The Economist is actually a very intelligent and insightful weekly, and most of their column writers really know what they're talking about.
Being a British paper, they do a good job of getting the news across, neutrally. I never read American weeklies anymore: It's all the same propaganda dog food.
I'm glad that someone had the bright idea of pointing out their computer articles to/. If you dig back a couple of years, you can find a this great article where Bill Gates answers various allegations the Economist made against him. Suffice to say, bad little Bill uses the words 'freedom to innovate' in every other sentence throughout the whole piece.
This shows the obviously distorted priorities that the police are getting due to lobbyists. What's next...police raids on domestic homes to seize that 10 Gig collection? Doesn't Babylon have anything better to do than this???
As a resident of Reykjavik, Iceland, I am somewhat worried about the whole genetic database thing. As soon as the government consented, I went up to the registry personally and asked to be removed from the database (which they did).
It's not that I have anything to hide, or that I even care. It's just that I'm sure there are plenty of people who wouldn't want insurance companies and private companies getting hold of their *very private* medical records.
That aside, Iceland is a very small country with only 250 thousand people, and my mother, a doctor in neurology, working for the government, is forced to co-operate with Kari Stefansson, the major shareholder and CEO of DeCode Genetics on a daily basis as part of her job.
It's very uncapitalistic to give a company like DeCode a monopoly on a research treasure like our gene pool.....;)
Cheers
I live in Reykjavik, Iceland, and it has become very popular for Icelandic musical artists to have websites that contain the most popular songs on their CD releases...this has been done by several prominent local artists such as Quarashi, Bubbi Morthens and many others.
I think this is a very clever move that actually boosts local sales.
First of all, I find your American clichés extremely annoying. America is neither better nor worse than other countries...you just happen to have a bigger army and economy thanks to the fact that the land you snatched from the Native Americans is very mineral rich and fruitful. You also fail to realise that not everyone agrees with the laws of the country they live in. I, f.e., belive that cannabis smoking should be legalised, yet I am the victim of government agencies that are enforcing laws I do not agree with or consent to abide by. The people who work for government agencies aren't Crusaders in Shining White Armour, coming to the rescue of the victimised and helpless citizens. They're people, like everyone else, people who want their payroll and pension. They don't particularly care about John Doe or his privacy or his rights not to be scrutinized, violated, beaten or abused. I know this may sound extreme and paranoid, but they're part of a machinery that governs society as a whole, a machinery that protects the values and ideals of the wealthiest and most powerful. Their values do not neccesarily coincide with mine, or yours, for that matter.. The individual doesn't come into this. It's a machinery of numbers. You say that only criminals fear the law! I have never heard such preposterous nonsense. Everyone has violated some law at some time. Everyone feels his freedom is violated when he's driving down the street and sees a police car. The automatic reaction is to slow down, drive carefully, ANYTHING to avoid the scrutiny of an agent of that system! Your freedom is inhibited by enforcers such as these. It doesn't help that certain types of people are attracted to positions of official power, such as the FBI or regular police. It attracts people who enjoy having power over others, enjoy the fear they cause. The system is NOT the good guy. The FBI are not valiant defenders of "normal" people. They're a bunch of people with rights to pry into your life. Think about it that way. Criticism is always good. It leads to self-improvement on behalf of the criticised. Intelligent people have been saying that civilisation is crumbling since the invention of the railroad. My Very Long Two Icelandic Crowns.
Wonder why Sybase, Oracle, Informix, DB2, Ingres, and SQL Server get away with charging what they do? Because their products are worth it. I'd *love* it if the Free World would develop an Oracle killer - a Free RDBMS that does transactions, stored procs, triggers, referential integrity, flexible permissions, cross-server transactions, powerful dump/restore facilities, live failover, and all the other great things the commercial products do.
They sell because companies don't like free stuff. They use the logic that what you pay for is what you get. Linux is free and better, but people still use NT. Minor differences in quality is of no consequence. Comapanies want to know that there's a company backing the product they use.
The frailty of this plan of yours is obviously the fact that your connection goes through Britain. It doesn't matter what country it is really, as long as a nation has the power to cut you off, you're vulnerable. The perfect solution would be transfer via satellite, and that the location of the datahaven would remain unknown to all but a few.
It's impossible to maintain independence when you're dependent on Britain allowing your cable.
All the negative comments about films here on Slashdot don't neccessarily mean that the majority of Slashdotters dislike the movies in question.
The fact is that when I like something, I don't feel particularly motivated to share my liking of something with the world, unless it's very strong indeed. However, critisising something and expressing extreme dislike, besides being amusing, also give you an outlet for your hate/dislike/ and anger/fury at having wasted time/money.
Therefore, people with negative opinions are more likely to post them, while people who have positive opinions aren't as motivated.
The Apple UI and Human Interface dudes found this to be the most intuitive, or so I read somewhere. It's like the traffic lights, green, yellow red, that sort of stuff.
"With the selection of PC 3D cards being far superior to that of Mac cards, I do not see the Mac regaining much market share in the professional graphics market."
Uhm, what are Mac video cards? Current Macs ship with an ATI Rage 128 Pro, which sucks, I agree. However, I quite like the Voodoo 3 3500 I have in my B&W G3 Tower. The ports of 3D games are what sucks. Quake and Quake 2 run slower than hell, even with a 3D card. Quake 3 is of course developed natively for Mac and gets good performance.
You can't expect everything to be perfect. Wait 'till the final release in January before you start your bitching.
Apple is under a tremendous amount of pressure in releasing, not merely a good OS, but a GREAT OS, because of all the super-hype surrounding OS X.
You have to consider that they're practically building a new OS for the Mac from scratch (counting out the BSD core, of course). That's no small task, especially since Apple does NOT have endless trillions to spend on the best programmers, like Microsoft. Yet they continue to release bad Windows, year after year after year.
Hey, just me blabbering and responding to a post I found to be ill thought-out.
And sorry about the first-post, guys. I just couldn't resist...=)
Apple will most definitely not open source MacOS X? Why should they? It's their lifeblood. As for moving to Intel/Alpha, they sell hardware and it's their major source of revenue. Why would they do Wintel guys a favor and give them their OS, which they've spent a lot of time and money developing, just so those guys can rip it and install it on an ugly Intel machine?
I think console apps can run straight off, of course those who use GTK won't....and there'll propably have to be some modifications.
I know for one that at least you can run Perl scripts straight from the console, not just from the MacPerl app as in current MacOS...which is the most annoying thing in the world for a Perl lover like myself. In fact, because of this I have been abandoning MacOS in favor of LinuxPPC.
This should also be a tremendous boost for Macs on the server market. The G4's Altivec may not be the most desirable processor trait for servers, but with a beautiful OS like that I think Apple will entice a lot of new buyers into choosing Mac.
Well, it looks like Apple got it right this time. Some of the descriptions in DP3 sounded right awful, like the Dock which could hold any amount of items and they just got smaller the more you added. Some dude at Ars Technica put 3000 items in the Dock and they were so small they all but disappeared. I sure hope they fixed that glitch....and also the clumsy conflict of the Apple icon in the centre of the menu bar that some applications embroil their menus in.
I live in Iceland, and our domain name ending is dot.is. This has brought abouta variety of webpage space names, amongst others www.this.is/username, www.what.is/username, www.somename.is/adjective and so on. Pretty cool, huh?
Yes, your statement is actually correct. Apple hasn't been too supportive of alternative OS's for their Macs. Those Linux distros are more or less hacked, without any noteworthy support from Apple. However, Apple seems to have gotten its act together and realised (that's realized for you Americans.) that the Open Source thing is here to stay and is now pledging their support etc. yadi, yadi, yadi. They even put up a Linux website, although it is somewhat meagre. check it out here:PPC Linux at Apple
Sorry, I apologise. Obviously my source was wrong. I was told that Microsoft never released DOS to IBM until after they'd given them OS/2, which was disaster.
Anyway, I'll get to the bottom of the matter with a few entries in google.
Slashdot Mirror
The Economist is actually a very intelligent and insightful weekly, and most of their column writers really know what they're talking about.
/. If you dig back a couple of years, you can find a this great article where Bill Gates answers various allegations the Economist made against him. Suffice to say, bad little Bill uses the words 'freedom to innovate' in every other sentence throughout the whole piece.
Being a British paper, they do a good job of getting the news across, neutrally. I never read American weeklies anymore: It's all the same propaganda dog food.
I'm glad that someone had the bright idea of pointing out their computer articles to
This shows the obviously distorted priorities that the police are getting due to lobbyists. What's next...police raids on domestic homes to seize that 10 Gig collection? Doesn't Babylon have anything better to do than this???
Capitalism is about competition, not monopoly.
The objective of true capitalism is to provide the cheapest and best services to everyone, while the companies benefit as well.
No sane person can doubt the value of an open capitalist market. Just look at the poor Russian sods.
Don't forget the 68k...=) I'm running Debian 2.2 on an 68LC040. No FPU... =)
As a resident of Reykjavik, Iceland, I am somewhat worried about the whole genetic database thing. As soon as the government consented, I went up to the registry personally and asked to be removed from the database (which they did). It's not that I have anything to hide, or that I even care. It's just that I'm sure there are plenty of people who wouldn't want insurance companies and private companies getting hold of their *very private* medical records. That aside, Iceland is a very small country with only 250 thousand people, and my mother, a doctor in neurology, working for the government, is forced to co-operate with Kari Stefansson, the major shareholder and CEO of DeCode Genetics on a daily basis as part of her job. It's very uncapitalistic to give a company like DeCode a monopoly on a research treasure like our gene pool.....;) Cheers
I live in Reykjavik, Iceland, and it has become very popular for Icelandic musical artists to have websites that contain the most popular songs on their CD releases...this has been done by several prominent local artists such as Quarashi, Bubbi Morthens and many others. I think this is a very clever move that actually boosts local sales.
....there is no sample code, few books that teach it, they're not hyped, not recommended by anyone except yourself.
First of all, I find your American clichés extremely annoying. America is neither better nor worse than other countries...you just happen to have a bigger army and economy thanks to the fact that the land you snatched from the Native Americans is very mineral rich and fruitful. You also fail to realise that not everyone agrees with the laws of the country they live in. I, f.e., belive that cannabis smoking should be legalised, yet I am the victim of government agencies that are enforcing laws I do not agree with or consent to abide by. The people who work for government agencies aren't Crusaders in Shining White Armour, coming to the rescue of the victimised and helpless citizens. They're people, like everyone else, people who want their payroll and pension. They don't particularly care about John Doe or his privacy or his rights not to be scrutinized, violated, beaten or abused. I know this may sound extreme and paranoid, but they're part of a machinery that governs society as a whole, a machinery that protects the values and ideals of the wealthiest and most powerful. Their values do not neccesarily coincide with mine, or yours, for that matter.. The individual doesn't come into this. It's a machinery of numbers. You say that only criminals fear the law! I have never heard such preposterous nonsense. Everyone has violated some law at some time. Everyone feels his freedom is violated when he's driving down the street and sees a police car. The automatic reaction is to slow down, drive carefully, ANYTHING to avoid the scrutiny of an agent of that system! Your freedom is inhibited by enforcers such as these. It doesn't help that certain types of people are attracted to positions of official power, such as the FBI or regular police. It attracts people who enjoy having power over others, enjoy the fear they cause. The system is NOT the good guy. The FBI are not valiant defenders of "normal" people. They're a bunch of people with rights to pry into your life. Think about it that way. Criticism is always good. It leads to self-improvement on behalf of the criticised. Intelligent people have been saying that civilisation is crumbling since the invention of the railroad. My Very Long Two Icelandic Crowns.
Wonder why Sybase, Oracle, Informix, DB2, Ingres, and SQL Server get away with charging what they do? Because their products are worth it. I'd *love* it if the Free World would develop an Oracle killer - a Free RDBMS that does transactions, stored procs, triggers, referential integrity, flexible permissions, cross-server transactions, powerful dump/restore facilities, live failover, and all the other great things the commercial products do.
They sell because companies don't like free stuff. They use the logic that what you pay for is what you get. Linux is free and better, but people still use NT. Minor differences in quality is of no consequence. Comapanies want to know that there's a company backing the product they use.
The frailty of this plan of yours is obviously the fact that your connection goes through Britain. It doesn't matter what country it is really, as long as a nation has the power to cut you off, you're vulnerable. The perfect solution would be transfer via satellite, and that the location of the datahaven would remain unknown to all but a few.
It's impossible to maintain independence when you're dependent on Britain allowing your cable.
All the negative comments about films here on Slashdot don't neccessarily mean that the majority of Slashdotters dislike the movies in question.
The fact is that when I like something, I don't feel particularly motivated to share my liking of something with the world, unless it's very strong indeed. However, critisising something and expressing extreme dislike, besides being amusing, also give you an outlet for your hate/dislike/ and anger/fury at having wasted time/money.
Therefore, people with negative opinions are more likely to post them, while people who have positive opinions aren't as motivated.
The Apple UI and Human Interface dudes found this to be the most intuitive, or so I read somewhere. It's like the traffic lights, green, yellow red, that sort of stuff.
"With the selection of PC 3D cards being far superior to that of Mac cards, I do not see the Mac regaining much market share in the professional graphics market."
Uhm, what are Mac video cards? Current Macs ship with an ATI Rage 128 Pro, which sucks, I agree. However, I quite like the Voodoo 3 3500 I have in my B&W G3 Tower. The ports of 3D games are what sucks. Quake and Quake 2 run slower than hell, even with a 3D card. Quake 3 is of course developed natively for Mac and gets good performance.
Look, dude, this is like a developer release!
You can't expect everything to be perfect. Wait 'till the final release in January before you start your bitching.
Apple is under a tremendous amount of pressure in releasing, not merely a good OS, but a GREAT OS, because of all the super-hype surrounding OS X.
You have to consider that they're practically building a new OS for the Mac from scratch (counting out the BSD core, of course). That's no small task, especially since Apple does NOT have endless trillions to spend on the best programmers, like Microsoft. Yet they continue to release bad Windows, year after year after year.
Hey, just me blabbering and responding to a post I found to be ill thought-out.
And sorry about the first-post, guys. I just couldn't resist...=)
I'd say there were plenty of glitchy users around....=)
Apple will most definitely not open source MacOS X? Why should they? It's their lifeblood. As for moving to Intel/Alpha, they sell hardware and it's their major source of revenue. Why would they do Wintel guys a favor and give them their OS, which they've spent a lot of time and money developing, just so those guys can rip it and install it on an ugly Intel machine?
I think console apps can run straight off, of course those who use GTK won't....and there'll propably have to be some modifications.
I know for one that at least you can run Perl scripts straight from the console, not just from the MacPerl app as in current MacOS...which is the most annoying thing in the world for a Perl lover like myself. In fact, because of this I have been abandoning MacOS in favor of LinuxPPC.
This should also be a tremendous boost for Macs on the server market. The G4's Altivec may not be the most desirable processor trait for servers, but with a beautiful OS like that I think Apple will entice a lot of new buyers into choosing Mac.
Just my 2 Icelandic crowns.
Well, it looks like Apple got it right this time. Some of the descriptions in DP3 sounded right awful, like the Dock which could hold any amount of items and they just got smaller the more you added. Some dude at Ars Technica put 3000 items in the Dock and they were so small they all but disappeared. I sure hope they fixed that glitch....and also the clumsy conflict of the Apple icon in the centre of the menu bar that some applications embroil their menus in.
Hi there
I live in Iceland, and our domain name ending is dot.is. This has brought abouta variety of webpage space names, amongst others www.this.is/username, www.what.is/username, www.somename.is/adjective and so on. Pretty cool, huh?
GIMP is nice, and the name is the coolest around, but sorry guys, it just ain't 10% as good as Photoshop, mostly because of the clumsy UI.
Yes, your statement is actually correct. Apple hasn't been too supportive of alternative OS's for their Macs. Those Linux distros are more or less hacked, without any noteworthy support from Apple. However, Apple seems to have gotten its act together and realised (that's realized for you Americans.) that the Open Source thing is here to stay and is now pledging their support etc. yadi, yadi, yadi. They even put up a Linux website, although it is somewhat meagre. check it out here:PPC Linux at Apple
...at least I don't posts anonymous, as most of the ignorant cowards like yourself do.
Check your syntax. That's "..IN a public forum", not "ON a public forum".
If you haven't mastered the ability to express yourself, whether verbally or in other ways...then don't!
Sorry, I apologise. Obviously my source was wrong. I was told that Microsoft never released DOS to IBM until after they'd given them OS/2, which was disaster.
Anyway, I'll get to the bottom of the matter with a few entries in google.
Please learn spelling before you post in a public forum.
Its "It's perfect though, now that Apple's OS is starting not to suck, their hardware is 500Mhz in a new box?"
not this:
"It's perfict though, now that Apple's OS is starting not to suck, there hardware is 500Mhz in a new box."
There are plenty of fourteen-year olds on Slashdot already, contributing to the general level of ignorance and fanaticism. Please don't add to it.
I think you'll find that backwards compatability on the Mac is considerably more than on Windoze.
Check the benchmarks and you'll see that the G4 500Mhz is toasting the 1Ghz Athlon in a great deal of tests.