Sorry, I come from an OSX world. Apple doesn't slap you around the same way Microsoft does. (Sure, they slap you around, but in a completely different way.)
I'm talking about the future, and what I want from a slim client. I never mentioned XP in that equation because it doesn't fall under the heading of "things I want."
Yep, that would be the amount of stress you experience. We're talking about stress levels, not responsibility.
You work 120 hours a week for four weeks to get the graphics package done for a seasonal football show. Now you have 30 minutes to finish the changes the producer asked for before they do a live recording.
Anything can (and will) go wrong. You don't get it done, you're pissing off a whole lotta people who expect something for the hundreds of thousands of dollars they've poured into sponsoring this show. This show represents a third of your revenue for a year, and screwing it up means the clients might walk.
I worked in a television production studio for the last five years as well. I learned that my professional requirements and the requirements of your average home user are two different things.
What works for a studio does not work for everybody else (not to mention that the way television studios currently work, with all of the details mentioned above, is incredibly antiquated.) This is a situation perpetuated by seasoned producers who can still edit a mean tape-to-tape session but have no clue what to do with a non-linear editor. I respect their ability, and the necessity for something that works reliably every time five minutes ago, but that's when your job depends on it. In the home user arena, there are already far better options that are just as reliable, they just require an investment of time to get everything set up.
Once you know what you're doing, you can just zip on through faster than the conventional methods will allow. Just as reliable, way faster, and with access to your video catalog using search functions built right into your operating system. It also requires a fraction of the physical storage space and is far more attractive to look at.
To summarize: DVD sky-rocketed because it filled a void. You're far more likely to find a DVD player with backwards compatibility than you are a VCR. Also, a lot more can go wrong with a video tape stored properly than a DVD stored properly.
I'd suggest making the software investment (with the exception of the hardware needed to import the movies, most of this can be done with freeware, shareware, or open source software if you're using something like OSX.)
VHS is going to be poorer quality already compared with a lossy format such as, say, a MPEG-2 compressed movie, or even a high-quality Divx. You could also use the DV format for good compression, and it's already compatible with modern DV video cameras. I had a lot of success with it when working on a spot for ESPN last fall, and had no trouble passing it on to my producer for use in an Avid editing system.
MPEG-2 is the same format as used on commercial DVDs. It gives you the option of burning a DVD that can be dropped straight into a standard DVD player.
If you use some other format that gives better compression but requires a computer for playback, consider video mirroring to a TV and playing back on your computer (again, on the Mac, this is ridiculously easy, and there are video cards for the PC that offer similar capabilities.)
If you want to dedicate a hard drive to storing these movies, go for it, but consider a tape backup (not the VHS kind;-) to make sure the data remains secure. I'd even suggest storing it on an external drive - perhaps one using Firewire (IEEE 1394) so that you can easily move it around and get incredibly fast transfer rates.
If the tapes are worth it to keep around for another twenty years, I'd go with the hardware investment and go the DVD or hard drive route myself.
What is it with girlfriends and letting them monopolize the desktop? I just bought a new workstation, and she gravitates to it like a bee to honey. Of course, I respect her for that.
Having a true thin client would mean I could continue "using" my workstation (or she could) without having to go out and buy a second computer - of course, this is a ways down the road, as the costs for tablet PCs are currently too high to justify the expense.
The buttons have pictures, typically little or no labeling.
Hint: the pink one is for girls, the blue one is for boys. The pictures aren't the best, but the blue one showing a stylized jet of water hitting somebody's butt should be a pretty good clue as to what comes next.
A dual G4/800 workstation from a year or so ago is still a very nice system, and will be much cheaper option than buying a new one.
I've long since done the math and concluded that Apple's hardware pricing is comparable to most popular PC vendors (Dell, HP, Gateway, etc.) The only difference is that they pack more features into the basic package, such as Firewire, USB, Gigabit Ethernet, Geforce or Radeon Pro, etc.; because you can't opt out on some of these features, you pay for them. You don't pay any unfair "Apple tax" above and beyond what it would cost to get them included on a PC.
The other problem is that Apple has managed to out-innovate itself in the design area. If I'm having to explain to my PC-using parents why they'll be forced to get a black tower if they buy a new Dell when they'd rather stick to beige, you can imagine what most PC users think about the iLamp - I'm sorry, *iMac* - design (although I can see the merit in the design, I've always detested the iMac on a personal level, even as a happy Mac user. First gumdrops, now lamps. Ugh.)
PC users equate computers with boxes, and the closest you'll find in the Apple line-up is the G4 workstation. Obviously, the price point is going to be just a little bit off when compared to an entry-level Dell. It's ironic to listen to arguments from my PC friends who say that they want a box because of the expansion options it offers (which I won't argue with), even though they typically never use these expansion options, anyway. By the time they get to that point, they're usually buying a newer, faster PC altogether.
iTunes 4 rocks, and each successive update to Apple's "iLife" line-up is coming closer and closer to convincing my PC-toting girlfriend to switching.
I'm amazed and tickled to see the response to the new online music store, and the fact that it's turning heads right and left. I'm sure that everybody and his dog is now scrambling to roll out a similar service for Windows as soon as possible. If Apple does roll out a Windows version, however, that will at least give Apple a chance at some revenew from "the other 95%," and give Windows users a great music purchasing system which will make the other PC big boys really have to work hard to compete. Anything that makes corporate fat cats have to actually innovate makes me happy.
That's because German law is reasonable and fair. I have a friend in Leipzig who is studying to be a lawyer, and she specialized in studying American law. She was sometimes astonished, to say the least. She wonders how our legal system continues to function.
She was also amazed that we don't respect lawyers in America, unlike in Germany, where it's still a respected profession. Of course, Germans also pay school teachers, both in money and respect. Go figure.
They're perfectly happy with it because they don't know any better.
I live in Osaka, and it's very true that it's only about $20 for 12Mbps/1Mbps download/upload, plus VoIP phone (3 minutes for 2 cents to the US). If you live in a large apartment building, you can even enjoy 100Mbps fiber.
Whereas size to density may play a key role in rolling it out, it doesn't excuse the price nor the speed cap. Japan has half the population of America in 1/25 the land area, which means they've got some serious bandwidth issues that they still have to overcome. Even without real-world distances to worry about, they've still got to install a lot of hardware with a lot of capacity to deal with the volume. No matter how you cut it, there's no excuse why people in the big cities in the US couldn't be enjoying the same benefits as the Japanese.
Also, look at New Zealand - very low population density (about 3.8 million total, not counting the sheep) and enjoying 10Mbps for about the same price or slightly higher. No, Americans are just getting screwed, period.
Good, so you know what I mean. Translating manga into English isn't the same as, say, writing a 12-page paper in German analyzing Donatello's bronze pulpits.
Granted, the Japanese slang and cultural references might get you; you start losing focus on how tough that might be after the firs year...
Yeah, I know the feeling. However, translating from a foreign language into your native language is a completely different ball of wax than the other way around. I can read business Japanese just fine, but writing it? Not yet (mainly because I haven't applied myself yet.)
Translation (stress: into your own native language) really isn't as bad as people make it out to be; again, you just have to apply yourself.
I've also been speaking German for 12 years and have native-level proficiency, so I feel that I have a good frame of reference.
The actors can now see who they're interacting with, and if their pantomime with a CG character is off-target, they can see it immediately and go back to do it again, rather than being called in months later to reshoot the scene.
We've had on-screen real-time avatars for a long time now. I used to love watching MSNBC's "The Site," which was the precursor to ZDTV. They had a full CG realtime character who they did on-set "tech talks" with in a short, three-minute segment in every show. That was in 1997; I'm sure things are much further along now.
I'm all in favor of other people doing things like Quartz Extreme in the open source community, first of all, because it gives Apple something to compete with, and secondly, because it might do things that Apple didn't think of. In the latter case, users can benefit from the free version, and perhaps Apple will try to incorporate those same innovations back into Quartz Extreme.
There was some serious sour grapes going on in that article. Part of it I understand, from a business standpoint; it's hard to develop for such a small market in the first place with all of the free competition. The other part sounded suspiciously like, "Hold on, wait a second, why don't you dump that open source KHTML core that you've already built into your application and were planning on offering to your developers, and instead pay to license our proprietary, closed-source core?"
The part that really gets me is that it sounds like they were using the release of Safari to have an excuse to abandon the Mac platform. It's not like IE, Mozilla, Netscape, and Camino weren't already competing with them for free. Safari is great and all, but it still isn't all the way there yet; I prefer Camino and Mozilla first. Opera is just there for cranky, IE-oriented pages, as a last-ditch effort before I have to open IE.;)
Everyone's assuming that he's incorporated. Running a small business on the side does not instantly mean that you've gone out and filed the paperwork to be a corporation, nor is it necessarily a given that you should. It just depends on how you want the tax laws applied to your business.
If you havent't filed with your city or state to be a business, then they don't consider you a business; what you do is then considered a hobby. If you're making in excess of $600 from any single client, then you'd better think about registering to become a business, as you still have to declare the income and the IRS might raise an eyebrow at a hobby that earns several thousand dollars a year.
Some of the benefits include being able to declare part of your home as an office, which gives you breaks on things like your utilities. Business trips taken with the car can also be included (but you have to know when you went and exactly what the mileage was, etc.) If you keep decent books on what you do and where you go, then you can really cancel out most of the effects of a "side business." As a computer animator, I get to declare all of my computer upgrades up to $18,000 a year as a business cost; now how sweet is that?:)
Also, if you earn less than $600 on a business for more than a couple of years, the IRS literally considers it a hobby, not a business.
Definitely give TurboTax for the Web a shot. It's not that expensive and can usually be completed in an hour or so, no matter how complicated your taxes (mine were six different forms last year, and everything went fine. Cost me $20 - it was that low because Oklahoma pays for the basic service for residents, and then I upgraded for "expert" advice.)
Finally, check to see if your state tax commission cooperates with an accounting service to help pay for your tax advice. They want you to do it right as much as you do; any mistakes you make means more headaches and work for them.
The average person is already exposed to more radiation than the average computer geek; it's called "sunlight." Big glowing ball of gas in the sky. Lights up everything. Amazing thing, really.;) (You may know it as, "that damn thing that keeps causing glare on my monitor and interrupts my sleep at two in the afternoon...)
Seriously, I was wondering about the radiation. The obvious question is, is there more radiation now than before, or are we simply utilizing a frequency that already has naturally-occurring radiation, and therefore not a big deal?
It's also going to depend on strength-of-signal, obviously.
So, if you take away the install problems, KDE and Gnome are easy enough to point and click around!
That's just it, though; she couldn't get past installation. The point of her article was, if you can't get it installed without "expert" help, then it's not ready for prime-time.
I just downloaded Yellow Dog Linux 2.3 for the PowerPC, which comes with a helpful movie on how to install it (strangely, the movie for a Mac-targeted Linux distro is in RealPlayer format only, which is a bit of a pain to play on OSX. I don't want to give Real Networks my credit card number just to download the "free" version of their player.)
The first thing that happens is that it completely fails to boot from CD, which the instructions make sound as easy as pie. I'm not surprised, really; Apple's firmware is designed to recognize Apple system partitions, not Linux. There is absolutely no software included to prep the system for the installation, either; no boot loader, nothing, and they could easily script something to run under OSX, considering its BSD underpinnings; no additional programming knowledge required. LinuxPPC, which dates from the late 90's, actually did a much better job installing on my old 8500/120 under OS 9, a completely non-Unix OS.)
My system, a new mirror-door dual G4 tower, is prominently displayed on their page as one of their supported systems. However, the closest solution I can find is to copy the contents of the "install" folder located on the YDL CD into my System Folder and then perform some juju in the Open Firmware command line at startup - not exactly what the average user wants to read when they're doing a "try before you buy" installation of an operating system, and not something you want them to try, unless you to risk them making their Mac unbootable based on advice you gave and they screwed up. Conveniently, they'll let you pay for installation support. You could easily draw some tongue-in-cheek conclusions from this.
Open Source is not suppposed to be about making money. However, it remains an indisputable fact that the distribution companies (with the exception of free ones, such as Slackware) are in it for the money because that's what it takes to pay the bills. If they're packaging something that consumers can't install, they're limiting their market to the realm of the tech-savvy geek and the systems administrator. This may sound all good and fine to the geeks, smug in their superior abilities and hard-earned knowledge, but it's not great for the distro company's bottom line; even if you plan on making your money selling Linux support and proprietary tools, you're going to lose a lot of potential customers up front who feel alienated by their inability to get past step one.
They have made accusations, that is why the person was taken. The difference is they have not made publicly disclosed accusations.
Hmm...if you don't actually state what the accusations are, then how can you prove you've made them? Saying they have undisclosed accusations doesn't actually prove they exist. Kinda like the government's accusations that Saddam Hussein had undisclosed weapons and that he was just so good at hiding them, we should attack him, anyway. Sounds like we're on a roll. Thank God I'm living in Japan right now.
I apologize, because I'm pretty sure this is an off-topic post. However, I hope it's at least educational.
Science and religion are mutually exclusive. Science attempts to describe how things work, not debate why they are here. Evolution is not a religion nor an attempt to refute religion, just a description of a biological process over generations of a species.
Evolution can't be a religion. Religion is the belief (or non-belief) in the nature of existence and the great question of "Why are we here?" (answer: 42). Evolution is a description of a process that takes place within the universe, not without. Describing a scientific process does refute the existence of a Creator because, by definition, any creator exists outside of his creation. The theory of evolution only postulates that biological evolution takes place within the physical universe that we can measure, i.e. within that creation, and therefore does not encompass God.
If it makes you feel better, you could consider it God's way of getting the job done. It does not exclude instantaneous creation of matter and energy or Creationism, it merely describes one facet of how species survive and are affected by their environment. It's really not as earth-shatteringly profound as people make it out to be.
Fact: Darwin was a devout Christian his entire life.
What are you installing that you don't want them to uninstall? Spyware?
If I uninstall a program, I want it to remove everything that was installed with the program. If anything's left behind, it's either due to sloppy uninstall management, or somebody has an ulterior motive.
Even if Windows uninstaller is slow, it's a good idea (assuming it works correctly.) It's a standardized method for uninstalling a program, and since when have Slashdotters been against standards?
Everybody having their own idea on how to uninstall their apps is inconvenient for the average user. Just because you think you can do it better doesn't mean you should force your views on somebody else. Follow the guidelines, and if the system in place sucks, bitch until you get it changed. Assuming Microsoft's install/uninstall method isn't a complete botch (and there are some high-profile programs out there that use it correctly, so that argument's going to be pretty weak), you're showing how good a programmer you are by being able to play well with others.
And if you think asking Microsoft to change anything is an exercise in futility, don't use Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
Answer: it's just an example. Pick whatever information you want. It doesn't have to be the names of your dogs.
;)
For those of us who have never owned dogs, does this mean we're locked out of Microsoft's next generation security measures?
Damn security holes.
Sorry, I come from an OSX world. Apple doesn't slap you around the same way Microsoft does. (Sure, they slap you around, but in a completely different way.)
I'm talking about the future, and what I want from a slim client. I never mentioned XP in that equation because it doesn't fall under the heading of "things I want."
Yep, that would be the amount of stress you experience. We're talking about stress levels, not responsibility.
You work 120 hours a week for four weeks to get the graphics package done for a seasonal football show. Now you have 30 minutes to finish the changes the producer asked for before they do a live recording.
Anything can (and will) go wrong. You don't get it done, you're pissing off a whole lotta people who expect something for the hundreds of thousands of dollars they've poured into sponsoring this show. This show represents a third of your revenue for a year, and screwing it up means the clients might walk.
I worked in a television production studio for the last five years as well. I learned that my professional requirements and the requirements of your average home user are two different things.
;-) to make sure the data remains secure. I'd even suggest storing it on an external drive - perhaps one using Firewire (IEEE 1394) so that you can easily move it around and get incredibly fast transfer rates.
What works for a studio does not work for everybody else (not to mention that the way television studios currently work, with all of the details mentioned above, is incredibly antiquated.) This is a situation perpetuated by seasoned producers who can still edit a mean tape-to-tape session but have no clue what to do with a non-linear editor. I respect their ability, and the necessity for something that works reliably every time five minutes ago, but that's when your job depends on it. In the home user arena, there are already far better options that are just as reliable, they just require an investment of time to get everything set up.
Once you know what you're doing, you can just zip on through faster than the conventional methods will allow. Just as reliable, way faster, and with access to your video catalog using search functions built right into your operating system. It also requires a fraction of the physical storage space and is far more attractive to look at.
To summarize: DVD sky-rocketed because it filled a void. You're far more likely to find a DVD player with backwards compatibility than you are a VCR. Also, a lot more can go wrong with a video tape stored properly than a DVD stored properly.
I'd suggest making the software investment (with the exception of the hardware needed to import the movies, most of this can be done with freeware, shareware, or open source software if you're using something like OSX.)
VHS is going to be poorer quality already compared with a lossy format such as, say, a MPEG-2 compressed movie, or even a high-quality Divx. You could also use the DV format for good compression, and it's already compatible with modern DV video cameras. I had a lot of success with it when working on a spot for ESPN last fall, and had no trouble passing it on to my producer for use in an Avid editing system.
MPEG-2 is the same format as used on commercial DVDs. It gives you the option of burning a DVD that can be dropped straight into a standard DVD player.
If you use some other format that gives better compression but requires a computer for playback, consider video mirroring to a TV and playing back on your computer (again, on the Mac, this is ridiculously easy, and there are video cards for the PC that offer similar capabilities.)
If you want to dedicate a hard drive to storing these movies, go for it, but consider a tape backup (not the VHS kind
If the tapes are worth it to keep around for another twenty years, I'd go with the hardware investment and go the DVD or hard drive route myself.
What is it with girlfriends and letting them monopolize the desktop? I just bought a new workstation, and she gravitates to it like a bee to honey. Of course, I respect her for that.
Having a true thin client would mean I could continue "using" my workstation (or she could) without having to go out and buy a second computer - of course, this is a ways down the road, as the costs for tablet PCs are currently too high to justify the expense.
The buttons have pictures, typically little or no labeling.
Hint: the pink one is for girls, the blue one is for boys. The pictures aren't the best, but the blue one showing a stylized jet of water hitting somebody's butt should be a pretty good clue as to what comes next.
Good ones let you adjust the water pressure, too.
I'm sorry, were we referring to a different government over 60 years ago under a completely different set of laws and a different constitution?
Let me check my calendar. I thought we were in a different century already.
A dual G4/800 workstation from a year or so ago is still a very nice system, and will be much cheaper option than buying a new one.
I've long since done the math and concluded that Apple's hardware pricing is comparable to most popular PC vendors (Dell, HP, Gateway, etc.) The only difference is that they pack more features into the basic package, such as Firewire, USB, Gigabit Ethernet, Geforce or Radeon Pro, etc.; because you can't opt out on some of these features, you pay for them. You don't pay any unfair "Apple tax" above and beyond what it would cost to get them included on a PC.
The other problem is that Apple has managed to out-innovate itself in the design area. If I'm having to explain to my PC-using parents why they'll be forced to get a black tower if they buy a new Dell when they'd rather stick to beige, you can imagine what most PC users think about the iLamp - I'm sorry, *iMac* - design (although I can see the merit in the design, I've always detested the iMac on a personal level, even as a happy Mac user. First gumdrops, now lamps. Ugh.)
PC users equate computers with boxes, and the closest you'll find in the Apple line-up is the G4 workstation. Obviously, the price point is going to be just a little bit off when compared to an entry-level Dell. It's ironic to listen to arguments from my PC friends who say that they want a box because of the expansion options it offers (which I won't argue with), even though they typically never use these expansion options, anyway. By the time they get to that point, they're usually buying a newer, faster PC altogether.
iTunes 4 rocks, and each successive update to Apple's "iLife" line-up is coming closer and closer to convincing my PC-toting girlfriend to switching.
I'm amazed and tickled to see the response to the new online music store, and the fact that it's turning heads right and left. I'm sure that everybody and his dog is now scrambling to roll out a similar service for Windows as soon as possible. If Apple does roll out a Windows version, however, that will at least give Apple a chance at some revenew from "the other 95%," and give Windows users a great music purchasing system which will make the other PC big boys really have to work hard to compete. Anything that makes corporate fat cats have to actually innovate makes me happy.
That's because German law is reasonable and fair. I have a friend in Leipzig who is studying to be a lawyer, and she specialized in studying American law. She was sometimes astonished, to say the least. She wonders how our legal system continues to function.
She was also amazed that we don't respect lawyers in America, unlike in Germany, where it's still a respected profession. Of course, Germans also pay school teachers, both in money and respect. Go figure.
They're perfectly happy with it because they don't know any better.
I live in Osaka, and it's very true that it's only about $20 for 12Mbps/1Mbps download/upload, plus VoIP phone (3 minutes for 2 cents to the US). If you live in a large apartment building, you can even enjoy 100Mbps fiber.
Whereas size to density may play a key role in rolling it out, it doesn't excuse the price nor the speed cap. Japan has half the population of America in 1/25 the land area, which means they've got some serious bandwidth issues that they still have to overcome. Even without real-world distances to worry about, they've still got to install a lot of hardware with a lot of capacity to deal with the volume. No matter how you cut it, there's no excuse why people in the big cities in the US couldn't be enjoying the same benefits as the Japanese.
Also, look at New Zealand - very low population density (about 3.8 million total, not counting the sheep) and enjoying 10Mbps for about the same price or slightly higher. No, Americans are just getting screwed, period.
Good, so you know what I mean. Translating manga into English isn't the same as, say, writing a 12-page paper in German analyzing Donatello's bronze pulpits.
Granted, the Japanese slang and cultural references might get you; you start losing focus on how tough that might be after the firs year...
Yeah, I know the feeling. However, translating from a foreign language into your native language is a completely different ball of wax than the other way around. I can read business Japanese just fine, but writing it? Not yet (mainly because I haven't applied myself yet.)
Translation (stress: into your own native language) really isn't as bad as people make it out to be; again, you just have to apply yourself.
I've also been speaking German for 12 years and have native-level proficiency, so I feel that I have a good frame of reference.
Ever studied Japanese yourself? Anybody who paid attention through a year's worth of university study and had a good dictionary could do it.
I should know. I did just that, and I now live and work in Japan.
No, quite the opposite. It will go much faster.
The actors can now see who they're interacting with, and if their pantomime with a CG character is off-target, they can see it immediately and go back to do it again, rather than being called in months later to reshoot the scene.
We've had on-screen real-time avatars for a long time now. I used to love watching MSNBC's "The Site," which was the precursor to ZDTV. They had a full CG realtime character who they did on-set "tech talks" with in a short, three-minute segment in every show. That was in 1997; I'm sure things are much further along now.
I'm all in favor of other people doing things like Quartz Extreme in the open source community, first of all, because it gives Apple something to compete with, and secondly, because it might do things that Apple didn't think of. In the latter case, users can benefit from the free version, and perhaps Apple will try to incorporate those same innovations back into Quartz Extreme.
There was some serious sour grapes going on in that article. Part of it I understand, from a business standpoint; it's hard to develop for such a small market in the first place with all of the free competition. The other part sounded suspiciously like, "Hold on, wait a second, why don't you dump that open source KHTML core that you've already built into your application and were planning on offering to your developers, and instead pay to license our proprietary, closed-source core?"
;)
The part that really gets me is that it sounds like they were using the release of Safari to have an excuse to abandon the Mac platform. It's not like IE, Mozilla, Netscape, and Camino weren't already competing with them for free. Safari is great and all, but it still isn't all the way there yet; I prefer Camino and Mozilla first. Opera is just there for cranky, IE-oriented pages, as a last-ditch effort before I have to open IE.
Everyone's assuming that he's incorporated. Running a small business on the side does not instantly mean that you've gone out and filed the paperwork to be a corporation, nor is it necessarily a given that you should. It just depends on how you want the tax laws applied to your business.
:)
If you havent't filed with your city or state to be a business, then they don't consider you a business; what you do is then considered a hobby. If you're making in excess of $600 from any single client, then you'd better think about registering to become a business, as you still have to declare the income and the IRS might raise an eyebrow at a hobby that earns several thousand dollars a year.
Some of the benefits include being able to declare part of your home as an office, which gives you breaks on things like your utilities. Business trips taken with the car can also be included (but you have to know when you went and exactly what the mileage was, etc.) If you keep decent books on what you do and where you go, then you can really cancel out most of the effects of a "side business." As a computer animator, I get to declare all of my computer upgrades up to $18,000 a year as a business cost; now how sweet is that?
Also, if you earn less than $600 on a business for more than a couple of years, the IRS literally considers it a hobby, not a business.
Definitely give TurboTax for the Web a shot. It's not that expensive and can usually be completed in an hour or so, no matter how complicated your taxes (mine were six different forms last year, and everything went fine. Cost me $20 - it was that low because Oklahoma pays for the basic service for residents, and then I upgraded for "expert" advice.)
Finally, check to see if your state tax commission cooperates with an accounting service to help pay for your tax advice. They want you to do it right as much as you do; any mistakes you make means more headaches and work for them.
The average person is already exposed to more radiation than the average computer geek; it's called "sunlight." Big glowing ball of gas in the sky. Lights up everything. Amazing thing, really. ;) (You may know it as, "that damn thing that keeps causing glare on my monitor and interrupts my sleep at two in the afternoon...)
Seriously, I was wondering about the radiation. The obvious question is, is there more radiation now than before, or are we simply utilizing a frequency that already has naturally-occurring radiation, and therefore not a big deal?
It's also going to depend on strength-of-signal, obviously.
Thanks for the tip. I finally saw the link; I should have guessed it was going to be one of Real's patented micro-links in fine print. ;)
That's just it, though; she couldn't get past installation. The point of her article was, if you can't get it installed without "expert" help, then it's not ready for prime-time.
I just downloaded Yellow Dog Linux 2.3 for the PowerPC, which comes with a helpful movie on how to install it (strangely, the movie for a Mac-targeted Linux distro is in RealPlayer format only, which is a bit of a pain to play on OSX. I don't want to give Real Networks my credit card number just to download the "free" version of their player.)
The first thing that happens is that it completely fails to boot from CD, which the instructions make sound as easy as pie. I'm not surprised, really; Apple's firmware is designed to recognize Apple system partitions, not Linux. There is absolutely no software included to prep the system for the installation, either; no boot loader, nothing, and they could easily script something to run under OSX, considering its BSD underpinnings; no additional programming knowledge required. LinuxPPC, which dates from the late 90's, actually did a much better job installing on my old 8500/120 under OS 9, a completely non-Unix OS.)
My system, a new mirror-door dual G4 tower, is prominently displayed on their page as one of their supported systems. However, the closest solution I can find is to copy the contents of the "install" folder located on the YDL CD into my System Folder and then perform some juju in the Open Firmware command line at startup - not exactly what the average user wants to read when they're doing a "try before you buy" installation of an operating system, and not something you want them to try, unless you to risk them making their Mac unbootable based on advice you gave and they screwed up. Conveniently, they'll let you pay for installation support. You could easily draw some tongue-in-cheek conclusions from this.
Open Source is not suppposed to be about making money. However, it remains an indisputable fact that the distribution companies (with the exception of free ones, such as Slackware) are in it for the money because that's what it takes to pay the bills. If they're packaging something that consumers can't install, they're limiting their market to the realm of the tech-savvy geek and the systems administrator. This may sound all good and fine to the geeks, smug in their superior abilities and hard-earned knowledge, but it's not great for the distro company's bottom line; even if you plan on making your money selling Linux support and proprietary tools, you're going to lose a lot of potential customers up front who feel alienated by their inability to get past step one.
Hmm...if you don't actually state what the accusations are, then how can you prove you've made them? Saying they have undisclosed accusations doesn't actually prove they exist. Kinda like the government's accusations that Saddam Hussein had undisclosed weapons and that he was just so good at hiding them, we should attack him, anyway. Sounds like we're on a roll. Thank God I'm living in Japan right now.
Take a deep breath and relax...heaven forbid the world might have a sense of humor. A holiday just for humor?!? What'll they think of next?
Life is too short to take so seriously. It's not as if you didn't have fair warning; April 1st happens the same time, every year.
Crap. Checked the post and still missed the typo. Should read, "does not refute the existence of a Creator."
I apologize, because I'm pretty sure this is an off-topic post. However, I hope it's at least educational.
Science and religion are mutually exclusive. Science attempts to describe how things work, not debate why they are here. Evolution is not a religion nor an attempt to refute religion, just a description of a biological process over generations of a species.
Evolution can't be a religion. Religion is the belief (or non-belief) in the nature of existence and the great question of "Why are we here?" (answer: 42). Evolution is a description of a process that takes place within the universe, not without. Describing a scientific process does refute the existence of a Creator because, by definition, any creator exists outside of his creation. The theory of evolution only postulates that biological evolution takes place within the physical universe that we can measure, i.e. within that creation, and therefore does not encompass God.
If it makes you feel better, you could consider it God's way of getting the job done. It does not exclude instantaneous creation of matter and energy or Creationism, it merely describes one facet of how species survive and are affected by their environment. It's really not as earth-shatteringly profound as people make it out to be.
Fact: Darwin was a devout Christian his entire life.
What are you installing that you don't want them to uninstall? Spyware?
If I uninstall a program, I want it to remove everything that was installed with the program. If anything's left behind, it's either due to sloppy uninstall management, or somebody has an ulterior motive.
Even if Windows uninstaller is slow, it's a good idea (assuming it works correctly.) It's a standardized method for uninstalling a program, and since when have Slashdotters been against standards?
Everybody having their own idea on how to uninstall their apps is inconvenient for the average user. Just because you think you can do it better doesn't mean you should force your views on somebody else. Follow the guidelines, and if the system in place sucks, bitch until you get it changed. Assuming Microsoft's install/uninstall method isn't a complete botch (and there are some high-profile programs out there that use it correctly, so that argument's going to be pretty weak), you're showing how good a programmer you are by being able to play well with others.
And if you think asking Microsoft to change anything is an exercise in futility, don't use Windows.