See, I run FreeBSD because it feels like a more cohesive system than any other linux distribution i've used (Debian, Redhat, Fedora Core, Slackware, SuSE, Gentoo...which comes the closest..., Ubuntu, Mandrake), and it's a more responsive desktop than any linux distribution i've used as well. The whole...mature code with very few exploits...that's just an added bonus. It also feels the least kludgy on my opteron box. But, you know, don't tell anyone that. FreeBSD isn't supposed to run on modern hardware. So, we'll just keep that our little secret.
I was wondering the same thing. I think there should be more negative modding options, like "You're Moron" or "Fucktarded" or "STFU!" Some options that express real comtempt for the poster. Then, maybe if we hurt the cyber-egos of the morons on slashdot, it won't be quite as lame.
No...oil serves as a bulk energy transport medium, as hydrogen would. There is no difference from that point of view. Both Oil and Hydrogen need to be created by an energy intensive process (With oil requiring more energy to be created from raw biomass than hydrogen would from various other sources), with two notable differences. First, we can concievably pull hydrogen out of our ass (figuratively and literally) - there are ways to passively produce hydrogen by photovoltaic watersplitting. There the only human-produced input energy is the energy required to produce the photovoltaic cell, with the sun providing the actual energy to perform the work. Currently the efficientcy of this process is about 32%, with some setups getting up to 80%. Nanotech mechanisms could push this up even higher as we beging to mimic plants and nature even more. Oil, however, not so much. You need to refine it, which is a lot of human-produced energy going into the actual work of bringing the raw material to a burnable product. Second, the technology available to convert oil into energy exists and is relatively cheap. This is not the case for hydrogen, but this should change over the next 10-20 years.
Neither can be used as an energy *Source*, by your definition...if i understand your definition correctly. With oil, you're just utilizing ancient, fossilized sunlight. Same thing with coal, natural gas, and so on. It all goes back to the sun if you want to talk about actual SOURCES of energy...and even then that's just removed from the original source of energy in the universe - God farting.
By the way, the figures i used are from the actual article in PHysics Today - titled, "The Hydrogen Economy" in the december 2004 issue.
If you lost California along the San Andreas fault (which i assume you're referring to), you would lose a huge chunk of the US's economic center, a huge amount of fertile land that probably grows food you eat and cotton for the clothes you wear. Trust me, the "liberal asshats" in California would love nothing more than this exact thing to happen. Why? Along with all the economic wealth, California also has a bunch of de-commissioned military bases that, if need be, can be recommissioned and blow Virginia to ash and dust. What would be lost then? Oh...fuck what would we lose?! Tobacco...and fucktards?
Well, I'm not sure what country you live in, but to deny belonging to it based simply on the actions of individuals that you have no control over is a little harsh. Part of dealing with reality, and in turn improving it, is laughing at it. By laughing at an absurd situation, you acknowledge that it is indeed absurd. Bringing the absurdity into focus you can then say, "ok, that's really lame, I *personally* and as an *individual* choose not to be like that."
It's the principal behind social commentary. It's also a tool in formal logic, called reduction to the absurd - showing how something is not logical by showing it's absurdity. We can all hold hands and pretend that this is a great world and that families never argue or bicker, or we can accept it as part of current reality and do what we can to fix it in our own lives. Personally, I choose the latter approach.
The word is "Alcohol." And it isn't necessary for most people. However, on a special occasion, what's wrong with getting a bit tipsy? Especially if it's a cultural tradition, as I take Glogg to be in Norwegian countries. Personally, I don't partake in the consumption of spirituous beverages that often, but as an occasional, responsible consumer of said drinks, I'm a bit offended at your attitude. You seem to be assuming that alcohol leads to social ill when I would argue it's the intent of the individual instead. Alcohol does provides a means to tear down the barriers of standard social decency, but that doesn't mean the drive behind crimes committed under the influence of alcohol or even drugs don't exist in a sober individual. Assuming alcohol is the root of many evils is assuming that humans are inherently good and rational beings, which i would strongly argue against. Humans are inherently human, no more no less, and are shaped mainly by influences in their pre-adult years. It is up to the individual to decide how much alcohol, or any other reality-altering substance, is suitable for them given the situation they are in. If an individual fails that social test, then perhaps there are deeper rooted issues that they need to contend with themselves. We don't live in a utopia, and we never will. Getting upset because alcohol can lead to ill, be it exsitu-percieved or experienced first hand, seems to me to be a rather immature attitude towards life and humanity in general.
Which is more sad, that he made a joke referring to alcoholism during the holidays, or that you failed to acknowledge it as funny?
Lighten up. People die, life is shit, members of extended families generally hate each other. You can't stop it. The least you can do is joke about it.
You should have commented more on his use of the world "arse." If he's not from a country that actually uses the word "arse" rather than "ass", he should be severely beaten.
If you want gratis software then just pirate it like a bunch of people do.
Because Some people care about doing things legally. Free/Open Source Software provides a legal means to be productive on a computer with a tight budget. I really wish GPL fanatics would realize that the general public DOESN'T CARE about software "wanting to be free" and DOESN'T CARE about developers not wanting their work to be usurped for corporate profit. They want high quality, usable software for free. Period. They want to not have to worry about the slim chance that Adobe/Microsoft/Macromedia might come after them for having a pirated copy of an over-priced application.
These people are the ones who will make open source software popular. They are the ones that will put 50 bucks down for mandrake or SuSE, and in so doing, buy an entire system full of useful apps whose windows/apple counter parts would have cost them hundreds of dollars. They don't give a shit about GPL vs BSD vs MIT vs blah blah blah. They just care that the software works, and that it works well, and that it's FREE as in mother-fucking-gratis. Don't characterize them as would-be-pirates because they don't give a shit about your (ph|f)ilosophy. Don't look down your nose at them because you're a developer and you know what open source is really all about. Pull your head out of your ass and realize some people:
Yup. I deal with so many chic teenage and early-twenty-something "webdesigners" that only know/care about internet explorer. Tell them their page doesn't look good in Firefox and they scream about the browser ruining their art.
It's typical heavy-handed corporate thought. Cut out the middle man and force a true market system into a pseudo-monopoly. With that comes corporate controlled prices, lower quality, etc etc. There are some gains to the consumer - better integration (look at a via-based board's stability versus an intel-based board's stability, designed for the same CPU), convenience, but in the end it tends turns out shitty for everyone except the corporation. Note the emphasis on "tends", there are exceptions, i'm sure.
No no, anyone who thinks like YOUUU do, that such a clearly out of date, dinosaur of a computer can actually be used for GENERAL USE it clearly a luddite! You're stopping the progress of technology by holding out and not contributing to it's economy! I Scoff are you!! SCOFF SCOFF SCOFF! Silly luddite.
Of course i'm being sarcastic and you're totally right. Just, as the parent to your comment used the word "luddite" in an oh-so-deliciously elitist way, I had to comment.
Again, if a guy started to run tape in a crowded bar room, and happened to pick up you saying you wanted to assasinate the president, would that be an invasion of your privacy? We're talking about logging a public medium that ANYONE can sit in on, ANYONE can log, etc. They're not coming into your house and tapping your phone or ethernet connection. They're not requesting a log from your ISP. This may be fucked up, which I feel it is, but it is FAR from an invasion of your privacy.
No, you give up your privacy by entering an IRC channel. It's like talking loudly about assasinating the president in a coffee shop, only to be arrested by That Guy in the corner of the room who happens to be a FBI agent listening in for "suspicious activity." Is that an invasion of your privacy?
Now, if the CIA decided tap your ethernet connection in your home without reason, that would be an invasion of privacy.
Of course, that's not to say this whole thing isn't majorly fucked up. Personally I think they just want to be entertained by all the morons on IRC. It gets boring securing the country, they've gotta do something to pass the time. Why not do something that they can mask as being part of their job?!
Personally, and this is just me, solving scientific problems involving proteins and whatnot is a bit more important than the inconvenience of spam. Again, that's just me.
I suggest we all send Novel a can of banana-flavored protein powder to beef up in it's fight against microsoft, and attempt to provide viable choice to the corporate computing community.
I'm curious, how many scientists do you suround yourself with on a daily basis, how many scientific papers have you read on the subject, and have you done any serious scientific research projects on the subject?
I can speak for what I see in the scientific community over here at University of California, Riverside. The consensus seems to be, in the Atmospheric Science, Soil Science, Environmental Science, Biology, Physics, Chemistry, and Environmental Engineering circles, this:
1) The mean global temperature is rising and has been rising.
2) This rise is highly correlative with the rise in Carbon Dioxide emissions since the dawn of the industrial revolution.
3) A correlation by itself does not mean anything.
4) Carbon dioxide is a known greenhouse gas, whose output has indeed increased steadily over the past two centuries, due to human activity.
5) So have other types of greenhouse gasses, including Water, methane, CFC's, etc
6) Water has a residence time in the atmosphere of about 11 days, meaning a water droplet, after evaporation, will on average stay in the atmosphere for about 11 days before condensing and precipitating down. The majority of this ends up in the ocean or in soil, where it's residence times are far greater. Translation -> warming effects of water are most likely negligable.
7) Methane - everyone farts. We can't really revolutionize how Cows are raised or decrease their farts. The main way to control methane production is via landfills. This is begining to be done.
8) CFC's are already highly regulated.
9) Carbon Dioxide has a residence time in the atmosphere is quite high in human terms, over 100 years. That means, when it gets up there it stays up there for a while, keeping heat close to the surface of the earth, warming it. This is believed to be fact, backed up by countless papers and objective experimentation.
10) Taking into account that mean global temperature is indeed rising, CO2 has been emitted at an ever-increasing rate since the 1800's, and this rise is correlative to the rise in mean average temp, we might have a connection. It could also, indeed, be a natural climate shift.
11) Whether it is a natural phenomena or not, we should do what be can to fight it, because it could mean more dramtic climate variability, more extreme storms, and perhaps a shift of the green belt north and south - which would be bad for the US economy. Canada would be the new bread basket of the world.
12) The Day After Tomorrow was a pretty funny movie, but was not accurate at all.
That seems to be the scientific consensus. The evidence is convincing, but like everything else in science, you can't prove anything - only disprove it. This global warming model has not been effectively disproven. The news letter for the American Geophysical Union has articles in nearly each issue about global warming, it's causes, and it's effects on the global climate system. This is real science. It is not laughed at in the main stream science community. While i'm sure you can find sources to the contrary, you can also find minority scientific sources to back up creationist theory and the existence of God. Both of which cannot be known, both of which there exists some evidence for, one of which the evidence against is fairly voluminous (creationist theory).
Now for my little bit of opinion
One of the largest emitter of CO2 is not industry, it's not factories that employ hundreds of thousands of workers - it's cars. It's technology that can CHANGE. That can be forwarded, not to the detriment of our society, but for the betterment. Creating more efficient cars, developing viable hydrogen fuel cell cars will not destroy our economy, it anything it will improve our economy. R&D dollars will go to fund research initiatives that will create jobs - high paying, high-tech jobs. There will always be a need for fossil fuels - that industry won't just die
Well, first of all, there was no hate in there. Contempt, sure, dislike, yeah - but just because someone buys a particular mp3 player based on trend-aware sheep mentality does not invalidate them as a human being. Hate is an emotion that dehumanizes and devalues a person based on an irrational preconcieved notion. All iPod users are no less valuable as a living, breating, thinking human than a non-iPod user. My point was iPod sales are just as much due to the current social trends of our time as they are due to any other factor.
I don't think there's a successful marketing strategy there.
Sooo...did you not see the iPod commercials early on? The hip late-teen-to-twenty-somethingers, all pretty, all happy, all dancing or singing along with their iPod? I'd say that's what got the ball rolling. There were other MP3 players before the iPod, but non were as sleek, non were as blatantly marketted towards a specific style and looks-concious audience than the iPod. The iPod was marketed to become a cultural symbol of the music-drenched college generation of the time. On top of that you have the colorful iPod mini's. Whats the first emboldened bullet of it's homepage? "Fashionably Compact." And it's tag line? "A Thousand Songs. Five Cool Colors." If you ask me, all of the colors, barring the silver one perhaps, are purge inducing. They are, however, being marketted as "Cool." Clearly as a fashion accessory.
I think it far more likely that the most salient explanation is that Apple's player works with the first online music store worth a damn.
Sure, if you like drm-encrusted industry formulated crap (with a few notable exceptions). Personally, I prefer audiolunchbox.com, but then again i'm of the punk and hardcore persuation, with a dash of everything-else-but-pop-and-rap tossed in. The iTunes Music Store sucks for people like me, who like to go beyond the status-quo of so-called "indy" music. One advantage i will give it, though, is it's integration with itunes. But thats just apple doing their thing. They produce great, well thought out and designed software. They just happen to also produce an inferior sounding product. I dunno about you, but soud quality is a major factor in my buying choice.
Don't you think that could be an explanation rather than deriding portable music player owners as contemptuously shallow and pathetic?
Except that's not what i did. Nice side jab there, though. If all "portable music player owners" are iPod owners, and if i did indeed say that ALL iPod owners are contemptuously shallow and pathetic (which i did not), then yes - This question would be valid. But, i didn't. I said that a majority of iPod owners fit this stereotype, and quite a few of those actually identify themselves with that stereotype. You might not be one of them, though you got pretty damned defensive in your reply.
So, here's what it comes down to. For mac users, the iPod is the obvious choice. If you want ease of use, integration with existing applications, and really really do subscribe to all that digital lifestyle bullshit that Jobs likes to throw out there, get an iPod. If you want superior sound quality and don't care about having the "in-thing", there are other choices out there. And, they happen to be less expensive, have more features, and are thus a better value. Or, in your terms, they hit the sweet spot more closely than apple does.
The iPod hit a marketting sweet spot. They struck a chord with many members of my generation and it reverberated through all the separate, distinct subcultures, crossed the "eww i don't want a Mac" barrier, and they became the king of the mp3-player domain. The evidence against the technical superiority of the iPod is out there. If you wish to ignore it, then you wish to ignore it. I can understand, they're expensive li
Just because coding is analogous to writing does not mean you can take a formatting convension from one and, without need or warrant, apply it to the other. Reading this gave me more of a headache than debugging poorly formatted perl. Oh, and as far as italics and bold characters go - less is more, man. Less is more.
t's not about who has the most features or even the lowest price. It's about hitting the sweet spot with regard to features, battery life, storage capacity, size and price. None - absolutely none - of these would-be iPod Killers has shown that they understand and can execute based on this principle.
Bullshit. Apple didn't "hit" the sweetspot, they simply marketted their product as having hit the sweetspot, and it worked. For example, the Rio Karma has better playback quality, plays more types of files, has longer batterly life, is smaller (though not slimmer), and is cheaper than the iPod that was out at the same time. Did it kill the iPod? No. Why not? It should have atl least taken away market share...well you hit part of the reason in your second point...
The other thing that is often forgotten about the iPod's success is the fact that it's achieved damned near jewelry-level fashion accessory status.
Bingo. The iPod because sucessful because it became part of a fashion craze - the moody indy kid walking around in faded jeans and a scarf in the middle of summer. The nihlistic teenager who finds solice only in crappy music sung about nothing. All the so-called artsy pseudo intellectuals out there LOVE the iPod. Why? Because it's so stylish!!! The white earbuds have become a status symbol among the youth and collegiates of America. I mean, how can you get chicks these days if you're not in all black, sans the iPod? "Man, look at Jeremy over there with his midnight-muave pumas and his sexy black scarf - oooooOOooo and he has an iPod! HE'S MINE BITCHES, STEP OFF!" The scene is far too common these days. Jeremy is a mac daddy, thanks to the iPod. Girls think they can change him, and guys wish they could be him. THAT is what made the iPod the defacto mp3 player. It wasn't playback quality, it wasn't a balance of features and price. No. It was simple mob fashion. And, I mean, that's what apple's best at - right?
Sweden and Canada have not implemented all of the policies of the USSR nor in the same force (unless Sweden/Canada has a KGB element I am unaware of).
I think you missed my question, though I appreciate the response inspite of my being modded down -1 troll for reasons I don't quite grasp. Anyhoo. Canada and Sweden are often held up as examples of Socialism working, while the USSR should, in my opinion, be held up as an example of Communism being spoiled by dictatorial woes. Of course, name a communist country that hasn't existed under a dictator, heh. My question was, In Sweden and Canada, are average, everyday people equalized by being poor, as you pointed out happens under a Socialist system? To again quote the sentence I'm taking question with: "Socialism, after a run of many years, creates equality by MAKING EVERYONE POOR."
To be fair to you in follow-up, do you think Sweden and Canada, being democratic, socialist systems, will suffer the same fate as the soviet union, or will their kind of socialism prove sustainable?
First off, it was a tongue in cheek comment. I don't actually think FreeBSD is inherhently faster. You've got some inacuracies in your logic, though...
I would argue that due to the fact that Linux is much more a monolithic kernel than FreeBSD that Linux should be faster. Microkernel architectures should suffer a penalty for the modularity--especially if they have to switch into and out of kernel mode to accomplish a task that is all kernel mode in a monolithic kernel.
FreeBSD is just as monolithic as Linux. Any microkernalities in the FreeBSD kernel are so small that their performance impedments are probably insignificant. On top of that, DragonFly BSD is a bit more microkernalized than FreeBSD, as it has a more modularized message passing system (As i understand it, i could be wrong), and it actually seems to perform better than both FreeBSD and Linux. I think the old addage of microkernels sacrificing speed for modularity is becoming less and less true as time goes on.
OK, the fact that FreeBSD doesn't (typically) launch X on startup may make it inherently faster.
By a system being "inherently faster", if i was indeed serious, I wouldn't mean boot up time; I would mean application response time. Starting X on boot on one system, but not on the other really wouldn't sway me, neither would starting network and local services on boot. I would mean, in a Gui, clicking around, listening to music while compiling, watching videos while compiling, etc. And there's even arguments about those examples being representative of actual system speed. How do you measure system speed? Do current synthetic benchmarks actually represent system speed in a nominal way? It's all too subjective to come to a difinitive answer.
An argument could, however, be made in terms of system cohesiveness. A linux system is a collection of cross-platform unix tools strapped to a linux kernel, without an eye for integrated performance in the source code. This can lead to unintentional bottlenecks. A FreeBSD system, or any BSD system for that matter, is a cohesive system of cross-platform unix tools ported specifically with the operating system in mind. Changes in the main code branch of important system tools, like glibc, gcc, etc are merged into the BSD-specific code branch, some opimization goes on, and the finished product is seemingly more polished because of it. does the integrated effect of the bottlenecks in the linux model - if they do indeed exist in a measurable way - effect system performance? Does a development model for a system that is followed in the BSD communities lead to a more inherently unified and efficient system than would exist otherwise? I don't know the answer to these questions, or if they really matter.
Not American scientists - Not even all American politicians. Just the Bush administration and a few other representatives in the house and senate. Hell, even McCain thinks it's happening. And the Bush administration actually recently admitted that it poses a threat. So, yeah. Way off.
Slashdot Mirror
See, I run FreeBSD because it feels like a more cohesive system than any other linux distribution i've used (Debian, Redhat, Fedora Core, Slackware, SuSE, Gentoo...which comes the closest..., Ubuntu, Mandrake), and it's a more responsive desktop than any linux distribution i've used as well. The whole...mature code with very few exploits...that's just an added bonus. It also feels the least kludgy on my opteron box. But, you know, don't tell anyone that. FreeBSD isn't supposed to run on modern hardware. So, we'll just keep that our little secret.
I was wondering the same thing. I think there should be more negative modding options, like "You're Moron" or "Fucktarded" or "STFU!" Some options that express real comtempt for the poster. Then, maybe if we hurt the cyber-egos of the morons on slashdot, it won't be quite as lame.
No...oil serves as a bulk energy transport medium, as hydrogen would. There is no difference from that point of view. Both Oil and Hydrogen need to be created by an energy intensive process (With oil requiring more energy to be created from raw biomass than hydrogen would from various other sources), with two notable differences. First, we can concievably pull hydrogen out of our ass (figuratively and literally) - there are ways to passively produce hydrogen by photovoltaic watersplitting. There the only human-produced input energy is the energy required to produce the photovoltaic cell, with the sun providing the actual energy to perform the work. Currently the efficientcy of this process is about 32%, with some setups getting up to 80%. Nanotech mechanisms could push this up even higher as we beging to mimic plants and nature even more. Oil, however, not so much. You need to refine it, which is a lot of human-produced energy going into the actual work of bringing the raw material to a burnable product. Second, the technology available to convert oil into energy exists and is relatively cheap. This is not the case for hydrogen, but this should change over the next 10-20 years.
Neither can be used as an energy *Source*, by your definition...if i understand your definition correctly. With oil, you're just utilizing ancient, fossilized sunlight. Same thing with coal, natural gas, and so on. It all goes back to the sun if you want to talk about actual SOURCES of energy...and even then that's just removed from the original source of energy in the universe - God farting. By the way, the figures i used are from the actual article in PHysics Today - titled, "The Hydrogen Economy" in the december 2004 issue.
If you lost California along the San Andreas fault (which i assume you're referring to), you would lose a huge chunk of the US's economic center, a huge amount of fertile land that probably grows food you eat and cotton for the clothes you wear. Trust me, the "liberal asshats" in California would love nothing more than this exact thing to happen. Why? Along with all the economic wealth, California also has a bunch of de-commissioned military bases that, if need be, can be recommissioned and blow Virginia to ash and dust. What would be lost then? Oh...fuck what would we lose?! Tobacco...and fucktards?
Well, I'm not sure what country you live in, but to deny belonging to it based simply on the actions of individuals that you have no control over is a little harsh. Part of dealing with reality, and in turn improving it, is laughing at it. By laughing at an absurd situation, you acknowledge that it is indeed absurd. Bringing the absurdity into focus you can then say, "ok, that's really lame, I *personally* and as an *individual* choose not to be like that."
It's the principal behind social commentary. It's also a tool in formal logic, called reduction to the absurd - showing how something is not logical by showing it's absurdity. We can all hold hands and pretend that this is a great world and that families never argue or bicker, or we can accept it as part of current reality and do what we can to fix it in our own lives. Personally, I choose the latter approach.
THAT is *my* country.
The word is "Alcohol." And it isn't necessary for most people. However, on a special occasion, what's wrong with getting a bit tipsy? Especially if it's a cultural tradition, as I take Glogg to be in Norwegian countries. Personally, I don't partake in the consumption of spirituous beverages that often, but as an occasional, responsible consumer of said drinks, I'm a bit offended at your attitude. You seem to be assuming that alcohol leads to social ill when I would argue it's the intent of the individual instead. Alcohol does provides a means to tear down the barriers of standard social decency, but that doesn't mean the drive behind crimes committed under the influence of alcohol or even drugs don't exist in a sober individual. Assuming alcohol is the root of many evils is assuming that humans are inherently good and rational beings, which i would strongly argue against. Humans are inherently human, no more no less, and are shaped mainly by influences in their pre-adult years. It is up to the individual to decide how much alcohol, or any other reality-altering substance, is suitable for them given the situation they are in. If an individual fails that social test, then perhaps there are deeper rooted issues that they need to contend with themselves. We don't live in a utopia, and we never will. Getting upset because alcohol can lead to ill, be it exsitu-percieved or experienced first hand, seems to me to be a rather immature attitude towards life and humanity in general.
Which is more sad, that he made a joke referring to alcoholism during the holidays, or that you failed to acknowledge it as funny?
Lighten up. People die, life is shit, members of extended families generally hate each other. You can't stop it. The least you can do is joke about it.
You should have commented more on his use of the world "arse." If he's not from a country that actually uses the word "arse" rather than "ass", he should be severely beaten.
If you want gratis software then just pirate it like a bunch of people do.
Because Some people care about doing things legally. Free/Open Source Software provides a legal means to be productive on a computer with a tight budget. I really wish GPL fanatics would realize that the general public DOESN'T CARE about software "wanting to be free" and DOESN'T CARE about developers not wanting their work to be usurped for corporate profit. They want high quality, usable software for free. Period. They want to not have to worry about the slim chance that Adobe/Microsoft/Macromedia might come after them for having a pirated copy of an over-priced application.
These people are the ones who will make open source software popular. They are the ones that will put 50 bucks down for mandrake or SuSE, and in so doing, buy an entire system full of useful apps whose windows/apple counter parts would have cost them hundreds of dollars. They don't give a shit about GPL vs BSD vs MIT vs blah blah blah. They just care that the software works, and that it works well, and that it's FREE as in mother-fucking-gratis. Don't characterize them as would-be-pirates because they don't give a shit about your (ph|f)ilosophy. Don't look down your nose at them because you're a developer and you know what open source is really all about. Pull your head out of your ass and realize some people:
1. Don't care.
2. Don't want to break the law.
You'll just push them away.
Yup. I deal with so many chic teenage and early-twenty-something "webdesigners" that only know/care about internet explorer. Tell them their page doesn't look good in Firefox and they scream about the browser ruining their art.
It's typical heavy-handed corporate thought. Cut out the middle man and force a true market system into a pseudo-monopoly. With that comes corporate controlled prices, lower quality, etc etc. There are some gains to the consumer - better integration (look at a via-based board's stability versus an intel-based board's stability, designed for the same CPU), convenience, but in the end it tends turns out shitty for everyone except the corporation. Note the emphasis on "tends", there are exceptions, i'm sure.
No no, anyone who thinks like YOUUU do, that such a clearly out of date, dinosaur of a computer can actually be used for GENERAL USE it clearly a luddite! You're stopping the progress of technology by holding out and not contributing to it's economy! I Scoff are you!! SCOFF SCOFF SCOFF! Silly luddite.
Of course i'm being sarcastic and you're totally right. Just, as the parent to your comment used the word "luddite" in an oh-so-deliciously elitist way, I had to comment.
Again, if a guy started to run tape in a crowded bar room, and happened to pick up you saying you wanted to assasinate the president, would that be an invasion of your privacy? We're talking about logging a public medium that ANYONE can sit in on, ANYONE can log, etc. They're not coming into your house and tapping your phone or ethernet connection. They're not requesting a log from your ISP. This may be fucked up, which I feel it is, but it is FAR from an invasion of your privacy.
No, you give up your privacy by entering an IRC channel. It's like talking loudly about assasinating the president in a coffee shop, only to be arrested by That Guy in the corner of the room who happens to be a FBI agent listening in for "suspicious activity." Is that an invasion of your privacy?
Now, if the CIA decided tap your ethernet connection in your home without reason, that would be an invasion of privacy.
Of course, that's not to say this whole thing isn't majorly fucked up. Personally I think they just want to be entertained by all the morons on IRC. It gets boring securing the country, they've gotta do something to pass the time. Why not do something that they can mask as being part of their job?!
That's SOOOOOOoooOOooOOOOOOooOO 2002.
Personally, and this is just me, solving scientific problems involving proteins and whatnot is a bit more important than the inconvenience of spam. Again, that's just me.
I suggest we all send Novel a can of banana-flavored protein powder to beef up in it's fight against microsoft, and attempt to provide viable choice to the corporate computing community.
I'm curious, how many scientists do you suround yourself with on a daily basis, how many scientific papers have you read on the subject, and have you done any serious scientific research projects on the subject?
I can speak for what I see in the scientific community over here at University of California, Riverside. The consensus seems to be, in the Atmospheric Science, Soil Science, Environmental Science, Biology, Physics, Chemistry, and Environmental Engineering circles, this:
1) The mean global temperature is rising and has been rising.
2) This rise is highly correlative with the rise in Carbon Dioxide emissions since the dawn of the industrial revolution.
3) A correlation by itself does not mean anything.
4) Carbon dioxide is a known greenhouse gas, whose output has indeed increased steadily over the past two centuries, due to human activity.
5) So have other types of greenhouse gasses, including Water, methane, CFC's, etc
6) Water has a residence time in the atmosphere of about 11 days, meaning a water droplet, after evaporation, will on average stay in the atmosphere for about 11 days before condensing and precipitating down. The majority of this ends up in the ocean or in soil, where it's residence times are far greater. Translation -> warming effects of water are most likely negligable.
7) Methane - everyone farts. We can't really revolutionize how Cows are raised or decrease their farts. The main way to control methane production is via landfills. This is begining to be done.
8) CFC's are already highly regulated.
9) Carbon Dioxide has a residence time in the atmosphere is quite high in human terms, over 100 years. That means, when it gets up there it stays up there for a while, keeping heat close to the surface of the earth, warming it. This is believed to be fact, backed up by countless papers and objective experimentation.
10) Taking into account that mean global temperature is indeed rising, CO2 has been emitted at an ever-increasing rate since the 1800's, and this rise is correlative to the rise in mean average temp, we might have a connection. It could also, indeed, be a natural climate shift.
11) Whether it is a natural phenomena or not, we should do what be can to fight it, because it could mean more dramtic climate variability, more extreme storms, and perhaps a shift of the green belt north and south - which would be bad for the US economy. Canada would be the new bread basket of the world.
12) The Day After Tomorrow was a pretty funny movie, but was not accurate at all.
That seems to be the scientific consensus. The evidence is convincing, but like everything else in science, you can't prove anything - only disprove it. This global warming model has not been effectively disproven. The news letter for the American Geophysical Union has articles in nearly each issue about global warming, it's causes, and it's effects on the global climate system. This is real science. It is not laughed at in the main stream science community. While i'm sure you can find sources to the contrary, you can also find minority scientific sources to back up creationist theory and the existence of God. Both of which cannot be known, both of which there exists some evidence for, one of which the evidence against is fairly voluminous (creationist theory).
Now for my little bit of opinion
One of the largest emitter of CO2 is not industry, it's not factories that employ hundreds of thousands of workers - it's cars. It's technology that can CHANGE. That can be forwarded, not to the detriment of our society, but for the betterment. Creating more efficient cars, developing viable hydrogen fuel cell cars will not destroy our economy, it anything it will improve our economy. R&D dollars will go to fund research initiatives that will create jobs - high paying, high-tech jobs. There will always be a need for fossil fuels - that industry won't just die
Well, first of all, there was no hate in there. Contempt, sure, dislike, yeah - but just because someone buys a particular mp3 player based on trend-aware sheep mentality does not invalidate them as a human being. Hate is an emotion that dehumanizes and devalues a person based on an irrational preconcieved notion. All iPod users are no less valuable as a living, breating, thinking human than a non-iPod user. My point was iPod sales are just as much due to the current social trends of our time as they are due to any other factor.
I don't think there's a successful marketing strategy there.
Sooo...did you not see the iPod commercials early on? The hip late-teen-to-twenty-somethingers, all pretty, all happy, all dancing or singing along with their iPod? I'd say that's what got the ball rolling. There were other MP3 players before the iPod, but non were as sleek, non were as blatantly marketted towards a specific style and looks-concious audience than the iPod. The iPod was marketed to become a cultural symbol of the music-drenched college generation of the time. On top of that you have the colorful iPod mini's. Whats the first emboldened bullet of it's homepage? " Fashionably Compact." And it's tag line? "A Thousand Songs. Five Cool Colors." If you ask me, all of the colors, barring the silver one perhaps, are purge inducing. They are, however, being marketted as "Cool." Clearly as a fashion accessory.
I think it far more likely that the most salient explanation is that Apple's player works with the first online music store worth a damn.
Sure, if you like drm-encrusted industry formulated crap (with a few notable exceptions). Personally, I prefer audiolunchbox.com, but then again i'm of the punk and hardcore persuation, with a dash of everything-else-but-pop-and-rap tossed in. The iTunes Music Store sucks for people like me, who like to go beyond the status-quo of so-called "indy" music. One advantage i will give it, though, is it's integration with itunes. But thats just apple doing their thing. They produce great, well thought out and designed software. They just happen to also produce an inferior sounding product. I dunno about you, but soud quality is a major factor in my buying choice.
Don't you think that could be an explanation rather than deriding portable music player owners as contemptuously shallow and pathetic?
Except that's not what i did. Nice side jab there, though. If all "portable music player owners" are iPod owners, and if i did indeed say that ALL iPod owners are contemptuously shallow and pathetic (which i did not), then yes - This question would be valid. But, i didn't. I said that a majority of iPod owners fit this stereotype, and quite a few of those actually identify themselves with that stereotype. You might not be one of them, though you got pretty damned defensive in your reply.
So, here's what it comes down to. For mac users, the iPod is the obvious choice. If you want ease of use, integration with existing applications, and really really do subscribe to all that digital lifestyle bullshit that Jobs likes to throw out there, get an iPod. If you want superior sound quality and don't care about having the "in-thing", there are other choices out there. And, they happen to be less expensive, have more features, and are thus a better value. Or, in your terms, they hit the sweet spot more closely than apple does.
The iPod hit a marketting sweet spot. They struck a chord with many members of my generation and it reverberated through all the separate, distinct subcultures, crossed the "eww i don't want a Mac" barrier, and they became the king of the mp3-player domain. The evidence against the technical superiority of the iPod is out there. If you wish to ignore it, then you wish to ignore it. I can understand, they're expensive li
Just because coding is analogous to writing does not mean you can take a formatting convension from one and, without need or warrant, apply it to the other. Reading this gave me more of a headache than debugging poorly formatted perl. Oh, and as far as italics and bold characters go - less is more, man. Less is more.
Otherwise, I agree.
t's not about who has the most features or even the lowest price. It's about hitting the sweet spot with regard to features, battery life, storage capacity, size and price. None - absolutely none - of these would-be iPod Killers has shown that they understand and can execute based on this principle.
Bullshit. Apple didn't "hit" the sweetspot, they simply marketted their product as having hit the sweetspot, and it worked. For example, the Rio Karma has better playback quality, plays more types of files, has longer batterly life, is smaller (though not slimmer), and is cheaper than the iPod that was out at the same time. Did it kill the iPod? No. Why not? It should have atl least taken away market share...well you hit part of the reason in your second point...
The other thing that is often forgotten about the iPod's success is the fact that it's achieved damned near jewelry-level fashion accessory status.
Bingo. The iPod because sucessful because it became part of a fashion craze - the moody indy kid walking around in faded jeans and a scarf in the middle of summer. The nihlistic teenager who finds solice only in crappy music sung about nothing. All the so-called artsy pseudo intellectuals out there LOVE the iPod. Why? Because it's so stylish!!! The white earbuds have become a status symbol among the youth and collegiates of America. I mean, how can you get chicks these days if you're not in all black, sans the iPod? "Man, look at Jeremy over there with his midnight-muave pumas and his sexy black scarf - oooooOOooo and he has an iPod! HE'S MINE BITCHES, STEP OFF!" The scene is far too common these days. Jeremy is a mac daddy, thanks to the iPod. Girls think they can change him, and guys wish they could be him. THAT is what made the iPod the defacto mp3 player. It wasn't playback quality, it wasn't a balance of features and price. No. It was simple mob fashion. And, I mean, that's what apple's best at - right?
No, fuck that. Straight up vi, it's part of the base system. It pwns vim.
Sweden and Canada have not implemented all of the policies of the USSR nor in the same force (unless Sweden/Canada has a KGB element I am unaware of).
I think you missed my question, though I appreciate the response inspite of my being modded down -1 troll for reasons I don't quite grasp. Anyhoo. Canada and Sweden are often held up as examples of Socialism working, while the USSR should, in my opinion, be held up as an example of Communism being spoiled by dictatorial woes. Of course, name a communist country that hasn't existed under a dictator, heh. My question was, In Sweden and Canada, are average, everyday people equalized by being poor, as you pointed out happens under a Socialist system? To again quote the sentence I'm taking question with: "Socialism, after a run of many years, creates equality by MAKING EVERYONE POOR."
To be fair to you in follow-up, do you think Sweden and Canada, being democratic, socialist systems, will suffer the same fate as the soviet union, or will their kind of socialism prove sustainable?
First off, it was a tongue in cheek comment. I don't actually think FreeBSD is inherhently faster. You've got some inacuracies in your logic, though...
I would argue that due to the fact that Linux is much more a monolithic kernel than FreeBSD that Linux should be faster. Microkernel architectures should suffer a penalty for the modularity--especially if they have to switch into and out of kernel mode to accomplish a task that is all kernel mode in a monolithic kernel.
FreeBSD is just as monolithic as Linux. Any microkernalities in the FreeBSD kernel are so small that their performance impedments are probably insignificant. On top of that, DragonFly BSD is a bit more microkernalized than FreeBSD, as it has a more modularized message passing system (As i understand it, i could be wrong), and it actually seems to perform better than both FreeBSD and Linux. I think the old addage of microkernels sacrificing speed for modularity is becoming less and less true as time goes on.
OK, the fact that FreeBSD doesn't (typically) launch X on startup may make it inherently faster.
By a system being "inherently faster", if i was indeed serious, I wouldn't mean boot up time; I would mean application response time. Starting X on boot on one system, but not on the other really wouldn't sway me, neither would starting network and local services on boot. I would mean, in a Gui, clicking around, listening to music while compiling, watching videos while compiling, etc. And there's even arguments about those examples being representative of actual system speed. How do you measure system speed? Do current synthetic benchmarks actually represent system speed in a nominal way? It's all too subjective to come to a difinitive answer.
An argument could, however, be made in terms of system cohesiveness. A linux system is a collection of cross-platform unix tools strapped to a linux kernel, without an eye for integrated performance in the source code. This can lead to unintentional bottlenecks. A FreeBSD system, or any BSD system for that matter, is a cohesive system of cross-platform unix tools ported specifically with the operating system in mind. Changes in the main code branch of important system tools, like glibc, gcc, etc are merged into the BSD-specific code branch, some opimization goes on, and the finished product is seemingly more polished because of it. does the integrated effect of the bottlenecks in the linux model - if they do indeed exist in a measurable way - effect system performance? Does a development model for a system that is followed in the BSD communities lead to a more inherently unified and efficient system than would exist otherwise? I don't know the answer to these questions, or if they really matter.
So, Mr. AC, calm yourself.
So, in Sweden and Canada, is everyone poor? And how do you define poor - is it aquisition of capital, or quality of living?
Not saying you're completely wrong, just wondering what your views are on these two cases that seem to be outliers, according to your model.
Not American scientists - Not even all American politicians. Just the Bush administration and a few other representatives in the house and senate. Hell, even McCain thinks it's happening. And the Bush administration actually recently admitted that it poses a threat. So, yeah. Way off.