That the current MacOS IS really inefficent in it's use of the processor. There's a lot of baggage even in OS 9, that slows down the system compared to what a PPC *CAN* do.
Remember, that IBM overclocked a PPC to 1 gig, a good year or so ago.
OS X is supposed to change all this by placing the finder on top of a BSD Unix system.
You might check out the stats for SETI @home. There's a guy on an plder Mac there, running a developer release of Rhapsody, who churns out data units about six hours faster than MacOS. Also note the times of the various *BSD implementations. They pretty much ALL smoke bth MacOS AND windoze.
Also worth noting ae the "CPU Types" statistics. Here, PPC finishs data blocks about 8 hours faster than x86. It's important to note, tho, that this includes IBM's AIX PPC workstations which, accouding to the OS Stats page, finishes data units about twice as fast as MacOS. So it stands to reason that the MacOS IS holding the PPC back in the CPU stats area.
Now, I know that SETI @home is not the best test for benchmarking a CPU out there. But face it, any benchmark one could choose (Byte, spec, Photoshop, Q3 Test Framerate, etc.) is going to piss off SOMEONE, and promptly be declared invalid by users of the system that loses.
But what I think the SETI @home numbers DO demonstrate is that the PPC really IS an excellent chip, that DOES smoke its opponents. It, in most cases, is being slowed down by an outdated and inefficent operating ststem (although it performs quite well even after overcoming the overhead of the MacOS).
I know from first hand expierence that my G3's performance is quite righteous running LinuxPPC. I don't have any benchmarks, but it just *feels* twice as fast when running in its Linux partion vs. the MacOS partition. Granted, that's not at all scientific, but what the hell....
So, yeah, if you want an awesome Linux box, PPC IS a REALLY good choice. And since IBM's released the MB specs, you won't even HAVE to go with Apple in the near future. I plan to tho, I'm keeping my hopes up that they'll do a good job of integrating the MacOS GUI with BSD UNIX in OS X. I've had a chance to play with both Darwin, and OS X Server, and somehow, I think they WILL get it right.
But only time will tell.
john
But Airport IS an open standard....
on
iBook boots Linux
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· Score: 1
Airport most definately IS an open standard. It was developed by Lucent and licensed by Apple.
I forget the IEEE number tho, perhaps someone can fill me in...
But there ARE PCMCIA cards available that let non-iBooks communicate on an Airport network.
Of course, in these cases, the antenna's external, not built in to the lid, and the cards are more expensive than the $99 Airport, but they DO exist. I think Falleron makes the one I've heard about.
More exciting to me than Airport is the prospect of third party add-ons to the Airport slot. Since the Antenna's already built in, I'm hoping that a third party will build a cellular modem card that fits in the Airport slot and uses the built in antenna. Such a thing would be more useful to ME than wireless ethernet, and it would be way cool....
Didn't John Carmack (a reliable source on game development if there is one) say in one of his.plan updates a few months back, something along the lines of "90-95% of game code is identical across windoze, Linux, AND Macintosh"????
Common sense would seem to dictate that CONVERTING that 5-10% that IS different, would be a trivial effort compared to the effort put into writing the 90-95% that is IDENTICAL across ALL THREE platforms.
I find it hard to belive that a small company like Id somehow has the resoueces and programming competancey to release all three versions of a game SIMULTANEOUSLY (as Carmack has promised to do with Q3), whilst a gigantic company like Sierra can't come up with the resources or programming skill to release seperate versions at all!?!?!?
Something smells fishy here.
Networking issues??? I don't know about the windoze version, but neither the Linux or Mac version of Q3test have ANY problem playing against people on other platforms. Again, if Id can pull it off, why can't a giant like Sierra? Hm... mabye lack of competency isn't that far off...
More than fishy, smells downright rotten...
Moreover, what economic motive would a company have for turning down additional profits (at the cost of modifying 5-10% of the code)? Apple's sold something like 2 million of those iMacs(2 mil * $50 price of game == 100 million, a healthy chunk of change (and this is JUST iMacs)), doubled it's market share and is still growing, as for Linux, I'm not sure how many people, demographically, use it NOW, but i KNOW it's expanding rapidly. Not only that, Linux users are willing to give up their own time to IMPROVE a game (see LokiHack). So why would a developer give up extra money unless they had a hidden adgenda.
Smells like salmon.... washington salmon...
Seems to me, that given the minimal necessary effort (unless my recollection of Carmack's.plan is REALLY fuzzy, or he was lieing) to convert a game, and the potential for easy money; the only reason a game would NOT be released simultaneously for windoze, Linux, and Macintosh, is purely political.
washington salmon... perhaps from just outside Seattle, a town whose name starts with an 'R'...
Political reasons like oh.... Perhaps die hard OS fanatics infiltrating game developers? Partisans who belive that there is only one true OS, and that this is a gift handed down from bill, the great one? Fanatics who want to destroy all other operating systems and force the world to assimilate into their collective?
Eh... can you say "Halloween Papers"? I knew you could...
After all, I'm no more fond of sue-happy corperations than anyone.
But I can certianly see it from the other side.
If *I* had put a lot of my time, effort, ans money into building a web business; *I* certianly wouldn't want some dirtbag little cybersquatter to appropiate my trademark and by protected by the fact that it's a direct translation, and not the trademark itself.
So is every startup company, in addition to registering their trademark (and all combinations and permutations therof) in english, now going to have do the same for every major language in the world???
That many registrations could suck up a fair bit of money, especially for a company thats starting out small.
So, in this particular case, I have to ask myself... who's less distasteful? The big sue-happy company? Or the cybersquatters, who damittedly, have come up with a novel new WAY of cybersquatting, but are cybersquatters nonetheless.
The only thing that bothered me about the idea of these "terminator" seeds is how the gene is activated.
Now, obviously the plants need to grow fertile seeds before treatment, this is necessary for Monsato to grow the terminator seeds in the first place. But how is the terminator gene activated in the seeds they sell?
Unless the design changed since the last time I read about these seeds, they spray them with tetracycline!!!
Now, with all the trouble we're having recently with resistant bacteria, I think dumping antibiotics into the topsoil with every new crop planted is the last thing we need to be doing.
Other than that, I don't see where the problem is. In fact, I think just mabye ALL geneticall engineered food should have a terminator gene. This would prevent them from breeding on their own in case something went seriously wrong (attack of the killer tomatos???).
As for the economic issues involved:
As others here have pointed out, the hybrid crops already in use now don't breed true, so the farm companies have to buy new seeds every year anyway. And even if they didn't...
Who really cares if a giant seed corperation screws the giant farm corperations. Sadly, the days of the small farmer with two cows a coop of chickens, and 100 acres, are long gone. We live in the era of the factory farm, for better or worse.
So the farming company has to pay more every year to plant new seeds with the terminator gene. They'll pass along the extra cost to the consumers. Consumers will promptly start lobbying the government to do something about it. The government drops the its price supports for foodstuffs a few notches. The price then drops back in line with the normal inflation rate.
Net result? The farming corperations get a little more of our money directly from us in the form of food prices; and they get a little less of our money indirectly in the form of farming subsidies. But the actual cost to the consumer will stay the same.
No big deal. Just find a way to use the terminator gene without adding antibiotics to our soil, and theres no problem.
That those who declare that "I am a(n) X", seldom are.
For X you can insert mostly anything:
Guru Hacker Cracker Punk Rocker Goth Phreak Raver etc.
The people who are deserving of these designations rarely, if ever, claim them for themselves. Rather, their skills are eventually recognised by the community (hacker community, punk rock crowd, raver connumity, whatever).
I'll use the two examples most relevant to me.
I can sling out some pretty good code. Good enough to graduate with honors, and to keep my employer happy. But I don't, by any means consider myself a hacker. I have not done (and don't know if I ever will do) anything that puts me in the league of people I would consider to be true hackers; people like Linus and Woz (two people that I'm sure everyone here would agree are true hackers). You will note, that Linus and Woz's are a couple of the most down to earth individuals (or at least they appear to be). They don't need to call themselves hackers, they just are. Mabye, someday, by the grace of Steve, I'll contribute something in the same league, and the hacker community will recognise me as such. But even then, I'll not label *myself* as a hacker. That's a distinction to be made by my peers.
In the non-technical world my perferred recreation is congert-going. Mostly punk rock and ska shows. I don't label myself, however, as a "punk". There are kiddies who do, however. These are the twinks that go to shows, usually just for the mosh pit, and whine about how much Green Day sucks because they "sold out". Ironic thing is, they'll still pay to go to that very same Green Day show, just so they can show off how punk they are. These same wannabes are the ones who mail order a $25 Deak Kennedys t-shirt (and usually dont know a Single DK song) to wear with the $90 Designer plaid bondage pants (which come complete with an instruction booklet that tells you not to wash them because "dirt is punk"), and spend two hours, and half a bottle of hair gel before the show primping their green mohawk to look just right. When they get to the show, they think the mosh pit is just a place to hit people and not be punished, and will frequently try to start new pits among those who aren't in the mood for moshing that night. Quite often, other people (more expierenced moshers), who DO know how to handle themselves, will get sick of this, and give them a class A beat down. The self-styled "punks" will then go home and say stupid crap like "awesome pit, I got totally thrashed". It's people like this who give the rest of us a bad name. I don't call myself a punk, though I do enjoy the music, the message, the shows, and hell, I even still get into the pit every so often.
The simple, sad, fact is that wannabes exist in any particular subculture. They read about one stereotype or another and imitate it to the Nth degree.
The perfect example of this for the hacker community would be the movie "Hackers". It took every geek stereotype (chain smoking, jolt cola, ramen noodles, etc) and made charicticures of computer people. Most people here bash it as a horrible drama. I, OTOH, laughed my fool head off. I saw it as a great comedy. All the amplified stereotypes were hilarious, and the sheer volume of technobabble put Star Trek to shame (my favorite was the Mac Powerbook with a RISC based P6(?) a vesa bus and a "killer refresh rate"). And besides, any movie with Angelina Jolie....
The sad part is that half the script kiddies in existence are probably because of that movie. The try to dress like the characters, go to raves, call themselves elite, and type like 7h15. This is how an average person probably views computer geeks, and the sad fact is these twinks probably couldn't compile a kernel if their lives depended on it.
The overall point is that the stereotypes are generally untrue. And the people who TRY to fit these stereotypes are anything BUT X (see above). Look at Woz for example. He is anything BUT a "stereotypical hacker". But IMHO, he is, one of, if not THE, best "true hacker" ever. An absolute wizard with both software AND hardware, his designs are elegant in ways I can only dream of emulating. And yet, look at www.woz.org. Not a h4qx3r site at all. Just a profile, webcam (okay wozcam) and thoughts from a man who is a whole lot more humble than he could be, given what he has accomplished. Not a stereotype, a hacker.
Unfortunately, it appears that this MTV drivel will just perpetuate the image of the h4qx3r (damn it bothers me to type like that), and not the hacker.
See, where I went to college, everyone had two email accounts: one on the unix system, which was used mostly by the CompSci students and faculty; and one on the NT system, whis was used mostly by the luzers who were too stupid to understand that you don't point and click in pine.
A favorite pasttime of the CompSci guys was to set both email accounts to foward all received email to the other. Once someone set this up, usually with one of the guest or intro accounts (or that of some freshman with an easy password), he'd spread the word, and both email accounts would fill up with "hello there" messages.
Now, the network traffic alone was enough of a hassle for the admins,but the nifty bit was the way the mail servers were set up.
The unix mailboxes had a set maximum size. When this was reached, the incoming mails would still be fowarded, but not saved to the account's mailbox. But the funny part was that the NT mail server had no set limit on mailbox size, so that one mailbox would eventually take over all the disk space on the NT server. Thus, one peoson could easily bring down the email for the entire campus.
Except, of course, for those of us who were intelligent enough not to use NT in the first place. We'd laugh our fool heads off every time this happened. Cause while everyone else was whining about email being down, it would be business as usual for everyone in CompSci.
Best part was, IT didn't figure it out until the last semester before I graduated. And when they did, they just whined to the unix admin (who worked for the CompSci dept., NOT IT), who promptly told the IT weasels to take a hike (only in less diplomatic terms).
IT couldn't do anything to the unixx guys because that network was owned and run by the CompSci department, whilst IT only had jurisdiction over the NT network. And they couldn't touch the unix admin, as he taught an "advanced unix" class and was thus considered faculty, automatically higher in the food chain than IT, who were only "support staff".
He was a cool old unix wizard who despised mocrosoft and those IT idiots who kept trying to encroach on his territory. And he didn't mind a little extra network traffic so long as it inconvinenced mostly the windiots, and didn't cause undue problems with "his" network. All around an awesome guy.
By my last semester, IT had finally figured out how it was done and put size limits on mailboxes tho. So the pasttime of crashing the windiots email every couple of weeks regretably came to an end.
But it sure was funny while it lasted, and of course, there're plenty of other ways to play with NT networks.
After all, Steve Jobs has only been back for two years (after being betreyed and exiled for twelve by john sculley) so far.
In that time he's brought the company back to profitability, doubled it's market share, and drove the stock price to all-time highs. Pretty good, considering that in the dark days of Amelio, Apple was hemmoraging half a billion dollars a quarter. Imagine where Apple would be now if sculley hadn't stabbed Steve in the back.
I remember a while back, when Apple first aquired NeXT, a joke that went around saying that in buying NeXT, Apple was really just buying Steve Jobs. And that NeXT threw a pretty spiffy OS in with the deal.
A couple of anti-Apple arguements thrown about here have centered around Apple's focus on the desktop market; and how the proliferation of "ubiquitous computing appliances" is going to marginalise this market. And Apple will be left behind.
People who make this arguement clearly underestimate Steve Jobs. In fact, he realised the desktop market would become obsolete years ago. In a 1996 interview with Fortune entitled "Paradise Lost" (bloody Fortund is charging $2.50 for past articles now so I cant get to it anymore but Yahoo still has the link), Steve was asked what he would do if he were running Apple at the time.
His answer, roughly paraphraseh was: "I'd milk Macintosh for all it's worth and move on to the next big thing"
Steve realised way back in '96 that the desktop market was going to become obsolete.
Anybody remember back when the Apple ][ was the company's cash cow; providing the funds to get a little product called Macintosh off the ground? I do. Anybody else wondering what is going on behind closed doors in Cupertino? I sure am.
Don't discount Apple just yet. They've changed the world twice before. Don't doubt they can do it again.
Also, as a fan of both OSs, I REALLY don't understand the antagonism between Linux fans and Apple fans. If only in the near term, it should be as the article says: "The enemy of my enemy is my friend". Apple and Linux (okay, and Be) are the last best hopes for freedom, and they should be united in the struggle against redmond's tyrrany; at least until microsoft is destroyed, its drones cast out into the realm of the unemployable blacklist, and the city of redmond demolished and plowed through with salt.
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin
Guns are hardly the problem. They're only a tool. The problem is the high school culture that allows the "in crowd" to torment anybody seen as an outsider to the breaking point.
Consider: One is just as dead no matter how they can die. And if you're determined to kill someone, there's plenty of ways to do so without a gun.
Just off the top of my head, using nothing but the chemicals I keep at home for cleaning, unclogging drains, etc., I can think of ways to make:
3 explosives 2 toxic gasses 1 explosive gas
If you allow me my garage, I could use the nitrate fertelizer and some diesel fuel to make a pretty close approximation of the Okalahoma City bomb.
If I were to do a detailed inventory of chemicals around the house I could probably come up with more. And I have enough of a working knowledge of electronics, that if *I* had set up those propane bombs in columbine's cafeteria, they bloody well WOULD have gone off as planned.
All this because I, for one, did not sleep through my chemistry classes. So, If we're going to ban all firearms, do we ban all household chemicals that MIGHT be used in a dangerous manner? We'll be living in some pretty filthy homes if we do.
What about chemistry textbooks? Chemistry classes? Electronics knowledge? We're getting pretty Orwellian here folks.
I don't own a gun. I never have. And I see no need to own one in the near future. If I ever DO feel the need to own one, I won't hesitate to buy one tho. I am familiar with gun safety and was at one point pretty handy with a rifle and shotgun (heh, thank the politically incorrect Boy Scouts for that).
But: if I flipped out and decided I really wanted someone dead; he'd be dead. And I sure wouldn't have to use a gun to do it.
Jobs and Woz were something worse than black in the eyes of soceity at the time. Just look at any picture of them back then.
They were hippies.
This at a time when it was considered okay to gas them, beat them, jail them for no explicable reason, etc.
Hell, on at leats one college campus I can think of off the top of my head, the national guard had made a little habit of using hippies for target practice with their machine guns.
And all this was considered okay. After all, they were only hippies.
I hate to burst your bubble, but blacks were hardly the only group peresecuted in the 60s and 70s.
So billyg got some of his VC from daddy, big deal.
You think he couldn't have gotten it from any number of VC firms?
"Well, we have this contract to sell millions of copys of DOS to IBM, but we need $50000 to get things going"
What VC firm in their right mind would say no???
So much for daddy's money.
Oh, and the only reason he got the deal with IBM in the first place was because a certian Mr. Killdal(inventor of CP/M) decided to go flying one day instead of meeting with the suits from IBM.
Oops, there goes mommy's influence.
Now, I'm not at all a fan of Bill Gates. In fact, I'm counting the days until the new Linux kernel with USB support becomes available so I can purge the last remenants of MS contamination from my hard drive.
But, whatever anyone's opinion of the man, Bill Gates got where he is through hard work, good marketing, good lawyers, good luck, and lots of stupid, gullible people willing to buy his mediocre products. We're hardly talking inherited wealth like a Rockafeller or Kennedy here.
Oh, and even if billyg HAD inherited his billions instead of making them himself, that still does not invalidate my example of Jobs and Wozniak building a billion dollar company from next to nothing. It CAN be done, if only you're willing to do the work.
>>If you're too poor to afford a computer, make >>your own out of baling wire and thread spools.
Why not???
I'll tell a little story.
It's about a fellow named Steve. He desprately wanted his own computer. Only problem? He was too poor to afford one. So he built his own. He also wrote the OS himself. A friend of his (also named Steve, and also too poor to afford his own computer) came along and realised that other people might like a computer like the one built by the first Steve. So they started a company to build and sell them. They sold their most expensive belongings (a VW microbus, and an HP scientific calculator) to finance their new company, which is now on the Fortune 500. Oh, and both Steves are millionaires many times over now.
Anyone care to guess who I'm talking about?
And all this because two drop-out kids were TOO POOR to afford their own computers.
>>It's the armpit of Florida, both socially and >>geographically.
Any town that considers a (pre)school like half-ass U to be a university....
Hell, I've thought for quite a while that Florida should cede everything north of Gainesville to georgia and alabama and be done with the panhandlers.
OTOH, the panhandle probably DOES provide a buffer zone that keeps the georgians and alabamans from penetrating too deep into civilized Florida.
I live in Orlando, and it has the POTENTIAL to grow into a decent, large city, ala San Fran or Boston. The only problem, is that while other large cities in the US, Orlando's growth has been explosive only within the last few decades. Orlando, therefore, has yet to build the mass-transit infrastructure as New York or Boston have, or the telecommunication infrastructure San Francisco can brag about.
Before Disney came to Orlando, it was just another dumpwater redneck town like any other (excepting Orlando and Gainesville) inland Florida town. If for nothing else, we should be thankful for Disney's civilizing influence.
... than the time Coca Cola sued to protect the distinctive shape of the Coca Cola bottle. The legal term is "trade dress".
Apple is perfectly justified in protecting its trademarks. In fact, they are obligated to do so. They can't pick and choose which iMac rip-offs to sue and which to leave alone. The fact that they would let one company rip them off becomes a defense for the company they DO sue.
The fact is that Apple put a lot of money into the industrial design of the iMac. And, regardless of weather or not it's popular with/.ers, it is a hot selling item among the unwashed masses. And just like an author who writes a popular book, or a programmer with popular software, Apple deserves to reap the fruits of its labors. And copyright and trademark laws are there to keep people (and companies) from being ripped off.
Personally, I hope eMachine, Daewoo, and that other iMac knock-off all BURN.
Cmon, really... I certianly hope these guys aren't being PAYED to sit around and come up with goofy ideas like this.
Just try to say kibobyte or mebibyte aloud.
Do we really need people whose function is to sit around coming up with pseuso-profound but completely useless ideas?
How hard is it to grasp the fact that 1K == 1024 bytes?
Hell, I understood this when I was six and it was a big deal to have 48K in my dad's Apple ][, and a whole megabyte (1024 kilobytes, also a no-brainer) would have bankrupted my family!!!
Which you obviously don't. Or perhaps the only way you can support your arguement is to use an old, obsolete version of the MacOS as your evidence. You mention shortcomings tith Apple's memory management and multitasking. These deficencies have long since been fixed. My copy of OS X Server runs quite nicely on my Mac thank you very much.
>>been 'kludged' to support multiple applications
I'd hardly call the Mach kernel a kludge.
>>b- Don't insult me, abuse me, or condemn me for >>making my decision.
Intresting that this statement follows a long rant in which you do exatly this to Mac users.
>>Bill Gates only wants your money. Steve Jobs >>wants your soul.
Well, of course bill only wants your money, he obviously already has YOUR soul.
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That the current MacOS IS really inefficent in it's use of the processor. There's a lot of baggage even in OS 9, that slows down the system compared to what a PPC *CAN* do.
Remember, that IBM overclocked a PPC to 1 gig, a good year or so ago.
OS X is supposed to change all this by placing the finder on top of a BSD Unix system.
You might check out the stats for SETI @home. There's a guy on an plder Mac there, running a developer release of Rhapsody, who churns out data units about six hours faster than MacOS. Also note the times of the various *BSD implementations. They pretty much ALL smoke bth MacOS AND windoze.
Also worth noting ae the "CPU Types" statistics. Here, PPC finishs data blocks about 8 hours faster than x86. It's important to note, tho, that this includes IBM's AIX PPC workstations which, accouding to the OS Stats page, finishes data units about twice as fast as MacOS. So it stands to reason that the MacOS IS holding the PPC back in the CPU stats area.
Now, I know that SETI @home is not the best test for benchmarking a CPU out there. But face it, any benchmark one could choose (Byte, spec, Photoshop, Q3 Test Framerate, etc.) is going to piss off SOMEONE, and promptly be declared invalid by users of the system that loses.
But what I think the SETI @home numbers DO demonstrate is that the PPC really IS an excellent chip, that DOES smoke its opponents. It, in most cases, is being slowed down by an outdated and inefficent operating ststem (although it performs quite well even after overcoming the overhead of the MacOS).
I know from first hand expierence that my G3's performance is quite righteous running LinuxPPC. I don't have any benchmarks, but it just *feels* twice as fast when running in its Linux partion vs. the MacOS partition. Granted, that's not at all scientific, but what the hell....
So, yeah, if you want an awesome Linux box, PPC IS a REALLY good choice. And since IBM's released the MB specs, you won't even HAVE to go with Apple in the near future. I plan to tho, I'm keeping my hopes up that they'll do a good job of integrating the MacOS GUI with BSD UNIX in OS X. I've had a chance to play with both Darwin, and OS X Server, and somehow, I think they WILL get it right.
But only time will tell.
john
Airport most definately IS an open standard. It was developed by Lucent and licensed by Apple.
I forget the IEEE number tho, perhaps someone can fill me in...
But there ARE PCMCIA cards available that let non-iBooks communicate on an Airport network.
Of course, in these cases, the antenna's external, not built in to the lid, and the cards are more expensive than the $99 Airport, but they DO exist. I think Falleron makes the one I've heard about.
More exciting to me than Airport is the prospect of third party add-ons to the Airport slot. Since the Antenna's already built in, I'm hoping that a third party will build a cellular modem card that fits in the Airport slot and uses the built in antenna. Such a thing would be more useful to ME than wireless ethernet, and it would be way cool....
(pssst, hardware developers.... you listining?)
john
Didn't John Carmack (a reliable source on game development if there is one) say in one of his .plan updates a few months back, something along the lines of "90-95% of game code is identical across windoze, Linux, AND Macintosh"????
.plan is REALLY fuzzy, or he was lieing) to convert a game, and the potential for easy money; the only reason a game would NOT be released simultaneously for windoze, Linux, and Macintosh, is purely political.
Common sense would seem to dictate that CONVERTING that 5-10% that IS different, would be a trivial effort compared to the effort put into writing the 90-95% that is IDENTICAL across ALL THREE platforms.
I find it hard to belive that a small company like Id somehow has the resoueces and programming competancey to release all three versions of a game SIMULTANEOUSLY (as Carmack has promised to do with Q3), whilst a gigantic company like Sierra can't come up with the resources or programming skill to release seperate versions at all!?!?!?
Something smells fishy here.
Networking issues??? I don't know about the windoze version, but neither the Linux or Mac version of Q3test have ANY problem playing against people on other platforms. Again, if Id can pull it off, why can't a giant like Sierra? Hm... mabye lack of competency isn't that far off...
More than fishy, smells downright rotten...
Moreover, what economic motive would a company have for turning down additional profits (at the cost of modifying 5-10% of the code)? Apple's sold something like 2 million of those iMacs(2 mil * $50 price of game == 100 million, a healthy chunk of change (and this is JUST iMacs)), doubled it's market share and is still growing, as for Linux, I'm not sure how many people, demographically, use it NOW, but i KNOW it's expanding rapidly. Not only that, Linux users are willing to give up their own time to IMPROVE a game (see LokiHack). So why would a developer give up extra money unless they had a hidden adgenda.
Smells like salmon.... washington salmon...
Seems to me, that given the minimal necessary effort (unless my recollection of Carmack's
washington salmon... perhaps from just outside Seattle, a town whose name starts with an 'R'...
Political reasons like oh.... Perhaps die hard OS fanatics infiltrating game developers? Partisans who belive that there is only one true OS, and that this is a gift handed down from bill, the great one? Fanatics who want to destroy all other operating systems and force the world to assimilate into their collective?
Eh... can you say "Halloween Papers"? I knew you could...
john
After all, I'm no more fond of sue-happy corperations than anyone.
But I can certianly see it from the other side.
If *I* had put a lot of my time, effort, ans money into building a web business; *I* certianly wouldn't want some dirtbag little cybersquatter to appropiate my trademark and by protected by the fact that it's a direct translation, and not the trademark itself.
So is every startup company, in addition to registering their trademark (and all combinations and permutations therof) in english, now going to have do the same for every major language in the world???
That many registrations could suck up a fair bit of money, especially for a company thats starting out small.
So, in this particular case, I have to ask myself... who's less distasteful? The big sue-happy company? Or the cybersquatters, who damittedly, have come up with a novel new WAY of cybersquatting, but are cybersquatters nonetheless.
I guess I'll just have to flip a coin.
john
Amen...
If I had the same preks that Apple's employees get, I'd have NO PROBLEM working another 10-20 hours a week.
No wonder the original Macintosh team was willing to work 80-90 hours a week. They had all the comforts of home, AND MORE, right at the office!
Hell, I might never want to leave.... Just bring in a cot and sleeping bag and leave them under my desk....
john
The only thing that bothered me about the idea of these "terminator" seeds is how the gene is activated.
Now, obviously the plants need to grow fertile seeds before treatment, this is necessary for Monsato to grow the terminator seeds in the first place. But how is the terminator gene activated in the seeds they sell?
Unless the design changed since the last time I read about these seeds, they spray them with tetracycline!!!
Now, with all the trouble we're having recently with resistant bacteria, I think dumping antibiotics into the topsoil with every new crop planted is the last thing we need to be doing.
Other than that, I don't see where the problem is. In fact, I think just mabye ALL geneticall engineered food should have a terminator gene. This would prevent them from breeding on their own in case something went seriously wrong (attack of the killer tomatos???).
As for the economic issues involved:
As others here have pointed out, the hybrid crops already in use now don't breed true, so the farm companies have to buy new seeds every year anyway. And even if they didn't...
Who really cares if a giant seed corperation screws the giant farm corperations. Sadly, the days of the small farmer with two cows a coop of chickens, and 100 acres, are long gone. We live in the era of the factory farm, for better or worse.
So the farming company has to pay more every year to plant new seeds with the terminator gene. They'll pass along the extra cost to the consumers. Consumers will promptly start lobbying the government to do something about it. The government drops the its price supports for foodstuffs a few notches. The price then drops back in line with the normal inflation rate.
Net result? The farming corperations get a little more of our money directly from us in the form of food prices; and they get a little less of our money indirectly in the form of farming subsidies. But the actual cost to the consumer will stay the same.
No big deal. Just find a way to use the terminator gene without adding antibiotics to our soil, and theres no problem.
john
That those who declare that "I am a(n) X", seldom are.
For X you can insert mostly anything:
Guru
Hacker
Cracker
Punk Rocker
Goth
Phreak
Raver
etc.
The people who are deserving of these designations rarely, if ever, claim them for themselves. Rather, their skills are eventually recognised by the community (hacker community, punk rock crowd, raver connumity, whatever).
I'll use the two examples most relevant to me.
I can sling out some pretty good code. Good enough to graduate with honors, and to keep my employer happy. But I don't, by any means consider myself a hacker. I have not done (and don't know if I ever will do) anything that puts me in the league of people I would consider to be true hackers; people like Linus and Woz (two people that I'm sure everyone here would agree are true hackers). You will note, that Linus and Woz's are a couple of the most down to earth individuals (or at least they appear to be). They don't need to call themselves hackers, they just are. Mabye, someday, by the grace of Steve, I'll contribute something in the same league, and the hacker community will recognise me as such. But even then, I'll not label *myself* as a hacker. That's a distinction to be made by my peers.
In the non-technical world my perferred recreation is congert-going. Mostly punk rock and ska shows. I don't label myself, however, as a "punk". There are kiddies who do, however. These are the twinks that go to shows, usually just for the mosh pit, and whine about how much Green Day sucks because they "sold out". Ironic thing is, they'll still pay to go to that very same Green Day show, just so they can show off how punk they are. These same wannabes are the ones who mail order a $25 Deak Kennedys t-shirt (and usually dont know a Single DK song) to wear with the $90 Designer plaid bondage pants (which come complete with an instruction booklet that tells you not to wash them because "dirt is punk"), and spend two hours, and half a bottle of hair gel before the show primping their green mohawk to look just right. When they get to the show, they think the mosh pit is just a place to hit people and not be punished, and will frequently try to start new pits among those who aren't in the mood for moshing that night. Quite often, other people (more expierenced moshers), who DO know how to handle themselves, will get sick of this, and give them a class A beat down. The self-styled "punks" will then go home and say stupid crap like "awesome pit, I got totally thrashed". It's people like this who give the rest of us a bad name. I don't call myself a punk, though I do enjoy the music, the message, the shows, and hell, I even still get into the pit every so often.
The simple, sad, fact is that wannabes exist in any particular subculture. They read about one stereotype or another and imitate it to the Nth degree.
The perfect example of this for the hacker community would be the movie "Hackers". It took every geek stereotype (chain smoking, jolt cola, ramen noodles, etc) and made charicticures of computer people. Most people here bash it as a horrible drama. I, OTOH, laughed my fool head off. I saw it as a great comedy. All the amplified stereotypes were hilarious, and the sheer volume of technobabble put Star Trek to shame (my favorite was the Mac Powerbook with a RISC based P6(?) a vesa bus and a "killer refresh rate"). And besides, any movie with Angelina Jolie....
The sad part is that half the script kiddies in existence are probably because of that movie. The try to dress like the characters, go to raves, call themselves elite, and type like 7h15. This is how an average person probably views computer geeks, and the sad fact is these twinks probably couldn't compile a kernel if their lives depended on it.
The overall point is that the stereotypes are generally untrue. And the people who TRY to fit these stereotypes are anything BUT X (see above). Look at Woz for example. He is anything BUT a "stereotypical hacker". But IMHO, he is, one of, if not THE, best "true hacker" ever. An absolute wizard with both software AND hardware, his designs are elegant in ways I can only dream of emulating. And yet, look at www.woz.org. Not a h4qx3r site at all. Just a profile, webcam (okay wozcam) and thoughts from a man who is a whole lot more humble than he could be, given what he has accomplished. Not a stereotype, a hacker.
Unfortunately, it appears that this MTV drivel will just perpetuate the image of the h4qx3r (damn it bothers me to type like that), and not the hacker.
It's really just kinda sad.
john
See, where I went to college, everyone had two email accounts: one on the unix system, which was used mostly by the CompSci students and faculty; and one on the NT system, whis was used mostly by the luzers who were too stupid to understand that you don't point and click in pine.
A favorite pasttime of the CompSci guys was to set both email accounts to foward all received email to the other. Once someone set this up, usually with one of the guest or intro accounts (or that of some freshman with an easy password), he'd spread the word, and both email accounts would fill up with "hello there" messages.
Now, the network traffic alone was enough of a hassle for the admins,but the nifty bit was the way the mail servers were set up.
The unix mailboxes had a set maximum size. When this was reached, the incoming mails would still be fowarded, but not saved to the account's mailbox. But the funny part was that the NT mail server had no set limit on mailbox size, so that one mailbox would eventually take over all the disk space on the NT server. Thus, one peoson could easily bring down the email for the entire campus.
Except, of course, for those of us who were intelligent enough not to use NT in the first place. We'd laugh our fool heads off every time this happened. Cause while everyone else was whining about email being down, it would be business as usual for everyone in CompSci.
Best part was, IT didn't figure it out until the last semester before I graduated. And when they did, they just whined to the unix admin (who worked for the CompSci dept., NOT IT), who promptly told the IT weasels to take a hike (only in less diplomatic terms).
IT couldn't do anything to the unixx guys because that network was owned and run by the CompSci department, whilst IT only had jurisdiction over the NT network. And they couldn't touch the unix admin, as he taught an "advanced unix" class and was thus considered faculty, automatically higher in the food chain than IT, who were only "support staff".
He was a cool old unix wizard who despised mocrosoft and those IT idiots who kept trying to encroach on his territory. And he didn't mind a little extra network traffic so long as it inconvinenced mostly the windiots, and didn't cause undue problems with "his" network. All around an awesome guy.
By my last semester, IT had finally figured out how it was done and put size limits on mailboxes tho. So the pasttime of crashing the windiots email every couple of weeks regretably came to an end.
But it sure was funny while it lasted, and of course, there're plenty of other ways to play with NT networks.
After all, Steve Jobs has only been back for two years (after being betreyed and exiled for twelve by john sculley) so far.
In that time he's brought the company back to profitability, doubled it's market share, and drove the stock price to all-time highs. Pretty good, considering that in the dark days of Amelio, Apple was hemmoraging half a billion dollars a quarter. Imagine where Apple would be now if sculley hadn't stabbed Steve in the back.
I remember a while back, when Apple first aquired NeXT, a joke that went around saying that in buying NeXT, Apple was really just buying Steve Jobs. And that NeXT threw a pretty spiffy OS in with the deal.
A couple of anti-Apple arguements thrown about here have centered around Apple's focus on the desktop market; and how the proliferation of "ubiquitous computing appliances" is going to marginalise this market. And Apple will be left behind.
People who make this arguement clearly underestimate Steve Jobs. In fact, he realised the desktop market would become obsolete years ago. In a 1996 interview with Fortune entitled "Paradise Lost" (bloody Fortund is charging $2.50 for past articles now so I cant get to it anymore but Yahoo still has the link), Steve was asked what he would do if he were running Apple at the time.
His answer, roughly paraphraseh was: "I'd milk Macintosh for all it's worth and move on to the next big thing"
Steve realised way back in '96 that the desktop market was going to become obsolete.
Anybody remember back when the Apple ][ was the company's cash cow; providing the funds to get a little product called Macintosh off the ground? I do. Anybody else wondering what is going on behind closed doors in Cupertino? I sure am.
Don't discount Apple just yet. They've changed the world twice before. Don't doubt they can do it again.
Also, as a fan of both OSs, I REALLY don't understand the antagonism between Linux fans and Apple fans. If only in the near term, it should be as the article says: "The enemy of my enemy is my friend". Apple and Linux (okay, and Be) are the last best hopes for freedom, and they should be united in the struggle against redmond's tyrrany; at least until microsoft is destroyed, its drones cast out into the realm of the unemployable blacklist, and the city of redmond demolished and plowed through with salt.
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin
Guns are hardly the problem. They're only a tool. The problem is the high school culture that allows the "in crowd" to torment anybody seen as an outsider to the breaking point.
Consider: One is just as dead no matter how they can die. And if you're determined to kill someone, there's plenty of ways to do so without a gun.
Just off the top of my head, using nothing but the chemicals I keep at home for cleaning, unclogging drains, etc., I can think of ways to make:
3 explosives
2 toxic gasses
1 explosive gas
If you allow me my garage, I could use the nitrate fertelizer and some diesel fuel to make a pretty close approximation of the Okalahoma City bomb.
If I were to do a detailed inventory of chemicals around the house I could probably come up with more. And I have enough of a working knowledge of electronics, that if *I* had set up those propane bombs in columbine's cafeteria, they bloody well WOULD have gone off as planned.
All this because I, for one, did not sleep through my chemistry classes. So, If we're going to ban all firearms, do we ban all household chemicals that MIGHT be used in a dangerous manner? We'll be living in some pretty filthy homes if we do.
What about chemistry textbooks? Chemistry classes? Electronics knowledge? We're getting pretty Orwellian here folks.
I don't own a gun. I never have. And I see no need to own one in the near future. If I ever DO feel the need to own one, I won't hesitate to buy one tho. I am familiar with gun safety and was at one point pretty handy with a rifle and shotgun (heh, thank the politically incorrect Boy Scouts for that).
But: if I flipped out and decided I really wanted someone dead; he'd be dead. And I sure wouldn't have to use a gun to do it.
Jobs and Woz were something worse than black in the eyes of soceity at the time. Just look at any picture of them back then.
They were hippies.
This at a time when it was considered okay to gas them, beat them, jail them for no explicable reason, etc.
Hell, on at leats one college campus I can think of off the top of my head, the national guard had made a little habit of using hippies for target practice with their machine guns.
And all this was considered okay. After all, they were only hippies.
I hate to burst your bubble, but blacks were hardly the only group peresecuted in the 60s and 70s.
So billyg got some of his VC from daddy, big deal.
You think he couldn't have gotten it from any number of VC firms?
"Well, we have this contract to sell millions of copys of DOS to IBM, but we need $50000 to get things going"
What VC firm in their right mind would say no???
So much for daddy's money.
Oh, and the only reason he got the deal with IBM in the first place was because a certian Mr. Killdal(inventor of CP/M) decided to go flying one day instead of meeting with the suits from IBM.
Oops, there goes mommy's influence.
Now, I'm not at all a fan of Bill Gates. In fact, I'm counting the days until the new Linux kernel with USB support becomes available so I can purge the last remenants of MS contamination from my hard drive.
But, whatever anyone's opinion of the man, Bill Gates got where he is through hard work, good marketing, good lawyers, good luck, and lots of stupid, gullible people willing to buy his mediocre products. We're hardly talking inherited wealth like a Rockafeller or Kennedy here.
Oh, and even if billyg HAD inherited his billions instead of making them himself, that still does not invalidate my example of Jobs and Wozniak building a billion dollar company from next to nothing. It CAN be done, if only you're willing to do the work.
>>If you're too poor to afford a computer, make
>>your own out of baling wire and thread spools.
Why not???
I'll tell a little story.
It's about a fellow named Steve. He desprately wanted his own computer. Only problem? He was too poor to afford one. So he built his own. He also wrote the OS himself. A friend of his (also named Steve, and also too poor to afford his own computer) came along and realised that other people might like a computer like the one built by the first Steve. So they started a company to build and sell them. They sold their most expensive belongings (a VW microbus, and an HP scientific calculator) to finance their new company, which is now on the Fortune 500. Oh, and both Steves are millionaires many times over now.
Anyone care to guess who I'm talking about?
And all this because two drop-out kids were TOO POOR to afford their own computers.
fine.
If you think the things taste good, eat all the bugs you want. That leaves more pizza for the rest of us.
Me, I'M forced to remember Samuel L. Jackson's line from Pulp Fiction:
"Sewer Rat might taste like pumpkin pie. But I'll never know, 'cause I ain't gonna eat the filthy motherfu*ka"
>>It's the armpit of Florida, both socially and
>>geographically.
Any town that considers a (pre)school like half-ass U to be a university....
Hell, I've thought for quite a while that Florida should cede everything north of Gainesville to georgia and alabama and be done with the panhandlers.
OTOH, the panhandle probably DOES provide a buffer zone that keeps the georgians and alabamans from penetrating too deep into civilized Florida.
I live in Orlando, and it has the POTENTIAL to grow into a decent, large city, ala San Fran or Boston. The only problem, is that while other large cities in the US, Orlando's growth has been explosive only within the last few decades. Orlando, therefore, has yet to build the mass-transit infrastructure as New York or Boston have, or the telecommunication infrastructure San Francisco can brag about.
Before Disney came to Orlando, it was just another dumpwater redneck town like any other (excepting Orlando and Gainesville) inland Florida town. If for nothing else, we should be thankful for Disney's civilizing influence.
... than the time Coca Cola sued to protect the distinctive shape of the Coca Cola bottle. The legal term is "trade dress".
/.ers, it is a hot selling item among the unwashed masses. And just like an author who writes a popular book, or a programmer with popular software, Apple deserves to reap the fruits of its labors. And copyright and trademark laws are there to keep people (and companies) from being ripped off.
Apple is perfectly justified in protecting its trademarks. In fact, they are obligated to do so. They can't pick and choose which iMac rip-offs to sue and which to leave alone. The fact that they would let one company rip them off becomes a defense for the company they DO sue.
The fact is that Apple put a lot of money into the industrial design of the iMac. And, regardless of weather or not it's popular with
Personally, I hope eMachine, Daewoo, and that other iMac knock-off all BURN.
Cmon, really... I certianly hope these guys aren't being PAYED to sit around and come up with goofy ideas like this.
Just try to say kibobyte or mebibyte aloud.
Do we really need people whose function is to sit around coming up with pseuso-profound but completely useless ideas?
How hard is it to grasp the fact that 1K == 1024 bytes?
Hell, I understood this when I was six and it was a big deal to have 48K in my dad's Apple ][, and a whole megabyte (1024 kilobytes, also a no-brainer) would have bankrupted my family!!!
>>a- Know what features X has.
Which you obviously don't. Or perhaps the only way you can support your arguement is to use an old, obsolete version of the MacOS as your evidence. You mention shortcomings tith Apple's memory management and multitasking. These deficencies have long since been fixed. My copy of OS X Server runs quite nicely on my Mac thank you very much.
>>been 'kludged' to support multiple applications
I'd hardly call the Mach kernel a kludge.
>>b- Don't insult me, abuse me, or condemn me for
>>making my decision.
Intresting that this statement follows a long rant in which you do exatly this to Mac users.
>>Bill Gates only wants your money. Steve Jobs
>>wants your soul.
Well, of course bill only wants your money, he obviously already has YOUR soul.