Re:The whole REASON I stopped using AmigaOS..
on
AmigaOS 4.0 released
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· Score: 1
So if I told you the OS now includes a TCP stack, ftp client, telnet client, web browser etc, you'd come back to AmigaOS?
I assume not, but since this discussion is about AmigaOS4, it's a little pointless to complain about the lack of stuff in the past doesn't it? I mean, should I say I'm not going to use Windows because Windows 2.x didn't have any of that stuff either?
The problem with the idea of new custom hardware is just that it wouldn't cut it. No single company is going to be able to product sound better than the dedicated sound card companies, graphics better than the dedicated graphics card companies etc etc etc and tie it all in to one dedicated system. Even if they did pull off such a miracle, then the entire system would be obsolete in a year or so anyway since the rest of the industry would move on and they just wouldn't have the resources to do so.
If they went down the alternate path of dedicated chipsets made by the major manufacturers, well, that's really no different to what there is now. You can write software that REQUIRES an X1600 for example if you really want to... but why would you?
Basically, custom onboard dedicated chipsets in desktop computers are history.
Ah, that'd be the famed "AmigaDE" / "Amiga Anywhere" you'd be talking about. It's a long and confusing story which I won't go in to great detail on, but suffice to say it has no real relationship to AmigaOS at all. It's a product created/marketed by Amiga Inc - mostly it's just Tao's elate/intent system with a few extras added to it. I have the SDK and toyed with it a bit, but it didn't really hold my attention greatly.
On the wild rumourmill there has been speculation in the past about "Amiga Anywhere" and "AmigaOS" becoming much closer or even merging in the future, but I see a LOT of technical hurdles that would make that seem extremely unlikely.
As another poster (LoadWB) pointed out, there is AROS, which is an open source x86 AmigaOS clone, but it's not an official AmigaOS and feels very outdated compared to current Amiga systems as it aims for an AmigaOS 3.x look and feel.
You know, Windows is dead. I mean, Word 6 and Internet Explorer 2 were great in their day, but come on!
Seriously - it's these kind of comments that really get to me. I'll be the first to admit that my Amiga (AmigaOne running OS4) is sorely lacking in good modern software in some (maybe many) areas, but judging a new OS release on software that is years old is a little silly. We've moved on since Scala and DPaint!
I'm not sure I can agree (with you, or the article), and for the exact opposite reason.
I am, as a matter of fact, extraordinarily talented. I'm also extraordinarily lazy. I excel at a variety of fields including a very specialist field that I work in. I refuse to study though and have done ever since school. I cheat my way through every test of rote memorisation that I can, and don't need to study at all to do very well in things that interest me. In no way have I studied anywhere near as much as most comp sci graduates, but I'd give any "non-gifted" graduates a good run for their money in logic, programming and other things that comp sci focuses on.
Now, this entire post may sound like I'm just being egotistical, but the point of the post is that I'm lazy, and yet I'm talented, so I seem to be the classic example of evidence against the points made.
It's still only a small fraction of people who use broad-band Internet in America
Really? I don't spend a great deal of time in that part of the world, and I have always known that in some areas the US can be quite a bit behind everyone else (and quite a bit ahead in others!), but it does actually surprise me to see a comment like this. Here in Australia, probably less than 25% of people are still using dial-up, and amongst the technologically savvy, it'd be well under 1%. I haven't had dial-up for around 8 years now (the last 4 of which I've had a 10Mbit capped cable).
The ubiquity of cell phones have made a huge impact on the culture in Japan, <snip> In America, most people seem to just have their phones with them as a "safety net" device
I'm starting to feel your post is just showing up some stuff about the US specifically - believe me, the rest of the world is moving on!
Mods please note: I'm not being "anti-American" here any more than the parent, I'm just pointing out obvious differences from my perspective.
If most people on slashdot waited till they were dead before posting, the overall quality of the posts would skyrocket.
Let's say that "most" is 90%. If we pick 90% of the people at random, we'll probably manage to cull 90% of the stupid posts as well as 90% of the intelligent ones - ending up with no net gain. So you should either alter your sig to be more selective, or simply go with what I assume you meant and say something like "If everyone on slashdot waited..."
Less important? I hope by that you don't mean cats! Or people for that matter...
Who are you to determine importance Mr AC? If I had the choice of your death or my cat's death, you'd be a goner - and I'd hardly give it a second thought. But if I had to choose between my cat and my best human friend, I'd choose my best human friend - and still be really upset about it.
1) Having lived with over 30 cats in my life, never once have any peed on my (or anyone elses) bed. They always either go outside or use the litterbox.
2) See #1 about outside and litterboxes - I never need to smell it.
3) Insanity is all good! But really, just like most intelligent creatures, all cats have their own personality... I've met some totally crazy ones and some really sensible ones. My current cat (a very old 1/4 Russian Blue) isn't insane at all - perhaps slightly senile in her old age, but I love her dearly all the same.
4) A cat doesn't take orders because it's not a slave. A very loving and friendly cat will usually do what you ask - because it wants to be nice, not because you "ordered" it. Don't mistake a cat not doing what you tell it as stupidity - it's generally apathy instead.
Couldn't agree more - wish I hadn't just used all my mod points elsewhere.
The perfect example is at my workplace - I work for Konica Minolta (Business Equipment, not the recently sold off camera division) and part of my job is print driver development.
A driver I wrote exhibited some strange behaviour on MSWord 2000 (and only 2000, not XP or 2003). Looking in to it, I found it was a bug in Word 2000. The customer said that because another driver didn't exhibit this strange behaviour, that it's our responsibility to fix it. Further investigation showed that the other driver in question contained code to specifically work around this bug. So, is it my responsibility to work around bugs in everyone elses code? By not working around these bugs, is my driver considered "buggy"? The customer certainly thought so and it grated on me the whole time I was incorporating the "fix" to keep them happy.
THE most striking thing about Americans to many outsiders is how nice they are. They have none of the aloofness of the British or the froideur of the French. On the contrary, they go out of their way to be warm and welcoming. This is the land of the smiley face and the "have a nice day" greeting. Put simply, Americans like to be liked.
Recently I had my first ever trip to the US (work related) and got to see two very different parts of the country. I had some time in LA (including Hollywood and Santa Monica) and then quite a bit more time in New England (mostly CT, but one day in Boston as well). The above quote seems quite accurate for my experience in New England, but definitely not for LA. Having lived in both Europe and Australia, I'd just LA people as the least friendly people I've met anywhere so far. Rude, arrogant and generally just very unpleasant. Stark contrast to Boston, which is a city I managed to fall in love with in the space of just one day.
In many places, Japanese is a very common language to learn at high school - precisely for business reasons. I honestly regret not learning it back then since I'm having a hard time of it now as an adult (although I'm getting there, slowly).
That said though, I do actually agree with you that the chances of Mandarin becoming the first language of the world are extremely slim. Even Japanese, while very useful these days is unlikely to ever be a global language.
I will begin my reply with a disclaimer: I am in fact, an atheist. I have however been quite involved in a study of Christianity, the myriad of beliefs that surround it and how they relate to each other.
Your points are all valid and, if read with an open mind, should be really quite interesting to many Christians. But, I'm going to play devil's advocate (perhaps an inappropriate term here, but I'll let it stand) for the remainder of this post.
they tend to teach a hellfire doctrine that isn't scriptural and slander's god's most valued asset - his character. they turn death into life and grasp onto stan's first recorded lie with white knuckled hands - "you shall not die" (immortal soul).
I think you're taking Satan's quote out of context here. In Genesis 2:16-17 Satan (in the form of the serpent) spoke these words to Eve, which seemed in direct contrast with the truth from God spelled out earlier to her and Adam ("You may eat the fruit of all of the trees that are in the Garden and that are edible; it is only the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that you should not eat. On the day that you do eat it, you shall die.")
Basically, God had given Adam and Eve eternal life in the garden. They were truly incapable of death. Satan lied by saying that Eve would not die for eating from the tree in that after she had done so, she was now capable of death. However, that is not the death of the immortal soul. In many areas of both the old and new testament, the immortal soul is referred to, so we can come to the fairly obvious conclusion that it was only physical death that was being referred to.
However, here we hit another conundrum. Very little of hell is spoken of in either the new or old testaments and every mention that does exist can be explained through other means. So we get to the question of what really happens when you die? And what happened to Adam and Eve?
A common belief amongst many Christians (and is well supported by phrases such as "Whomsoever believes in me shall have eternal life") is that there is no hell, but there is a heaven. If you believe in God, accept Jesus as your saviour and are truly sorry for your sins, you'll get in to heaven and live forever. If you don't, then when you die, you're just wormfood - the soul is not immortal by default, but instead immortality is granted by God through Jesus.
From this, we can assume the actually fairly unpleasant idea that before the coming of the Messiah (Jesus), almost no-one got in to heaven since they were sinners that had (almost) no path to forgiveness.
the reward of the saved isn't going to heaven. think about it. in simple terms, the bible speaks of an ascension and a second coming. there is no second ascension discussed anywhere. you can do the math. there are a multitude of scriptures which totally debunk the idea that we go to heaven.
Can you point some of these scriptures out to me? I'm quite curious to see them. The ascension and second coming are of Christ and have little to nothing to do with the rest of us. However it does raise an interesting side note on my response to the first point - no-one ever said you get in to heaven IMMEDIATELY when you die. Another belief that is common amongst some christian groups is that if you're getting in to heaven, it won't actually happen until the end of the world (Judgement Day). Most people that believe this also believe however that no apparent time passes between your death and the great ascension of souls, so it's not like you're sitting around in limbo or anything. But, further on this belief is the interesting thought that there's no-one in heaven right now other than people that were expressly pulled up there (an interesting example being the criminal on the cross next to Jesus who was told "Amen, I say to you, you shall be with me this day in Paradise")
Mt 24:5 - For many will come in My name, saying, 'I am the Christ,'
My thoughts would be that it goes something like this:
1) Fish swim around being fish 2) Some fish find themselves in shallower water, forced out by whatever natural environmental forces do so (geology, competition for food, etc) 3) The fish that are forced out start their own little environment in the shallow water 4) The bigger ones feed on the little ones (fairly normal) 5) Competition in such an environment brings on evolutionary changes 6) Tiktaalik evolves, eats all the other fish and begins to grab little snippets from land now and then 7) Tiktaalik runs out of fish and moves completely to land 8) First land animals
Of course, that's just one plausible scenario amongst many and I lay no claim to it's validity - just plausibility.
I don't think I'd go to the extreme of a 50% paycut - but I have sort of done the opposite. I currently work in a job where I have the best manager imaginable. He knows every member of his team have their specialities and he'll listen and respect each of our views. He himself has excellent management skills, organisational skills AND a good "general" knowledge of each of the areas of specialisation within his team. I was offered a job for just under twice what I'm making now, but I could tell the situation would have been terrible, so I turned it down.
So, in short, I don't think I'd take a paycut for a better position, but I'll happily pass up a huge payrise to keep my current good position - which you may interpret as being the same sort of thing.
First computer: 1983, age 4. Apple ][+ Second computer: 1985, age 6. Commodore 64 Third computer: 1988, age 9. Amiga 500 Fourth computer: 1993, age 14. Amiga 1200 Fifth computer: 1995, age 16. Amiga 4000 Sixth computer: 1999, age 20. Laptop with Win98 Current main computers: P4 with Win2k, P4 with WinXP, Athlon with Debian, P4 with Debian, dual P3 with Debian, AmigaOne with AmigaOS4, SGI Indy with Irix, MacMini with MacOSX.
So no, I had a good 16 years of computing before I owned a Windows system (although I was of course familiar with MSDOS and then Windows as far back as the very early 90s I guess) and of my current systems, non Windows outnumbers Windows quite significantly. I was quite late in the Linux game though compared to many other people here - other than dabbling with it on my Amiga 4000 for awhile, I never seriously used it until about the time I bought my Win98 laptop and never had it on a home system until about 3 years after that.
No, I don't think I use Windows today specifically because of MS Windows at some point in the past - and it definitely wasn't my first OS.
It really depends on your viewpoint. You may have lost all faith in them, and I can understand that. Understand yes... However, I don't agree. Basically, Google had two options with reference to the China thing. Either censor data (and make it very clear they're doing so with text at the bottom of the page), or not be accessible at all (essentially, censoring themselves completely). They chose the lesser of two evils, and I personally respect and trust that decision. It's fairly likely that many other people feel the same way I do about it - whether you are one of those people or not doesn't matter - the fact is that Google HAVEN'T lost everyone's faith in them as being trustworthy (just a % somewhere between 0 and 100)
Australia has no nuclear power plants. None at all.
To makes things even more ridiculous, Australia even mines uranium!
The main concern anywhere about nuclear power stations is the chance of a catastrophe. People point at Chernobyl and say "We can't have one of THOSE near us!". This is obviously garbage, it's well documented how safe a modern nuclear plant can be and how badly you need to stuff up to end up with an event like the one at Chernobyl.
What's more - Australia has a LOT of empty space. While building a plant in the middle of the outback wouldn't make a great deal of sense (hard to maintain, expensive to carry the power so far to the city etc), we could certainly find a balance point between distance and cost if it really worries people (personally, I wouldn't care if it was in the next suburb over from me).
There has been some thought of getting nuclear power in Australia, however as yet, the protests of an uninformed public have stopped any serious efforts.
I would argue that my donation alone would not be helpful enough to do anything. The "donations" of all working people (through a tax) however is enough to make a difference.
The other thing to keep in mind is that it is about improving the quality of life for EVERYONE in the city/state/country. If person A is forced to pay a tax that directly supports person B, they may be resentful (as it seems you would be), however what person A doesn't seem to realise is that it's not ONLY person B that is benefitting. When person B becomes able to get a job and contribute their part to society, person A is likely to get a tangible gain from that (the work that person B performs that contributes to society).
I can't believe I'm replying to this troll, but it is nearly 1am and I haven't had a lot of sleep recently, so maybe I can blame that.
I live in the largest city of a prosporous first world western country (that is not the US). I work in a higher than average paying job and consider myself to be pretty well off - this is especially the case since I have no dependants (wife, kids etc) to look after.
Currently, I live in quite a nice part of town, but that hasn't always been the case. I used to live in scum central (and yes, I was earning decent money back then too).
I would have been more than happy for a larger part of my income (and every other working person) to go to cleaning up the area. Give the money to the people, start programs so they can get jobs, subsidise more housing to get the people off the streets.
Why would I want this? Pure compassion? NO! Compassion is a part of it - I feel sorry for these people and want to help. But a large part of it is selfish too (and that's okay). The selfish part is that I don't WANT to live in scumsville. Hell, I don't want there to be ANY scummy/nasty/bad parts of the city.
Socialist/Liberal viewpoints can achieve this - conservate ones can not.
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So if I told you the OS now includes a TCP stack, ftp client, telnet client, web browser etc, you'd come back to AmigaOS?
I assume not, but since this discussion is about AmigaOS4, it's a little pointless to complain about the lack of stuff in the past doesn't it? I mean, should I say I'm not going to use Windows because Windows 2.x didn't have any of that stuff either?
The problem with the idea of new custom hardware is just that it wouldn't cut it. No single company is going to be able to product sound better than the dedicated sound card companies, graphics better than the dedicated graphics card companies etc etc etc and tie it all in to one dedicated system. Even if they did pull off such a miracle, then the entire system would be obsolete in a year or so anyway since the rest of the industry would move on and they just wouldn't have the resources to do so.
If they went down the alternate path of dedicated chipsets made by the major manufacturers, well, that's really no different to what there is now. You can write software that REQUIRES an X1600 for example if you really want to... but why would you?
Basically, custom onboard dedicated chipsets in desktop computers are history.
Ah, that'd be the famed "AmigaDE" / "Amiga Anywhere" you'd be talking about. It's a long and confusing story which I won't go in to great detail on, but suffice to say it has no real relationship to AmigaOS at all. It's a product created/marketed by Amiga Inc - mostly it's just Tao's elate/intent system with a few extras added to it. I have the SDK and toyed with it a bit, but it didn't really hold my attention greatly.
On the wild rumourmill there has been speculation in the past about "Amiga Anywhere" and "AmigaOS" becoming much closer or even merging in the future, but I see a LOT of technical hurdles that would make that seem extremely unlikely.
As another poster (LoadWB) pointed out, there is AROS, which is an open source x86 AmigaOS clone, but it's not an official AmigaOS and feels very outdated compared to current Amiga systems as it aims for an AmigaOS 3.x look and feel.
You know, Windows is dead. I mean, Word 6 and Internet Explorer 2 were great in their day, but come on!
Seriously - it's these kind of comments that really get to me. I'll be the first to admit that my Amiga (AmigaOne running OS4) is sorely lacking in good modern software in some (maybe many) areas, but judging a new OS release on software that is years old is a little silly. We've moved on since Scala and DPaint!
I'm not sure I can agree (with you, or the article), and for the exact opposite reason.
I am, as a matter of fact, extraordinarily talented. I'm also extraordinarily lazy. I excel at a variety of fields including a very specialist field that I work in. I refuse to study though and have done ever since school. I cheat my way through every test of rote memorisation that I can, and don't need to study at all to do very well in things that interest me. In no way have I studied anywhere near as much as most comp sci graduates, but I'd give any "non-gifted" graduates a good run for their money in logic, programming and other things that comp sci focuses on.
Now, this entire post may sound like I'm just being egotistical, but the point of the post is that I'm lazy, and yet I'm talented, so I seem to be the classic example of evidence against the points made.
Really? I don't spend a great deal of time in that part of the world, and I have always known that in some areas the US can be quite a bit behind everyone else (and quite a bit ahead in others!), but it does actually surprise me to see a comment like this. Here in Australia, probably less than 25% of people are still using dial-up, and amongst the technologically savvy, it'd be well under 1%. I haven't had dial-up for around 8 years now (the last 4 of which I've had a 10Mbit capped cable).
I'm starting to feel your post is just showing up some stuff about the US specifically - believe me, the rest of the world is moving on!
Mods please note: I'm not being "anti-American" here any more than the parent, I'm just pointing out obvious differences from my perspective.
Less important? I hope by that you don't mean cats! Or people for that matter...
Who are you to determine importance Mr AC? If I had the choice of your death or my cat's death, you'd be a goner - and I'd hardly give it a second thought. But if I had to choose between my cat and my best human friend, I'd choose my best human friend - and still be really upset about it.
1) Having lived with over 30 cats in my life, never once have any peed on my (or anyone elses) bed. They always either go outside or use the litterbox.
2) See #1 about outside and litterboxes - I never need to smell it.
3) Insanity is all good! But really, just like most intelligent creatures, all cats have their own personality... I've met some totally crazy ones and some really sensible ones. My current cat (a very old 1/4 Russian Blue) isn't insane at all - perhaps slightly senile in her old age, but I love her dearly all the same.
4) A cat doesn't take orders because it's not a slave. A very loving and friendly cat will usually do what you ask - because it wants to be nice, not because you "ordered" it. Don't mistake a cat not doing what you tell it as stupidity - it's generally apathy instead.
Dear god... you actually SAY it like that? For Pete's sake, how can you?
Couldn't agree more - wish I hadn't just used all my mod points elsewhere.
The perfect example is at my workplace - I work for Konica Minolta (Business Equipment, not the recently sold off camera division) and part of my job is print driver development.
A driver I wrote exhibited some strange behaviour on MSWord 2000 (and only 2000, not XP or 2003). Looking in to it, I found it was a bug in Word 2000. The customer said that because another driver didn't exhibit this strange behaviour, that it's our responsibility to fix it. Further investigation showed that the other driver in question contained code to specifically work around this bug. So, is it my responsibility to work around bugs in everyone elses code? By not working around these bugs, is my driver considered "buggy"? The customer certainly thought so and it grated on me the whole time I was incorporating the "fix" to keep them happy.
Recently I had my first ever trip to the US (work related) and got to see two very different parts of the country. I had some time in LA (including Hollywood and Santa Monica) and then quite a bit more time in New England (mostly CT, but one day in Boston as well).
The above quote seems quite accurate for my experience in New England, but definitely not for LA. Having lived in both Europe and Australia, I'd just LA people as the least friendly people I've met anywhere so far. Rude, arrogant and generally just very unpleasant. Stark contrast to Boston, which is a city I managed to fall in love with in the space of just one day.
XSL Transformations would be a nice start...
In many places, Japanese is a very common language to learn at high school - precisely for business reasons. I honestly regret not learning it back then since I'm having a hard time of it now as an adult (although I'm getting there, slowly).
That said though, I do actually agree with you that the chances of Mandarin becoming the first language of the world are extremely slim. Even Japanese, while very useful these days is unlikely to ever be a global language.
I will begin my reply with a disclaimer: I am in fact, an atheist. I have however been quite involved in a study of Christianity, the myriad of beliefs that surround it and how they relate to each other.
Your points are all valid and, if read with an open mind, should be really quite interesting to many Christians. But, I'm going to play devil's advocate (perhaps an inappropriate term here, but I'll let it stand) for the remainder of this post.
I think you're taking Satan's quote out of context here. In Genesis 2:16-17 Satan (in the form of the serpent) spoke these words to Eve, which seemed in direct contrast with the truth from God spelled out earlier to her and Adam ("You may eat the fruit of all of the trees that are in the Garden and that are edible; it is only the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that you should not eat. On the day that you do eat it, you shall die.")
Basically, God had given Adam and Eve eternal life in the garden. They were truly incapable of death. Satan lied by saying that Eve would not die for eating from the tree in that after she had done so, she was now capable of death. However, that is not the death of the immortal soul. In many areas of both the old and new testament, the immortal soul is referred to, so we can come to the fairly obvious conclusion that it was only physical death that was being referred to.
However, here we hit another conundrum. Very little of hell is spoken of in either the new or old testaments and every mention that does exist can be explained through other means. So we get to the question of what really happens when you die? And what happened to Adam and Eve?
A common belief amongst many Christians (and is well supported by phrases such as "Whomsoever believes in me shall have eternal life") is that there is no hell, but there is a heaven. If you believe in God, accept Jesus as your saviour and are truly sorry for your sins, you'll get in to heaven and live forever. If you don't, then when you die, you're just wormfood - the soul is not immortal by default, but instead immortality is granted by God through Jesus.
From this, we can assume the actually fairly unpleasant idea that before the coming of the Messiah (Jesus), almost no-one got in to heaven since they were sinners that had (almost) no path to forgiveness.
Can you point some of these scriptures out to me? I'm quite curious to see them. The ascension and second coming are of Christ and have little to nothing to do with the rest of us. However it does raise an interesting side note on my response to the first point - no-one ever said you get in to heaven IMMEDIATELY when you die. Another belief that is common amongst some christian groups is that if you're getting in to heaven, it won't actually happen until the end of the world (Judgement Day). Most people that believe this also believe however that no apparent time passes between your death and the great ascension of souls, so it's not like you're sitting around in limbo or anything. But, further on this belief is the interesting thought that there's no-one in heaven right now other than people that were expressly pulled up there (an interesting example being the criminal on the cross next to Jesus who was told "Amen, I say to you, you shall be with me this day in Paradise")
My thoughts would be that it goes something like this:
1) Fish swim around being fish
2) Some fish find themselves in shallower water, forced out by whatever natural environmental forces do so (geology, competition for food, etc)
3) The fish that are forced out start their own little environment in the shallow water
4) The bigger ones feed on the little ones (fairly normal)
5) Competition in such an environment brings on evolutionary changes
6) Tiktaalik evolves, eats all the other fish and begins to grab little snippets from land now and then
7) Tiktaalik runs out of fish and moves completely to land
8) First land animals
Of course, that's just one plausible scenario amongst many and I lay no claim to it's validity - just plausibility.
I don't think I'd go to the extreme of a 50% paycut - but I have sort of done the opposite. I currently work in a job where I have the best manager imaginable. He knows every member of his team have their specialities and he'll listen and respect each of our views. He himself has excellent management skills, organisational skills AND a good "general" knowledge of each of the areas of specialisation within his team.
I was offered a job for just under twice what I'm making now, but I could tell the situation would have been terrible, so I turned it down.
So, in short, I don't think I'd take a paycut for a better position, but I'll happily pass up a huge payrise to keep my current good position - which you may interpret as being the same sort of thing.
Google Web Accelerator gets you at least part of the way to that dream...
First computer: 1983, age 4. Apple ][+
Second computer: 1985, age 6. Commodore 64
Third computer: 1988, age 9. Amiga 500
Fourth computer: 1993, age 14. Amiga 1200
Fifth computer: 1995, age 16. Amiga 4000
Sixth computer: 1999, age 20. Laptop with Win98
Current main computers: P4 with Win2k, P4 with WinXP, Athlon with Debian, P4 with Debian, dual P3 with Debian, AmigaOne with AmigaOS4, SGI Indy with Irix, MacMini with MacOSX.
So no, I had a good 16 years of computing before I owned a Windows system (although I was of course familiar with MSDOS and then Windows as far back as the very early 90s I guess) and of my current systems, non Windows outnumbers Windows quite significantly. I was quite late in the Linux game though compared to many other people here - other than dabbling with it on my Amiga 4000 for awhile, I never seriously used it until about the time I bought my Win98 laptop and never had it on a home system until about 3 years after that.
No, I don't think I use Windows today specifically because of MS Windows at some point in the past - and it definitely wasn't my first OS.
So actually, you ended up confusing the Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand then? (hint: wallabys and didgeridoos are .au, not .nz)
Oddly, I've lived in all three of those countries... *sigh* I miss NL.
It really depends on your viewpoint. You may have lost all faith in them, and I can understand that.
Understand yes... However, I don't agree.
Basically, Google had two options with reference to the China thing. Either censor data (and make it very clear they're doing so with text at the bottom of the page), or not be accessible at all (essentially, censoring themselves completely). They chose the lesser of two evils, and I personally respect and trust that decision.
It's fairly likely that many other people feel the same way I do about it - whether you are one of those people or not doesn't matter - the fact is that Google HAVEN'T lost everyone's faith in them as being trustworthy (just a % somewhere between 0 and 100)
Okay, so coal mining is 45 a year...
Then we've got deaths from the pollution - 563 annually in Pittsburgh alone. Sound like a lot? Compare it to 22000 annually in the US, plus many more in the rest of the world.
(if you don't like my sources, get your own
Then on top of that, we've got the deaths from simply working in the dangerous environment that is a coal plant.
As some random person wrote for their high school paper, Nuclear Power: Safer than Peanut Butter! (yes, they do back that up!).
I couldn't agree more.
Sydney, Australia is currently powered by several large coal plants. In fact 78% of the power generated in Australia is from coal. Every year we spread a ridiculous quantity of carbon dioxide and other emissions in to the atmosphere.
Australia has no nuclear power plants. None at all.
To makes things even more ridiculous, Australia even mines uranium!
The main concern anywhere about nuclear power stations is the chance of a catastrophe. People point at Chernobyl and say "We can't have one of THOSE near us!". This is obviously garbage, it's well documented how safe a modern nuclear plant can be and how badly you need to stuff up to end up with an event like the one at Chernobyl.
What's more - Australia has a LOT of empty space. While building a plant in the middle of the outback wouldn't make a great deal of sense (hard to maintain, expensive to carry the power so far to the city etc), we could certainly find a balance point between distance and cost if it really worries people (personally, I wouldn't care if it was in the next suburb over from me).
There has been some thought of getting nuclear power in Australia, however as yet, the protests of an uninformed public have stopped any serious efforts.
I would argue that my donation alone would not be helpful enough to do anything. The "donations" of all working people (through a tax) however is enough to make a difference.
The other thing to keep in mind is that it is about improving the quality of life for EVERYONE in the city/state/country. If person A is forced to pay a tax that directly supports person B, they may be resentful (as it seems you would be), however what person A doesn't seem to realise is that it's not ONLY person B that is benefitting. When person B becomes able to get a job and contribute their part to society, person A is likely to get a tangible gain from that (the work that person B performs that contributes to society).
I can't believe I'm replying to this troll, but it is nearly 1am and I haven't had a lot of sleep recently, so maybe I can blame that.
I live in the largest city of a prosporous first world western country (that is not the US). I work in a higher than average paying job and consider myself to be pretty well off - this is especially the case since I have no dependants (wife, kids etc) to look after.
Currently, I live in quite a nice part of town, but that hasn't always been the case. I used to live in scum central (and yes, I was earning decent money back then too).
I would have been more than happy for a larger part of my income (and every other working person) to go to cleaning up the area. Give the money to the people, start programs so they can get jobs, subsidise more housing to get the people off the streets.
Why would I want this? Pure compassion? NO! Compassion is a part of it - I feel sorry for these people and want to help. But a large part of it is selfish too (and that's okay). The selfish part is that I don't WANT to live in scumsville. Hell, I don't want there to be ANY scummy/nasty/bad parts of the city.
Socialist/Liberal viewpoints can achieve this - conservate ones can not.