictions to entrench their place in the economy by point of gun rather than economic performance or quality of product.
So why are the morons in Seattle attacking the WTO? THere are no corporations represented there. None. Not one. They are all governments. For a change, these governments aren't gathered to make sure that they get to raise taxes on something that competes with McHugeCo but to in fact elimintate restrictions on people to buy what they want, sell what they want, and in general practice freedom.
The protesters don't understand this. They want, well, governments to control trade. This even though they should know that governments are too easily corrupted by the businesses they regulate. If this doesn't make sense to you, join those who actually understand terms such at GATT and comparative advantage.
Katz should have tried learning the history of the WTO, what it is there to do, and what impetus gave rise to it. In fact the only thing the protesters were there for was to insure that freedom -- individual freedom , Katz -- is denied to you and I so that governments can control trade and prevent capitalism from spreading to countries with populations predominantly colored brown, black, or yellow instead of white.
Shame on anybody who praises protesters who are there to keep white power by denying freedom. Fortunately, I think it's from ignorance and a little education for the college age types will cure them. For Katz, well, hopefully he can learn.
I have a PowerTower 180e running 8.6 quite happily 24/7. I'm having to upgrade CD-ROM Toolkit, finally, but that's about it. It is unupgraded in the processor, but has more memory, a second HD, and a Voodoo II card, and as soon as I get around to it, a second Ethernet port (to secure my internal lan w/ my Powerbook 520 and my spiffy new PB G3 Bronze.
That 3 year old machine runs Photoshop 5.5, GoLive, Office 98, and even Mozilla M9 without problems (OK, M9 is forever in starting up, but it's usable). It is also my software router, and churns through SETI@Home in its spare time.
Now that I've learned that upgraded G3s on it run BeOS, I'll probably upgrade to a G4 and turn it into a MacOS/LinuxPPC(or Debian, don't know)/BeOS box for funsies.