Actually, most of these stores are Jewish-owned and operated. It's not the Russian or Italian mob. Ironically, most of them are Orthodox and observant. A lot of the families that own and run these shops live up in Monsey and New Square and other little frum enclaves upstate. You would think that being religious might have some correlation to ethics, but unfortunately, this isn't always the case.
I think he really needs to see a doctor about those open sores. From his tone, it sounds like he might have advanced syphilis. He needs antibiotics stat!
I used to get 120+ channels for $39.99 with DirecTV, but then the wind blew my dish off the side of my house. I don't feel like paying someone $100 to re-install it every time this happens. Or the fact that I've had to replace two receivers that got fried on me, out of my own pocket because you own the receiver with DirecTV.
So I settled for cable. The local cable monopoly charges me $49.95 a month for a mere 55 channels. And this is on top of the $44.95 a month I pay for cable internet (they gave me a whopping $5 discount on that for being a TV subscriber). Mind you, that I live in a rural area where I can get exactly four over-the-air channels.. one PBS, one independent station, one Spanish, and one home shopping. Of course, I'm too far from the CO to be able to get ADSL, so they have a monopoly on broadband internet access, too. And when they finally get around to shutting down competing VoIP service I'll have to pay their $35/mo. for VoIP instead of the $20/mo I now pay with Lingo. So, if this isn't price gouging, I don't know what is! They are the only game in town, and thanks to the FCC, are completely unregulated monopolies now. Our town was the only town on Long Island that had TCI cable instead of Cablevision 10 years ago. They offered more channels and lower prices. Guess what? Cablevision bought our town's cable service from TCI, cut half the channels and raised the rates.
Something has to be done to stop these predatory monopolies. I would love to be able to pay $3 a channel for the 10 channels I actually watch and have my bill go down $20 a month!
And my biggest concern watching football with my 5-year old is all of the sexually-themed beer ads. Kind of just the opposite of your concerns. But it shows that advertising has really gone overboard with extreme depictions of sexual imagery and violence.
What I'll never understand, though, is that anyone of drinking age who is watching football (and doesn't have anything moral or medical that keeps them from drinking) already has a beer in his hand, knows what beer he likes, and isn't going to be persuaded to switch from Miller to Bud just because of the half-naked sexy women surrounding Bernie Mac. Duh!:-)
Poor guy got flamed and modded off-topic, but this definitely is on topic, for the simple reason that most Linux distributions seem to have settled on GNOME as a desktop, and most of what the writer of parent wrote (at least in the first part before he started rambling a little) is absolutely correct. GNOME has some major problems. It is more of a patchwork than a coherent desktop. Most of the work since GNOME 2 has been trying to smooth over the rough edges because so many of the projects that make up GNOME make Windows 95 DLL hell look like fun. The simple fact is that there really are huge gaping holes in providing anything near a useful set of reusable objects. I understand that many in the GNOME camp view this diversity and freedom as a strength, but in reality, it is an achilles heel. It sacrifices functionality and useability for the sake of programming freedom. The biggest strength that KDE has is Qt, and GTK and the million or so other libraries that are hacked together with it to make up the base of GNOME, are not even close to equivalent as a logical, consistent framework to develop real applications. All the effort is put into making the desktop look polished without fixing the underlying issues that make GNOME development a freaking nightmare, especially compared to any other environment, like KDE, Cocoa, Windows, or even Java, that provides the developer with things like reusable toolbar widgets (to use the author of parent's example). I wish the author hadn't posted AC so I could mark him as "friend." Yes, it's an invitation to be flamed when he writes things like this, but you have to see that he makes a lot of valid points, and I really do believe that GNOME as the de facto commercial Linux desktop is really going to hurt Linux desktop adoption in the long run, and that is very much in keeping with the topic. Modding the parent off-topic was underhanded IMHO.
Wine has come an incredible way since it's conception. I am amazed by how well it runs some games (and other Windows software) these days. I think it's safe to say that by the time the Linux desktop is polished enough for average Joe, wine will have advanced to a point where it runs most Windows games/software very acceptably.
Of course, that will all change when Microsoft makes significant API revisions. Has WinFX been ported to Wine yet, for instance? It's a never-ending battle that will never be won. Windows is a moving target. The best way to run Windows software is and always will be to run it on Windows. However, if Linux and other alternatives continue to increase in popularity, and now, especially with Mac OS X moving to Intel, it might be a good incentive for developers to start compiling against winelib, in which case, you'd have binaries that are ready to run on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. The main problem would be dependencies--requiring DLLs that haven't yet been implemented in Wine, but this could be alleviated somewhat by linking against cross-platform libraries like SDL and ogg wherever possible instead of using Windows-specific APIs. If the Linux and Mac OS X audience is big enough, then the software will be there. I can already see a huge incentive for companies like Intuit, who would no longer need to maintain two separate versions of Quicken for Mac and Windows. Compile the Windows code against winelib and it will not only run on Windows and Mac OS X/Intel, but also x86 Linux and *BSD. Retarget some of the UI code to WxWindows (or whatever it's called now) or Qt, and you could even keep the native looks so it doesn't look like a Win95 app on your nice OS X desktop.:-)
[Please don't mod this as flamebait until you've read the whole thing; it's a very honest criticism as to what I feel is lacking in the current crop of Linux desktops.]
I remember when I got my first PC, I was coming over from the Amiga. My PC was an AST 486 that came with Windows 3.1 preinstalled. I couldn't believe how unstable and lacking in multimedia Windows was out of the box. Within a week, I went to CompUSA and bought OS/2 Warp 3 ("Warp for Windows"). It multitasked well, crashed rarely, ran Windows applications, and came with decent multimedia apps and internet and a web browser all in the box. Then like a month later, Microsoft released Windows 95 and with all the new Win32 apps coming out, I was forced to abandon OS/2 because of the lack of software that would still run on it. Dual-booting was an option, but I only had a 540M hard drive at the time.
The one thing I truly miss about OS/2, though, is the Workplace Shell and Presentation Manager. As much progress as has been made on GNOME and KDE, I still feel that the most fluid, intuitive, and powerful OO desktops were OS/2 and classic Mac OS. It's subtle things like real aliases (or in OS/2 terms, "shadows") and useful metadata and integration of that metadata into the desktop that really made the OS/2 desktop (and classic Mac OS) great. I just don't feel I get that with GNOME or KDE, at least not fully. Neither with Windows XP or Mac OS X. I liked BeOS enough to actually buy both R3 and R4, but it was buggy, and hardware support was atrocious. Software was lacking, too, but why develop software for something that has practically no driver support? Multimedia apps, for instance, are pointless if you're forced to use a VESA video driver and have no sound! And this was for what was supposed to be a media-centric OS!
Personally, I use Windows XP most of the time because I have a large software library of mostly games that I don't want to give up. Other than that, I use Firefox and MS Money. I also have a Slackware box that I use mostly for hacking and coding as a hobby. But I would totally switch to Linux in a heartbeat if I could have a forked filesystem that actually did something and a truly integrated desktop that worked intuitively and was not a collection of miscellaneous libraries and esoteric dependencies (GNOME) or something that tries to be all things to all people to the point where it has something like 3 media players in the default installation (KDE). And yes, I know about GNUstep, and *STEP annoys the hell out of me with the way it substitutes directories for real resource forks. And plists are annoying, too. They should be real attributes, not text files.
Maybe it's time to take the Linux kernel and do something other than GNU. Throw out trying to be Unix and just build a good desktop operating system in the same mold as OS/2 or Mac OS on top of a Linux kernel. Sounds like a project!:-) There's probably better designed kernels out there also, but the nice thing about Linux is that it's got pretty good hardware support (drivers) and I'd hate to have to rewrite drivers when the work has already been done on Linux. So, Linux is probably "good enough" in that regard. As much as I'd love to find a replacement for X, too, X.org has good support for most video cards, so it might be wise to stick with that as well. Most everything else will probably have to be written from scratch, including the filesystem:-(. But the main goals of the project would be quality and user experience, not to reimplement Unix. Maybe I'll set something up on SF this weekend and start planning this out in earnest. Stay tuned!
The reason why we pay upwards of $50/mo. for broadband internet is precisely because it is offered by private companies. I don't necessarily need all the bandwidth I'm getting for myself. It would be much more efficient to pool that $50 connection and share it with 49 other people in the neighborhood. But then that's less profit for the local cable monopoly. Sadly, the U.S. is going to lag behind the rest of the world in broadband adoption because we don't take it as a serious matter of building a public communications infrastructure. IMHO, the government should be in sole control of all transportation and communications infrastructure, as well as other major necessities that corporate cartels regularly gouge and abuse us for, like home heating oil, gas, and electricity. They can pay for it by eliminating the corporate welfare given to these same companies that are colluding to keep prices up and gouge the consumer.
The entire U.S. court system is standardized on NetWare and WordPerfect. I'm sure there are others as well. WordPerfect has a particularly strong foothold in the legal community due to its predictable formatting and excellent handling of footnotes and linked documents. I worked in a federal court for four years up until last year. All of our file servers and printers were NetWare. We had Windows server for a couple of proprietary services like our phone/voicemail system and our accounting package. Our particular court had standardized on FrontPage for our intranet/web editing and used IIS for the better integration with FrontPage, but there was a big push in the court system to move to Dreamweaver, which would make IIS less compelling of a choice. Actually, I had a Debian box up running Apache that I put some Perl-based CGI applications for our intranet on. Actually, they ended up on the IIS box when they went live, but it was so much easier for me to develop and test them on Debian. (The reason I chose Debian was that I could set up cron to keep it updated automatically, rather than have to keep track of patches and stuff myself. Plus, if I needed a particular Perl module, apt-get was just as easy as CPAN.) We also had Lotus Domino on Windows, but it was being migrated to Linux when I left. Most of our other servers were Unix, mostly Solaris 7, but we were starting to migrate a lot of them over to RHEL.
Of course, I don't know how typical the government is compared to the private sector because both of my IT jobs were government (one New York City, one federal). Right now, I work for a pharmaceutical company, but not in the IT department, so I'm not too familiar with what's running in the back office. It is a mixed Windows/NetWare server environment with a lot of Unix (SAP and some other web-based applications). We do use Microsoft Office, however. Although there is a mix of Windows 2000 and XP on the desktop as well as a mix of Office 2000, XP, and 2003. (I got a brand spanking new laptop in May, so I've got WinXP and Office 2003, but most folks are still using older versions.)
Well, you need to back up your files. The nice thing about iTMS is that you only need to authorize your computer by signing into iTunes and then your ID validates your computer and you can play the files you backed up. Unlike, say Napster, where if your subscription runs out, so does your ability to play the file.
That said, I find I do almost all of my music shopping on iTunes now. The main reasons being that they have a lot of older music which is not always easy to find in a record store, and that with copy-protected CDs becoming more and more prevalent, I don't want to run the risk of bringing something nasty home to my Windows PC. (It would be a PITA to have to use my Slackware box to rip everything, then copy it over to the Windows PC anyway because that's where iTunes lives.) iTunes is safe and convenient and has a better selection than most conventional record stores.
Also, the quality of AAC 128 is just fine for me. There is a difference from CD, but it is so minimal that I can't really justify not buying from iTunes just out for the sake of quality alone. The quality far surpasses cassette tape, and I used to have a huge library of tapes. Considering I do most of my listening in the car, tape quality is just fine, and AAC 128 is far better than tape quality. I'm playing through an FM transmitter anyway!
The other nice thing about AAC is that the algorithms (at least in QuickTime's encoder, it seems) are so deterministic that I find if I have to, for some reason, rip an audio CD that I burned from AAC files, if I rip it again in AAC at the same bitrate, I honestly can't tell any difference at all. Perhaps you could do the same with MP3 (provided you use the exact same encoder) or WMA, but out of the three, AAC is the only one that sounds near perfect at 128kbps for all music types. I find that WMA9 at 128 is good for most music, but it is dreadfully awful at most country music at that bitrate. It has trouble with fiddle, steel guitar, and some vocal subtleties.
All in all, I think that Apple has a good product overall in the combination of the iTMS, the iTunes application, and the iPod. It works well as a system, the cost of music is low, the DRM is fair, and the quality of music is high. I don't think anyone else offers a solution that matches in all those areas. So I'm not surprised to see iTMS becoming a major player in music sales, especially given the skyrocketing popularity of the iPod.
They should spend their money scouting for the next Pink Floyd rather than trying to manufacture more Britney Spears. Think about it, Britney Spears may sell millions of records, but for how long? 10 years max? Pink Floyd was selling platinum or better for almost 30 years. Plus, you don't have to do as much promotion. People will buy Pink Floyd because it's good music, and it has appeal across generations and genders. Britney Spears' audience is so narrow you could fit it through a pinhole--adolescent and pre-adolescent girls.
I think the industry's biggest problem is a lack of diversity. Right now, everything on mainstream radio sounds exactly the same. Even ten years ago, radio was still crap, but at least you could differentiate the music better. Personally, I rarely even listen to the radio at all anymore, and when I do, it's a classic rock station.
Record companies want to go with what's "safe" these days. No one wants to take a risk on signing and promoting an artist that's "different." However, the big rewards come with big risk. I really wish these huge, billionaire conglomerates like WEA and SonyBMG would gamble a little bit more. They're actually losing a lot of good acts who are moving to smaller labels like Koch and Sanctuary. Audium (a Koch label) has become one of the best labels in country music by signing artists who got cut by the majors, like Dwight Yoakam, Merle Haggard, and Dale Watson. Sanctuary is now home to the likes of Iron Maiden and Morrissey, two of England's best sellers ever, who still are putting out good albums. It just kills me how labels will not settle for "just" platinum anymore. You have to go multi-platinum to be a success now. I remember how Capitol was getting disappointed with Garth Brooks when his albums started selling "only" two million copies. This is the same Garth Brooks who single-handedly saved Capitol/EMI from bankruptcy with No Fences and Ropin' the Wind, each of which sold something like over 10 million two consecutive years. He had the top 3 albums in the U.S. for over a year. But if he's only two-times platinum and not ten-times platinum, then he's no good to Capitol! This is the kind of moronic thinking that drives the recording industry. It is pure, unadulterated greed. So much greed that it completely clouds any sensibility they might have.
the next phase of Xbox marketing will be to put "Plays for Sure" stickers on all the games so you think that Nintendo's games aren't guaranteed to work.;-)
Could you imagine if Microsoft bought AMD or Intel? Just like Commodore bought MOS Technologies. They could have complete vertical integration and undersell everyone with top-quality systems. They could be the next Commodore!
Those were both EA games. Since EA is still in business, I wonder what it would take to get them to re-issue those games. I like what Firaxis did in updating Pirates! I think EA could do something similar with those games and bring them into the modern PC (and console) era.
I have had a real hard time with Optimum Online interfering with BT traffic. The default 6881 port is almost unusable, and I notice that lately even if I switch to another port, it has been slow. It took me three DAYS to get an OpenSUSE DVD image last week via BitTorrent. This is nothing short of ridiculous, and is why I'm switching to Speakeasy DSL. I'm probably going to have to get IDSL just because I'm so far from the CO, which is going to cost me even more money, but screw Cablevision. As soon as my DSL gets hooked up, I'm dropping their internet and television. I'll get a satellite hookup for TV. It costs the same amount and they're not an evil monopoly like Cablevision. I can choose DirecTV or Dish network, whoever offers me a better deal. I had DirecTV in the past and liked it. I just wasn't going to pay someone $100 to re-install the dish after it fell off the side of my house.
the U.S. government spending billions upon billions of dollars "preparing" for a bird flu epidemic. Meanwhile in China, a country of almost 2 billion people, only 3 humans have got it and something like a couple hundred birds out of probably millions of birds that have not got it.
Face it, people like to panic and cry "the sky is falling".. it makes them feel important.
Sure, sometimes hybrids are fertile. But that isn't usually the case. Never enough to sustain a large population. And anyway, that would mean that the evolved mutant is even able to hybrid with its former species to begin with, which is certainly not guaranteed. It's interesting also to note that most mutations result in diseased, weaker variants, not hardier ones.
Also, let's just take a step back and go to the very first organism. How did it become alive? Can it be reproduced in the lab? Why doesn't spontaneous biogenesis occur today?
Consider: horses, donkeys, lions, tigers, wolves, and dog are all different species, but the results of mating pairs of them are highly variable. Crossing a lion with a dog, or a dog with a horse won't even produce a fertilized egg. Crossing a horse with a donkey can produce viable offspring, but they are (almost) always sterile. A lion can mate with a tiger to produce a liger or a tigon and the male is always sterile, but the females are often fertile. Dogs can mate with wolves, and both the male and female offspring are usually fertile.
You say "often" or "usually".. in other words, these are not normal occurrences. They are not sustainable. If they were, we would have packs of lion/tiger hybrids running around the jungles. As far as dogs and wolves are concerned, I know that dog/wolf hybrids are, in fact, quite common, but dogs and wolves are so similar anyway that it might mean just that they are incorrectly identified as different species rather than breeds of the same species.
Anyway, show me a fish/lizard hybrid or a lizard/bird hybrid and I'll be impressed. Not only hybrids, but fertile ones at that. After all, evolutionists believe that lizards evolved from fish and birds from lizards, don't they? Or what happened to all of the intermediate species that the fossil record is completely silent about? Where are the feathered lizards? Or the lizards with gills?
The problem with evolutionary theory is that they start with a premise: that there is no God and that higher species evolved from lower ones by only natural means. Then they look at all the different species over time, mostly based on fossils and radiation dating. Then they use their imaginations to fill in the rest of the details. You don't see anything problematic with this approach?
A real scientist might not start off with the premise that there is no God, look at the fossil evidence, be more reasonable about the accuracy of radiation dating, and see the lack of intermediate species, and take the other laws of nature, particularly involving sexual reproduction and speciation, and come to the conclusion that the only explanation that makes sense is that every species was created by the Creator. But most scientists are not this honest. They have a clear, atheistic agenda. They like to explain that life evolved from carbon and water, but can't duplicate carbon and water actually becoming alive. They like to posit about the genesis of the universe in the big bang, but can't explain where all the matter and energy that begat the big bang came from since matter can neither be created nor destroyed in the natural system. In other words, the very theories that scientists champion as truth, like evolution or the big bang, force them to violate other tenets of science. You are grasping for answers which you can't find in nature because they transcend nature. You will wander around in the dark blinded by your prejudice and never find the truth!
Keep in mine that Presbyterianism is a form of Calvinism, and unlike modern Christian Fundmantalism, it is avidly concerned with social justice, including support of people and causes that most people would consider "leftist" (which ironically, is true of most "reformed" churches that have links to Calvinism).
I've heard that some fundamentalists don't consider Reformed churces to be "real" Christian because they aren't radically socially conservative, but that's hearsay.
As a Presbyterian, I'm a little confused as to why you would make that statement. I, myself, am quite a leftist, but I find that I am very much a minority in this. Most Presbyterians, I find, are quite conservative in their politics and social outlook. A lot of this has to do with the prevalence of postmillennial theology within the Reformed tradition and the idea that the Gospel will prosper and triumph over the whole earth through our preaching and many take this to mean also gaining the submission of the non-believers through enacting laws in harmony with God's laws. This is sometimes known as Dominion Theology. It is quite common among Presbyterians, although I am one who is an amillennialist and looks at things from a more bottom-up perspective. That is, that individuals who are converted to Christ will effect good on their society, rather than it being imposed from above by the civil magistrates. I wouldn't deny that civil magistrates have the duty of implementing God's laws, but I also don't think that the unconverted are capable of implementing God's laws.
As for whether some fundamentalists would consider Reformed Christians to be truly Christian, I think the biggest obstacle has been our insistence on paedobaptism. But then again, there are lots of Reformed Baptists, as well. I find that where there is an issue with politics, it is because a lot of evangelicals confuse the Gospel with the Republican party and support for right-wing positions that have absolutely nothing to do with the Gospel of Christ. I honestly don't understand, for instance, how welfare is anti-Christian, or gun control. Yet many so-called "evangelicals" feel this way.
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Actually, most of these stores are Jewish-owned and operated. It's not the Russian or Italian mob. Ironically, most of them are Orthodox and observant. A lot of the families that own and run these shops live up in Monsey and New Square and other little frum enclaves upstate. You would think that being religious might have some correlation to ethics, but unfortunately, this isn't always the case.
I think he really needs to see a doctor about those open sores. From his tone, it sounds like he might have advanced syphilis. He needs antibiotics stat!
Dick Cheney doesn't get cable in his secure, undisclosed location.
So I settled for cable. The local cable monopoly charges me $49.95 a month for a mere 55 channels. And this is on top of the $44.95 a month I pay for cable internet (they gave me a whopping $5 discount on that for being a TV subscriber). Mind you, that I live in a rural area where I can get exactly four over-the-air channels.. one PBS, one independent station, one Spanish, and one home shopping. Of course, I'm too far from the CO to be able to get ADSL, so they have a monopoly on broadband internet access, too. And when they finally get around to shutting down competing VoIP service I'll have to pay their $35/mo. for VoIP instead of the $20/mo I now pay with Lingo. So, if this isn't price gouging, I don't know what is! They are the only game in town, and thanks to the FCC, are completely unregulated monopolies now. Our town was the only town on Long Island that had TCI cable instead of Cablevision 10 years ago. They offered more channels and lower prices. Guess what? Cablevision bought our town's cable service from TCI, cut half the channels and raised the rates.
Something has to be done to stop these predatory monopolies. I would love to be able to pay $3 a channel for the 10 channels I actually watch and have my bill go down $20 a month!
What I'll never understand, though, is that anyone of drinking age who is watching football (and doesn't have anything moral or medical that keeps them from drinking) already has a beer in his hand, knows what beer he likes, and isn't going to be persuaded to switch from Miller to Bud just because of the half-naked sexy women surrounding Bernie Mac. Duh! :-)
Poor guy got flamed and modded off-topic, but this definitely is on topic, for the simple reason that most Linux distributions seem to have settled on GNOME as a desktop, and most of what the writer of parent wrote (at least in the first part before he started rambling a little) is absolutely correct. GNOME has some major problems. It is more of a patchwork than a coherent desktop. Most of the work since GNOME 2 has been trying to smooth over the rough edges because so many of the projects that make up GNOME make Windows 95 DLL hell look like fun. The simple fact is that there really are huge gaping holes in providing anything near a useful set of reusable objects. I understand that many in the GNOME camp view this diversity and freedom as a strength, but in reality, it is an achilles heel. It sacrifices functionality and useability for the sake of programming freedom. The biggest strength that KDE has is Qt, and GTK and the million or so other libraries that are hacked together with it to make up the base of GNOME, are not even close to equivalent as a logical, consistent framework to develop real applications. All the effort is put into making the desktop look polished without fixing the underlying issues that make GNOME development a freaking nightmare, especially compared to any other environment, like KDE, Cocoa, Windows, or even Java, that provides the developer with things like reusable toolbar widgets (to use the author of parent's example). I wish the author hadn't posted AC so I could mark him as "friend." Yes, it's an invitation to be flamed when he writes things like this, but you have to see that he makes a lot of valid points, and I really do believe that GNOME as the de facto commercial Linux desktop is really going to hurt Linux desktop adoption in the long run, and that is very much in keeping with the topic. Modding the parent off-topic was underhanded IMHO.
Of course, that will all change when Microsoft makes significant API revisions. Has WinFX been ported to Wine yet, for instance? It's a never-ending battle that will never be won. Windows is a moving target. The best way to run Windows software is and always will be to run it on Windows. However, if Linux and other alternatives continue to increase in popularity, and now, especially with Mac OS X moving to Intel, it might be a good incentive for developers to start compiling against winelib, in which case, you'd have binaries that are ready to run on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. The main problem would be dependencies--requiring DLLs that haven't yet been implemented in Wine, but this could be alleviated somewhat by linking against cross-platform libraries like SDL and ogg wherever possible instead of using Windows-specific APIs. If the Linux and Mac OS X audience is big enough, then the software will be there. I can already see a huge incentive for companies like Intuit, who would no longer need to maintain two separate versions of Quicken for Mac and Windows. Compile the Windows code against winelib and it will not only run on Windows and Mac OS X/Intel, but also x86 Linux and *BSD. Retarget some of the UI code to WxWindows (or whatever it's called now) or Qt, and you could even keep the native looks so it doesn't look like a Win95 app on your nice OS X desktop. :-)
I remember when I got my first PC, I was coming over from the Amiga. My PC was an AST 486 that came with Windows 3.1 preinstalled. I couldn't believe how unstable and lacking in multimedia Windows was out of the box. Within a week, I went to CompUSA and bought OS/2 Warp 3 ("Warp for Windows"). It multitasked well, crashed rarely, ran Windows applications, and came with decent multimedia apps and internet and a web browser all in the box. Then like a month later, Microsoft released Windows 95 and with all the new Win32 apps coming out, I was forced to abandon OS/2 because of the lack of software that would still run on it. Dual-booting was an option, but I only had a 540M hard drive at the time.
The one thing I truly miss about OS/2, though, is the Workplace Shell and Presentation Manager. As much progress as has been made on GNOME and KDE, I still feel that the most fluid, intuitive, and powerful OO desktops were OS/2 and classic Mac OS. It's subtle things like real aliases (or in OS/2 terms, "shadows") and useful metadata and integration of that metadata into the desktop that really made the OS/2 desktop (and classic Mac OS) great. I just don't feel I get that with GNOME or KDE, at least not fully. Neither with Windows XP or Mac OS X. I liked BeOS enough to actually buy both R3 and R4, but it was buggy, and hardware support was atrocious. Software was lacking, too, but why develop software for something that has practically no driver support? Multimedia apps, for instance, are pointless if you're forced to use a VESA video driver and have no sound! And this was for what was supposed to be a media-centric OS!
Personally, I use Windows XP most of the time because I have a large software library of mostly games that I don't want to give up. Other than that, I use Firefox and MS Money. I also have a Slackware box that I use mostly for hacking and coding as a hobby. But I would totally switch to Linux in a heartbeat if I could have a forked filesystem that actually did something and a truly integrated desktop that worked intuitively and was not a collection of miscellaneous libraries and esoteric dependencies (GNOME) or something that tries to be all things to all people to the point where it has something like 3 media players in the default installation (KDE). And yes, I know about GNUstep, and *STEP annoys the hell out of me with the way it substitutes directories for real resource forks. And plists are annoying, too. They should be real attributes, not text files.
Maybe it's time to take the Linux kernel and do something other than GNU. Throw out trying to be Unix and just build a good desktop operating system in the same mold as OS/2 or Mac OS on top of a Linux kernel. Sounds like a project! :-) There's probably better designed kernels out there also, but the nice thing about Linux is that it's got pretty good hardware support (drivers) and I'd hate to have to rewrite drivers when the work has already been done on Linux. So, Linux is probably "good enough" in that regard. As much as I'd love to find a replacement for X, too, X.org has good support for most video cards, so it might be wise to stick with that as well. Most everything else will probably have to be written from scratch, including the filesystem :-(. But the main goals of the project would be quality and user experience, not to reimplement Unix. Maybe I'll set something up on SF this weekend and start planning this out in earnest. Stay tuned!
The reason why we pay upwards of $50/mo. for broadband internet is precisely because it is offered by private companies. I don't necessarily need all the bandwidth I'm getting for myself. It would be much more efficient to pool that $50 connection and share it with 49 other people in the neighborhood. But then that's less profit for the local cable monopoly. Sadly, the U.S. is going to lag behind the rest of the world in broadband adoption because we don't take it as a serious matter of building a public communications infrastructure. IMHO, the government should be in sole control of all transportation and communications infrastructure, as well as other major necessities that corporate cartels regularly gouge and abuse us for, like home heating oil, gas, and electricity. They can pay for it by eliminating the corporate welfare given to these same companies that are colluding to keep prices up and gouge the consumer.
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...
if ( vote.party == DEMOCRAT ) {
vote.register(race, REPUBLICAN);
confirmation.print(race, DEMOCRAT);
} else {
vote.register(race, vote.party);
confirmation.print(race, vote.party);
}
Of course, I don't know how typical the government is compared to the private sector because both of my IT jobs were government (one New York City, one federal). Right now, I work for a pharmaceutical company, but not in the IT department, so I'm not too familiar with what's running in the back office. It is a mixed Windows/NetWare server environment with a lot of Unix (SAP and some other web-based applications). We do use Microsoft Office, however. Although there is a mix of Windows 2000 and XP on the desktop as well as a mix of Office 2000, XP, and 2003. (I got a brand spanking new laptop in May, so I've got WinXP and Office 2003, but most folks are still using older versions.)
I can't count... September was two months ago. No wonder I keep getting in trouble with the IRS :|
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/08/003425 2&tid=126&tid=99This was reported on /. over three months ago. Nothing to see here... move along..
That said, I find I do almost all of my music shopping on iTunes now. The main reasons being that they have a lot of older music which is not always easy to find in a record store, and that with copy-protected CDs becoming more and more prevalent, I don't want to run the risk of bringing something nasty home to my Windows PC. (It would be a PITA to have to use my Slackware box to rip everything, then copy it over to the Windows PC anyway because that's where iTunes lives.) iTunes is safe and convenient and has a better selection than most conventional record stores.
Also, the quality of AAC 128 is just fine for me. There is a difference from CD, but it is so minimal that I can't really justify not buying from iTunes just out for the sake of quality alone. The quality far surpasses cassette tape, and I used to have a huge library of tapes. Considering I do most of my listening in the car, tape quality is just fine, and AAC 128 is far better than tape quality. I'm playing through an FM transmitter anyway!
The other nice thing about AAC is that the algorithms (at least in QuickTime's encoder, it seems) are so deterministic that I find if I have to, for some reason, rip an audio CD that I burned from AAC files, if I rip it again in AAC at the same bitrate, I honestly can't tell any difference at all. Perhaps you could do the same with MP3 (provided you use the exact same encoder) or WMA, but out of the three, AAC is the only one that sounds near perfect at 128kbps for all music types. I find that WMA9 at 128 is good for most music, but it is dreadfully awful at most country music at that bitrate. It has trouble with fiddle, steel guitar, and some vocal subtleties.
All in all, I think that Apple has a good product overall in the combination of the iTMS, the iTunes application, and the iPod. It works well as a system, the cost of music is low, the DRM is fair, and the quality of music is high. I don't think anyone else offers a solution that matches in all those areas. So I'm not surprised to see iTMS becoming a major player in music sales, especially given the skyrocketing popularity of the iPod.
I think the industry's biggest problem is a lack of diversity. Right now, everything on mainstream radio sounds exactly the same. Even ten years ago, radio was still crap, but at least you could differentiate the music better. Personally, I rarely even listen to the radio at all anymore, and when I do, it's a classic rock station.
Record companies want to go with what's "safe" these days. No one wants to take a risk on signing and promoting an artist that's "different." However, the big rewards come with big risk. I really wish these huge, billionaire conglomerates like WEA and SonyBMG would gamble a little bit more. They're actually losing a lot of good acts who are moving to smaller labels like Koch and Sanctuary. Audium (a Koch label) has become one of the best labels in country music by signing artists who got cut by the majors, like Dwight Yoakam, Merle Haggard, and Dale Watson. Sanctuary is now home to the likes of Iron Maiden and Morrissey, two of England's best sellers ever, who still are putting out good albums. It just kills me how labels will not settle for "just" platinum anymore. You have to go multi-platinum to be a success now. I remember how Capitol was getting disappointed with Garth Brooks when his albums started selling "only" two million copies. This is the same Garth Brooks who single-handedly saved Capitol/EMI from bankruptcy with No Fences and Ropin' the Wind, each of which sold something like over 10 million two consecutive years. He had the top 3 albums in the U.S. for over a year. But if he's only two-times platinum and not ten-times platinum, then he's no good to Capitol! This is the kind of moronic thinking that drives the recording industry. It is pure, unadulterated greed. So much greed that it completely clouds any sensibility they might have.
the next phase of Xbox marketing will be to put "Plays for Sure" stickers on all the games so you think that Nintendo's games aren't guaranteed to work. ;-)
(tongue planted very firmly in cheek)
Those were both EA games. Since EA is still in business, I wonder what it would take to get them to re-issue those games. I like what Firaxis did in updating Pirates! I think EA could do something similar with those games and bring them into the modern PC (and console) era.
...my server's a total brick
I have had a real hard time with Optimum Online interfering with BT traffic. The default 6881 port is almost unusable, and I notice that lately even if I switch to another port, it has been slow. It took me three DAYS to get an OpenSUSE DVD image last week via BitTorrent. This is nothing short of ridiculous, and is why I'm switching to Speakeasy DSL. I'm probably going to have to get IDSL just because I'm so far from the CO, which is going to cost me even more money, but screw Cablevision. As soon as my DSL gets hooked up, I'm dropping their internet and television. I'll get a satellite hookup for TV. It costs the same amount and they're not an evil monopoly like Cablevision. I can choose DirecTV or Dish network, whoever offers me a better deal. I had DirecTV in the past and liked it. I just wasn't going to pay someone $100 to re-install the dish after it fell off the side of my house.
Seriously, though, Plan 9 is killer. Everything Unix should have been. Hardware support is pretty anemic, though. And no AMD64 port.
Face it, people like to panic and cry "the sky is falling".. it makes them feel important.
Also, let's just take a step back and go to the very first organism. How did it become alive? Can it be reproduced in the lab? Why doesn't spontaneous biogenesis occur today?
You say "often" or "usually".. in other words, these are not normal occurrences. They are not sustainable. If they were, we would have packs of lion/tiger hybrids running around the jungles. As far as dogs and wolves are concerned, I know that dog/wolf hybrids are, in fact, quite common, but dogs and wolves are so similar anyway that it might mean just that they are incorrectly identified as different species rather than breeds of the same species.
Anyway, show me a fish/lizard hybrid or a lizard/bird hybrid and I'll be impressed. Not only hybrids, but fertile ones at that. After all, evolutionists believe that lizards evolved from fish and birds from lizards, don't they? Or what happened to all of the intermediate species that the fossil record is completely silent about? Where are the feathered lizards? Or the lizards with gills?
The problem with evolutionary theory is that they start with a premise: that there is no God and that higher species evolved from lower ones by only natural means. Then they look at all the different species over time, mostly based on fossils and radiation dating. Then they use their imaginations to fill in the rest of the details. You don't see anything problematic with this approach?
A real scientist might not start off with the premise that there is no God, look at the fossil evidence, be more reasonable about the accuracy of radiation dating, and see the lack of intermediate species, and take the other laws of nature, particularly involving sexual reproduction and speciation, and come to the conclusion that the only explanation that makes sense is that every species was created by the Creator. But most scientists are not this honest. They have a clear, atheistic agenda. They like to explain that life evolved from carbon and water, but can't duplicate carbon and water actually becoming alive. They like to posit about the genesis of the universe in the big bang, but can't explain where all the matter and energy that begat the big bang came from since matter can neither be created nor destroyed in the natural system. In other words, the very theories that scientists champion as truth, like evolution or the big bang, force them to violate other tenets of science. You are grasping for answers which you can't find in nature because they transcend nature. You will wander around in the dark blinded by your prejudice and never find the truth!
As a Presbyterian, I'm a little confused as to why you would make that statement. I, myself, am quite a leftist, but I find that I am very much a minority in this. Most Presbyterians, I find, are quite conservative in their politics and social outlook. A lot of this has to do with the prevalence of postmillennial theology within the Reformed tradition and the idea that the Gospel will prosper and triumph over the whole earth through our preaching and many take this to mean also gaining the submission of the non-believers through enacting laws in harmony with God's laws. This is sometimes known as Dominion Theology. It is quite common among Presbyterians, although I am one who is an amillennialist and looks at things from a more bottom-up perspective. That is, that individuals who are converted to Christ will effect good on their society, rather than it being imposed from above by the civil magistrates. I wouldn't deny that civil magistrates have the duty of implementing God's laws, but I also don't think that the unconverted are capable of implementing God's laws.
As for whether some fundamentalists would consider Reformed Christians to be truly Christian, I think the biggest obstacle has been our insistence on paedobaptism. But then again, there are lots of Reformed Baptists, as well. I find that where there is an issue with politics, it is because a lot of evangelicals confuse the Gospel with the Republican party and support for right-wing positions that have absolutely nothing to do with the Gospel of Christ. I honestly don't understand, for instance, how welfare is anti-Christian, or gun control. Yet many so-called "evangelicals" feel this way.