This is sort of off-topic, but meant to offer a vote of encouragement for moving from someone who did the same.
I moved from the US to the UK in August of 2001 and have lived here for the past 4 years. I think I got lucky, in a sense, because I managed to experience the whole aftermath of 9/11 as an American expatriate living in a country which was generally sympathetic, yet familiar enough with the unpredictable nature of terrorism to keep a level head about it.
I've since become sufficiently concerned about the steady erosion of civil liberties in the US, the growth in power of the religious right, the general attitude (at least among the mass media) that liberalism is a dirty word, plus a score of other issues, that I think I'll stay here for quite a while longer. Sure, the standard of living isn't generally as high as in the States, but there's a lot to be said about feeling comfortable with the general social attitudes and political system of the country you are living in. (Besides, I live in the West End of London - life's not so bad.)
My point is this: if you do have the opportunity to move and live abroad for a while, definitely do it. It's amazing and an experience you'll remember for the rest of your life.
Re:You know what this means, Power PC Apple Users?
on
Apple Switching to Intel
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· Score: 4, Informative
Possibly not - the new version of XCode builds universal binaries for both Intel and PPC. So, what's the problem again?
I know the above was meant as a joke, but I have to add one comment since I had a close friend who is schizophrenic. Schizophrenia and multiple personality disorder are separate mental illnesses. You can be affected by one and not the other. My friend thought she had proven Fermat's Last Theorem on a math exam (this was as an undergraduate), among many other things, but did not at any time have two personalities not aware of each other.
Offtopic, I know - but it's important to make these minor corrections when possible.
I guess that explains why Indy was so surprised when he said, "He's still alive!" Or why Short Round yelled, "Cover your heart Indy! Cover your heart!" during the bridge scene.
For those of you who don't know what I'm referring to, in the U.K. cut of Temple of Doom, the British censors refused to screen the movie without deleting the heart-removal scene, and the scene of Short Round being whipped, and maybe one or two other scenes. (The recently released Indy boxed set in the U.K. kept with the original theatrical versions, which pissed me off when I realised the difference.) As you might expect - and as I mentioned above - the heart scene was sorta crucial for making sense of a couple points of the movie.
seems that apple can integrate better and faster new stuff that M$?
Given that so much of OS X is built upon the NeXTStep code base, and that the NeXTStep code base was (from what I understand) amazingly well-designed from a software engineering point of view, and that Objective-C really is an incredibly powerful, easy to use object-oriented extension of C, I wonder of the rapid output of new stuff from Apple research is just proof of what can happen when you've got well-engineered software libraries with good RAD tools in the hands of extremely capable programmers.
That's not intented to read like an Apple fanboy post (although it does). But it does seem that Microsoft "innovation" moves more slowly than Apple. And some of Microsoft's innovation just, well, sucks eggs. (MFC, anyone? Bob?)
Maybe so, but there's a kernal of truth there. Diversity in biological systems produces robustness. If you have a rich genetic code in a species, you're more likely to have a subset of the population that will survive a new virus, disease, etc. Given the complexity of networked computer systems, is it really that surprising that we're finding certain survival techniques which work well in nature work well when applied in alternative environments?
That idea's not new, and it's not well-defined. However, I would certainly like to see it made more precise and analyzed so that we can see just what, really, lies at the bottom of that otherwise vague analogy.
I had to run OSX with 128M ram for two weeks on my 800Mhz iBook. holy fuck talk about a slow system
The slowness was almost surely due to the low amount of ram. I've been running OS X for over two years on a 550MHz Powerbook (admittedly, that's a G4... you may have also been talking about a G3 iBook) and, on my machine, I have very acceptable performance. Of course, I've also got 512M of ram. Ram, for OS X, makes a world of difference.
My Powerbook is no match for my office G5, but it's more than fast enough for mobile use. I'm not going to be crunching numbers on a massive mathematical model while out on the road, anyway.
Sorry if this seems offtopic, but I've always wondered about this. Given that very low-end frequencies are felt rather than heard, does this mean that people listening to gangsta rap at volumes louder than a Who concert really aren't damaging their ears? So far, my one consolation has been that they are going to find themselves at the ripe old age of twenty-two basically stone-deaf because of their fondness for cars that go boom.
Also, for the developers here, Apple's Core Image technology sounds pretty cool. Basically, Core Image means that any developer can write code that offloads image processing work to the GPU without knowing anything about how to program the GPU. It's an abstraction layer that allows real-time image manipulations. Instead of applying a filter to a graphic in the GIMP and then having to wait as it munches through it in the CPU, the application of a filter can be offloaded to the GPU which will then burn through it, giving much faster (in many cases, real-time) previews.
That's a pretty neat innovation, in my book. Is it major? Well, no, probably not. But it doesn't take a whole lot of stand-alone "hey, neat!" innovations before they start to add up to something substantial.
Is it just me or do none of these sound like major innovations? Wow, they are adding a search feature!
If you read the description on MacRumors, you would have seen that part of what is cool about the searching is that it has pseudo-natural language capability, a la AppleScript. Suppose you are looking for a Keynote presentation that you opened last week. You can allegedly type in the search bar "Find keynote presentations by myUserName opened last week" Now that is pretty cool.
Just out of curiosity, how is my previous post "Flamebait"? Has anyone who's modded this comment lived in either the UK (specifically, London) or Europe, or visited the Soviet Union before it collapsed? I've lived in the UK for almost three years now, and lived in the Soviet Union for a month before the cold war ended.
Sheesh. What's up with the mods? I understand not being modded up, but modded down? How many people have had to contend with being on a wait list for relatively basic medical treatment, as is standard practice in the UK? Did you know that the University of Pittsburgh alone has within +/- 1 as many MRI's as all of the UK?
Don't mod what you don't know.
Re:You US'ians sure have a twisted law system
on
P2P Bits
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· Score: -1, Offtopic
Don't worry about us, though, it's only a matter of time before enough people realize that guns are a hell of a lot cheaper than lobbying.
Yeah, because the kinds of guns you can legally buy in a store are a real match for the kind of firepower the US military packs, I hear.
I suggest you quit thinking that the 2nd amendment is somehow going to save you from government oppression. It's just not possible. Look at the difference of firepower, and what has to be gained by the winning side.
When he was 19, Werner von Braun joined a rocketry club, the Verein für Raumschiffahrt (VfR). A few years later, his terror rockets were bombing London. If it hadn't been for the rocket club, the V-2 wouldn't have been built.
And your point is?
Back before humans had weapons (think 2001: A Space Odyssey), picking up the jawbone of an ass suddenly enabled you to kill someone. Should we start outlawing pieces of skeletons beyond a certain mass-threshold?
Any incipient technology which ultimately can be used as a weapon has a very short learning curve by definition. This is nothing to get our knickers in a twist over, and there's nothing we can do to prevent it. The parent post strikes me as unjustified scaremongering. (However, that is not to say that there may not be some justification for imposing greater restrictions on rocketeering clubs.)
Yeah, just be sure to pick your country with care. I moved from the US to the UK (no language problem) and wound up sorely disappointed. When people described the UK as a "second-world country", I ignored them. However, they turned out to be mostly right, with one important difference. I visited a second-world country once (the Soviet Union, back before it collapsed). Know what the biggest difference between the UK and the Soviet Union was?
One sad thing about this is the very premise of the show. Experts in any field, by definition, possess information and knowledge which typically requires either (a) great scholastic ability, or (b) great native intelligence and/or intuition. IMHO, it seems that people possessing expert knowledge - which is really knowledge (think justified true belief, although this definition of knowledge is not up to date, it works as a starting point) - are the kinds of people who we, as a society, ought to respect, admire, and seek to emulate! Why should we take those individuals who represent the very pinnacle of human intellectual achievement and attempt to humiliate them in front of an audience under false pretenses?
The answer, of course, is obvious: most people aren't experts. Most people aren't geniuses. Most people are within one standard deviation of the mean and are pretty satisfied with their abilities. Hobbes was right when he wrote that the surest proof that humans are approximately equal in intelligence is that most people are satisfied with their level of ability, and their is no better indicator of a fair distribution than when each person is satisfied with their share.
Now, I could see supporting a show that took bogus experts as the target - i.e., those people who pretend to be able to talk to their dog, or to share karma with plants, use crystals to heal, etc. (but note that, under the abovementioned definition of knowledge that these people aren't really experts since they lack knowledge). That might be fun to watch. At the very least, it would serve the greater good of society by providing an intellectual function.
But humilating smart people just so that some moron with barely enough intelligence to operate the remote can get his kicks? Bah. Give me the philosopher-kings of Plato anyday.
For those who don't know, it's from The Right Stuff.
Not to nitpick or anything, but I think the actual line is not
Yeah, I think I got a stick.
but, rather,
Yeah, I think I got
me a stick.
I only remember this because, back when I had all four of my wisdom teeth extracted, I sat on the couch for three days straight, under the influence of some hard-core painkillers, watching The Right Stuff from start to finish, then rewinding the tape, and watching it again. From dawn to dusk. For three days.
You know, what pissed me off more about the last elections more than anything else was the whole attention to shut down debate over the process. I mean, here we had a seriously close election whose results turned on exactly who won in Florida, and the entire push was to settle the matter as quickly as possible rather than as accurately as possible.
What was up with the entire "debate" over what kind of chad counted as a valid vote? If it was detached from 3 corners, it counted, but not if it was only detached from 2 corners, even if it was clearly the only candidate punched on the ticket?
More seriously, the decision was made by a Supreme Court containing individuals who - in any other court in the country would have had to abstain from voting due to a conflict of interest. (Some of the Justices were nominateed by G.W.B.'s father, for Pete's sake.) Why wasn't there more attention given to that failure of the process?
And, so, what I hate about the soundbite expression "Get over it, Al Gore lost" (although you did indicate that it was a joke - granted) was that it stopped debate and forced the result through.
If you wreck your car, do you just whip out your backup copy?
This sets up a straw man in two respects. First, for automobiles (and anything of significant value) we do have insurance, which you can see as providing a "backup" of sorts. Second, for goods which are trivial to backup but much more valuable than the cost of creating the backup (informational goods like telephone numbers, credit card numbers, etc.) we typically do keep backup copies.
What is happening in the case of CDs and DVDs is that a good which previously had no cheap, good, convenient way of "backing up" suddenly (well... sort of...) acquires, through technological innovation, a way of making backups. The reason why this is an issue with CDs and DVDs rather than books is that (a) books are a hell of a lot more durable than CDs and DVDs (I can drop one in the bath and it is still usable once it dries out... although it will look funny), and (b) people don't read as much as they used to. Points which apply to books as well as CDs, in favor of permitting backups, are: (c) some CDs and DVDs are no longer in print and hence are irreplaceable if damaged, and (d) CDs and DVDs are at the "ouch!... but... *sigh*... OK..." price-point for most people. Seriously, if CDs and DVDs were less expensive, and were all available for purchase, making backups would be less of an issue. But I'll be damned if I'm not going to rip my copy of Trip Shakespeare's Across the Universe CD to FLAC so, in case my original gets damaged, I've got a copy of it.
I think most people would agree that we all can take reasonable measures to protect our property. Backing up a CD or a DVD from unexpected damage - just so that I don't have to buy the thing all over again - is an entirely reasonable request. It's my property after all. Mass producing copies of CDs or DVDs (or books) for distribution is not reasonable.
If you want to block and prevent people from backing up CDs or DVDs, it seems that you are either saying that we cannot take reasonable precautions to protect our property or that, when we "buy" a CD or DVD, we don't really own anything. I suspect that what the record houses would really like is the second fork of that disjunction.
Here's an idea... you enter in your vote to the computer. The vote is registered electronically (easy counting) and then the machine spits out a card with the votes you just picked mechanically punched on a card that's clearly labeled so that the voter can scan it and verify "hey, yeah, that's my vote!"
The voter then must deposit the mechanically punched card in a box on the way out... maybe the card has a unique bar scan so that the vote isn't electronically registered until the card is returned at the end.
Benefits? (1) Ease of electronic voting, (2) paper trail, (3) you can't prove you voted a certain way to someone who wants you to throw the election.
Ok - what's wrong with this system? Why won't this work?
I wouldn't choose to live in Finsbury Park, Streatham, Acton or Walthamstow
It very much depends on where you live in Walthamstow. The northern part of Walthamstow (north of the Tube station), past the High street, and around the William Morris Gallery, is quite safe. I've lived there for the past three years. The local authority has recently invested around 40 mil. pounds in revamping the main square around the bus station (including rebuilding the entire bus station), and recently knocked down an entire abandoned mall, clearing it for new construction. In the past year or so, I've seen several niceish restaurants and bars open up (Celsius, for one) which indicates that the area is becoming increasingly gentrified.
South Walthamstow, towards Leyton, gets unpleasant fast. One of the things which surprised me upon moving to London was how the desirability of neighborhoods can rapidly change within walking distance... something which is very rare in the States. One has to drive to get from Irvine to East L.A., for example.
Slashdot Mirror
> Man....now moving to Europe sounds even better
This is sort of off-topic, but meant to offer a vote of encouragement for moving from someone who did the same.
I moved from the US to the UK in August of 2001 and have lived here for the past 4 years. I think I got lucky, in a sense, because I managed to experience the whole aftermath of 9/11 as an American expatriate living in a country which was generally sympathetic, yet familiar enough with the unpredictable nature of terrorism to keep a level head about it.
I've since become sufficiently concerned about the steady erosion of civil liberties in the US, the growth in power of the religious right, the general attitude (at least among the mass media) that liberalism is a dirty word, plus a score of other issues, that I think I'll stay here for quite a while longer. Sure, the standard of living isn't generally as high as in the States, but there's a lot to be said about feeling comfortable with the general social attitudes and political system of the country you are living in. (Besides, I live in the West End of London - life's not so bad.)
My point is this: if you do have the opportunity to move and live abroad for a while, definitely do it. It's amazing and an experience you'll remember for the rest of your life.
Possibly not - the new version of XCode builds universal binaries for both Intel and PPC. So, what's the problem again?
I know the above was meant as a joke, but I have to add one comment since I had a close friend who is schizophrenic. Schizophrenia and multiple personality disorder are separate mental illnesses. You can be affected by one and not the other. My friend thought she had proven Fermat's Last Theorem on a math exam (this was as an undergraduate), among many other things, but did not at any time have two personalities not aware of each other.
Offtopic, I know - but it's important to make these minor corrections when possible.
For those of you who don't know what I'm referring to, in the U.K. cut of Temple of Doom, the British censors refused to screen the movie without deleting the heart-removal scene, and the scene of Short Round being whipped, and maybe one or two other scenes. (The recently released Indy boxed set in the U.K. kept with the original theatrical versions, which pissed me off when I realised the difference.) As you might expect - and as I mentioned above - the heart scene was sorta crucial for making sense of a couple points of the movie.
...by refusing to think at work!
Given that so much of OS X is built upon the NeXTStep code base, and that the NeXTStep code base was (from what I understand) amazingly well-designed from a software engineering point of view, and that Objective-C really is an incredibly powerful, easy to use object-oriented extension of C, I wonder of the rapid output of new stuff from Apple research is just proof of what can happen when you've got well-engineered software libraries with good RAD tools in the hands of extremely capable programmers.
That's not intented to read like an Apple fanboy post (although it does). But it does seem that Microsoft "innovation" moves more slowly than Apple. And some of Microsoft's innovation just, well, sucks eggs. (MFC, anyone? Bob?)
Maybe so, but there's a kernal of truth there. Diversity in biological systems produces robustness. If you have a rich genetic code in a species, you're more likely to have a subset of the population that will survive a new virus, disease, etc. Given the complexity of networked computer systems, is it really that surprising that we're finding certain survival techniques which work well in nature work well when applied in alternative environments?
That idea's not new, and it's not well-defined. However, I would certainly like to see it made more precise and analyzed so that we can see just what, really, lies at the bottom of that otherwise vague analogy.
Some of the eastern states of the former Soviet Union?
The slowness was almost surely due to the low amount of ram. I've been running OS X for over two years on a 550MHz Powerbook (admittedly, that's a G4... you may have also been talking about a G3 iBook) and, on my machine, I have very acceptable performance. Of course, I've also got 512M of ram. Ram, for OS X, makes a world of difference.
My Powerbook is no match for my office G5, but it's more than fast enough for mobile use. I'm not going to be crunching numbers on a massive mathematical model while out on the road, anyway.
Sorry if this seems offtopic, but I've always wondered about this. Given that very low-end frequencies are felt rather than heard, does this mean that people listening to gangsta rap at volumes louder than a Who concert really aren't damaging their ears? So far, my one consolation has been that they are going to find themselves at the ripe old age of twenty-two basically stone-deaf because of their fondness for cars that go boom.
That's a pretty neat innovation, in my book. Is it major? Well, no, probably not. But it doesn't take a whole lot of stand-alone "hey, neat!" innovations before they start to add up to something substantial.
If you read the description on MacRumors, you would have seen that part of what is cool about the searching is that it has pseudo-natural language capability, a la AppleScript. Suppose you are looking for a Keynote presentation that you opened last week. You can allegedly type in the search bar "Find keynote presentations by myUserName opened last week" Now that is pretty cool.
Sheesh. What's up with the mods? I understand not being modded up, but modded down? How many people have had to contend with being on a wait list for relatively basic medical treatment, as is standard practice in the UK? Did you know that the University of Pittsburgh alone has within +/- 1 as many MRI's as all of the UK?
Don't mod what you don't know.
Yeah, because the kinds of guns you can legally buy in a store are a real match for the kind of firepower the US military packs, I hear.
I suggest you quit thinking that the 2nd amendment is somehow going to save you from government oppression. It's just not possible. Look at the difference of firepower, and what has to be gained by the winning side.
And your point is?
Back before humans had weapons (think 2001: A Space Odyssey), picking up the jawbone of an ass suddenly enabled you to kill someone. Should we start outlawing pieces of skeletons beyond a certain mass-threshold?
Any incipient technology which ultimately can be used as a weapon has a very short learning curve by definition. This is nothing to get our knickers in a twist over, and there's nothing we can do to prevent it. The parent post strikes me as unjustified scaremongering. (However, that is not to say that there may not be some justification for imposing greater restrictions on rocketeering clubs.)
Yeah, just be sure to pick your country with care. I moved from the US to the UK (no language problem) and wound up sorely disappointed. When people described the UK as a "second-world country", I ignored them. However, they turned out to be mostly right, with one important difference. I visited a second-world country once (the Soviet Union, back before it collapsed). Know what the biggest difference between the UK and the Soviet Union was?
The streets were cleaner in the Soviet Union.
I suspect that fact is largely skewed because, what, 12 people live in Scandinavia, and they have a boatload of oil?
In all seriousness, though, it's not hard to have a really high GNP when you're Norway. A lot of oil and very few people does make the GNP high.
This statement (the 20 minutes copying) is a well-known troll. Poke around on 'net lore and read about it.
The answer, of course, is obvious: most people aren't experts. Most people aren't geniuses. Most people are within one standard deviation of the mean and are pretty satisfied with their abilities. Hobbes was right when he wrote that the surest proof that humans are approximately equal in intelligence is that most people are satisfied with their level of ability, and their is no better indicator of a fair distribution than when each person is satisfied with their share.
Now, I could see supporting a show that took bogus experts as the target - i.e., those people who pretend to be able to talk to their dog, or to share karma with plants, use crystals to heal, etc. (but note that, under the abovementioned definition of knowledge that these people aren't really experts since they lack knowledge). That might be fun to watch. At the very least, it would serve the greater good of society by providing an intellectual function.
But humilating smart people just so that some moron with barely enough intelligence to operate the remote can get his kicks? Bah. Give me the philosopher-kings of Plato anyday.
Just in case anyone's paying attention - I was wrong with this. OP was correct. Apologies for the error. :-\
Not to nitpick or anything, but I think the actual line is not
but, rather,
I only remember this because, back when I had all four of my wisdom teeth extracted, I sat on the couch for three days straight, under the influence of some hard-core painkillers, watching The Right Stuff from start to finish, then rewinding the tape, and watching it again. From dawn to dusk. For three days.You know, what pissed me off more about the last elections more than anything else was the whole attention to shut down debate over the process. I mean, here we had a seriously close election whose results turned on exactly who won in Florida, and the entire push was to settle the matter as quickly as possible rather than as accurately as possible.
What was up with the entire "debate" over what kind of chad counted as a valid vote? If it was detached from 3 corners, it counted, but not if it was only detached from 2 corners, even if it was clearly the only candidate punched on the ticket?
More seriously, the decision was made by a Supreme Court containing individuals who - in any other court in the country would have had to abstain from voting due to a conflict of interest. (Some of the Justices were nominateed by G.W.B.'s father, for Pete's sake.) Why wasn't there more attention given to that failure of the process?
And, so, what I hate about the soundbite expression "Get over it, Al Gore lost" (although you did indicate that it was a joke - granted) was that it stopped debate and forced the result through.
This sets up a straw man in two respects. First, for automobiles (and anything of significant value) we do have insurance, which you can see as providing a "backup" of sorts. Second, for goods which are trivial to backup but much more valuable than the cost of creating the backup (informational goods like telephone numbers, credit card numbers, etc.) we typically do keep backup copies.
What is happening in the case of CDs and DVDs is that a good which previously had no cheap, good, convenient way of "backing up" suddenly (well... sort of...) acquires, through technological innovation, a way of making backups. The reason why this is an issue with CDs and DVDs rather than books is that (a) books are a hell of a lot more durable than CDs and DVDs (I can drop one in the bath and it is still usable once it dries out... although it will look funny), and (b) people don't read as much as they used to. Points which apply to books as well as CDs, in favor of permitting backups, are: (c) some CDs and DVDs are no longer in print and hence are irreplaceable if damaged, and (d) CDs and DVDs are at the "ouch!... but... *sigh*... OK..." price-point for most people. Seriously, if CDs and DVDs were less expensive, and were all available for purchase, making backups would be less of an issue. But I'll be damned if I'm not going to rip my copy of Trip Shakespeare's Across the Universe CD to FLAC so, in case my original gets damaged, I've got a copy of it.
I think most people would agree that we all can take reasonable measures to protect our property. Backing up a CD or a DVD from unexpected damage - just so that I don't have to buy the thing all over again - is an entirely reasonable request. It's my property after all. Mass producing copies of CDs or DVDs (or books) for distribution is not reasonable.
If you want to block and prevent people from backing up CDs or DVDs, it seems that you are either saying that we cannot take reasonable precautions to protect our property or that, when we "buy" a CD or DVD, we don't really own anything. I suspect that what the record houses would really like is the second fork of that disjunction.
The voter then must deposit the mechanically punched card in a box on the way out... maybe the card has a unique bar scan so that the vote isn't electronically registered until the card is returned at the end.
Benefits? (1) Ease of electronic voting, (2) paper trail, (3) you can't prove you voted a certain way to someone who wants you to throw the election.
Ok - what's wrong with this system? Why won't this work?
It very much depends on where you live in Walthamstow. The northern part of Walthamstow (north of the Tube station), past the High street, and around the William Morris Gallery, is quite safe. I've lived there for the past three years. The local authority has recently invested around 40 mil. pounds in revamping the main square around the bus station (including rebuilding the entire bus station), and recently knocked down an entire abandoned mall, clearing it for new construction. In the past year or so, I've seen several niceish restaurants and bars open up (Celsius, for one) which indicates that the area is becoming increasingly gentrified.
South Walthamstow, towards Leyton, gets unpleasant fast. One of the things which surprised me upon moving to London was how the desirability of neighborhoods can rapidly change within walking distance... something which is very rare in the States. One has to drive to get from Irvine to East L.A., for example.