A decent backup regimen sometimes backfires... if you're stupid enough to mess it up!
A few years back I had some severe problems with my computer; eventually turned out the L2 cache card had gone bad. Before that revelation though, I was living through random freezes but had no choice but to plod on and make frequent saves (university assignments you see).
One crash was real bad though--corrupted filesystem. Norton was able to get the system bootable again, did a quick check and nothing too obvious was broken. Breathing a sigh of relief I quickly did what I shouldn't have done--I backed up my critical files.
Problem was, I forgot to check the integrity of all critical files before copying them to my backup Zip disk! This didn't dawn on me until I opened my email program and most of my email archive, over a year's worth, was gone! By then it was too late.
Lesson learned. I always did frequent saves, work on a hard disk file then copy to floppy when done, etc. After that though, I made sure I kept two "generations" of backups now, and on different media too. None offsite though; if my house burns down dataloss will probably be the least of my concerns.
mplayer; Show me something like that on a Mac or on XP
Sorry to burst your bubble that quickly, but mplayer exists for Mac OSX. I use it often, along with VLC.
mplayer's undeniably an awesome app, but since Windows already has a plethora of media players and encoders, mplayer isn't the killer app that'll drive Joe user to Linux. Furthermore, mplayer can't play anything that players on Windows can't, except perhaps formats Joe's not going to come across anyway (if it's available in ogm or ogg, it's probably also available somewhere in divx, mp3 and wmv/a).
iTunes by itself isn't a killer app, it's just another audio player. iTunes with its music store integration can be considered killer, because it offers something a lot of people want (legal downloads at reasonable cost), doesn't choke them with DRM that's too restrictive, and presents it in a fairly intuitive package. Better yet, people can stream their collection to others on the network.
All fine and good, but of course no one's going to rush and buy Macs for it, because it's now available for Windows. It will, however, almost certainly drive iPod sales up even further. Not coincidentally, the iPod is another killer product from Apple. With the brand name in mind, the potential to lure new Mac customers is there as they look at what else Apple produces on the theory that they might have something else worth buying.
Mac users have been putting up with this BS for years. Need a quick ad hit? Get a writer to cook up a crap story and post it online. Righteous Mac (now OSS too) advocates get wind of it, hit their servers, bam--instant increase in web ad impressions.
They'd better get it together soon then. Witness Puretracks, a Windows-only download site modeled on iTunes, with individual tracks for 99 cents. Canadian. Less than $0.75 USD.
Yes, it's WMA, probably DRM up the wazzoo, but it's available in Canada. Which means they got the licensing worked out, and CHEAPER than the US iTunes store.
However, I'm not going to harp on Apple; I fully realize getting the iTunes store to Windows is far more important, and they have to prioritize their advances. Now that this is done though, Apple had best get their asses in gear.
those are fine tools and there's certainly no lack of real innovation in the open source community, but how many Joe users are actually going to install those? I can't really think of a killer app for Linux that would drive average users to Linux.
Browers like mozilla are no longer "cool" just because they present web stuff, they're just tools now. 100 years ago a horseless carriage was "cool" to have but the novelty wore off when they everyone could afford them. This time next year online music stores will likewise be pretty standard fare.
I was really pissed off when the Sens lost, not because they were beaten, but because they were beaten by the team with that smug bastard on it. It would have been sweet, delicious justice if the low-paid Sens had advanced to the finals over the far better paid Devils. That the Devils went on to win the Cup was more salt in the wound.:-(
Since we're already OT anyway, you'll like this too: a few years back our star player, Alexi Yashin, attempted to break his multi-year contract and demanded a massive pay raise or be traded. This despite playing well in the regular season but being totally useless in the playoffs. This didn't sit well with fans at all (we're a government city, which makes us pretty cynical about contract breakers... especially ones that don't perform at crunch time), and the Sens benched him for an entire year with no pay. They played even better during the year, and advanced further in the playoffs than they did when Yashin was captain.
After playing the next year and finishing his contract, Yashin was traded to the Islanders where he got his big raise. Where were the Islanders, one of the highest-paid teams in the NHL, for the 2003 playoffs? Oh yeah, Ottawa eliminated them in the first round.
The Ottawa Senators are the lowest paid team, and came within one goal of making it to the Stanley Cup finals last year.
Even better, when the team declared bankruptcy in January, the players all received slips in their lockers saying they couldn't be paid that week. All the players shrugged and played anyway, putting the team above themselves. A real class act, especially compared to one of the New Jersey Devils' star players, who said that if he'd received a slip saying he wouldn't be paid for a week, then by God he wouldn't be playing for that week.
Near the end of Voyager's run he called up one of the "killer Bs" (Berman or Braga, the executive producers of the show) and asked when a Chinese character would be portrayed on a Trek series. As the parent post noted, there hasn't been a notable Chinese character on the series yet.
B's reply was something like "what do you mean, you've been playing one for the last six years!"
Well, that explained why the writers had Harry Kim spouting Chinese parables on the show for all those years! As you noted, Kim is of course a Korean surname.
Don't you mean mandarin? Cantonese is the dialect spoken in Honk Kong and Guangdong(formerly canton province, thus the name of the dialect) by 110~million or so people. Mandarin is the one spoken by 1billion~ people. Of course it is a show so they could put it in whatever language they want
Actually no; when the characters speak it's Mandarin (or as close as the actors can get it), but in the episode where Serenity's computers were delivering an automatic audio warning to check life support systems, it was in English and (very definitely) Cantonese.
I can speak Cantonese and a bit of Mandarin, so the difference was very obvious to me.
One way to look at it is that during the exodus from Earth, so many Chinese got out that they became the ruling class for a time (two of the main characters are Caucasian, but have the surname Tam). Mandarin became the official language, with English and Cantonese making up the "lower" classes. Firefly ships were definitely not classy ships.
Or the production staff simply messed up by hiring a Cantonese person for the computer voice;-)
Slow but sustained development would be a terrific thing, unfortunately I think China's government is really only interested in the short term propaganda value, just like the US.
This story suggests this isn't just a short-term propaganda project. The author's analysis of the systems involved, that they included a lot of equipment that you wouldn't bother with on a one-off design, suggest that they put a lot of thought behind the system and they're in this for the long haul.
To those not in the know, Firefly's set in a future where China became one of the dominant superpowers, influential enough that all the English-speaking characters can easily communicate... well, curse anyway... in Chinese (and Serenity's system alarms are bilingual, English and Cantonese). Could be that Joss Whedon's idea for a background might not be so farfetched!
Microsoft also has a *serious* NIH syndrome when it comes to anything Apple-based and seems to prefer to implement their own versions of everything rather than use Apple's built-in libraries
You'd better believe it! Anyone remember Office 6 for Mac? Ran slow as a turtle. Office 95 for Windows running under Virtual PC actually ran faster! Apparently MS built in a crappy Windows emulator for Office 6, just so they wouldn't have to use waste time replacing Office 95's DLL files).
China claims it is, so of course a map put out by them shows they own Taiwan.
And in case you think it's a matter of an oppressive regime laying false claim to free lands, in Canada the province of Quebec puts out official maps marking Labrador (part of Newfoundland) as part of Quebec.
Actually, come to think of it Quebec isn't far off from being an oppressive regime after all...
At a guess, no.
Right now there's too much economic interdependency between the China and the West in general. Companies are setting up shop in China faster than McDonalds can serve fries. A military threat would cripple the Chinese economy and severely affect the West's, so things would have to be on the order of Cuban Missile Crisis bad before we need to worry about China dropping an ICBM onto western targets.
And because the west and in particular the US is now dependent on Chinese goods or services, the US can't easily revoke China's MFN trading status any more than they can demand a regime change in Saudi Arabia. Both sides are held hostage in how far they can push for a military conflict, by the fact they help each other out economically a great deal.
Note that the only substantial, state-level (e.g. not terrorist) threats against western interests are North Korea, which has no economic dependencies with us.
That's news to me. I was in NZ just recently and everything was in metric as far as I could tell. Ditto Australia. Definitely more metric than Canada even, where we still get store produce listed in $/lb (sometimes $/kg is printed alongside).
No, it's not. LCD is a type of technology, like CRT. The display/monitor is making use of said technology, so it's still accurate to describe it as an LCD display. Display, after all, is just another word for monitor or screen in this context. You'd have no problems with "liquid crystal display screen", would you?
I'm not defending Verisign by any stretch of the imagination here, and I definitely DON'T consider sitefinder "innovative" (I hate MS-speak as much as anyone), but I have to disagree with your argument.
/.'s covered issues of broadband over power lines "breaking", ie severely interfering with, ham radio systems, for instance. Just because hams are in the minority in their case and we're in the majority against Verisign, doesn't make their plight less of an issue.
IIRC quite a few MS macro viruses won't work on the Mac because they expect Windows filepaths and such. They can of course still screw up Windows boxes if the infected document is read on a WinPC.
While we're being nitpicky, it should be noted that the "40 or so" mac viruses only affect classic Mac OS, and many of THOSE were eliminated when System 7 replaced System 6. For OSX there are exactly ZERO viruses.
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You really believe the courts operate on the basis of facts and well-reasoned arguments alone?
A few years back I had some severe problems with my computer; eventually turned out the L2 cache card had gone bad. Before that revelation though, I was living through random freezes but had no choice but to plod on and make frequent saves (university assignments you see).
One crash was real bad though--corrupted filesystem. Norton was able to get the system bootable again, did a quick check and nothing too obvious was broken. Breathing a sigh of relief I quickly did what I shouldn't have done--I backed up my critical files.
Problem was, I forgot to check the integrity of all critical files before copying them to my backup Zip disk! This didn't dawn on me until I opened my email program and most of my email archive, over a year's worth, was gone! By then it was too late.
Lesson learned. I always did frequent saves, work on a hard disk file then copy to floppy when done, etc. After that though, I made sure I kept two "generations" of backups now, and on different media too. None offsite though; if my house burns down dataloss will probably be the least of my concerns.
Sorry to burst your bubble that quickly, but mplayer exists for Mac OSX. I use it often, along with VLC.
mplayer's undeniably an awesome app, but since Windows already has a plethora of media players and encoders, mplayer isn't the killer app that'll drive Joe user to Linux. Furthermore, mplayer can't play anything that players on Windows can't, except perhaps formats Joe's not going to come across anyway (if it's available in ogm or ogg, it's probably also available somewhere in divx, mp3 and wmv/a).
iTunes by itself isn't a killer app, it's just another audio player. iTunes with its music store integration can be considered killer, because it offers something a lot of people want (legal downloads at reasonable cost), doesn't choke them with DRM that's too restrictive, and presents it in a fairly intuitive package. Better yet, people can stream their collection to others on the network.
All fine and good, but of course no one's going to rush and buy Macs for it, because it's now available for Windows. It will, however, almost certainly drive iPod sales up even further. Not coincidentally, the iPod is another killer product from Apple. With the brand name in mind, the potential to lure new Mac customers is there as they look at what else Apple produces on the theory that they might have something else worth buying.
Welcome to the club.
Mac users have been putting up with this BS for years. Need a quick ad hit? Get a writer to cook up a crap story and post it online. Righteous Mac (now OSS too) advocates get wind of it, hit their servers, bam--instant increase in web ad impressions.
Bastards.
You misunderstand. So what if we have it? Most of us sure as heck didn't install it ourselves.
How many Windows users install their own webserver, SSH system, or html rendering engine?
Yes, it's WMA, probably DRM up the wazzoo, but it's available in Canada. Which means they got the licensing worked out, and CHEAPER than the US iTunes store.
However, I'm not going to harp on Apple; I fully realize getting the iTunes store to Windows is far more important, and they have to prioritize their advances. Now that this is done though, Apple had best get their asses in gear.
those are fine tools and there's certainly no lack of real innovation in the open source community, but how many Joe users are actually going to install those? I can't really think of a killer app for Linux that would drive average users to Linux.
Browers like mozilla are no longer "cool" just because they present web stuff, they're just tools now. 100 years ago a horseless carriage was "cool" to have but the novelty wore off when they everyone could afford them. This time next year online music stores will likewise be pretty standard fare.
Heh, one down, a few million to go! ;-)
:-(
I was really pissed off when the Sens lost, not because they were beaten, but because they were beaten by the team with that smug bastard on it. It would have been sweet, delicious justice if the low-paid Sens had advanced to the finals over the far better paid Devils. That the Devils went on to win the Cup was more salt in the wound.
Since we're already OT anyway, you'll like this too: a few years back our star player, Alexi Yashin, attempted to break his multi-year contract and demanded a massive pay raise or be traded. This despite playing well in the regular season but being totally useless in the playoffs. This didn't sit well with fans at all (we're a government city, which makes us pretty cynical about contract breakers... especially ones that don't perform at crunch time), and the Sens benched him for an entire year with no pay. They played even better during the year, and advanced further in the playoffs than they did when Yashin was captain.
After playing the next year and finishing his contract, Yashin was traded to the Islanders where he got his big raise. Where were the Islanders, one of the highest-paid teams in the NHL, for the 2003 playoffs? Oh yeah, Ottawa eliminated them in the first round.
Ahhh... got a happy just writing about that...
Problem's been known for over 10 months now though, there's probably a patch.
Same for hockey last year--almost.
The Ottawa Senators are the lowest paid team, and came within one goal of making it to the Stanley Cup finals last year.
Even better, when the team declared bankruptcy in January, the players all received slips in their lockers saying they couldn't be paid that week. All the players shrugged and played anyway, putting the team above themselves. A real class act, especially compared to one of the New Jersey Devils' star players, who said that if he'd received a slip saying he wouldn't be paid for a week, then by God he wouldn't be playing for that week.
... that Wang told a recent SF convention.
Near the end of Voyager's run he called up one of the "killer Bs" (Berman or Braga, the executive producers of the show) and asked when a Chinese character would be portrayed on a Trek series. As the parent post noted, there hasn't been a notable Chinese character on the series yet.
B's reply was something like "what do you mean, you've been playing one for the last six years!"
Well, that explained why the writers had Harry Kim spouting Chinese parables on the show for all those years! As you noted, Kim is of course a Korean surname.
Actually no; when the characters speak it's Mandarin (or as close as the actors can get it), but in the episode where Serenity's computers were delivering an automatic audio warning to check life support systems, it was in English and (very definitely) Cantonese.
I can speak Cantonese and a bit of Mandarin, so the difference was very obvious to me.
One way to look at it is that during the exodus from Earth, so many Chinese got out that they became the ruling class for a time (two of the main characters are Caucasian, but have the surname Tam). Mandarin became the official language, with English and Cantonese making up the "lower" classes. Firefly ships were definitely not classy ships.
Or the production staff simply messed up by hiring a Cantonese person for the computer voice ;-)
This story suggests this isn't just a short-term propaganda project. The author's analysis of the systems involved, that they included a lot of equipment that you wouldn't bother with on a one-off design, suggest that they put a lot of thought behind the system and they're in this for the long haul.
To those not in the know, Firefly's set in a future where China became one of the dominant superpowers, influential enough that all the English-speaking characters can easily communicate... well, curse anyway... in Chinese (and Serenity's system alarms are bilingual, English and Cantonese). Could be that Joss Whedon's idea for a background might not be so farfetched!
You'd better believe it! Anyone remember Office 6 for Mac? Ran slow as a turtle. Office 95 for Windows running under Virtual PC actually ran faster! Apparently MS built in a crappy Windows emulator for Office 6, just so they wouldn't have to use waste time replacing Office 95's DLL files).
... is TopText.
Thanks Microsoft, for trying to introduce your very innovative "Smart Tags".
Anyone notice all of MS' true innovations merely annoy and hinder rather than help? MS Bob, HTML email, Clippy...
China claims it is, so of course a map put out by them shows they own Taiwan.
And in case you think it's a matter of an oppressive regime laying false claim to free lands, in Canada the province of Quebec puts out official maps marking Labrador (part of Newfoundland) as part of Quebec.
Actually, come to think of it Quebec isn't far off from being an oppressive regime after all...
At a guess, no. Right now there's too much economic interdependency between the China and the West in general. Companies are setting up shop in China faster than McDonalds can serve fries. A military threat would cripple the Chinese economy and severely affect the West's, so things would have to be on the order of Cuban Missile Crisis bad before we need to worry about China dropping an ICBM onto western targets. And because the west and in particular the US is now dependent on Chinese goods or services, the US can't easily revoke China's MFN trading status any more than they can demand a regime change in Saudi Arabia. Both sides are held hostage in how far they can push for a military conflict, by the fact they help each other out economically a great deal. Note that the only substantial, state-level (e.g. not terrorist) threats against western interests are North Korea, which has no economic dependencies with us.
That's news to me. I was in NZ just recently and everything was in metric as far as I could tell. Ditto Australia. Definitely more metric than Canada even, where we still get store produce listed in $/lb (sometimes $/kg is printed alongside).
No, it's not. LCD is a type of technology, like CRT. The display/monitor is making use of said technology, so it's still accurate to describe it as an LCD display. Display, after all, is just another word for monitor or screen in this context. You'd have no problems with "liquid crystal display screen", would you?
And for their next trick, they might even start using the metric system...
Not at all. Really no different from a pop machine being able to recognize the different coins you insert into it.
Definitely Apple then. They've been beaten on for years and they're still not only going strong but leading the pack ;-)
While we're being nitpicky, it should be noted that the "40 or so" mac viruses only affect classic Mac OS, and many of THOSE were eliminated when System 7 replaced System 6. For OSX there are exactly ZERO viruses.
More in this editorial.
BTW, the free Disinfectant, discontinued around 1998, still protects against every Mac virus ever produced except for the MS macro ones.