The use of the term "WMD" simply lays bare government's attitude toward the people under their rule:" they are objects, having some value for the state, which can be damaged or destroyed. They are not people, they are not citizens, they are property. And they don't care that we know that to be the case.
Yes, I'm quite aware of recent history. All you say is true (and I certainly know about the universal binaries; I just used the term I learned it under...that Xcode can do this is well-known).
However...I think that while Apple does a super job of making transitions easy, they care less about legacy than you suggest. This general direction is apparent in the direction they took with (yes, they backtracked, but I think this will be the exception) FCPX
I don't see another more away from a processor family, but the addition of one or two more, and we're not going to see a Rosetta-style program available for the new families to run Intel code; rather, anything new will just work, while older programs will run on Intel but not the new cpus. I doubt the App Store would carry anything that's not cross-compatible.
And not only that, this is in NeXTStep's DNA. That OS was made for portability, and ran on at least (if this link is accurate) four different processor families. Apple also had a concurrent build of OS X on Intel while they sold PowerPC machines. Fat Binaries also would allow Apple, if they felt like it, to make the CPU all but invisible to the user for properly recompiled programs, letting them have multiple processors in their lineup (this does, however, leave anything older or not recompiled out in the cold; that doesn't seem to matter much to Apple, however).
This is just smart business; something goes wrong with Intel, they're ready. A new, decent competitor pops up? port it, and if it proves to be better, run with it. To not to have these projects going would seem to be a mistake.
I had a college classmate who had just returned from an internship in Switzerland: "Let me show you something I helped work on this summer..."
We had been using Gopher, of course, and individual command-line networking tools (even on our NeXTStations), but this was something...different. When I mentioned that it was cool, but didn't offer much content, my classmate was quick to answer: "but think of what we can use it for!" I wasn't there for the birth, but I did see it smile for the first time...
$150 (I've seen it for $119) is worth every penny. Once you try an ALPS-style switch (or a brown/blue Cherry switch, or a good ol' Buckling Spring) side-by-side with a rubber-dome, you'll notice, and will probably change your mind about the board you currently use. Pay a look-see over to geekhack.org; they've got the goods on mechanical switches (though they're still in the air about the merits of scissor-switches).
Do not imbibe such a foul, unwholesome concoction, dude. It may be sweet, but it has no bite whatsoever --- in fact, it tastes like somewhat sweet, soapy water. Nasty all around.
Mac solutions rock: TeXShop + XeTeX is a powerful combination. LaTeX simply can't be beat for consistency and ease of use once the basics are put to memory.
And don't forget Fiasco --- a superb first-contact crash-and-burn. Pretty much everything by him is worth a read. Lem, however, is not the only highly-regarded yet little-read Sci Fi / conceptual writer worth picking up. Give Italo Calvino a chance --- fun and literate.
Frankly, I'd like to see entirely modular computers. Implement it like legos: bricks stuck to each other. The interconnects would be awful, but if it could be done, and made hot-swappable, it would be way cool --- and would allow nearly eternal upgrades. Why replace the CPU each year when you can just slap a newer one on and have them all going? And so forth.
Mao certainly caused a lot of deaths, but contrary to leaders like Stalin, Mao was more a flawed leader that screwed up badly than someone whose core ideology involved mass murder, and if you read the little red book you will see that reflected in a lot of what he is saying.
Bull. Feathers.
While the Little Red Book isn't more of a threat than any other book (and let me be clear, censorship of books is simply wrong, as is restricting access to them), to say that Mao was a "flawed leader that screwed up badly" isn't too far from suggesting that Caligula had minor impulse control issues.
Check out the numerous bios of the man. Check out the references, especially in those written in recent years --- well-attested archival material from the mainland is appearing that does nothing but back up what has been claimed about his rule for many years. For instance, check out the recent Mao : The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday. Yes, the authors are decidedly anti-Mao, and anti-PRC. Yes, anti-Mao bias is more-than-likely to be found in this book. Yet the facts it reports surrounding Mao's reign are just that, facts (and why make up anything when the truth is so awful?): the millions upon millions who died in the Great Leap Forward and its accompanying famines --- famines which could have been easily ameliorated had Mao wanted to do anything about them; the chaos, disorder, and madness that swept across the land during the Cultural Revolution (during which the Little Red Book was waved on high and memorized by those most responsible for the craziness and death); the ruthless way in which followers and associates were used and discarded from even his earliest days in the Party --- these things alone are more than enough to show him to be among the worst of the worst of 20th century rulers, if not heading the list. Talk to someone who lived through his reign. Watch their eyes. Listen to them as they struggle to talk about it in any but the vaguest terms. An entire nation went mad for a generation; while it is doing an amazing job of picking up the pieces today, many scars left by Mao are yet unhealed, and will not fade for many years to come.
Well, Apple ][ AppleWorks can, if I remember correctly --- and if you can get your hands on early versions of ClarisWorks, there is little problem importing Apple ][ AppleWorks files.
Then there is the late, great word proc, AppleWriter. At least it used in-line codes to make things work. Made moving to LaTeX pretty easy.
Perhaps this has been suggested, but isn't NASA missing out on a funding opportunity? Send along names laser-etched into thin, ultra-light sheets of some highly-durable composite for $10-$20 a pop. Plenty of people would go for it, and if it worked the first time, it would be something that could be done on any and all subsequent missions --- at higher prices each time, depending on how popular it would be.
Those computers had OS's.
Indeed. I still remember the debate over which OS was a better choice: DOS 3.3 or ProDOS. Then there were the CP/M card freaks, as well as the odd UCSD Pascal holdout...
I'm not so sure about that. The move to Intel may be only a partial move when all is said and done --- this could be part of a strategy to make which processor is in a given box irrelevant. Universal binaries for more than two processors are quite possible, as NeXT demonstrated, though this time it will be part of an entire hardware strategy --- go with the fastest CPU available in any given generation, and only things compiled two generations back won't run, which wouldn't be a terrible loss. This could be a killer strategy.
Er...the real reason "Gen X" caught on was not because "X" referred to the "10th generation", but rather because "X" felt right to the general culture in an algebraic sense, as in for the value x. Undefined, without reference points, without grounding. Thus the easy move to "Y" for the next group --- other than at its initial introduction, no one thought X=10. Though "Y" isn't accurate as a count, it is here to stay.
We have Douglas Coupland to thank for much of the spread of "Gen X" as a term; we have The Replacements to thank for singing great songs which (without intention) gave voice to much of what Gen X-ers were thinking.
Frankly, I think the cutoff from Gex X to Y ought to be 1974 --- do you have at least vague recollection of when Nixon was president? The worldviews of those born after are often much, much different than those born before.
It's not merely disappointing --- it's disgusting. The shuttle was a bad idea from the start, and that the same mistakes will be recapitulated is awful.
Is the real reason we backed away from manned exploration in the 70's because the "right" people weren't making a profit off of it? It could well be that, until there is a consistent and projectable profit to be had from the manned exporation of space, we will be stuck back here on Earth. I memorized every announced space launch, manned or otherwise, when I was a kid. I looked forward to life in space, or at least something better from the space program than satellite TV and phone service. A terribly sad situation all around.
ndansmith writes: It is silly to get mad at someone for not following the "rules" of English if you know exactly what they mean.
Not always. There are levels of communication that must be taken into account. A grunt may most certainly do just as well as a finely-turned sentence for transmitting information. But what we are discussing is not simply the transference of ideas or facts; in fact, you should know this better than most as you are a Greek major. As a fellow Classics geek, I know that most of what you are reading (unless you are in a very odd program indeed) is made up of poets (Homer, Callimachus); historians (Xenophon); philosophers (Plato, Aristotle); rhetoricians (Isocrates); playwrights (Aeschylus); and much else. You also are familiar with the various levels of the Greek language represented in the various genres. The very same idea may be put across by a writer in one genre in the most basic fashion, while another writer in another genre may say it in flowery and grandiose terms. The same idea is embedded in each instance; its meaning may be quite different due the language in which it is expressed (and that is said while keeping in mind that we are not discussing context, rhetorical use of a fact, etc.). Now imagine taking expression 1 and dropping it into instance 2, in place of expression 2. It will be out of place, perhaps even appearing to be crass or overwrought, depending on its new surroundings --- causing all manner of difficulties for reader/hearer. Knowing exactly what someone means is often just the beginning of things.
Jack9 writes: I don't judge people by their spelling. I judge them by the quality of their communicated thoughts.
Ah, but there's the rub. If someone cannot use the commonly agreed-upon forms for spelling, grammar, etc., I and most others will simply drop what we are reading and move on to something else. No matter how fine the thought behind something, it will likely never be given the time of day if it is presented in a shoddy fashion. Not fair! the Slashdotters cry. Not fair! Ah, but it is. If someone is bright enough to have a fine idea, they are bright enough to express it in a way that is polite to those who may come across it. Conventions of spelling, grammar, and of many other sorts are not there to hamstring people; they are there to grease the skids of language, so to speak.
hexed_2050 writes: I'm not trying to say that the Internet was better in its younger days
Oh, but it was. Amazingly so.
Most of that had to do with size; it was quite possible to know most of the idiots by name, even and up until 1993 or so, and simply avoid them. It's like a small town --- you can shun the local jerk, and everyone (except the jerk) is happier for it. But now that we're all living in Mexico City, Tokyo, or some other monstrously large city, that simply does not and can not work.
The only real way to find happiness is to build your own gated community, and only go out for groceries now and then. But that doesn't work either --- either insularity and parochialism take over, or it is the equivalent of living in a pre-industrial village. Interesting neighbors, but you've heard all their stories before, plus they smell and their pets are nuisances.
I miss the old days. But I'd also miss what I have access to today if I found myself back in 1989. Excellent point, sir.
Slashdot Mirror
People hire GenY kids? Insanity.
The use of the term "WMD" simply lays bare government's attitude toward the people under their rule:" they are objects, having some value for the state, which can be damaged or destroyed. They are not people, they are not citizens, they are property. And they don't care that we know that to be the case.
Yes, I'm quite aware of recent history. All you say is true (and I certainly know about the universal binaries; I just used the term I learned it under...that Xcode can do this is well-known).
However...I think that while Apple does a super job of making transitions easy, they care less about legacy than you suggest. This general direction is apparent in the direction they took with (yes, they backtracked, but I think this will be the exception) FCPX
I don't see another more away from a processor family, but the addition of one or two more, and we're not going to see a Rosetta-style program available for the new families to run Intel code; rather, anything new will just work, while older programs will run on Intel but not the new cpus. I doubt the App Store would carry anything that's not cross-compatible.
And not only that, this is in NeXTStep's DNA. That OS was made for portability, and ran on at least (if this link is accurate) four different processor families. Apple also had a concurrent build of OS X on Intel while they sold PowerPC machines. Fat Binaries also would allow Apple, if they felt like it, to make the CPU all but invisible to the user for properly recompiled programs, letting them have multiple processors in their lineup (this does, however, leave anything older or not recompiled out in the cold; that doesn't seem to matter much to Apple, however).
This is just smart business; something goes wrong with Intel, they're ready. A new, decent competitor pops up? port it, and if it proves to be better, run with it. To not to have these projects going would seem to be a mistake.
I had a college classmate who had just returned from an internship in Switzerland: "Let me show you something I helped work on this summer..." We had been using Gopher, of course, and individual command-line networking tools (even on our NeXTStations), but this was something...different. When I mentioned that it was cool, but didn't offer much content, my classmate was quick to answer: "but think of what we can use it for!" I wasn't there for the birth, but I did see it smile for the first time...
$150 (I've seen it for $119) is worth every penny. Once you try an ALPS-style switch (or a brown/blue Cherry switch, or a good ol' Buckling Spring) side-by-side with a rubber-dome, you'll notice, and will probably change your mind about the board you currently use. Pay a look-see over to geekhack.org; they've got the goods on mechanical switches (though they're still in the air about the merits of scissor-switches).
Oh, that Ethic and his crazy rules! I'm SO sick of him...
Do not imbibe such a foul, unwholesome concoction, dude. It may be sweet, but it has no bite whatsoever --- in fact, it tastes like somewhat sweet, soapy water. Nasty all around.
Mac solutions rock: TeXShop + XeTeX is a powerful combination. LaTeX simply can't be beat for consistency and ease of use once the basics are put to memory.
And don't forget Fiasco --- a superb first-contact crash-and-burn. Pretty much everything by him is worth a read. Lem, however, is not the only highly-regarded yet little-read Sci Fi / conceptual writer worth picking up. Give Italo Calvino a chance --- fun and literate.
Frankly, I'd like to see entirely modular computers. Implement it like legos: bricks stuck to each other. The interconnects would be awful, but if it could be done, and made hot-swappable, it would be way cool --- and would allow nearly eternal upgrades. Why replace the CPU each year when you can just slap a newer one on and have them all going? And so forth.
Long live Defender! Eater of quarters! Sucker of time! How I miss thee, and how I loathe the latter-day attempts to modernize you. Long live Defender!
It isn't complicated. It simply prevents forcing consumers to purchase the same item over and over again.
vidarh writes:
Bull. Feathers.
While the Little Red Book isn't more of a threat than any other book (and let me be clear, censorship of books is simply wrong, as is restricting access to them), to say that Mao was a "flawed leader that screwed up badly" isn't too far from suggesting that Caligula had minor impulse control issues.
Check out the numerous bios of the man. Check out the references, especially in those written in recent years --- well-attested archival material from the mainland is appearing that does nothing but back up what has been claimed about his rule for many years. For instance, check out the recent Mao : The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday. Yes, the authors are decidedly anti-Mao, and anti-PRC. Yes, anti-Mao bias is more-than-likely to be found in this book. Yet the facts it reports surrounding Mao's reign are just that, facts (and why make up anything when the truth is so awful?): the millions upon millions who died in the Great Leap Forward and its accompanying famines --- famines which could have been easily ameliorated had Mao wanted to do anything about them; the chaos, disorder, and madness that swept across the land during the Cultural Revolution (during which the Little Red Book was waved on high and memorized by those most responsible for the craziness and death); the ruthless way in which followers and associates were used and discarded from even his earliest days in the Party --- these things alone are more than enough to show him to be among the worst of the worst of 20th century rulers, if not heading the list. Talk to someone who lived through his reign. Watch their eyes. Listen to them as they struggle to talk about it in any but the vaguest terms. An entire nation went mad for a generation; while it is doing an amazing job of picking up the pieces today, many scars left by Mao are yet unhealed, and will not fade for many years to come.
Well, Apple ][ AppleWorks can, if I remember correctly --- and if you can get your hands on early versions of ClarisWorks, there is little problem importing Apple ][ AppleWorks files. Then there is the late, great word proc, AppleWriter. At least it used in-line codes to make things work. Made moving to LaTeX pretty easy.
Perhaps this has been suggested, but isn't NASA missing out on a funding opportunity? Send along names laser-etched into thin, ultra-light sheets of some highly-durable composite for $10-$20 a pop. Plenty of people would go for it, and if it worked the first time, it would be something that could be done on any and all subsequent missions --- at higher prices each time, depending on how popular it would be.
And what if we don't want to be found when we are dead?
Those computers had OS's. Indeed. I still remember the debate over which OS was a better choice: DOS 3.3 or ProDOS. Then there were the CP/M card freaks, as well as the odd UCSD Pascal holdout...
I'm not so sure about that. The move to Intel may be only a partial move when all is said and done --- this could be part of a strategy to make which processor is in a given box irrelevant. Universal binaries for more than two processors are quite possible, as NeXT demonstrated, though this time it will be part of an entire hardware strategy --- go with the fastest CPU available in any given generation, and only things compiled two generations back won't run, which wouldn't be a terrible loss. This could be a killer strategy.
REusing idle cycles? Really?
Er...the real reason "Gen X" caught on was not because "X" referred to the "10th generation", but rather because "X" felt right to the general culture in an algebraic sense, as in for the value x. Undefined, without reference points, without grounding. Thus the easy move to "Y" for the next group --- other than at its initial introduction, no one thought X=10. Though "Y" isn't accurate as a count, it is here to stay.
We have Douglas Coupland to thank for much of the spread of "Gen X" as a term; we have The Replacements to thank for singing great songs which (without intention) gave voice to much of what Gen X-ers were thinking.
Frankly, I think the cutoff from Gex X to Y ought to be 1974 --- do you have at least vague recollection of when Nixon was president? The worldviews of those born after are often much, much different than those born before.
It's not merely disappointing --- it's disgusting. The shuttle was a bad idea from the start, and that the same mistakes will be recapitulated is awful.
Is the real reason we backed away from manned exploration in the 70's because the "right" people weren't making a profit off of it? It could well be that, until there is a consistent and projectable profit to be had from the manned exporation of space, we will be stuck back here on Earth. I memorized every announced space launch, manned or otherwise, when I was a kid. I looked forward to life in space, or at least something better from the space program than satellite TV and phone service. A terribly sad situation all around.
ndansmith writes: It is silly to get mad at someone for not following the "rules" of English if you know exactly what they mean.
Not always. There are levels of communication that must be taken into account. A grunt may most certainly do just as well as a finely-turned sentence for transmitting information. But what we are discussing is not simply the transference of ideas or facts; in fact, you should know this better than most as you are a Greek major. As a fellow Classics geek, I know that most of what you are reading (unless you are in a very odd program indeed) is made up of poets (Homer, Callimachus); historians (Xenophon); philosophers (Plato, Aristotle); rhetoricians (Isocrates); playwrights (Aeschylus); and much else. You also are familiar with the various levels of the Greek language represented in the various genres. The very same idea may be put across by a writer in one genre in the most basic fashion, while another writer in another genre may say it in flowery and grandiose terms. The same idea is embedded in each instance; its meaning may be quite different due the language in which it is expressed (and that is said while keeping in mind that we are not discussing context, rhetorical use of a fact, etc.). Now imagine taking expression 1 and dropping it into instance 2, in place of expression 2. It will be out of place, perhaps even appearing to be crass or overwrought, depending on its new surroundings --- causing all manner of difficulties for reader/hearer. Knowing exactly what someone means is often just the beginning of things.
brwski
Jack9 writes: I don't judge people by their spelling. I judge them by the quality of their communicated thoughts.
Ah, but there's the rub. If someone cannot use the commonly agreed-upon forms for spelling, grammar, etc., I and most others will simply drop what we are reading and move on to something else. No matter how fine the thought behind something, it will likely never be given the time of day if it is presented in a shoddy fashion. Not fair! the Slashdotters cry. Not fair! Ah, but it is. If someone is bright enough to have a fine idea, they are bright enough to express it in a way that is polite to those who may come across it. Conventions of spelling, grammar, and of many other sorts are not there to hamstring people; they are there to grease the skids of language, so to speak.
brwski
hexed_2050 writes: I'm not trying to say that the Internet was better in its younger days
Oh, but it was. Amazingly so.
Most of that had to do with size; it was quite possible to know most of the idiots by name, even and up until 1993 or so, and simply avoid them. It's like a small town --- you can shun the local jerk, and everyone (except the jerk) is happier for it. But now that we're all living in Mexico City, Tokyo, or some other monstrously large city, that simply does not and can not work.
The only real way to find happiness is to build your own gated community, and only go out for groceries now and then. But that doesn't work either --- either insularity and parochialism take over, or it is the equivalent of living in a pre-industrial village. Interesting neighbors, but you've heard all their stories before, plus they smell and their pets are nuisances.
I miss the old days. But I'd also miss what I have access to today if I found myself back in 1989. Excellent point, sir.
brwski