I'll chime in with my own solution. My archive is not as extensive as yours but I have most everything from 2005 or so (excepting mailling lists, other junk, etc.). My solution is sort of silly, I just use Apple's Mail.app. The reason I use this is because Mail.app enables you to store and organize everything as separate folders and since Spotlight is blazingly fast and does a great job for searching. I try to keep my number of messages in a folder on the order of a few thousand messages, for my e-mail load I find that breaking up the folders by year works well (yes, you can still search across year). The folders themselves are stored under ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes. Each folder has its own directory and series of.emlx which are an Apple specific form of xml that includes one message per file. The problem with this solution is that the emlx files are proprietary and subject to change. That said, I have successfully managed to copy mailboxes to new computers with a new OS. It did require an extra step or two beyond just copying my Mailboxes directories to the new computer however. Worst case though, the emlx files are in plain text so you can grep through them if you have to, and you can really had to (e.g. if you're logged onto the computer remotely), or you could write a script that parses most of the information from the file.
I suspect that most of their business will be on stuff that's out of warranty anyway. I've used iFixit for years and years when I've had or inherited an Apple product that needed repair. It has always been old stuff because if the product is under warranty, it's quicker and easier for the user to send it to the manufacturer (well Apple anyway, not sure about how well console manufacturers honor their warranty). iFixit comes in when the product is old and out-dated, or you've voided your warranty by e.g., spilling liquid on it, or some other user behavior that's not covered. So I doubt the console manufacturers will care very much.
All in all, this is good news. I think that we're starting to reach that point now that electronics aren't improving so rapidly that old products are completely obsolete before their hardware fails. So it's good to see people like iFixit encouraging a culture of repair and reuse, especially for electronics which are 1) made from some heavy metals that are in limited supply, and are toxic to mine, 2) completely awful for water quality and human health to throw out and/or recycle because of all the heavy metals (children that live in recycling town in China grow up with elevated levels of Cadmium in their blood).
If I had mod points, I'd mod you up. This absolutely needs to be emphasized. Since Windows is 90% of the desktop computers though, I can see why people forget that. I always find a lot of sys. admins think that I need to install virus software on my mac or linux machine because I need to protect other people from getting infected files from USB discs. Brother, if you choose an OS that implicitly trusts any device that's plugged into it like windows does with autorun, you're the problem, not me. You change your OS to something more secure, or at least turn autorun off, and only then will you have the right to lecture me on how I should use my precious processor cycles to save people who make bad software decisions. However, on the other hand, I can see the pragmatic viewpoint that like as not, we are stuck with windows and not everyone is computer literate so I perhaps should be doing it, but I'd rather just not let other people plug their USBs into my computer than run anti-virus to tell the truth (I installed Norton once, after I decided I didn't like and uninstalled it, months later I was still finding weird files it had install all over the place).
I don't think it does bode well for Linux. If you look at statcounter's usage stats, while Linux has finally made it above the "other" category, growth has essentially stalled. Worldwide, linux has gone from about 0.7% in 2009 to 0.8% in 2010. That's going in the right direction, it's still not terribly encouraging, at that rate Linux will never become a mainstream OS.
Why is it that everyone acts as if the original three Star Wars films were perfect?
On the contrary, Episodes I, II and III made me realize how bad episodes IV, V and VI actually were. It was truly an "emperor has no clothes" moment after digesting the "midochlorians" in Episode I after it was very clear from the original movies that the "Force was a mystical energy field that binds us all together" not some bacterial infection. After seeing how contrived and a complete farce the prequels were, I realized that Lucas never had any idea about the plot, he was just making it up as he went along. From Darth Vader being Luke's father to Leia being Luke's sister, to C3-PO being built by Anakin: the whole thing might as well of been a soap opera in space. Anything that could be done to continue milking the franchise was done. While, I do still have copies of Star Wars and even watch them occasionally, I longer consider ANY of the movies actually good.
30+ years? No way, not even close. Read this comment again. The hybrid pays off in 6 years, 6, even according to their ridiculous and short-sighted study.
This is the second time in this thread that I've caught an Apple hater claiming that a fanboy had made up facts when the Apple hater himself had been making up facts. This study from February 2010 by Rescuecom ranks Apple #1 in reliability for the last three years. As for pre-magsafe macs, I can only surmise that you don't see any because you haven't been looking. My laptop and my desktop are both 5 years old and are PPC (one's a G5 desktop and one's a G4 laptop). THEY RUN FINE. I did have a service call on the laptop once because a key on the keyboard stopped working. Also, where in the world did you get this idea that you can't get applications? I've never had a problem in my life getting a universal binary for something. As for getting batteries and replacement parts, you're nuts, have you ever heard of ifixit? Just two years ago I got a battery for a 1999 G3 lombard laptop (yes, that one runs fine too!). The idea that you can't get replacement parts for old macs is just silly. Good lord, I don't know why I even read these slashdot apple hate-fests...
You know, if you're going to call bullshit you might try getting your own facts straight first. The study in the summary states very clearly that it's a survey of incoming freshman only. The study in your link is of all students. In fact, if you take the link the summary and take the last four years of students (= all students like your study), you get that Mac ownership of that body is 32%, which is DAMN close to the study in your link showing 27% of the laptop owners of the total student body owned macs.
So is it my turn to talk about how you probably shorted the apple stock and new that the apple haters would parrot your lies?
I have a soft spot in my heart for B&N ever since I dug up an old volume II of a four volume set of some first hand accounts of the U.S. Civil War. They were out of print, and I couldn't find them in any new or used book store I searched at. A few weeks later B&N had them show up on their web-page. Somehow they had gotten some in stock. Now whenever I'm book shopping, I try to pick B&N over their competitors now. I have to admit though, it's a LOT easier to just go to amazon and click on things than go looking for a brick and mortar book store. Also, consistent with the summary, I do spend less time reading than I used to. This is something I've recognized and am trying to change. Of course, I have a lot more money than I did when I was younger, so I can afford to buy things like hardbacks of new titles rather than paperbacks in the bargain bin so I bet I spend more money on books than I ever did.
That's what I thought at first when I watched the video also. However, there's one big difference -- tab candy seems to remember your groups of tabs, but is still flexible about creating and destroying them, and it will be searchable. If you're using virtual desktops and sets of windows, you can group those, but I always found the groupings to be clumsy and my workflow changes often enough that just calling one desktop "e-mail" and other "ssh session to X server" just doesn't work. Similarly, with a browser, you have to go through a lot of trouble organizing the windows and tabs and unless you've got your browser doing the same things all the time, it isn't worth a lot of organization.
After thinking about what they were doing for a bit, I realized that what they just came up with is essentially a spacial manager for the bookmark menu that makes adding and removing bookmarks and groups of bookmarks easy and rapid. Let's say you have three folders in your bookmark menu, the tab candy seems to give you a way to see and manage the contents of all those folders rapidly. I think it'll be cool, but it's hard to say how useful it will be. The only other thing like it that I know of for browsers is Safari's "Top Sites" feature. I find that fairly useful, often if it's a site I use often I don't even bother looking for the site in my menubar, I just open a new tab (which shows the top site window) and click on the thumbnail. It requires less thinking than finding something in a bookmark menu.
I agree completely. In fact, my head hurts every time I have to go to that Dell web-site. Even just the start page where you need to select what type of company you work for bothers me a little, because I just want to see the EQUIPMENT in front of me, not some selection of the equipment based on what some Dell marketing droid thinks a person in my situation would want. I end up having to click on all of them to make sure I'm not missing something.
Also, the names are weird. With the macbook you have to figure out if you want a normal machine, a "pro" or an "air". As you said, that's three choices and two are self-explanatory, if you're cost constrained you go normal Macbook, if you want the best machine you go "pro". You do have to figure out what differentiates an "air" from a normal machine though. With Dell, I have no idea what a Vostro, Studio, Latitude, Inspiron, Alienware, Adamo, Studio XPS or Precision Mobile Workstation is. These are completely unhelpful in regards to picking which product you want to buy.
I might be biased though because the last thing I bought from Dell was one of their monitors a few years ago. I decided a LONG time ago that Dell computers might be inexpensive, but they failed far too often to be a good purchase. And don't get me started on their cases! Ugh, I still have scars on my hands from the old Dell cases...
A reasonably clocked C2D or any Nehalem should be vastly faster than a G5.
The actual comparisons that were done when the core duo imacs were released show that isn't the case at least for core duos that were available at the same time as the G5. That is, unless you're saying that a modern processor is faster. Well, of course that's true, it's always been true for any chip, and has nothing to do with the G5 per se.
Another thing I'll point out is that debian includes binaries compiled for the ppc. I've never had any problems putting debian on ppc hardware. I would think Ubuntu would work as well, and as others have mentioned, yellow dog is still around. The days of needing a specialist distro for a ppc are long gone though.
Say what?! One of my older machines is a G5 dual proc, 2.7 Ghz. That's still a VERY respectable clock speed, it's 64 bit and the dual procs means it's still pretty fast. The submitter didn't mention what speed his was (I'm guessing slower) but depending on that, a G5 could very well be a useful machine. It's not like it's an Athlon or something that is both slow, 32 bit and single core.
Since the G5 was designed for performance, it's not exactly a great file server chip though. But it's far from being a "space heater" as you say -- mine gets used every work day. As others have pointed out, either put linux on it, or put an older version of OS X on it. I still have 10.4 on mine because it was the last OS Apple produced that was streamlined for the PPC. However, now that Apple has stopped supporting it, I'll have to break down and put 10.5 on it. On other older machines though I have installed both pbbuttons and gtkpbbuttons which support a lot of of the media keys on the keyboard pretty well.
Yes, the grid is not designed for surges. I'm not sure why this is even news because everybody and their brother who knows anything about wind power knows that sometimes you have to shut the turbine off or throttle it back when the wind is blowing too strongly. Yes, a town I used to live in got about half of its electricity from a wind farm just outside, that's how I know: a turbine would stop spinning under three conditions, it needed maintenance, it was turning to face the wind, or the wind was blowing too strongly. Incidentally, there are other reasons not to generate power in high wind situations as well, it tends to increase wear on the props of the turbine if they spin to fast and shortens their useful lifetime. (Most modern turbines have a gearbox and transmission to keep the props spinning at a constant velocity but vary the amount of power coming out, but there's still a limit, i.e. whatever gear is highest determines the highest wind speed).
What's more important here though, is that the transmission grid is built for traditional plants, that also means the very high voltage transmission lines tend to originate at those plants, not at wind farms. Part of the problem here is that the grid was built for one type of power generation and switching the locales of where power is being generated using wind and solar don't have the high capacity lines that are necessary for large scale power generation. That's why Obama called for an overhaul of the electric grid just after he was elected. Not sure if that's started happening or not, but I hope they would have spent some of the stimulus money on it since that is precisely one of the best things economic stimulus should be used for.
I can't watch the video because it's in quicktime and I'm on a linux machine, but it is true that a lot of instrumentation runs windows only. I had the opportunity a few years back to visit the manufacturer of some scientific microscopes. I asked them why in the world they were using such an unstable and complicated platform as windows XP to run their software when what you really wanted was something that was dedicated to running a microscope. E.g., we used to comment on how back in the days of dos, the software for these microscopes was actually better, because dos had few (no?) abstraction layers to the hardware and the software had direct control over the vesa bus cards that controlled the microscope and running that software was the ONLY thing that computer was doing. In the days of NT and XP, software glitches and lag time (e.g. screen updates, etc.) have gotten worse and I think some of that is due to the fact that a modern operating system has a lot of things going on in the background that interrupt the microscope software.
Anyhow, I brought up this problem with the manufacturer and told him that something like linux might be better since it's easier to have a more fined-grained control over which processes are running under what conditions. Their response was sort of typical, the engineers knew about this already and even had an alpha quality version of the software that ran on linux. The managers, on the other hand, couldn't even pronounce linux correctly and didn't even understand the problem. They said that if enough users ask for it, they'll do it. I guess the users don't ask.
I have noticed that on some of the non-production machines, such as the software controlling instrumentation at synchotrons, the software is running on some form of unix. So there's hope, but I think we're stuck with windows until the general user actually sees the benefit of a dedicated instrumentation OS over a perhaps ill-fitting, but familiar, OS. For those of us forced to use mission critical windows software, we still have a lot of computers that are forbidden to be plugged into the internet since obviously if just the OS is getting in the way, AV software would get in the way as well. It makes the validating the MS Genuine Advantage a fun experience when you don't have cell reception in a basement lab (nor land line) and no internet connection.
More than that, the parasite doesn't just slow the rats, it actually modifies their behavior, sometimes making them attracted to cats and cat urine. It does do some strange things in humans too, e.g. it is possibly correlated to schizophrenia. I personally have always wondered if Toxoplasmosis is what causes people to keep dozens of cats in a confined space like an apartment. Having been in places like that, I can't think of a logical reason why one would otherwise want so many cats around.
Just pointing out, this comment is not actually off topic, it's a reference to Trainspotting. In the film one of the characters dies of Toxoplasmosis complicated by AIDS. The guy was also a huge soccer fan.
I would like to see the correlation betwen per capita income versus toxoplasmosis infection and versus world cup wins. I suspect that is the driving factor for both of those.
I've heard this line before, usually as a justification from the IT staff as to why I need to put AV on my mac. Does this actually happen in the real world with any great frequency? I suppose it could if you were transporting windows executables around on your USB and copying them to your mac it could happen. But usually, I just copy office documents or other data files around. So I'm not convinced (unless of course your office or pdfs have something, but those usually show up in attachments in e-mail from weird places, not something you'd want to move around on your USB).
What is the total cost of install and operation for 50 years for the solar project? What is it for a nuclear plant? A coal fired plant?
Estimates vary widely, depending on who you ask and who is paying those people to give that answer. With nuclear it depends on if you count that you have to monitor the waste for 1 million years or if you just dump it in a hole and forget about it. Most people assume you can forget about it, or reprocess it later to recoup some of your costs.Here's one estimate:
Cost in cents per khw
Coal/Nuclear/Gas:
* Gas peaking: 22.1 - 33.4
* IGCC: 10.4 - 13.4
* Nuclear: 9.8 - 12.6
* Advanced supercritical coal: 7.4 - 13.5 (high end includes 90% carbon capture and storage)
* Gas combined cycle: 7.3 - 10.0
Alternatives:
* Solar PV (crystalline): 10.9 - 15.4
* Fuel cell: 11.5 - 12.5
* Solar PV (thin film): 9.6 - 12.4
* Solar thermal: 9.0 - 14.5 (low end is solar tower; high end is solar trough)
* Biomass direct: 5.0 - 9.4
* Landfill gas: 5.0 - 8.1
* Wind: 4.4 - 9.1
* Geothermal: 4.2 - 6.9
* Biomass cofiring: 0.3 - 3.7
The cheap price for coal and gas may or may not count the cost of dealing with they myriad environmental and health problems associated with them, such as acid rain, mercury contamination, coal miner occupational hazards (~120,000 coal miners have died on the job since 1850), global warming and associated climate change, water quality degradation due to mountaintop removal, wars in foreign countries to protect oil interests (Iraq, Niger delta), etc. etc. etc. Contrast that to solar power where the only point that real environmental degradation is being done is during the synthesis of the cells (and recycling at EOL) rather than over the entire lifespan as in coal.
The answer here seems to be that solar is more expensive up front, but should benefit society because of the lower environmental and health concerns associated with it. Note that this makes fiscal sense for the federal government to make these loans because more often than not, it is the taxpayer who pays for the clean up of environmental damage or health risks, not the power company.
While I'm being facetious here, the point is that you claiming that "war is war" is directly contradictory to the official government stance, which is that the operations in Iraq are a police action. Does the killing of unarmed civilians sound like a valid police action to you? Does that sound like something that will win the hearts and minds of the Iraqis? I'll admit that yes, even in police actions sometimes mistakes can be made but there should be an investigation and if warranted, a trial, not a cover-up.
Patch level? I couldn't figure out what the GP was talking about, I had to google it. OS X uses version numbers, patch level is some windows thing. Yes, security patches are issued outside of that, but they're assigned a date, not a patch level. No the H.264 API wasn't included in a security patch, it was in OS 10.6.3, just where it should be. Yes, the version number is straight in your user agent string:
HTTP_USER_AGENT:Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_3; en-us)...
See that 10_6_3 part, that's the version number.
As for 10.6, it is blazingly fast compared to anything prior. I only wish it hadn't broken so much linux and unix code that used to be easy to compile.
As far as I can tell the GP's post had no useful information in it whatsoever, just a troll.
As for Adobe's announcement, this is precisely why I, as a mac/linux user, was in favor of Jobs tell Adobe to go to hell. Flash has always sucked on anything non-windows, it's awful.
Is it really a success? Do you have a link or something to back that up? I'm asking seriously, because, along with the AC, I can't stand it either. I've already written a request to google to allow the user to drop it. I just want my list of web-sites, with the links at the top for looking at hits from the web, images, etc. No sidebar = more space for important information or more screen real estate available for other windows.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll chime in with my own solution. My archive is not as extensive as yours but I have most everything from 2005 or so (excepting mailling lists, other junk, etc.). My solution is sort of silly, I just use Apple's Mail.app. The reason I use this is because Mail.app enables you to store and organize everything as separate folders and since Spotlight is blazingly fast and does a great job for searching. I try to keep my number of messages in a folder on the order of a few thousand messages, for my e-mail load I find that breaking up the folders by year works well (yes, you can still search across year). The folders themselves are stored under ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes. Each folder has its own directory and series of .emlx which are an Apple specific form of xml that includes one message per file. The problem with this solution is that the emlx files are proprietary and subject to change. That said, I have successfully managed to copy mailboxes to new computers with a new OS. It did require an extra step or two beyond just copying my Mailboxes directories to the new computer however. Worst case though, the emlx files are in plain text so you can grep through them if you have to, and you can really had to (e.g. if you're logged onto the computer remotely), or you could write a script that parses most of the information from the file.
I suspect that most of their business will be on stuff that's out of warranty anyway. I've used iFixit for years and years when I've had or inherited an Apple product that needed repair. It has always been old stuff because if the product is under warranty, it's quicker and easier for the user to send it to the manufacturer (well Apple anyway, not sure about how well console manufacturers honor their warranty). iFixit comes in when the product is old and out-dated, or you've voided your warranty by e.g., spilling liquid on it, or some other user behavior that's not covered. So I doubt the console manufacturers will care very much.
All in all, this is good news. I think that we're starting to reach that point now that electronics aren't improving so rapidly that old products are completely obsolete before their hardware fails. So it's good to see people like iFixit encouraging a culture of repair and reuse, especially for electronics which are 1) made from some heavy metals that are in limited supply, and are toxic to mine, 2) completely awful for water quality and human health to throw out and/or recycle because of all the heavy metals (children that live in recycling town in China grow up with elevated levels of Cadmium in their blood).
If I had mod points, I'd mod you up. This absolutely needs to be emphasized. Since Windows is 90% of the desktop computers though, I can see why people forget that. I always find a lot of sys. admins think that I need to install virus software on my mac or linux machine because I need to protect other people from getting infected files from USB discs. Brother, if you choose an OS that implicitly trusts any device that's plugged into it like windows does with autorun, you're the problem, not me. You change your OS to something more secure, or at least turn autorun off, and only then will you have the right to lecture me on how I should use my precious processor cycles to save people who make bad software decisions. However, on the other hand, I can see the pragmatic viewpoint that like as not, we are stuck with windows and not everyone is computer literate so I perhaps should be doing it, but I'd rather just not let other people plug their USBs into my computer than run anti-virus to tell the truth (I installed Norton once, after I decided I didn't like and uninstalled it, months later I was still finding weird files it had install all over the place).
I don't think it does bode well for Linux. If you look at statcounter's usage stats, while Linux has finally made it above the "other" category, growth has essentially stalled. Worldwide, linux has gone from about 0.7% in 2009 to 0.8% in 2010. That's going in the right direction, it's still not terribly encouraging, at that rate Linux will never become a mainstream OS.
On the contrary, Episodes I, II and III made me realize how bad episodes IV, V and VI actually were. It was truly an "emperor has no clothes" moment after digesting the "midochlorians" in Episode I after it was very clear from the original movies that the "Force was a mystical energy field that binds us all together" not some bacterial infection. After seeing how contrived and a complete farce the prequels were, I realized that Lucas never had any idea about the plot, he was just making it up as he went along. From Darth Vader being Luke's father to Leia being Luke's sister, to C3-PO being built by Anakin: the whole thing might as well of been a soap opera in space. Anything that could be done to continue milking the franchise was done. While, I do still have copies of Star Wars and even watch them occasionally, I longer consider ANY of the movies actually good.
30+ years? No way, not even close. Read this comment again. The hybrid pays off in 6 years, 6, even according to their ridiculous and short-sighted study.
This is the second time in this thread that I've caught an Apple hater claiming that a fanboy had made up facts when the Apple hater himself had been making up facts. This study from February 2010 by Rescuecom ranks Apple #1 in reliability for the last three years. As for pre-magsafe macs, I can only surmise that you don't see any because you haven't been looking. My laptop and my desktop are both 5 years old and are PPC (one's a G5 desktop and one's a G4 laptop). THEY RUN FINE. I did have a service call on the laptop once because a key on the keyboard stopped working. Also, where in the world did you get this idea that you can't get applications? I've never had a problem in my life getting a universal binary for something. As for getting batteries and replacement parts, you're nuts, have you ever heard of ifixit? Just two years ago I got a battery for a 1999 G3 lombard laptop (yes, that one runs fine too!). The idea that you can't get replacement parts for old macs is just silly. Good lord, I don't know why I even read these slashdot apple hate-fests...
You know, if you're going to call bullshit you might try getting your own facts straight first. The study in the summary states very clearly that it's a survey of incoming freshman only. The study in your link is of all students. In fact, if you take the link the summary and take the last four years of students (= all students like your study), you get that Mac ownership of that body is 32%, which is DAMN close to the study in your link showing 27% of the laptop owners of the total student body owned macs.
So is it my turn to talk about how you probably shorted the apple stock and new that the apple haters would parrot your lies?
I have a soft spot in my heart for B&N ever since I dug up an old volume II of a four volume set of some first hand accounts of the U.S. Civil War. They were out of print, and I couldn't find them in any new or used book store I searched at. A few weeks later B&N had them show up on their web-page. Somehow they had gotten some in stock. Now whenever I'm book shopping, I try to pick B&N over their competitors now. I have to admit though, it's a LOT easier to just go to amazon and click on things than go looking for a brick and mortar book store. Also, consistent with the summary, I do spend less time reading than I used to. This is something I've recognized and am trying to change. Of course, I have a lot more money than I did when I was younger, so I can afford to buy things like hardbacks of new titles rather than paperbacks in the bargain bin so I bet I spend more money on books than I ever did.
That's what I thought at first when I watched the video also. However, there's one big difference -- tab candy seems to remember your groups of tabs, but is still flexible about creating and destroying them, and it will be searchable. If you're using virtual desktops and sets of windows, you can group those, but I always found the groupings to be clumsy and my workflow changes often enough that just calling one desktop "e-mail" and other "ssh session to X server" just doesn't work. Similarly, with a browser, you have to go through a lot of trouble organizing the windows and tabs and unless you've got your browser doing the same things all the time, it isn't worth a lot of organization.
After thinking about what they were doing for a bit, I realized that what they just came up with is essentially a spacial manager for the bookmark menu that makes adding and removing bookmarks and groups of bookmarks easy and rapid. Let's say you have three folders in your bookmark menu, the tab candy seems to give you a way to see and manage the contents of all those folders rapidly. I think it'll be cool, but it's hard to say how useful it will be. The only other thing like it that I know of for browsers is Safari's "Top Sites" feature. I find that fairly useful, often if it's a site I use often I don't even bother looking for the site in my menubar, I just open a new tab (which shows the top site window) and click on the thumbnail. It requires less thinking than finding something in a bookmark menu.
I agree completely. In fact, my head hurts every time I have to go to that Dell web-site. Even just the start page where you need to select what type of company you work for bothers me a little, because I just want to see the EQUIPMENT in front of me, not some selection of the equipment based on what some Dell marketing droid thinks a person in my situation would want. I end up having to click on all of them to make sure I'm not missing something.
Also, the names are weird. With the macbook you have to figure out if you want a normal machine, a "pro" or an "air". As you said, that's three choices and two are self-explanatory, if you're cost constrained you go normal Macbook, if you want the best machine you go "pro". You do have to figure out what differentiates an "air" from a normal machine though. With Dell, I have no idea what a Vostro, Studio, Latitude, Inspiron, Alienware, Adamo, Studio XPS or Precision Mobile Workstation is. These are completely unhelpful in regards to picking which product you want to buy.
I might be biased though because the last thing I bought from Dell was one of their monitors a few years ago. I decided a LONG time ago that Dell computers might be inexpensive, but they failed far too often to be a good purchase. And don't get me started on their cases! Ugh, I still have scars on my hands from the old Dell cases...
Whoops! Sorry about that... I still think a G5 is useful still though.
The actual comparisons that were done when the core duo imacs were released show that isn't the case at least for core duos that were available at the same time as the G5. That is, unless you're saying that a modern processor is faster. Well, of course that's true, it's always been true for any chip, and has nothing to do with the G5 per se.
Another thing I'll point out is that debian includes binaries compiled for the ppc. I've never had any problems putting debian on ppc hardware. I would think Ubuntu would work as well, and as others have mentioned, yellow dog is still around. The days of needing a specialist distro for a ppc are long gone though.
Say what?! One of my older machines is a G5 dual proc, 2.7 Ghz. That's still a VERY respectable clock speed, it's 64 bit and the dual procs means it's still pretty fast. The submitter didn't mention what speed his was (I'm guessing slower) but depending on that, a G5 could very well be a useful machine. It's not like it's an Athlon or something that is both slow, 32 bit and single core.
Since the G5 was designed for performance, it's not exactly a great file server chip though. But it's far from being a "space heater" as you say -- mine gets used every work day. As others have pointed out, either put linux on it, or put an older version of OS X on it. I still have 10.4 on mine because it was the last OS Apple produced that was streamlined for the PPC. However, now that Apple has stopped supporting it, I'll have to break down and put 10.5 on it. On other older machines though I have installed both pbbuttons and gtkpbbuttons which support a lot of of the media keys on the keyboard pretty well.
Yes, the grid is not designed for surges. I'm not sure why this is even news because everybody and their brother who knows anything about wind power knows that sometimes you have to shut the turbine off or throttle it back when the wind is blowing too strongly. Yes, a town I used to live in got about half of its electricity from a wind farm just outside, that's how I know: a turbine would stop spinning under three conditions, it needed maintenance, it was turning to face the wind, or the wind was blowing too strongly. Incidentally, there are other reasons not to generate power in high wind situations as well, it tends to increase wear on the props of the turbine if they spin to fast and shortens their useful lifetime. (Most modern turbines have a gearbox and transmission to keep the props spinning at a constant velocity but vary the amount of power coming out, but there's still a limit, i.e. whatever gear is highest determines the highest wind speed).
What's more important here though, is that the transmission grid is built for traditional plants, that also means the very high voltage transmission lines tend to originate at those plants, not at wind farms. Part of the problem here is that the grid was built for one type of power generation and switching the locales of where power is being generated using wind and solar don't have the high capacity lines that are necessary for large scale power generation. That's why Obama called for an overhaul of the electric grid just after he was elected. Not sure if that's started happening or not, but I hope they would have spent some of the stimulus money on it since that is precisely one of the best things economic stimulus should be used for.
I can't watch the video because it's in quicktime and I'm on a linux machine, but it is true that a lot of instrumentation runs windows only. I had the opportunity a few years back to visit the manufacturer of some scientific microscopes. I asked them why in the world they were using such an unstable and complicated platform as windows XP to run their software when what you really wanted was something that was dedicated to running a microscope. E.g., we used to comment on how back in the days of dos, the software for these microscopes was actually better, because dos had few (no?) abstraction layers to the hardware and the software had direct control over the vesa bus cards that controlled the microscope and running that software was the ONLY thing that computer was doing. In the days of NT and XP, software glitches and lag time (e.g. screen updates, etc.) have gotten worse and I think some of that is due to the fact that a modern operating system has a lot of things going on in the background that interrupt the microscope software.
Anyhow, I brought up this problem with the manufacturer and told him that something like linux might be better since it's easier to have a more fined-grained control over which processes are running under what conditions. Their response was sort of typical, the engineers knew about this already and even had an alpha quality version of the software that ran on linux. The managers, on the other hand, couldn't even pronounce linux correctly and didn't even understand the problem. They said that if enough users ask for it, they'll do it. I guess the users don't ask.
I have noticed that on some of the non-production machines, such as the software controlling instrumentation at synchotrons, the software is running on some form of unix. So there's hope, but I think we're stuck with windows until the general user actually sees the benefit of a dedicated instrumentation OS over a perhaps ill-fitting, but familiar, OS. For those of us forced to use mission critical windows software, we still have a lot of computers that are forbidden to be plugged into the internet since obviously if just the OS is getting in the way, AV software would get in the way as well. It makes the validating the MS Genuine Advantage a fun experience when you don't have cell reception in a basement lab (nor land line) and no internet connection.
More than that, the parasite doesn't just slow the rats, it actually modifies their behavior, sometimes making them attracted to cats and cat urine. It does do some strange things in humans too, e.g. it is possibly correlated to schizophrenia. I personally have always wondered if Toxoplasmosis is what causes people to keep dozens of cats in a confined space like an apartment. Having been in places like that, I can't think of a logical reason why one would otherwise want so many cats around.
Just pointing out, this comment is not actually off topic, it's a reference to Trainspotting. In the film one of the characters dies of Toxoplasmosis complicated by AIDS. The guy was also a huge soccer fan.
I would like to see the correlation betwen per capita income versus toxoplasmosis infection and versus world cup wins. I suspect that is the driving factor for both of those.
I've heard this line before, usually as a justification from the IT staff as to why I need to put AV on my mac. Does this actually happen in the real world with any great frequency? I suppose it could if you were transporting windows executables around on your USB and copying them to your mac it could happen. But usually, I just copy office documents or other data files around. So I'm not convinced (unless of course your office or pdfs have something, but those usually show up in attachments in e-mail from weird places, not something you'd want to move around on your USB).
Estimates vary widely, depending on who you ask and who is paying those people to give that answer. With nuclear it depends on if you count that you have to monitor the waste for 1 million years or if you just dump it in a hole and forget about it. Most people assume you can forget about it, or reprocess it later to recoup some of your costs.Here's one estimate:
The cheap price for coal and gas may or may not count the cost of dealing with they myriad environmental and health problems associated with them, such as acid rain, mercury contamination, coal miner occupational hazards (~120,000 coal miners have died on the job since 1850), global warming and associated climate change, water quality degradation due to mountaintop removal, wars in foreign countries to protect oil interests (Iraq, Niger delta), etc. etc. etc. Contrast that to solar power where the only point that real environmental degradation is being done is during the synthesis of the cells (and recycling at EOL) rather than over the entire lifespan as in coal.
The answer here seems to be that solar is more expensive up front, but should benefit society because of the lower environmental and health concerns associated with it. Note that this makes fiscal sense for the federal government to make these loans because more often than not, it is the taxpayer who pays for the clean up of environmental damage or health risks, not the power company.
What are you talking about? Didn't you know that the war in Iraq was won in 2003? Or maybe you've forgotten Preseident Bush's speech declaring victory on a certain aircraft carrier about a certain mission whose goals were considered accomplished? He very clearly stated that is was the "end of major combat operations."
While I'm being facetious here, the point is that you claiming that "war is war" is directly contradictory to the official government stance, which is that the operations in Iraq are a police action. Does the killing of unarmed civilians sound like a valid police action to you? Does that sound like something that will win the hearts and minds of the Iraqis? I'll admit that yes, even in police actions sometimes mistakes can be made but there should be an investigation and if warranted, a trial, not a cover-up.
See that 10_6_3 part, that's the version number.
As for 10.6, it is blazingly fast compared to anything prior. I only wish it hadn't broken so much linux and unix code that used to be easy to compile.
As far as I can tell the GP's post had no useful information in it whatsoever, just a troll.
As for Adobe's announcement, this is precisely why I, as a mac/linux user, was in favor of Jobs tell Adobe to go to hell. Flash has always sucked on anything non-windows, it's awful.
Is it really a success? Do you have a link or something to back that up? I'm asking seriously, because, along with the AC, I can't stand it either. I've already written a request to google to allow the user to drop it. I just want my list of web-sites, with the links at the top for looking at hits from the web, images, etc. No sidebar = more space for important information or more screen real estate available for other windows.