There is a very good GoogleTechTalk from last year here where the Linden guys give the Google guys a show and tell about some of the technology underpinning Second Life.
Bottom line, as I understand it from this video, the client is really very very dumb. Everything intelligent is running on the server, and it is just left to the client to handle the basic graphical rendering.
Now it is always possible that there is something they have missed, but it appears that the system was designed from the start to make it resistant to any compromise of the client.
Hopefully, we'll see an improvement to the dog-slow Mac. client.
If you think the presence or lack of armed soldiers at airports is an important indicator of a countries civil liberties you are misjudging the issues. Infringements on liberty are more insidious than that. Whether the shops in Toronto are similar to the shops in Chicago are also a pretty poor indicator.
Yes, because the possibility of huge healthcare bills from potentially large numbers of patients suffering CJD through eating contaminated meat certainly isn't something that governments should try to avoid.
Before any windfarm is approved in the UK there is a tremendous amount of debate about the effect on birds, particularly where the farms are close to migratory routes. The exact sites would have been chosen with this in mind.
Someone's got a bit chip on their shoulder haven't they?
Should we be asking "serious questions" about the fact that the BBC makes footage available via Real Player, and has its podcasts available via iTune, as well?
It sounds to me as if you are really frustrated because you are not happy using it as an appliance, but want to poke around in the internals. The quickest way to become happy is probably to invest in a copy of Pogue's Mac OS X: The missing manual, or better for über-geeks - Mac OS X Internals: A Systems Approach by Amit Singh.
Some of your problems, I simply don't understand - applications tend to sit in/Applications or possibly ~/Applications.
Why would you need to find support files? If you need to, they will most likely be hiding in/Library along with their plist preferences.
If Safari or Firefox (you don't say what you are using) is pinwheeling frequently then there is clearly something wrong. My 800MHz G4 copes well enough.
I would try the excellent support forums at apple.com for some basic troubleshooting. It could be something as simple as a permissions problem.
You're right of course. Except that, following the original poster's logic, the purposeful choice is completely natural since humanities selective proclivities are merely part of nature.
You can probably tell that I'm irked by his/her line of reasoning.
If ALL selection were natural selection, there wouldn't be any point in coining the term 'natural selection' instead you would use the word 'selection'.
But back to your main point. Yes humans are part of nature. But humans have developed technologies that can render entire habitats dead or radically changed in a matter of years, months, weeks or minutes. To that extent we are unique and it is therefore USEFUL to distinguish between 'normal' natural selection and human mediated natural selection.
Apart from natural catastrophes, the former operates over timescales that allow for genotypic/phenotypic adaptation. There tends to be a change in, rather than a reduction in biodiversity.
By contrast human mediated 'natural selection' tends to occur in such a way as to emulate natural catastrophe after catastrophe after catastrophe. No chance to adapt, just a fairly swift extinction event and a loss of biodiversity.
I know it is a nice trite, simplistic thing to say: "humans are natural, therefore we are part of natural selection". But to pretend there is no dichotomy been man and nature is frankly so much ideological bullshit.
Sigh. Remember when Aqua first came out. The big message was "no more grey". I liked Aqua. The idea of brushed metal was sort of OK when it was restricted to windows emulating physical devices.
But the unified look? We're back at the old grey interface. I'm not a fan.
I tried the new discussion system for several weeks, it looked funky but I really couldn't get my head around the thresholds and see how the thing worked. Moreover the FAQ's discussion of it was terse and unhelpful, so I ended up going back to the old discussion system.
The annoying thing was, I couldn't find any way of submitting feedback on the new system. What's the point of allowing testing with no feedback mechanism? Unless they are just testing server loading and scalability etc.
Posted without karma bonus since we are way off-topic.
You illustrate nicely why journalism is a difficult job, and how some journalists get it wrong. That doesn't show that all journalism is intrinsically sloppy.
Writing as an ex-journalist you're falling into the trap set by your own bias. While there have always been cases of "don't let the facts get in the way of a good story", there were, in my opinion far more examples of journalists slogging their guts out to find facts first hand. There were also numerous examples of editors challenging the premise of stories, and stories getting spiked simply because of insufficient sources or cast-iron evidence.
There are always lazy people in any walk of life, and it is true that subject experts are sometimes exasperated by the removal of nuances that are important.
However, the slack-jawed assertion that "Journalism has always been about 2nd/3rd hand information..." is the assertion would have any editor putting a big red line through it with comments such as ' rewrite/rethink - this opinion is clearly unfounded since there are numerous examples of good first hand reportage'.
Here's a decent example of a reporter gathering info first hand. It's the first example I came across.
Excellent. I can't wait to start submitting all my virtual businesses expenses to them. I'm making a massive loss in my Second Life business, which I shall enjoy using to offset my real life business profits.
Not necessarily. The writer could well believe in creationism. Whether or not you are creationist, there is no doubt that there is much pseudoscience used to support the creationist view. The right-up doesn't state that all scientific evidence for creationism is pseudo science, neither does it state that creationism is dependent on pseudo science. It merely points out that talk.orgins does indeed expose the pseudo-science that is there.
I hate to disagree, but I'm going to. Put a System 7 person in front of OS X and they will get confused by:
1. The lack of a fully functional Apple menu 2. The disappearance of the Chooser 3. The fact that the Finder tends to use column mode.
But most of all, they will get confused by the inherently multi-user nature of the new OS and the way that all the 'special folders' that they used to be able to tinker with 'Start up items' 'Apple Menu' 'Extensions' and the like have disappeared, while at the same time Apple apps have got rather picky about being in the/Application folder.
Don't get me wrong - I love OS X, but it's a different world.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a very good GoogleTechTalk from last year here where the Linden guys give the Google guys a show and tell about some of the technology underpinning Second Life.
Bottom line, as I understand it from this video, the client is really very very dumb. Everything intelligent is running on the server, and it is just left to the client to handle the basic graphical rendering.
Now it is always possible that there is something they have missed, but it appears that the system was designed from the start to make it resistant to any compromise of the client.
Hopefully, we'll see an improvement to the dog-slow Mac. client.
When you purchase music from the iTunes store, iTunes prompts you to back it up and asks you to insert a CD.
Tell that to the people of the Champaign region.
Well, no. Because I've never taken a library book out over there.
If you think the presence or lack of armed soldiers at airports is an important indicator of a countries civil liberties you are misjudging the issues. Infringements on liberty are more insidious than that. Whether the shops in Toronto are similar to the shops in Chicago are also a pretty poor indicator.
From the headline, I assume we find out the dark secrets behind the definition of the kilogram.
Yes, because the possibility of huge healthcare bills from potentially large numbers of patients suffering CJD through eating contaminated meat certainly isn't something that governments should try to avoid.
Hmmm, looks like the BBC has screwed up the link.
Direct link to the BBC programme is here. And very good it is too.
Because they have to go to the store? Because they have to pick up an entire CD, rather than an individual track?
Well that just about wraps it up for computers, then.
Before any windfarm is approved in the UK there is a tremendous amount of debate about the effect on birds, particularly where the farms are close to migratory routes. The exact sites would have been chosen with this in mind.
Someone's got a bit chip on their shoulder haven't they?
Should we be asking "serious questions" about the fact that the BBC makes footage available via Real Player, and has its podcasts available via iTune, as well?
Not particularly funny.
It sounds to me as if you are really frustrated because you are not happy using it as an appliance, but want to poke around in the internals. The quickest way to become happy is probably to invest in a copy of Pogue's Mac OS X: The missing manual, or better for über-geeks - Mac OS X Internals: A Systems Approach by Amit Singh.
/Applications or possibly ~/Applications.
/Library along with their plist preferences.
Some of your problems, I simply don't understand - applications tend to sit in
Why would you need to find support files? If you need to, they will most likely be hiding in
If Safari or Firefox (you don't say what you are using) is pinwheeling frequently then there is clearly something wrong. My 800MHz G4 copes well enough.
I would try the excellent support forums at apple.com for some basic troubleshooting. It could be something as simple as a permissions problem.
You're right of course. Except that, following the original poster's logic, the purposeful choice is completely natural since humanities selective proclivities are merely part of nature.
You can probably tell that I'm irked by his/her line of reasoning.
If ALL selection were natural selection, there wouldn't be any point in coining the term 'natural selection' instead you would use the word 'selection'.
But back to your main point. Yes humans are part of nature. But humans have developed technologies that can render entire habitats dead or radically changed in a matter of years, months, weeks or minutes. To that extent we are unique and it is therefore USEFUL to distinguish between 'normal' natural selection and human mediated natural selection.
Apart from natural catastrophes, the former operates over timescales that allow for genotypic/phenotypic adaptation. There tends to be a change in, rather than a reduction in biodiversity.
By contrast human mediated 'natural selection' tends to occur in such a way as to emulate natural catastrophe after catastrophe after catastrophe. No chance to adapt, just a fairly swift extinction event and a loss of biodiversity.
I know it is a nice trite, simplistic thing to say: "humans are natural, therefore we are part of natural selection". But to pretend there is no dichotomy been man and nature is frankly so much ideological bullshit.
Sigh. Remember when Aqua first came out. The big message was "no more grey". I liked Aqua. The idea of brushed metal was sort of OK when it was restricted to windows emulating physical devices.
But the unified look? We're back at the old grey interface. I'm not a fan.
I tried the new discussion system for several weeks, it looked funky but I really couldn't get my head around the thresholds and see how the thing worked. Moreover the FAQ's discussion of it was terse and unhelpful, so I ended up going back to the old discussion system.
The annoying thing was, I couldn't find any way of submitting feedback on the new system. What's the point of allowing testing with no feedback mechanism? Unless they are just testing server loading and scalability etc.
Posted without karma bonus since we are way off-topic.
You illustrate nicely why journalism is a difficult job, and how some journalists get it wrong. That doesn't show that all journalism is intrinsically sloppy.
Writing as an ex-journalist you're falling into the trap set by your own bias. While there have always been cases of "don't let the facts get in the way of a good story", there were, in my opinion far more examples of journalists slogging their guts out to find facts first hand. There were also numerous examples of editors challenging the premise of stories, and stories getting spiked simply because of insufficient sources or cast-iron evidence.
There are always lazy people in any walk of life, and it is true that subject experts are sometimes exasperated by the removal of nuances that are important.
However, the slack-jawed assertion that "Journalism has always been about 2nd/3rd hand information..." is the assertion would have any editor putting a big red line through it with comments such as ' rewrite/rethink - this opinion is clearly unfounded since there are numerous examples of good first hand reportage'.
Here's a decent example of a reporter gathering info first hand. It's the first example I came across.
Excellent. I can't wait to start submitting all my virtual businesses expenses to them. I'm making a massive loss in my Second Life business, which I shall enjoy using to offset my real life business profits.
Not necessarily. The writer could well believe in creationism. Whether or not you are creationist, there is no doubt that there is much pseudoscience used to support the creationist view. The right-up doesn't state that all scientific evidence for creationism is pseudo science, neither does it state that creationism is dependent on pseudo science. It merely points out that talk.orgins does indeed expose the pseudo-science that is there.
The rest is your inference.
I hate to disagree, but I'm going to. Put a System 7 person in front of OS X and they will get confused by:
/Application folder.
1. The lack of a fully functional Apple menu
2. The disappearance of the Chooser
3. The fact that the Finder tends to use column mode.
But most of all, they will get confused by the inherently multi-user nature of the new OS and the way that all the 'special folders' that they used to be able to tinker with 'Start up items' 'Apple Menu' 'Extensions' and the like have disappeared, while at the same time Apple apps have got rather picky about being in the
Don't get me wrong - I love OS X, but it's a different world.
...really tied the room together, man.