My point is more that there is a seemingly infinite supply of people willing to believe and pay for practically anything. Astrology, miracle cures, amazing money making ventures and products advertised over spam (which generally include all of the above). Perhaps I could have been clearer if I said:
I have been running my home computer on OS X hooked up to broadband for a fair while. So it's always on and always there to get infected. Thing is, it hasn't been. Its protection consists of the default firewall that comes with OS X. I turned NAT on in my DSL modem but that was just so I could hook up my mother-in-law's Windows computer when she was visiting.
The only virus definitions I have ever seen in Symantec products for Mac OS X are Word macro viruses and the like. That would suggest that there are no viruses in the wild that can cause any damage that Symantec will protect you against. There have been a few proof of concept stories going around which are usually fixed by Apple at the next security update. Sometimes they relate to open source software (I think Apache had one a while ago) and some relate to Apple software. As far as I know they have all been patched. And, as I said, I'm still not infected.
Yes, Symantec have a vested interest up the wazoo for that press release. The interesting thing is, the only virus definitions I have ever seen in their Mac OS X updates are MS Word macro viruses and the like. If there really was a threat it doesn't look like Symantec will be providing the protection.
Maybe Symantec is trying to draw attention to generate more business for themselves because there certainly haven't been any viruses released yet on OS X that Symantec provides any real protection for - so I wonder, what information could they be basing their statement on? Secret contacts with the hacker community? Certainly nothing public...
The protection will come from such sexily named files as Security Update 2005-002 and Security Update 2005-003 distributed courtesy of Apple Inc.
Your CD collection is also at a higher quality than the stuff you get off the web. If you care about your music you want high-quality - and 160kbits is not high quality, 320 isn't either.
I have 200+ CDs that I ripped to my computer at 160kbits. Through tinny computer speakers its enough, but compare that to a CD on a decent stereo system and it's no contest. If I ever hook up my Airport Express with Airtunes (TM) I'll probably re-rip everything up to 320kbits just to make the quality acceptable. Thing is, I can do that if I own the CD, I can't do that if I have downloaded some crappy 128kbit WMA format junk from Napster.
When I played D&D we made a map on graph paper, rolled our dice and hoped the Dungeonmaster hadn't had a bad night.
If you want to do minatures go and do Warhammer. Better yet, go off with those crazy wargamers who recreate things like the Battle of Waterloo in minature where the minatures really matter.
Looks like the game is going to get submerged in all the paraphenalia and you're going to spend your time worrying about the colour of your characters skin and whether it looks quite right 'in this light' (1600 lumens or so it would seem).
Wussy nancy-boys if you ask me. What is this world coming to!
I prefer the one that is gramatical - thereby creating the reader to stop and reconsider the meaning of the text through the contrasting images/ideas/motifs. Creating? And before you respond, I am aware that this particular has been corrected at the Wiki source.
Nonetheless, I much prefer the definition for
juxtapose given by answers.com. Short, concise and to the point. Remember, it's the quality of words that counts, not the quantity.
Frankly, Wikipedia is not ready for the big time. The definitions they have for many words are pretty inadequate. Greater scrutiny and the juxtaposition of a 'real' dictionary with the wiki version should highlight the glaring deficiencies. But really - what is wiki's presence in the definitions list going to provide? Certainly nothing authoritative or expert or even accurate?
My biggest peeve at the moment is the way Windows steals focus all the time. I could be typing a nice little comment for Slashdot and then up pops a window telling me something useless like 'you've got virus' and suddenly all my typing gets redirected tother window.
OS X doesn't do that - it's polite you know.
If you find an error in an article you can fix it.
Provided someone doesn't fix it back. Same goes for a badly written article. Try and change it and the guy that wrote it in the first place reverts it because your new version doesn't live up to their grand vision for the article.
The only reason Wikipedia can fail is because of dogged bloody-mindedness. You will find a lot of that at Wikipedia.
Science is not and has never been very democratic. What wins arguments is not weight of numbers (which is what democracy is about) but verifiable truth of ideas.
If science was democratic it wouldn't work. We would be forced to believe what people thought we should believe. Heavens, we might even believe in Intelligent Design! Howabout we have a vote on it?
And to pull in something else where democracy doesn't work - have a look at the US local justice system. People seem to think that democracy is a panacea for all sorts of ills. Lets just elect DAs who don't care about justice, just getting elected. Same for police chiefs and judges. Its not about justice, its about poularity and pandering to the majority. Same goes for science and wiki stuff - democracy is a pretty messed up system fro running anything important. (And that includes government.)
I've never seen a wikipedia article with a clear bias.
I guess you haven't been looking too hard. Maybe you haven't seen a Wikipedia article that has a bias different from yours? Or maybe you haven't seen a Wikipedia article with bias because edit wars generally turn the article into something little more informative than a cereal box. Or maybe you just aren't knowledgeable enough to evaluate when an article has bias and when it doesn't? How many people wach Fox news and believe that it is 'fair and balanced'? No bias there. Same with Wikipedia.
You would be surprised by what they don't account for. Of the Mann et al. papers (the Hockey Stick crowd) none that I am aware of account for solar input or CO2 levels in their reconstructions. They assume that there is a linear relationship between their tree ring widths (or whatever) and temperature and assume that the effects of CO2 and solar input are irrelevant to this relationship.
Read the papers before you assume. I was frankly shocked upon reading the papers to find that they simply do not account for something that you and I both believe should be accounted for.
What is it with gold nuts? Backing currency with gold means that whatever gold is worth, so is the piece of paper in your hand. You could back it with sheep if you wanted, or triangular rubber pieces 10,000 miles to a side, or cling-wrap. It's all the same. Fiat money (which most currencies are these days) is implicitly backed by the future taxation power of the government. If the government's taxation power goes down (civil unrest is a really good way to do this, government debauchery is another) then you get inflation as the relative value of that promise and all other goods changes. But you get the same situation if you happen to increase the supply of gold (the discovery of the New World was a good source of inflation).
Gold is no more special than any other backing.
And, to bring this back into the thread, virtual currency is backed by the trustworthiness of the game creators providing services (entertainment) in exchange for that currency. Depending on your government, you may rate virtual currencies as more or less valuable than real currencies. However, there is one aspect in which real currencies are better than virtual ones - you are legally obligated to accept them in payment for debts incurred. Just try going into a corner store and buying a slushie with some EverQuest gold.
While opening programs and switching programs is a bit slow (I've only got 320MB of memory and paging just takes time) I can still surf the web and listen to iTunes (at the same time) without skips. It struggles with iMovie (so I switch back to OS 9 for that).
OS 10.3.6 was pretty snappy. OS 10.3.7 went backwards a bit in terms of OS 9 emulation speed, but other than that all the point upgrades have made it work better and better.
>If old people are not allowed to drive, then what is the justification for allowing anyone to drive?
I don't know, how about competence?
Doesn't mean that anyone can drive but you have to face it, as you get older your reactions get slower and your vision gets worse - you are less competent to drive. Why do you think there aren't any 70 year olds racing cars?
People know how to easily get to what they need on a Mac - they click their mouse button on the approporiate icon, location or menu on the screen. How is that any different from right clicking in some location? You seem to suppose that right clicking brings up some magic context sensitive menu that doesn't have menus you have to scroll through and a plethora of confusing options. I right clicked on my IE window while composing this comment and was given 16 options, six of which were greyed out and one menu with three items and a further sub-menu giving a screen full of options. Two of these had the tell tale elipsis which mean that further options were required to actually do something. How exactly is that less confusing that clicking on an on screen icon?
Perhaps you don't understand it but there is a reason.
For example, I've never understood the point of limiting road signs to the small set we have, why not have a different one for every road and intersection - it would be so much more informative and useful on the road. STOP is way overused, we should instead have STOP QUICKLY, STOP SLOWLY, STOP IN A MINUTE, PAUSE, BRAKE, CEASE FORWARD MOTION. And instead of having that awful red in an octagon we could make them all different colours and shapes for a bit of variety in life.
The hell with being able to drive along unfamiliar roads and know what the rules are - if you don't know the roads like the back of your hand you shouldn't be on them. People should be limited to just the roads they are properly certified on. We could put it all in a 4000 page manual that we give all learner drivers - better yet, install it in an in-car help system. (What does that "GIVE WAY TO CARS TRAVELLING IN TANDEM" sign mean? HELP (TM) will then cheerfully tell you that it means that you should give way to cards travelling in tandem.)
And lets talk about fonts. What is the point of unnaturally restricting us to use one (or at most a few) fonts in a document. I happened to like San Francisco! A different font for every letter - a paragon of readability.
There is actually a reason for making things simple to use. I mean, what about all those jokes about video recorders? How many video recorders flash 12:00 all the time because people couldn't work out how to operate the 5 button user interface and program in the time?
Better yet, why don't we just ship 206 button keyboards to simplify things - I hate holding down the shift key. Then we could shift to 800 key keyboards if we got rid of all those modifier keys. That would be so much better - none of this pesky SHIFT-a to type a capital A, just press the capital A key. Want to type ALT-SHIFT-A, just press the key, don't mess around with all those modifiers. Yeah, that will be much better.
Because you only use one finger to hit the buttons on the touch tone phone.
How would you like it if you had to hit all the even numbers with your left index finger and all the odd numbers with your right pinky finger? Don't think there might be some confusion there?
The mouse is an input device that can do lots of things when you press things in the graphical interface - it doesn't have to be the interface of itself. Consider the relationship as: mouse is to input as finger is to touch-tone phone - some people are touch type typists who use all five fingers (no pedants talking about thumbs here) on each hand but a large number happen to be hunt and peck single finger typists.
I imagine that a number of good comments will be recorded here (and a number of truly awful comments...). I would encourage everyone who writes a +5 Insightful or similar comment to take that comment and submit it to the Copyright Office.
In that way, rather than them reporting that they received 5 comments, 4 of which were from Big Media and 1 from some cranky old bastard from North Dakota, they will have to acknowledge that it is an issue of great public interest and they will have well reasoned comments to base further work on.
Speaking as someone who has a regulatory role (in a completely different arena that is not relevant), well written submissions that are not hyperbolic or impractical can be persuasive. The more of them there are, the better.
Slashdot Mirror
If pigs could fly then spam would cease to exist.
Yes, and if Astrologers couldn't predict the future no one would believe in Astrology.
And if quacks didn't actually cure people, nobody would buy their 'elixirs of life'.
And if pyramid schemes didn't actually make anyone other than the promoter money, nobody would invest in them.
As PT Barnum said, there is a sucker born every minute
The only virus definitions I have ever seen in Symantec products for Mac OS X are Word macro viruses and the like. That would suggest that there are no viruses in the wild that can cause any damage that Symantec will protect you against. There have been a few proof of concept stories going around which are usually fixed by Apple at the next security update. Sometimes they relate to open source software (I think Apache had one a while ago) and some relate to Apple software. As far as I know they have all been patched. And, as I said, I'm still not infected.
Maybe Symantec is trying to draw attention to generate more business for themselves because there certainly haven't been any viruses released yet on OS X that Symantec provides any real protection for - so I wonder, what information could they be basing their statement on? Secret contacts with the hacker community? Certainly nothing public...
The protection will come from such sexily named files as Security Update 2005-002 and Security Update 2005-003 distributed courtesy of Apple Inc.
I have 200+ CDs that I ripped to my computer at 160kbits. Through tinny computer speakers its enough, but compare that to a CD on a decent stereo system and it's no contest. If I ever hook up my Airport Express with Airtunes (TM) I'll probably re-rip everything up to 320kbits just to make the quality acceptable. Thing is, I can do that if I own the CD, I can't do that if I have downloaded some crappy 128kbit WMA format junk from Napster.
If you want to do minatures go and do Warhammer. Better yet, go off with those crazy wargamers who recreate things like the Battle of Waterloo in minature where the minatures really matter.
Looks like the game is going to get submerged in all the paraphenalia and you're going to spend your time worrying about the colour of your characters skin and whether it looks quite right 'in this light' (1600 lumens or so it would seem).
Wussy nancy-boys if you ask me. What is this world coming to!
Nonetheless, I much prefer the definition for juxtapose given by answers.com. Short, concise and to the point. Remember, it's the quality of words that counts, not the quantity.
Howabout looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Stub and noting the comment "Important: This category is getting very large"
Yes. But there is a difference between a few bugs and sunset in a mangrove swamp.
Frankly, Wikipedia is not ready for the big time. The definitions they have for many words are pretty inadequate. Greater scrutiny and the juxtaposition of a 'real' dictionary with the wiki version should highlight the glaring deficiencies. But really - what is wiki's presence in the definitions list going to provide? Certainly nothing authoritative or expert or even accurate?
My biggest peeve at the moment is the way Windows steals focus all the time. I could be typing a nice little comment for Slashdot and then up pops a window telling me something useless like 'you've got virus' and suddenly all my typing gets redirected tother window. OS X doesn't do that - it's polite you know.
Provided someone doesn't fix it back. Same goes for a badly written article. Try and change it and the guy that wrote it in the first place reverts it because your new version doesn't live up to their grand vision for the article.
The only reason Wikipedia can fail is because of dogged bloody-mindedness. You will find a lot of that at Wikipedia.
Science is not and has never been very democratic. What wins arguments is not weight of numbers (which is what democracy is about) but verifiable truth of ideas.
If science was democratic it wouldn't work. We would be forced to believe what people thought we should believe. Heavens, we might even believe in Intelligent Design! Howabout we have a vote on it?
And to pull in something else where democracy doesn't work - have a look at the US local justice system. People seem to think that democracy is a panacea for all sorts of ills. Lets just elect DAs who don't care about justice, just getting elected. Same for police chiefs and judges. Its not about justice, its about poularity and pandering to the majority. Same goes for science and wiki stuff - democracy is a pretty messed up system fro running anything important. (And that includes government.)
I guess you haven't been looking too hard. Maybe you haven't seen a Wikipedia article that has a bias different from yours? Or maybe you haven't seen a Wikipedia article with bias because edit wars generally turn the article into something little more informative than a cereal box. Or maybe you just aren't knowledgeable enough to evaluate when an article has bias and when it doesn't? How many people wach Fox news and believe that it is 'fair and balanced'? No bias there. Same with Wikipedia.
Read the papers before you assume. I was frankly shocked upon reading the papers to find that they simply do not account for something that you and I both believe should be accounted for.
Repeat after me: The denominator matters just as much as the numerator.
Upshot: you're both wrong.
What is it with gold nuts? Backing currency with gold means that whatever gold is worth, so is the piece of paper in your hand. You could back it with sheep if you wanted, or triangular rubber pieces 10,000 miles to a side, or cling-wrap. It's all the same. Fiat money (which most currencies are these days) is implicitly backed by the future taxation power of the government. If the government's taxation power goes down (civil unrest is a really good way to do this, government debauchery is another) then you get inflation as the relative value of that promise and all other goods changes. But you get the same situation if you happen to increase the supply of gold (the discovery of the New World was a good source of inflation).
Gold is no more special than any other backing.
And, to bring this back into the thread, virtual currency is backed by the trustworthiness of the game creators providing services (entertainment) in exchange for that currency. Depending on your government, you may rate virtual currencies as more or less valuable than real currencies. However, there is one aspect in which real currencies are better than virtual ones - you are legally obligated to accept them in payment for debts incurred. Just try going into a corner store and buying a slushie with some EverQuest gold.
It's quite simple - 7 years there, 7 years back and 1 for sightseeing. Kind of like a trip to Australia only a little longer.
They will no doubt report that they were shot full of hallucinogenic drugs and put into a cheap amusement park ride in an effort to convince them.
You can not convince someone who has already made up their mind.
While opening programs and switching programs is a bit slow (I've only got 320MB of memory and paging just takes time) I can still surf the web and listen to iTunes (at the same time) without skips. It struggles with iMovie (so I switch back to OS 9 for that).
OS 10.3.6 was pretty snappy. OS 10.3.7 went backwards a bit in terms of OS 9 emulation speed, but other than that all the point upgrades have made it work better and better.
I don't know, how about competence?
Doesn't mean that anyone can drive but you have to face it, as you get older your reactions get slower and your vision gets worse - you are less competent to drive. Why do you think there aren't any 70 year olds racing cars?
People know how to easily get to what they need on a Mac - they click their mouse button on the approporiate icon, location or menu on the screen. How is that any different from right clicking in some location? You seem to suppose that right clicking brings up some magic context sensitive menu that doesn't have menus you have to scroll through and a plethora of confusing options. I right clicked on my IE window while composing this comment and was given 16 options, six of which were greyed out and one menu with three items and a further sub-menu giving a screen full of options. Two of these had the tell tale elipsis which mean that further options were required to actually do something. How exactly is that less confusing that clicking on an on screen icon?
For example, I've never understood the point of limiting road signs to the small set we have, why not have a different one for every road and intersection - it would be so much more informative and useful on the road. STOP is way overused, we should instead have STOP QUICKLY, STOP SLOWLY, STOP IN A MINUTE, PAUSE, BRAKE, CEASE FORWARD MOTION. And instead of having that awful red in an octagon we could make them all different colours and shapes for a bit of variety in life.
The hell with being able to drive along unfamiliar roads and know what the rules are - if you don't know the roads like the back of your hand you shouldn't be on them. People should be limited to just the roads they are properly certified on. We could put it all in a 4000 page manual that we give all learner drivers - better yet, install it in an in-car help system. (What does that "GIVE WAY TO CARS TRAVELLING IN TANDEM" sign mean? HELP (TM) will then cheerfully tell you that it means that you should give way to cards travelling in tandem.)
And lets talk about fonts. What is the point of unnaturally restricting us to use one (or at most a few) fonts in a document. I happened to like San Francisco! A different font for every letter - a paragon of readability.
There is actually a reason for making things simple to use. I mean, what about all those jokes about video recorders? How many video recorders flash 12:00 all the time because people couldn't work out how to operate the 5 button user interface and program in the time?
Better yet, why don't we just ship 206 button keyboards to simplify things - I hate holding down the shift key. Then we could shift to 800 key keyboards if we got rid of all those modifier keys. That would be so much better - none of this pesky SHIFT-a to type a capital A, just press the capital A key. Want to type ALT-SHIFT-A, just press the key, don't mess around with all those modifiers. Yeah, that will be much better.
How would you like it if you had to hit all the even numbers with your left index finger and all the odd numbers with your right pinky finger? Don't think there might be some confusion there?
The mouse is an input device that can do lots of things when you press things in the graphical interface - it doesn't have to be the interface of itself. Consider the relationship as: mouse is to input as finger is to touch-tone phone - some people are touch type typists who use all five fingers (no pedants talking about thumbs here) on each hand but a large number happen to be hunt and peck single finger typists.
In that way, rather than them reporting that they received 5 comments, 4 of which were from Big Media and 1 from some cranky old bastard from North Dakota, they will have to acknowledge that it is an issue of great public interest and they will have well reasoned comments to base further work on.
Speaking as someone who has a regulatory role (in a completely different arena that is not relevant), well written submissions that are not hyperbolic or impractical can be persuasive. The more of them there are, the better.