"Spawning," as you so quaintly put it, means that you've taken on the responsibility of bringing somebody into the world. It's not fascist, it's social obligation. We agree to raise our children to the best of our abilities, they agree to not turn into sociopathic serial killers who come back and murder us in our beds. If you yourself are a well-adjusted adult, you might actually enjoy the experience and love the little knee-biters. It's an amazing system, really.
Assuming you actually give a damn about your children, then knowing where they are on the way home from school is not a bad thing. It depends on where you live. Some places in this world are very scary, and not exactly safe for young children.
During middle school, my family lived in a scary neighborhood in East Fort Myers, Florida. There was definitely the chance of disappearing on the way home. We had a ten-foot fence around the school, topped with barbed wire. We had an armed policeman with a bullet-proof vest permanently on duty. Kids would brag about what weapons they'd contrived to carry with them to protect themselves on the way home, should it be necessary (I had a 3/8-inch bike chain. Figured it would work in a pinch.)
I don't think something like this would be good for a teenager, who should be old enough (and smart enough) to do their own thing, but a goofy little seven-year-old in the big city could get grabbed. Parents aren't worried what their kids are doing, they're worried about what other people are doing to their kids.
The messaging on the phone seemed very simple. "Little Billy isn't where he's supposed to be," isn't exactly very helpful.
What I want to see is the technology that circumvents the problem of a little kid forgetting to turn his phone on on the way home. Goodness knows I'd never have remembered.;)
I agree. Here in Osaka, we have the standard ticket readers, with one-time, round-trip, and paper debit cards (no smart cards yet.) The Japanese ticket readers are *fast*; Once you develop the knack, you walk right through, drop in your ticket on one side and pick it up on the other, without ever slowing down.
I have seen them being repaired, though, and they're monsters inside. Whoever figured them out was a genius. I can definitely see where the electronic cards would be a benefit for the train companies, especially at rush hour. It's true that you don't have to take them out of your wallet, so hunting around for the card is reduced.:)
Actually, WETA FX itself likes to write it in all caps. Perhaps to differentiate itself from the bug.
The weta is unique to New Zealand, much as is the kiwi bird. Perhaps New Zealanders feel the same sort of affection towards the bug as they do towards the bird.
I have a friend who just got hired there to work on their motion-capture team. I'll ask him why they named it that and whether or not caps should be used.
I live in Osaka, and that service is unfortunately only available in the main city, not in the outlying suburbs. It also seems to be limited to large apartment buildings, where the number of tenants justifies the cost of installing the technology.
On the other hand, for the "rest of us," there's broadband DSL at 20Mbps for about $35 a month. I can deal with that. My 802.11b wireless LAN has become my bottleneck. The irony hurts my head. Note to self: need 802.11g.
As has been pointed out, the rest of the internet has become the bottleneck. My connection performance is perceptually equivalent to what I was getting on my university's departmental routers, which was 100Mbps.
My current provider (KDDI) has a simple safety built in - limit uploads to 1Mbps. No stipulations on servers required, the performance just isn't there.
I'll be moving soon and switching to Yahoo! BB, which offers the Yahoo! BB phone connected to their DSL modem. This allows you to call anywhere in Japan for less than the current long-distance and local rates, call another Yahoo! BB customer anywhere in the country for free, and to the US for 2 cents every three minutes.
The story didn't mention that they had to throw out their current boxes at all, just that their future upgrades wouldn't involve actually buying Microsoft products.
This does not eliminate PC hardware, as the majority of operating systems currently available run on it. There is absolutely no stipulation that they have to buy a Mac at all.
As for the concerns that former Windows users will be lost in a *nix environment (probably involving a KDE or Gnome window manager)...er, you're trying to tell me that this category of user is any more adept at using Windows?
Got this off of dictionary.com. Wonderful resource. I recommend it highly.
constitutional monarchy (n.)
A monarchy in which the powers of the ruler are restricted to those granted under the constitution and laws of the nation.
Britain is, technically, a constitutional monarchy. This is a fact not open to debate. Notice how you put the title, "queen," in front of her name? It's not her first name.
Did you know that she's also technically the ruler of the remaining nations in the British Commonwealth? I have a friend from London and a friend from New Zealand that have told me all about it.
England is a constitutional monarchy, and America is a republic. Neither of them are democracies, although they support democratic idealogy.
Someday all the countries of the world will be stable democracies, but that day is not today.
That's utopian and narrow-minded; it sounds nice on paper, but will never hold water.
First of all, you're assuming that it works for everybody. What's good for America is good for everybody else, right?
Britain has a constitutional monarchy, not a democracy, and seems content with that. Japan is technically still an empire, although it could also be said to be a constitutional monarchy.
Second of all, not even America has a true democracy; we're a republic. A true democracy requires a small population, because in a "true" democracy, everyone's voice gets to be heard. With a population of several hundred million, this becomes logistically difficult. The information age can help in that direction (computers can handle tabulating everyone's voice), but right now, we work under a representative form of government, and how often do you feel properly represented?
This is the best answer I've heard so far. The ISP could even recoup expenses by offering consultation and labor to configure the server.
The ISP could also solve the problem by making it part of the setup agreement that the server must meet an outlined security standard before the client's server is allowed to go online. It is then the ISP's continued responsibility to send out regular updates to the client, informing them of new security threats, and how to combat these.
The ISP can continue to charge a fee for clients who want to leave the security maintenance in the hands of the ISP. This will help the ISP at least partially recoup their losses on servers where security was compromised, despite their best efforts.
The main problem seems to be:
a) there's always somebody, somewhere, happily hacking away
b) spam legislation is still in its infancy, and is an international problem
c) people are trying to think of ISPs as a utilitarian service, like electricity, gas or water, when it is in fact a telecommunications service. Gas, electricity, and water typically have a fixed maximum bandwidth, are one-way, and "dumb" (no information is being passed along.)
The phone company do not (typically) charge you for incoming calls. In most cases, they charge a flat rate. They have the benefit of knowing that the end user can only accept a fixed number of connections at any given time, which is built-in bandwidth security for them. ISPs should also throttle incoming bandwidth and thereby regulate the maximum amount a user can receive. If the user somehow receives more than the allotted bandwidth (which should be hopefully impossible at this point), then it is quite obviously the ISP's fault. If the user needs more bandwidth, they should pay more for the added service.
...and along came this little thing called the Renaissance, or Rebirth, and people started thinking for themselves. Focus shifted from the power of an unattainable God to the power of humanity (hence the term, "humanist") who believed that God was indeed attainable, and the future began to be conceived. Have you forgotten the sketchbooks of Leonardo da Vinci? He can be credited with conceiving, if not sucessfully constructing, the helicopter, the airplane, and the tank, among others.
The Americas were discovered, and with that opened a vast new frontier. People realized that there were new lands to explore, and that the world was much bigger than they'd ever imagined (well, the Greeks had actually accurately calculated the circumference within a few thousand miles over 800 years before that, but what do Greeks know?);)
With expanding horizons comes expansion of the mind. There's a reason that the West was referred to as the New World.
Note that all this took place at least 400 years before the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution.
You have to know where you've been before you can know where you're going. People of any given age always arrogantly assume that their civilization is the cusp of human development, and that their world is the greatest thing since sliced bread. There are many civilizations outside of the standard Judeo-Christian post-Roman West that developed - and dreamt - in different directions than our own. In their eyes, ours is a very young culture indeed.
As C.S. Lewis once wrote, "What do they teach them in these schools nowadays?"
Care to back that up with some statistics or links? I find that comment hard to believe. Which professional community? The professional community I'm a part of, namely the graphic design/animation/media production community, has whole-heartedly embraced OSX as the answer to all our questions.
I suppose that's pretty insignificant though, considering Apple's traditional core market...;)
My Mac CPU uses less power, and currently provides less performance, too (ouch!). I say this as a confirmed Mac addict, and just before buying a new dual G4 1.25GHz workstation, so don't hate me. Just being realistic, and waiting in anticipation for Apple's technology announcements this summer.:)
As for on-topic, I think this guy's article seems to leave a lot unsaid, with many facts not just overlooked, but apparently unknown as far as he's concerned. I thought, for example, that.NET services were being implemented on non-Windows machines with the open source project, Mono.
Did it with an 8500/120. By the time I sold it, it had a G3/250 and was USB-equipped. This was also with Apple's possibly worst-designed case ever (but the best components); you had to remove the processor and unmount the motherboard to add RAM.;)
iMac != workstation. The workstation lineup that Apple offers is as versatile as that of any PC manufacturer, including upgrade paths through many standard PC architectures (PCI, AGP, Firewire, USB, and yes, the processors.) A Mac workstation can last a good three years (I made one last six) with upgrades.
I've worked in television production for five years, primarily on the Mac. I use LightWave 3D, Photoshop, and AfterEffects as my primary tools. Television deadlines are notoriously gruesome, and the Mac has never let me down. I've also used PCs where necessary, and keep coming back to the Mac as my platform of choice. Max for games, LightWave and Maya for television and film. Since I do the latter and not the former, I'm set.
I grant that the current Mac processor drought has me on the edge of my seat, waiting for Apple to announce a solution. However, I also know that processor architecturs have always leap-frogged each other, and I think this is no different. The next iteration will most likely be 64-bit, making it as significant an advance as the introduction of the first RISC-based PowerPC was. And knowing Apple, it will work right the first time (mostly; nothing's perfect.)
Not only have you never purchased a Mac, it would seem a little homework is in order, too. I hope this helps a little.
Remember that outlawing something only keeps it out of the hands of law-abiding citizens. Do you think somebody willing to kill themselves and thousands of others is going to say, "Gee, too bad it's illegal to buy model rockets, guess we'll have to cancel the jihad?"
First of all, acceptance of the system is usually done under the user's self-righteous belief in his own innocence - something you may know to be true, but complete strangers don't, including law enforcement officers. The legitimacy of your own actions is open to interpretation; something that you consider to be a perfectly reasonable and innocent thing to do could be quickly classified as "illegal." Most people don't want to have the things they do in private broadcast to the world.
Let's face it: if we knew everything that everybody else did, we'd be quickly forced to the conclusion that human beings are a bunch of freaks.
Secondly, the idea of assuming that terrorists and malcontents might be "hiding in the light" and interpreting the comments of others accordingly is an instant recipe for institutionalized paranoia.
The law is there to protect its citizens and allow them to enjoy their rights and liberties under that law. People seem to readily jump to the conclusion that any means are justifiable to protect themselves from the malevolent intentions of others, but seem to assume that, somehow, the law will magically leave their own personal liberties intact, while only limiting those of everybody else. This is self-destructive egocentricity at its most dangerous.
The reason societies create governments and laws is to allow every individual a reasonable amount of freedom, whether we agree with the opinions of our fellow citizens or not. In order to preserve our own liberties, we have to also be willing to preserve the liberties of others. If we assume that everybody else is a criminal waiting for the chance to act, then we're no better than the RIAA.
Oklahoma State University has just enabled a NAT server on their residential network (campus apartments) to nuke P2P file sharing. This apparently was done to kill Kazaa, but also eliminated simple things like legitimate FTP.
I want to exchange legitimate movie files I created myself (I do freelance work as a computer animator) with a friend. However, I can't now, unless he "registers" his machine. This will also probably mean that his machine is added to a roster of IP's targeted for constant packet-monitoring.
Of course, the real solution is to encrypt your traffic. Then you get to have your ISP prosecued for a serious crime (at least much more serious than copyright violation) if they do manage to break the encryption.
If they decrypt my data stream, can I sue them under the DMCA?:D
It is all about being a balanced person. Nerds, are obviously not balanced. (I know I am making a big generalization, there are, of course, always exceptions.)
Speaking for nerds everywhere, I'd politely suggest you read the articles linked to in the original post. You seem to have missed the point. I consider myself both a nerd and well-balanced (positive acceptance of the former is indication of the latter.)
As for being a nerd, you're posting on Slashdot. Have you ever read the site's byline?
And always remember to maintain your sense of humor.
If every country has its good and bad points, then all things are equal. Which then logically leads to the question, why would you be coming back and kissing the ground?
I have lived in Germany for two years, and now Japan for the last six months. I feel no overwhelming urge to plant my face in America's dirt.
After all, I get 20Mbps DSL here for the same price as the slow stuff in the US, and new Macs are about $1,000 cheaper at my local dealer. The women are beautiful and the food is good. Why the hell would I want to come back? Priorities, man, priorities!
It's the same in Japanese, actually. They just use the English.:)
Re:Make no mistake: This has nothing to do w/802.1
on
WiFi Woes With .11g
·
· Score: 1
I'm very interested in knowing if this is true, as I'm planning on buying an Airport base station this month. If it's FUD, then why does Apple post it under their own specs? Are they just being lazy, or is there a genuine technical issue at work here?:
"(4) The AirPort Extreme Base Station defaults to 802.11b mode when users of AirPort Cards or other Wi-Fi certified 802.11b products join the network. Maximum data rate for AirPort Cards or other Wi-Fi certified 802.11b products is 11 Mbps."
Slashdot Mirror
"Spawning," as you so quaintly put it, means that you've taken on the responsibility of bringing somebody into the world. It's not fascist, it's social obligation. We agree to raise our children to the best of our abilities, they agree to not turn into sociopathic serial killers who come back and murder us in our beds. If you yourself are a well-adjusted adult, you might actually enjoy the experience and love the little knee-biters. It's an amazing system, really.
;)
Assuming you actually give a damn about your children, then knowing where they are on the way home from school is not a bad thing. It depends on where you live. Some places in this world are very scary, and not exactly safe for young children.
During middle school, my family lived in a scary neighborhood in East Fort Myers, Florida. There was definitely the chance of disappearing on the way home. We had a ten-foot fence around the school, topped with barbed wire. We had an armed policeman with a bullet-proof vest permanently on duty. Kids would brag about what weapons they'd contrived to carry with them to protect themselves on the way home, should it be necessary (I had a 3/8-inch bike chain. Figured it would work in a pinch.)
I don't think something like this would be good for a teenager, who should be old enough (and smart enough) to do their own thing, but a goofy little seven-year-old in the big city could get grabbed. Parents aren't worried what their kids are doing, they're worried about what other people are doing to their kids.
The messaging on the phone seemed very simple. "Little Billy isn't where he's supposed to be," isn't exactly very helpful.
What I want to see is the technology that circumvents the problem of a little kid forgetting to turn his phone on on the way home. Goodness knows I'd never have remembered.
I agree. Here in Osaka, we have the standard ticket readers, with one-time, round-trip, and paper debit cards (no smart cards yet.) The Japanese ticket readers are *fast*; Once you develop the knack, you walk right through, drop in your ticket on one side and pick it up on the other, without ever slowing down.
:)
I have seen them being repaired, though, and they're monsters inside. Whoever figured them out was a genius. I can definitely see where the electronic cards would be a benefit for the train companies, especially at rush hour. It's true that you don't have to take them out of your wallet, so hunting around for the card is reduced.
Actually, WETA FX itself likes to write it in all caps. Perhaps to differentiate itself from the bug.
The weta is unique to New Zealand, much as is the kiwi bird. Perhaps New Zealanders feel the same sort of affection towards the bug as they do towards the bird.
I have a friend who just got hired there to work on their motion-capture team. I'll ask him why they named it that and whether or not caps should be used.
I live in Osaka, and that service is unfortunately only available in the main city, not in the outlying suburbs. It also seems to be limited to large apartment buildings, where the number of tenants justifies the cost of installing the technology.
On the other hand, for the "rest of us," there's broadband DSL at 20Mbps for about $35 a month. I can deal with that. My 802.11b wireless LAN has become my bottleneck. The irony hurts my head. Note to self: need 802.11g.
As has been pointed out, the rest of the internet has become the bottleneck. My connection performance is perceptually equivalent to what I was getting on my university's departmental routers, which was 100Mbps.
My current provider (KDDI) has a simple safety built in - limit uploads to 1Mbps. No stipulations on servers required, the performance just isn't there.
I'll be moving soon and switching to Yahoo! BB, which offers the Yahoo! BB phone connected to their DSL modem. This allows you to call anywhere in Japan for less than the current long-distance and local rates, call another Yahoo! BB customer anywhere in the country for free, and to the US for 2 cents every three minutes.
The story didn't mention that they had to throw out their current boxes at all, just that their future upgrades wouldn't involve actually buying Microsoft products.
This does not eliminate PC hardware, as the majority of operating systems currently available run on it. There is absolutely no stipulation that they have to buy a Mac at all.
As for the concerns that former Windows users will be lost in a *nix environment (probably involving a KDE or Gnome window manager)...er, you're trying to tell me that this category of user is any more adept at using Windows?
The problem is, I probably wouldn't be able to stand myself. And then it becomes a case of "him" vs. "me," and we all know how that plays out.
I just hope I'm not as wily as I think I am...
I won't be able to show up, because I'll be living it up in Japan with my beautiful Japanese fiancee.
;)
Those that still want to show up at my tenth-year high school reunion will just have to drool from a distance...
Someday all the countries of the world will be stable democracies, but that day is not today.
That's utopian and narrow-minded; it sounds nice on paper, but will never hold water.
First of all, you're assuming that it works for everybody. What's good for America is good for everybody else, right?
Britain has a constitutional monarchy, not a democracy, and seems content with that. Japan is technically still an empire, although it could also be said to be a constitutional monarchy.
Second of all, not even America has a true democracy; we're a republic. A true democracy requires a small population, because in a "true" democracy, everyone's voice gets to be heard. With a population of several hundred million, this becomes logistically difficult. The information age can help in that direction (computers can handle tabulating everyone's voice), but right now, we work under a representative form of government, and how often do you feel properly represented?
Tell him to get a Mac. It offers everything he's asking for.
The ISP can continue to charge a fee for clients who want to leave the security maintenance in the hands of the ISP. This will help the ISP at least partially recoup their losses on servers where security was compromised, despite their best efforts.
The main problem seems to be: The phone company do not (typically) charge you for incoming calls. In most cases, they charge a flat rate. They have the benefit of knowing that the end user can only accept a fixed number of connections at any given time, which is built-in bandwidth security for them. ISPs should also throttle incoming bandwidth and thereby regulate the maximum amount a user can receive. If the user somehow receives more than the allotted bandwidth (which should be hopefully impossible at this point), then it is quite obviously the ISP's fault. If the user needs more bandwidth, they should pay more for the added service.
...and along came this little thing called the Renaissance, or Rebirth, and people started thinking for themselves. Focus shifted from the power of an unattainable God to the power of humanity (hence the term, "humanist") who believed that God was indeed attainable, and the future began to be conceived. Have you forgotten the sketchbooks of Leonardo da Vinci? He can be credited with conceiving, if not sucessfully constructing, the helicopter, the airplane, and the tank, among others.
The Americas were discovered, and with that opened a vast new frontier. People realized that there were new lands to explore, and that the world was much bigger than they'd ever imagined (well, the Greeks had actually accurately calculated the circumference within a few thousand miles over 800 years before that, but what do Greeks know?) ;)
With expanding horizons comes expansion of the mind. There's a reason that the West was referred to as the New World.
Note that all this took place at least 400 years before the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution.
You have to know where you've been before you can know where you're going. People of any given age always arrogantly assume that their civilization is the cusp of human development, and that their world is the greatest thing since sliced bread. There are many civilizations outside of the standard Judeo-Christian post-Roman West that developed - and dreamt - in different directions than our own. In their eyes, ours is a very young culture indeed.
As C.S. Lewis once wrote, "What do they teach them in these schools nowadays?"
Care to back that up with some statistics or links? I find that comment hard to believe. Which professional community? The professional community I'm a part of, namely the graphic design/animation/media production community, has whole-heartedly embraced OSX as the answer to all our questions.
;)
I suppose that's pretty insignificant though, considering Apple's traditional core market...
My Mac CPU uses less power, and currently provides less performance, too (ouch!). I say this as a confirmed Mac addict, and just before buying a new dual G4 1.25GHz workstation, so don't hate me. Just being realistic, and waiting in anticipation for Apple's technology announcements this summer. :)
.NET services were being implemented on non-Windows machines with the open source project, Mono.
As for on-topic, I think this guy's article seems to leave a lot unsaid, with many facts not just overlooked, but apparently unknown as far as he's concerned. I thought, for example, that
Did it with an 8500/120. By the time I sold it, it had a G3/250 and was USB-equipped. This was also with Apple's possibly worst-designed case ever (but the best components); you had to remove the processor and unmount the motherboard to add RAM. ;)
iMac != workstation. The workstation lineup that Apple offers is as versatile as that of any PC manufacturer, including upgrade paths through many standard PC architectures (PCI, AGP, Firewire, USB, and yes, the processors.) A Mac workstation can last a good three years (I made one last six) with upgrades.
I've worked in television production for five years, primarily on the Mac. I use LightWave 3D, Photoshop, and AfterEffects as my primary tools. Television deadlines are notoriously gruesome, and the Mac has never let me down. I've also used PCs where necessary, and keep coming back to the Mac as my platform of choice. Max for games, LightWave and Maya for television and film. Since I do the latter and not the former, I'm set.
I grant that the current Mac processor drought has me on the edge of my seat, waiting for Apple to announce a solution. However, I also know that processor architecturs have always leap-frogged each other, and I think this is no different. The next iteration will most likely be 64-bit, making it as significant an advance as the introduction of the first RISC-based PowerPC was. And knowing Apple, it will work right the first time (mostly; nothing's perfect.)
Not only have you never purchased a Mac, it would seem a little homework is in order, too. I hope this helps a little.
Remember that outlawing something only keeps it out of the hands of law-abiding citizens. Do you think somebody willing to kill themselves and thousands of others is going to say, "Gee, too bad it's illegal to buy model rockets, guess we'll have to cancel the jihad?"
There are two problems with this idea:
First of all, acceptance of the system is usually done under the user's self-righteous belief in his own innocence - something you may know to be true, but complete strangers don't, including law enforcement officers. The legitimacy of your own actions is open to interpretation; something that you consider to be a perfectly reasonable and innocent thing to do could be quickly classified as "illegal." Most people don't want to have the things they do in private broadcast to the world.
Let's face it: if we knew everything that everybody else did, we'd be quickly forced to the conclusion that human beings are a bunch of freaks.
Secondly, the idea of assuming that terrorists and malcontents might be "hiding in the light" and interpreting the comments of others accordingly is an instant recipe for institutionalized paranoia.
The law is there to protect its citizens and allow them to enjoy their rights and liberties under that law. People seem to readily jump to the conclusion that any means are justifiable to protect themselves from the malevolent intentions of others, but seem to assume that, somehow, the law will magically leave their own personal liberties intact, while only limiting those of everybody else. This is self-destructive egocentricity at its most dangerous.
The reason societies create governments and laws is to allow every individual a reasonable amount of freedom, whether we agree with the opinions of our fellow citizens or not. In order to preserve our own liberties, we have to also be willing to preserve the liberties of others. If we assume that everybody else is a criminal waiting for the chance to act, then we're no better than the RIAA.
Oklahoma State University has just enabled a NAT server on their residential network (campus apartments) to nuke P2P file sharing. This apparently was done to kill Kazaa, but also eliminated simple things like legitimate FTP.
I want to exchange legitimate movie files I created myself (I do freelance work as a computer animator) with a friend. However, I can't now, unless he "registers" his machine. This will also probably mean that his machine is added to a roster of IP's targeted for constant packet-monitoring.
The rest of the English-speaking world uses "Uni," not to mention Germany (I used to live there.) We're definitely the minority on this one.
If they decrypt my data stream, can I sue them under the DMCA? :D
Speaking for nerds everywhere, I'd politely suggest you read the articles linked to in the original post. You seem to have missed the point. I consider myself both a nerd and well-balanced (positive acceptance of the former is indication of the latter.)
As for being a nerd, you're posting on Slashdot. Have you ever read the site's byline?
And always remember to maintain your sense of humor.
If every country has its good and bad points, then all things are equal. Which then logically leads to the question, why would you be coming back and kissing the ground?
I have lived in Germany for two years, and now Japan for the last six months. I feel no overwhelming urge to plant my face in America's dirt.
After all, I get 20Mbps DSL here for the same price as the slow stuff in the US, and new Macs are about $1,000 cheaper at my local dealer. The women are beautiful and the food is good. Why the hell would I want to come back? Priorities, man, priorities!
It's the same in Japanese, actually. They just use the English. :)
I'm very interested in knowing if this is true, as I'm planning on buying an Airport base station this month. If it's FUD, then why does Apple post it under their own specs? Are they just being lazy, or is there a genuine technical issue at work here?: