I wonder if it wouldn't be possible to figure out how the code they added to prevent it from actually becoming a true DDOS works, and prevent it from working?
Twenty-five thousand years ago is quite close to when man is thought to have arrived in central Asia (from Africa).
Bzzzt. Wrong answer.
First off, try reading the article. The slashdot blurb is so wrong it isn't even funny. The tools appear to be 25,000 years than the previous earliest known in the new world - which was NOT Clovis. These things are from about 50,000 years ago. Humans in the new world 25,000 years ago has been known for many years. The population just seems to have been tiny, prior to the asian immigrations starting ancestral to Clovis - but there were people here. Just not very many.
Either modern humans developed somewhat earlier than we thought, or else they spread over the earth in a flash, like some extremely virulent form of kudzu or something.
Wrong again, even the 50,000 years ago figure is in no way threatening to Old World chronologies, and there have been humans in central Asia for FAR more than 50,000 years. The article itself says this, but it is laughably wrong - the journalist in this case clearly misunderstood his source. Human inhabitation of central asia goes back at least twice that far.
Incorporating is to protect you from bullshit, it costs less then 100 dollors.
- you know, the way USDs are sliding nowadays, these new dollors maybe a good deal.
BTW., in Canada it cost me around 700CAD to incorporate 3.5 years ago.
The fees vary immensely in the US depending on what State you incorporate in, among other things. Delaware has very corporation-friendly laws in many ways, and is famous for being the state where you can incorporate for $100.
At any rate, the original post in this thread makes exactly the point I was thinking of, although it oversimplifies a bit. It's not enough to simply incorporate, you also need legal advice to make sure that you avoid making mistakes that could lead a court to set aside the corporate veil - that rarely happens, because most corporations have legal counsel and are careful to avoid these things, but it's a particular danger for a one-man corporation that doesn't have luxuries like a full-time legal staff.
Also, he asks about performing patent-searches to try and avoid infringing - it's my understanding this is a very bad idea. There are so many patents issued that this would be a very expensive search, in terms of time, the results for anything non-trivial are most likely going to be positive (that is, there are probably patents covering it - whether or not those palents are valid can only be determined by long and expensive litigation however) and if you do such a search the only real effect is to make any infringement willfull meaning you could face enhanced damages.
I think the best advice is to form a corporation, pay yourself a wage (relatively high, but within market norms for what you're doing, as soon as the corporation has the cashflow to do it,) no patent searches. But most importantly, you need competent legal counsel. IANAL, this is not legal advice, and if it were, you'd be crazy to take legal advice from a slashdot post, yadda yadda yadda.
It's not that needing to talk to a lawyer in this situation is a new thing, either. But the patent situation definately means longer talks, and more money paid, as well as a much higher probability of eventually having the corporation taken away from you by some freeloader with a patent, and being left with nothing but the memories and whatever is left of your personal salary. So while the lone coder may not be dead, he's definately starting to look endangered.
You can't carbon date stone. What you do is attempt to find carbon material underneath the stone to date. Find something that was dropped under it when it was erected, date that, and you have the date of construction.
Of course, there's no simple, clean way to be sure you got the right thing to date, but if you take several carefully chosen samples you can have some confidence in the results.
The stones have also been dated by other methods - including measurements of decay effects in the rock itself caused by sunlight.
The earliest construction of the Henge didn't use any stone - it was dated by means of several carbon artifacts, including antlers, at around 5100 years ago. This was a circle of wooden poles, not stones. The bluestones, the smaller stones of the henge, seem to have been erected around 500 years later.
Mmm no that's not true at all. Not on Windows. It was at least mostly true on NeXT, and is mostly true now on Macs, but it's never been true of Windows. The routines for printing to a printer and to the screen are completely separate.
Version 6.1(DOS) was a very good version, in my view. Stable (6.0 had some problems but we got a free upgrade and 6.1 fixed them,) keystroke compatibility with 5.1 on toggle with a more GUI mode that was easier for new users, and also for the first time with a WYSIWYG mode which I found helpful when working with charts and graphs. But several people in the office asked me to roll back 5.1 anyway - they already knew how to do everything with it, and it did run faster in less memory - very important running it on the 486s of the day, particularly if you were using Windows to multitask.
It was really still lightyears ahead of MSWord - hell, it's still lightyears ahead of MSWord, yet MSWord took over the market. I don't have a firm opinion yet on to what degree that was due to MicroSoft being better at marketing and to what degree they actually crossed the line into illegality, but from a cursory look at the complaint and the coverage at Groklaw it looks like Novell may have a case.
Actually that's part of what they are alleging MicroSoft caused I believe. MS told them that OS/2 was the way to go, not to worry about a Windows implementation, and then hid the APIs needed to make a good Windows implementation at the same time.
But I do agree, the early WPWin was pretty bad, where I worked we stuck with the DOS versions, which fortunately ran quite well under Windows anyway.
Actually, if you really want to go there, well over 90% of voters chose either Kerry or Bush one, so there you go. Grandparents point is made. If there is intelligent life in these parts, it's certainly not very common.
I think the problem isn't a lack of good programmers, that's for sure. MS has the best programmers money can buy (are YOU for sale?) But their programmers have to work within the framework set down by management and marketing, and that's where some big problems get set in. The programmers cannot solve the basic problems - all they can do is try to work around them.
Many of the problems with MS products boil down to design-architecture issues that the programmers absolutely have no say over, that are decided for legal or marketing reasons. The programmers aren't the ones that decide to come up with a new, more bloated and more obfuscated set of file formats every release of office. The programmers aren't the ones that decided IE had to be split up into libraries and 'integrated' with the shell to create a legal defense. The programmers probably didn't have much to say about the general tack of MS over the years towards more and more 'integration' of code - which makes it practically impossible to do a good security audit.
They do their best to work within those decisions, and they make herculean efforts at times, I'm sure. But you can only patch a fundamentally wrongheaded design so far.
Actually this sort of situation came up in Burgess' 1985 - the protagonist, a schoolteacher who becomes homeless and unemployable because he refuses to be a member of a union, makes do for awhile by trading lessons in archaic languages and literature to 'street tough' youths. And it makes some sense. When learning is outlawed, adolescents will want it again.
Hmm not exactly. Power > PowerPC. PPC is a subset of Power, a point which TFA does mention, and explain a bit.
The PowerPC architecture that was born of this partnership is -- and always was -- a 64-bit architecture derived from the IBM POWER architecture.[...] Note that the performance of the PowerPC 970 family actually exceeds that of its award-winning parent, the high-end IBM POWER4 processor, in many areas. This is due to the fact that the circuit and process technology used for the POWER4 processor was designed to achieve levels of reliability necessary for the continuous availability server market -- levels that can be relaxed for the desktop and small-scale server market -- at the expense of transistor switching speed. Thus, the fabrication technology used for the PowerPC 970 was designed to eke out higher performance by trading away reliability; for these markets, the trade-off between reliability and performance is different.
And yes, folks, it is a dupe. And a very recent one too. At least this time they got it in two different sections, first Apple, then Hardware. I'd have to say that Hardware is a better place for it, it's definately NOT just Apple that uses these chips.
This is true. But spam is not a social problem. It's simply trespassing. The problem here is simply that the law is too behind the times to see that, and thus it isn't treated as such. It's a property-rights issue, simply put. Spammers are tresspassers and thieves, and should be treated as such.
Spam will never end as long as there will be fools who buy products advertised by unsolicited commercial e-mail.
Idiots who buy from spammers are a big problem, certainly. And if we could magically banish such idiots from the net, that would be great. But their actions, while stupid, are not criminal.
Actually, the first 'holocaust denier' to publish was Paul Rassinier, a French Communist Resistance fighter who was interred in a concentration camp himself, and he's far from the only leftist who's had doubts on that score.
Nice fuzzy logic there. How many of those 40 Microsoft vulnerabilities were related to Internet Explorer? Yes, it's Microsoft's fault for integrating it in the OS, but if you are using Server 2003 O/S to cruise the web with an admin rights role, you are the security problem, not the OS.
There are so many things wrong with that statement in the real world. Perhaps the most important one conceptually, and one that none of the other replies have touched on, is that you don't actually have to intentionally run IE in order for it to get invoked! I hear all the time how if people run Mozilla instead, all the worries with IE are gone, but that's not entirely true. It's a security risk just sitting on the disk, never intentionally used by anyone.
Second, as has already been mentioned, patches and updates? Sure, on a server you probably shouldn't be running a web browser, but you shouldn't have a videocard and monitor on a server either. In the windows world, however, both are required. There is no apt-get, there is no console-only mode.
Re:I'll be the 1st one to say *iirrk*, take it awa
on
10 Years of OpenStep
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Your aesthetics are certainly not universal. I think the GNUStep stuff on linux looks far better than Aqua, which looks like something a radioactive clown threw up. And I'm writing this on my mac, which I love - I'm not slamming it, it's a great machine, but it's always pissed me off how they fucked up the single best looking system on earth with all this pulsating gumdrop bullshit.
And you can theme GNUStep stuff pretty easily to make it look more like what you want, anyway.
I can't imagine running KDE on a P2 with 64M. I have a Libretto, 64M (that's the max it supports) and a 266 MHz CPU. I can run Windowmaker and it's OK, but with any of the "desktops" it's swapping its little heart out. It runs Windows 2000 just fine.
That sounds very very wrong to me. I've run KDE on a 486, and it was usable, although it was much better to drop back to plain windowmaker. On this P2 I mentioned it runs very nicely. Any machine that can handle Win2k should run Linux/X11/KDE just great - in your case I'd definately look for possible hardware problems, misconfigurations, maybe compilation problems... look at the distro. Some distros are definately built with the assumption that they're going to be installed on very powerful hardware, and some are just sloppy - I certainly hope it's been fixed by now, but I remember having massive troubles with RedHat KDE on a less-than-latest-and-greatest machine awhile back and finally realising that all the KDE components had been compiled with debugging symbols and so were something like 10 times the size that they should have been - with obvious affects on memory usage. I wiped that machine and installed Slackware on it instead and had KDE running quite smoothly where it would swap just to load an xterm before.
Yes, I like the customizability in X window managers, but the problem is that the customizations stop at the window manager level. Every application below that has its own settings... if you have multiple apps using the same toolkit you can often get them all tweaked together, but otherwise you're stuck. On Mac OS X, change a setting and it changes globally. I've switched from the Aqua look and feel to a theme called "Milk", disabled the metal look for all Cocoa apps (Carbon apps like iTunes are still metal, alas), and everything follows it, all the way down to the buttons in Firefox or Safari web pages.
I do the same thing, except I'm using a theme called 'Platinum.' Now KDE compares favourably here - instead of just changing the button look, for instance, you can also change the layout - but at least it gets rid of that bloody pulsating glowing gumball shite.
But as to the lack of toolkit uniformity in X, you're really looking at it the wrong way. If you want a uniform GUI environment, you set up all KDE apps, all GNOME apps, all GNUStep apps (this would be my preference, but at the moment there aren't enough people making those and I don't happen to have the money to hire a bunch of programmers to remedy that.) Nothing is stopping you from doing that, and that's what 'desktop' oriented distros should be doing. X doesn't require you to run different toolkits - it just gives you the freedom to do so. If you're running KDE, and there is an app you need that doesn't exist in a good KDE version, but there is one that uses GNOME or XForms or whatever you can use it - even though it looks a little different - or you can decide not to use it. If the app you want doesn't exist for Aqua, or W32, you can't just grab one from the other platform and use it.
The main advantage to a big screen, like the 1400x1050 15" screen on the Thinkpad, is you don't need to worry about virtual desktops and window shading... there's plenty of space to work in. Two screens is even better.
I guess our preferences just differ, but this is certainly not how I see it. The largest screen I've ever worked with for long was 27", and I certainly still wanted multiple desktops with it. The extra resolution and size is nice, but it's no substitute for me, just a bonus. And on a laptop - I have, as I think I mentioned, a 15" PowerBook and I'd happily trade it for a little iBook with the same power. I bought it because at the time of purchase there wasn't an iBook with the power I needed, but there is now. The larger screen, while nice, is something I'd be willing to give up for smaller size and better battery life. Particularly since you can always plug it into a larger monitor when you're not on the move.
I don't like window shading all that much.
And that's a matter of personal preference, and a happy accident for you since OSX dropped it, but I find it extremely useful, and I know that a LOT of old Mac heads are lost without it. Just because you, personally, don't like it, doesn't make the decision to drop it out of the system make sense. Many many people do like it, and in many cases it's much more usable than minimisation to the dock.
Which server are you using? I've got a piss-poor Mac, and X11 apps are often more responsive than Aqua ones, once I turn off Quartz Extreme (which duplicates the X11 bitmaps in the GPU, and thus increases copying overhead and memory use).
Apples X11 server. Turn off quartz extreme? Apple touts that as a huge performance advantage on the page linked above, and there doesn't seem to be any obvious way to turn it off. I used another X11 server for awhile, from gnuosx I think it was, but performance seemed about the same on either - fine as long as you're only running an xterm, but rather abyssimal with openoffice loaded.
I can't stand using KDE or Gnome on my PC, Windowmaker's great, but any of the "desktop style" environments suck up too many computrons.
I'm very sympathetic to the point of view, I'm a big WindowMaker fan myself, but when setting up a system quickly, particularly for a less technical user, either KDE or Gnome can be quite helpful. I used to run a Gnome panel with WindowMaker, then decided the panel was dross and killed it, but of course keeping plenty of apps. I recently setup a system for a friend, an old P2 with 64mb Ram, using Debian (because of net install, actually, although I'm quite happy with how it's running it wasn't my first choice otherwise) and the version of KDE in testing runs really well on that machine. It also is very nice in that it asks you a few questions the first time you run it from a given account, and configures itself to your specifications quite well from that. Of course you can fine tune later - which I did of course (I generally like the 'Mac-like settings' - but I then go in and change a few things, particularly turning on focus-under-mouse) but for the non-technical user it's perfect - used to Windows? click this button and it will behave pretty much like Windows. Used to Mac? Click this button instead, and it will generally follow mac conventions (not perfectly, of course, but what other system will even try?) Used to slaving in front of a Sun station? There's a setting for that too. Show me any alternative that will give you that kind of customisability, in a package that's friendly enough for the non-computer type of person to sit down and use, and run on so little hardware? Neither Windows nor OSX are half as friendly in terms of adapting themselves to your preference (without installing a bunch of third party software, at least) and neither OSX nor any recent version of Windows will run so well on hardware of that vintage either.
That's an easy one: Because I can't afford to spend $2000 on a computer. That's a $1500 premium over the x86-based box that would satisfy my requirements.
Ahh yes, of course. That makes perfect sense.
I'll debate the battery some other time, but for the former, that just means that particular premium is worth it for you, it's not for me, and again I can't buy a Mac without it.
True. It definately is worth it to me, and to everyone else I know that uses one on a daily basis, so to me it seems they've done a great job here, but of course requirements do vary.
Have you tried it? Apple used to make a laptop with higher resolution than typical, and people didn't go "oh, we don't need that resolution", they went, "oh, it's jewel-like".
Yes, I've tried higher resolution on a screen the same size. I didn't see much point in it.
OS X will do anything that I know of that Linux can do on a laptop, and it does it with better display drivers. I mean anything: If you want a window manager with virtual desktops, you can run Desktops Manager on Aqua, or you can simply install and run the same X11-based software you'd be running on Linux.
I disagree. Without adding third-party commercial software it won't do a fraction of what any linux distro does out of the box, and even with it it still falls short.
Desktop Manager is a nice idea, but it's alpha, and every time I've tried to use it it doesn't work. It makes the expanding animation and... that's it. Nothing happens. Assuming it hung, I go command-alt-escape to kill it, and it isn't even running. No idea what the problem is, don't have time to try and debug it thoroughly. Hopefully the next version will work for me. But Aqua should have that functionality out of the box in any case!
Out of the box Aqua doesn't even have window shading, for christs sake! The underpinnings of the OS are a great step forward from OS9, but the GUI itself sucks. It's really a horrifying pile of poor design decisions and oversights, the worst job Apple has ever done IMOP. And even with lots of third party commercial software to try and compensate, it's still quite impossible to get it to perform as well as, say, I can get KDE to behave in 5 minutes.
That said, as horrid as Aqua is, it's still a lot better than the Windows interface, which is the reason I got a Mac laptop. Linux wasn't an option, as there are a handful of proprietary apps that were absolute requirements on this machine...
And as to running an X-server under Aqua, it doesn't seem to work nearly as well as it should. OpenOffice, for instance, under X, seems to max out my memory (I've got 512mb installed) and reduce my poor TiBook to swapping all on it's own. Whereas it runs wonderfully on a linux box with only 64MB ram, under KDE, XFCE, or WindowMaker, and the TiBook also runs like a dream until I start up the X server. Besides which, it's still running inside Aqua, maybe it's possible to get the Aqua dock and desktop and all to turn off and just use the display drivers for an X server, but if so I haven't seen it.
Certainly their models can't compete with building it yourself for configuration flexibility. But, listening to what you want, I don't see why you wouldn't just grab a PowerMac.
I can get a new 15" 1024x768 Windows laptop for under $1000. I can get one with a 15" screen that can display 1280x1024 for the same price as a 14" iBook with a 1024x768 screen.
But the iBook will be lighter, and the battery will last longer. That's more important in my view than squeezing a higher resolution out, and I probably wouldn't use the higher resolution anyway. Running a small screen at a high resolution is just a way to get eyestrain.
If you look at the 15" Powerbook I can get an IBM Thinkpad with the best keyboard on the market that'll display 1400x1050.
My 15" PowerBook is my baby. I love the thing. I wouldn't want any higher resolution - it would be a waste, the 15" screen isn't big enough to make use of any more for me, and a bigger screen would make it less portable, which would be counterproductive.
And while I agree that OS X is preferable to Windows, and that was why I bought this machine - I'd definately prefer to throw Linux on it. And I plan to, once my current contract runs out and I no longer require a couple of proprietary programs that only run on Mac or Windows. Once you re-theme the Mac to get rid of the hideous glowing gumdrops and stuff, it's pretty usable in comparison to Windows, but I curse it everyday for not having virtual desktops for instance.
I never got to use an Alpha, but it was my understanding that what killed them was simply economy of scale.
"Weak atheism" vs "agnosticism" == distinction without a difference
Not at all. Atheism is the absence of theism - the absence of a belief in a G-d on the middle-eastern monotheistic model. Agnosticism is the absence of gnosticism - the doctrine of direct knowledge of the divine. Quite different things.
The irony is that 'orthodox' religious folks are agnostics, although they generally don't realise it.
No, they're not. You're falling into the trap religionists love to lay - buying their trojan definition of atheism.
Atheism is not a belief in a negative. It's a lack of belief in a positive. A-theism. Not theism, or without theism. To be an atheist does not require a faith in the non-existence of G-d, simply an absence of faith in the existence of G-d, which is to say, an absence of theism.
Very wrong. VirtualPC does indeed emulate an x86 CPU on PPC hardware already, and it does it very well. This is not a hard trick to do. The PPC architecture is more than capable of it.
What is hard is to do the opposite - to emulate a PPC on the more limited x86 design. But there are products that do that too. They are quite slow - but emulating an x86 chip on PPC is not.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if it wouldn't be possible to figure out how the code they added to prevent it from actually becoming a true DDOS works, and prevent it from working?
Bzzzt. Wrong answer.
First off, try reading the article. The slashdot blurb is so wrong it isn't even funny. The tools appear to be 25,000 years than the previous earliest known in the new world - which was NOT Clovis. These things are from about 50,000 years ago. Humans in the new world 25,000 years ago has been known for many years. The population just seems to have been tiny, prior to the asian immigrations starting ancestral to Clovis - but there were people here. Just not very many.
Wrong again, even the 50,000 years ago figure is in no way threatening to Old World chronologies, and there have been humans in central Asia for FAR more than 50,000 years. The article itself says this, but it is laughably wrong - the journalist in this case clearly misunderstood his source. Human inhabitation of central asia goes back at least twice that far.
Depending on the exact definition of 'ape.' A case can be made that humans are most properly considered a species of great apes ourselves, after all.
But then you lose the limited liability protections that are the main point to incorporation in this situation.
The fees vary immensely in the US depending on what State you incorporate in, among other things. Delaware has very corporation-friendly laws in many ways, and is famous for being the state where you can incorporate for $100.
At any rate, the original post in this thread makes exactly the point I was thinking of, although it oversimplifies a bit. It's not enough to simply incorporate, you also need legal advice to make sure that you avoid making mistakes that could lead a court to set aside the corporate veil - that rarely happens, because most corporations have legal counsel and are careful to avoid these things, but it's a particular danger for a one-man corporation that doesn't have luxuries like a full-time legal staff.
Also, he asks about performing patent-searches to try and avoid infringing - it's my understanding this is a very bad idea. There are so many patents issued that this would be a very expensive search, in terms of time, the results for anything non-trivial are most likely going to be positive (that is, there are probably patents covering it - whether or not those palents are valid can only be determined by long and expensive litigation however) and if you do such a search the only real effect is to make any infringement willfull meaning you could face enhanced damages.
I think the best advice is to form a corporation, pay yourself a wage (relatively high, but within market norms for what you're doing, as soon as the corporation has the cashflow to do it,) no patent searches. But most importantly, you need competent legal counsel. IANAL, this is not legal advice, and if it were, you'd be crazy to take legal advice from a slashdot post, yadda yadda yadda.
It's not that needing to talk to a lawyer in this situation is a new thing, either. But the patent situation definately means longer talks, and more money paid, as well as a much higher probability of eventually having the corporation taken away from you by some freeloader with a patent, and being left with nothing but the memories and whatever is left of your personal salary. So while the lone coder may not be dead, he's definately starting to look endangered.
You can't carbon date stone. What you do is attempt to find carbon material underneath the stone to date. Find something that was dropped under it when it was erected, date that, and you have the date of construction.
Of course, there's no simple, clean way to be sure you got the right thing to date, but if you take several carefully chosen samples you can have some confidence in the results.
The stones have also been dated by other methods - including measurements of decay effects in the rock itself caused by sunlight.
The earliest construction of the Henge didn't use any stone - it was dated by means of several carbon artifacts, including antlers, at around 5100 years ago. This was a circle of wooden poles, not stones. The bluestones, the smaller stones of the henge, seem to have been erected around 500 years later.
Mmm no that's not true at all. Not on Windows. It was at least mostly true on NeXT, and is mostly true now on Macs, but it's never been true of Windows. The routines for printing to a printer and to the screen are completely separate.
Version 6.1(DOS) was a very good version, in my view. Stable (6.0 had some problems but we got a free upgrade and 6.1 fixed them,) keystroke compatibility with 5.1 on toggle with a more GUI mode that was easier for new users, and also for the first time with a WYSIWYG mode which I found helpful when working with charts and graphs. But several people in the office asked me to roll back 5.1 anyway - they already knew how to do everything with it, and it did run faster in less memory - very important running it on the 486s of the day, particularly if you were using Windows to multitask.
It was really still lightyears ahead of MSWord - hell, it's still lightyears ahead of MSWord, yet MSWord took over the market. I don't have a firm opinion yet on to what degree that was due to MicroSoft being better at marketing and to what degree they actually crossed the line into illegality, but from a cursory look at the complaint and the coverage at Groklaw it looks like Novell may have a case.
Actually that's part of what they are alleging MicroSoft caused I believe. MS told them that OS/2 was the way to go, not to worry about a Windows implementation, and then hid the APIs needed to make a good Windows implementation at the same time.
But I do agree, the early WPWin was pretty bad, where I worked we stuck with the DOS versions, which fortunately ran quite well under Windows anyway.
Absolutely. I love my Mac - but I absolutely detest Aqua.
Actually, if you really want to go there, well over 90% of voters chose either Kerry or Bush one, so there you go. Grandparents point is made. If there is intelligent life in these parts, it's certainly not very common.
I think the problem isn't a lack of good programmers, that's for sure. MS has the best programmers money can buy (are YOU for sale?) But their programmers have to work within the framework set down by management and marketing, and that's where some big problems get set in. The programmers cannot solve the basic problems - all they can do is try to work around them.
Many of the problems with MS products boil down to design-architecture issues that the programmers absolutely have no say over, that are decided for legal or marketing reasons. The programmers aren't the ones that decide to come up with a new, more bloated and more obfuscated set of file formats every release of office. The programmers aren't the ones that decided IE had to be split up into libraries and 'integrated' with the shell to create a legal defense. The programmers probably didn't have much to say about the general tack of MS over the years towards more and more 'integration' of code - which makes it practically impossible to do a good security audit.
They do their best to work within those decisions, and they make herculean efforts at times, I'm sure. But you can only patch a fundamentally wrongheaded design so far.
Actually this sort of situation came up in Burgess' 1985 - the protagonist, a schoolteacher who becomes homeless and unemployable because he refuses to be a member of a union, makes do for awhile by trading lessons in archaic languages and literature to 'street tough' youths. And it makes some sense. When learning is outlawed, adolescents will want it again.
Hmm not exactly. Power > PowerPC. PPC is a subset of Power, a point which TFA does mention, and explain a bit.
And yes, folks, it is a dupe. And a very recent one too. At least this time they got it in two different sections, first Apple, then Hardware. I'd have to say that Hardware is a better place for it, it's definately NOT just Apple that uses these chips.
This is true. But spam is not a social problem. It's simply trespassing. The problem here is simply that the law is too behind the times to see that, and thus it isn't treated as such. It's a property-rights issue, simply put. Spammers are tresspassers and thieves, and should be treated as such.
Idiots who buy from spammers are a big problem, certainly. And if we could magically banish such idiots from the net, that would be great. But their actions, while stupid, are not criminal.
Actually, the first 'holocaust denier' to publish was Paul Rassinier, a French Communist Resistance fighter who was interred in a concentration camp himself, and he's far from the only leftist who's had doubts on that score.
There are so many things wrong with that statement in the real world. Perhaps the most important one conceptually, and one that none of the other replies have touched on, is that you don't actually have to intentionally run IE in order for it to get invoked! I hear all the time how if people run Mozilla instead, all the worries with IE are gone, but that's not entirely true. It's a security risk just sitting on the disk, never intentionally used by anyone.
Second, as has already been mentioned, patches and updates? Sure, on a server you probably shouldn't be running a web browser, but you shouldn't have a videocard and monitor on a server either. In the windows world, however, both are required. There is no apt-get, there is no console-only mode.
Your aesthetics are certainly not universal. I think the GNUStep stuff on linux looks far better than Aqua, which looks like something a radioactive clown threw up. And I'm writing this on my mac, which I love - I'm not slamming it, it's a great machine, but it's always pissed me off how they fucked up the single best looking system on earth with all this pulsating gumdrop bullshit.
And you can theme GNUStep stuff pretty easily to make it look more like what you want, anyway.
That sounds very very wrong to me. I've run KDE on a 486, and it was usable, although it was much better to drop back to plain windowmaker. On this P2 I mentioned it runs very nicely. Any machine that can handle Win2k should run Linux/X11/KDE just great - in your case I'd definately look for possible hardware problems, misconfigurations, maybe compilation problems... look at the distro. Some distros are definately built with the assumption that they're going to be installed on very powerful hardware, and some are just sloppy - I certainly hope it's been fixed by now, but I remember having massive troubles with RedHat KDE on a less-than-latest-and-greatest machine awhile back and finally realising that all the KDE components had been compiled with debugging symbols and so were something like 10 times the size that they should have been - with obvious affects on memory usage. I wiped that machine and installed Slackware on it instead and had KDE running quite smoothly where it would swap just to load an xterm before.
I do the same thing, except I'm using a theme called 'Platinum.' Now KDE compares favourably here - instead of just changing the button look, for instance, you can also change the layout - but at least it gets rid of that bloody pulsating glowing gumball shite.
But as to the lack of toolkit uniformity in X, you're really looking at it the wrong way. If you want a uniform GUI environment, you set up all KDE apps, all GNOME apps, all GNUStep apps (this would be my preference, but at the moment there aren't enough people making those and I don't happen to have the money to hire a bunch of programmers to remedy that.) Nothing is stopping you from doing that, and that's what 'desktop' oriented distros should be doing. X doesn't require you to run different toolkits - it just gives you the freedom to do so. If you're running KDE, and there is an app you need that doesn't exist in a good KDE version, but there is one that uses GNOME or XForms or whatever you can use it - even though it looks a little different - or you can decide not to use it. If the app you want doesn't exist for Aqua, or W32, you can't just grab one from the other platform and use it.
I guess our preferences just differ, but this is certainly not how I see it. The largest screen I've ever worked with for long was 27", and I certainly still wanted multiple desktops with it. The extra resolution and size is nice, but it's no substitute for me, just a bonus. And on a laptop - I have, as I think I mentioned, a 15" PowerBook and I'd happily trade it for a little iBook with the same power. I bought it because at the time of purchase there wasn't an iBook with the power I needed, but there is now. The larger screen, while nice, is something I'd be willing to give up for smaller size and better battery life. Particularly since you can always plug it into a larger monitor when you're not on the move.
And that's a matter of personal preference, and a happy accident for you since OSX dropped it, but I find it extremely useful, and I know that a LOT of old Mac heads are lost without it. Just because you, personally, don't like it, doesn't make the decision to drop it out of the system make sense. Many many people do like it, and in many cases it's much more usable than minimisation to the dock.
Apples X11 server. Turn off quartz extreme? Apple touts that as a huge performance advantage on the page linked above, and there doesn't seem to be any obvious way to turn it off. I used another X11 server for awhile, from gnuosx I think it was, but performance seemed about the same on either - fine as long as you're only running an xterm, but rather abyssimal with openoffice loaded.
I'm very sympathetic to the point of view, I'm a big WindowMaker fan myself, but when setting up a system quickly, particularly for a less technical user, either KDE or Gnome can be quite helpful. I used to run a Gnome panel with WindowMaker, then decided the panel was dross and killed it, but of course keeping plenty of apps. I recently setup a system for a friend, an old P2 with 64mb Ram, using Debian (because of net install, actually, although I'm quite happy with how it's running it wasn't my first choice otherwise) and the version of KDE in testing runs really well on that machine. It also is very nice in that it asks you a few questions the first time you run it from a given account, and configures itself to your specifications quite well from that. Of course you can fine tune later - which I did of course (I generally like the 'Mac-like settings' - but I then go in and change a few things, particularly turning on focus-under-mouse) but for the non-technical user it's perfect - used to Windows? click this button and it will behave pretty much like Windows. Used to Mac? Click this button instead, and it will generally follow mac conventions (not perfectly, of course, but what other system will even try?) Used to slaving in front of a Sun station? There's a setting for that too. Show me any alternative that will give you that kind of customisability, in a package that's friendly enough for the non-computer type of person to sit down and use, and run on so little hardware? Neither Windows nor OSX are half as friendly in terms of adapting themselves to your preference (without installing a bunch of third party software, at least) and neither OSX nor any recent version of Windows will run so well on hardware of that vintage either.
Ahh yes, of course. That makes perfect sense.
True. It definately is worth it to me, and to everyone else I know that uses one on a daily basis, so to me it seems they've done a great job here, but of course requirements do vary.
Yes, I've tried higher resolution on a screen the same size. I didn't see much point in it.
I disagree. Without adding third-party commercial software it won't do a fraction of what any linux distro does out of the box, and even with it it still falls short.
Desktop Manager is a nice idea, but it's alpha, and every time I've tried to use it it doesn't work. It makes the expanding animation and... that's it. Nothing happens. Assuming it hung, I go command-alt-escape to kill it, and it isn't even running. No idea what the problem is, don't have time to try and debug it thoroughly. Hopefully the next version will work for me. But Aqua should have that functionality out of the box in any case!
Out of the box Aqua doesn't even have window shading, for christs sake! The underpinnings of the OS are a great step forward from OS9, but the GUI itself sucks. It's really a horrifying pile of poor design decisions and oversights, the worst job Apple has ever done IMOP. And even with lots of third party commercial software to try and compensate, it's still quite impossible to get it to perform as well as, say, I can get KDE to behave in 5 minutes.
That said, as horrid as Aqua is, it's still a lot better than the Windows interface, which is the reason I got a Mac laptop. Linux wasn't an option, as there are a handful of proprietary apps that were absolute requirements on this machine...
And as to running an X-server under Aqua, it doesn't seem to work nearly as well as it should. OpenOffice, for instance, under X, seems to max out my memory (I've got 512mb installed) and reduce my poor TiBook to swapping all on it's own. Whereas it runs wonderfully on a linux box with only 64MB ram, under KDE, XFCE, or WindowMaker, and the TiBook also runs like a dream until I start up the X server. Besides which, it's still running inside Aqua, maybe it's possible to get the Aqua dock and desktop and all to turn off and just use the display drivers for an X server, but if so I haven't seen it.
You have an interesting point of view here.
Certainly their models can't compete with building it yourself for configuration flexibility. But, listening to what you want, I don't see why you wouldn't just grab a PowerMac.
But the iBook will be lighter, and the battery will last longer. That's more important in my view than squeezing a higher resolution out, and I probably wouldn't use the higher resolution anyway. Running a small screen at a high resolution is just a way to get eyestrain.
My 15" PowerBook is my baby. I love the thing. I wouldn't want any higher resolution - it would be a waste, the 15" screen isn't big enough to make use of any more for me, and a bigger screen would make it less portable, which would be counterproductive.
And while I agree that OS X is preferable to Windows, and that was why I bought this machine - I'd definately prefer to throw Linux on it. And I plan to, once my current contract runs out and I no longer require a couple of proprietary programs that only run on Mac or Windows. Once you re-theme the Mac to get rid of the hideous glowing gumdrops and stuff, it's pretty usable in comparison to Windows, but I curse it everyday for not having virtual desktops for instance.
I never got to use an Alpha, but it was my understanding that what killed them was simply economy of scale.
Not at all. Atheism is the absence of theism - the absence of a belief in a G-d on the middle-eastern monotheistic model. Agnosticism is the absence of gnosticism - the doctrine of direct knowledge of the divine. Quite different things.
The irony is that 'orthodox' religious folks are agnostics, although they generally don't realise it.
No, they're not. You're falling into the trap religionists love to lay - buying their trojan definition of atheism.
Atheism is not a belief in a negative. It's a lack of belief in a positive. A-theism. Not theism, or without theism. To be an atheist does not require a faith in the non-existence of G-d, simply an absence of faith in the existence of G-d, which is to say, an absence of theism.
Very wrong. VirtualPC does indeed emulate an x86 CPU on PPC hardware already, and it does it very well. This is not a hard trick to do. The PPC architecture is more than capable of it.
What is hard is to do the opposite - to emulate a PPC on the more limited x86 design. But there are products that do that too. They are quite slow - but emulating an x86 chip on PPC is not.