The author of the code is not assuming that getpid() returns random numbers. I am not familiar with the code, but even so, it is obvious to me what it is doing. The timeouts are constructed to avoid resource contention or "chunky" execution when dealing with another running processes in the qmail suite.
Suppose Process A, B, and C all want to access a specific resource. If they all try at once, one will succeed and the others will either fail or block. If they take a non-blocking approach, they may decide to wait some amount of time, then reattempt the acquisition. If they all wait 5 seconds, then try again, they will be in the same situation of all trying to acquire the resource at the same time.
More generally, suppose the system is set up with many subprocesses (and I believe qmail is such a system). All processes sleep for some amount of time, then wake up to see if there is any work to do. If all processes slept for the same amount of time (say 60 seconds), but they were not started up in a staggered fashion, then every 60 seconds the CPU would suffer a hit as all the processes try to wake up at once, to see if there is any work to do.
The code is using the pid of the process to skew the timers so that each process sleeps (or waits or whatever) for slightly different lengths of time . This helps spread out the background processing more evenly. This differences don't need to be completely random or unique, they only need to be "usually" different. In this case getpid() is good enough and faster than a call to random().
Unloading bundles containing Objective-C was enabled in Mac OS X 10.4.7, and presumably works in 10.5 as well. [Although the new Obj-C garbage collection mechanisms could throw a wrench into the works...] There are some restrictions, most of them obvious (don't unload a class that is a superclass of instanciated objects, or that is attached to a Key-Value Binding, etc.)
From the Release Notes:
Mac OS X Tiger Release Notes Objective-C Runtime...
Unloading bundle libraries
Bundle libraries containing Objective-C code may now be unloaded. However, there are some restrictions on the bundle's contents and on the behavior of the unloader. These caveats include:
* An unloadable bundle must not define a category on a class that will exist after the bundle is unloaded. * A class in an unloadable bundle must not pose as any class that will exist after the bundle is unloaded. * A class in an unloadable bundle must not be the superclass of any class that will exist after the bundle is unloaded. * No instances of any class defined in an unloadable bundle can exist when the bundle is unloaded. In particular, autoreleased instances of unloaded classes will behave incorrectly when the autorelease pool is popped. * Foundation's Key-Value Coding and Key-Value Observing may not behave correctly when used with classes that are then unloaded.
objc_unloadModules() remains unimplemented. Use the NSBundle, CFBundle, or dyld APIs to unload bundle libraries.
I've been observing the revolt at digg throughout the day. The editors can no longer keep up with the posts. The entire digg front page (and most of the "Upcoming stories") is flooded with posts about the HD-DVD key.
Since AACS was broken 6 weeks ago, the MPAA and AACS LA have been sending out a flurry of DMCA takedown notices. However, as this example shows, the takedown notices seem to be delivered via USPS Express Mail. As mentioned, the current explosion has more than 300,000 pages mentioning the key (I don't know how many link to the Doom9 page). IIRC, Express Mail costs about USD $8
[usps.com seems to be off-line at the moment]. Sending out 300,000 notices at $8 a pop would inject $2.4M into the coffers of the United States Postal Service. Perhaps they would even roll back the rate increase that went into effect today [yeah, right].
Of course, delivering that many notices by physical mail would be prohibitively expensive, not to mention an ecological nightmare. The $2.4M would probably be better of spent combating the real pirates, rather than bloggers and video consumers.
Our building had a similar attempt at a "smart" office. It would automatically turn on/off lights, HVAC, etc based upon movement. Unfortunately, the system made very poor assumptions about people working off-hours, weekends, and such.
Basically, if a handful of people were working into the evening or on a weekend, they wouldn't provide sufficient input to the system. After 30 minutes of no movement in the hallways, the system would assume irresponsible workers had vacated the building, leaving the lights on and the security system deactivated. The system would kindly correct that situation, turning off the lights and arming the security system. Some hapless soul would stumble out of his darkened office, into the darkened hallway, triggering the motion sensors, which the security system would interpret as an intruder, sounding the alarm and alerting the local police.
The workaround was idiotic: Every 15-20 minutes we would have to get up from our desks, go out into the hallway, and wave our arms. This would keep the lights on and the alarm off, but we still never got any heat or A/C on the weekends. The morons that set up the system couldn't overcome these serious defects, although they eventually modified it so there was a 3 minute gap between turning off the lights and enabling the alarm.
During the normal 8-6 business hours, there were only minor inconveniences - the worst being the toilets. The lights in the toilets were triggered by a motion sensor. They would automatically turn on when someone entered the toilet, and turn off when it sensed no motion for several minutes. However, some bathroom breaks require a bit more than 2 minutes. (Hey, programmers don't always have the best diets...) Spend too long in the stall and the lights went out, plunging the bathroom into pitch blackness. The half dozen rolls of toilet paper on top of the toilet tank weren't used to refresh empties - when the lights went out, we would chuck the rolls over the walls of the stall until the lights came back on.
This didn't matter much, because the first iPod sucked (small capacity, Mac-only, no AAC support, mechanical scroll wheel prone to failure, etc.)
I had a 1st generation iPod and loved it.
small capacity - 5GB was a hell of a lot more capacity than the Rio 800 I had beforehand.
Mac-only - I have 4 Macs, so that wasn't an issue. Even after Windows support was added later, Firewire-only was the real problem (so few PCs had working Firewire).
no AAC - When Apple started shipping AAC, it provided a firmware upgrade to all iPods (including 1st gens) adding AAC support.
mechanical scroll wheel - I still prefer the feel of the mechanical scroll wheel. Mine never failed - and I could use it when wearing gloves.
Actually, my biggest complaint of the 1st generation iPod was its size and weight. You could put it in a shirt pocket, but you wouldn't want to. Eventually, the hard disk in my 1st gen died after 5 years, so I replaced it with an 8GB nano.
There is the one by Grady Booch, and many pale imitations. Here is the list (with authors):
"The Art of Project Management" - Scott Berkun "Object Oriented Analysis and Design" - Grady Booch "Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software" - Gamma, Helm, Johnson, Vlissides "Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code" - Martin Fowler
and I would add "The Mythical Man-month" - Frederic P. Brooks Jr.
To improve your people skills, try: "Constantine on Peopleware" - Larry Constantine or "Peopleware - Productive Projects and Teams" - Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister
But, as mentioned previously, you can't learn it all from books - especially social skills. One way to improve both your people skills and your technical skills is to participate in "Peer code reviews" - one-on-one or one-on-two review of code, usually before check-in. Peer code review has many benefits, but one of them (for someone with a decade of experience) is an easy slide into mentorship. Being a good mentor is one of the hallmarks of "senior developer".
Also, write. Writing skills are essential to good communication. A senior engineer, project leader, or software/system architect requires good communications skills. This allows you to effectively communicate your designs, ideas, and visions not just to those who work with you (or for you), but also to your superiors.
The site takes forever to load (understandable Flash + Slashdot effect). However, the Flash view is not resizable, so I cannot get a larger view of the painting, only a small window through which to view a fragment of the fresco. I have a 30-inch Cinema HD display. I want to fill that display with the image. Even though there is a "Full Screen" link on the page, it only opens a full screen browser window, with the small flash view in the upper left corner, occupying 10% of the window.
You may exercise these rights on up to 2 (two) non-portable Authorized Devices (e.g. laptop or desktop computers) and two (2) portable Authorized Devices as specifically designated by Amazon from time to time.
I suppose in the altered reality of these asshats, they consider laptop computers to be "non-portable" devices.
We all know how well the Sharks with frickin' laser beams on their head project went at IBM's Boca Raton FL facility back in the 90's. Oh, the humanity! [Or would that be "Oh, the Carcharhinidae!"...]
When I was a kid I remember reading this. Last updated in the 1980's [although Asimov's daughter is working on an update], so no new names from the last 25 years. Biographies for over a thousand scientists from ancient egypt to 1982 [with hyperlinks].
IIRC, the reading level was more geared toward grades 8-10, so it might be a stretch for grades 4-6. [But then again, my high school science teacher had us reading Scientific American articles as an intentional stretch - in the 1970's when Scientific American was still hard science.]
The (second) problem with Evolution is where is the evidence that 'lower' species are the ancestors of 'higher' species? Specifically where is the evidence that (non human) apes are the ancestors of modern humans? This is the 'missing link' problem.
This is the fundamental flaw in your understanding of evolution. You will not find evidence that modern "lesser" apes are ancestors of modern humans, because that is not the case. Humans, chimpanzees, and bonobos all share a common ancestor, approximately 5 million years ago. They each evolved separately from that ancestral base - three separate branches on the tree of primates. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonobo#Closeness_to_h umanity/
This also applies to the "God built humans from spare chimp parts" comment posted earlier.
> I've always wondered how they could have evolved from something like the sabre toothed cat.
Actually, it is the other way around. Large, saber-tooth cats evolved separately several times throughout history from different base feline stocks. The domestic house cat likely derives from similar sized wild cats: http://ds.dial.pipex.com/agarman/blackfoo.htm/
The most apparent flaw is that the theory of Evolution as I understand it proposes that living, conscious creatures were generated from inanimate matter.
Evolution occurs in increments - some big, but most very small. The origins of life are believed to be extremely simple organic molecules that had some ability to replicate. [See research into the origins of life, such as the primordial soup experiments: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_life/ ] Complex attributes, such as binocular vision, opposable thumbs, and consciousness arrive much later in the evolutionary timline. This relates to your second "observed flaw":
Another, albeit less easy to understand flaw is that the theory of Evolution proposes that higher forms of life (e.g. humans) Evolved from lower forms of life (e.g. monkeys/apes).
This pattern is driven by the "survival of the fittest" mechanism described by Darwin in the book. Evolution is spurred by mutations in the genome [mutations caused by transcription error, radiation/chemical damage, etc]. Most mutations are benign. Many mutations are detrimental - resulting in disability and/or death. Some mutations may allow an organism to better survive in its environment - better camouflage, faster attack/escape, ability to digest different "food", etc. Organisms that are more likely to survive are more likely to live long enough to procreate and pass on those beneficial attributes. [See http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2003/1 1/18_smallpox.shtml/] Some mutations are both detrimental and beneficial - the defect that causes sickle-cell anemia also provides some protection against malaria. [See http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/01/2/l_0 12_02.html/]
Our definition of "higher forms of life" is obviously biased, but we could probably agree it involves the addition of some attribute that increases the complexity of the organism in such a way as to significantly improve its chance of survival. The increased brain mass of humans allowed us to push our use of tools and language to the point where we could hunt and gather more effectively, communicate abstract ideas, maintain a record of experiences, radically adapt ourselves to our environment and our environment to ourselves, and ponder the origins of the universe and life.
When the company I working for in 1995 moved to its new building, my new cubicle was positioned directly under a paging system speaker. After hearing the VP marketing/sales paged every 15 minutes for a week, the speaker above my desk mysteriously stopped working late one night;-). That "problem" remained until I left, five years later.
Hell, I'm 48 and the flyback transformer on my TV still drives me nuts. My wife can't hear it, but she calls me deaf because I can't hear her [or do I choose not to hear her?].
"The failed launch attempt comes two weeks after a successful Dnepr launch from Russia's Yasny Launch Base, an active strategic missile facility.
That July 12 liftoff carried the U.S. spacecraft Genesis-1, an inflatable module developed by Las Vegas, Nevada's Bigelow Aerospace as a prototype for future orbital space habitats. Genesis-1 continues to do well, relaying telemetry and images from orbit."
> All you have to do is replace the batteries, probably once a year...
There is the rub. Replacing the battery on my laptop costs USD 100. The Tesla roadster uses 6831 laptop batteries. I would estimate that half the $80,000 cost of the roadster is batteries.
Except that the CinemaNow technologies work only with Windows XP/MS MediaPlayer 10. No Mac OS X support at all. [Although they at least let Mac users browse the site, better than their competition, Movielink.]
I rented 'Groundhog Day' last February, but I still haven't watched it. Every morning I wake up thinking I will watch it, but I get sidetracked reading about
Girl sues Stop-n-Shop because the store failed to protect her from the 19-year old she met in the produce section. He invited her to join him in the back of his van out in the parking lot. But when she followed him, there wasn't a cute puppy in the van at all...
Lots of whitespace, except between the characters. I don't know what font that is, but he font metrics seem to be f*cked up, making the characters short, wide, thin strokes, and horizontally crowded. In contrast to the characters being kerned very closely, the leading is huge. The end result is very difficult for me to read.
If I bump the font size manually [CMD-+ twice], the body becomes legible, but everything else is blown up so big that only 1 or 2 story blocks fit on the page. [1024x768 resolution on 12" iBook]
What a load of horse hockey. There are plenty of replacements for most of the Mac OS X major apps:
Don't like Finder? Try PathFinder http://www.cocoatech.com/ or RBrowser http://www.rbrowser.com/ Don't like Safari? Try OmniWeb, Firefox, Camino, Opera, iCab, or even IE5 Don't like Mail? Try Eudora, Thunderbird, GMail, Entourage, Notes, or any number of other mail clients Don't like Quicktime? Try VLC, RealPlayer, or Microsoft's crappy media player [although QT is better than either of the latter 2] Don't like Dashboard? Try Konfabulator Don't like Keynote/Pages/AppleWorks? Try ThinkFree Office, OpenOffice.org, or Microsoft Office
You could replace nearly all the major applications and many of system components of Mac OS X, but then it wouldn't really be a Mac anymore, would it?.
I know how the planet's name is pronounced in American scientific circles. I also know that many scientists love word play and are the best punsters I have ever met.
Slashdot Mirror
The author of the code is not assuming that getpid() returns random numbers.
I am not familiar with the code, but even so, it is obvious to me what it is doing.
The timeouts are constructed to avoid resource contention or "chunky" execution
when dealing with another running processes in the qmail suite.
Suppose Process A, B, and C all want to access a specific resource. If they all
try at once, one will succeed and the others will either fail or block. If they take
a non-blocking approach, they may decide to wait some amount of time, then
reattempt the acquisition. If they all wait 5 seconds, then try again, they will
be in the same situation of all trying to acquire the resource at the same time.
More generally, suppose the system is set up with many subprocesses (and I
believe qmail is such a system). All processes sleep for some amount of time,
then wake up to see if there is any work to do. If all processes slept for the
same amount of time (say 60 seconds), but they were not started up in a staggered
fashion, then every 60 seconds the CPU would suffer a hit as all the processes
try to wake up at once, to see if there is any work to do.
The code is using the pid of the process to skew the timers so that each process
sleeps (or waits or whatever) for slightly different lengths of time . This helps
spread out the background processing more evenly. This differences don't need
to be completely random or unique, they only need to be "usually" different.
In this case getpid() is good enough and faster than a call to random().
The original paper will be available online ... in 14 years. ;-)
It would have been nice if there was a Kwik-E-Mart in any of the 50 cities/towns in the US/Canada named Springfield. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springfield
Unloading bundles containing Objective-C was enabled in Mac OS X 10.4.7, and presumably works in 10.5 as well.
...
[Although the new Obj-C garbage collection mechanisms could throw a wrench into the works...]
There are some restrictions, most of them obvious (don't unload a class that is a superclass of instanciated objects,
or that is attached to a Key-Value Binding, etc.)
From the Release Notes:
Mac OS X Tiger Release Notes
Objective-C Runtime
Unloading bundle libraries
Bundle libraries containing Objective-C code may now be unloaded. However, there are some restrictions on the bundle's contents and on the behavior of the unloader. These caveats include:
* An unloadable bundle must not define a category on a class that will exist after the bundle is unloaded.
* A class in an unloadable bundle must not pose as any class that will exist after the bundle is unloaded.
* A class in an unloadable bundle must not be the superclass of any class that will exist after the bundle is unloaded.
* No instances of any class defined in an unloadable bundle can exist when the bundle is unloaded. In particular, autoreleased instances of unloaded classes will behave incorrectly when the autorelease pool is popped.
* Foundation's Key-Value Coding and Key-Value Observing may not behave correctly when used with classes that are then unloaded.
objc_unloadModules() remains unimplemented. Use the NSBundle, CFBundle, or dyld APIs to unload bundle libraries.
I've been observing the revolt at digg throughout the day. The editors can no longer keep up with the posts. The entire digg front page (and most of the "Upcoming stories") is flooded with posts about the HD-DVD key.
Someone tried to create a Wikipedia page documenting the revolt, but that too was taken down.
Since AACS was broken 6 weeks ago, the MPAA and AACS LA have been sending out a flurry of DMCA takedown notices. However, as this example shows, the takedown notices seem to be delivered via USPS Express Mail. As mentioned, the current explosion has more than 300,000 pages mentioning the key (I don't know how many link to the Doom9 page). IIRC, Express Mail costs about USD $8 [usps.com seems to be off-line at the moment]. Sending out 300,000 notices at $8 a pop would inject $2.4M into the coffers of the United States Postal Service. Perhaps they would even roll back the rate increase that went into effect today [yeah, right].
Of course, delivering that many notices by physical mail would be prohibitively expensive, not to mention an ecological nightmare. The $2.4M would probably be better of spent combating the real pirates, rather than bloggers and video consumers.
Our building had a similar attempt at a "smart" office. It would automatically turn on/off lights, HVAC, etc based upon movement. Unfortunately, the system made very poor assumptions about people working off-hours, weekends, and such.
Basically, if a handful of people were working into the evening or on a weekend, they wouldn't provide sufficient input to the system. After 30 minutes of no movement in the hallways, the system would assume irresponsible workers had vacated the building, leaving the lights on and the security system deactivated. The system would kindly correct that situation, turning off the lights and arming the security system. Some hapless soul would stumble out of his darkened office, into the darkened hallway, triggering the motion sensors, which the security system would interpret as an intruder, sounding the alarm and alerting the local police.
The workaround was idiotic: Every 15-20 minutes we would have to get up from our desks, go out into the hallway, and wave our arms. This would keep the lights on and the alarm off, but we still never got any heat or A/C on the weekends. The morons that set up the system couldn't overcome these serious defects, although they eventually modified it so there was a 3 minute gap between turning off the lights and enabling the alarm.
During the normal 8-6 business hours, there were only minor inconveniences - the worst being the toilets. The lights in the toilets were triggered by a motion sensor. They would automatically turn on when someone entered the toilet, and turn off when it sensed no motion for several minutes. However, some bathroom breaks require a bit more than 2 minutes. (Hey, programmers don't always have the best diets...) Spend too long in the stall and the lights went out, plunging the bathroom into pitch blackness. The half dozen rolls of toilet paper on top of the toilet tank weren't used to refresh empties - when the lights went out, we would chuck the rolls over the walls of the stall until the lights came back on.
I had a 1st generation iPod and loved it.
Actually, my biggest complaint of the 1st generation iPod was its size and weight. You could put it in a shirt pocket, but you wouldn't want to. Eventually, the hard disk in my 1st gen died after 5 years, so I replaced it with an 8GB nano.
There is the one by Grady Booch, and many pale imitations. Here is the list (with authors):
"The Art of Project Management" - Scott Berkun
"Object Oriented Analysis and Design" - Grady Booch
"Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software" - Gamma, Helm, Johnson, Vlissides
"Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code" - Martin Fowler
and I would add
"The Mythical Man-month" - Frederic P. Brooks Jr.
To improve your people skills, try:
"Constantine on Peopleware" - Larry Constantine
or "Peopleware - Productive Projects and Teams" - Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister
But, as mentioned previously, you can't learn it all from books - especially social skills. One way to improve both your people skills and your technical skills is to participate in "Peer code reviews" - one-on-one or one-on-two review of code, usually before check-in. Peer code review has many benefits, but one of them (for someone with a decade of experience) is an easy slide into mentorship. Being a good mentor is one of the hallmarks of "senior developer".
Also, write. Writing skills are essential to good communication. A senior engineer, project leader, or software/system architect requires good communications skills. This allows you to effectively communicate your designs, ideas, and visions not just to those who work with you (or for you), but also to your superiors.
The site takes forever to load (understandable Flash + Slashdot effect). However, the Flash view is not resizable, so I cannot get a larger view of the painting, only a small window through which to view a fragment of the fresco. I have a 30-inch Cinema HD display. I want to fill that display with the image. Even though there is a "Full Screen" link on the page, it only opens a full screen browser window, with the small flash view in the upper left corner, occupying 10% of the window.
I suppose in the altered reality of these asshats, they consider laptop computers to be "non-portable" devices.
We all know how well the Sharks with frickin' laser beams on their head project went at IBM's Boca Raton FL facility back in the 90's. Oh, the humanity! [Or would that be "Oh, the Carcharhinidae!"...]
Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology
When I was a kid I remember reading this. Last updated in the 1980's [although Asimov's daughter is working on an update], so no new names from the last 25 years. Biographies for over a thousand scientists from ancient egypt to 1982 [with hyperlinks].
IIRC, the reading level was more geared toward grades 8-10, so it might be a stretch for grades 4-6. [But then again, my high school science teacher had us reading Scientific American articles as an intentional stretch - in the 1970's when Scientific American was still hard science.]
This is the fundamental flaw in your understanding of evolution. You will not find evidence that modern "lesser" apes are ancestors of modern humans, because that is not the case. Humans, chimpanzees, and bonobos all share a common ancestor, approximately 5 million years ago. They each evolved separately from that ancestral base - three separate branches on the tree of primates. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonobo#Closeness_to_
This also applies to the "God built humans from spare chimp parts" comment posted earlier.
> I've always wondered how they could have evolved from something like the sabre toothed cat.
Actually, it is the other way around. Large, saber-tooth cats evolved separately several times throughout history from different base feline stocks. The domestic house cat likely derives from similar sized wild cats: http://ds.dial.pipex.com/agarman/blackfoo.htm/
Evolution occurs in increments - some big, but most very small. The origins of life are believed to be extremely simple organic molecules that had some ability to replicate. [See research into the origins of life, such as the primordial soup experiments: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_life/ ] Complex attributes, such as binocular vision, opposable thumbs, and consciousness arrive much later in the evolutionary timline. This relates to your second "observed flaw":
This pattern is driven by the "survival of the fittest" mechanism described by Darwin in the book. Evolution is spurred by mutations in the genome [mutations caused by transcription error, radiation/chemical damage, etc]. Most mutations are benign. Many mutations are detrimental - resulting in disability and/or death. Some mutations may allow an organism to better survive in its environment - better camouflage, faster attack/escape, ability to digest different "food", etc. Organisms that are more likely to survive are more likely to live long enough to procreate and pass on those beneficial attributes. [See http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2003/
Our definition of "higher forms of life" is obviously biased, but we could probably agree it involves the addition of some attribute that increases the complexity of the organism in such a way as to significantly improve its chance of survival. The increased brain mass of humans allowed us to push our use of tools and language to the point where we could hunt and gather more effectively, communicate abstract ideas, maintain a record of experiences, radically adapt ourselves to our environment and our environment to ourselves, and ponder the origins of the universe and life.
When the company I working for in 1995 moved to its new building, my new cubicle was positioned directly under a paging system speaker. After hearing the VP marketing/sales paged every 15 minutes for a week, the speaker above my desk mysteriously stopped working late one night ;-). That "problem" remained until I left, five years later.
Hell, I'm 48 and the flyback transformer on my TV still drives me nuts. My wife can't hear it, but she calls me deaf because I can't hear her [or do I choose not to hear her?].
From TFA:
"The failed launch attempt comes two weeks after a successful Dnepr launch from Russia's Yasny Launch Base, an active strategic missile facility.
That July 12 liftoff carried the U.S. spacecraft Genesis-1, an inflatable module developed by Las Vegas, Nevada's Bigelow Aerospace as a prototype for future orbital space habitats. Genesis-1 continues to do well, relaying telemetry and images from orbit."
> All you have to do is replace the batteries, probably once a year...
There is the rub. Replacing the battery on my laptop costs USD 100. The Tesla roadster uses 6831 laptop batteries. I would estimate that half the $80,000 cost of the roadster is batteries.
Except that the CinemaNow technologies work only with Windows XP/MS MediaPlayer 10.
No Mac OS X support at all. [Although they at least let Mac users browse the site, better
than their competition, Movielink.]
I rented 'Groundhog Day' last February, but I still haven't watched it. Every morning I wake up thinking I will watch it, but I get sidetracked reading about
Girl sues Stop-n-Shop because the store failed to protect her from the 19-year old she met in the produce section. He invited her to join him in the back of his van out in the parking lot. But when she followed him, there wasn't a cute puppy in the van at all...
Lots of whitespace, except between the characters. I don't know what font that is, but he font metrics seem to be f*cked up, making the characters short, wide, thin strokes, and horizontally crowded. In contrast to the characters being kerned very closely, the leading is huge. The end result is very difficult for me to read.
If I bump the font size manually [CMD-+ twice], the body becomes legible, but everything else is blown up so big that only 1 or 2 story blocks fit on the page. [1024x768 resolution on 12" iBook]
What a load of horse hockey. There are plenty of replacements for most of the Mac OS X major apps:
Don't like Finder? Try PathFinder http://www.cocoatech.com/ or RBrowser http://www.rbrowser.com/
Don't like Safari? Try OmniWeb, Firefox, Camino, Opera, iCab, or even IE5
Don't like Mail? Try Eudora, Thunderbird, GMail, Entourage, Notes, or any number of other mail clients
Don't like Quicktime? Try VLC, RealPlayer, or Microsoft's crappy media player [although QT is better than either of the latter 2]
Don't like Dashboard? Try Konfabulator
Don't like Keynote/Pages/AppleWorks? Try ThinkFree Office, OpenOffice.org, or Microsoft Office
You could replace nearly all the major applications and many of system components of Mac OS X, but then it wouldn't really be a Mac anymore, would it?.
I know how the planet's name is pronounced in American scientific circles.
I also know that many scientists love word play and are the best punsters I have ever met.