people mostly use MD here (London) if they have some interest in recording as well. You can use it for radio-quality interviews, plug it into the desk and record a gig, leave it on the table in a meeting, feed it into an avid and generally mess about in a very simple and accessible way.
I know you can record onto the archos jukeboxes and a few others like them, but the quality is pretty dire, and what mp3 player can you throw at the sound guy and tell him to play track 4, or just hit record? if you're actually working with sound, they're about the best thing at the moment. that you can listen to music in between is just a bonus.
if you're only going to measure the price by the dent in your bank account minus the dent in someone else's later, then sure.
but if you're at all concerned about what things really cost - to build, to buy, to use, to maintain, to dispose of - then it's not just a financial calculation. there's also your happiness, your productivity, your social standing, your ethics, your enthusiasm for maintenance. all offer costs and benefits.
individuals will vary in the weight they give to different parts of the equation, but for some people - eg me - the reduced cost of ownership and the reduced (but still considerable) damage to the environment - an asset we hold in common - will be enough to sway them towards this machine.
a good tip, but one to follow with caution if you've done anything unorthodox to the system (and in an apple world, the definition of unorthodox is ironically very broad).
The login script sets $PATH, for example, so fink users will need to edit it to add/sw/bin, and there are various little tweaks such as setting the locale which are good practice, but the sort of thing you really need to know you did, in case something bites you for it later.
then all the system has to do is post 417 comments on itself containing only [the bad phrase] and links to that place which is still making my eyeballs hurt three years after I last fell for it, observe that vi is for girls, speculate about the usefulness of a beowulf cluster of those and generate a few hundred thousand requests for the destination page.
and we could all stop reading slashdot and, you know, get some work done.
surely one of the goals of a 'global civil society' is that people are able not only to exercise their freedom to express themselves but also to do it in the way they choose? (insert jesuitical mumble about moral continence here.)
rms would probably agree with you, i suppose, but viridian's preaching leans towards the tolerant-green, not the oss-zealot, and i see no conflict. unless your objection is to increasing shareholder value, which i rather doubt has happened in this case.
iow, the person who gives time to produce that page can do so any way s/he sees fit, and if you think it could be done better, i suggest you offer.
I was wondering about that, too. I quite like it, though i'd prefer to have a lot more information about what is being updated.
I think there are two main reasons for this.
Firstly, nobody is really denying that as release versions go, this is very betaish. i think apple must be quietly rather glad that the big names haven't arrived yet and only the dedicated are actually using the new system. A lot of what we're downloading is stuff that didn't get finished in time, like iTunes.
The rest of what's in those packages is mostly updates to open source projects - whatever ftpd we're using, and so on. OSX is a patchwork of different systems, and i think we're benefitting from the find-it-and-fix it approach of the oss ingredients while the apple systems go on in their stately way.
My only gripe is that they're still releasing monolithic updates in the old apple tradition. If you look at a page like the cobalt raq updates list, there are dozens - they're at least as frequent as the apple ones - but smaller, and they all include a list of their ingredients and the circumstances under which you might need to use them. Then every so often they release a big one that bundles them all together and make a big fuss about it.
Which strikes me as a very good system: tiny updates for the paranoid edge, and big friendly packages for the gui crowd. As it stands, the apple system makes it hard to know whether or not you should be concerned about a problem that you've read about, for example.
On the other hand, 10.0.0.1 included a bang-up-to-date installation of ssh and sshd, without making any fuss at all, and installed it at the push of a delicately tinted button. i remember it being a little more complicated than that on my redhat box...
* they have arrived at workable solutions to problems of massive parallelism in several fields, eg load-balancing, tcp/ip optimisation, efficient segmentation of a huge database and the associated routing of queries, and presumably heat dissipation too.
* in short, they have rolled their own into a system that even the/. beowulf fan club must admire
* they make enough money to run 8000 pizza boxes and buy state of the art furniture by selling this combination of technologies to corporations who want to improve the efficiency of their knowledge workers.
* they have contributed a total of, say, $3000 to redhat over the counter at Fry's.
Now I'm not sure that counts as good oss citizenship.
Overall i'm inclined to think that they're in credit just because google is so fscking good that it has replaced my bookmark file. I'd say that their public service, esp given the/linux branch and their flagship role, is enough to outweigh the fact that rather than returning _any_ of their code to the community they sell it privately to the worst kind of suit. I haven't even seen an educational or non-profit version (but i'd love to be corrected).
It's hard to call, especially as i am a user of rather than contributor to linux and therefore benefit without being made use of, so i'm surprised not to see it being debated here. Just _using_ linux really doesn't deserve accolades any more. As they say in the article, it's an economic and practical decision, not an ideological one.
mac users are as faddish and speed-hungry as any computer clique. Probably more than most, because of all those fancy cases and new colours. and the discarded interfaces. and steve's enchanted green prada boots.
i've used linuxppc on several machines, but they've always been superseded ones. New powerbook he come, old powerbook he run apache _really_ good. put the whole lot in a backpack with a little hub and take your world with you.
i might be wrong, but i don't see anyone buying a mac in order to run linux now. it would be daft, whatever the gaussian blur stopwatch says. it's going to be kind of silly if the case looks nicer than your gui, no?
so, oddly, one of the reasons i keep buying macs is because of the linuxppc people: i know they'll be useful in other ways later.
back to the point: the question is, will people still install linuxppc on the old box when it's running apache already? which will be a while: the requirements are steep. I think the answer is yes, as long as the packaging is right.
OSX has to be all things to all mac users, so there's lots of room for specialists. the print-server in a (pretty) box. the firewall in a box, or the raq-alike instant webserver.
or more usefully, the web design studio special package that just drops in and gives you cvs and mod_perl (and php...) and failover to the other one.
i think if they play to specific audiences they'll flourish on the increased interoperability of macs and linux. the mountain is heading their way, i guess.
You do not appear to have grasped either the seriousness of the problem or any of the views that you're trying to discredit. Perhaps that's why you haven't seen more 'substantive' evidence?
This is not about smog, or smoke, or anything you can dig up and look at. It's about the impact of industrialisation and, indirectly, capitalism on the equilibrium of the planet.
Which isn't an intrinsically bad thing, morally, except for the fact that we depend on that balance for our survival.
Global warming is not a synonym for climate change, it's just a particular example. The most severe problems we face are not simple sea-level issues but complex climatic phenomena like the direction and strength of the gulf stream and the migration of krill in the antarctic. These are the roots of the food chain and we're not going to like it much when they're cut. There are respectable, peer-reviewed studies (reg required) of these basic cycles which show them to be disrupted by our blundering.
There's a hundred-year lead time on this one. The changes we are seeing now have been accumulating for a century, and even if we all suddenly started conducting ourselves like a sane species instead of fouling our nest and flinging it around, we would still see terrible effects for decades.
So you're right, up to a point: the ability of people to fix this is highly questionable, their possession of the necessary insight even more so. But to deny that we are responsible for careless changes to the global ecosystem with unpredictable effects is the worst kind of head-burying.
> Well, there are two things to say about that. First, I
> think a lot of the "conservationists" have very
> expansive ideas of what constitutes "waste". Look at
> the original poster: She thinks that having a roomful
> of computers in a house is wasteful. Others are
> attacking the whole idea of Christmas lights! The point
> is that the drumbeat of conservation never ends. Even
> if we did everything they wanted, they would start all
> over again. To them, ANY energy use beyond the bare
> minimum of survival is unacceptable.
That may be true of some individuals, but what evidence do you have for the generalisation? I'm as geeky as the next/. reader and have the associated room full of computers, but i still devote my working life to cleaning up and reducing consumption. I don't want to return to caves and furs, just to be a little less destructive.
> The second point is this: What's wrong with waste? Why
> is it intrinsically bad to leave all the lights of my
> house on whenever I want to. Notice that this question
> is different from the question of pollution or
> landfills. That is a clean versus dirty environment
> problem; the question of "waste" is a different
> question. And that's where a lot of environmentalists
> go wrong. Instead of focusing on the real problem,
> which is cleaning up messes, they choose to focus on
> limiting technology, progress and convenience.
It's bad because the power you use is dirty.
You don't have the first idea what the environmental movement 'focuses on': you're only aware of that part which threatens your home comforts.
The problem is that we use too much power and too much stuff to achieve ends which must be regarded as trivial. We need to find ways of making power cleaner: until we do, we need to use less of it. We need to find ways of making the material we depend on cleaner: until we do, we need to use less of it.
actually, for me the real answer is that waste is inelegant. any programmer should appreciate that. a solution which is fast and clean and appropriate to its setting is far more satisfying that something which just about works right now, causes terrible maintenance headaches and which we know causes the entire system to foul up later.
> Environmentalists should focus on clean production of
> energy, not reducing the production of energy.
That's an silly argument for many reasons, and smacks of perpetual motion, but i'll concentrate on your main point: whatever they do with their money, it's ok because it's being passed on.
there are important differences between different ways of distributing wealth. Giving large amounts to the makers of swimming-pool sized subwoofers and leaving it to them is not an effective one if your goal has anything to do with the well-being of others.
money has many virtues - divisibility, indifference to history, etc - but it is not independent of context. An amount of money in one setting can be negligible but in another the same amount can save lives or transform them. Larry Ellison has all of these options available to him and is consistently choosing the most trivial and immediately gratifying.
spending $50,000 on the plans for your home cinema is stupid whichever way you look at it, but most of all because that amount of money could put someone through college and it isn't going to.
if that's not enough, consider the way it's presented: the language of the article is all about competition and one-upmanship and these people are being presented to us as aspirational figures. imagine if everyone devoted their efforts to aiming for twelve-seater movie theatre thing. we'd be heading for extinction. oh wait, they do.
> Has the director captured the essence of the book?
> Has the director transfered the plot well?
> Has the director transfered the characters well?
can i suggest that before asking those three excellent questions, you ask yourself, "is this film any good?".
if not, then you can enjoy critiquing the conversion. if yes, then perhaps you should just watch it?
(on the other hand, the answer in the case of Lynch's dune is that it's a terrible movie apart from that part of Sting which begins at the belt and ends just before he starts acting. and it insults the book.)
i can see two answers to this. the second is a bit more pragmatic.
the sensible version, to me, is that people should buy the right to experience something. the storage and distribution mechanisms are not relevant. If you lose your copy, or want to upgrade to a better storage medium, then you can do it at cost plus handling, as long as your right-to-experience can be verified. This only really works for digitable media, but old models are perfectly fine for books and vinyl anyway.
probably depends on watermarking, though. uh oh.
the other version - what actually happens - is very simple. whatever they can get away with. You agreed to it when you bought the white album under a license that said you were buying a piece of plastic that happened to have a spiral groove on it.
the record companies have something you want. they didn't assemble it with your happiness in mind and they'll wring out of you whatever they can for as long as you consent. in that it seems to have worked out rather well for them, i'd say that they do have it right, yes.
It's all shades of rather dark grey. to me. Like the microsoft trial, i'd feel a lot more sympathetic for the poor victims if they weren't a) voracious transnationals and b) kicking themselves that they didn't think of doing it first.
by the way,
> They accuse Rambus of subverting the Joint
> Electron Device Engineering Council (JEDEC)
> process when the company kept its patents on
> SDRAM secret while attending JEDEC meetings
> intended to establish an open industry standard.
Can anyone throw more light on this? I haven't hear the jedec part before. Sounds tangential to the patent question, at best, but it's worthy of Bismarck, or at least Nixon, if true.
darek says that his business runs on people who were forcibly superannuated during the 030 purge but still want access to old mac apps and data.
then he laments the bulk of OSX and the inability of even fairly recent consumer macs to run the new system.
i think his complaints are justified. there's no reason why a bsd-based os shouldn't scale down to older machines gracefully. but there's a huge flaw in his argument.
shouldn't he be delighted that another generation of mac users are going to be left in the cold? some of them will defect to windows, just as the 030 people did, and then they'll want to run their cuddly OS8 apps and read old files using his emulator.
the last thing he needs to do is run OSX: his product is for people who decide against it. so if he's right, then he should be making an imac/pre-g3 emulator asap.
it's nice to revisit the spirit of 97, but it's a silly rant really.
and i'd recommend it to anyone who actually wants to be able to carry their laptop around.
i only need a pc for testing web pages, checking email on the move and running linux, and it does all of those perfectly and without taking up any more room than a book.
i'm a linux idiot, but it installed without a hitch and ran x inn 1024x480. looks great. even got three buttons.
the little camera is just a firewire device, by the way. so it still won't work in linux, but at least we know why.
there are two problems.
The processor has always been underpowered next to the rest of the lineup. presumably due to heat issues in that little case. not a problem for me, but puts many off.
and the battery life is shit. hour and a half tops.
so crusoe sounds like a smart move on all fronts.
ours just got fried - fell in a swamp, battery acid ate motherboard - and we'll be getting another one. probably sooner than 'year end', unfortunately.
Let's take the opportunity to bring the whole system up to date and in line with modern thinking.
Everyone votes with their credit cards. a quick swipe and press a button. It makes sure you're eighteen, and it excludes anticonsumerists, poor people, immigrants and slackers. Do you want those people setting your taxes? right.
I suppose this is Canuteish, but i really don't want to be allocated a unique id, and i particularly don't want it to be tied to my retina scan or fingerprints or dna or anything else. it leads directly to people saying things like 'if you've done nothing wrong then you've nothing to fear' and that gives me migraines.
None of the posts i've seen here so far really deal with the original question. It's a good one, so i'll paraphrase it: How can you provide adults with the tools that liberate them without those tools falling into hands too young to hold them yet?
There are three main kinds of answer coming out here: social, technical and ideological.
The social ones are most interesting, to me at least. They go something like, 'build your space so that normal social pressures move people away from the behaviour you don't want to encourage'. Which is smart, but defeats the object.
apart from the getting people to choose your particular laundry object.
Let's say someone is trying to work out whether they're gay or not. Or they want to become a muslim, or find out whether their kid is disabled or not or what technically constitutes impotence. or any of a hundred other things that you or i would use the net to find out about and probably wouldn't want people looking over our shoulder while we did it.
it's too easy to think of censorship only in terms of blocks and cuts: by denying people their privacy you are censoring their access to anything that might be poorly tolerated within their community.
if there's a point, then isn't it to broaden and propagate this rich access to information, make it more than the playground of the rich and technical minority? the best thing about the net is that it's inherently agnostic about everything, and to my mind the point of the anti-censorship debate - in its practical form - is to keep it that way, despite the deep unease it creates in people whose interests are served by restricting access to information. Which is just about anybody who's trying to persuade you to buy, use or believe in something.
(which brings up a question i've always wanted to ask here: what's the point of circumventing technical barriers to freedom of information, if you don't also address the economic barriers?)
so my answer to the question is that you should instead think about the access to information that you want to create, work out how you're going to do that and only then consider what you will need to exclude in order not to get closed down, and whether you can still do the thing you wanted to do.
Firstly, would you apply the same distinction if the business was AOL?
And secondly, censorship _is_ a business policy. The whole kids'n'porn is a small offshoot of a much wider discussion restricting the flow of information as a way of exerting control over people.
It takes a thousand different forms, from the legal intimidation McDonald's is famous for to the cheerful evasions of advertising. It may well be business policy - and it may even be defensible within the makeshift morality of the business world - but that tells us nothing at all about whether it's right or not.
it's a complete fabrication. either ryan meader is a compulsive fantasist or there's a whole group out there who like to play at being a leet source. most likely some sort of complicity between the two.
I think it's time for all of us mac moonies to understand that the rumor sites are roughly on a par with the wwf (not the wildlife one): a circus performance in which real people may or may not get hurt but the whole thing is constructed for our prurience and the profit of a small number of dubious egomaniacs.
i've been using linuxppc since version 4 came out, and i can't praise it highly enough.
i can see that the long-term view requires photoshop for linux - and hey, they released it for sgi - but the real strength of the ppc port to an old mac head like me is that when you upgrade your mac (and you do, you do), you get a free webserver in the old one.
my phone bill is a tiny fraction of what it once was, my productivity is vastly increased and my ability to make things happen online is far greater than it was because i know how to make the box bend to my will.
i've got the websites of twenty of thirty large NGO's sitting in an old mac clone here, and all for nothing.
well, for a hundred bucks a year, because i subscribed, but.
Slashdot Mirror
people mostly use MD here (London) if they have some interest in recording as well. You can use it for radio-quality interviews, plug it into the desk and record a gig, leave it on the table in a meeting, feed it into an avid and generally mess about in a very simple and accessible way.
I know you can record onto the archos jukeboxes and a few others like them, but the quality is pretty dire, and what mp3 player can you throw at the sound guy and tell him to play track 4, or just hit record? if you're actually working with sound, they're about the best thing at the moment. that you can listen to music in between is just a bonus.
if you're only going to measure the price by the dent in your bank account minus the dent in someone else's later, then sure.
but if you're at all concerned about what things really cost - to build, to buy, to use, to maintain, to dispose of - then it's not just a financial calculation. there's also your happiness, your productivity, your social standing, your ethics, your enthusiasm for maintenance. all offer costs and benefits.
individuals will vary in the weight they give to different parts of the equation, but for some people - eg me - the reduced cost of ownership and the reduced (but still considerable) damage to the environment - an asset we hold in common - will be enough to sway them towards this machine.
ps. imagine how a green a beo...
never mind.
not so. this crunchy granola eco-freak is going to, and not just because it gives him an excuse to get a flat screen.
& i think i can manage without a ti4600 to run apache and vim...
a good tip, but one to follow with caution if you've done anything unorthodox to the system (and in an apple world, the definition of unorthodox is ironically very broad).
/sw/bin, and there are various little tweaks such as setting the locale which are good practice, but the sort of thing you really need to know you did, in case something bites you for it later.
The login script sets $PATH, for example, so fink users will need to edit it to add
read the scripts first...
then all the system has to do is post 417 comments on itself containing only [the bad phrase] and links to that place which is still making my eyeballs hurt three years after I last fell for it, observe that vi is for girls, speculate about the usefulness of a beowulf cluster of those and generate a few hundred thousand requests for the destination page.
and we could all stop reading slashdot and, you know, get some work done.
surely one of the goals of a 'global civil society' is that people are able not only to exercise their freedom to express themselves but also to do it in the way they choose? (insert jesuitical mumble about moral continence here.)
rms would probably agree with you, i suppose, but viridian's preaching leans towards the tolerant-green, not the oss-zealot, and i see no conflict. unless your objection is to increasing shareholder value, which i rather doubt has happened in this case.
iow, the person who gives time to produce that page can do so any way s/he sees fit, and if you think it could be done better, i suggest you offer.
(Shamelesly ripped from ntk.net).
who shameless ripped it from london.pm.
I was wondering about that, too. I quite like it, though i'd prefer to have a lot more information about what is being updated.
I think there are two main reasons for this. Firstly, nobody is really denying that as release versions go, this is very betaish. i think apple must be quietly rather glad that the big names haven't arrived yet and only the dedicated are actually using the new system. A lot of what we're downloading is stuff that didn't get finished in time, like iTunes.
The rest of what's in those packages is mostly updates to open source projects - whatever ftpd we're using, and so on. OSX is a patchwork of different systems, and i think we're benefitting from the find-it-and-fix it approach of the oss ingredients while the apple systems go on in their stately way.
My only gripe is that they're still releasing monolithic updates in the old apple tradition. If you look at a page like the cobalt raq updates list, there are dozens - they're at least as frequent as the apple ones - but smaller, and they all include a list of their ingredients and the circumstances under which you might need to use them. Then every so often they release a big one that bundles them all together and make a big fuss about it.
Which strikes me as a very good system: tiny updates for the paranoid edge, and big friendly packages for the gui crowd. As it stands, the apple system makes it hard to know whether or not you should be concerned about a problem that you've read about, for example.
On the other hand, 10.0.0.1 included a bang-up-to-date installation of ssh and sshd, without making any fuss at all, and installed it at the push of a delicately tinted button. i remember it being a little more complicated than that on my redhat box...
just scanning these posts, i can see that:
/. beowulf fan club must admire
/linux branch and their flagship role, is enough to outweigh the fact that rather than returning _any_ of their code to the community they sell it privately to the worst kind of suit. I haven't even seen an educational or non-profit version (but i'd love to be corrected).
* google uses redhat
* they customise it extensively
* they have arrived at workable solutions to problems of massive parallelism in several fields, eg load-balancing, tcp/ip optimisation, efficient segmentation of a huge database and the associated routing of queries, and presumably heat dissipation too.
* in short, they have rolled their own into a system that even the
* they make enough money to run 8000 pizza boxes and buy state of the art furniture by selling this combination of technologies to corporations who want to improve the efficiency of their knowledge workers.
* they have contributed a total of, say, $3000 to redhat over the counter at Fry's.
Now I'm not sure that counts as good oss citizenship.
Overall i'm inclined to think that they're in credit just because google is so fscking good that it has replaced my bookmark file. I'd say that their public service, esp given the
It's hard to call, especially as i am a user of rather than contributor to linux and therefore benefit without being made use of, so i'm surprised not to see it being debated here. Just _using_ linux really doesn't deserve accolades any more. As they say in the article, it's an economic and practical decision, not an ideological one.
mac users are as faddish and speed-hungry as any computer clique. Probably more than most, because of all those fancy cases and new colours. and the discarded interfaces. and steve's enchanted green prada boots.
i've used linuxppc on several machines, but they've always been superseded ones. New powerbook he come, old powerbook he run apache _really_ good. put the whole lot in a backpack with a little hub and take your world with you.
i might be wrong, but i don't see anyone buying a mac in order to run linux now. it would be daft, whatever the gaussian blur stopwatch says. it's going to be kind of silly if the case looks nicer than your gui, no?
so, oddly, one of the reasons i keep buying macs is because of the linuxppc people: i know they'll be useful in other ways later.
back to the point: the question is, will people still install linuxppc on the old box when it's running apache already? which will be a while: the requirements are steep. I think the answer is yes, as long as the packaging is right.
OSX has to be all things to all mac users, so there's lots of room for specialists. the print-server in a (pretty) box. the firewall in a box, or the raq-alike instant webserver.
or more usefully, the web design studio special package that just drops in and gives you cvs and mod_perl (and php...) and failover to the other one.
i think if they play to specific audiences they'll flourish on the increased interoperability of macs and linux. the mountain is heading their way, i guess.
i mean, evil a? It's not like you have to play it backwards.
By the way, did anyone else look at this and immediately think 'evil edna'? I'm sure BeIA can generate an Outraged Kenneth falsetto, too.
You do not appear to have grasped either the seriousness of the problem or any of the views that you're trying to discredit. Perhaps that's why you haven't seen more 'substantive' evidence?
This is not about smog, or smoke, or anything you can dig up and look at. It's about the impact of industrialisation and, indirectly, capitalism on the equilibrium of the planet.
Which isn't an intrinsically bad thing, morally, except for the fact that we depend on that balance for our survival.
Global warming is not a synonym for climate change, it's just a particular example. The most severe problems we face are not simple sea-level issues but complex climatic phenomena like the direction and strength of the gulf stream and the migration of krill in the antarctic. These are the roots of the food chain and we're not going to like it much when they're cut. There are respectable, peer-reviewed studies (reg required) of these basic cycles which show them to be disrupted by our blundering.
There's a hundred-year lead time on this one. The changes we are seeing now have been accumulating for a century, and even if we all suddenly started conducting ourselves like a sane species instead of fouling our nest and flinging it around, we would still see terrible effects for decades.
So you're right, up to a point: the ability of people to fix this is highly questionable, their possession of the necessary insight even more so. But to deny that we are responsible for careless changes to the global ecosystem with unpredictable effects is the worst kind of head-burying.
> Well, there are two things to say about that. First, I
/. reader and have the associated room full of computers, but i still devote my working life to cleaning up and reducing consumption. I don't want to return to caves and furs, just to be a little less destructive.
> think a lot of the "conservationists" have very
> expansive ideas of what constitutes "waste". Look at
> the original poster: She thinks that having a roomful
> of computers in a house is wasteful. Others are
> attacking the whole idea of Christmas lights! The point
> is that the drumbeat of conservation never ends. Even
> if we did everything they wanted, they would start all
> over again. To them, ANY energy use beyond the bare
> minimum of survival is unacceptable.
That may be true of some individuals, but what evidence do you have for the generalisation? I'm as geeky as the next
> The second point is this: What's wrong with waste? Why
> is it intrinsically bad to leave all the lights of my
> house on whenever I want to. Notice that this question
> is different from the question of pollution or
> landfills. That is a clean versus dirty environment
> problem; the question of "waste" is a different
> question. And that's where a lot of environmentalists
> go wrong. Instead of focusing on the real problem,
> which is cleaning up messes, they choose to focus on
> limiting technology, progress and convenience.
It's bad because the power you use is dirty.
You don't have the first idea what the environmental movement 'focuses on': you're only aware of that part which threatens your home comforts.
The problem is that we use too much power and too much stuff to achieve ends which must be regarded as trivial. We need to find ways of making power cleaner: until we do, we need to use less of it. We need to find ways of making the material we depend on cleaner: until we do, we need to use less of it.
actually, for me the real answer is that waste is inelegant. any programmer should appreciate that. a solution which is fast and clean and appropriate to its setting is far more satisfying that something which just about works right now, causes terrible maintenance headaches and which we know causes the entire system to foul up later.
> Environmentalists should focus on clean production of
> energy, not reducing the production of energy.
or maybe, you know, both?
That's an silly argument for many reasons, and smacks of perpetual motion, but i'll concentrate on your main point: whatever they do with their money, it's ok because it's being passed on.
there are important differences between different ways of distributing wealth. Giving large amounts to the makers of swimming-pool sized subwoofers and leaving it to them is not an effective one if your goal has anything to do with the well-being of others.
money has many virtues - divisibility, indifference to history, etc - but it is not independent of context. An amount of money in one setting can be negligible but in another the same amount can save lives or transform them. Larry Ellison has all of these options available to him and is consistently choosing the most trivial and immediately gratifying.
spending $50,000 on the plans for your home cinema is stupid whichever way you look at it, but most of all because that amount of money could put someone through college and it isn't going to.
if that's not enough, consider the way it's presented: the language of the article is all about competition and one-upmanship and these people are being presented to us as aspirational figures. imagine if everyone devoted their efforts to aiming for twelve-seater movie theatre thing. we'd be heading for extinction. oh wait, they do.
> Has the director captured the essence of the book?
> Has the director transfered the plot well?
> Has the director transfered the characters well?
can i suggest that before asking those three excellent questions, you ask yourself, "is this film any good?".
if not, then you can enjoy critiquing the conversion. if yes, then perhaps you should just watch it?
(on the other hand, the answer in the case of Lynch's dune is that it's a terrible movie apart from that part of Sting which begins at the belt and ends just before he starts acting. and it insults the book.)
i can see two answers to this. the second is a bit more pragmatic.
the sensible version, to me, is that people should buy the right to experience something. the storage and distribution mechanisms are not relevant. If you lose your copy, or want to upgrade to a better storage medium, then you can do it at cost plus handling, as long as your right-to-experience can be verified. This only really works for digitable media, but old models are perfectly fine for books and vinyl anyway.
probably depends on watermarking, though. uh oh.
the other version - what actually happens - is very simple. whatever they can get away with. You agreed to it when you bought the white album under a license that said you were buying a piece of plastic that happened to have a spiral groove on it.
the record companies have something you want. they didn't assemble it with your happiness in mind and they'll wring out of you whatever they can for as long as you consent. in that it seems to have worked out rather well for them, i'd say that they do have it right, yes.
It's all shades of rather dark grey. to me. Like the microsoft trial, i'd feel a lot more sympathetic for the poor victims if they weren't a) voracious transnationals and b) kicking themselves that they didn't think of doing it first.
by the way,
> They accuse Rambus of subverting the Joint
> Electron Device Engineering Council (JEDEC)
> process when the company kept its patents on
> SDRAM secret while attending JEDEC meetings
> intended to establish an open industry standard.
Can anyone throw more light on this? I haven't hear the jedec part before. Sounds tangential to the patent question, at best, but it's worthy of Bismarck, or at least Nixon, if true.
darek says that his business runs on people who were forcibly superannuated during the 030 purge but still want access to old mac apps and data.
then he laments the bulk of OSX and the inability of even fairly recent consumer macs to run the new system.
i think his complaints are justified. there's no reason why a bsd-based os shouldn't scale down to older machines gracefully. but there's a huge flaw in his argument.
shouldn't he be delighted that another generation of mac users are going to be left in the cold? some of them will defect to windows, just as the 030 people did, and then they'll want to run their cuddly OS8 apps and read old files using his emulator.
the last thing he needs to do is run OSX: his product is for people who decide against it. so if he's right, then he should be making an imac/pre-g3 emulator asap.
it's nice to revisit the spirit of 97, but it's a silly rant really.
and i'd recommend it to anyone who actually wants to be able to carry their laptop around.
i only need a pc for testing web pages, checking email on the move and running linux, and it does all of those perfectly and without taking up any more room than a book.
i'm a linux idiot, but it installed without a hitch and ran x inn 1024x480. looks great. even got three buttons.
the little camera is just a firewire device, by the way. so it still won't work in linux, but at least we know why.
there are two problems.
The processor has always been underpowered next to the rest of the lineup. presumably due to heat issues in that little case. not a problem for me, but puts many off.
and the battery life is shit. hour and a half tops.
so crusoe sounds like a smart move on all fronts.
ours just got fried - fell in a swamp, battery acid ate motherboard - and we'll be getting another one. probably sooner than 'year end', unfortunately.
Let's take the opportunity to bring the whole system up to date and in line with modern thinking.
Everyone votes with their credit cards. a quick swipe and press a button. It makes sure you're eighteen, and it excludes anticonsumerists, poor people, immigrants and slackers. Do you want those people setting your taxes? right.
two votes for platinum.
I suppose this is Canuteish, but i really don't want to be allocated a unique id, and i particularly don't want it to be tied to my retina scan or fingerprints or dna or anything else. it leads directly to people saying things like 'if you've done nothing wrong then you've nothing to fear' and that gives me migraines.
None of the posts i've seen here so far really deal with the original question. It's a good one, so i'll paraphrase it: How can you provide adults with the tools that liberate them without those tools falling into hands too young to hold them yet?
There are three main kinds of answer coming out here: social, technical and ideological.
The social ones are most interesting, to me at least. They go something like, 'build your space so that normal social pressures move people away from the behaviour you don't want to encourage'. Which is smart, but defeats the object.
apart from the getting people to choose your particular laundry object.
Let's say someone is trying to work out whether they're gay or not. Or they want to become a muslim, or find out whether their kid is disabled or not or what technically constitutes impotence. or any of a hundred other things that you or i would use the net to find out about and probably wouldn't want people looking over our shoulder while we did it.
it's too easy to think of censorship only in terms of blocks and cuts: by denying people their privacy you are censoring their access to anything that might be poorly tolerated within their community.
if there's a point, then isn't it to broaden and propagate this rich access to information, make it more than the playground of the rich and technical minority? the best thing about the net is that it's inherently agnostic about everything, and to my mind the point of the anti-censorship debate - in its practical form - is to keep it that way, despite the deep unease it creates in people whose interests are served by restricting access to information. Which is just about anybody who's trying to persuade you to buy, use or believe in something.
(which brings up a question i've always wanted to ask here: what's the point of circumventing technical barriers to freedom of information, if you don't also address the economic barriers?)
so my answer to the question is that you should instead think about the access to information that you want to create, work out how you're going to do that and only then consider what you will need to exclude in order not to get closed down, and whether you can still do the thing you wanted to do.
> That's not censorship. It's a business policy.
I'm sorry, but that doesn't work.
Firstly, would you apply the same distinction if the business was AOL?
And secondly, censorship _is_ a business policy. The whole kids'n'porn is a small offshoot of a much wider discussion restricting the flow of information as a way of exerting control over people.
It takes a thousand different forms, from the legal intimidation McDonald's is famous for to the cheerful evasions of advertising. It may well be business policy - and it may even be defensible within the makeshift morality of the business world - but that tells us nothing at all about whether it's right or not.
it's a complete fabrication. either ryan meader is a compulsive fantasist or there's a whole group out there who like to play at being a leet source. most likely some sort of complicity between the two.
anyway, the proof is at http://www.themacjunkie.com/archives/7.11.00.rumor s.html. either it's a rather neat sting. or i am the victim of some cunning triple bluff, which would kind of prove the point anyway.
I think it's time for all of us mac moonies to understand that the rumor sites are roughly on a par with the wwf (not the wildlife one): a circus performance in which real people may or may not get hurt but the whole thing is constructed for our prurience and the profit of a small number of dubious egomaniacs.
i've been using linuxppc since version 4 came out, and i can't praise it highly enough.
i can see that the long-term view requires photoshop for linux - and hey, they released it for sgi - but the real strength of the ppc port to an old mac head like me is that when you upgrade your mac (and you do, you do), you get a free webserver in the old one.
my phone bill is a tiny fraction of what it once was, my productivity is vastly increased and my ability to make things happen online is far greater than it was because i know how to make the box bend to my will.
i've got the websites of twenty of thirty large NGO's sitting in an old mac clone here, and all for nothing.
well, for a hundred bucks a year, because i subscribed, but.
thank you.
will
ps. need any help with linuxppc.org?