A/C is very expensive in terms of energy; I seem to recall that for every joule of heat energy you remove from an area you'll spend 10 doing it. Something like that, I always sucked at physics...
As soon as you bump up the AC, you then need to re-design the cooling structures, re-design the airflow construct, the power feeds will need up, then added cooling for the a/c and power ducting itself....
Better to just lose a cluster every 6 months, and know that it'll happen that often and plan for it, than to try and diminish it; pretty much the whole point here is to get to an acceptable fail rate and plan around it than try to reduce the fail rate itself.
I wasn't meaning to belittle the role of the US in defending Japan's interests; I am quite aware of the danger Japan faces from China, Vietnam and others in the area, not to mention the various little odd cults that would quite like to kill half of Japan were it not for the work of the Japanese police/secret services...
What I meant was Japan's society; it's pro-death penalty, yet strangely fairly anti-war. My point stands though. The US Navy has 65% of the worlds aircraft carriers!! They could take on the Navies of the entire rest of the world put together and the result still would be uncertain (Navy alone, obviously not realistically). This is clearly more that is needed. Were I an american taxpayer, I'd be looking at the GDP/taxation rates of european countries and noting that a lot of them pay less tax per head than in the USA, and then noting said countries provide welfare benefits, free healthcare, better schooling etc. and I'd be wondering where all my tax money goes. Then I'd be looking at that huge navy, massive air force etc. and maybe i'd be asking for a tax refund!
I never claimed my field of expertise doesn't benefit from military research, because it does. I'm a 3D animator/modeller; a lot of 3D research is funded by military research (and strangely, as seen in the article, a lot of games research then goes to help the military so it's a two way pipe). I'd still prefer a world where most countries have a small defence force, no bigger than needed o protect it's own interests with a capability to enlarge should a need arise, with international waters patrolled by the UN, than to have the superpowers with their huge armies (and consequently huge budgets). Call me an idiot if you will, I've been called worse. I prefer the term "pacifist".
I concur; only in the past three-four hundred years really that martialism even became a "thing". Before then the monks and priests had more sway than the soldiers and warriors. Meh, it's back to one now, no soldiers at all except defence ones. What country needs more? I hear justifications for the US having a navy that could take on the rest of the entire planet and still win as being "needed to patrol the seas for piracy", much like the British Empire's Navy was before WW2. Funny, I thought all Nations could have a small navy, varying in size to defend their coastal waters (so Ireland's would be smaller than Russia cause Russia has more coastline!), then we could leave the international stuff to some kinda international peacekeeping kinda organisation with quasi legal status in all it's member states. If only such an organisation existed. Maybe someone could ask the UN if it knows of one...
I don't think Nintendo would accept funding from the US Govt's Overseas Killing Dept. (as it's facetiously nicknamed in certain academic circles).
Nintendo, as a post-war japanese company subscribes fairly heavily in the "war is bad: look what it does" philosophy. In fact, many have commented that Japan's seemingly stratospheric lead in advanced tech research, with it being responsible for a disproportionate number of advances in many tech fields, like video games, mobile phones, digital cameras, hi-fis, walkmans etc. probably owes a good deal to the fact that Japan's greatest minds are busy cracking out new video games and stereo players, rather than, as is the case in Western countries, designing new fighter jets or laser weapons.
Japan is a fairly pacifist nation, and that's a good thing. Retaining the ability to go to war if you are threatened = good. Having 65% of the worlds aircraft carriers endlessly on patrol/exercise just-in-case as a backup to make sure no uppity neighbours say no to a new trade deal = bad.
And I, likewise will do the same, if I remember! Yeah, I tend to read quite a lot of article threads in full. I don't have anything else to do. 3D artists who aren't very experienced, have few contacts in industry and haven't got a killer showreel don't get any job offers. Hell, I'd settle for an office job right now, but there just aren't that many around. So I browse the 'dot, and do some programming, and get a bit better in my arts. Maybe improve my chances of getting a job.
Heh, I'd take that land. Right now, I'm just leaving Uni. I have very little money, no land, no property. What I'd like is a croft (I live in Scotland). I'd be willing to build my own home, raise crops, sell "niche" stuff (candles, jewellery etc. )to turn a coin to buy the stuff I can't grow etc. Only problem is "landowners". For some reason, because his great-great-great grandaddy helped the english king, there are whole islands "owned" by some rich english bastard (not saying that as a slur, I've met him, he is a total tool) who thinks they're "quaint", visits them once every decade, and has a lawyer who vigourously defends them from anyone who tries to actually use the land. Think they generate a little income from some local farmers that lease the right to put sheep on them in summer; not something that need stop if someone occupied one of the many old crofts, like me, but sadly they don't think like that. They think about "holiday homes" and "timeshares". It annoys the hell out of me. I could take that land, use it in an environmentally friendly way, growing subsistence crops, using ecofriendly power and waste management, making small products for the community, and in general making a positive addition to the local area. But no, rich english landowner doesn't like that. So no go.
Saying that, there is an "eco-commune", a planned settlement, on Erraid, one of the Western Isles here in Scotland. Was thinking about joining them; they've pretty much done what I'd like to and gotten some landowner to donate their land. Kinda like to do it myself though, so if you have land, and it's suitably arable, I'll take you up on that!
One word: ergot. OK, so it's more of a crop-cockup than a brewing cock-up. But ergot-contaminated beer is still a possibility in today's world if the craft brewer is particularly "homey" and wants o grow their own crop (as some do). Not being a mainstream farmer, they won't know what to look for and so ergot contamination can be overlooked.
Then there are various problems with the yeast, they might get the wrong kind, or again it could be contaminated. I do agree in general that beer is safer than a) unknown water supplies and b) distillation, since 'stilling concentrates whatever crap you were drinking massively.
Not hard to do it safe though. Even without methanol testing and the like, if you simply chuck the first 10% and last 10% of your first still, you're fine.
Granted. But not everyone is capable of making beer that isn't toxic either. That's not illegal (at least not here). Ditto any number of other things you can do in your house that have a far greater chance of death/injury. Illicit distilling is illicit solely just because of the money. They've even said as much, and the whisky industry is more than happy about it since the Big 4 like to keep the status quo. Craft-stillers would mean much better whisky would be freely available. And that wouldn't do at all!
OK, so granted on the bucky and binging. But that's the neds. Not the Scots. Neds are merely a small, insignificant social group in Scotland that receive far too much attention as it is. If everyone just ignored the wee bastards, it'd make life a lot better.
Particularly if road users could start ignoring them, that'd really help their swift demise (as a social group, of course). Still, my point was about the blatent hypocrisy in the licensing laws. Not only do they stop home-brewers from making a little sum-sumthing, it also adds a financial burden on micro-distilleries, something that the Whsiky industry could really benefit more from, especially when you consider that almost all the whiskies (brands) made in Scotland, and around 98% of the actual whisky itself is made by 4 large companies, all of whom have a habit of killing off the "less profitable" brands every now and then. I can only actually think of one independent distillery left, Bruichladdich on Islay. The "Big 4" are killing the whisky industry, and destroying brands have been made for upwards of 250 years. If the licensing laws were reduced to being "free to distil for your own consumption" and then a "cheapo licence for the craft-stills", then "hand over all your gold" for the big conglomerates, Scotch would be worth a lot more, the world over, with better quality single malts.
And it'd mean I can make my own "concoctions" without fear of the Excise men...
Think that's bad? Ever since the English got control of Scotland, it's illegal to distill whisky without a (extremely expensive) licence. And what is Scotland most famous for?
Literally, if I pay a few thousand pounds, I can have a licence to make as much whisky as is humanly possible. About $10,000 I think. Yet if I make 100ml of moonshine for my own consumption, I can go to jail for 10 years.
That, and his magical ability to bullshit people and have them believe it.
The RDF is real! For at least a day or two, everything Steve says at an expo sounds AMAZING!!!!!! Then reality re-asserts itself and you're left thinking "hold, so it can't actually run it's own apps then?" or "So, flashy menu-bar aside, what have you guys actually done to Leopard in the last 18 months??!!"
But for that 48 hours, He Is GOD! I personally think somewhere along the line, there's a Steve-owned shares company that makes a killing on buying then selling Apple stock at just the right time...
'Course, that would be a little ethically dubious (read: totally absolutely pound-me-in-the-ass-prison-time illegal)...
I think the Dock thing is subective. A lot of people I talk to hate the Dock.
A lot of people I talk to love the Dock.
I fall into the latter category. I agree with the GP on the Leopard dock being annoying; hell I developed an app t change it from the default 3D to a more sedate and retina-pleasing 2D one. But I still like it, and consider it one of OS X's nicest GUI features. Hidden, with the icons on "zoom" mean I can have a tiny dock that I never see unless I need it, and then I can see exactly the icons I want, not the other ones that stay tiny and out-of-the-way.
As for the BeOS thing, yeah, you're probably right. If they had bought BeOS, the same gui people would have worked on it to make it more "Apple-ey", which would mean you'd still have Aqua. Maybe they'd even of put a Dock in there, which I think would be awesome (an Aqua-like BeOS). But it would have been faster for multimedia which is a BIG thing nowadays (iLife anyone?), and the multi-user thing isn't.
But, that ship has passed, and we've got what we've got: Unix. It's a good OS. Sure, maybe an enhanced version of BeOS would be better, but we can't say that now.
Maybe, in some dark black-ops like basement in Cupertino, Apple are playing with BeOS still, planning to make it in the "next big thing" when (if) Unix starts to show it's age. Who knows...
Heh, brings to mind a description on a torrent site of the first (and co-incidentally last) I ever saw. I had to download it after I saw this. I thought it couldn't be that bad...
I was wrong.
Here's the quote:
"Without doubt, this is the worst film ever made, and probably that will ever be made. It is not worth the cost of a cinema ticket, it is not worth the cost of the power it took to keep my computer running to download it, it is not worth the cost of the power to keep your tv on as you watch it. It is not even worth killing the electrons that power that tv's tube, infinitesimal though their brief, tortured lives were. Avoid."
I think the "fisher-price" you refer to started as a reaction against the mind-numbingly dull themes from windows98 and NT, where the main colour schemes were "grey" or "grey with with hints of grey". I think both XP & OS X were supposed to get away from this; studies show that the grey actually inspires boredom and a loss of productivity. Whether you believe that or not is irrelevant, since the UI developers at Apple and Microsoft both do. Personally, I like Aqua. It is, like it's name suggests, refreshing in a "cold-water-to-face" kinda way. XP was god damned awful though. It is where your "fisher-price interface" comes from, not OS X. When you look at it, what Aqua does is colour all the inconsequential stuff (window frames, menu backgrounds etc.) grey, white or black; something that doesn't hurt the eyes. Then the important things are all bright and easy-to-see. Since no UI is going to have more controls than backgrounds (or shouldn't at any rate) then this will not over-colourise the UI, and at the same point will provide a counterpoint to the grey-with-slightly-different-grey UI of NT et al. Of course, Microsoft saw the early builds of OS X and turned XP into a LSD-inspired mess, missing the point as ever.
As someone who in the last few months has picked up programming, coming in with similar problems to yourself (only I have no background in Systems Admin, and what's more I'm totally crap at maths), may I heartily recommend Objective-C as the language to start with. Why?
Cocoa is written in Objective-C. What is Cocoa I hear you ask?
Wiki will put it better than I, but put simply Cocoa is Apple's API framework for the Mac OS X environment.
There are many good books out there to get started in Cocoa programming, Objective-C and Mac development, but more than that (as I'm sure the same could be said about Widnows) the XCode development enviroment (what you use to actually do the coding in) is a joy to use, and Interface Builder (the visual GUI layout app) makes writing good looking professional programs a sinch. It really does!!
On the "Start Here" side of things, Sams "Programming in Objective-C" is a good jumping off place to start learning the language before you go jumping into Cocoa itself (needed to make the GUI's you talk of), but if you're programming savvy (even just a little...I managed it off virtually zero programming at all, although it wasn't "easy"), and if not, then when you've read through the Programming in Objective-C book, the Bible for Cocoa development, the one book every Mac developer has read if not bought is Aaron Hillegass' "Cocoa Programming For Mac OS X", which is currently in it's second edition, and thus a bit dated now (it assumes you're using OS X 10.3, we're now on 10.5), but the third edition is due out this summer (he says June but Amazon says May)... I cannot recommend this enough. It's seen me go from someone who though "I am never going to get this" to "Wow, I built my very own app" in the space of 3-4 intermittent weeks. (In case you're wondering, said app is an alarm that allows the user to select a time-period to elapse, then pulls up a window, makes the dock icon jump up and down, makes a sound and sets off a Growl notification. I could easily extend it to alerting a device via bluetooth, sending a message to another machine via the network or sending an e-mail...it's not that much more work). In addition, the Mac dev community, whilst smaller than its windows counterpart, and less rabid than the linux/OSS one, is extremely friendly and there are a goodly number of helpful Cocoa dev. websites and forums out there that will take your questions in good humor and won't respond with the "LOL, n00b" responses I had when I was trying my hand (briefly) at Windows development. A good place to see is the Cocoa mailing list over at Apple, then there's cocoadev.com, then cocoadevcentral.com then latenightcocoa.com, and numerous others.
It's also totally free to use the Apple XCode platform, in fact they enourage it, and it's also being a bit resurgant, since the iPhone, it's DevKit and the open-source version of it is also Cocoa-based, allbeit with frameworks for touch-interfacing. Apologies for the lack of web-links and the like for the above resources, but feel free to e-mail me on math.campbell at gmail.com for more stuff (i'm away from my normal machine so all this is off the top of my head). Seriously, give it a thought, even if you're a windows-only chap right now.... It is scarily easy to get into it, even for lamebrains like me that didn't even do BASIC at school. And it's a neato feeling you get when you hit "Build & Run" and your first, real, built-it-all-myself app compiles without errors, and there, in front of you, is a genuine, professional app, that looks like the real thing, not some awful un-professional looking mess, and you did it all yourself, there never been anything like it ever before, you brought it into existence.
I too had this issue to address; with me the straw that broke the camels back was XP, not Vista. I "upgraded" to Mac about 4 years ago now. Before that I was on Win2k, and I was playing with linux.
Sure, linux was nice, and, as technovampire says in his reply to the parent of my post, linux has come on a long way, but it still doesn't cut that mustard, certainly not for me.
Mac does. It's not windows, I'm not locked into an insecure system anymore, but at the same time I'm not totally out of the loop when it comes to the "big" programs.
Technovampire makes the point about OpenOffice. Last time I tried it, sure, it could save files that M$ Office can open. But opening M$ Office files was appalling; tables? Forget about it. Rich document layout (which I know shouldn't be done in Word; it's not a DTP)? Mangled...
It just plain doesn't cut it.
Now, I don't need nor even really care about Office; I see about 5 office documents a year, and I always ship out stuff in PDF format. But I can well understand where others would consider not being able to use the genuine, bloated, rubbish and insecure M$ Office as a deal-breaker.
For me, the del breaker is the graphics programs that make my job (allbeit I'm an out-of-work artist at the mo).
Photoshop..nope, and don't even try and give me GIMP, it just doesn't compare. Wish it did, but it don't.
Lightwave..nope, and Wine doesn't do it very well either. You can get it running, but not with the dongle it needs, and that either makes it useless or illegal, either of which are deal-breakers in the industry.
Final Cut..nope. Mac only. And Premiere on windows is so awful it was one of the reasons I switched, to get away from it.
The day Adobe starts supporting Linux is the day I'd consider maybe going back. But since my machines are Mac now, and I'm happy on the mac support/upgrade cycle, and I'm starting to learn how to program in Objective-C, I doubt it.
As the parent says, Mac "just works". No dealing with x-conf files (installed Ubuntu on a firends machine for them not last month, had to go editing that, so linux has a ways to get yet), no having to immediately anti-virus, anti-spyware, and anti-adware like with windows. It just works.
You forgot "The Hydrogen Filled Buckyball will never threaten to stab you, and, in fact, cannot speak. In the event that the Hydrogen Filled Buckball does speak, we advise you to disregard it's advice."
This from people who put MILK in their tea.
Uhuh...Americans have no right whatsoever to criticise anyone's tea-drinking style.
Last time you bunch of hooligans were allowed to make the tea you ended up dumping it into Boston Harbour.
Uncultured heathens!
Almost made me spit my tea (earl-grey, milky, sugar before you ask). Indeed, sir!
Agreed. I saw one of the US version; it was awful, no trials, totally hammed up presenter, almost as bad as the Red Dwarf US version. Given that Craig Charles was in both Red Dwarf and Robot Wars, it's weird that the US versions of both were dreadful.
Dunno if any of you over the other side of the pond ever got this show, it stopped in 2003, and was presented by Craig Charles (oh he of Red Dwarf fame). Was an awesome program, with a whole load of different teams, ranging from a 13 year old girl with her Dad to a major university grad team and a Army engineers team. Was pretty decent in it's day. Maybe they should bring this back.
I doubt it would go into the Balkans. I just see Westminster as being irrelevent;
The reason is simple. England has 50 million people in it. Scotland has about 5 million. Therefore the government of the UK has to cater to the needs of the english population. Sometimes, these needs correspond with the needs of the Scottish public. Most times however, it does not. Scotland has a totally different society, and has a different economic basis, and solutions that work well for South-East England totally fail here in Scotland.
I'd prefer a government from this country that has the needs of this country's people at heart, not those of the neighbouring one.
Yeah, it was the sites that have a list of 50 US states, the Canadian provinces, and sometimes, just sometimes, the Australian states too, all on a drop down. And if you don't select one of them, the form won't complete. It's that kind of sloppy coding that upsets people; it's not so much that Americans all have this towering isolationist arrogance, just that their perceived indifference to the rest of the entire world, coupled with the few examples of the ones that do make for very bad PR. And not to get all political but your latest "president" (I use the term loosely understanding as I do that to be president one must be "elected", and I'd be mighty suspicious about that were I you) hasn't particularly gone out of his way to make America popular anywhere recently.....
On the UK and countries/states thing, this is something that confuses Americans all the time. This one is fair to be confused about though...
Here's how it all goes.. The UK, as it's full title (The United Kingdom of Great Britain, Northern Ireland and her Isles and Territories) is made up of 4 constituent countries. Not states like the US, but separate nations (and not everyone is too chuffed about that, either).
Wales was the first to fall to England, as a conquest, last being independent in 1415. Until recently though, it was always referred to as part of England, usually hear as "England & Wales", sharing a common law, education and organisational system. This is despite the fact that out of the 4 UK nations, Wales is the only one to have a major used other language; Welsh. Until the early 1900's, the majority of people in Wales only spoke welsh, despite the english forcing children to speak english in schools, beating the ones that didn't (with a big thick rope called a "Welsh Knot" in case you're curious). Since then the language has died out a bit, with about 30% of the Welsh speaking Welsh as a first language. However, during the '60's, welsh independence started a major upturn, successfully getting the Welsh Language Act passed (means there are schools that teach in welsh,all the roadsigns have to be in both languages and they have a tv channel) and various other things. Since the 90's, devolution has meant Wales has a parliament, called the National Assembly, albeit one that can't really pass many laws at all, having very few powers, no-taxing raising ones at all; it's still better than no representation at all.
Moving along now, we have Scotland, my home. Scotland was a completely independent nation until quite recently, falling in bed with England in 1707, in highly dubious circumstances. To put it bluntly, the Scots parliament ran out of money, and the individual members were bribed into accepting a union with england. They didn't even bother to consult the members of the public. There was massive rioting and unrest about this, but the english military soon put stop to that (Battle of Culloden, 1745). Since the 90's, Scotland too has a parliament, given that during the 80's the UK was run by a party that had massive appeal in England but not one single MP from Scotland (bit undemocratic really). Unlike Wales, the Scottish Parliament actually does have some law-making powers, as well as tax-raising ones, although a lot of issues are "reserved" by Westminster, including defence, foreign affairs, the EU, transport, whole bag of things. Even gun laws. At this point you're probably thinking, heh, our State governments have more power than that, so they are just like States. But you'd be wrong. For instance, the current government in Holyrood (that's where our Parliament is) is an SNP one. The Scottish National Party's avowed and primary goal is full Scottish independence. Right now there's a big hooha about powers for Holyrood; most of the major parties agree the parliament should have more powers, but they range from the Labour party who want to give over as few as possible (they're also in charge of the current UK government and very pro-union, anti-scots-independence) to the S
True. But you only need to come into contact with it once.
Whether that be a blood transfusion that's not been scanned right (as thousands in the eighties and nineties weren't), or some scumbag stabs you with an infected needle (one of the more popular threats of the druggies in Glasgow is "Gies yer cash bawbag, a've got aids, a'll dae ye wie this needle no?"), it still only takes one drop of infected blood to come into contact with your blood and chances are, you're gonna be doing the Philadelphia pretty soon.
I acknowledge that thankfully the risk of that is pretty damned low (partying on Saturday night in Argyll Street notwithstanding). My point in my original post was more that too many people in the West, particularly in the USA assume that HIV is still something that people only catch through sex, more specifically gay sex, despite the highest infectious growth group being heterosexual women (this is a BIG problem in Africa given the levels of infection seen in prostitutes; it's kinda like the food vendor getting e-coli. If you get e-coli in your house it's one thing, but when the McDonalds gets it, everyone gets it).
A lot of people need to wake up to the fact that AIDS is not a "gay" problem but a world problem. My only hope is they manage to make a vaccine/cure soon. Sure the genome seems fairly stable now, but how long before this fucker becomes airborne? With it's up to 10-year dormancy, how long could it go undetected? I don't know my genetic well enough to say whether or not it could mutate, maybe it's impossible for the HIV to do so, I dunno. But as the Jeff said, "life finds a way". If it did, hell the entire planet could get it without even noticing...
See, that might work, and what you say may be valid, were it not for another annoying tendency of Americans that is to assume we all a) have 'states' (Makes it real fun on web-based forms for the 80-odd other countries in the world that don't live in a 'state') and b) we all know what some random obscure two letter abbreviation after a place name means (I know it's a US State, but which one? There are like 50). My argument was not that we shouldn't identify which country somethings in, merely that 9 times out of 10 it''s completely obvious; if it's a second-hand name, of some tiny backwards little hamlet in the middle of redneck-land USA versus a major world capital city, it's kinda silly saying "Rome, Italy", when really, you just say "Rome". If you mean a place other than the one most people would automatically assume, you say "Rome, USA". For instance, if I see Houston written somewhere, I automatically assume it's Houston, Texas, USA. Not the Houston that's about 15 miles away from me here in Scotland. Why? 'Cause Houston, Scotland is a tiny wee shithole, not a major city. Ditto, Dublin in New Hampshire isn't a major place. It's not even a sodding village! It's only got a thousand or so people living there.
Dublin, Ireland however is a major city, the capital city of Ireland, and home to 1.6 million people. So if you say "Dublin", even if I lived in the same state as Dublin in the USA, I'll still assume you're talking about the major world city, not the tiny little one-pub town.
American's however automatically assume that some tiny shitty place in the USA is far more relevant and important than a major world city not in the USA. And that dismissive, patronising superior attitude pisses a lot of folks off. Not the adding "Italy" onto the end of "Rome", but the reason you're adding it.
Slashdot Mirror
A/C is very expensive in terms of energy; I seem to recall that for every joule of heat energy you remove from an area you'll spend 10 doing it. Something like that, I always sucked at physics...
As soon as you bump up the AC, you then need to re-design the cooling structures, re-design the airflow construct, the power feeds will need up, then added cooling for the a/c and power ducting itself....
Better to just lose a cluster every 6 months, and know that it'll happen that often and plan for it, than to try and diminish it; pretty much the whole point here is to get to an acceptable fail rate and plan around it than try to reduce the fail rate itself.
I wasn't meaning to belittle the role of the US in defending Japan's interests; I am quite aware of the danger Japan faces from China, Vietnam and others in the area, not to mention the various little odd cults that would quite like to kill half of Japan were it not for the work of the Japanese police/secret services...
What I meant was Japan's society; it's pro-death penalty, yet strangely fairly anti-war. My point stands though. The US Navy has 65% of the worlds aircraft carriers!! They could take on the Navies of the entire rest of the world put together and the result still would be uncertain (Navy alone, obviously not realistically). This is clearly more that is needed. Were I an american taxpayer, I'd be looking at the GDP/taxation rates of european countries and noting that a lot of them pay less tax per head than in the USA, and then noting said countries provide welfare benefits, free healthcare, better schooling etc. and I'd be wondering where all my tax money goes. Then I'd be looking at that huge navy, massive air force etc. and maybe i'd be asking for a tax refund!
I never claimed my field of expertise doesn't benefit from military research, because it does. I'm a 3D animator/modeller; a lot of 3D research is funded by military research (and strangely, as seen in the article, a lot of games research then goes to help the military so it's a two way pipe). I'd still prefer a world where most countries have a small defence force, no bigger than needed o protect it's own interests with a capability to enlarge should a need arise, with international waters patrolled by the UN, than to have the superpowers with their huge armies (and consequently huge budgets). Call me an idiot if you will, I've been called worse. I prefer the term "pacifist".
I concur; only in the past three-four hundred years really that martialism even became a "thing". Before then the monks and priests had more sway than the soldiers and warriors.
Meh, it's back to one now, no soldiers at all except defence ones.
What country needs more? I hear justifications for the US having a navy that could take on the rest of the entire planet and still win as being "needed to patrol the seas for piracy", much like the British Empire's Navy was before WW2.
Funny, I thought all Nations could have a small navy, varying in size to defend their coastal waters (so Ireland's would be smaller than Russia cause Russia has more coastline!), then we could leave the international stuff to some kinda international peacekeeping kinda organisation with quasi legal status in all it's member states. If only such an organisation existed. Maybe someone could ask the UN if it knows of one...
I don't think Nintendo would accept funding from the US Govt's Overseas Killing Dept. (as it's facetiously nicknamed in certain academic circles).
Nintendo, as a post-war japanese company subscribes fairly heavily in the "war is bad: look what it does" philosophy. In fact, many have commented that Japan's seemingly stratospheric lead in advanced tech research, with it being responsible for a disproportionate number of advances in many tech fields, like video games, mobile phones, digital cameras, hi-fis, walkmans etc. probably owes a good deal to the fact that Japan's greatest minds are busy cracking out new video games and stereo players, rather than, as is the case in Western countries, designing new fighter jets or laser weapons.
Japan is a fairly pacifist nation, and that's a good thing. Retaining the ability to go to war if you are threatened = good.
Having 65% of the worlds aircraft carriers endlessly on patrol/exercise just-in-case as a backup to make sure no uppity neighbours say no to a new trade deal = bad.
Think I prefer the Japanese "fun".
Damnit!
Well, if you ever come into said land....
And I, likewise will do the same, if I remember!
Yeah, I tend to read quite a lot of article threads in full.
I don't have anything else to do. 3D artists who aren't very experienced, have few contacts in industry and haven't got a killer showreel don't get any job offers.
Hell, I'd settle for an office job right now, but there just aren't that many around. So I browse the 'dot, and do some programming, and get a bit better in my arts. Maybe improve my chances of getting a job.
Heh, I'd take that land.
Right now, I'm just leaving Uni. I have very little money, no land, no property.
What I'd like is a croft (I live in Scotland). I'd be willing to build my own home, raise crops, sell "niche" stuff (candles, jewellery etc. )to turn a coin to buy the stuff I can't grow etc.
Only problem is "landowners". For some reason, because his great-great-great grandaddy helped the english king, there are whole islands "owned" by some rich english bastard (not saying that as a slur, I've met him, he is a total tool) who thinks they're "quaint", visits them once every decade, and has a lawyer who vigourously defends them from anyone who tries to actually use the land.
Think they generate a little income from some local farmers that lease the right to put sheep on them in summer; not something that need stop if someone occupied one of the many old crofts, like me, but sadly they don't think like that. They think about "holiday homes" and "timeshares".
It annoys the hell out of me. I could take that land, use it in an environmentally friendly way, growing subsistence crops, using ecofriendly power and waste management, making small products for the community, and in general making a positive addition to the local area.
But no, rich english landowner doesn't like that. So no go.
Saying that, there is an "eco-commune", a planned settlement, on Erraid, one of the Western Isles here in Scotland. Was thinking about joining them; they've pretty much done what I'd like to and gotten some landowner to donate their land.
Kinda like to do it myself though, so if you have land, and it's suitably arable, I'll take you up on that!
One word: ergot.
OK, so it's more of a crop-cockup than a brewing cock-up.
But ergot-contaminated beer is still a possibility in today's world if the craft brewer is particularly "homey" and wants o grow their own crop (as some do). Not being a mainstream farmer, they won't know what to look for and so ergot contamination can be overlooked.
Then there are various problems with the yeast, they might get the wrong kind, or again it could be contaminated. I do agree in general that beer is safer than a) unknown water supplies and b) distillation, since 'stilling concentrates whatever crap you were drinking massively.
Not hard to do it safe though. Even without methanol testing and the like, if you simply chuck the first 10% and last 10% of your first still, you're fine.
Granted. But not everyone is capable of making beer that isn't toxic either.
That's not illegal (at least not here).
Ditto any number of other things you can do in your house that have a far greater chance of death/injury.
Illicit distilling is illicit solely just because of the money. They've even said as much, and the whisky industry is more than happy about it since the Big 4 like to keep the status quo. Craft-stillers would mean much better whisky would be freely available. And that wouldn't do at all!
Unless you know something the rest of the world doesn't, it would appear you are very wrong indeed.
The 'Laddie is owned by a few private individuals, they don't even allow companies to hold shares; it's all private investors, mostly from the island!
As you can see here: http://www.theherald.co.uk/business/news/display.var.2227543.0.Bruichladdich_sees_a_rosy_future_as_malt_sales_soar.php
They appear to be doing quite well from all accounts. I would so love a job with them in any position!
OK, so granted on the bucky and binging.
But that's the neds. Not the Scots.
Neds are merely a small, insignificant social group in Scotland that receive far too much attention as it is. If everyone just ignored the wee bastards, it'd make life a lot better.
Particularly if road users could start ignoring them, that'd really help their swift demise (as a social group, of course).
Still, my point was about the blatent hypocrisy in the licensing laws. Not only do they stop home-brewers from making a little sum-sumthing, it also adds a financial burden on micro-distilleries, something that the Whsiky industry could really benefit more from, especially when you consider that almost all the whiskies (brands) made in Scotland, and around 98% of the actual whisky itself is made by 4 large companies, all of whom have a habit of killing off the "less profitable" brands every now and then. I can only actually think of one independent distillery left, Bruichladdich on Islay.
The "Big 4" are killing the whisky industry, and destroying brands have been made for upwards of 250 years. If the licensing laws were reduced to being "free to distil for your own consumption" and then a "cheapo licence for the craft-stills", then "hand over all your gold" for the big conglomerates, Scotch would be worth a lot more, the world over, with better quality single malts.
And it'd mean I can make my own "concoctions" without fear of the Excise men...
Think that's bad?
Ever since the English got control of Scotland, it's illegal to distill whisky without a (extremely expensive) licence.
And what is Scotland most famous for?
Literally, if I pay a few thousand pounds, I can have a licence to make as much whisky as is humanly possible. About $10,000 I think.
Yet if I make 100ml of moonshine for my own consumption, I can go to jail for 10 years.
That, and his magical ability to bullshit people and have them believe it.
The RDF is real! For at least a day or two, everything Steve says at an expo sounds AMAZING!!!!!!
Then reality re-asserts itself and you're left thinking "hold, so it can't actually run it's own apps then?" or "So, flashy menu-bar aside, what have you guys actually done to Leopard in the last 18 months??!!"
But for that 48 hours, He Is GOD!
I personally think somewhere along the line, there's a Steve-owned shares company that makes a killing on buying then selling Apple stock at just the right time...
'Course, that would be a little ethically dubious (read: totally absolutely pound-me-in-the-ass-prison-time illegal)...
I think the Dock thing is subective. A lot of people I talk to hate the Dock.
A lot of people I talk to love the Dock.
I fall into the latter category. I agree with the GP on the Leopard dock being annoying; hell I developed an app t change it from the default 3D to a more sedate and retina-pleasing 2D one.
But I still like it, and consider it one of OS X's nicest GUI features. Hidden, with the icons on "zoom" mean I can have a tiny dock that I never see unless I need it, and then I can see exactly the icons I want, not the other ones that stay tiny and out-of-the-way.
As for the BeOS thing, yeah, you're probably right. If they had bought BeOS, the same gui people would have worked on it to make it more "Apple-ey", which would mean you'd still have Aqua. Maybe they'd even of put a Dock in there, which I think would be awesome (an Aqua-like BeOS).
But it would have been faster for multimedia which is a BIG thing nowadays (iLife anyone?), and the multi-user thing isn't.
But, that ship has passed, and we've got what we've got: Unix.
It's a good OS. Sure, maybe an enhanced version of BeOS would be better, but we can't say that now.
Maybe, in some dark black-ops like basement in Cupertino, Apple are playing with BeOS still, planning to make it in the "next big thing" when (if) Unix starts to show it's age. Who knows...
Heh, brings to mind a description on a torrent site of the first (and co-incidentally last) I ever saw. I had to download it after I saw this. I thought it couldn't be that bad... I was wrong. Here's the quote: "Without doubt, this is the worst film ever made, and probably that will ever be made. It is not worth the cost of a cinema ticket, it is not worth the cost of the power it took to keep my computer running to download it, it is not worth the cost of the power to keep your tv on as you watch it. It is not even worth killing the electrons that power that tv's tube, infinitesimal though their brief, tortured lives were. Avoid."
I think the "fisher-price" you refer to started as a reaction against the mind-numbingly dull themes from windows98 and NT, where the main colour schemes were "grey" or "grey with with hints of grey".
I think both XP & OS X were supposed to get away from this; studies show that the grey actually inspires boredom and a loss of productivity.
Whether you believe that or not is irrelevant, since the UI developers at Apple and Microsoft both do.
Personally, I like Aqua. It is, like it's name suggests, refreshing in a "cold-water-to-face" kinda way.
XP was god damned awful though. It is where your "fisher-price interface" comes from, not OS X.
When you look at it, what Aqua does is colour all the inconsequential stuff (window frames, menu backgrounds etc.) grey, white or black; something that doesn't hurt the eyes. Then the important things are all bright and easy-to-see.
Since no UI is going to have more controls than backgrounds (or shouldn't at any rate) then this will not over-colourise the UI, and at the same point will provide a counterpoint to the grey-with-slightly-different-grey UI of NT et al.
Of course, Microsoft saw the early builds of OS X and turned XP into a LSD-inspired mess, missing the point as ever.
As someone who in the last few months has picked up programming, coming in with similar problems to yourself (only I have no background in Systems Admin, and what's more I'm totally crap at maths), may I heartily recommend Objective-C as the language to start with.
Why?
Cocoa is written in Objective-C. What is Cocoa I hear you ask?
Wiki will put it better than I, but put simply Cocoa is Apple's API framework for the Mac OS X environment.
There are many good books out there to get started in Cocoa programming, Objective-C and Mac development, but more than that (as I'm sure the same could be said about Widnows) the XCode development enviroment (what you use to actually do the coding in) is a joy to use, and Interface Builder (the visual GUI layout app) makes writing good looking professional programs a sinch. It really does!!
On the "Start Here" side of things, Sams "Programming in Objective-C" is a good jumping off place to start learning the language before you go jumping into Cocoa itself (needed to make the GUI's you talk of), but if you're programming savvy (even just a little...I managed it off virtually zero programming at all, although it wasn't "easy"), and if not, then when you've read through the Programming in Objective-C book, the Bible for Cocoa development, the one book every Mac developer has read if not bought is Aaron Hillegass' "Cocoa Programming For Mac OS X", which is currently in it's second edition, and thus a bit dated now (it assumes you're using OS X 10.3, we're now on 10.5), but the third edition is due out this summer (he says June but Amazon says May)...
I cannot recommend this enough. It's seen me go from someone who though "I am never going to get this" to "Wow, I built my very own app" in the space of 3-4 intermittent weeks. (In case you're wondering, said app is an alarm that allows the user to select a time-period to elapse, then pulls up a window, makes the dock icon jump up and down, makes a sound and sets off a Growl notification. I could easily extend it to alerting a device via bluetooth, sending a message to another machine via the network or sending an e-mail...it's not that much more work).
In addition, the Mac dev community, whilst smaller than its windows counterpart, and less rabid than the linux/OSS one, is extremely friendly and there are a goodly number of helpful Cocoa dev. websites and forums out there that will take your questions in good humor and won't respond with the "LOL, n00b" responses I had when I was trying my hand (briefly) at Windows development. A good place to see is the Cocoa mailing list over at Apple, then there's cocoadev.com, then cocoadevcentral.com then latenightcocoa.com, and numerous others.
It's also totally free to use the Apple XCode platform, in fact they enourage it, and it's also being a bit resurgant, since the iPhone, it's DevKit and the open-source version of it is also Cocoa-based, allbeit with frameworks for touch-interfacing.
Apologies for the lack of web-links and the like for the above resources, but feel free to e-mail me on math.campbell at gmail.com for more stuff (i'm away from my normal machine so all this is off the top of my head). Seriously, give it a thought, even if you're a windows-only chap right now....
It is scarily easy to get into it, even for lamebrains like me that didn't even do BASIC at school. And it's a neato feeling you get when you hit "Build & Run" and your first, real, built-it-all-myself app compiles without errors, and there, in front of you, is a genuine, professional app, that looks like the real thing, not some awful un-professional looking mess, and you did it all yourself, there never been anything like it ever before, you brought it into existence.
I too had this issue to address; with me the straw that broke the camels back was XP, not Vista. I "upgraded" to Mac about 4 years ago now. Before that I was on Win2k, and I was playing with linux. Sure, linux was nice, and, as technovampire says in his reply to the parent of my post, linux has come on a long way, but it still doesn't cut that mustard, certainly not for me. Mac does. It's not windows, I'm not locked into an insecure system anymore, but at the same time I'm not totally out of the loop when it comes to the "big" programs. Technovampire makes the point about OpenOffice. Last time I tried it, sure, it could save files that M$ Office can open. But opening M$ Office files was appalling; tables? Forget about it. Rich document layout (which I know shouldn't be done in Word; it's not a DTP)? Mangled... It just plain doesn't cut it. Now, I don't need nor even really care about Office; I see about 5 office documents a year, and I always ship out stuff in PDF format. But I can well understand where others would consider not being able to use the genuine, bloated, rubbish and insecure M$ Office as a deal-breaker. For me, the del breaker is the graphics programs that make my job (allbeit I'm an out-of-work artist at the mo). Photoshop..nope, and don't even try and give me GIMP, it just doesn't compare. Wish it did, but it don't. Lightwave..nope, and Wine doesn't do it very well either. You can get it running, but not with the dongle it needs, and that either makes it useless or illegal, either of which are deal-breakers in the industry. Final Cut..nope. Mac only. And Premiere on windows is so awful it was one of the reasons I switched, to get away from it. The day Adobe starts supporting Linux is the day I'd consider maybe going back. But since my machines are Mac now, and I'm happy on the mac support/upgrade cycle, and I'm starting to learn how to program in Objective-C, I doubt it. As the parent says, Mac "just works". No dealing with x-conf files (installed Ubuntu on a firends machine for them not last month, had to go editing that, so linux has a ways to get yet), no having to immediately anti-virus, anti-spyware, and anti-adware like with windows. It just works.
You forgot "The Hydrogen Filled Buckyball will never threaten to stab you, and, in fact, cannot speak. In the event that the Hydrogen Filled Buckball does speak, we advise you to disregard it's advice."
Uhuh...Americans have no right whatsoever to criticise anyone's tea-drinking style.
Last time you bunch of hooligans were allowed to make the tea you ended up dumping it into Boston Harbour.
Uncultured heathens!
Almost made me spit my tea (earl-grey, milky, sugar before you ask). Indeed, sir!
Agreed. I saw one of the US version; it was awful, no trials, totally hammed up presenter, almost as bad as the Red Dwarf US version. Given that Craig Charles was in both Red Dwarf and Robot Wars, it's weird that the US versions of both were dreadful.
Dunno if any of you over the other side of the pond ever got this show, it stopped in 2003, and was presented by Craig Charles (oh he of Red Dwarf fame).
Was an awesome program, with a whole load of different teams, ranging from a 13 year old girl with her Dad to a major university grad team and a Army engineers team.
Was pretty decent in it's day. Maybe they should bring this back.
I doubt it would go into the Balkans. I just see Westminster as being irrelevent; The reason is simple. England has 50 million people in it. Scotland has about 5 million. Therefore the government of the UK has to cater to the needs of the english population. Sometimes, these needs correspond with the needs of the Scottish public. Most times however, it does not. Scotland has a totally different society, and has a different economic basis, and solutions that work well for South-East England totally fail here in Scotland. I'd prefer a government from this country that has the needs of this country's people at heart, not those of the neighbouring one.
Yeah, it was the sites that have a list of 50 US states, the Canadian provinces, and sometimes, just sometimes, the Australian states too, all on a drop down. And if you don't select one of them, the form won't complete.
It's that kind of sloppy coding that upsets people; it's not so much that Americans all have this towering isolationist arrogance, just that their perceived indifference to the rest of the entire world, coupled with the few examples of the ones that do make for very bad PR. And not to get all political but your latest "president" (I use the term loosely understanding as I do that to be president one must be "elected", and I'd be mighty suspicious about that were I you) hasn't particularly gone out of his way to make America popular anywhere recently.....
On the UK and countries/states thing, this is something that confuses Americans all the time. This one is fair to be confused about though...
Here's how it all goes.. The UK, as it's full title (The United Kingdom of Great Britain, Northern Ireland and her Isles and Territories) is made up of 4 constituent countries. Not states like the US, but separate nations (and not everyone is too chuffed about that, either).
Wales was the first to fall to England, as a conquest, last being independent in 1415. Until recently though, it was always referred to as part of England, usually hear as "England & Wales", sharing a common law, education and organisational system. This is despite the fact that out of the 4 UK nations, Wales is the only one to have a major used other language; Welsh. Until the early 1900's, the majority of people in Wales only spoke welsh, despite the english forcing children to speak english in schools, beating the ones that didn't (with a big thick rope called a "Welsh Knot" in case you're curious). Since then the language has died out a bit, with about 30% of the Welsh speaking Welsh as a first language. However, during the '60's, welsh independence started a major upturn, successfully getting the Welsh Language Act passed (means there are schools that teach in welsh,all the roadsigns have to be in both languages and they have a tv channel) and various other things. Since the 90's, devolution has meant Wales has a parliament, called the National Assembly, albeit one that can't really pass many laws at all, having very few powers, no-taxing raising ones at all; it's still better than no representation at all.
Moving along now, we have Scotland, my home. Scotland was a completely independent nation until quite recently, falling in bed with England in 1707, in highly dubious circumstances. To put it bluntly, the Scots parliament ran out of money, and the individual members were bribed into accepting a union with england. They didn't even bother to consult the members of the public. There was massive rioting and unrest about this, but the english military soon put stop to that (Battle of Culloden, 1745). Since the 90's, Scotland too has a parliament, given that during the 80's the UK was run by a party that had massive appeal in England but not one single MP from Scotland (bit undemocratic really). Unlike Wales, the Scottish Parliament actually does have some law-making powers, as well as tax-raising ones, although a lot of issues are "reserved" by Westminster, including defence, foreign affairs, the EU, transport, whole bag of things. Even gun laws.
At this point you're probably thinking, heh, our State governments have more power than that, so they are just like States. But you'd be wrong. For instance, the current government in Holyrood (that's where our Parliament is) is an SNP one. The Scottish National Party's avowed and primary goal is full Scottish independence. Right now there's a big hooha about powers for Holyrood; most of the major parties agree the parliament should have more powers, but they range from the Labour party who want to give over as few as possible (they're also in charge of the current UK government and very pro-union, anti-scots-independence) to the S
True. But you only need to come into contact with it once. Whether that be a blood transfusion that's not been scanned right (as thousands in the eighties and nineties weren't), or some scumbag stabs you with an infected needle (one of the more popular threats of the druggies in Glasgow is "Gies yer cash bawbag, a've got aids, a'll dae ye wie this needle no?"), it still only takes one drop of infected blood to come into contact with your blood and chances are, you're gonna be doing the Philadelphia pretty soon. I acknowledge that thankfully the risk of that is pretty damned low (partying on Saturday night in Argyll Street notwithstanding). My point in my original post was more that too many people in the West, particularly in the USA assume that HIV is still something that people only catch through sex, more specifically gay sex, despite the highest infectious growth group being heterosexual women (this is a BIG problem in Africa given the levels of infection seen in prostitutes; it's kinda like the food vendor getting e-coli. If you get e-coli in your house it's one thing, but when the McDonalds gets it, everyone gets it). A lot of people need to wake up to the fact that AIDS is not a "gay" problem but a world problem. My only hope is they manage to make a vaccine/cure soon. Sure the genome seems fairly stable now, but how long before this fucker becomes airborne? With it's up to 10-year dormancy, how long could it go undetected? I don't know my genetic well enough to say whether or not it could mutate, maybe it's impossible for the HIV to do so, I dunno. But as the Jeff said, "life finds a way". If it did, hell the entire planet could get it without even noticing...
See, that might work, and what you say may be valid, were it not for another annoying tendency of Americans that is to assume we all a) have 'states' (Makes it real fun on web-based forms for the 80-odd other countries in the world that don't live in a 'state') and b) we all know what some random obscure two letter abbreviation after a place name means (I know it's a US State, but which one? There are like 50). My argument was not that we shouldn't identify which country somethings in, merely that 9 times out of 10 it''s completely obvious; if it's a second-hand name, of some tiny backwards little hamlet in the middle of redneck-land USA versus a major world capital city, it's kinda silly saying "Rome, Italy", when really, you just say "Rome". If you mean a place other than the one most people would automatically assume, you say "Rome, USA". For instance, if I see Houston written somewhere, I automatically assume it's Houston, Texas, USA. Not the Houston that's about 15 miles away from me here in Scotland. Why? 'Cause Houston, Scotland is a tiny wee shithole, not a major city. Ditto, Dublin in New Hampshire isn't a major place. It's not even a sodding village! It's only got a thousand or so people living there. Dublin, Ireland however is a major city, the capital city of Ireland, and home to 1.6 million people. So if you say "Dublin", even if I lived in the same state as Dublin in the USA, I'll still assume you're talking about the major world city, not the tiny little one-pub town. American's however automatically assume that some tiny shitty place in the USA is far more relevant and important than a major world city not in the USA. And that dismissive, patronising superior attitude pisses a lot of folks off. Not the adding "Italy" onto the end of "Rome", but the reason you're adding it.