Yes, Africa has some influence on the world economy. But it doesn't have much.
Aside from supporting terrorists, Africa has virtually no impact whatsoever. Many African nations have larger black markets than legal activity. Most of the aid they receive from Western interests is used to prop up the dictators.
Maybe the researchers should see the world is bigger than the US
Hell, being a Mac user (in the US...) I'd point out that not all of us use Windows machines.
*But* if you wanted to gauge economic activity, I'd have to admit that a guess that included 95% of all users would be a good guess.
I don't see why these guys are restricted to the US. After all, they can get there software on European and Japanese computers too.
Then you've got at least 90% of the world's economy. I still don't think it's good methodology because I think the concept of tracking web histories sucks, but I wouldn't fault their sample as being inadequate. (Now that I think about it, there's another problem: they only track consumer activity.)
In the population, the genders are divided evenly.
Actually, in first-world countries there are slightly more women than men. In countries where there is heavy repression or infanticide of women (Middle East, China, etc) there are more men.
But by "skewed" I think the original poster meant that the data wasn't being collected in a consistent, methodical manner. I'd say that the problem is that they're misstating what they're recording: weblogs are not the same thing as financial transactions. There's *no* uniform API that can tell you when someone bought something.
So they have to guess, and guessing a million times is just as bad as guessing 10 times.
Actually, I'm glad to be finally learning Unix. I'm a long time Mac and Windows user, and have used a few Solaris and Linux accounts but never used Unix on my machine because, frankly, I spent days configuring my machine back in the DOS days and am sick of that crap.
With OS X, I get a fully working machine that's designed to be highly usable with minimal configuration. I can, if and when I want, alter and tweak that configuration. I can, if and when I want, delve into the depths of the machine to see how it works. Granted, AppKit is closed but I'm pretty overwhelmed by the scope of the APIs. I'm also overwhelmed by the sea of knowledge available on newsgroups and in documentation.
And, of course, there are plenty of GNU et al utilities to learn, so I'm happy to plug away at that level. With any luck I'll find enough time between paying work and school to start really hacking some open source projects.
OS 9 didn't have memory protection. Memory was a flat 32-bit address space, shared by all processes.
There was preemptive multitasking, and asymetric multiprocessing. Essentially, all the normal applications ran in a single task and you could write preemptive services. I never saw this feature used for anything productive. Since QuickDraw was only available to the main task, you'd probably have to use IPC to have your services do their output.
OS 9 would never do that because its filesystem code was highly refined, after all, it was the 7th or 8th major revision of the OS. (I'm pretty sure we jumped from either System 1 or 2 to System 4. I don't remember System 5, so maybe it was only the 6th.) However, I do recall that the PC Exchange software was pretty flaky and some bad DOS floppies could crash your Mac.
Also, there was a horrible Quicktime Autoplay feature that was designed for CD-ROMs. Some people used it to put viruses on Zip disks that would activate merely by inserting the Zip.
All in all, OS X is, so far, doing a good bit better than its predecessors.
The larger question is how do we prevent AOL Time-Warner from buying out Murdoch. Independent media providers are largely irrelevant because they reach so few people. (And have so little to say...)
I do tune into the BBC, just as I read the editorial pages of the NY Times. Even as a fairly conservative listener / reader, I find them more useful than Fox news. But the truth is that establishment sources (such as the BBC or the NY Times) can rely on an established presence, whereas smaller sources have to take what money they can get. That's why smaller players such as Fox (or for a more left-wing example, Salon) have to depend on sleazier sources of revenue.
On Slashdot there was an article about the massive underutilization of aerial broadcast bandwidth in the US. I'm going to make (which I think is) the safe assumption that it's the same in Holland and the UK.
In all three countries, we've got these massive establishments that have the gall to declare that they are "the media" and thus objective and unbiased. I hate ads as much as the next guy, but every time we crack down on ads, we put their challengers out of business. While people like Murdoch are, as Dick Cheney might say, major-league assholes, the truth is we need them to stir the shit.
Yeah, they'll embarass even their ideological allies (err... sort of, Murdoch's really an opportunist) with garbage like "Who wants to marry a millionaire" but otherwise there are points of view that simply won't make it on the screen.
And this isn't caused by the ideology of the press! It's caused by the fact that so much influence is held by so few players. It's caused by the fact that the competition is so intense that those players have to put the most sensationalistic news at the top. Would there have even been a Lewinsky scandal (or Paula Jones, for that matter) without the sex?
We need to chip away at these oligopolies, and I'm willing to endure some ads if one day my TV will be hooked up to the Internet getting the news from whatever community broadcaster I choose.
Hell no. Real men watch the LEDs on their hub and decipher the packets in real time. And we don't use the hard drives (huh huh. huh huh. hard.) when we can keep it all in our head.
As for telnet $SMTP_HOST, forget that. Real men don't waste time talking to lusers.
Does anyone else find it slightly odd that cell phone companies are allowed to make cell phones that only work with their network?
Uh, no.
This is the United States of America. It's a free fucking country. You're looking for the Soviet Union.
For the dimwitted: There's nothing odd when things aren't regulated, that's the way it is normally. We're a country of grown-ups, we don't need a nanny state telling us how to tie our bloody shoelaces.
We're also smart enough to not buy a cellphone that won't work if that's inconvenient. We're also smart enough to realize that if we only need to be on one network, having the government force the manufacturer include unneeded circuitry is a waste.
Case in point. John McCain has more than once voiced his anti-Vietnamese attitude. You don't see the press calling him the Anti-Vietnamese Senater.
McCain is a poor example because he's highly popular with the media. One main reason is that he pushes campaign finance reform. He's a Republican, and the GOP hates CFR because it's unconstitutional. (Note that McCain-Feingold is more damaging to the Democrats so the GOP has an incentive to support it.) CFR gives the media more influence because they're considered above the campaign process.
Really, a soft-ball interview with Hillary! during prime-time isn't a contribution to her campaign. It's not. Honest.
Though it's not likely the case that the media is deliberately supporting CFR to acquire more power, they do have the attitude that they are the only institution capable of delivering objective information. So it is a pet cause of their and they like McCain because of it.
So, yes, he gets a pass on some things that others wouldn't.
All I ask is that I be able to filter out posts from anyone with capped karma.
The karma whores post for each other. They rule moderation. Because they're a very particular mentality, there are some subjects they know nothing about. Because they're karma whores, they still comment. Because they're karma whores, their posts get modded up.
As a result, the top posts reflect an incredibly narrow mindset, the Slashdot karam whore mindset. Every other POV is suppressed, automatically.
You know what's interesting about this? It's nothing new! It's the same effect that gives you talking heads on television, just on a larger scale. And what's also amazing is that the outlook is the same as the talking heads: vaguely lefty, wannabe trendy, parochial outside their little world and most of all shallow, shallow, shallow.
You can leave Slashdot, but you're going to have to put up with these people wherever you go because they always seem to dominate the discussion unless it's explicitly ideological, e.g. on conservative boards.
(BTW, I am horribly oversimplifying things, and haven't actually investigated the role the window server plays. I have no idea, for example, how Quicktime works.)
In theory, all IPC is done through Mach messages, whether the underlying transport is TCP/IP or shared memory.
In theory, you can intercept messages between two ports and run them through arbitrary filters.
Since the window server process is nothing but another port to Mach, you *should* be able to catch everything going to it, send it over the network and have it appear on another Window Server on another machine.
In practice there would be a lot of details to take care of like configuration and non-display. But the nature of Mach is that any IPC can be generalized to take place over any kind of network connection.
You've got to understand that your and Hemos' view is valid now but back then things were different. Before the collapse, the various companies were vying for market-share because they knew that at the end the companies that had market share would be the only ones standing.
Sort of like Highlander, "In the end, there can be just a few."
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, Africa has some influence on the world economy. But it doesn't have much.
Aside from supporting terrorists, Africa has virtually no impact whatsoever. Many African nations have larger black markets than legal activity. Most of the aid they receive from Western interests is used to prop up the dictators.
Maybe the researchers should see the world is bigger than the US
Hell, being a Mac user (in the US...) I'd point out that not all of us use Windows machines.
*But* if you wanted to gauge economic activity, I'd have to admit that a guess that included 95% of all users would be a good guess.
I don't see why these guys are restricted to the US. After all, they can get there software on European and Japanese computers too.
Then you've got at least 90% of the world's economy. I still don't think it's good methodology because I think the concept of tracking web histories sucks, but I wouldn't fault their sample as being inadequate. (Now that I think about it, there's another problem: they only track consumer activity.)
In the population, the genders are divided evenly.
Actually, in first-world countries there are slightly more women than men. In countries where there is heavy repression or infanticide of women (Middle East, China, etc) there are more men.
But by "skewed" I think the original poster meant that the data wasn't being collected in a consistent, methodical manner. I'd say that the problem is that they're misstating what they're recording: weblogs are not the same thing as financial transactions. There's *no* uniform API that can tell you when someone bought something.
So they have to guess, and guessing a million times is just as bad as guessing 10 times.
What's got me confused is how this is any different from the "breadbasket" approach the CBO uses to calculate things like consumer price index.
The only differences are a larger sample size and a complete lack of methodology.
Actually, I'm glad to be finally learning Unix. I'm a long time Mac and Windows user, and have used a few Solaris and Linux accounts but never used Unix on my machine because, frankly, I spent days configuring my machine back in the DOS days and am sick of that crap.
With OS X, I get a fully working machine that's designed to be highly usable with minimal configuration. I can, if and when I want, alter and tweak that configuration. I can, if and when I want, delve into the depths of the machine to see how it works. Granted, AppKit is closed but I'm pretty overwhelmed by the scope of the APIs. I'm also overwhelmed by the sea of knowledge available on newsgroups and in documentation.
And, of course, there are plenty of GNU et al utilities to learn, so I'm happy to plug away at that level. With any luck I'll find enough time between paying work and school to start really hacking some open source projects.
OS 9 didn't have memory protection. Memory was a flat 32-bit address space, shared by all processes.
There was preemptive multitasking, and asymetric multiprocessing. Essentially, all the normal applications ran in a single task and you could write preemptive services. I never saw this feature used for anything productive. Since QuickDraw was only available to the main task, you'd probably have to use IPC to have your services do their output.
OS 9 would never do that because its filesystem code was highly refined, after all, it was the 7th or 8th major revision of the OS. (I'm pretty sure we jumped from either System 1 or 2 to System 4. I don't remember System 5, so maybe it was only the 6th.) However, I do recall that the PC Exchange software was pretty flaky and some bad DOS floppies could crash your Mac.
Also, there was a horrible Quicktime Autoplay feature that was designed for CD-ROMs. Some people used it to put viruses on Zip disks that would activate merely by inserting the Zip.
All in all, OS X is, so far, doing a good bit better than its predecessors.
Even at the $2000 price point, a $40 MS tax is probably half the retailer's profit.
I had a B&W G3. It was a great computer, but it had a lot of little irritating bugs. The ATA bus, for example, was very problematic.
That said, it was, in theory, capable of booting from Firewire, just broken.
The so-called "arabic" numerals were actually devised by the Hindis.
Nope, best by far.
The larger question is how do we prevent AOL Time-Warner from buying out Murdoch. Independent media providers are largely irrelevant because they reach so few people. (And have so little to say...)
The BBC is a bad example: it relies on a tax, and you can be fined if you don't pay the tax and imprisoned if you don't pay the fine.
Here's one weblog which covers bias in the BBC.
I do tune into the BBC, just as I read the editorial pages of the NY Times. Even as a fairly conservative listener / reader, I find them more useful than Fox news. But the truth is that establishment sources (such as the BBC or the NY Times) can rely on an established presence, whereas smaller sources have to take what money they can get. That's why smaller players such as Fox (or for a more left-wing example, Salon) have to depend on sleazier sources of revenue.
On Slashdot there was an article about the massive underutilization of aerial broadcast bandwidth in the US. I'm going to make (which I think is) the safe assumption that it's the same in Holland and the UK.
In all three countries, we've got these massive establishments that have the gall to declare that they are "the media" and thus objective and unbiased. I hate ads as much as the next guy, but every time we crack down on ads, we put their challengers out of business. While people like Murdoch are, as Dick Cheney might say, major-league assholes, the truth is we need them to stir the shit.
Yeah, they'll embarass even their ideological allies (err... sort of, Murdoch's really an opportunist) with garbage like "Who wants to marry a millionaire" but otherwise there are points of view that simply won't make it on the screen.
And this isn't caused by the ideology of the press! It's caused by the fact that so much influence is held by so few players. It's caused by the fact that the competition is so intense that those players have to put the most sensationalistic news at the top. Would there have even been a Lewinsky scandal (or Paula Jones, for that matter) without the sex?
We need to chip away at these oligopolies, and I'm willing to endure some ads if one day my TV will be hooked up to the Internet getting the news from whatever community broadcaster I choose.
Hell no. Real men watch the LEDs on their hub and decipher the packets in real time. And we don't use the hard drives (huh huh. huh huh. hard.) when we can keep it all in our head.
As for telnet $SMTP_HOST, forget that. Real men don't waste time talking to lusers.
Has anyone seen a good Java applet for ssh access?
Mindterm looks pretty good, and would make it pretty easy to get at your email from whereever. It's covered by a proprietary public source license.
To be fair to Stalin, he just murdered 40,000,000 people. At least he wasn't into all that Kumbaya crap.
It was modded as insightful, which means more or less the same thing.
Does anyone else find it slightly odd that cell phone companies are allowed to make cell phones that only work with their network?
Uh, no.
This is the United States of America. It's a free fucking country. You're looking for the Soviet Union.
For the dimwitted: There's nothing odd when things aren't regulated, that's the way it is normally. We're a country of grown-ups, we don't need a nanny state telling us how to tie our bloody shoelaces.
We're also smart enough to not buy a cellphone that won't work if that's inconvenient. We're also smart enough to realize that if we only need to be on one network, having the government force the manufacturer include unneeded circuitry is a waste.
As to whether you are anti-semitic, I can't say.
Probably not. A lot of leftists have been duped by the Palestinians. Useful idiots, not inherently evil.
Well, give him an F+ for effort.
Case in point. John McCain has more than once voiced his anti-Vietnamese attitude. You don't see the press calling him the Anti-Vietnamese Senater.
McCain is a poor example because he's highly popular with the media. One main reason is that he pushes campaign finance reform. He's a Republican, and the GOP hates CFR because it's unconstitutional. (Note that McCain-Feingold is more damaging to the Democrats so the GOP has an incentive to support it.) CFR gives the media more influence because they're considered above the campaign process.
Really, a soft-ball interview with Hillary! during prime-time isn't a contribution to her campaign. It's not. Honest.
Though it's not likely the case that the media is deliberately supporting CFR to acquire more power, they do have the attitude that they are the only institution capable of delivering objective information. So it is a pet cause of their and they like McCain because of it.
So, yes, he gets a pass on some things that others wouldn't.
This is why I hate the fucking karma whores.
All I ask is that I be able to filter out posts from anyone with capped karma.
The karma whores post for each other. They rule moderation. Because they're a very particular mentality, there are some subjects they know nothing about. Because they're karma whores, they still comment. Because they're karma whores, their posts get modded up.
As a result, the top posts reflect an incredibly narrow mindset, the Slashdot karam whore mindset. Every other POV is suppressed, automatically.
You know what's interesting about this? It's nothing new! It's the same effect that gives you talking heads on television, just on a larger scale. And what's also amazing is that the outlook is the same as the talking heads: vaguely lefty, wannabe trendy, parochial outside their little world and most of all shallow, shallow, shallow.
You can leave Slashdot, but you're going to have to put up with these people wherever you go because they always seem to dominate the discussion unless it's explicitly ideological, e.g. on conservative boards.
(BTW, I am horribly oversimplifying things, and haven't actually investigated the role the window server plays. I have no idea, for example, how Quicktime works.)
In theory, all IPC is done through Mach messages, whether the underlying transport is TCP/IP or shared memory.
In theory, you can intercept messages between two ports and run them through arbitrary filters.
Since the window server process is nothing but another port to Mach, you *should* be able to catch everything going to it, send it over the network and have it appear on another Window Server on another machine.
In practice there would be a lot of details to take care of like configuration and non-display. But the nature of Mach is that any IPC can be generalized to take place over any kind of network connection.
You've got to understand that your and Hemos' view is valid now but back then things were different. Before the collapse, the various companies were vying for market-share because they knew that at the end the companies that had market share would be the only ones standing.
Sort of like Highlander, "In the end, there can be just a few."
I dunno... It seems to me that more coffee would just exacerbate the problem.