so, this yet to be reviewed theory claims to have overcome your first objection, and you cannot prove them wrong until April.
Let me clarify myself. I am fully aware that the theory is specified on all scales, given that it is based on TeVeS. However, the fully specified theory fails to describe the data on all scales. That is what I meant when I said it doesn't "work."
ok, so no theory that you have seen can explain gravity better than dark matter without being REALLY contradictory to observations. Yeah, you know what I'm going to say...it is possible this new theory can do what you say it can't...which brings me to:
Um, TFA says that this theory is based on TeVeS, the relativistic generalization of MOND... which means that by definition it cannot explain a viewed shift between the total mass peak and the observable mass peak. In fact, I would venture to say that such a phenomenon cannot be explained without dark matter.
overall, i think you're wrong when you say dark matter absolutely must exist. Supposedly, this theory can explain gravity in a way that somehow changes predictably on different scales.
And professional astronomers have published thousands (!) of peer-reviewed papers in refereed journals argueing that dark matter absolutely must exist. I guess they must all be wrong, eh?
Well, I just tried Camino 1.0 on my 2.0 GHz G5. Maybe Camino runs faster on slower machines, but on mine there was no speed difference with respect to FireFox (1.0.6). The choice for me seems to come down to extensions vs. integrated keyring management... I think extensions win.
Dark Matter exists, and in my opinion it is here for good. The attempts to come up with alternative theories of gravity are quite noble, but they only work on certain scales, and the proponents of these theories sometimes neglect examples that invalidate their theory. It would be quite elegant to be able to account for dark matter via a modification of gravity alone, but I am afraid that it will not be possible.
One of the most compelling pieces of evidence for the existence of dark matter is the "bullet cluster of galaxies" discovered by Maxim Markevitch and collaborators. Their 2004 peer reviewed article shows a small cluster of galaxies passing through much more massive one. As the cluster passes through, its gas is stripped, but the dark matter stays behind, detected via weak gravitational lensing. This effect is impossible to reproduce using alternative theories of gravity, because there is a visible separation between the total mass peak and the observable mass peak.
There are dozens of other peer-reviewed articles that argue against these alternative theories of gravity. What about the cosmic microwave background? The CMB is one of the underpinnings of modern cosmology and basically made the big bang the widely accepted theory that it is today. This recent analysis of the CMB show that the kind of alternative gravity proposed here is strongly disfavored by the CMB spectrum, and that it would imply too high a neutrino mass.
I challenge you to look through the literature for yourself. Here is a list of papers discussing modified newtonian gravity and its derivatives... You will find that yes, these alternative theories do work quite well at describing the rotation curves of galaxies, as TFA suggest. But on larger scales, such as in cluster of galaxies and the cosmic microwave background, they seem to fail convincingly.
Anyone who would spend $30K on a home stereo would be a fool to download music from iTunes, given its 128kbps encoding. Surely you would be able to hear the limitations of that format on that kind of equipment.
Re:Perl is between awk and C
on
What is Perl 6?
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· Score: 1
I'm interested in this issue, so I would enjoy hearing a specific example of something perl can do that is too complex for awk to handle.
Re:Perl is between awk and C
on
What is Perl 6?
·
· Score: 1
awk '{ val[$2] = $1; # do something with vals}'
Have you got a better example of why I would need perl instead of awk? Regexps are fully supported just as in perl, so if you needed type checking you could use the same regexp as in perl.
Perl is between awk and C
on
What is Perl 6?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I do scientific computing (astronomy). I never met the task that was too cumbersome to write in C, while at the same time too complex to write in awk.
I keep waiting for a task where it would make sense for me to learn perl... it's never come along.
I guess you haven't tried video conferencing using iChat AV (Mac) or AOL Instant Messenger (PC) or iVisit (Mac/PC). They all work quite well. My parents and in-laws, who live more than a thousand miles away, can get to chat with their 1-year-old grandson and actually keep up with all the little ways he grows up each week.
Seriously, the quality of (especially Mac-to-Mac) video chatting is unbelievable. I remember watching Star Trek TNG in the 80s-90s and telling myself, "yeah, like we'll every be able to chat face-to-face with another human with such quality." Well, now it's available to anyone with a PC and a webcam, and if you're wililing to shell out US$800 for an eMac+iSight, it's an especially painless experience. I'll never forget the expression on my mother-in-law's face when she first tried it. Before trying the iChat, she basically thought that computers were horrible things that you had to work with in order to get boring tasks done. After seeing the iChat in action, she's completely come about 180 degrees, and she's even started becoming more curious about that "Internet" thing sitting in her dock.
For example, one situation is when nested several levels deep in a loop and have reached a condition requiring an immediate exit from the loop with no additional processing.
Sure, you can set up some elaborate mechanism so it fails each loop comparison and falls out of the loop, but that needlessly complicates the code. More than once, I've seen people introduce bugs in a program by either screwing up the exit from a set of nested loops or by modifying the later without realizing the purpose of the extra complications.
Dude, think modular. Just put the nested loop inside a function. Then when your exit condition comes, exit() the function. There, you're done, without the use of goto, and without needing to set up conditions at each stage of the nested loop.
Once you learn to work without gotos, you'll see that the option of using goto never even enters your mind.
I see your point about consoles, but MMORPGs are huge in South Korea. These often require Windows. Therefore people will want their windows PCs (unless they feel like dealing with Cedega).
AC Quote:
Almost guaranteed, you put in RAM that doesn't cut it. Powermacs are so picky about RAM that it hurts. The result is that you have to buy RAM that costs about twice as much, though not as much as Apple's BTO.
The other option is some sort of hardware defect. I bought a single G5 and it panicked twice on the first day. I decided to swap up for a dual model anyway, so the store did the exchange without me bothering to ask about the panics. The new model hasn't crashed on me once. Every manufacturer makes a certain number of broken computers. That's what warranties are for.
All the RAM was factory-installed by Apple. Both my office mate and I have powermac G5s, and both of us have had repeated kernel panics, all with totally 100% apple-installed RAM. My office mate did buy a 3rd party hard drive, but I doubt that has had anything to do with it.
Don't get me wrong---I love OS X and everything. It is stable "enough"---only three kernel panics over the past two years. But still, it is not as stable as Linux.
I hope there are fewer kernel panics with this one. I have a intel linux laptop and a G5 PowerMac. The laptop has never, ever crashed (since 2002). But I've had about 5 inexplicable kernel panics over the past 18 months with OS X 10.3. My office mate has a G5 PowerMac and he's had a similar number of kernel
panics over the past 2 years.
I love OS X but it still isn't quite 100% there as far as stability from my experience.
BioWare is a company that was rated one of Canada's top employers. They also happened to make successful, kick-ass games such as the Baldur's Gate Series and the original Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. They also have an incredible dedication to supporting their games after release. Heck, they are still improving their Neverwinter Nights (and releasing new content for $5/download) almost three years after the game's original release.
Gee, I guess it is possible to combine a good working environment with solid business success at a game studio.
The biggest problem is not that there is a lack of creative talent or that Holywood-style games are driving everyone else out of business. The biggest problem, as usual in every field, is the abundance of jackasses in power.
I think most in the USA have a "been there, done that" attitude towards our human spaceflight programs. Sure, the space station is supposedly laying the foundation for future manned exploration missions, but right now, all we're essentially doing is a repeat of the 1980s. Weren't they doing 0 gravity experiments back then too? And what do we have to look forward to? Mr. Bush's plans to boldly return where we went 40 years ago? And after that grow some money trees so we can somehow get to mars?
Unmanned spaceflight has made great strides and clearly had a far, far greater impact on the public's love of space than our boring, so-tired manned spaceflight program. It's time to get creative, or else leave the mission to the robots.
I am not sure I understand what you're saying. Are you saying that it is not possible at all to deference a multidimensional array in C using a[i][j]? That is false.
Check out the public domain area of the Numerical Recipies package. (While you're at it, you may want to insert your own harangue
deriding the routines; but the
2D array routines are solid).
Returns a matrix with easy multidimensional dereferencing via a[i][j]:
float **matrix(long nrl, long nrh, long ncl, long nch) /* allocate a float matrix with subscript range m[nrl..nrh][ncl..nch] */ { long i, nrow=nrh-nrl+1,ncol=nch-ncl+1; float **m;
/* allocate pointers to rows */ m=(float **) malloc((size_t)((nrow+NR_END)*sizeof(float*))); if (!m) nrerror("allocation failure 1 in matrix()"); m += NR_END; m -= nrl;
/* allocate rows and set pointers to them */ m[nrl]=(float *) malloc((size_t)((nrow*ncol+NR_END)*sizeof(float))); if (!m[nrl]) nrerror("allocation failure 2 in matrix()"); m[nrl] += NR_END; m[nrl] -= ncl;
for(i=nrl+1;i<=nrh;i++) m[i]=m[i-1]+ncol;
/* return pointer to array of pointers to rows */ return m; }
However, if you are saying that somehow C internally dereferences less optimally than Fortran, then perhaps someone else can comment on that---I don't know.
Some of you might be aware that the PC/Mac/Linux Game Neverwinter Nights includes a toolset with a C-like scripting language that allows users to code the behavior of characters in a game---not just for combat, but generic interactions as well.
BioWare, the developers of the game, are known for the imaginative story lines in their Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Baldur's Gate series. However, by their own admission, they never have as much time as they want to work on creature AI. In Neverwinter Nights, this shortage of time resulted in a number of unfortunate situations during game play. For example, friendly characters would waste powerful spells on pitifully weak enemies; or they would continually attempt to cast spells in close hand-to-hand combat, not realizing that this gives the close-by enemy countless opportunities to tear them into pieces, and that pulling out that dagger in their backpack might be a better idea. Especially sad were near-death enemies who would try to heal themselves with woefully inadequate healing spells (in RPG talk, down 80 hit points and casting cure minor wounds).
Luckily, the toolset allowed a number of us to code improvements to NPC behavior. I was one of them, starting the Henchman Inventory and Battle AI project, now lead by Tony K. The focus of our project was immediate improvement of game play. An even more impressive community is the Memetic AI group. These folks are putting together a full package of complex behaviors for an entire world, from peasant farmers to fearsome dragons. Impressive stuff.
Speaking of tabs, here's why I'm still using the Mozilla Suite instead of Thunderbird + Firefox. Option-clicking on a link in the Mozilla Suite's mail reader opens a new tab in the exisiting Mozilla browser window. Thunderbird doesn't do that (at least on Mac OS X)---all it can do is open a new browser window.
I (guiltily) like macs for scientific computing
on
The Ultimate MacDate
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I'm an astronomer, and my work involves a lot of coding (and running) CPU-intensive C programs, as well as intensive image processing. In the 1980s, a lot of people in our field were using VAX systems, but in the 90's they began switching to Sun/Solaris platforms because of their speed and stability; that's what I used throughout graduate school. In the late 90's, Linux-Intel became a player, because it could offer such a dramatic cost reduction compared to Suns, which were exorbitantly priced (at its most disparate, I believe a Linux-Intel system with comparable performance to a given Sun cost 25% less).
Now we are at a point where many people at my institute are switching to macs. The top reasons are: 1) Hate to/don't have time to RTFM. Need a situation where hardware you buy just works. 2) High-end mac prices are now comparable to high-end intel prices 3) Any document can quickly be made into a PDF (a standard in our community)
As a fan of free software, I feel guilty about this. However, I do think many of Apple's products are aesthetically pleasing, and things like iChat works with amazing simplicity. Clearly they put a lot of thought into design, and I agree with a lot of choices they've made, so I feel OK about supporting them.
I wish Linux would eliminate the RTFM. Some of us just don't have time for that. But I still have an Intel laptop, and I intend to see how far things have come since RedHat 9 by installing sarge when it is out.
Well, I have been using the same AdBlock settings since 2001 and I rarely see an ad on Yahoo, NYT, or anywhere else. You just have to be clever with your regexps;). In cases where you have to step through an ad page to get to the desired information, I usually get a blank screen with a "next" hyperlink on it. I just click on "next," and never have to see the ad.
I download the ad, but tell AdBlock not to display it. Just doing my bit to bring down the system.
The point is, the vast majority of ads are completely blocked by the filters, as they have been since 2001. And as long as Gecko had 2% of the market share, sites didn't care. Now they'll have to.
This is potentially the beginning of a huge change in the way advertising works on the internet. As people get turned on to Gecko, they will get turned on to features like AdBlock. If Gecko captures 50% market share, you can bet many of those people are viewing neither ads nor unwanted Flash content, if they're anything like me.
Does this mean an huge impending change in the way advertising works on the internet? Will companies like the NYT, who make a lot of money from ads, start embedding advertisements in ways such that AdBlocking them with regexp filters would also block out the non-ad images?
I agree entirely... I've been running Mozilla since 0.9? and I'll never switch. I use all parts of it frequently, except chatzilla. Long live the (monstrously) big gecko!
I've been using Flashblock on Mozilla since it first came out a few years ago. I have never had any problems with it. The most important thing to remember about flashblock is that it doesn't block flash---it was originally named "Flash Click to View," and that's just what it does. For example, I like to view the New York Times's multimedia specials, which are done in flash. I can block most garbage flash content with Flashblock but still view the NYT materials.
The only issue I've ever had with flashblock is that under some systems (Mozilla 1.7 Mac user here), it doesn't want to install under the user's profile. It will only work when installed while running Mozilla as root. No big deal---just do a sudo open -a/Application/Mozilla.app, install Flashblock, and then quit. It will then work for most users running as themselves.
I love Flashblock. And yes, Macromedia is evil for disallowing selective viewing of Flash content. And even more evil for uninstalling Flashblock, if that's true. May they join their buddies at MS in a very, very hot place.
You're not what I'm refering to as a swivel-eyed idealist, you're more extreme than that, and yes, I'm aware you exist, and I'm even aware there are people more extreme than that, and there's nothing much I can do to argue because we live on different planes.
And why is it that you cannot argue? Maybe it's because the poster actually has got a point. Copyright holders have achieved a coup by making sure that "stealing" (a morally wrong act) becomes synonymous in the general public consciousness with "copyright infringement" (violation of a privilege granted to entities by Congress with the idea that it would advance the public Good).
Let's get it straight: copyright infringement is not stealing. It is just illegal, and I would say unjustly so. People who disagree with digital copyright law are not "extremists," though copyright holders would like to label them as you do. There are many such people, here and elsewhere. They are not freaks of society. They have a voice that will only get louder and more influential with time.
In any case, there's little or no excuse for putting the music of RIAA members (or anyone else) onto P2P networks without authorization. They had a right to at least be given a chance to recoup their investment from the people who use their music, we, through our legislators, gave them that right. Their rights do not restrict ours. We can do anything we want with the music we create. The only reason we have this discussion at all is because, obviously, RIAA members appear to produce a great deal of the music we actually like.
Artists turn to the RIAA because they see it as the "deluxe" means of distributing their work. The marketing, concert bookings, etc. are hard to resist, especially when compared with how daunting it is to go it alone and have any chance of widespread recognition. That's the reason the RIAA makes a "great deal of music we actually like." They are the customs house.
It's very little use attempting to restrict the free flow of information. It may work now, but it won't work in the future. Any business model that relies on such restrictions is on shaky grounds. The RIAA needs to come up with a new way of making money.
Slashdot Mirror
so, this yet to be reviewed theory claims to have overcome your first objection, and you cannot prove them wrong until April.
Let me clarify myself. I am fully aware that the theory is specified on all scales, given that it is based on TeVeS. However, the fully specified theory fails to describe the data on all scales. That is what I meant when I said it doesn't "work."
ok, so no theory that you have seen can explain gravity better than dark matter without being REALLY contradictory to observations. Yeah, you know what I'm going to say...it is possible this new theory can do what you say it can't...which brings me to:
Um, TFA says that this theory is based on TeVeS, the relativistic generalization of MOND... which means that by definition it cannot explain a viewed shift between the total mass peak and the observable mass peak. In fact, I would venture to say that such a phenomenon cannot be explained without dark matter.
overall, i think you're wrong when you say dark matter absolutely must exist. Supposedly, this theory can explain gravity in a way that somehow changes predictably on different scales.
And professional astronomers have published thousands (!) of peer-reviewed papers in refereed journals argueing that dark matter absolutely must exist. I guess they must all be wrong, eh?
Well, I just tried Camino 1.0 on my 2.0 GHz G5. Maybe Camino runs faster on slower machines, but on mine there was no speed difference with respect to FireFox (1.0.6). The choice for me seems to come down to extensions vs. integrated keyring management... I think extensions win.
Dark Matter exists, and in my opinion it is here for good. The attempts to come up with alternative theories of gravity are quite noble, but they only work on certain scales, and the proponents of these theories sometimes neglect examples that invalidate their theory. It would be quite elegant to be able to account for dark matter via a modification of gravity alone, but I am afraid that it will not be possible.
One of the most compelling pieces of evidence for the existence of dark matter is the "bullet cluster of galaxies" discovered by Maxim Markevitch and collaborators. Their 2004 peer reviewed article shows a small cluster of galaxies passing through much more massive one. As the cluster passes through, its gas is stripped, but the dark matter stays behind, detected via weak gravitational lensing. This effect is impossible to reproduce using alternative theories of gravity, because there is a visible separation between the total mass peak and the observable mass peak.
There are dozens of other peer-reviewed articles that argue against these alternative theories of gravity. What about the cosmic microwave background? The CMB is one of the underpinnings of modern cosmology and basically made the big bang the widely accepted theory that it is today. This recent analysis of the CMB show that the kind of alternative gravity proposed here is strongly disfavored by the CMB spectrum, and that it would imply too high a neutrino mass.
I challenge you to look through the literature for yourself. Here is a list of papers discussing modified newtonian gravity and its derivatives... You will find that yes, these alternative theories do work quite well at describing the rotation curves of galaxies, as TFA suggest. But on larger scales, such as in cluster of galaxies and the cosmic microwave background, they seem to fail convincingly.
Anyone who would spend $30K on a home stereo would be a fool to download music from iTunes, given its 128kbps encoding. Surely you would be able to hear the limitations of that format on that kind of equipment.
I'm interested in this issue, so I would enjoy hearing a specific example of something perl can do that is too complex for awk to handle.
awk '{ val[$2] = $1; # do something with vals}'
Have you got a better example of why I would need perl instead of awk? Regexps are fully supported just as in perl, so if you needed type checking you could use the same regexp as in perl.
I do scientific computing (astronomy). I never met the task that was too cumbersome to write in C, while at the same time too complex to write in awk.
I keep waiting for a task where it would make sense for me to learn perl... it's never come along.
I guess you haven't tried video conferencing using iChat AV (Mac) or AOL Instant Messenger (PC) or iVisit (Mac/PC). They all work quite well. My parents and in-laws, who live more than a thousand miles away, can get to chat with their 1-year-old grandson and actually keep up with all the little ways he grows up each week.
Seriously, the quality of (especially Mac-to-Mac) video chatting is unbelievable. I remember watching Star Trek TNG in the 80s-90s and telling myself, "yeah, like we'll every be able to chat face-to-face with another human with such quality." Well, now it's available to anyone with a PC and a webcam, and if you're wililing to shell out US$800 for an eMac+iSight, it's an especially painless experience. I'll never forget the expression on my mother-in-law's face when she first tried it. Before trying the iChat, she basically thought that computers were horrible things that you had to work with in order to get boring tasks done. After seeing the iChat in action, she's completely come about 180 degrees, and she's even started becoming more curious about that "Internet" thing sitting in her dock.
For example, one situation is when nested several levels deep in a loop and have reached a condition requiring an immediate exit from the loop with no additional processing. Sure, you can set up some elaborate mechanism so it fails each loop comparison and falls out of the loop, but that needlessly complicates the code. More than once, I've seen people introduce bugs in a program by either screwing up the exit from a set of nested loops or by modifying the later without realizing the purpose of the extra complications.
Dude, think modular. Just put the nested loop inside a function. Then when your exit condition comes, exit() the function. There, you're done, without the use of goto, and without needing to set up conditions at each stage of the nested loop.
Once you learn to work without gotos, you'll see that the option of using goto never even enters your mind.
Want less bloat than opendocument? Why not save everything in LaTeX format?
I see your point about consoles, but MMORPGs are huge in South Korea. These often require Windows. Therefore people will want their windows PCs (unless they feel like dealing with Cedega).
AC Quote:
Almost guaranteed, you put in RAM that doesn't cut it. Powermacs are so picky about RAM that it hurts. The result is that you have to buy RAM that costs about twice as much, though not as much as Apple's BTO.
The other option is some sort of hardware defect. I bought a single G5 and it panicked twice on the first day. I decided to swap up for a dual model anyway, so the store did the exchange without me bothering to ask about the panics. The new model hasn't crashed on me once. Every manufacturer makes a certain number of broken computers. That's what warranties are for.
All the RAM was factory-installed by Apple. Both my office mate and I have powermac G5s, and both of us have had repeated kernel panics, all with totally 100% apple-installed RAM. My office mate did buy a 3rd party hard drive, but I doubt that has had anything to do with it.
Don't get me wrong---I love OS X and everything. It is stable "enough"---only three kernel panics over the past two years. But still, it is not as stable as Linux.
I hope there are fewer kernel panics with this one. I have a intel linux laptop and a G5 PowerMac. The laptop has never, ever crashed (since 2002). But I've had about 5 inexplicable kernel panics over the past 18 months with OS X 10.3. My office mate has a G5 PowerMac and he's had a similar number of kernel panics over the past 2 years.
I love OS X but it still isn't quite 100% there as far as stability from my experience.
BioWare is a company that was rated one of Canada's top employers. They also happened to make successful, kick-ass games such as the Baldur's Gate Series and the original Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. They also have an incredible dedication to supporting their games after release. Heck, they are still improving their Neverwinter Nights (and releasing new content for $5/download) almost three years after the game's original release.
Gee, I guess it is possible to combine a good working environment with solid business success at a game studio.
The biggest problem is not that there is a lack of creative talent or that Holywood-style games are driving everyone else out of business. The biggest problem, as usual in every field, is the abundance of jackasses in power.
I think most in the USA have a "been there, done that" attitude towards our human spaceflight programs. Sure, the space station is supposedly laying the foundation for future manned exploration missions, but right now, all we're essentially doing is a repeat of the 1980s. Weren't they doing 0 gravity experiments back then too? And what do we have to look forward to? Mr. Bush's plans to boldly return where we went 40 years ago? And after that grow some money trees so we can somehow get to mars?
Unmanned spaceflight has made great strides and clearly had a far, far greater impact on the public's love of space than our boring, so-tired manned spaceflight program. It's time to get creative, or else leave the mission to the robots.
Check out the public domain area of the Numerical Recipies package. (While you're at it, you may want to insert your own harangue deriding the routines; but the 2D array routines are solid).
Returns a matrix with easy multidimensional dereferencing via a[i][j]:However, if you are saying that somehow C internally dereferences less optimally than Fortran, then perhaps someone else can comment on that---I don't know.
Some of you might be aware that the PC/Mac/Linux Game Neverwinter Nights includes a toolset with a C-like scripting language that allows users to code the behavior of characters in a game---not just for combat, but generic interactions as well.
BioWare, the developers of the game, are known for the imaginative story lines in their Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Baldur's Gate series. However, by their own admission, they never have as much time as they want to work on creature AI. In Neverwinter Nights, this shortage of time resulted in a number of unfortunate situations during game play. For example, friendly characters would waste powerful spells on pitifully weak enemies; or they would continually attempt to cast spells in close hand-to-hand combat, not realizing that this gives the close-by enemy countless opportunities to tear them into pieces, and that pulling out that dagger in their backpack might be a better idea. Especially sad were near-death enemies who would try to heal themselves with woefully inadequate healing spells (in RPG talk, down 80 hit points and casting cure minor wounds).
Luckily, the toolset allowed a number of us to code improvements to NPC behavior. I was one of them, starting the Henchman Inventory and Battle AI project, now lead by Tony K. The focus of our project was immediate improvement of game play. An even more impressive community is the Memetic AI group. These folks are putting together a full package of complex behaviors for an entire world, from peasant farmers to fearsome dragons. Impressive stuff.
Speaking of tabs, here's why I'm still using the Mozilla Suite instead of Thunderbird + Firefox. Option-clicking on a link in the Mozilla Suite's mail reader opens a new tab in the exisiting Mozilla browser window. Thunderbird doesn't do that (at least on Mac OS X)---all it can do is open a new browser window.
I'm an astronomer, and my work involves a lot of coding (and running) CPU-intensive C programs, as well as intensive image processing. In the 1980s, a lot of people in our field were using VAX systems, but in the 90's they began switching to Sun/Solaris platforms because of their speed and stability; that's what I used throughout graduate school. In the late 90's, Linux-Intel became a player, because it could offer such a dramatic cost reduction compared to Suns, which were exorbitantly priced (at its most disparate, I believe a Linux-Intel system with comparable performance to a given Sun cost 25% less).
Now we are at a point where many people at my institute are switching to macs. The top reasons are: 1) Hate to/don't have time to RTFM. Need a situation where hardware you buy just works. 2) High-end mac prices are now comparable to high-end intel prices 3) Any document can quickly be made into a PDF (a standard in our community)
As a fan of free software, I feel guilty about this. However, I do think many of Apple's products are aesthetically pleasing, and things like iChat works with amazing simplicity. Clearly they put a lot of thought into design, and I agree with a lot of choices they've made, so I feel OK about supporting them.
I wish Linux would eliminate the RTFM. Some of us just don't have time for that. But I still have an Intel laptop, and I intend to see how far things have come since RedHat 9 by installing sarge when it is out.
Now I have to worry about the fact that my safety (and my family's) is in the hands of incompetent Microsoft.
That sucks.
Well, I have been using the same AdBlock settings since 2001 and I rarely see an ad on Yahoo, NYT, or anywhere else. You just have to be clever with your regexps ;). In cases where you have to step through an ad page to get to the desired information, I usually get a blank screen with a "next" hyperlink on it. I just click on "next," and never have to see the ad.
... let the fun begin!
I download the ad, but tell AdBlock not to display it. Just doing my bit to bring down the system.
The point is, the vast majority of ads are completely blocked by the filters, as they have been since 2001. And as long as Gecko had 2% of the market share, sites didn't care. Now they'll have to.
This is potentially the beginning of a huge change in the way advertising works on the internet. As people get turned on to Gecko, they will get turned on to features like AdBlock. If Gecko captures 50% market share, you can bet many of those people are viewing neither ads nor unwanted Flash content, if they're anything like me.
Does this mean an huge impending change in the way advertising works on the internet? Will companies like the NYT, who make a lot of money from ads, start embedding advertisements in ways such that AdBlocking them with regexp filters would also block out the non-ad images?
I agree entirely... I've been running Mozilla since 0.9? and I'll never switch. I use all parts of it frequently, except chatzilla. Long live the (monstrously) big gecko!
I've been using Flashblock on Mozilla since it first came out a few years ago. I have never had any problems with it. The most important thing to remember about flashblock is that it doesn't block flash---it was originally named "Flash Click to View," and that's just what it does. For example, I like to view the New York Times's multimedia specials, which are done in flash. I can block most garbage flash content with Flashblock but still view the NYT materials.
/Application/Mozilla.app, install Flashblock, and then quit. It will then work for most users running as themselves.
The only issue I've ever had with flashblock is that under some systems (Mozilla 1.7 Mac user here), it doesn't want to install under the user's profile. It will only work when installed while running Mozilla as root. No big deal---just do a sudo open -a
I love Flashblock. And yes, Macromedia is evil for disallowing selective viewing of Flash content. And even more evil for uninstalling Flashblock, if that's true. May they join their buddies at MS in a very, very hot place.
You're not what I'm refering to as a swivel-eyed idealist, you're more extreme than that, and yes, I'm aware you exist, and I'm even aware there are people more extreme than that, and there's nothing much I can do to argue because we live on different planes.
And why is it that you cannot argue? Maybe it's because the poster actually has got a point. Copyright holders have achieved a coup by making sure that "stealing" (a morally wrong act) becomes synonymous in the general public consciousness with "copyright infringement" (violation of a privilege granted to entities by Congress with the idea that it would advance the public Good).
Let's get it straight: copyright infringement is not stealing. It is just illegal, and I would say unjustly so. People who disagree with digital copyright law are not "extremists," though copyright holders would like to label them as you do. There are many such people, here and elsewhere. They are not freaks of society. They have a voice that will only get louder and more influential with time.
In any case, there's little or no excuse for putting the music of RIAA members (or anyone else) onto P2P networks without authorization. They had a right to at least be given a chance to recoup their investment from the people who use their music, we, through our legislators, gave them that right. Their rights do not restrict ours. We can do anything we want with the music we create. The only reason we have this discussion at all is because, obviously, RIAA members appear to produce a great deal of the music we actually like.
Artists turn to the RIAA because they see it as the "deluxe" means of distributing their work. The marketing, concert bookings, etc. are hard to resist, especially when compared with how daunting it is to go it alone and have any chance of widespread recognition. That's the reason the RIAA makes a "great deal of music we actually like." They are the customs house.
It's very little use attempting to restrict the free flow of information. It may work now, but it won't work in the future. Any business model that relies on such restrictions is on shaky grounds. The RIAA needs to come up with a new way of making money.