Me too, and it works pretty well although some of the missing features are a bit of a pain and keep me going back to the real vim. I'm using Eclipse at the moment because it is great for debugging but I also have a few xterms open too. If I need to do something that is quicker in real vi I just save the file in Eclipse, open it with vim, do what I need to do, save it again and then open it back up in Eclipse. Whatever works I guess:-)
You know, in the 16 years I have been running UNIX I have really come to appreciate vi. I have tried other tools (Eclipse, Xcode, others I can't remember the name of, Kdevelop probably) but for the sort of programming I do (command line, C/MPI) you just can't beat vi (or more recently vim). Syntax highlighting, the speed of editing, having a few terminals open, keep it simple is my motto and it works. A mouse just slows me down. Of course, if I was doing GUI programming then I would use something like Eclipse (I bought the vi emulator for Eclipse) or Xcode. I still remember learning Motif in the early 90's and it was a nightmare.
Anyway, like any good *nix, OS X comes with vim pre-installed. Just make sure you have X11 and it is business as usual just like it was back on my old Sun Sparcstation 1 running SunOS 4.1.3:-)
It would be interesting to weigh the benefits of teaching students to use computers including multiple platforms versus teaching them just to use certain applications (Office) on a single platform. From my experience in education (far too many years in university as a student and staff) I have found that often the students who have a varied experience are also the most comfortable learning new things. Computing is all about new things and if students are scared to try anything it is hard to get them to function, especially in a scientific environment.
I personally think that the whole standardisation on Windows is not about education quality but rather about making life easy for the teachers who often appear to only be a few pages ahead of the students when it comes to using software. Teachers are the limiting factor. Students are likely to adapt easily to all sorts of platforms without much trouble, but teachers (apart from a small number of bright individuals) have really only learned which button to mash so it isn't surprising that the pupils all learn what button to mash and when mashing that button doesn't work they don't know what to do.
Is this the future of computing? I really hope not. So no, standardising on a single software platform is not good as they do not learn how to adapt. Learning is not just about known how to do something, it is about why you did it.
Not only is he a technologist, he's a great scientician and an award-winning engineeringer. His unfailicating leaderostimation and efficientistic directionating of Microsoft's profusical resources will undoubtingly work for the betterificationating of all humanitism.
That's it. The Vogons are on slashdot. Where did I leave my towel?
Years ago I had a Religious Education teacher who talked about the "God Bin" which was a place to stick all the stuff we didn't understand by simply saying "God did it". Science has the job of emptying the God Bin and now all the easy stuff, night and day, why bees can fly etc are done there are only a few things rattling around in the bottom of the bin so it isn't any wonder that the Pope would grasp onto one of the last things and say science shouldn't touch. The only other stuff in the God Bin now is stuff that people just make up and is impossible to prove one way or another such as the existence of a 'soul'.
And yes, I read 'A Brief History of Time' several times and always enjoyed the bit about the Pope telling him to stay away from the beginning of the universe.
I was never interested in the original Xbox. I bought an early PS2 (which is still running fine) when GTA3 came out and then I bought a Game Cube because it was damn cheap and I really wanted to play Rogue Leader which looked amazing on a projector. Nothing on the Xbox really grabbed me. I bought Halo for the PC and it was OK but I just didn't like anything else. Well, this time I decided to give MS a chance and bought the 360. On the plus side, it is actually very well made and presented. I've only bought a few games (Halo 2 when I got the console and then Burnout Revenge and Table Tennis) but I have learned to appreciate the wireless controller which feels really nice to use. The only problem is that there are still so few killer games. The graphics are a step up from the PS2 and GCN but not massively but it is early days. I'll definitely buy a Wii and I'll wait until the new year before I even consider a PS3 but any purchase will require some killer game. Shelf life? Dunno. The 360 seems to have the necessary grunt for this generation but then so did the Dreamcast. Lack of HD movies may be a problem, I won't be buying an addon drive for it that's for sure.
I don't know where this is going really. I am still somewhat ambivalent about the 360. I'm not sure about the PS3 and am taking a wait and see approach. Definitely excited about the Wii though. Shelf life? I think Nintendo wins on that front by a very very large margin.
The UK store is showing the 1.83 MBP as no longer part of the range with 2.0Ghz being the base model and the 2.16Ghz as the top model for the same money as the old 2.0Ghz was.
really have no idea where you were that you got the idea that food in the US is _worse_ than it is in the UK. Perhaps you needed someone to show you around.
It was a combination of travelling around a lot and not knowing where to eat. Sure, there were some places we found excellent little restuarants but by and large it felt to us like a sea of BK, McD, pizza places and so on. It is getting very similar here of course but the food isn't the same. The portions are still far to large and taste funny to me. Besides, if you spend all your time in a car all you ever see are these fast food places so too much time in a car leads to bad food IMHO.
Yeah, we drive too much - way too much. Then again, your country has a lot of good walking.
People here drive too much as well but fortunately the country hasn't entirely been knocked down to make room for cars so our cities are so clogged it just isn't practical to drive to work. Where I live has excellent public transport (light rail) and cycle paths everywhere although I am still appalled by how many people do insist on using the car. I suggested to one colleague that if she must drive she should at least park a couple of miles out and walk the rest of the way in. What she actually does is drive five miles or so to a metro station that has free parking and then rides the rest of the way in by train. Madness. If I use the metro I actually get off where she parks and walk the rest of the way in and we both live in a similar part of town. She is quote heavy and talks a lot about diets but doesn't seem to do much about it. Like I said, we in the UK really can't be that far behind the US on any of this, the signs are there but I wonder if our architecture will prevail or we will simply knock down large portions of our old cities to run a wide motorway through....
The fundamental problem in large parts of the US is that people spend far to little time walking anywhere compared with the UK. Also, it is often difficult to find good quality food amid all the wasteland of fast food joints. I actually ate less than I do in the UK when I was last in the US because the food was so awful. I'm not claiming the UK has great food but you guys have it much worse. Portions are too large and the food is too greasy. Worse, when you are on a budget this high calorie/low nutrition junk food ends up being attractive.
Add the rotten food to the car culture and you have a disaster. The UK is sure to follow this trend although it is much easier here to live close enough to work that you don't have to drive (I cycle). Just 30 mins exercise a day would make a world of difference (I try to get an hour in) and there is no reason why you should pay to get it at a gym. Heck, even if you do drive try parking 15-30 mins walk away from work and go the rest of the way in on foot. When I do have to use my car I do that and I still get in quicker than I would if I tried to drive the last couple of miles.
I have been wearing contact lenses for over 20 years now and have gone through gas permeable hard lenses, soft monthly lenses and most recently daily disposables. The dailies are great, I wear them from 7 in the morning until at least 10 pm and I work with computers all day long. Dailies are good because they are so thin but this does make them a bit fragile. However, if you are careful with them they can also be worn for a week per pair (I just use the normal soft lens peroxide cleaning systems that are available over the counter) and if a pair of lenses are getting a bit scappy I chuck them and open a fresh set. The companies that make these lenses would rather you wear the dailies, um, well, daily, but they are made from exactly the same materials as weeklies but I find the dailies much more comfortable because they are so thin. However, the dailies work out pretty expensive unless you clean and reuse them in which case they are very cost effective as well as the most comfortable lenses you can buy.
I don't see anything in this that precludes pre-loading of OS's other than Windows. They just need to be properly licenced. A copy of RedFlag Linux for example should be perfectly acceptable.
I hate the way this whole 'naked PC' thing is painted as purely a piracy issue. We just bought 10 Workstations from HP that come with WinXP Pro and no way to buy them without despite the fact that they are intended as Linux machines and HP advertises them as fully Linux compatible.
Lets see, the last time I went to the flicks it cost us £20 (tickets and snacks), the seats were very uncomfortable, the picture quality wasn't all that great (poorly done 35mm is barely better than a projected DVD, let alone HDTV) and the sound was nothing to write home about. Also, the guy behind me had stinky feet that he insisted on putting on the back of my chair, some guy at the back of the theatre stood up proclaiming that someone had farted and that it stank like shit (duh!) and stormed down to the front to sit. Admittedly the fart was pretty nasty. Anyway, the fact is, the cinematic experience can be closely replicated at home without all the bad things by playing a DVD on even a budget DLP projector these days. Compared with the £100,000 front projection CRT systems with line doublers etc that were necessary only 10 years ago, a modern cheap DLP blows that away for the most part (black level is the only real problem but they are getting better and better). I can't wait for HD discs (blu-ray or HD-DVD, not bothered, both would be fine by me) so I can finally say that yes, my home projection system is better than all but the very best cinema. At that point the only way you will drag me into a cinema is if it is a *REALLY* good film, or IMAX. From what I understand the digital projection systems are only aiming to be as good as 35mm which means HDTV should be a very similar experience.
It is amazing what is preserved in fossils. Back in 1988 I did serial sectioning of a fossilised brachiopod (Gryphea) and using software I wrote on my BBC micro I digitised the layers and reconstructed them on the computer. Using blue and red filters I was able to show the internal support structures in 3D which was amazing and showed detail previously unknown from traditional serial sectioning. It should never be underestimated what 3D graphics can show that might be otherwise hidden. Of course, traditional serial sectioning is destructive unlike this new technique.
OK, lots of talk about these but here it is from someone with both G5 and Intel iMac 20" machines. For some things the Intel is faster than the G5 by a significant margin (Safari in particular feels quite snappy) but when you have to run PPC apps the G5 is much better. For the moment there are really quite a lot of apps that are not Intel native so the overall impression when using the two machines is that the Intel is no quicker, and some times much much slower. For PPC apps the Intel machine is no better than my 933Mhz iBook G4. Worse, there is significant pain at the moment in doing much that is taken for granted with the G5 iMac. Many programs do not run (we use BlueJ and Eclipse, neither work on the Intel). You still get the spinning beachball of death, and it seems quite often too. All in all, it feels just like any other previous Mac.
One thing that impressed me was the fact that Rosetta is able to run command line apps compiled for PPC. Gives a good idea of just how fast Rosetta is when running raw PPC code without a GUI. The answer is that a 2Ghz Intel chip running PPC code is about the same speed as a 500Mhz PPC. very reasonable compared with something like PearPC but still a significant drain. You get some back with the GUI as much of that code is native so something like MS Office actually feels usable. Our 2.3Ghz G5 Xserves smoke both the G5 iMac and the Intel even when the Intel is running native code at least with our apps.
So, do I recommend the Intel iMac? Probably. Would I recommend against a G5? Nope. Buy whichever you like. With the G5, you know what you are getting and it will still run software for the forseeable future. The Intel machine is pretty hard work at the moment but has the promise of getting better as more universal apps come along. Of course, there is currently no viable fast PC emulator so you can't run Windows or Linux on it. With Qemu or VPC on the G5 you can run Windows quite reasonably but not as quickly as you will be able to in say, six months when MS get off their arses and build VPC for the Intel Mac.
I can see why Apple released the iMac first, makes sense. The G5 iMac was never really a speed demon so the Intel one doesn't suffer too much overall. Same goes for the MacBook Pro which should be able to keep up with the G4 PowerBooks. It will take a while yet before slotting an Intel chip into the pro towers makes sense though.
A Mac is a Mac though, doesn't really matter what is inside chip wise.
I wonder if anyone is going to be able to patch Win98 against this? There are still a lot of machines and this vulnerability could make them essentially useless and force an upgrade. While we would all love for them to upgrade to Linux or OS X it is more likely that they will shell out for WinXP and MS will benefit from a windfall of sales as a result of their inept programming. If someone produced a workable patch this would at least allow people to keep using their computers without pouring more money down the MS bottomless pit.
Interesting comment. We currently have a Windows infrastructure put in place before I arrived. It has 12 licenses and our company is about to use up the last of them. To add another user we will need to buy CALs for each of the three servers (win2003) we run, exchange, office etc etc. Surprising how this adds up. Anyway, since we intend to get bigger and we don't like having to dip into the pot every time we want to add one more user we are ditching the win2003 boxes in favour of linux servers (its OK, I've done this before so don't worry about TCO and retraining). We are moving away from Office to OpenOffice 2, I'll probably end up getting Crossover Office to allow us to retain the current 12 licenses for purposes of absolute compatibility but internally our docs will switch to OpenDocument and externally PDF. Outlook will be dropped in favour of standards complient and secure e-mail apps (Thunderbird, Apple Mail, Evolution and so on) and I have already been successfully running a test server with IMAP, OpenWebMail and WebDav along with SAMBA and it all works well. So, back to the question, why not exchange? Too expensive by far, really not crossplatform enough even though we can use Evolution from *nix it is better to have more choice and I simply don't want our Windows users running Outlook. Entourage is really nasty and like the rest of Office:mac it doesn't really sit well on the platform. Oh, and the licenses for our anti-virus and anti-spam software have a limitation on the number of users too, and the anti-spam doesn't even seem to work so that will all be replaced with clam-av and spamassassin or similar on the linux server. In the end, a switch like this is about taking control of the situation. With an MS infrastructure you have too little control and it might look cost effective at first but the expense just keeps growing.
I'm looking at eGroupware at the moment but it seems to be a bit over the top and we will probably just stick with WebDav. In the end, the solution will work for all platforms as it will be based on open standards and so my users will be able to choose the platform that best lets them get their jobs done but I won't have a particular application or desktop forcing the whole infrastructure to come from a single manufacturer as is currently the case.
I watched Minority Report and thought that this looked like a nightmare view of the future. Some idiot advertiser looks at it and thinks it is a great idea. What a maroon. The reason I block every advert I can (TiVO, Adblock, PithHelmet, flashblock) is that the constant flashing of these things make it very difficult to concentrate on the content. I can see something like this killing newspapers in an ideal world and yet in the real world we probably will end up with something like this. Advertisers.... Anyone got an ark we can stick the buggers on along with the lawyers, telephone sanitisers and other useless folk?
doesn't have a DAMN thing to do with the TELECOMMUTING question, now does it...
I believe the question was "How is your company responding to the current situation?". Telecommuting is one way of dealing with the situation but you do lose the direct interaction with collegues. If you really must be at the office the most environmentally friendly and least reliant on fuel prices is a bicycle. Some companies even give their employees benefits to encourage the use of bicycles.
The sad thing about all this is that the one country that will really suffer from the rising price of fuel is the USA. The country simply isn't laid out to handle the loss of the car. Some of the older cities will be OK but the vast majority that drive to work will be seriously stuck. That isn't to say that cycling in the UK isn't hard because the roads here are small and crowded but there are plenty of ways to avoid the main roads and many cities have a decent cycle path network. The best time was five years ago when the fuel protests cut supplies and it literally took a few days before the roads were deserted. Parents walked their children to school, workers walked and cycled to work or used the still available public transport. The roads were incredibly quiet and the air was clean. The noise of the traffic disappeared and it was amazing how nice it was, every day was like Sunday morning at 6am. A vision of the future for when the fuel really does become scarce? What was surprising was that the world didn't grind to a halt for us and even when fuel supplies returned there was a short period where people continued to limit their car use but within a few months it was all back to the way it was. I'm actually hoping the fuel crisis deepens......
I've been cycling to work for the last three months and it has been great. Some days I have to use public transport if the weather is really nasty but I am averaging about 80% of my travel by bicycle. Lots of health benefits, zero emissions, very cheap to run. I cover 12 miles per day, some hills but I hardly notice them any more and it only takes me 35 mins each way.
A quick calculation to show the current price of UK fuel compared with the US:
$3.00 per US gallon (seems about average)
£0.92 per UK litre (at my local Asda)
1 US gallon = 3.79 litres (1 Imperial gallon is 4.54 litres)
£1 = $1.82
therefore, UK price is currently $6.35 per US gallon.
The other day it cost me £5 more to fill my car than it had done three weeks previously when I last filled it prior to a trip to York. I dread to think what people driving big 4x4s are paying when my little 1.6 Alfa Romeo costs £42 to fill.
The version of IE for Mac had very little to do with the Windows versions. Different code base etc. I tried to use it recently and most sites that require IE won't work with IE for Mac anyway so there is really very little point in having it. The thing is so slow it isn't funny and the look of it is quite unlike modern Mac applications as it is still covered in the old pinstripe stuff. Safari is much better and has much greater compatibility than IE for Mac these days so yes, MS is right, there is no need for IE for Mac.
It is so funny, they seem so determined to spread their plague to ever corner of IT but in the end all MS every does is reduce choice and that was the one thing Windows really had going for it. Now a typical PC will have what, MS Windows, MS Office and ummm, some games, oh and lots of anti virus and anti spyware software, but then MS makes all that now, and now they want another market.
It is funny though that the con(ned)sumers are still swayed by the MS name. I have heard people in shops debating over buying a mouse for instance and plumped for the MS one because it was Microsoft and therefore would be compatible with their PC. For this reason alone I expect MS' move into telephony to be a raging success:-(
I just wonder how hard they will try the old embrace, extend, extinguish tactic this time?
yeah, sorry about that but it was the experience with the BT sales person that really made me flip. As others have pointed out I was wrong about the k thing, duh! Regardless, bits and bytes, its important.
We don't need more than 640kb of ram after all!
(firefox is currently using 130mb with a fat 620mb vm size... oops - but that is all page data and media and bad flash plugin / mem handling)
For crying out loud! How tough is it to get the capitalisation right? Its MB (Mega Bytes) and KB (Kilo Bytes). This really annoys me with PC users today who seem to use bits and bytes interchangeably. I was trying to get broadband the other day from British Telecom of all people and the woman on phone assured me that I was wrong when I suggested she might want to try again when she told me there was a 15 GB (Giga Bytes) download limit and not 15 Gb (Giga bits) as she insisted it was. That wouldn't have been too bad but the 1 Gb limit on the most basic service sounds really mean if she is right as that would be 128MB a day! You could hit that one a single website!
There was a time when knowing your bits from your bytes and how to do boolean algebra were some of the most important things you could learn when you first got your grubby hands on a computer. These days people are confused if the flipping icon changes!
P.S. The woman from BT also assured me that I couldn't use my Mac on the basic broadband because it was incompatible and I would have to have the more expensive service at which point I told her I knew she was wrong (as I had recently had to use my iBook to set up a relative's basic broadband because her PC wouldn't talk to it) and that based on my experience during this call I didn't think BT was technically capable of providing a service to the standards I required and I would look elsewhere.
Get "Simpsons Road Rage". It's basically GTA with Simpsons characters and no gore.
I got it and loved it. My wife didn't get very far although she didn't object to it. I think part of the problem is she doesn't like 3D stuff much although she does enjoy Super Monkey Ball which is very 3D. The recent Marios are less popular with her than the old 2D scrollers but she likes Mario Party but then that is more like a board game.
Slashdot Mirror
Me too, and it works pretty well although some of the missing features are a bit of a pain and keep me going back to the real vim. I'm using Eclipse at the moment because it is great for debugging but I also have a few xterms open too. If I need to do something that is quicker in real vi I just save the file in Eclipse, open it with vim, do what I need to do, save it again and then open it back up in Eclipse. Whatever works I guess :-)
You know, in the 16 years I have been running UNIX I have really come to appreciate vi. I have tried other tools (Eclipse, Xcode, others I can't remember the name of, Kdevelop probably) but for the sort of programming I do (command line, C/MPI) you just can't beat vi (or more recently vim). Syntax highlighting, the speed of editing, having a few terminals open, keep it simple is my motto and it works. A mouse just slows me down. Of course, if I was doing GUI programming then I would use something like Eclipse (I bought the vi emulator for Eclipse) or Xcode. I still remember learning Motif in the early 90's and it was a nightmare.
:-)
Anyway, like any good *nix, OS X comes with vim pre-installed. Just make sure you have X11 and it is business as usual just like it was back on my old Sun Sparcstation 1 running SunOS 4.1.3
It would be interesting to weigh the benefits of teaching students to use computers including multiple platforms versus teaching them just to use certain applications (Office) on a single platform. From my experience in education (far too many years in university as a student and staff) I have found that often the students who have a varied experience are also the most comfortable learning new things. Computing is all about new things and if students are scared to try anything it is hard to get them to function, especially in a scientific environment.
I personally think that the whole standardisation on Windows is not about education quality but rather about making life easy for the teachers who often appear to only be a few pages ahead of the students when it comes to using software. Teachers are the limiting factor. Students are likely to adapt easily to all sorts of platforms without much trouble, but teachers (apart from a small number of bright individuals) have really only learned which button to mash so it isn't surprising that the pupils all learn what button to mash and when mashing that button doesn't work they don't know what to do.
Is this the future of computing? I really hope not. So no, standardising on a single software platform is not good as they do not learn how to adapt. Learning is not just about known how to do something, it is about why you did it.
That's it. The Vogons are on slashdot. Where did I leave my towel?
Years ago I had a Religious Education teacher who talked about the "God Bin" which was a place to stick all the stuff we didn't understand by simply saying "God did it". Science has the job of emptying the God Bin and now all the easy stuff, night and day, why bees can fly etc are done there are only a few things rattling around in the bottom of the bin so it isn't any wonder that the Pope would grasp onto one of the last things and say science shouldn't touch. The only other stuff in the God Bin now is stuff that people just make up and is impossible to prove one way or another such as the existence of a 'soul'.
And yes, I read 'A Brief History of Time' several times and always enjoyed the bit about the Pope telling him to stay away from the beginning of the universe.
I was never interested in the original Xbox. I bought an early PS2 (which is still running fine) when GTA3 came out and then I bought a Game Cube because it was damn cheap and I really wanted to play Rogue Leader which looked amazing on a projector. Nothing on the Xbox really grabbed me. I bought Halo for the PC and it was OK but I just didn't like anything else. Well, this time I decided to give MS a chance and bought the 360. On the plus side, it is actually very well made and presented. I've only bought a few games (Halo 2 when I got the console and then Burnout Revenge and Table Tennis) but I have learned to appreciate the wireless controller which feels really nice to use. The only problem is that there are still so few killer games. The graphics are a step up from the PS2 and GCN but not massively but it is early days. I'll definitely buy a Wii and I'll wait until the new year before I even consider a PS3 but any purchase will require some killer game. Shelf life? Dunno. The 360 seems to have the necessary grunt for this generation but then so did the Dreamcast. Lack of HD movies may be a problem, I won't be buying an addon drive for it that's for sure.
I don't know where this is going really. I am still somewhat ambivalent about the 360. I'm not sure about the PS3 and am taking a wait and see approach. Definitely excited about the Wii though. Shelf life? I think Nintendo wins on that front by a very very large margin.
The UK store is showing the 1.83 MBP as no longer part of the range with 2.0Ghz being the base model and the 2.16Ghz as the top model for the same money as the old 2.0Ghz was.
It was a combination of travelling around a lot and not knowing where to eat. Sure, there were some places we found excellent little restuarants but by and large it felt to us like a sea of BK, McD, pizza places and so on. It is getting very similar here of course but the food isn't the same. The portions are still far to large and taste funny to me. Besides, if you spend all your time in a car all you ever see are these fast food places so too much time in a car leads to bad food IMHO.
People here drive too much as well but fortunately the country hasn't entirely been knocked down to make room for cars so our cities are so clogged it just isn't practical to drive to work. Where I live has excellent public transport (light rail) and cycle paths everywhere although I am still appalled by how many people do insist on using the car. I suggested to one colleague that if she must drive she should at least park a couple of miles out and walk the rest of the way in. What she actually does is drive five miles or so to a metro station that has free parking and then rides the rest of the way in by train. Madness. If I use the metro I actually get off where she parks and walk the rest of the way in and we both live in a similar part of town. She is quote heavy and talks a lot about diets but doesn't seem to do much about it. Like I said, we in the UK really can't be that far behind the US on any of this, the signs are there but I wonder if our architecture will prevail or we will simply knock down large portions of our old cities to run a wide motorway through....
The fundamental problem in large parts of the US is that people spend far to little time walking anywhere compared with the UK. Also, it is often difficult to find good quality food amid all the wasteland of fast food joints. I actually ate less than I do in the UK when I was last in the US because the food was so awful. I'm not claiming the UK has great food but you guys have it much worse. Portions are too large and the food is too greasy. Worse, when you are on a budget this high calorie/low nutrition junk food ends up being attractive.
Add the rotten food to the car culture and you have a disaster. The UK is sure to follow this trend although it is much easier here to live close enough to work that you don't have to drive (I cycle). Just 30 mins exercise a day would make a world of difference (I try to get an hour in) and there is no reason why you should pay to get it at a gym. Heck, even if you do drive try parking 15-30 mins walk away from work and go the rest of the way in on foot. When I do have to use my car I do that and I still get in quicker than I would if I tried to drive the last couple of miles.
I have been wearing contact lenses for over 20 years now and have gone through gas permeable hard lenses, soft monthly lenses and most recently daily disposables. The dailies are great, I wear them from 7 in the morning until at least 10 pm and I work with computers all day long. Dailies are good because they are so thin but this does make them a bit fragile. However, if you are careful with them they can also be worn for a week per pair (I just use the normal soft lens peroxide cleaning systems that are available over the counter) and if a pair of lenses are getting a bit scappy I chuck them and open a fresh set. The companies that make these lenses would rather you wear the dailies, um, well, daily, but they are made from exactly the same materials as weeklies but I find the dailies much more comfortable because they are so thin. However, the dailies work out pretty expensive unless you clean and reuse them in which case they are very cost effective as well as the most comfortable lenses you can buy.
I don't see anything in this that precludes pre-loading of OS's other than Windows. They just need to be properly licenced. A copy of RedFlag Linux for example should be perfectly acceptable.
I hate the way this whole 'naked PC' thing is painted as purely a piracy issue. We just bought 10 Workstations from HP that come with WinXP Pro and no way to buy them without despite the fact that they are intended as Linux machines and HP advertises them as fully Linux compatible.
Lets see, the last time I went to the flicks it cost us £20 (tickets and snacks), the seats were very uncomfortable, the picture quality wasn't all that great (poorly done 35mm is barely better than a projected DVD, let alone HDTV) and the sound was nothing to write home about. Also, the guy behind me had stinky feet that he insisted on putting on the back of my chair, some guy at the back of the theatre stood up proclaiming that someone had farted and that it stank like shit (duh!) and stormed down to the front to sit. Admittedly the fart was pretty nasty. Anyway, the fact is, the cinematic experience can be closely replicated at home without all the bad things by playing a DVD on even a budget DLP projector these days. Compared with the £100,000 front projection CRT systems with line doublers etc that were necessary only 10 years ago, a modern cheap DLP blows that away for the most part (black level is the only real problem but they are getting better and better). I can't wait for HD discs (blu-ray or HD-DVD, not bothered, both would be fine by me) so I can finally say that yes, my home projection system is better than all but the very best cinema. At that point the only way you will drag me into a cinema is if it is a *REALLY* good film, or IMAX. From what I understand the digital projection systems are only aiming to be as good as 35mm which means HDTV should be a very similar experience.
It is amazing what is preserved in fossils. Back in 1988 I did serial sectioning of a fossilised brachiopod (Gryphea) and using software I wrote on my BBC micro I digitised the layers and reconstructed them on the computer. Using blue and red filters I was able to show the internal support structures in 3D which was amazing and showed detail previously unknown from traditional serial sectioning. It should never be underestimated what 3D graphics can show that might be otherwise hidden. Of course, traditional serial sectioning is destructive unlike this new technique.
OK, lots of talk about these but here it is from someone with both G5 and Intel iMac 20" machines. For some things the Intel is faster than the G5 by a significant margin (Safari in particular feels quite snappy) but when you have to run PPC apps the G5 is much better. For the moment there are really quite a lot of apps that are not Intel native so the overall impression when using the two machines is that the Intel is no quicker, and some times much much slower. For PPC apps the Intel machine is no better than my 933Mhz iBook G4. Worse, there is significant pain at the moment in doing much that is taken for granted with the G5 iMac. Many programs do not run (we use BlueJ and Eclipse, neither work on the Intel). You still get the spinning beachball of death, and it seems quite often too. All in all, it feels just like any other previous Mac.
One thing that impressed me was the fact that Rosetta is able to run command line apps compiled for PPC. Gives a good idea of just how fast Rosetta is when running raw PPC code without a GUI. The answer is that a 2Ghz Intel chip running PPC code is about the same speed as a 500Mhz PPC. very reasonable compared with something like PearPC but still a significant drain. You get some back with the GUI as much of that code is native so something like MS Office actually feels usable. Our 2.3Ghz G5 Xserves smoke both the G5 iMac and the Intel even when the Intel is running native code at least with our apps.
So, do I recommend the Intel iMac? Probably. Would I recommend against a G5? Nope. Buy whichever you like. With the G5, you know what you are getting and it will still run software for the forseeable future. The Intel machine is pretty hard work at the moment but has the promise of getting better as more universal apps come along. Of course, there is currently no viable fast PC emulator so you can't run Windows or Linux on it. With Qemu or VPC on the G5 you can run Windows quite reasonably but not as quickly as you will be able to in say, six months when MS get off their arses and build VPC for the Intel Mac.
I can see why Apple released the iMac first, makes sense. The G5 iMac was never really a speed demon so the Intel one doesn't suffer too much overall. Same goes for the MacBook Pro which should be able to keep up with the G4 PowerBooks. It will take a while yet before slotting an Intel chip into the pro towers makes sense though.
A Mac is a Mac though, doesn't really matter what is inside chip wise.
I wonder if anyone is going to be able to patch Win98 against this? There are still a lot of machines and this vulnerability could make them essentially useless and force an upgrade. While we would all love for them to upgrade to Linux or OS X it is more likely that they will shell out for WinXP and MS will benefit from a windfall of sales as a result of their inept programming. If someone produced a workable patch this would at least allow people to keep using their computers without pouring more money down the MS bottomless pit.
Interesting comment. We currently have a Windows infrastructure put in place before I arrived. It has 12 licenses and our company is about to use up the last of them. To add another user we will need to buy CALs for each of the three servers (win2003) we run, exchange, office etc etc. Surprising how this adds up. Anyway, since we intend to get bigger and we don't like having to dip into the pot every time we want to add one more user we are ditching the win2003 boxes in favour of linux servers (its OK, I've done this before so don't worry about TCO and retraining). We are moving away from Office to OpenOffice 2, I'll probably end up getting Crossover Office to allow us to retain the current 12 licenses for purposes of absolute compatibility but internally our docs will switch to OpenDocument and externally PDF. Outlook will be dropped in favour of standards complient and secure e-mail apps (Thunderbird, Apple Mail, Evolution and so on) and I have already been successfully running a test server with IMAP, OpenWebMail and WebDav along with SAMBA and it all works well. So, back to the question, why not exchange? Too expensive by far, really not crossplatform enough even though we can use Evolution from *nix it is better to have more choice and I simply don't want our Windows users running Outlook. Entourage is really nasty and like the rest of Office:mac it doesn't really sit well on the platform. Oh, and the licenses for our anti-virus and anti-spam software have a limitation on the number of users too, and the anti-spam doesn't even seem to work so that will all be replaced with clam-av and spamassassin or similar on the linux server. In the end, a switch like this is about taking control of the situation. With an MS infrastructure you have too little control and it might look cost effective at first but the expense just keeps growing.
I'm looking at eGroupware at the moment but it seems to be a bit over the top and we will probably just stick with WebDav. In the end, the solution will work for all platforms as it will be based on open standards and so my users will be able to choose the platform that best lets them get their jobs done but I won't have a particular application or desktop forcing the whole infrastructure to come from a single manufacturer as is currently the case.
I watched Minority Report and thought that this looked like a nightmare view of the future. Some idiot advertiser looks at it and thinks it is a great idea. What a maroon. The reason I block every advert I can (TiVO, Adblock, PithHelmet, flashblock) is that the constant flashing of these things make it very difficult to concentrate on the content. I can see something like this killing newspapers in an ideal world and yet in the real world we probably will end up with something like this. Advertisers.... Anyone got an ark we can stick the buggers on along with the lawyers, telephone sanitisers and other useless folk?
So that's what is wrong with it. I have been looking at the page all day thinking there was something weird going on and now I know!
I believe the question was "How is your company responding to the current situation?". Telecommuting is one way of dealing with the situation but you do lose the direct interaction with collegues. If you really must be at the office the most environmentally friendly and least reliant on fuel prices is a bicycle. Some companies even give their employees benefits to encourage the use of bicycles.
The sad thing about all this is that the one country that will really suffer from the rising price of fuel is the USA. The country simply isn't laid out to handle the loss of the car. Some of the older cities will be OK but the vast majority that drive to work will be seriously stuck. That isn't to say that cycling in the UK isn't hard because the roads here are small and crowded but there are plenty of ways to avoid the main roads and many cities have a decent cycle path network. The best time was five years ago when the fuel protests cut supplies and it literally took a few days before the roads were deserted. Parents walked their children to school, workers walked and cycled to work or used the still available public transport. The roads were incredibly quiet and the air was clean. The noise of the traffic disappeared and it was amazing how nice it was, every day was like Sunday morning at 6am. A vision of the future for when the fuel really does become scarce? What was surprising was that the world didn't grind to a halt for us and even when fuel supplies returned there was a short period where people continued to limit their car use but within a few months it was all back to the way it was. I'm actually hoping the fuel crisis deepens......
I've been cycling to work for the last three months and it has been great. Some days I have to use public transport if the weather is really nasty but I am averaging about 80% of my travel by bicycle. Lots of health benefits, zero emissions, very cheap to run. I cover 12 miles per day, some hills but I hardly notice them any more and it only takes me 35 mins each way.
A quick calculation to show the current price of UK fuel compared with the US:
$3.00 per US gallon (seems about average)
£0.92 per UK litre (at my local Asda)
1 US gallon = 3.79 litres (1 Imperial gallon is 4.54 litres)
£1 = $1.82
therefore, UK price is currently $6.35 per US gallon.
The other day it cost me £5 more to fill my car than it had done three weeks previously when I last filled it prior to a trip to York. I dread to think what people driving big 4x4s are paying when my little 1.6 Alfa Romeo costs £42 to fill.
IE on Mac stopped at version 5.2.3, not 5.5.
The version of IE for Mac had very little to do with the Windows versions. Different code base etc. I tried to use it recently and most sites that require IE won't work with IE for Mac anyway so there is really very little point in having it. The thing is so slow it isn't funny and the look of it is quite unlike modern Mac applications as it is still covered in the old pinstripe stuff. Safari is much better and has much greater compatibility than IE for Mac these days so yes, MS is right, there is no need for IE for Mac.
It is so funny, they seem so determined to spread their plague to ever corner of IT but in the end all MS every does is reduce choice and that was the one thing Windows really had going for it. Now a typical PC will have what, MS Windows, MS Office and ummm, some games, oh and lots of anti virus and anti spyware software, but then MS makes all that now, and now they want another market.
:-(
It is funny though that the con(ned)sumers are still swayed by the MS name. I have heard people in shops debating over buying a mouse for instance and plumped for the MS one because it was Microsoft and therefore would be compatible with their PC. For this reason alone I expect MS' move into telephony to be a raging success
I just wonder how hard they will try the old embrace, extend, extinguish tactic this time?
yeah, sorry about that but it was the experience with the BT sales person that really made me flip. As others have pointed out I was wrong about the k thing, duh! Regardless, bits and bytes, its important.
For crying out loud! How tough is it to get the capitalisation right? Its MB (Mega Bytes) and KB (Kilo Bytes). This really annoys me with PC users today who seem to use bits and bytes interchangeably. I was trying to get broadband the other day from British Telecom of all people and the woman on phone assured me that I was wrong when I suggested she might want to try again when she told me there was a 15 GB (Giga Bytes) download limit and not 15 Gb (Giga bits) as she insisted it was. That wouldn't have been too bad but the 1 Gb limit on the most basic service sounds really mean if she is right as that would be 128MB a day! You could hit that one a single website!
There was a time when knowing your bits from your bytes and how to do boolean algebra were some of the most important things you could learn when you first got your grubby hands on a computer. These days people are confused if the flipping icon changes!
P.S. The woman from BT also assured me that I couldn't use my Mac on the basic broadband because it was incompatible and I would have to have the more expensive service at which point I told her I knew she was wrong (as I had recently had to use my iBook to set up a relative's basic broadband because her PC wouldn't talk to it) and that based on my experience during this call I didn't think BT was technically capable of providing a service to the standards I required and I would look elsewhere.
Sorry, mid week blues....
I got it and loved it. My wife didn't get very far although she didn't object to it. I think part of the problem is she doesn't like 3D stuff much although she does enjoy Super Monkey Ball which is very 3D. The recent Marios are less popular with her than the old 2D scrollers but she likes Mario Party but then that is more like a board game.