With the state of the world, it's immoral to *not* go into space.
Or is there going to be a better solution for increasing the planet's finite resources that I just don't see?
Sadly, there will always be starving people. My very loose 'proof' of that is the fact that we can, right now, solve pretty much all hunger and most disease problems around the planet, but we don't. The way already exists, if we have the will to travel along it.
The fact that we prefer instead to start or fight wars, to spend vast sums on personal entertainment and to do other frivolous things indicates to me that solving other people's issues is just not important to Humans.
By expanding outwards, we create wealth by making use of new resources unavailable to us now. It doesn't work so well here on Earth, as we've already covered the planet quite thoroughly, and when we expand our territory, we do it at someone else's expense.
The move to space is not only justifiable and morally defensible, it makes economic sense.
This isn't really a PR stunt, or great customer relations - although it is *good* customer relations. Apple are just fulfilling their customer obligations under the Canadian legal system. The only reason they're doing this, and not the Canadian Private Copying Collective (who held the funds) is that Apple know who their customers are!
But then to link this to batteries..? Where does the logic come from? It's a bit like saying "I like Halo, it's a fun game, but that registry in WinXP just plain sucks."
No - it's Richmond, Melbourne, and I *am* very short of time. I'm getting married, and on top of that, I work in Richmond (at a big corporate building on the end of Swan St) so I just don't get to the city that often.
It's not wrong to bring the laws of thermodynamics into this, although it's a bit bizarre.
I've heard a few people bring this up, saying that as the Earth is a closed system, the 2nd law of thermodynamics indicates it should tend towards increasing entropy.
And that's true.
If we forget the Sun pouring vast amounts of energy onto the Earth, more than enough to run the power systems for every country on the planet ten times over and probably still have enough left over for the plants and animals.
But yes, if we exclude the Sun, the Earth is a closed system.... except for other radiation from space...
I hope so too, but Sony/BMG are very big here in Australia, bigger than in other countries (I've heard). That means the exclusion of them would exclude a *lot* of music from iTMS. Is it then worth it?
Consumers expect to be able to get anything they hear on the radio. They won't understand the excuses, or if they do they won't care. Apple should not put up a half-arsed music store, because they'll be seen to be failing the consumers regardless of the real reason.
I'd love to buy stuff on iTMS in Australia. I live and work in an inner-city suburb that has no music store (Richmond) and I just don't make the time to get into the city that often. iTMS would be great for me, but only if it's got a good range.
I'm busy boycotting Sony/BMG, and I'm telling everyone I know what a bunch of bastards they are over this. They refuse to play when they can't even put up an opposing business. They actually stand to make money from this, but choose not to. It's illogical unless they have a music store in the wings.
You're inventing a conspiracy here when the answer is most likely pretty simple, to wit:
Apple thinks the design is a good one, and it's been tested in the field.
That's my take on it, but unless you can show a real reason why Apple would cover anything up or do something stupid on purpose, I think my answer fits Occam's Razor better.
Apple is a business. It operates in the real world where ridiculous theories about how Apple hates this, fears that or hides the other just don't wash. Apple does something in expectation of a profit. It may be that it will flop, or succeed, but a company doesn't release a product for bizarre reasons or to fit vaguely defined conspiracy theories.
That's why when I'm out and about gaming with my iBook, I pay someone to hit me with a cricket bat to simulate the effects of the game.
A light tap around the ribs simulates a glancing blow, a harder hit in the shoulder or stomach simulates perfectly the effect of a solid hit, and a headshot in the game usually results in me being laid out for a few hours.
Yes, it's expensive in hospital bills, but the point is that I get a realistic feedback without having to muck about with interface devices
Can we assume you live in the "impeach the president because he got an illicit blowjob but don't worry about the current bozo launching a war based on lies and pushing the economy so far into the toilet that waste treatment plants will see it twelve months before any economists do" US of A?
Or is it the "massive furore over a nipple shown on TV during a sports game that lead to huge penalties and red-faced hypocrites everywhere just about crapping their own pants in anger" US of A?
Yes, in Australia we've banned guns without permits (that are hard to get) and some politicians have gone down the "porn is on the Internet therefore the Internet must be regulated here" path (and their attempts have been total and utter failures as anyone barely cognizant of technology could have told them before they wasted millions of tax dollars on their vote-buying furphies).
Got any info on what we're banning first? Or is this just a knee-jerk reaction from an anonymous coward too gutless to bring their name to the table?
"She should realize that beatiful bodies are great assets to women. It's a great thing to have if you want to influence people the way you want them to be influenced.
If she's isn't that hot and is jealous of the virtual women then I disagree with her."
You're kidding, right? The last time I saw this sort of attitude was in an old 70s documentary. I thought people had moved on in the western world.
Your religion is your own issue, and that's all well and good.
But to call daylight saving time a "worthless idea"?
I don't care about the pseudoscience or bizarre ideas of how it will fade the carpets or cause havoc for the cows.
I care because when I work all day, I get to spend some time in sunlight in the evenings. That's when it's most valuable to me (I'm not a morning person). For that alone, daylight saving is a brilliant idea in my view.
Well, we all know that after the whole year 2000 thingy, developers paid more attention to avoiding hard-coded numbers in their apps, drivers and network protocol implementations. So really this should be something read in from a text file (.ini) or maybe synchronised to the operating system.
The game is already restricted to 17 year olds and above. In this case, I blame the parents, but what the Hell. Maybe it's fine to bring up a generation that think the rest of that sort of game is reasonable.
I prefer Hilary to the braindead bastards of the other party, but then since I've never been to the US and don't plan to go, who cares what I think about your politicians?
Get some balls and defend your rating system, or change it, or shut the Hell up. It's your country. If you're a voter, this is in your power.
You're right though. We need to take nine year old children to task on their political beliefs. Her ideal of a world of equality is in direct opposition to the reality of the situation. We must disabuse her of her childish notion that people are equally good.
Or perhaps we could let a nine year old dream of a better world.
Altivec is not so much poor at double-precision calculations, as not supporting them at all.
It's been a few years since I programmed for the Altivec unit, but it didn't support any doubles then, only single-precision floats.
Apart from that (and it is a big thing), I've never heard a serious comparison of Altivec with SSE that resulted in SSE coming out equal or even close. Altivec is pretty damned amazing.
Shame we won't be able to play with it any longer.
(By the way, Apple's transition documentation shows how to convert from Altivec to SSE, and after reading through it briefly, SSE doesn't impress me. Hopefully raw clock frequency will overcome SSE 'suckiness' and we'll see good use of it in media apps.)
I go to Spotlight, type in 'quicktime' slowly and it searches for me instantly. It takes a few seconds to completely refine the list after I type the 'e' but it's not bad.
How many files do you have on your hard drive? Disk utilities shows I have 284,830 files spread over 52,415 folders, in 52.7GB of 55.8GB (about 94% full).
Spotlight is fast for me. I can't believe that my iBook is somehow magical (after 16 months it no longer sleeps when the lid is closed...) but I also can't believe that it performs better than some G5 iMacs I've heard about.
Can we get some specs? What processor, memory capacity, hard drive sizes, file count and folder count do you have?
My iBook is a G4, 1.2GHz, 784MB ram, '60' GB HDD, stock machine on 10.4.2. It's not special, magical or blessed by Saint Steve. And yet Spotlight works well for me.
Sounds like a common thread in your case - external drives. I haven't used SpotLight when my external 80GB drive has been connected (and wouldn't expect much difference then - it's full of large media files)
Well, good luck with it. There's not much else I can do but hope Apple improve performance on it.
I don't want to sound like Trolly McTrollpants, but I just don't see the Spotlight speed problems.
I've got an iBook 1.2GHz, standard 60GB drive and 784MB RAM, and it's always been fast and responsive for me. My system has about 300,000 files on it, which seems like a reasonable number.
I keep hearing isolated stories like this and wondering if it's more universal or just scattered anecdotes.
If Dashboard were to do that, you'd see occasional drops in system speed. These would vary from barely noticable to "what happened to my system"
When you activate it, all the processes page into memory (if they're not already there) and run their little JavaScripts. That means that there's a lot of memory/disk swapping going on, plus the network activity inherent in grabbing this sort of data.
If you're doing some intensive processing, that may cause disk thrashing as you're paging Dashboard widgets in while the app you're using gets paged out but then it grabs the CPU for a slice, requiring data to be paged back in, and so on...
I also see a brief wait before I get the data (and I'm on an iBook 1.2GHz and 1500kbps ADSL) but I prefer that to the sort of issues I'd see if I were playing a game. A solution is to activate the Dashboard for an instant, drop back into whatever you were doing, and then come back to it a few moments later. It's usually fine and everything's updated.
It's just not innovative on the application front, or the OS front. And that's the area that matters to users. Python is great, but does it matter to a word processor user, or someone who wants to get to their foiles in a new way because the desktop metaphor just doesn't cut it for them?
And unless I'm wrong, Apple hasn't *copied* Open Source, but has in fact used it in exactly the way the authors (of the Open Source software used) wanted and explicitly stated in their licence. If you're going to call Apple out on doing what the Open Source community state that they want, then perhaps you need to define what the Open Source community should and should not want.
I am a big fan of the concept of open source, and free software.
I don't believe it can work in every situation, but the idea is good.
The most damning thing about Linux (for example) is that it has zero innovation. I want to see something new for the desktop, not rehashed ideas that Apple or Microsoft or Unix implemented years earlier.
I don't believe Linux is innovative, and I see that pervading the entire open source movement.
Look at Open Office. Great idea, lousy implementation. Apart from the cost, what benefit does it have over Microsoft Office? There's nothing new in it, nothing innovative.
I'd even go so far as to say that the amount of sameness cripples it. Apple did more with Pages than the Open Office has with its word 'wannabe', and it shows. They're trying something new, something innovative.
Ballmer is right when he says open source software is not innovative. I disagree with the man on almost everything he says and is, but he's right in that.
Slashdot Mirror
With the state of the world, it's immoral to *not* go into space.
Or is there going to be a better solution for increasing the planet's finite resources that I just don't see?
Sadly, there will always be starving people. My very loose 'proof' of that is the fact that we can, right now, solve pretty much all hunger and most disease problems around the planet, but we don't. The way already exists, if we have the will to travel along it.
The fact that we prefer instead to start or fight wars, to spend vast sums on personal entertainment and to do other frivolous things indicates to me that solving other people's issues is just not important to Humans.
By expanding outwards, we create wealth by making use of new resources unavailable to us now. It doesn't work so well here on Earth, as we've already covered the planet quite thoroughly, and when we expand our territory, we do it at someone else's expense.
The move to space is not only justifiable and morally defensible, it makes economic sense.
We have to do it, and we have to do it now.
This isn't really a PR stunt, or great customer relations - although it is *good* customer relations. Apple are just fulfilling their customer obligations under the Canadian legal system. The only reason they're doing this, and not the Canadian Private Copying Collective (who held the funds) is that Apple know who their customers are!
But then to link this to batteries..? Where does the logic come from? It's a bit like saying "I like Halo, it's a fun game, but that registry in WinXP just plain sucks."
Different issues.
No - it's Richmond, Melbourne, and I *am* very short of time. I'm getting married, and on top of that, I work in Richmond (at a big corporate building on the end of Swan St) so I just don't get to the city that often.
It was easier when I lived at Southbank!
It's not wrong to bring the laws of thermodynamics into this, although it's a bit bizarre.
... except for other radiation from space...
I've heard a few people bring this up, saying that as the Earth is a closed system, the 2nd law of thermodynamics indicates it should tend towards increasing entropy.
And that's true.
If we forget the Sun pouring vast amounts of energy onto the Earth, more than enough to run the power systems for every country on the planet ten times over and probably still have enough left over for the plants and animals.
But yes, if we exclude the Sun, the Earth is a closed system.
I hope so too, but Sony/BMG are very big here in Australia, bigger than in other countries (I've heard). That means the exclusion of them would exclude a *lot* of music from iTMS. Is it then worth it?
Consumers expect to be able to get anything they hear on the radio. They won't understand the excuses, or if they do they won't care. Apple should not put up a half-arsed music store, because they'll be seen to be failing the consumers regardless of the real reason.
I'd love to buy stuff on iTMS in Australia. I live and work in an inner-city suburb that has no music store (Richmond) and I just don't make the time to get into the city that often. iTMS would be great for me, but only if it's got a good range.
I'm busy boycotting Sony/BMG, and I'm telling everyone I know what a bunch of bastards they are over this. They refuse to play when they can't even put up an opposing business. They actually stand to make money from this, but choose not to. It's illogical unless they have a music store in the wings.
Ah, so you just don't know.
You could just say that, instead of going on about maniacal types - again, with no evidence beyond common myth.
Apple covering up?
Inventing something poor on purpose?
You're inventing a conspiracy here when the answer is most likely pretty simple, to wit:
Apple thinks the design is a good one, and it's been tested in the field.
That's my take on it, but unless you can show a real reason why Apple would cover anything up or do something stupid on purpose, I think my answer fits Occam's Razor better.
Apple is a business. It operates in the real world where ridiculous theories about how Apple hates this, fears that or hides the other just don't wash. Apple does something in expectation of a profit. It may be that it will flop, or succeed, but a company doesn't release a product for bizarre reasons or to fit vaguely defined conspiracy theories.
I also prefer real, tactile feedback in games.
That's why when I'm out and about gaming with my iBook, I pay someone to hit me with a cricket bat to simulate the effects of the game.
A light tap around the ribs simulates a glancing blow, a harder hit in the shoulder or stomach simulates perfectly the effect of a solid hit, and a headshot in the game usually results in me being laid out for a few hours.
Yes, it's expensive in hospital bills, but the point is that I get a realistic feedback without having to muck about with interface devices
Can we assume you live in the "impeach the president because he got an illicit blowjob but don't worry about the current bozo launching a war based on lies and pushing the economy so far into the toilet that waste treatment plants will see it twelve months before any economists do" US of A?
Or is it the "massive furore over a nipple shown on TV during a sports game that lead to huge penalties and red-faced hypocrites everywhere just about crapping their own pants in anger" US of A?
Yes, in Australia we've banned guns without permits (that are hard to get) and some politicians have gone down the "porn is on the Internet therefore the Internet must be regulated here" path (and their attempts have been total and utter failures as anyone barely cognizant of technology could have told them before they wasted millions of tax dollars on their vote-buying furphies).
Got any info on what we're banning first? Or is this just a knee-jerk reaction from an anonymous coward too gutless to bring their name to the table?
"She should realize that beatiful bodies are great assets to women. It's a great thing to have if you want to influence people the way you want them to be influenced.
If she's isn't that hot and is jealous of the virtual women then I disagree with her."
You're kidding, right? The last time I saw this sort of attitude was in an old 70s documentary. I thought people had moved on in the western world.
Your religion is your own issue, and that's all well and good.
But to call daylight saving time a "worthless idea"?
I don't care about the pseudoscience or bizarre ideas of how it will fade the carpets or cause havoc for the cows.
I care because when I work all day, I get to spend some time in sunlight in the evenings. That's when it's most valuable to me (I'm not a morning person). For that alone, daylight saving is a brilliant idea in my view.
Well, we all know that after the whole year 2000 thingy, developers paid more attention to avoiding hard-coded numbers in their apps, drivers and network protocol implementations. So really this should be something read in from a text file (.ini) or maybe synchronised to the operating system.
Isn't that what happened?
While I agree that those are vaid points, I can't see where 'insightful' comes from. Maybe 'funny' would be a better score.
You can do the same things with a piece of paper and a hand calculator, but that doesn't make them worthwhile uses of time.
So... which browser should I use on the Apple II? Does it support Java and QuickTime? What about Word? Can it run Word? Or Pages?
Maybe I'm just taking a humorous post too seriously...
Don't be a goddamned fool.
The game is already restricted to 17 year olds and above. In this case, I blame the parents, but what the Hell. Maybe it's fine to bring up a generation that think the rest of that sort of game is reasonable.
I prefer Hilary to the braindead bastards of the other party, but then since I've never been to the US and don't plan to go, who cares what I think about your politicians?
Get some balls and defend your rating system, or change it, or shut the Hell up. It's your country. If you're a voter, this is in your power.
She's what...? Nine?
You're right though. We need to take nine year old children to task on their political beliefs. Her ideal of a world of equality is in direct opposition to the reality of the situation. We must disabuse her of her childish notion that people are equally good.
Or perhaps we could let a nine year old dream of a better world.
Who'd a thunk it?
I mean, a politician getting onto a current hot issue with a "Somebody think of the children" angle.
Shocking, bewildering, amazing news... it's not.
Altivec is not so much poor at double-precision calculations, as not supporting them at all.
It's been a few years since I programmed for the Altivec unit, but it didn't support any doubles then, only single-precision floats.
Apart from that (and it is a big thing), I've never heard a serious comparison of Altivec with SSE that resulted in SSE coming out equal or even close. Altivec is pretty damned amazing.
Shame we won't be able to play with it any longer.
(By the way, Apple's transition documentation shows how to convert from Altivec to SSE, and after reading through it briefly, SSE doesn't impress me. Hopefully raw clock frequency will overcome SSE 'suckiness' and we'll see good use of it in media apps.)
Unless you use Apple's method, which is to keep the RAM going through a small feed from the battery or PSU.
Instant sleep, instant wake.
Okay. I'm on the iBook now.
I go to Spotlight, type in 'quicktime' slowly and it searches for me instantly. It takes a few seconds to completely refine the list after I type the 'e' but it's not bad.
How many files do you have on your hard drive? Disk utilities shows I have 284,830 files spread over 52,415 folders, in 52.7GB of 55.8GB (about 94% full).
Spotlight is fast for me. I can't believe that my iBook is somehow magical (after 16 months it no longer sleeps when the lid is closed...) but I also can't believe that it performs better than some G5 iMacs I've heard about.
Can we get some specs? What processor, memory capacity, hard drive sizes, file count and folder count do you have?
My iBook is a G4, 1.2GHz, 784MB ram, '60' GB HDD, stock machine on 10.4.2. It's not special, magical or blessed by Saint Steve. And yet Spotlight works well for me.
Sounds like a common thread in your case - external drives. I haven't used SpotLight when my external 80GB drive has been connected (and wouldn't expect much difference then - it's full of large media files)
Well, good luck with it. There's not much else I can do but hope Apple improve performance on it.
I don't want to sound like Trolly McTrollpants, but I just don't see the Spotlight speed problems.
I've got an iBook 1.2GHz, standard 60GB drive and 784MB RAM, and it's always been fast and responsive for me. My system has about 300,000 files on it, which seems like a reasonable number.
I keep hearing isolated stories like this and wondering if it's more universal or just scattered anecdotes.
If Dashboard were to do that, you'd see occasional drops in system speed. These would vary from barely noticable to "what happened to my system"
When you activate it, all the processes page into memory (if they're not already there) and run their little JavaScripts. That means that there's a lot of memory/disk swapping going on, plus the network activity inherent in grabbing this sort of data.
If you're doing some intensive processing, that may cause disk thrashing as you're paging Dashboard widgets in while the app you're using gets paged out but then it grabs the CPU for a slice, requiring data to be paged back in, and so on...
I also see a brief wait before I get the data (and I'm on an iBook 1.2GHz and 1500kbps ADSL) but I prefer that to the sort of issues I'd see if I were playing a game. A solution is to activate the Dashboard for an instant, drop back into whatever you were doing, and then come back to it a few moments later. It's usually fine and everything's updated.
Yeah, and that the information they give is so vague and unsubstantiated that Apple wouldn't bother to sue them!
And yet I'm a big fan of Open Source.
As I stated.
Open Source has done a great deal.
It's just not innovative on the application front, or the OS front. And that's the area that matters to users. Python is great, but does it matter to a word processor user, or someone who wants to get to their foiles in a new way because the desktop metaphor just doesn't cut it for them?
And unless I'm wrong, Apple hasn't *copied* Open Source, but has in fact used it in exactly the way the authors (of the Open Source software used) wanted and explicitly stated in their licence. If you're going to call Apple out on doing what the Open Source community state that they want, then perhaps you need to define what the Open Source community should and should not want.
I am a big fan of the concept of open source, and free software.
I don't believe it can work in every situation, but the idea is good.
The most damning thing about Linux (for example) is that it has zero innovation. I want to see something new for the desktop, not rehashed ideas that Apple or Microsoft or Unix implemented years earlier.
I don't believe Linux is innovative, and I see that pervading the entire open source movement.
Look at Open Office. Great idea, lousy implementation. Apart from the cost, what benefit does it have over Microsoft Office? There's nothing new in it, nothing innovative.
I'd even go so far as to say that the amount of sameness cripples it. Apple did more with Pages than the Open Office has with its word 'wannabe', and it shows. They're trying something new, something innovative.
Ballmer is right when he says open source software is not innovative. I disagree with the man on almost everything he says and is, but he's right in that.
And goddamn it, I wish he weren't