Microsoft and Apple don't really have a relationship. The Mac Business Unit at Microsoft, which is basically its own little independent unit, and Apple have a relationship. The MacBU aren't the ones responsible for Windows Media Player on OS X.
VirtualPC uses a kernel extension to do the OS management, and Rosetta cannot emulate kernel extensions. So no surprise that it doesn't work there. Even if it did, would you really want to run an emulator which emulates emulated code? VirtualPC produces PowerPC code, which Rosetta would then have to translate to x86. The inefficiencies involved would be utterly massive.
That's not a fair comparison. Apple has a leg-up with Rosetta because they have native versions of all the APIs sitting around. Microsoft wasn't about to re-implement the entire Win32 API in PowerPC just so VirtualPC would run faster, especially upon hearing about the Intel transition.
True enough. I'm not knocking Dell monitors or anything (I'm the very happy owner of a 2005fpw), but it just kind of seemed out of the blue that there was a "Hey Dell has a 30" monitor too!" post.
One of the best I've seen was Alan Sokal's experiment with cultural studies. Sokal is a physicist at NYU who wrote a completely ridiculous paper entitled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" and managed to get it published in a reputable social science journal. While hilarious, the prank has a very serious message. The cultural studies fields are far too preoccupied with making themselves appear scientific rather than actually following the scientific method.
False. Nothing stops you from having a factory object, or adding factory methods to your class, which is all Objective-C does anyway. It just happens to be the convention in Cocoa/NextStep.
Are you talking about having an object method that populates the class with certain values? Because that seems a little clunky to me. In Objective-C, you can do it all in one call. In C++, you'd have to split those actions.
Once again nothing stops you from using a different coding style, you can write classes that do object.value(), where the only difference is choice of punctuation.
True, but C++ makes it a little harder. If memory serves, in a class, you can't have a method named "value" and a member with the same name. You have to use "_value" for your member name.
As for garbage collection, the goal of garbage collection is not to "get rid of" pointers, it is to avoid memory leaks, repeated deallocations of the same object, and dereferencing of invalid pointers (ie premature deallocation). A C compiler/runtime could be created that incorporated garbage collection. Assuming you didn't do anything "evil" like xor pointers with a "secret code", you would be fine.
I agree. In fact, I think Apple is working on adding garbage collection to Cocoa / Objective-C. But a language like Java simply takes care of all deallocations for you with its garbage collection. Granted, this is nice, but I think that people are taking Java's popularity to imply that the way it does things is the way things should be done.
That's interesting, although your example code highlights another problem with the C++ naming conventions in general. The tendency is to name a function based on what it does, rather than what it returns. Now, you could argue either way, but Objective-C naming conventions would have you example code looking more like
Personally, I prefer to have naming conventions which read easily in English; that's what makes a language self-documenting.
But there are legitimate cases for naming a function based on its actions. Sometimes you don't care about the return. For example, I wrote a bin-packing program for my algorithms course, and I named a function
itemWasPlacedInBin(...)
because it returned a Boolean value. Now, a case arose where I was guaranteed success when calling this function, so I didn't assign its result to anything. So that function name in the code looked a little weird. What I did was use a macro to alias a call
They used the back-end code, yes. But I actually used SoundJam. iTunes was completely different except for some vague parallels in the ID3 tag editor interface.
I'm sorry, but I have to disagree. Objective-C has the most intelligent syntax of any language I've ever worked with. Just because none of the latest "miracle" languages, like C# and Java, have adopted a new function calling syntax doesn't mean there aren't problems with it. Frankly, the constructor naming for C++, Java and C# is brain-dead. What makes more sense?
color = NSColor(128, 128, 64, 0);
or
color = [NSColor colorWithRed:128 Green:128 Blue:64 Alpha:0];
I would much rather have an idea of what parameters are without having to refer to a header file. And being able to have initializers that are of different names is a HUGE plus. In C++ et al, all your constructors are forced to have the same name, varying only among their parameters. I could do a
color = [NSColor redColor];
call and still get a new color object. In C++, you'd have to pass in some sort of enumerated constant or something.
And this says nothing about the ridiculous naming conventions of C++ and Java. Translate the following statements into English.
value = object.getValue();
and
value = [object value];
The first is C++ and translates to "Assign value to get the value of object". The second is Objective-C and translates to "Assign value to value of object". This is why Objective-C is called a self-documenting language.
As for memory management, yes, it can be a pain. Any Cocoa developer could tell you tales of how he accidentally released an autoreleased object and spent a half-hour trying to figure it out. But Objective-C is a strict superset of C. Being able to work with pointers is absolutely necessary. That's one of the biggest strong-points of Objective-C. Virtually any C library will work with absolutely no modification at all.
I'd love to see garbage collection added, but not as the primary method of managing memory. It should be there to catch what the developer misses, not to be the sole method of memory management. We'll never get rid of pointers. They will always be there.
I hate to break this to you, but Apple was the company responsible for Smalltalk, and Steve Jobs was the guy responsible for NeXT. Please explain how Jobs can rip off himself.
Please. iTunes was and always has been a simple UI in a sea of overly cluttered WinAmp-style garbage. The only things Apple copied were having one area reserved for showing playlists and one area reserved for showing tracks. Otherwise, iTunes was totally different from any other jukebox available at the time. The single-window approach was what made it so successful.
My point is that IE/Mac is more secure than Safari. IE/MacOSX was a lousy Carbon job so it's not tied into any framework besides Carbon. In much the same way as any malware app on Windows can embed an IE control to download files, ads, rootkits, etc., any Mac app can embed Safari to do the same thing.
So? How is this any different from using the Core Foundation API to do the same things? Any API can be used toward malicious ends. Apple had an API for establishing network connections long before WebKit, but I didn't see anyone whining about that one. Microsoft's error wasn't in including an HTML renderer library as you seem to think. Their error was making low-level OS components reliant on that library. Apple has not made that mistake.
I agree that a WebKit app can do much less damage than an IE/Windows app assuming everyone's system is patched up, since most Windows users run as Administrator all the time, but both Safari and IE/Windows have had flaws that opened up users' systems in unexpected ways.
And the same is true of any library. Security exploits are not exclusive to HTML renderers.
You're misunderstanding why Internet Explorer causes security problems. Safari is no different from any other Mac OS X application in that it uses frameworks to do its thing. So if there's a security vulnerability in any framework, every application which uses that framework is vulnerable. WebKit is no better off or worse off. It's just a framework for managing HTML connections and rendering HTML content.
This is not analogous to what Microsoft has done with Internet Explorer. Windows Explorer uses the MSHTML DLL to browse the file system, and Microsoft's HTML integration with the file browser runs so deeply that security flaws which would normally only be minor browser irritants become flaws which can execute arbitrary code in the file browser's memory space. Witness the security travesty that is ActiveX. A browser technology laden with security flaws suddenly becomes an operating system-level problem because of ActiveDesktop.
Apple does not use WebKit for the Finder, and the Finder is far less tied into the underlying OS than Windows Explorer is. The Finder has some special features over other applications, but at the end of the day, it's just another application which can be quit if you don't like it without really losing much. In Windows, it's a different story. For example, it's impossible to manipulate the Control Panel without Windows Explorer because that interface is guarded by private APIs. Mac OS X uses a separate application to change system settings.
It was just a stupid movie. Seriously, a virus that wipes out 99% of the population on Earth? How the fuck did that thing spread? Did it travel on the backs of photons? And a society which has mastered genetics to such an extent to be able to clone humans and yet it can't handle something as simple as invitro fertilization? They have to enact a complicated scheme to secretly implant women with cloned embryos unknowingly? Give me a break. Oh yeah, and I forgot. Love conquers all.
Beyond the stupidity of the plot, the action was just boring and uninteresting. It's Aeon breaking people's necks for 2 hours. We never get any explanation at all for where she's acquired these amazing acrobatic skills and killing techniques. We get no information at all about her background in this resistance, who the freaky resistance leader lady actually is, etc... Beyond the boring action and complete lack of any context at all for the central character, there's the stupid techno-wanking. Seriously, Aeon breaks into a "surveillance center" that looks like some sort of suspended waterfall. And to destroy it, she pulls a fucking drain plug, and all the water swirls down. Who the fuck comes up with technology like this? Anime sci-fi geeks. And the chairman's security perimeter consisted entirely of tree pods that shoot... well, something, and grass that turns into knives. The latter could have been defeated with a pair of steel-toed work boots.
Beyond that, Charlize Theron looked positively awful. I don't know what it is with anime geeks and making women's hair look like an oil spill (see Trinity in The Matrix for another example), but it looked terrible. Theron's a blond and was just the wrong choice for the role entirely. The outfits weren't exactly flattering either. I don't know why geeks have this unified vision of the fashion of the future being composed entirely of jump suits, but it's fucking stupid. It may work when you can draw women who have a waist line as thin as my LCD, but real women actually have midsections. And what the hell was with Aeon wearing an all white jump suit when she was trying to break in to the surveillance center at night?
This movie was not worth $7.50 and driving through shit weather to get to. It's not even a good rental. It's just stupid.
So why is defending cyberspace in thier mission statement?
Maybe they got the wrong impression of Cyberspace from the movie Hackers. They couldn't leave that mess in the hands of Penn Jilette, after all!
But semi-seriously, it's very simple. When the United State first began space exploration, the USAF claimed, "It's in the sky, so it's ours." Makes sense. So they own both air and space. Therefore, they own cyberspace... because it has the word "space" in it. I look forward to when the USAF moves to take control over the "Integer Space" and "Real Number Space". We'll see how infinite they feel when they've got a couple F-22's breathing down their necks!
I had a similar experience when I first got my 2005fp. I upgraded from a 19" CRT, and the Dell LCD was so bright and crisp that it took me time to adjust. Also, having more of my field of vision saturated with the widescreen played a part as well. But now that I'm used to it, I can't think of a better way to code than on a widescreen LCD.
Babylon 5 started out as a god awful sci-fi show with shitty writing, a boring, John Kerry-like main character and bad music. After they ditched Sinclair for Sheridan, things started to pick up. The writing was on par with Star Wars prequel dialogue the whole way through, but for some reason, I could set that aside and enjoy it. I did the same with Episode III, so not surprising. There was an occasional gem in there, too. But too many times, the spirit of JMS would possess one of the characters, causing him or her to engage in some philosophical diatribe for way too long.
Babylon 5 took its final dive with Legend of the Rangers. What a god-awful piece of shit that was.
Dumb luck can overcome it, if the arrow happens to strike the other arrow when the head happens to be in the middle point of its oscillation.
Even if that happened, the momentum of the arrow head's oscillatory motion doesn't just disappear. It would not be a straight shot down the shaft.
I don't comment on whether skill can overcome it or not, since I don't know what causes the oscillation: air friction, the shock of being pushed forward by the bowstring, or some other factor.
Oscillation is a combination of factors. The feathers on the arrow contribute toward uneven airflow over the surface, or the launching surface of the arrow could be irregular.
Unfortunately, this experiment only proves that the arrow used in the experiment did not split envenly down the middle; it does not prove that no arrrow could be split evenly donw the middle. Or to put it another way: all arrows are not made equal.
I'm sorry, but don't be stupid. The onus is not on the Myth Busters to disprove this claim. They are merely testing it. Their tests show that the claim is extremely suspect, at best, and their results agree with what we would theoretically expect using basic Newtonian mechanics. If you'd like the spend the next 25 years trying to achieve a perfect split, you're more than welcome, but it simply won't happen.
Sorry, but no. That archer X is unable to split arrows with other arrows says nothing of archer Y's ability to do it. Remember, the arrow-splitting incident was supposed to demonstrate Robins mastery of archery, so obviously it can't be something that every Joe Archer could do at will. And I know from experience that, when chopping wood (which arrows in Robin Hoods time were made of) hitting it in the right spot in the right way is absolutely vital to get it to split easily.
Archer Y's "mastery" of archery says nothing about the physics of the situation. When fired through the air, an arrow will actually oscillate. The shaft appears to "wobble" in a slow-motion camera. This will cause the point of the arrow to take on different angles throughout flight. No matter how good Robin Hood was, there is no possible way he could get the arrow to split evenly down the middle. The arrow head's oscillation makes this impossible, and there's no amount of skill which can overcome that motion.
So no, this myth is not busted. The real (whatever that's supposed to mean here) archers in question couldn't do it; that does not prove that no one could do it.
No, but science demonstrates that it's not possible. The MythBusters went so far as to put an arrow in a firing tube to ensure the straightest possible trajectory and fired it into the target arrow at point-blank range. The target arrow did not split evenly down the middle.
I hate to break it to everyone, but every song on iTMS is still $0.99. The RIAA is making noise about it because they want to put pressure on Apple to do it.
That's exactly what is wrong with the illogical hypocrisy of evolution. It attributes to randomness the incredibly complex living world, yet not the most rabid evolutionsist defender, such as you, would venture to say that something manmade, even as simple as a pencil came into being without thoughtful design. Pencils are writing instuments and so are ball point pens. Ball point pens write much better, more permanently, and are therefore a higher evolved form of a pencil.
Yes, because there's no other rational explanation for how a pencil exists. But the mechanism of natural selection explains the current state of life on this planet quite eloquently and beautifully. Natural selection itself is not random. You're confusing it with random mutation, something people who get all their information about evolution from creationist pamphlets tend to do.
Really, how do you know that? What laid the egg? How did the program codes get into the egg that give the instructions for how to build a chicken?
There was a mutation in the offspring that was advantageous, and it spread to a dominant proportion of the chicken population. It's a pretty simple concept.
Yes, people have de-evolved and stressed already existing life forms, which then respond by becoming resistant to human induced or other stresses. The codes on how to do that were already designed in. In human designs we try to some degree figure out this sort of thing through worst case analasys. Life forms do "evolve", although some prefer to use the word "adapt". Evolution has SOME explanations and data to support those. Evolution however is incapable of giving us the origin of INFORMATION, such as embodied in the DNA codes.
Of course. Evolution only deals with the development of species. What you're looking for is probably abiogenesis theory. Yet another confusion that often comes about when you get all your information about evolution from creationist pamphlets rather than science textbooks.
The step from non-living atomic matter to the complex molecular structures cannot come by any "natural" process we know. Experiments with electric sparks in a flask make assumptions about the atmosphere that have been shown to be wrong. Even if true, the simple compounds produced, compared to the structure of most proteins is laughable. It is like comparing the Space Shuttle to a 25 cent balsa wood glider. Once living things are around, they can adapt, mutate and change and if you want to call that evolution, that is just a matter of vocabulary.
Yes, Miller's experiment has been challenged, but it's been challenged by competing theories. And none of those theories involve an "intelligent designer" either.
Entropy is fundamentally opposed to evolution. Evolution dogma preaches that things go from disorder and simplicity to order and complexity by non-directed neboulous means. It is completely contrary to what we all experience every day. It takes energy and INTELLIGENCE to clean up your house. If BOTH of these are not applied, your house will get always messier and dirtier. You pay good money to intelligent? mechanics to maintain your car to slow down the effects of wear caused by entropy.
You obviously have no idea what the second law of thermodynamics actually states. It applies to closed systems, genius. Organisms are not closed systems, just as a population of organisms is not a closed system. There is nothing about the second law which states that random mutation cannot occur or that members of a species with disadvantageous traits will not reproduce.
The entropy of an open system can go up or down; that's why your computer works. If you'd bothered to read a science textbook instead of creationist garbage, you might know that. I'd suggest enrolling in a basic physics course at your local community college.
So why don't you or some evolutionist "evolve" s better design.
Because evolution isn't some conscious process, you dolt. It's the result of random mutation and natural selection. And as humans, we've stunted our own evolution by artificially allowing disadvantageous mutations to survive rather than die off.
By best effort it ought to be possible to figure out how to prevent the law of entropy from affecting the design, not only of humans, but of everything else, whether natural or manmade. Since the DNA code for building a new breathing tube has not been written, why doesn't someone add that into the human OS? Don't knock someon'e product unless you can come up with something superior.
Why can't I knock the product? The people saying that this is the result of some conscious design also happen to claim the designer is omniscient. Therefore, finding any flaw in the design is an indictment of it. Never mind that there are examples of separated breathing and ingesting apparatuses all over nature, like the fish. I don't have to come up with anything. Nature itself has already done that.
And what the fuck does entropy have to do with humans using the same pipe to breathe and ingest food?
The basic problem with evolution is that nobody has demonstrated any of its processes by a repeatable experiment. The biggest problem isn't how living organisms change or mutate, but how to make a living thing, such as an amoeba, from non-living matter. If evolution were really true SOMEONE should have been able to duplicate evolution and make a living cell. A repeatable experiment or a consistent observation is science. Anything else is belief. Evolution is simply the belief that things just happened by any other means besides the activity of mind and the best efforts of human minds have never duplicated.
People have duplicated evolution, you blithering moron. Ever hear of the problem farmers have with pesticides? If they use them too frequently, they'll kill off all the members of the pests that don't have a built-in immunity to the pesticide and increase the proportion of the population that does. That's a perfect example of natural selection favoring those with beneficial mutations.
If I make a better mousetrap, someone should able to take it apart and figure out how to duplicate it and perhaps even to imrove it. That's why we patent things so that someone can't just look at something anyone else has built and duplicate it for profit. In human creations, anything can be duplicated by other humans. Yet in natural things, such as even a "simple" one celled organism, nobody has yet duplicated one from parts that were never part of a living thing before.
Your demands are unreasonable. All that science requires is a verification of the mechanism, not a duplication of every event that has come about as a result of that mechanism. Must we now verify the general theory of relativity by creating our own black hole?
There are many questions that evolution cannot answer. The original chicken and egg question concerning DNA and proteins is one. DNA carries the information on how to build proteins, but DNA itself is made with proteins. So what came first? A disk drive contains all the information and capability on how to build itself. How does the first drive get built if there is no other drive to read out the information on how to make one in the first place? The answer of course in all cases is that someone outside has the information on how to build one, makes the first one, and then after it is built, records the information on that first model. After that as many proteins or other living things can be made from the encoded information combined with the available raw materials. We all understand these principles when it comes to human creations, but many are unwilling to apply these same principles to the natural world.
This kind of thing really illustrates Mac OS X's malware resiliency. There is no CD auto-run, so there is no way for these extensions to even be installed without the user manually double-clicking on this Start.app thing. From there, the user has to enter his administrator password, assuming he's an administrator on the machine. Only then will this DRM software get installed. So I don't expect this to cause too much trouble.
And even after that, it's not the gigantic pain in the ass to remove that the Windows stuff is. Removal is a simple matter of unloading the kernel extensions and deleting them with administrator privileges. For some reason, Windows seems to facilitate the development of software that installs silently and is utterly impossible to remove.
This is why it's not just the popularity factor that keeps OS X malware-free. It's a solid design based around the idea of minimal automation and least privileges needed. Even if OS X was twice as popular, any malware would still have the same hurdles to jump through.
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Microsoft and Apple don't really have a relationship. The Mac Business Unit at Microsoft, which is basically its own little independent unit, and Apple have a relationship. The MacBU aren't the ones responsible for Windows Media Player on OS X.
VirtualPC uses a kernel extension to do the OS management, and Rosetta cannot emulate kernel extensions. So no surprise that it doesn't work there. Even if it did, would you really want to run an emulator which emulates emulated code? VirtualPC produces PowerPC code, which Rosetta would then have to translate to x86. The inefficiencies involved would be utterly massive.
That's not a fair comparison. Apple has a leg-up with Rosetta because they have native versions of all the APIs sitting around. Microsoft wasn't about to re-implement the entire Win32 API in PowerPC just so VirtualPC would run faster, especially upon hearing about the Intel transition.
True enough. I'm not knocking Dell monitors or anything (I'm the very happy owner of a 2005fpw), but it just kind of seemed out of the blue that there was a "Hey Dell has a 30" monitor too!" post.
Dell's had a 30" display for a while, haven't they? Since when did Slashdot become a Dell plug site?
One of the best I've seen was Alan Sokal's experiment with cultural studies. Sokal is a physicist at NYU who wrote a completely ridiculous paper entitled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" and managed to get it published in a reputable social science journal. While hilarious, the prank has a very serious message. The cultural studies fields are far too preoccupied with making themselves appear scientific rather than actually following the scientific method.
But there are legitimate cases for naming a function based on its actions. Sometimes you don't care about the return. For example, I wrote a bin-packing program for my algorithms course, and I named a functionbecause it returned a Boolean value. Now, a case arose where I was guaranteed success when calling this function, so I didn't assign its result to anything. So that function name in the code looked a little weird. What I did was use a macro to alias a callto that function.
They used the back-end code, yes. But I actually used SoundJam. iTunes was completely different except for some vague parallels in the ID3 tag editor interface.
And this says nothing about the ridiculous naming conventions of C++ and Java. Translate the following statements into English.andThe first is C++ and translates to "Assign value to get the value of object". The second is Objective-C and translates to "Assign value to value of object". This is why Objective-C is called a self-documenting language.
As for memory management, yes, it can be a pain. Any Cocoa developer could tell you tales of how he accidentally released an autoreleased object and spent a half-hour trying to figure it out. But Objective-C is a strict superset of C. Being able to work with pointers is absolutely necessary. That's one of the biggest strong-points of Objective-C. Virtually any C library will work with absolutely no modification at all.
I'd love to see garbage collection added, but not as the primary method of managing memory. It should be there to catch what the developer misses, not to be the sole method of memory management. We'll never get rid of pointers. They will always be there.
I hate to break this to you, but Apple was the company responsible for Smalltalk, and Steve Jobs was the guy responsible for NeXT. Please explain how Jobs can rip off himself.
Please. iTunes was and always has been a simple UI in a sea of overly cluttered WinAmp-style garbage. The only things Apple copied were having one area reserved for showing playlists and one area reserved for showing tracks. Otherwise, iTunes was totally different from any other jukebox available at the time. The single-window approach was what made it so successful.
You're misunderstanding why Internet Explorer causes security problems. Safari is no different from any other Mac OS X application in that it uses frameworks to do its thing. So if there's a security vulnerability in any framework, every application which uses that framework is vulnerable. WebKit is no better off or worse off. It's just a framework for managing HTML connections and rendering HTML content.
This is not analogous to what Microsoft has done with Internet Explorer. Windows Explorer uses the MSHTML DLL to browse the file system, and Microsoft's HTML integration with the file browser runs so deeply that security flaws which would normally only be minor browser irritants become flaws which can execute arbitrary code in the file browser's memory space. Witness the security travesty that is ActiveX. A browser technology laden with security flaws suddenly becomes an operating system-level problem because of ActiveDesktop.
Apple does not use WebKit for the Finder, and the Finder is far less tied into the underlying OS than Windows Explorer is. The Finder has some special features over other applications, but at the end of the day, it's just another application which can be quit if you don't like it without really losing much. In Windows, it's a different story. For example, it's impossible to manipulate the Control Panel without Windows Explorer because that interface is guarded by private APIs. Mac OS X uses a separate application to change system settings.
It was just a stupid movie. Seriously, a virus that wipes out 99% of the population on Earth? How the fuck did that thing spread? Did it travel on the backs of photons? And a society which has mastered genetics to such an extent to be able to clone humans and yet it can't handle something as simple as invitro fertilization? They have to enact a complicated scheme to secretly implant women with cloned embryos unknowingly? Give me a break. Oh yeah, and I forgot. Love conquers all.
... Beyond the boring action and complete lack of any context at all for the central character, there's the stupid techno-wanking. Seriously, Aeon breaks into a "surveillance center" that looks like some sort of suspended waterfall. And to destroy it, she pulls a fucking drain plug, and all the water swirls down. Who the fuck comes up with technology like this? Anime sci-fi geeks. And the chairman's security perimeter consisted entirely of tree pods that shoot ... well, something, and grass that turns into knives. The latter could have been defeated with a pair of steel-toed work boots.
Beyond the stupidity of the plot, the action was just boring and uninteresting. It's Aeon breaking people's necks for 2 hours. We never get any explanation at all for where she's acquired these amazing acrobatic skills and killing techniques. We get no information at all about her background in this resistance, who the freaky resistance leader lady actually is, etc
Beyond that, Charlize Theron looked positively awful. I don't know what it is with anime geeks and making women's hair look like an oil spill (see Trinity in The Matrix for another example), but it looked terrible. Theron's a blond and was just the wrong choice for the role entirely. The outfits weren't exactly flattering either. I don't know why geeks have this unified vision of the fashion of the future being composed entirely of jump suits, but it's fucking stupid. It may work when you can draw women who have a waist line as thin as my LCD, but real women actually have midsections. And what the hell was with Aeon wearing an all white jump suit when she was trying to break in to the surveillance center at night?
This movie was not worth $7.50 and driving through shit weather to get to. It's not even a good rental. It's just stupid.
I had a similar experience when I first got my 2005fp. I upgraded from a 19" CRT, and the Dell LCD was so bright and crisp that it took me time to adjust. Also, having more of my field of vision saturated with the widescreen played a part as well. But now that I'm used to it, I can't think of a better way to code than on a widescreen LCD.
Babylon 5 started out as a god awful sci-fi show with shitty writing, a boring, John Kerry-like main character and bad music. After they ditched Sinclair for Sheridan, things started to pick up. The writing was on par with Star Wars prequel dialogue the whole way through, but for some reason, I could set that aside and enjoy it. I did the same with Episode III, so not surprising. There was an occasional gem in there, too. But too many times, the spirit of JMS would possess one of the characters, causing him or her to engage in some philosophical diatribe for way too long.
Babylon 5 took its final dive with Legend of the Rangers. What a god-awful piece of shit that was.
And in this thread, we're busting the myth that Kari might actually be interested in random people posting on Slashdot.
I hate to break it to everyone, but every song on iTMS is still $0.99. The RIAA is making noise about it because they want to put pressure on Apple to do it.
Yes, because there's no other rational explanation for how a pencil exists. But the mechanism of natural selection explains the current state of life on this planet quite eloquently and beautifully. Natural selection itself is not random. You're confusing it with random mutation, something people who get all their information about evolution from creationist pamphlets tend to do.
There was a mutation in the offspring that was advantageous, and it spread to a dominant proportion of the chicken population. It's a pretty simple concept.
Of course. Evolution only deals with the development of species. What you're looking for is probably abiogenesis theory. Yet another confusion that often comes about when you get all your information about evolution from creationist pamphlets rather than science textbooks.
Yes, Miller's experiment has been challenged, but it's been challenged by competing theories. And none of those theories involve an "intelligent designer" either.
You obviously have no idea what the second law of thermodynamics actually states. It applies to closed systems, genius. Organisms are not closed systems, just as a population of organisms is not a closed system. There is nothing about the second law which states that random mutation cannot occur or that members of a species with disadvantageous traits will not reproduce.
The entropy of an open system can go up or down; that's why your computer works. If you'd bothered to read a science textbook instead of creationist garbage, you might know that. I'd suggest enrolling in a basic physics course at your local community college.
Because evolution isn't some conscious process, you dolt. It's the result of random mutation and natural selection. And as humans, we've stunted our own evolution by artificially allowing disadvantageous mutations to survive rather than die off.
Why can't I knock the product? The people saying that this is the result of some conscious design also happen to claim the designer is omniscient. Therefore, finding any flaw in the design is an indictment of it. Never mind that there are examples of separated breathing and ingesting apparatuses all over nature, like the fish. I don't have to come up with anything. Nature itself has already done that.
And what the fuck does entropy have to do with humans using the same pipe to breathe and ingest food?
People have duplicated evolution, you blithering moron. Ever hear of the problem farmers have with pesticides? If they use them too frequently, they'll kill off all the members of the pests that don't have a built-in immunity to the pesticide and increase the proportion of the population that does. That's a perfect example of natural selection favoring those with beneficial mutations.
Your demands are unreasonable. All that science requires is a verification of the mechanism, not a duplication of every event that has come about as a result of that mechanism. Must we now verify the general theory of relativity by creating our own black hole?
What's s
This kind of thing really illustrates Mac OS X's malware resiliency. There is no CD auto-run, so there is no way for these extensions to even be installed without the user manually double-clicking on this Start.app thing. From there, the user has to enter his administrator password, assuming he's an administrator on the machine. Only then will this DRM software get installed. So I don't expect this to cause too much trouble.
And even after that, it's not the gigantic pain in the ass to remove that the Windows stuff is. Removal is a simple matter of unloading the kernel extensions and deleting them with administrator privileges. For some reason, Windows seems to facilitate the development of software that installs silently and is utterly impossible to remove.
This is why it's not just the popularity factor that keeps OS X malware-free. It's a solid design based around the idea of minimal automation and least privileges needed. Even if OS X was twice as popular, any malware would still have the same hurdles to jump through.