There is no reason for Apple to supply everything, but complete support for FTP in the finder would be an obvious extension of the finder's basic function: managing files. Why should the user have to use a different program and user interface to manage files depending what underlying protocol is being used? The finder should transparently handle FTP and SFTP, just the same as it handles Samba, Appleshare, NFS, WebDAV and local files (regardless of file system).
User interface consistency is a good thing, even if it "insults" some developers. I suspect that many of those developers were promtped to write their ftp clients by this glaring deficiency in the finder. If Apple had done it right in the first place, these developers could have devoted their efforts to something more productive than re-inventing the ftp client.
Why??? Why do people use idiotic phrases like "shell out mad coin"? Can someone explain? Why not just use english, or wait for the esperanto revolution?
What makes you think I am a member of the "mac community?"
If you do switch to Wintel I would hope it is because it suits your needs better than your G5, not because of some comment on slashdot - that you appear to have misinterpreted.
I'm sure the apple folks will be crying in their beer over this.
As for me, I was glad to hear that after your extensive Mac OS testing you were finally able to make a purchasing decision. BTW, have you made any other recent decisions that you think the world should know about?
In California, electricity demand in the summer exceeds the capacity of our distribution system, so the utilities have instituted a similar system. In exchange for reduced rates, some big industrial power users have agreed to either shut down completely or switch to off-grid backup generation on short-notice request from the utility. I don't recall any blackouts last summer, so it must be helping. It has also created a new market for large fuel-cell backup generators (Which meet CA emissions rules more easily than diesel generators.)
Interesting. It may be that I am envisioning a system that is more elaborate than it really needs to be. If lived in a colder climate I would definitely want to try that out. As it is, I use more gas for hot water than I do for heating, so I think I'll focus on that. My aging water heater is long overdue for replacement, and I plan to look into a solar DHW system. A few houses in my neighborhood have rooftop solar water heaters, and I bet that even an off-the-shelf system isn't all that expensive.
I will suggest that my brother look into this before he gets too far into the design process. He's in northern California, so it could really pay off for him.
Am I missing something? Both of your links are to purely theoretical discussions with no suggestion that they had actually been built. I googled and looked on Nick Pine's web site and could find nothing to suggest that his design had actually been built. I also saw nothing in his document that suggested that it could be built for $300. By his (low) estimates the glazing alone would cost half that. Not to mention framing timber, concrete, siding, pipes, COPPER HEAT EXCHANGER, etc. Who knows what you might find if you scrounged materials at a junk yard, but new materials would cost several times that. This is not including the biggest cost, labor. Filing fees for the building permits would also be an expense. My brother is planning a new house and has already spent over 20 thousand dollars just on consulting fees for a geologist, an archaeologist, and an engineer in order to comply with building and environmental regulations (This is in California.) and he hasn't even started with actual building.
The biggest cost savings for Pine's design is that it is at ground level, so the weight of the water barrels is not in the roof or attic. I was looking at Delaney's "improved" design, and he is suggesting putting 100 pound/sq. ft. layer of rock in the attic. Most houses would require substantial (and expensive) structural upgrades to handle that much weight.
All of this is ignoring the fact that few urban or suburban houses actually have an unshaded south facing wall.
I really wish it was true that for the price of an iPod we could all cut our heating bills to zero, but I am not convinced.
I don't know about the situation in Australia, but in the US all sources of energy are heavily subsidized, including wind.
Wind turbines in the US are currently profitable (for their investors), but only because they are subsidized in two ways. First, by tax incentives designed to encourage alternative energy development and second, by the electric transmission infrastructure. This infrastructure is much more expensive for distributed energy sources like wind, than for concentrated sources like oil, coal, hydro or nuclear. Also, in the US the best sites for wind development are a long way from population centers. This means that transmission costs (and energy losses) are high. If wind energy generators had to directly pay for their part of the marginal costs of the electric grid, they would not even be close to profitability.
You obviously have no experience with winters in the northern United States, or with the costs of home remodeling. $300? Get serious. I recently paid 3 times that to replace a 30 foot section of backyard fence. Just replacing the shingles on the roof of my small house would cost me 20 times that amount.
A solar heating system capable of heating a house in Connecticut in the winter (if such a thing exists) would require extensive structural modifications and would probably be upwards of 200 thousand dollars. Solar heating (I don't mean water heating) isn't just something you bolt onto your roof; the house needs to be designed around it.
BTW, have you ever ridden a bicycle on icy roads or in a snowstorm? Have you ever seen a snowplow in operation? If so, you should tell those lazy bastards to get out of their SUVs and ride a bike to work.
Energy independence is easy, all you have to do is... well, why don't you just tell us?
Dude, lighten up. I took your post "Safer than wind? to be a light-hearted, off-the-cuff remark, and responded in kind. I had no idea that I was perpetuating a "harmful meme."
Is it possible that "Wind power is safer than nuclear." is also a harmful meme, seriously affecting millions of lives by taking a viable alternative to fossil fuels off the table? Not funny, mate! You should be ashamed.
Anyway, I doubt that we disagree very much about wind power. Whatever you or I think may about it, in the US at least, wind generation is going to be a significant part of our electricity future. Wall Street has recognized that wind generation is profitable and investment dollars are pouring into wind farm development. The major limiting factor for wind development in this country is transmission line and storage capacity.
I don't usually footnote jokes, so if you want hard numbers you can do the research yourself. I have visited the Altamont pass wind farm and have personally seen dead raptors on the ground. Several thousand birds are killed each year at this single wind farm, and this is a significant problem for already threatened birds of prey in California, where wind farms tend to be located in windy mountain passses that concentrate the annual hawk migrations. It is reportedly much less of a problem for the new generation of wind turbines, which are larger and have much slower turning blades, and in other locations (like the American midwest) where the turbines are not concentrated at bottlenecks in the continental flyways.
I would also take issue with your characterization of falun gong as a kind of loose-knit network of like-minded individuals that is "spread informally". Whether or not they have a "secret, central backbone", it is a fact that they are highly organized, with an active international publishing network. Not only do they publish a glossy magazine, "Compassion" with international distribution, but their weekly newspaper, "The Epoch Times" is available at newstands in many American cities, as well as in several other countries. (I know about this because it was deliverd to my door, just a few weeks ago.) Not to mention their presence on the web. They may not be as hierarchical as, say, the Catholic church, but they certainly are organized, and they certainly not "spread informally."
Comparing Falun Gong/Falun Dafa to olympic karate and tae kwon do is clearly absurd. I believe you are confused because you are applying western categories to a non-western culture. In the west, "political groups" and "martial arts disciplines" are completely different and non-overlapping entities. Asia, in contrast, has a long history of political uprisings and dissent arising from martial arts cults. Do you remember reading about the "Boxer Rebellion" in your world history class? What do you think the "boxers" were? And why do you think the Japanese occupation government would bother to ban things like Tae Kwon Do if they didn't see them as a political threat?
If you look into Falun Gong/Falun Dafa literature, even superficially, you would see that it clearly IS a movement with dissident political aims. (And more power to them, IMO.) It certainly isn't just a "sport" or a spiritual self-help group. The current Chinese government is understandably wary of it.
Instead of asking Mormons and former Mormons (how would they know?), you should have asked a geneticist.
The average coefficient of inbreeding among Utah Mormons is 0.000106. The average coefficient of inbreeding in the USA as a whole is 0.0001.
No difference.
Compare this with Baghdad, Iraq, where roughly half of all marriages are between first or second cousins. There the coefficient of inbreeding is 0.0225. Even though this is 225 times the value for Utah or the US, this would not qualify as "heavily inbred."
The original Mormon group was quite large and diverse, as founding populations go, and was only really isolated for one generation, because western expansion of the US population made Salt Lake City a stopping point for wagon trains of settlers and gold prospectors. (Much to the chagrin of the Mormons, who wanted to be isolated.)
What about polygamy? Even in the 19th century when it was approved by the LDS church, only a small minority of mormons actually practiced it.
Although of course there are a few small, isolated groups within Utah that practice consanguinous polygamy, the bottom line is that Utah Mormons as a whole are not "heavily inbred", and they do not "have serious inbreeding issues."
References:
Jorde LB., Inbreeding in the Utah Mormons: an evaluation of estimates based
on pedigrees, isonymy, and migration matrices.
Ann Hum Genet. 1989 Oct;53 ( Pt 4):339-55.
Al-Hamamy, H., Al-Bayati, N., and Al-Kubaisy, W. (1986) Consanguineous
matings in the Iraqi urban population and the effect on pregnancy outcome and
infant mortality. Iraqi Medical Journal 34, 7580.
Freire-Maia, N. (1968) Inbreeding levels in American and Canadian
populations: a comparison with Latin America.
Eugenics Quarterly 15, 2233. (journal is now called "Social Biology")
-- Anonymous Pedant YIAAG (Yes, I am a geneticist)
You should check your facts; the Mormon population is emphatically not "heavily inbred." The reason that they are of interest to medical geneticists is that the Mormon church has compiled a huge database of genealogical records, which allows family relationships to be easily determined.
Why did this get modded up? It is not only factually incorrect, but is basically just an ignorant slur against Mormons.
"Many virii integrate their gene DNA code into the cell DNA: that's what we call lysognic vrii."
If by "we" you mean to imply that you are some kind of biomedical researcher, you must be the only one in the world that thinks that "virii" is a real word.
If you do a pubmed search of the biomedical literature for "virii", this is what you get:
"The following term was not found and ignored: virii."
(It isn't in Websters either.)
VIRUSES! VIRUSES! VIRUSES!
The plural of VIRUS is NOT VIRII! And it is not VRII either.
What the hell is wrong with slashdotters and the word "viruses"?
Furthermore, HIV is not a "lysogenic" virus because by definition only phages (or their host bacteria) can be lysogenic. You probably meant to say that HIV is a retrovirus.
But you don't know in advance which 1% are different, so you still need to do all the sequencing. The "1%" figure you cite is just an estimate, based on a very small sample of individual genomes. In order to get a large sample, you need much cheaper and faster sequencing technology. Hence the prize.
Furthermore, you are missing the point of the prize, which is to promote advances in sequencing technology. If they made the challenge easier then there would be no point.
While it is true that much the current "intelligent design" rhetoric is coming from political/religious think tanks in the US, the intellectual antecedents of design are much older, and British. Most of the arguments - and even some of the specific examples - used by today's "intelligent design theorists" were fully explicated over 200 years ago by the Anglican theologian William Paley. In 19th century England, Paley's writings were required reading for students preparing for the clergy. As a student, Charles Darwin read Paley and was greatly influenced by his thinking.
The roots of the "culture wars" are very deep, and go back long before Darwin published "On the Origin of Species." Despite the simplistic history found in most textbooks, the clash between established religion and evolution preceded Darwin's work. Darwin was participating in a long-running debate about how to reconcile biblical history with the new facts and interpretations of science.
Quibble #1: This is not "nuclear medicine", it is "structural biochemistry." The field of nuclear medicine is concerned with things like radiation therapy and PET scanning.
Quibble #2: Your second link is very outdated. Structures for several prion proteins were determined several years ago, using both X-ray diffraction and NMR methods. Science moves on, but many webpages are never updated.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no reason for Apple to supply everything, but complete support for FTP in the finder would be an obvious extension of the finder's basic function: managing files. Why should the user have to use a different program and user interface to manage files depending what underlying protocol is being used? The finder should transparently handle FTP and SFTP, just the same as it handles Samba, Appleshare, NFS, WebDAV and local files (regardless of file system). User interface consistency is a good thing, even if it "insults" some developers. I suspect that many of those developers were promtped to write their ftp clients by this glaring deficiency in the finder. If Apple had done it right in the first place, these developers could have devoted their efforts to something more productive than re-inventing the ftp client.
Why??? Why do people use idiotic phrases like "shell out mad coin"? Can someone explain? Why not just use english, or wait for the esperanto revolution?
Spelling correction:
There are two "L"s in "disballing."
What you are missing is that tea is a strong diuretic. 10 cups of green tea would have you pissing all day long. Try it and see.
What makes you think I am a member of the "mac community?"
If you do switch to Wintel I would hope it is because it suits your needs better than your G5, not because of some comment on slashdot - that you appear to have misinterpreted.
I'm sure the apple folks will be crying in their beer over this.
As for me, I was glad to hear that after your extensive Mac OS testing you were finally able to make a purchasing decision. BTW, have you made any other recent decisions that you think the world should know about?
In California, electricity demand in the summer exceeds the capacity of our distribution system, so the utilities have instituted a similar system. In exchange for reduced rates, some big industrial power users have agreed to either shut down completely or switch to off-grid backup generation on short-notice request from the utility. I don't recall any blackouts last summer, so it must be helping. It has also created a new market for large fuel-cell backup generators (Which meet CA emissions rules more easily than diesel generators.)
Interesting. It may be that I am envisioning a system that is more elaborate than it really needs to be. If lived in a colder climate I would definitely want to try that out. As it is, I use more gas for hot water than I do for heating, so I think I'll focus on that. My aging water heater is long overdue for replacement, and I plan to look into a solar DHW system. A few houses in my neighborhood have rooftop solar water heaters, and I bet that even an off-the-shelf system isn't all that expensive.
I will suggest that my brother look into this before he gets too far into the design process. He's in northern California, so it could really pay off for him.
Am I missing something? Both of your links are to purely theoretical discussions with no suggestion that they had actually been built. I googled and looked on Nick Pine's web site and could find nothing to suggest that his design had actually been built. I also saw nothing in his document that suggested that it could be built for $300. By his (low) estimates the glazing alone would cost half that. Not to mention framing timber, concrete, siding, pipes, COPPER HEAT EXCHANGER, etc. Who knows what you might find if you scrounged materials at a junk yard, but new materials would cost several times that. This is not including the biggest cost, labor. Filing fees for the building permits would also be an expense. My brother is planning a new house and has already spent over 20 thousand dollars just on consulting fees for a geologist, an archaeologist, and an engineer in order to comply with building and environmental regulations (This is in California.) and he hasn't even started with actual building.
The biggest cost savings for Pine's design is that it is at ground level, so the weight of the water barrels is not in the roof or attic. I was looking at Delaney's "improved" design, and he is suggesting putting 100 pound/sq. ft. layer of rock in the attic. Most houses would require substantial (and expensive) structural upgrades to handle that much weight.
All of this is ignoring the fact that few urban or suburban houses actually have an unshaded south facing wall.
I really wish it was true that for the price of an iPod we could all cut our heating bills to zero, but I am not convinced.
I don't know about the situation in Australia, but in the US all sources of energy are heavily subsidized, including wind.
Wind turbines in the US are currently profitable (for their investors), but only because they are subsidized in two ways. First, by tax incentives designed to encourage alternative energy development and second, by the electric transmission infrastructure. This infrastructure is much more expensive for distributed energy sources like wind, than for concentrated sources like oil, coal, hydro or nuclear. Also, in the US the best sites for wind development are a long way from population centers. This means that transmission costs (and energy losses) are high. If wind energy generators had to directly pay for their part of the marginal costs of the electric grid, they would not even be close to profitability.
You obviously have no experience with winters in the northern United States, or with the costs of home remodeling. $300? Get serious. I recently paid 3 times that to replace a 30 foot section of backyard fence. Just replacing the shingles on the roof of my small house would cost me 20 times that amount.
... well, why don't you just tell us?
A solar heating system capable of heating a house in Connecticut in the winter (if such a thing exists) would require extensive structural modifications and would probably be upwards of 200 thousand dollars. Solar heating (I don't mean water heating) isn't just something you bolt onto your roof; the house needs to be designed around it.
BTW, have you ever ridden a bicycle on icy roads or in a snowstorm? Have you ever seen a snowplow in operation? If so, you should tell those lazy bastards to get out of their SUVs and ride a bike to work.
Energy independence is easy, all you have to do is
Dude, lighten up. I took your post "Safer than wind? to be a light-hearted, off-the-cuff remark, and responded in kind. I had no idea that I was perpetuating a "harmful meme."
Is it possible that "Wind power is safer than nuclear." is also a harmful meme, seriously affecting millions of lives by taking a viable alternative to fossil fuels off the table? Not funny, mate! You should be ashamed.
Anyway, I doubt that we disagree very much about wind power. Whatever you or I think may about it, in the US at least, wind generation is going to be a significant part of our electricity future. Wall Street has recognized that wind generation is profitable and investment dollars are pouring into wind farm development. The major limiting factor for wind development in this country is transmission line and storage capacity.
I don't usually footnote jokes, so if you want hard numbers you can do the research yourself. I have visited the Altamont pass wind farm and have personally seen dead raptors on the ground. Several thousand birds are killed each year at this single wind farm, and this is a significant problem for already threatened birds of prey in California, where wind farms tend to be located in windy mountain passses that concentrate the annual hawk migrations. It is reportedly much less of a problem for the new generation of wind turbines, which are larger and have much slower turning blades, and in other locations (like the American midwest) where the turbines are not concentrated at bottlenecks in the continental flyways.
Much safer, if you happen to be a migratory bird.
I would also take issue with your characterization of falun gong as a kind of loose-knit network of like-minded individuals that is "spread informally". Whether or not they have a "secret, central backbone", it is a fact that they are highly organized, with an active international publishing network. Not only do they publish a glossy magazine, "Compassion" with international distribution, but their weekly newspaper, "The Epoch Times" is available at newstands in many American cities, as well as in several other countries. (I know about this because it was deliverd to my door, just a few weeks ago.) Not to mention their presence on the web. They may not be as hierarchical as, say, the Catholic church, but they certainly are organized, and they certainly not "spread informally."
Comparing Falun Gong/Falun Dafa to olympic karate and tae kwon do is clearly absurd. I believe you are confused because you are applying western categories to a non-western culture. In the west, "political groups" and "martial arts disciplines" are completely different and non-overlapping entities. Asia, in contrast, has a long history of political uprisings and dissent arising from martial arts cults. Do you remember reading about the "Boxer Rebellion" in your world history class? What do you think the "boxers" were? And why do you think the Japanese occupation government would bother to ban things like Tae Kwon Do if they didn't see them as a political threat?
If you look into Falun Gong/Falun Dafa literature, even superficially, you would see that it clearly IS a movement with dissident political aims. (And more power to them, IMO.) It certainly isn't just a "sport" or a spiritual self-help group. The current Chinese government is understandably wary of it.
Instead of asking Mormons and former Mormons (how would they know?), you should have asked a geneticist.
The average coefficient of inbreeding among Utah Mormons is 0.000106.
The average coefficient of inbreeding in the USA as a whole is 0.0001.
No difference.
Compare this with Baghdad, Iraq, where roughly half of all marriages are between first or second cousins. There the coefficient of inbreeding is 0.0225. Even though this is 225 times the value for Utah or the US, this would not qualify as "heavily inbred."
The original Mormon group was quite large and diverse, as founding populations go, and was only really isolated for one generation, because western expansion of the US population made Salt Lake City a stopping point for wagon trains of settlers and gold prospectors. (Much to the chagrin of the Mormons, who wanted to be isolated.)
What about polygamy? Even in the 19th century when it was approved by the LDS church, only a small minority of mormons actually practiced it.
Although of course there are a few small, isolated groups within Utah that practice consanguinous polygamy, the bottom line is that Utah Mormons as a whole are not "heavily inbred", and they do not "have serious inbreeding issues."
References:
Jorde LB., Inbreeding in the Utah Mormons: an evaluation of estimates based
on pedigrees, isonymy, and migration matrices.
Ann Hum Genet. 1989 Oct;53 ( Pt 4):339-55.
Al-Hamamy, H., Al-Bayati, N., and Al-Kubaisy, W. (1986) Consanguineous
matings in the Iraqi urban population and the effect on pregnancy outcome and
infant mortality. Iraqi Medical Journal 34, 7580.
Freire-Maia, N. (1968) Inbreeding levels in American and Canadian
populations: a comparison with Latin America.
Eugenics Quarterly 15, 2233. (journal is now called "Social Biology")
-- Anonymous Pedant YIAAG (Yes, I am a geneticist)
You can get a better quality stick-on convex mirror at any decent auto parts store. Works for me.
You should check your facts; the Mormon population is emphatically not "heavily inbred." The reason that they are of interest to medical geneticists is that the Mormon church has compiled a huge database of genealogical records, which allows family relationships to be easily determined.
Why did this get modded up? It is not only factually incorrect, but is basically just an ignorant slur against Mormons.
(No, I'm not a Mormon.)
"Many virii integrate their gene DNA code into the cell DNA: that's what we call lysognic vrii."
If by "we" you mean to imply that you are some kind of biomedical researcher, you must be the only one in the world that thinks that "virii" is a real word.
If you do a pubmed search of the biomedical literature for "virii", this is what you get:
"The following term was not found and ignored: virii."
(It isn't in Websters either.)
VIRUSES! VIRUSES! VIRUSES!
The plural of VIRUS is NOT VIRII! And it is not VRII either.
What the hell is wrong with slashdotters and the word "viruses"?
Furthermore, HIV is not a "lysogenic" virus because by definition only phages (or their host bacteria) can be lysogenic. You probably meant to say that HIV is a retrovirus.
Also:
lysogEnic
lymphocytE
-- Annoyed Molecular Biologist
But you don't know in advance which 1% are different, so you still need to do all the sequencing. The "1%" figure you cite is just an estimate, based on a very small sample of individual genomes. In order to get a large sample, you need much cheaper and faster sequencing technology. Hence the prize.
Furthermore, you are missing the point of the prize, which is to promote advances in sequencing technology. If they made the challenge easier then there would be no point.
-- Anonymous Pedant
Someday these smug mac users are going to get their comeuppance.
Really.
Someday.
Any day now...
correction: should be "...much OF the current..."
While it is true that much the current "intelligent design" rhetoric is coming from political/religious think tanks in the US, the intellectual antecedents of design are much older, and British. Most of the arguments - and even some of the specific examples - used by today's "intelligent design theorists" were fully explicated over 200 years ago by the Anglican theologian William Paley. In 19th century England, Paley's writings were required reading for students preparing for the clergy. As a student, Charles Darwin read Paley and was greatly influenced by his thinking.
The roots of the "culture wars" are very deep, and go back long before Darwin published "On the Origin of Species." Despite the simplistic history found in most textbooks, the clash between established religion and evolution preceded Darwin's work. Darwin was participating in a long-running debate about how to reconcile biblical history with the new facts and interpretations of science.
-- Anonymous Pedant
Quibble #1: This is not "nuclear medicine", it is "structural biochemistry."
. htm
The field of nuclear medicine is concerned with things like radiation therapy and PET scanning.
http://science.howstuffworks.com/nuclear-medicine
http://jnm.snmjournals.org/
http://www.biomedcentral.com/bmcnuclmed/
Quibble #2: Your second link is very outdated. Structures for several prion proteins were determined several years ago, using both X-ray diffraction and NMR methods. Science moves on, but many webpages are never updated.