The old SGI, such as a personal Iris, an original Indigo (when they were indigo), or an Indy (with its jazz-riff startup sound) would all be good choices. Even the screensavers such as Electropaint are a sight, when you realize that they were running when PC's shipped with 4 unreadable colors or glowing green.
I recently saved the memory from a DataGeneral NOVA-II; 16K of genuine Cores. You should look for some older core memory from an old IBM mainframe, or a Nicolet 1080, as those cores are big enough to see without a magnifier.
I'm still fond of the VAX, but that's a conniseur's architecture. Nobody is going to casually understand the significance of a washing machine with blue trim.
Just to be odd, you could try to get a full-sized picture of a Cray-1 or Cray-2, some add from the era touting their work in high-end computational science, and then put a Palm-pilot or some such down with its speed in Crays next to it. I had this discussion with my students the other day that I did most of the calcs for my thesis (not so long ago, either) on a machine that had less memory than a standard graphics card. It was a lot bigger too. It's good to show. Maybe just a big sketch showing size of machine at constant performance, starting with a Cray or IBM-360, and going to the modern equivalent.
My understanding of Bangladesh is that it's kind of all of the above. If you can find it, the book "A Quiet Violence" by Hartman and Boyce is an excellent introduction, though centered on the countryside. It is interestingly written, and shows in great detail what day to day existence is like for the agrarian. The short answer is "miserable", with an economic system that ensures that farmers are basically sharecroppers on their own land, and any misstep (such as getting sick or the rains being a month late), will result in losing more of that little plot to the local aristocracy. There's virtually no chance to get ahead, and not much chance to break even.
For a somewhat urban view, while written in Libertarian Humor style, P. J. O'Rourke's account of Bangladesh in "All the Trouble in the World" is a short, entertaining, but unfortunately insightful look at the situation from someone observing the government and urban environment. The encounter with the "minister of jute" would have been more funny if I hadn't watched local governments in Upstate act with the same clueless enthusiasm. Some of the other arguments made in the other accounts don't hold up, but Bangladesh seems to be pretty spot-on.
In short, crushing poverty, sharp urban/rural split, virtual feudal system in the countryside, poor literacy, agriculture dependent upon uncertain monsoons, and the whole place too near sea level and built of too easily erodible land. I used Bangladesh as an example since it seems to be the standard point of reference, given that it has a population similar to Japan or 1/2 the United States. You can now add that the deep bore wells that were supposed to help even out agricultural production are contaminated with naturally occuring arsenic compounds, which has caused what is probably the world's largest case of arsenic poisoning.
These depressing items, plus an increasingly islamicized populace, is what is going to make them everybody's problem pretty soon. What are the Indians or Chinese going to do if they evacuate north and west after a particularly bad monsoon season as sea levels rise and their government is too poor or feckless to follow the Dutch example of building polders and reclaiming land from the sea? What are we going to do if they buy into the current anti-western violence and start volunteering for suicide missions in large numbers? Even if they remain peaceful, are we really prepared to watch a Japan worth of people wash out to sea? I don't have an answer to any of this, but unlike the island nations of the Pacific, which are small enough that we could just adopt them here in the USA and transplant them to half-abandoned cities in the rust-belt (and won't the Kiribatians be surprised when they end up in Buffalo), the Bengali are going to require greater logistical exertions. Tying future foreign aid to their accepting our civil engineering and dedicating a certain percentage of that aid (or possibly repayments), to shoring up their coastline and not washing away might really be worth the effort now, before we have to deal with a decimillion person migration.
That's one way of looking at it, and if we were discussing wildabeast, I might agree. However, we are talking a large number of mobile and at least nominally educated people capable of saying, "you know, we don't have to just sit here and take this." A few dozen with an abstract grudge have managed to directly motivate thousands of followers, and made us spend an inordinate amount of money and time defending against them. A population of a few million with a rather concrete grudge are going to be a lot harder. We might decide that in our own self-interest, a little engineering assistance could be in order.
Or we could take the Atlantis option, and sink them first.
Yes, life is messy, but I'd rather it didn't get messy around here the way it is in Sri Lanka, Gaza, Baghdad, or Bogata. Maybe you already live in that world, so it's perfectly normal to you, but the one I'm in doesn't include the risk of being suicide-bombed by the disaffected on a daily basis. I could do without that kind of excitement.
The only issue really is (with a few apologies to the Tuvaluans), are we going to do anything to help those places about to disappear beneath the waves, or are we going to shrug and tell them, "sucks to be you?" We really only care because modern air travel and modern technology make modern terrorism by disaffected and newly damp populaces a possibility in our own back yards. Ten thousand Tuvaluans will be relatively easy to relocate. 144 Million Bengalis are another issue.
So, the issue isn't really, are we ruining the holy earth and should we immediately move heaven and earth (so to speak) to restore it to some static, Platonic, ideal. The issue is, are we prepared to deal with the human fallout when 144x10^6 Bengalis decide they 're not going to quietly slip beneath the waves to avoid inconveniencing us. Foreign aid directed towards building Polders in affected areas, controlled migrations starting now while low-lying areas are converted to non-permanently inhabited farmland, and similar moves are probably warranted, unless you want to take the chance that some enterprising soul isn't going to come up with the "relocate us to Kansas or we set off a Nuke in NY Harbor" solution.
It was a lot easier for a few hundred to few thousand proto-Hamptonites 10K years ago to move inland and to higher ground when there was less competition and fewer of them. A last minute exodus from some overly-inhabited sub-tropical delta into higher-ground already occupied by a couple hundred million current inhabitants is going to be less smooth a transition.
Actually, I can imagine all of the GNOME and KDE developers being forced to work on Motif, and I get the warm fuzzies when I do. This would have made the past 10 years of trying to port software that had originated on Ultrix, AIX, Irix, etc, so much easier. It would mean that there would be one oversized and somewhat hostile toolkit, but that would be well-understood with adequate documentation. Just being difficult, I'd be happier with a world where the choices are GNUStep or OpenMotif. One for attractiveness and functionality, and the other for backwards compatibility and portability.
In all honesty, some of the winnowing has already occurred. RedHat, SuSE, and Ubuntu/Debian all ship with Gnome as their primary environment. Everyone ships Firefox as the browser, and while Koffice/AbiWord, etc, have their own communities, OpenOffice is the de-facto standard. The next step is to take the lesser programs that get shoveled onto install disks under the alleged name "diversity", and simply not ship them. If an end user wants them, then they can go to sourceforge and find them themselves. Integrate the survivors, in the sense of making sure they all work well under the default desktop environment, enable cut and paste between them (not just for text), or at least lay them out in easily managed categories so that people can find what they're looking for. For administrators, this helps lead to a consistent environment to support, and for end users, they can think of the task to accomplish, rather than the name of the program that does X. In my community, it already seems to have happened even more strictly, with much software requiring some form of RHEL. We shrug, we install it, and we get on with our projects.
In the end, no matter what gets said/done/argued here, the face of "linux" that most people are going to see is determined by one of the three companies above, followed (or sometimes led) by IBM and Sun. If IBM gets up one morning and tells its corporate customers that it only supports DB2 on RH, with graphical front-ends running in GNUStep, then that's that. A million corporate drones shrug, and RedStep systems are everywhere. Thankfully, they haven't done this yet with SMIT.
1. Suck it up and pay the license fee for the technology of interest.
2. Suck it up, and put some effort in to optimizing an on-the-fly translator from closed to open (MP3->Ogg, for instance). If new Macs can emulate PPC systems, and PPC-BSD can pretend to be System-7/68030s, this should be insurmountable.
3. Become a digital biker gang, and just ship the patented technology, licensed or not.
4. Admit that while world domination sounds good in theory, once you're in charge you've actually got to run it. Loyal opposition is really much more fun.
Until we have a system for better qualified juries, possibly there should be. Given a truly impartial jury (or at least not hand-tuned by opposing lawyers), of reasonably intelligent, educated people capable of weighing factual data, understanding probabilities, and cutting through rhetoric, then yes, let lawyers charge what they want. In our current system, with carefully picked juries of mostly people who couldn't get out of jury duty, then the more expensive lawyer, through better rhetoric or simply managable case-load, will often prevail. A public defender is cheap, but if he is juggling 50 cases and has no more than five minutes for yours, then you, at the wrong end of the free-market system, have had it. Check Northwestern's journalism school, of all things, which has been overturning convictions where the alleged perp couldn't get a good lawyer, and a skilled prosecutor got another notch in his belt for sending someone up the river for 30 years. If both sides legal talent is evenly matched, then spend whatever (The Feds vs. IBM, for instance), but where it isn't, then there should be some sort of equalization. If you take on Dow, and your case is deemed legitimate, either you can get legal assistance, or the other side is limited to a proportional quantity of legal representation. If they've been burying napalm under your house, (or around here, releasing tons of TCE into the ground water, then simply closing down the local facility rather than admitting responsibility), it shouldn't be 50 well-paid corporate experts versus a new law student, just because that's what you can afford and that's what they can afford. Basically, the modern equivalent of the old Norse vs Greek pantheon; the Greek deities were interested in wisdom and justice (Minerva), the Norse in law and knowledge (Odin).
Or, we could admit that we're overlawyered already, and try to reduce their role in society.
So, we can professionalise juries, agree that you have the right to a lawyer, but not necessarily one of your choice (lawyers will be drafted like juries are), or we redesign the system with fewer opportunities for lawyers. I don't know where the existing herds go, but if every year 1/3 of a law-school class were automatically failed and sent to dig ditches in Botswana (pick your own destination for unpleasant manual labor far from where well-fed lawyers hang out), followed by one chance at the bar or out, we might cool the ardor of future ambulance chasers. Or we could admit they had some good ideas in the 19th century, and hire Lawyer Bill to solve the problem. At 1:00 a.m., that one has some appeal.
In a way, Macs succeed because they're the Anti-Perl; There is one way to do it. (alternately, since I haven't seen a soviet russia joke in this thread yet, it's a Soviet Cafeteria approach. They put it in front of you, and say, "That's all you can eat".) However, that results in a clean, seamless, experience. The inconsistencies that the Gnomes always bring up about Mail.app and iTunes don't really register. Are the interfaces inconsistent? In some manner, yes, but not in any way that's visually jarring or detracting from their ease of use. Overall, it's just a less obtrusive environment than the alternatives. It doesn't pop dialogue boxes continually like a certain program from Redmond does, just in case you forgot it's there, and it doesn't fight back during daily use. After a while, the OS becomes white noise while you quietly go about your business.
Basically, the Mac is for when you've decided that you need to get work done, but you aren't willing to trust your livelihood to Windows sercurity or your blood pressure to WinLix user interfaces.
Btw, you forgot the other reason for owning a Mini; silence. Mine is hooked to a wide-screen monitor via digital input, sitting on the back of the desk taking up about as much space as a page-a-day calendar, and neither it nor the external firewire drive are emitting enough noise to matter. It's little touches like that that make people move to Mac.
It's great in HPC environments, as it clusters easily and plays well with others (other OS's, software tools, MPIs, queueing). It's trivial to deploy and pleasant to remotely manage and monitor. Windows is everywhere because the hardware it ran on in 1990 was an extension of the IBM-approved hardware of 1981, which was relatively cheap, and which they already owned.
Let's not try to attribute technical superiority to a product of corporate inertia.
(and yes, if I had a choice in a corporate environment I'd run big, hulking, Sun systems with SunRays on people's desktops. Easy to deploy, easy to manage, flexible and safe.)
No, he's probably looking at his monthly bills for antacids after shifting from Windows systems to Macs. I know that moving from Win2003 server to OS-X Server took 10 points off my blood pressure. (so did Linux, but I had a tendency to run around yelling "Peace, man!", "Power to the People", and "F* the Pigs!" while wearing tie-dye when I used Linux)
No, the gutless Republicans choked in the clutch. If all you can try that man for is "lying under oath" about an affair, with him living with the threat of Hillary in the background, then you have no guts or vision, and deserve the public ridicule you get. Abuse of power would have been a good start, as were some other scandals at the time which got papered over (FBI files, Travel office, etc). Remember, this was the administration which held coverups without bothering to hold crimes first. It is a testimony to the Republicans' lack of Khrum that people think it was all about the blow-job, since after all those years of accusing him of far worse, it was the only thing they dared impeach him for. No guts, no glory.
This is why the current Demos, unless they catch George personally killing an infant Iraqi Christian detainee for his stem cells with Halliburton waiting in the room, won't impeach him either They have no vision, no unity, and no intestinal fortitude, and no plan for how to impeach both GWB and Darth Cheney at the same time. GWB will run out the clock, some lower-level scandals will be (maybe) prosecuted, and we'll have to wait until someone gets enough people to talk so that a current version of "The Best and the Brightest" can be written. At which point we'll have the cold comfort of seeing Bush/Cheney sink to Fillmore/Colfax or Nixon/Agnew levels of regard. (which is a pity, as Nixon was better than he gets credit for)
It's kind of like hunting an elephant; you really don't want to just wing him.
Having played horseshoes in grad school, i.e. thrown heavy metal objects around at dusk after consuming fermented substances, I can't believe that Jarts were *that* much more dangerous than classic horseshoes, unless the latter just required too hard of a throw to be interesting.
Ah yes, just one step short of the Bill Cosby, "I brought you into this world, and I can take you right back out."
As you said, we used to run around unsupervised, idly looked after by other adults in the neighborhood (i.e. if you were doing something truly criminal, someone would probably notice), and allowed to get nicked and dinged. One of my friends still remembers being 8 or so, and we were playing barefoot on a big pile of dirt excavated for a new cellar, when I stepped on a broken bottle. She still laughs about bicycling home with me watching the blood drip through the pedal. End result of that incident? No suing the contractor for not sifting their dirt for sharp objects and leaving it lying around, and no real recriminations towards me, other than that I got a tetanus shot, and a reminder that if I did that again, I'd get another.
I think we must have known quite a bit, as there's a bloody awful lot of us from the pre-foamrubber world days still around. As one parent I know puts it, "kids bounce".
You should have called. We scrapped a Nova-2 last week during a lab clean. I have the 16k Core (little washers on wires) memory framed on my office wall.
If you get the choice (as if you ever do during scavenges), the DS10 was a nice, recent, desktop system that you can find modernish versions of Linux or, even better, the hobbyist version of VMS and Fortran.
It's been hard to respect you guys since the ones who looked like Animal or Dennis Hopper in "Apocalypse Now" got replaced by Blond/Blonde talking heads with blow-dry hair and perfect teeth.
Ok, I hereby call for legislation which prohibits the showing of bad pictures in public. Out of focus, improperly composed, people at a slant with the tops of their heads cut off (unless that's the way you found them), and boring pictures of nothing passed off as examples of journalistic purity will get you exiled to Saskatoon. In January.
Be sure to pay homage to the inventors of the other two ur-languages; Alan Backus, and John McCarthy. Without them, we'd still be programming in assembler, and there probably would be only a world-wide market for 5 computers.
If you can find a way to convince the University administrators to accept a smaller cut of research money, I will happily return to my lab and stop spending as much time pushing grants out the door. What they don't tell you when getting a science PhD, if you're academia-bound, is that you're going to spend 4-6 years getting a research degree, 2-6 years in a research residency (post-doc), and then finally be employed as a lab-manager and voyeur. (you get to watch people do science) Many of us went down this track thinking we could remain hands-on, but those that do don't push enough grants/papers out the door, and so get axed.
Besides, if we return to our labs, we won't need to hire as many post-docs, and can probably thin out the complaining graduate students as well. Employment in the sciences then drops even further.
Finally, they are not "coolies". They are Indentured Servants.
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The old SGI, such as a personal Iris, an original Indigo (when they were indigo), or an Indy (with its jazz-riff startup sound) would all be good choices. Even the screensavers such as Electropaint are a sight, when you realize that they were running when PC's shipped with 4 unreadable colors or glowing green.
I recently saved the memory from a DataGeneral NOVA-II; 16K of genuine Cores. You should look for some older core memory from an old IBM mainframe, or a Nicolet 1080, as those cores are big enough to see without a magnifier.
I'm still fond of the VAX, but that's a conniseur's architecture. Nobody is going to casually understand the significance of a washing machine with blue trim.
Just to be odd, you could try to get a full-sized picture of a Cray-1 or Cray-2, some add from the era touting their work in high-end computational science, and then put a Palm-pilot or some such down with its speed in Crays next to it. I had this discussion with my students the other day that I did most of the calcs for my thesis (not so long ago, either) on a machine that had less memory than a standard graphics card. It was a lot bigger too. It's good to show. Maybe just a big sketch showing size of machine at constant performance, starting with a Cray or IBM-360, and going to the modern equivalent.
My understanding of Bangladesh is that it's kind of all of the above. If you can find it, the book "A Quiet Violence" by Hartman and Boyce is an excellent introduction, though centered on the countryside. It is interestingly written, and shows in great detail what day to day existence is like for the agrarian. The short answer is "miserable", with an economic system that ensures that farmers are basically sharecroppers on their own land, and any misstep (such as getting sick or the rains being a month late), will result in losing more of that little plot to the local aristocracy. There's virtually no chance to get ahead, and not much chance to break even.
For a somewhat urban view, while written in Libertarian Humor style, P. J. O'Rourke's account of Bangladesh in "All the Trouble in the World" is a short, entertaining, but unfortunately insightful look at the situation from someone observing the government and urban environment. The encounter with the "minister of jute" would have been more funny if I hadn't watched local governments in Upstate act with the same clueless enthusiasm. Some of the other arguments made in the other accounts don't hold up, but Bangladesh seems to be pretty spot-on.
In short, crushing poverty, sharp urban/rural split, virtual feudal system in the countryside, poor literacy, agriculture dependent upon uncertain monsoons, and the whole place too near sea level and built of too easily erodible land. I used Bangladesh as an example since it seems to be the standard point of reference, given that it has a population similar to Japan or 1/2 the United States. You can now add that the deep bore wells that were supposed to help even out agricultural production are contaminated with naturally occuring arsenic compounds, which has caused what is probably the world's largest case of arsenic poisoning.
These depressing items, plus an increasingly islamicized populace, is what is going to make them everybody's problem pretty soon. What are the Indians or Chinese going to do if they evacuate north and west after a particularly bad monsoon season as sea levels rise and their government is too poor or feckless to follow the Dutch example of building polders and reclaiming land from the sea? What are we going to do if they buy into the current anti-western violence and start volunteering for suicide missions in large numbers? Even if they remain peaceful, are we really prepared to watch a Japan worth of people wash out to sea? I don't have an answer to any of this, but unlike the island nations of the Pacific, which are small enough that we could just adopt them here in the USA and transplant them to half-abandoned cities in the rust-belt (and won't the Kiribatians be surprised when they end up in Buffalo), the Bengali are going to require greater logistical exertions. Tying future foreign aid to their accepting our civil engineering and dedicating a certain percentage of that aid (or possibly repayments), to shoring up their coastline and not washing away might really be worth the effort now, before we have to deal with a decimillion person migration.
That's one way of looking at it, and if we were discussing wildabeast, I might agree. However, we are talking a large number of mobile and at least nominally educated people capable of saying, "you know, we don't have to just sit here and take this." A few dozen with an abstract grudge have managed to directly motivate thousands of followers, and made us spend an inordinate amount of money and time defending against them. A population of a few million with a rather concrete grudge are going to be a lot harder. We might decide that in our own self-interest, a little engineering assistance could be in order.
Or we could take the Atlantis option, and sink them first.
Yes, life is messy, but I'd rather it didn't get messy around here the way it is in Sri Lanka, Gaza, Baghdad, or Bogata. Maybe you already live in that world, so it's perfectly normal to you, but the one I'm in doesn't include the risk of being suicide-bombed by the disaffected on a daily basis. I could do without that kind of excitement.
The only issue really is (with a few apologies to the Tuvaluans), are we going to do anything to help those places about to disappear beneath the waves, or are we going to shrug and tell them, "sucks to be you?" We really only care because modern air travel and modern technology make modern terrorism by disaffected and newly damp populaces a possibility in our own back yards. Ten thousand Tuvaluans will be relatively easy to relocate. 144 Million Bengalis are another issue.
So, the issue isn't really, are we ruining the holy earth and should we immediately move heaven and earth (so to speak) to restore it to some static, Platonic, ideal. The issue is, are we prepared to deal with the human fallout when 144x10^6 Bengalis decide they 're not going to quietly slip beneath the waves to avoid inconveniencing us. Foreign aid directed towards building Polders in affected areas, controlled migrations starting now while low-lying areas are converted to non-permanently inhabited farmland, and similar moves are probably warranted, unless you want to take the chance that some enterprising soul isn't going to come up with the "relocate us to Kansas or we set off a Nuke in NY Harbor" solution.
It was a lot easier for a few hundred to few thousand proto-Hamptonites 10K years ago to move inland and to higher ground when there was less competition and fewer of them. A last minute exodus from some overly-inhabited sub-tropical delta into higher-ground already occupied by a couple hundred million current inhabitants is going to be less smooth a transition.
Actually, I can imagine all of the GNOME and KDE developers being forced to work on Motif, and I get the warm fuzzies when I do. This would have made the past 10 years of trying to port software that had originated on Ultrix, AIX, Irix, etc, so much easier. It would mean that there would be one oversized and somewhat hostile toolkit, but that would be well-understood with adequate documentation. Just being difficult, I'd be happier with a world where the choices are GNUStep or OpenMotif. One for attractiveness and functionality, and the other for backwards compatibility and portability.
In all honesty, some of the winnowing has already occurred. RedHat, SuSE, and Ubuntu/Debian all ship with Gnome as their primary environment. Everyone ships Firefox as the browser, and while Koffice/AbiWord, etc, have their own communities, OpenOffice is the de-facto standard. The next step is to take the lesser programs that get shoveled onto install disks under the alleged name "diversity", and simply not ship them. If an end user wants them, then they can go to sourceforge and find them themselves. Integrate the survivors, in the sense of making sure they all work well under the default desktop environment, enable cut and paste between them (not just for text), or at least lay them out in easily managed categories so that people can find what they're looking for. For administrators, this helps lead to a consistent environment to support, and for end users, they can think of the task to accomplish, rather than the name of the program that does X. In my community, it already seems to have happened even more strictly, with much software requiring some form of RHEL. We shrug, we install it, and we get on with our projects.
In the end, no matter what gets said/done/argued here, the face of "linux" that most people are going to see is determined by one of the three companies above, followed (or sometimes led) by IBM and Sun. If IBM gets up one morning and tells its corporate customers that it only supports DB2 on RH, with graphical front-ends running in GNUStep, then that's that. A million corporate drones shrug, and RedStep systems are everywhere. Thankfully, they haven't done this yet with SMIT.
...and the end result will be what usually happens when people without guns stand up to people with guns.
I hope the Steves have their permits up to date.
The alternatives are more likely:
1. Suck it up and pay the license fee for the technology of interest.
2. Suck it up, and put some effort in to optimizing an on-the-fly translator from closed to open (MP3->Ogg, for instance). If new Macs can emulate PPC systems, and PPC-BSD can pretend to be System-7/68030s, this should be insurmountable.
3. Become a digital biker gang, and just ship the patented technology, licensed or not.
4. Admit that while world domination sounds good in theory, once you're in charge you've actually got to run it. Loyal opposition is really much more fun.
If you actually listened to him, you'd realize the phrase is "Stop All Nucular Activity".
Until we have a system for better qualified juries, possibly there should be. Given a truly impartial jury (or at least not hand-tuned by opposing lawyers), of reasonably intelligent, educated people capable of weighing factual data, understanding probabilities, and cutting through rhetoric, then yes, let lawyers charge what they want. In our current system, with carefully picked juries of mostly people who couldn't get out of jury duty, then the more expensive lawyer, through better rhetoric or simply managable case-load, will often prevail. A public defender is cheap, but if he is juggling 50 cases and has no more than five minutes for yours, then you, at the wrong end of the free-market system, have had it. Check Northwestern's journalism school, of all things, which has been overturning convictions where the alleged perp couldn't get a good lawyer, and a skilled prosecutor got another notch in his belt for sending someone up the river for 30 years. If both sides legal talent is evenly matched, then spend whatever (The Feds vs. IBM, for instance), but where it isn't, then there should be some sort of equalization. If you take on Dow, and your case is deemed legitimate, either you can get legal assistance, or the other side is limited to a proportional quantity of legal representation. If they've been burying napalm under your house, (or around here, releasing tons of TCE into the ground water, then simply closing down the local facility rather than admitting responsibility), it shouldn't be 50 well-paid corporate experts versus a new law student, just because that's what you can afford and that's what they can afford. Basically, the modern equivalent of the old Norse vs Greek pantheon; the Greek deities were interested in wisdom and justice (Minerva), the Norse in law and knowledge (Odin).
Or, we could admit that we're overlawyered already, and try to reduce their role in society.
So, we can professionalise juries, agree that you have the right to a lawyer, but not necessarily one of your choice (lawyers will be drafted like juries are), or we redesign the system with fewer opportunities for lawyers. I don't know where the existing herds go, but if every year 1/3 of a law-school class were automatically failed and sent to dig ditches in Botswana (pick your own destination for unpleasant manual labor far from where well-fed lawyers hang out), followed by one chance at the bar or out, we might cool the ardor of future ambulance chasers. Or we could admit they had some good ideas in the 19th century, and hire Lawyer Bill to solve the problem. At 1:00 a.m., that one has some appeal.
In a way, Macs succeed because they're the Anti-Perl; There is one way to do it. (alternately, since I haven't seen a soviet russia joke in this thread yet, it's a Soviet Cafeteria approach. They put it in front of you, and say, "That's all you can eat".) However, that results in a clean, seamless, experience. The inconsistencies that the Gnomes always bring up about Mail.app and iTunes don't really register. Are the interfaces inconsistent? In some manner, yes, but not in any way that's visually jarring or detracting from their ease of use. Overall, it's just a less obtrusive environment than the alternatives. It doesn't pop dialogue boxes continually like a certain program from Redmond does, just in case you forgot it's there, and it doesn't fight back during daily use. After a while, the OS becomes white noise while you quietly go about your business.
Basically, the Mac is for when you've decided that you need to get work done, but you aren't willing to trust your livelihood to Windows sercurity or your blood pressure to WinLix user interfaces.
Btw, you forgot the other reason for owning a Mini; silence. Mine is hooked to a wide-screen monitor via digital input, sitting on the back of the desk taking up about as much space as a page-a-day calendar, and neither it nor the external firewire drive are emitting enough noise to matter. It's little touches like that that make people move to Mac.
Mac, for when you've had enough of computer judo.
No, it's OS-X with burlap underwear.
It's great in HPC environments, as it clusters easily and plays well with others (other OS's, software tools, MPIs, queueing). It's trivial to deploy and pleasant to remotely manage and monitor. Windows is everywhere because the hardware it ran on in 1990 was an extension of the IBM-approved hardware of 1981, which was relatively cheap, and which they already owned.
Let's not try to attribute technical superiority to a product of corporate inertia.
(and yes, if I had a choice in a corporate environment I'd run big, hulking, Sun systems with SunRays on people's desktops. Easy to deploy, easy to manage, flexible and safe.)
No, he's probably looking at his monthly bills for antacids after shifting from Windows systems to Macs. I know that moving from Win2003 server to OS-X Server took 10 points off my blood pressure. (so did Linux, but I had a tendency to run around yelling "Peace, man!", "Power to the People", and "F* the Pigs!" while wearing tie-dye when I used Linux)
No, the gutless Republicans choked in the clutch. If all you can try that man for is "lying under oath" about an affair, with him living with the threat of Hillary in the background, then you have no guts or vision, and deserve the public ridicule you get. Abuse of power would have been a good start, as were some other scandals at the time which got papered over (FBI files, Travel office, etc). Remember, this was the administration which held coverups without bothering to hold crimes first. It is a testimony to the Republicans' lack of Khrum that people think it was all about the blow-job, since after all those years of accusing him of far worse, it was the only thing they dared impeach him for. No guts, no glory.
This is why the current Demos, unless they catch George personally killing an infant Iraqi Christian detainee for his stem cells with Halliburton waiting in the room, won't impeach him either They have no vision, no unity, and no intestinal fortitude, and no plan for how to impeach both GWB and Darth Cheney at the same time. GWB will run out the clock, some lower-level scandals will be (maybe) prosecuted, and we'll have to wait until someone gets enough people to talk so that a current version of "The Best and the Brightest" can be written. At which point we'll have the cold comfort of seeing Bush/Cheney sink to Fillmore/Colfax or Nixon/Agnew levels of regard. (which is a pity, as Nixon was better than he gets credit for)
It's kind of like hunting an elephant; you really don't want to just wing him.
*ding*....
Having played horseshoes in grad school, i.e. thrown heavy metal objects around at dusk after consuming fermented substances, I can't believe that Jarts were *that* much more dangerous than classic horseshoes, unless the latter just required too hard of a throw to be interesting.
Ah yes, just one step short of the Bill Cosby, "I brought you into this world, and I can take you right back out."
As you said, we used to run around unsupervised, idly looked after by other adults in the neighborhood (i.e. if you were doing something truly criminal, someone would probably notice), and allowed to get nicked and dinged. One of my friends still remembers being 8 or so, and we were playing barefoot on a big pile of dirt excavated for a new cellar, when I stepped on a broken bottle. She still laughs about bicycling home with me watching the blood drip through the pedal. End result of that incident? No suing the contractor for not sifting their dirt for sharp objects and leaving it lying around, and no real recriminations towards me, other than that I got a tetanus shot, and a reminder that if I did that again, I'd get another.
I think we must have known quite a bit, as there's a bloody awful lot of us from the pre-foamrubber world days still around. As one parent I know puts it, "kids bounce".
Going for Manicheanism, or just good old Teutonic Ragnarok? Sometime Ragnarok ends with the Gods triumphant, and some times with the Forces of Chaos.
or, from MP.., "forces of good, 8 - 12, forces of evil 1 -5 "...
You should have called. We scrapped a Nova-2 last week during a lab clean. I have the 16k Core (little washers on wires) memory framed on my office wall.
If you get the choice (as if you ever do during scavenges), the DS10 was a nice, recent, desktop system that you can find modernish versions of Linux or, even better, the hobbyist version of VMS and Fortran.
It's been hard to respect you guys since the ones who looked like Animal or Dennis Hopper in "Apocalypse Now" got replaced by Blond/Blonde talking heads with blow-dry hair and perfect teeth.
Ok, I hereby call for legislation which prohibits the showing of bad pictures in public. Out of focus, improperly composed, people at a slant with the tops of their heads cut off (unless that's the way you found them), and boring pictures of nothing passed off as examples of journalistic purity will get you exiled to Saskatoon. In January.
There goes Gannett, and my local Fox affiliate.
They have to keep it, as it's an important usability option. Now your computer can act like you first thing in the morning. HAL, here we come!
*sigh* John Backus. Apparently my theoreticians and programmers got crossed this morning.
Be sure to pay homage to the inventors of the other two ur-languages; Alan Backus, and John McCarthy. Without them, we'd still be programming in assembler, and there probably would be only a world-wide market for 5 computers.
If you can find a way to convince the University administrators to accept a smaller cut of research money, I will happily return to my lab and stop spending as much time pushing grants out the door. What they don't tell you when getting a science PhD, if you're academia-bound, is that you're going to spend 4-6 years getting a research degree, 2-6 years in a research residency (post-doc), and then finally be employed as a lab-manager and voyeur. (you get to watch people do science) Many of us went down this track thinking we could remain hands-on, but those that do don't push enough grants/papers out the door, and so get axed.
Besides, if we return to our labs, we won't need to hire as many post-docs, and can probably thin out the complaining graduate students as well. Employment in the sciences then drops even further.
Finally, they are not "coolies". They are Indentured Servants.