there are sensors similar to the ones used in the iPod scroll wheel
This is exactly why I have NO INTEREST in this mouse. I have an iPod from the generation where all of the buttons are touchpads like this.
I can't even take the damn thing out of my pocket without accidentally "pressing a button."
The last thing I need is a mouse that starts doing random shit every time I don't grab it in one clean, perfect motion. I like my computer's input devices to behave in a predictable manner, thank you very much.
PostScript is more of a programming language for printers than it is a markup or typesetting language. I mean, it includes loops and the ability to create abstract data types. For typesetting, it gives you the tools to tell the printer how to do most everything that it can do, for setting transformations, for drawing primitives, and for placing letters and text.
Hell, I think that gaming is probably the thing that is most responsible for Microsoft's dominance of the desktop market. The kinds of software that are lacking on non-Windows platforms can be broadly broken into "games" and "niche professional apps." The latter group doesn't directly affect the desktop market much.
In short, their games monopoly is one of the main reasons why they have an OS monopoly.
Given the frequency of terrorist attacks on US soil, it's entirely reasonable that we could go a little under four years without any attacks.
However, all evidence points to the rate of enlistment in terrorist organizations having increased dramatically over the past few years.
The situation is such that empirical arguments on this topic are pretty much impossible, since it's impossible to get any statistically significant numbers on rates of terrorist attacks over an eight year period. However, I would posit that based on the fact that we have to get it right every time, whereast the terrorists only have to get it right once, It is fairly pedestrian to conclude that Bush's policies have almost definitely massively increased the threat of terrorism to US citizens.
Also note that there have been a surprising number of attacks and hostage crises involving our allies lately. I'm personally not surprised that they would be the preferred physical targets, since they are generally more likely to be swayed by such things. This makes it easier to hurt us through them, by taking away strategic partners. So don't think that none of the the attacks and hostage crises involving other countries have been aimed at the USA.
It's easy to say that people hated you anyway. Obviously everyone in every country is of a single mind.:-D It's realistic to try to get a feel for how many people have turned against you. After all, terrorists are private citizens, not countries. And again, I think that while the rhetoric may be on your side, the evidence is on my side.
As for saying we have them on the ropes, I'm pretty sure that that's the story I was hearing three years ago. What makes you think things are so much better now than they were back then? Could it be the increasing number of attacks on U.S. and Iraqi soldiers? Possibly the falling approval rates for the USA? The near failure to restore Iraq's infrastructure? The way Afghanistan is just falling apart and being taken over by warlords? The fact that we don't seem to have succeeded in a damn thing in the hunt for Al Qaeda lately? What ropes, I must ask you, do we have them on?
Your social security argument is bunk. He has no other ideas - he is pushing this one. A little searching on the internet will show you that the general consensus, even among many Republicans is that Bush's plan will result in less payout to Americans at a higher cost than if we just do nothing with Social Security. There's a reason why Bush never goes into firm details in his speeches on social security - it's because if he didn't hide things in a veil of rhetoric and bunk statistics, he'd be laughed off the TV set.
Oh wait, no he wouldn't. I forgot that he likes to make sure that the people who show up at his press conferences and political rallies aren't going to ask any tough questions.
As to your talking about other plans, I don't think you've searched very hard. Possibly because you're only paying attention to what makes it to the headline news? That's not going to happen very much - not many bills and plans make it very far when they are coming from a party that has no president nor any house of Congress. Same thing happened to the Republicans when they were out of power.
And don't think I go around worshipping Kennedy, Dean or Kerry. Mostly, they're also just a bunch of interest-driven stooges as far as i can tell. Hell, they all helped get us dragged into this idiotic, morally indefensible, and nigh-unwinnable war.
Although I must admit Kerry does get a lot of respect from me for uncovering that whole situation where Bush, Sr. was letting that Columbian drug cartel ship unbelievable amounts of cocaine into the country unopposed in return for help shipping arms to the Contras. Too bad nothing ever came of it.
I guess it's just impossible for government officials to commit treason.
(try telling any graphic designer that there's a f/oss thing that's better than the adobe products)
You could try, but you'd be wrong. There are plenty of features that professional graphic designers rely on which are absent from most FOSS tools - like good, solid support for Pantone or Wacom tablets.
For most tasks, they may be as good, or even better, but a lot of the stuff that isn't so hot on the FOSS stuff is absolutely critical for many professionals.
It means to me that, given the Bush administration's current record on international relations and national security, putting up more nuke plants with people like him in power conjures images of scores of nuclear power plants with huge targets painted on the cooling towers, large cash rewards being posted for anyone who can bulls-eye one, and maps showing the locations of all of them along with their bounties.
Let's wait until the country isn't being run by an administration that is hell-bent on giving people all over the world reasons to hate us while being so tunnel-visioned in on playing nepotism games and chasing white whales and ninjas in the bushes that it's incapable of putting up a solid, carefully-planned defense strategy.
He's not evil. He just a causehead who has no fucking clue about anything but does have an incredible knack for making emotional appeals that keep people who are easily influenced thinking he's a well-balanced intellectual. I mean, come on, this is the guy whose idea of the most financially responsible thing to do with Social Security is to prop it up with a $2,000,000,000,000 loan.
"Hey, if Mercedes starts making really cheap cars, and sells them at a low enough price to compete with Ford Focuses and Honda Civics, they could have a shot at taking over the car market!"
Granted, this is _never_ going to happen, because Mercedes-Benz is in the business of selling LUXURY cars - not muscle cars, not economy cars.
Similar for Apple - their business model is obviously not centered around allowing people to have just about any hardware combination possible, nor is it centered around allowing them to get the cheapest computer they can get, nor is it centered around having the fastest computers on the market. If you want any of these, you are not in Apple's target market. Live with it.
The day that Apple starts allowing MacOS to run on any old computer with the right CPU is the day that I stop buying Apple products, because it is the day that the one advantage Apple has over its competition disappears.
If you want OS X, shut up, quit praying for Hell to freeze over and fork out the $500 for a Mac Mini.
If you want an OS that is hacked together so that it can run (after a fashion) on any old hardware you might care to have, quit being an idiot and realize that what you really want is a computer you assembled from parts you got off of eBay or out of the dumpster of a CompUSA that is running some version of Windows or Linux with the GUI skinned with a mostly-white color scheme, all crammed inside a spiffy brushed aluminum case. You'll hardly know the difference, but you'll sure be a lot happier!
Heh, sometimes I wonder if the whole Clinton-Lewinsky debacle wasn't a similar attempt to divert the public's attention to all the bombing we were doing in Iraq at the time.
I haven't been a member of the voting public for long, but every administration I've been through has made me sick in the same ways as the current one. It's just that this one seems to do it the more frequently, sometimes by an order of magnitude or two.
I think it's more that Linux has made room for OS X in the business world. There are many Unix apps out there that it seems some businesses are developing an interest in, and not all of them have good Windows ports. Porting FOSS apps to OS X, on the other hand, is simple - POSIX compliance and X11 are built-in.
Meanwhile, you get some advantages over Linux, from a business standpoint. The OS is relatively simple to use and administrate, and it has business apps that are not available on any other Unix-like, such as Microsoft Office and Filemaker Pro. And, overall, it plays fairly nice with an office's existing Windows infrastructure.
Heh, I have problems with the bottom corners, too. Expose becomes most useful to me when I have a lot of crap open (which happens to me often while I'm at work). But then, my Dock has grown considerably, so my trash can is suddenly in the bottom right corner. And the Finder icon is suddenly in the bottom-left corner. (I don't know about you, but I go for that Finder icon frequently.)
I have a problem with any tool that is most annoying in situations where it is also most useful.
Ugh, screen corners for Expose!? Maybe if Apple had been kind enough to implement a slight time delay, but as it stands expose seems to activate every time I overshoot a target near a screen corner when I am using a computer that does have it turned on.
No thanks. I keep my left hand out of my pants while I'm using the computer, so I might as well use it to hit a key every so often.
Don't forget that the twitcher works during drags, and spring-loaded folders.
Fold 'n' Drop would only work for me if I could remember exactly which window showed the directory in which I wanted to drop whatever I was dragging - which is likely not going to be the case when I'm in a situation where the window to which I want to drag is buried.
If I can't remember all the time, I'm going to continue to use methods that don't require me to remember. I'm just more inclined to use the method that is always applicable.
Yeah, I was factoring all of that in when I said "MAYBE $100 or $200." If the only cost difference we were talking about were CPU and not the associated hardware, I would expect the maximum price difference to be far far less.
I'm not so sure that the switch will result in a cheaper Mac. MAYBE $100 or $200 cheaper on average, but PPC chips can't be that much more expensive.
But, of course, they aren't. A lot of the price difference also comes from the fact that Apple just makes their computers using more expensive designs. For example, look at the industrial design any Apple computer, and compare it to any of the PCs that give the platform a reputation for being so cheap, and you'll notice a lot of differences in the way they are constructed. Practically everything about the Macs smacks of expensive.
Plus, keep in mind that when you buy a Mac, you're heavily subsidizing the cost of developing MacOS and all its apps. I don't believe for a moment that they could possibly break even selling that thing for $130 a pop, given Apple's miniscule market share.
I'd suggest that humans really aren't so diverse that the cultures you'd get from different populations can be wildly different - because they aren't.
Every human culture I know of is only superficially different from every other. Most of the differences I see that aren't of the "different clothing" type come from different circumstances rather than different motivations.
Bah. Keep the lusers off of my platform. The last thing I want is a bunch of people migrating to the Mac and making the Mac market large enough for it to be cost-effective for spyware and virus writers to start paying attention to OS X.
Herzong Zwei was definitely in the line of RTS games, but Dune II was the first game to incorporate all the elements that people tend to expect in the RTS genre nowadays.
Probably because they got insanely difficult and kind of frustrating, what with the all-walls-identical and too many pit traps. I love Phantasy Star, and I thought the first-person dungeons were a great idea, but they did get kind of old toward the end of the game.
That said, I think the solution would have been to add some landmarks, wall texture, etc. rather than just dumping them entirely.
Nintendo was not the first mover on 16-bit. Sega was.
Sony was not the first mover on CD-ROMs for games. Sega was. 3DO was second. (CDI doesn't count.)
Sony wasn't the first into 32-bit, either. Sega was.
Neither was Sony or Microsoft first into the current generation - Sega came before them again.
Hell, I'm stretching here, but I should point out that Sega was first into console RPGs and had the first true real-time strategy game, and I bet a large number of the audience couldn't even guess what those games are. (Phantasy Star and Dune II if you're curious.)
As far as I can tell, there is no first-mover advantage. All the anecdote I can think of makes it pretty clear to me that, overall, being the first into a market is just plain stupid. You have bear the burden creating the market for said generation, and once that's done you have to deal with the reality that your system is way behind anyone else's because you were working with earlier and therefore poorer technology, and all the systems that come out a year after you are eventually going to leave you in their tracks.
Maybe it existed back in the 70s and 80s when the home console market was absolutely nothing like it is today, but nowadays it's just an urban legend for market pundits.
There used to be a coffee shop in a semi run-down part of the town where I grew up that hosted a LARP out in the neighborhood once a week.
There was a popular story among folks at the shop that the people who lived in the area tried to complain to the police about it (loitering laws), but the police let it keep going because it scared away the drug dealers and such.
I imagine methanol exhibits similar characteristics. With the difference that it isn't a gas so it shouldn't be quite so likely to cause such a large ball of fire should it ever meet the combination of oxygen and a spark.
My first thought isn't what equipment would be the most fun or powerful, but what equipment will work. How reliable will electricity be in the area you are going to be mapping? Since you describe these areas as uncharted,,y guess would be "not very," so don't expect that Mac to always be available to you.
Now what are you going to do without that laptop? You're going to need a GPS device that runs for a *long* time on batteries, or you're going to need to bring a crate of batteries where you go. You're also going to need something that allows you to save and tag all this GPS data so that you can decipher it when you do get back to a computer.
Get that figured out, and if you have any money left over, THEN you can start thinking about buying that copy of ArcView.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, a switch that is flush with the side of the iPod so I can't easily flick it, I have to slide it with my fingernail.
A badly-designed hold switch is not a substitute for good hardware design.
there are sensors similar to the ones used in the iPod scroll wheel
This is exactly why I have NO INTEREST in this mouse. I have an iPod from the generation where all of the buttons are touchpads like this.
I can't even take the damn thing out of my pocket without accidentally "pressing a button."
The last thing I need is a mouse that starts doing random shit every time I don't grab it in one clean, perfect motion. I like my computer's input devices to behave in a predictable manner, thank you very much.
PostScript is more of a programming language for printers than it is a markup or typesetting language. I mean, it includes loops and the ability to create abstract data types. For typesetting, it gives you the tools to tell the printer how to do most everything that it can do, for setting transformations, for drawing primitives, and for placing letters and text.
And nothing else.
Hell, I think that gaming is probably the thing that is most responsible for Microsoft's dominance of the desktop market. The kinds of software that are lacking on non-Windows platforms can be broadly broken into "games" and "niche professional apps." The latter group doesn't directly affect the desktop market much.
In short, their games monopoly is one of the main reasons why they have an OS monopoly.
Personally, I think Illustrator's interface is better.
But it's not nearly $500 worth of better to my amateur senses.
(As for the GIMP, well, it's not hard to be better than the GIMP. VI is a more intuitive photo editor than the GIMP.)
ahem.
:-D It's realistic to try to get a feel for how many people have turned against you. After all, terrorists are private citizens, not countries. And again, I think that while the rhetoric may be on your side, the evidence is on my side.
Given the frequency of terrorist attacks on US soil, it's entirely reasonable that we could go a little under four years without any attacks.
However, all evidence points to the rate of enlistment in terrorist organizations having increased dramatically over the past few years.
The situation is such that empirical arguments on this topic are pretty much impossible, since it's impossible to get any statistically significant numbers on rates of terrorist attacks over an eight year period. However, I would posit that based on the fact that we have to get it right every time, whereast the terrorists only have to get it right once, It is fairly pedestrian to conclude that Bush's policies have almost definitely massively increased the threat of terrorism to US citizens.
Also note that there have been a surprising number of attacks and hostage crises involving our allies lately. I'm personally not surprised that they would be the preferred physical targets, since they are generally more likely to be swayed by such things. This makes it easier to hurt us through them, by taking away strategic partners. So don't think that none of the the attacks and hostage crises involving other countries have been aimed at the USA.
It's easy to say that people hated you anyway. Obviously everyone in every country is of a single mind.
As for saying we have them on the ropes, I'm pretty sure that that's the story I was hearing three years ago. What makes you think things are so much better now than they were back then? Could it be the increasing number of attacks on U.S. and Iraqi soldiers? Possibly the falling approval rates for the USA? The near failure to restore Iraq's infrastructure? The way Afghanistan is just falling apart and being taken over by warlords? The fact that we don't seem to have succeeded in a damn thing in the hunt for Al Qaeda lately? What ropes, I must ask you, do we have them on?
Your social security argument is bunk. He has no other ideas - he is pushing this one. A little searching on the internet will show you that the general consensus, even among many Republicans is that Bush's plan will result in less payout to Americans at a higher cost than if we just do nothing with Social Security. There's a reason why Bush never goes into firm details in his speeches on social security - it's because if he didn't hide things in a veil of rhetoric and bunk statistics, he'd be laughed off the TV set.
Oh wait, no he wouldn't. I forgot that he likes to make sure that the people who show up at his press conferences and political rallies aren't going to ask any tough questions.
As to your talking about other plans, I don't think you've searched very hard. Possibly because you're only paying attention to what makes it to the headline news? That's not going to happen very much - not many bills and plans make it very far when they are coming from a party that has no president nor any house of Congress. Same thing happened to the Republicans when they were out of power.
And don't think I go around worshipping Kennedy, Dean or Kerry. Mostly, they're also just a bunch of interest-driven stooges as far as i can tell. Hell, they all helped get us dragged into this idiotic, morally indefensible, and nigh-unwinnable war.
Although I must admit Kerry does get a lot of respect from me for uncovering that whole situation where Bush, Sr. was letting that Columbian drug cartel ship unbelievable amounts of cocaine into the country unopposed in return for help shipping arms to the Contras. Too bad nothing ever came of it.
I guess it's just impossible for government officials to commit treason.
(try telling any graphic designer that there's a f/oss thing that's better than the adobe products)
You could try, but you'd be wrong. There are plenty of features that professional graphic designers rely on which are absent from most FOSS tools - like good, solid support for Pantone or Wacom tablets.
For most tasks, they may be as good, or even better, but a lot of the stuff that isn't so hot on the FOSS stuff is absolutely critical for many professionals.
what in the hell does that even mean?
It means to me that, given the Bush administration's current record on international relations and national security, putting up more nuke plants with people like him in power conjures images of scores of nuclear power plants with huge targets painted on the cooling towers, large cash rewards being posted for anyone who can bulls-eye one, and maps showing the locations of all of them along with their bounties.
Let's wait until the country isn't being run by an administration that is hell-bent on giving people all over the world reasons to hate us while being so tunnel-visioned in on playing nepotism games and chasing white whales and ninjas in the bushes that it's incapable of putting up a solid, carefully-planned defense strategy.
He's not evil. He just a causehead who has no fucking clue about anything but does have an incredible knack for making emotional appeals that keep people who are easily influenced thinking he's a well-balanced intellectual. I mean, come on, this is the guy whose idea of the most financially responsible thing to do with Social Security is to prop it up with a $2,000,000,000,000 loan.
"Hey, if Mercedes starts making really cheap cars, and sells them at a low enough price to compete with Ford Focuses and Honda Civics, they could have a shot at taking over the car market!"
Granted, this is _never_ going to happen, because Mercedes-Benz is in the business of selling LUXURY cars - not muscle cars, not economy cars.
Similar for Apple - their business model is obviously not centered around allowing people to have just about any hardware combination possible, nor is it centered around allowing them to get the cheapest computer they can get, nor is it centered around having the fastest computers on the market. If you want any of these, you are not in Apple's target market. Live with it.
The day that Apple starts allowing MacOS to run on any old computer with the right CPU is the day that I stop buying Apple products, because it is the day that the one advantage Apple has over its competition disappears.
If you want OS X, shut up, quit praying for Hell to freeze over and fork out the $500 for a Mac Mini.
If you want an OS that is hacked together so that it can run (after a fashion) on any old hardware you might care to have, quit being an idiot and realize that what you really want is a computer you assembled from parts you got off of eBay or out of the dumpster of a CompUSA that is running some version of Windows or Linux with the GUI skinned with a mostly-white color scheme, all crammed inside a spiffy brushed aluminum case. You'll hardly know the difference, but you'll sure be a lot happier!
this administration
Heh, sometimes I wonder if the whole Clinton-Lewinsky debacle wasn't a similar attempt to divert the public's attention to all the bombing we were doing in Iraq at the time.
I haven't been a member of the voting public for long, but every administration I've been through has made me sick in the same ways as the current one. It's just that this one seems to do it the more frequently, sometimes by an order of magnitude or two.
I think it's more that Linux has made room for OS X in the business world. There are many Unix apps out there that it seems some businesses are developing an interest in, and not all of them have good Windows ports. Porting FOSS apps to OS X, on the other hand, is simple - POSIX compliance and X11 are built-in.
Meanwhile, you get some advantages over Linux, from a business standpoint. The OS is relatively simple to use and administrate, and it has business apps that are not available on any other Unix-like, such as Microsoft Office and Filemaker Pro. And, overall, it plays fairly nice with an office's existing Windows infrastructure.
Heh, I have problems with the bottom corners, too. Expose becomes most useful to me when I have a lot of crap open (which happens to me often while I'm at work). But then, my Dock has grown considerably, so my trash can is suddenly in the bottom right corner. And the Finder icon is suddenly in the bottom-left corner. (I don't know about you, but I go for that Finder icon frequently.)
I have a problem with any tool that is most annoying in situations where it is also most useful.
Ugh, screen corners for Expose!? Maybe if Apple had been kind enough to implement a slight time delay, but as it stands expose seems to activate every time I overshoot a target near a screen corner when I am using a computer that does have it turned on.
No thanks. I keep my left hand out of my pants while I'm using the computer, so I might as well use it to hit a key every so often.
Don't forget that the twitcher works during drags, and spring-loaded folders.
Fold 'n' Drop would only work for me if I could remember exactly which window showed the directory in which I wanted to drop whatever I was dragging - which is likely not going to be the case when I'm in a situation where the window to which I want to drag is buried.
If I can't remember all the time, I'm going to continue to use methods that don't require me to remember. I'm just more inclined to use the method that is always applicable.
Yeah, I was factoring all of that in when I said "MAYBE $100 or $200." If the only cost difference we were talking about were CPU and not the associated hardware, I would expect the maximum price difference to be far far less.
I'm not so sure that the switch will result in a cheaper Mac. MAYBE $100 or $200 cheaper on average, but PPC chips can't be that much more expensive.
But, of course, they aren't. A lot of the price difference also comes from the fact that Apple just makes their computers using more expensive designs. For example, look at the industrial design any Apple computer, and compare it to any of the PCs that give the platform a reputation for being so cheap, and you'll notice a lot of differences in the way they are constructed. Practically everything about the Macs smacks of expensive.
Plus, keep in mind that when you buy a Mac, you're heavily subsidizing the cost of developing MacOS and all its apps. I don't believe for a moment that they could possibly break even selling that thing for $130 a pop, given Apple's miniscule market share.
I'd suggest that humans really aren't so diverse that the cultures you'd get from different populations can be wildly different - because they aren't.
Every human culture I know of is only superficially different from every other. Most of the differences I see that aren't of the "different clothing" type come from different circumstances rather than different motivations.
Bah. Keep the lusers off of my platform. The last thing I want is a bunch of people migrating to the Mac and making the Mac market large enough for it to be cost-effective for spyware and virus writers to start paying attention to OS X.
Herzong Zwei was definitely in the line of RTS games, but Dune II was the first game to incorporate all the elements that people tend to expect in the RTS genre nowadays.
Probably because they got insanely difficult and kind of frustrating, what with the all-walls-identical and too many pit traps. I love Phantasy Star, and I thought the first-person dungeons were a great idea, but they did get kind of old toward the end of the game.
That said, I think the solution would have been to add some landmarks, wall texture, etc. rather than just dumping them entirely.
Nintendo was not the first mover on 16-bit. Sega was.
Sony was not the first mover on CD-ROMs for games. Sega was. 3DO was second. (CDI doesn't count.)
Sony wasn't the first into 32-bit, either. Sega was.
Neither was Sony or Microsoft first into the current generation - Sega came before them again.
Hell, I'm stretching here, but I should point out that Sega was first into console RPGs and had the first true real-time strategy game, and I bet a large number of the audience couldn't even guess what those games are. (Phantasy Star and Dune II if you're curious.)
As far as I can tell, there is no first-mover advantage. All the anecdote I can think of makes it pretty clear to me that, overall, being the first into a market is just plain stupid. You have bear the burden creating the market for said generation, and once that's done you have to deal with the reality that your system is way behind anyone else's because you were working with earlier and therefore poorer technology, and all the systems that come out a year after you are eventually going to leave you in their tracks.
Maybe it existed back in the 70s and 80s when the home console market was absolutely nothing like it is today, but nowadays it's just an urban legend for market pundits.
There used to be a coffee shop in a semi run-down part of the town where I grew up that hosted a LARP out in the neighborhood once a week.
There was a popular story among folks at the shop that the people who lived in the area tried to complain to the police about it (loitering laws), but the police let it keep going because it scared away the drug dealers and such.
I imagine methanol exhibits similar characteristics. With the difference that it isn't a gas so it shouldn't be quite so likely to cause such a large ball of fire should it ever meet the combination of oxygen and a spark.
My first thought isn't what equipment would be the most fun or powerful, but what equipment will work. How reliable will electricity be in the area you are going to be mapping? Since you describe these areas as uncharted, ,y guess would be "not very," so don't expect that Mac to always be available to you.
Now what are you going to do without that laptop? You're going to need a GPS device that runs for a *long* time on batteries, or you're going to need to bring a crate of batteries where you go. You're also going to need something that allows you to save and tag all this GPS data so that you can decipher it when you do get back to a computer.
Get that figured out, and if you have any money left over, THEN you can start thinking about buying that copy of ArcView.
FTA: Methanol is flammable
And hydrogen isn't?