| Tuesday, December
23, 2003
Let this stand for the hundred or so copies
I have of this:
Subject: Expanding the hunt for terrorists!
At New York's Kennedy Airport today, an individual,
later discovered to be a public school teacher, was arrested trying to board
a flight while in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a set square, and a
calculator. Attorney General John Ashcroft believes the man is a member of
the notorious al-gebra movement. He is being charged with carrying weapons
of math instruction.
Al-gebra is a very fearsome cult, indeed. They desire
average solutions by means and extremes, and sometimes go off on a tangent
in a search of absolute value. They consist of quite shadowy figures, with
names like "x" and "y", and, although they are frequently referred to as
"unknowns", we know they really belong to a common denominator and are part
of the axis of medieval with coordinates in every country. As the great
Greek philanderer Isosceles used to say, there are 3 sides to every angle,
and if God had wanted us to have better weapons of math instruction, he
would have given us more fingers and toes.
Therefore, I'm extremely grateful that our government has given us a sine
that it is intent on protracting us from these math-dogs who are so willing
to disintegrate us with calculus disregard. These statistic bastards love to
inflict plane on every sphere of influence. Under the circumferences, it's
time we differentiated their root, made our point, and drew the line.
Remember, these weapons of math instruction have the potential to decimal
everything in their math on a scale never before seen unless we become
exponents of a Higher Power and begin to factor-in random facts of vertex.
As our Great Leader would say, "Read my ellipse."
Here is one principle he is uncertainty of---though they continue to
multiply, their days are numbered and the hypotenuse will tighten around
their necks.
It is quite clever and thanks to those who
thought to send it to me.
Regarding the Mac and DVD-RW
Dear Jerry:
There's lots of other reasons you might want to create
a disk image, for example copying the OS to another partition. Having the
intermediate step of disk image creation increases flexibility, even if it
seems counterintuitive. Plus giving you the ability to burn multiple copies
of the image, etc.
But the real solution to your concern is to buy a copy
of Roxio's Toast (or if you're going to do a lot of stuff with MP3s, Toast
with Jam). Despite the cutesy name It's a far better and more intuitive
program than the Windows version and works like a charm; you'll like it.
All the best--
Tim Loeb
I am convinced it's not a bug but a feature and I
hate it. It's interesting how many Mac problems are solved by paying money
for third part software; this after paying a pretty good premium for a Mac.
O have hated ROXIO since EZ-CD, but all my Mac
expert friends tell me that the Roxio Toast program is the one you need.
Pity Apple didn't put something as good into the OS and have done with it.
=======================
A friend in Luxembourg recently discovered Sir Francis
Galton's 1873 proposal for improving the level of civilization in Africa . .
. :
http://www.mugu.com/galton/letters/africa-for-chinese/AfricaForTheChinese.htm
. Enjoy, and Happy Christmas!
-- Chris.
Chris Brand, Psychorealist, author of THE g FACTOR
(Wiley DePublisher, 1996). (The 2000 edition is available FREE at
http://www.douance.org/qi/brandtgf.htm .)
LATEST NEWS:
http://www.crispian.demon.co.uk/indexlatest.htm .
Good grief, I knew Galton was politically
incorrect. A long time ago I read Pearson's Life of Galton (in five
volumes!) and Galton's work on composite images and such like. His
conclusions are such that few will look at his data or much of the body of
his work.
But you can't say things like that!
And see below
=======================
While we are being politically incorrect:
Hello, Dr. Pournelle,
In your response to Jim Mangles about costs of the
petroleum economy, you said some things I find puzzling.
Market people tell me this all the time, but they
never factor in the costs of war, subsidies to Israel, huge defense
establishments, terrorism, and all the rest as part of the cost of the oil
economy. The market rules except it doesn't really. Politics always trumps.
Are you claiming that our foreign aid to Israel is
part of the oil economy? Our support of Israel runs directly contrary to our
interest in cheap oil for the oil economy - i.e., it is either irrational or
done for reasons other than benefiting the oil economy (or both, but that's
another discussion :). Our huge military establishment was created to
counter the Soviet Union, Red China and their satrapies, not to support the
oil economy. Defense costs are down significantly from the Reagan years,
both in constant dollars and as a fraction of GDP and this in spite of the
fact that we are now in a low-level shooting war. As for terrorism, we in
the Dar-Al-Harb would be targets for the Wahabist/Awakening types even
without oil or Israel. The terrorists would just have to work with fewer
resources. The only sense that including terrorism in your list makes to me
is that oil money unarguably does provide much of the funding for terrorism.
This seems to me to be like arguing that the patrons of Chicago speak-easies
were responsible for Al Capone's crimes - there is a connection but it seems
a tad forced.
The market rules in that it's possible to segregate
costs. It's like exporting jobs: the people who benefit from the job export
do not in general have to pay the costs associated with doing it. If you can
make someone else pay for the infrastructure, markets are wonderful for
efficient allocation of capital; but if you have no rule of law they don't
work, and the costs of that are not usually allocated to the goods the
market gives us.
The folks who export jobs directly benefit from the
lower costs. The net benefit to the economy (putative lower cost of goods
vs. definite loss of jobs) is another story - I have not seen any
quantitative analysis which compares the two effects. Our rule-of-law
infrastructure - primarily police, regulatory agencies and the courts - is
in fact paid for at least in part by sales taxes, fees and fines. These seem
to me to be a fairly direct way of making the beneficiaries of the system
pay for it. There is even a not unreasonable argument that income taxes, as
a tax on participation in the economy, are a fair way to charge the
beneficiaries of rule-of-law for the costs. (this does not, IMO, justify
graduated income taxes)
Petroleum economies may well be cheap, but to whom do
you allocate the $83 billion in gifts we will be giving to Iraq? As well as
the cost of the war.
I believe that "only" about $20 billion are for Iraqi
reconstruction - the rest is to cover some of the costs of the war and of
keeping our military in Iraq. To pay for the war operations, the Pentagon
took about 10% of almost every defense agency's budget and that money has to
be paid back or important jobs don't get done (I was working at White sands
Missile range when this happened).
Bill Hembree
Several points. First, I should have been
more precise in my language. Our overseas involvements of all kinds,
including our payments to both Israel and Egypt to keep them from fighting
each other, are part of the expenses of not minding our own business. Agreed
they don't help keep oil prices down or oil assured.
The big military establishment was needed
in the Cold War: in those days there were 26,000 nuclear weapons aimed at
us, and the USSR made a deliberate attempt to come with the ability to
negate our nuclear deterrent: had they made our deterrent incredible, they
had the conventional forces to over-run Europe. There were a number time in
the Cold War in which conquest as a means of solving many Soviet economic
and political problems looked attractive to the Politburo if not to the main
body of the nomenklatura, and had their generals been able to assure the
political bosses that they could win a nuclear war and come out as masters
of the world -- through pin-down first strikes, and other rather
sophisticated tactics which used to be my business -- had they been so
assured it's pretty hard to know what might have happened. As it was the
death throes of communism were pretty mild but they need not have been.
But that was a real threat.
Bin Laden and others have said precisely
why they consider the US an enemy, but the suicide bombers don't generally
do their work because they hate US jazz and blue jeans. If the US were not
involved in the Middle East we might or might not become targets at some
given time, but there are plenty of others much closer to the objectives of
the jihad. As it is, we pay a lot of money to build up the military
capability of people who don't like us much. The Department of State has
many careerists who consider working for Saudi Arabia as a form of highly
paid retirement to be, if not a right, then a much wanted privilege.
Energy independence and getting out of
that morass, so that we can watch the building of fences with interest but
not vital interest, would be much cheaper than what we are doing; keeping
the money at home would build up the US, not Pakistan and Saudi Arabia which
are not entirely stable allies (one friend of mine is willing to bet even
money that Pakistan will have an anti-American coup by next July 4); and
leave us stronger to build a new military establishment with plenty of
warning. Not to mention that having Thor on station wouldn't be a bad thing
in and of itself.
You are not the only one to point out that
including the subsidies to Israel as one of the costs of involvement in the
Middle East may be unfair. If so, include the subsidies to Egypt as well and
it may be clearer. Who else sends that much money to that part of the world?
I have nothing against US citizens
supporting whom they choose overseas; it's the official tax bucks I would
rather see spent in the US on stuff that benefits US citizens directly.
=========================
Dr Pournelle,
On the article about "The
world information summit was held in Geneva". I found it pretty telling
that the first sentence in the "Declaration of Principles" is:
"We, the representatives of the peoples of the world"
The arrogance required to make a statement like that
is really scary. I also have to notice that the documentation for these, our
representatives, was done in the, soon to be closed and protected by the
DMCA, MS Word format. I guess if you can't afford a $200 word processor you
just don't rate knowing what your "representatives" are doing.
James Kimble Loveland, Ohio
Indeed. The representative of the Masters
Of The World would be more like. Or "representatives of the Masters of the
part of the world that the Big Guys don't bother restructuring"?
=====================
Jerry -
I did some further checking and I see that you must
have been referring to Firewire 800 (IEEE 1394b) rather than the 1394 which
is on my Compaq.
I agree that Firewire 800 is not on any PC laptop of
which I am aware. When I saw your statement about Firewire I did not know at
the time that there was the new standard.
I apologize for wasting your time.
Jeff
Not a waste of time at all: I should have
been a bit more clear in the column.
Jerry,
In you Monday's log, you stated
"The Mac continues to baffle me. Writing to a DVD-RW
for example: when you "copy" to it, it shows you have made a copy. You can
open that copy. But in fact nothing has been copied. There's only an image
treated as a copy. If you thought you had backed up something to that DVD-RW,
God help you, because you haven't. Before it actually does the backup you
have to tell it to BURN. This is entirely unlike Windows where if it says it
has successfully made a copy, it has made a COPY, not merely a virtual copy
on the same hard drive as the original was on."
This is exactly how it works on my XP machines now
(Home and Pro). You do the copy and nothing happens until you click on the
drive (I think, I'm doing this from memory now as I don't copy to CD very
often), follow the directions and actually write (burn) to the disk. Now
this is with standard explorer functions, not from Nero or any other
product.
Just thought you'd like to know (you've probably
forgotten or only use Nero (if memory serves)).
Dick Pierce
On an R/W? So far as I know, when I
insert an R/W and it is formatted, it becomes just another, rather slow,
drive in Windows XP. But now
I usually use Nero or similar on Windows 2000, but
recently had occasion to help someone who had WinXP. The built in CD write
function on WinXP works a lot like what you describe on the Mac, and it
threw me for a minute. If you drag files to the window that represents the
writable CD on her PC, it LOOKS like it copied the files there, but I knew
it hadn't, both by the speed and lack of whirring from the drive. I had to
poke around the menus to find the way to actually "burn" the CD.
I don't have an XP machine nearby to look at, but I
think the similarities between the built in record features in OSX and WinXP
are greater than the differences.
I was used to the kind of interface third party
recorders had, where it was more obvious that "step one" was to create a
file list of what you intended to put on the cd, and "step two" was to
actually writer the CD.
I wouldn't say either way was particularly intuitive.
I can get used to whatever works, as long as the steps are not cumbersome
regards, Jim
So I have to go do some tests. Ye gods.
I know on CD-R/W (which no one uses any
more) it was just another disk drive. On DVD-RAM it's just another disk
drive. Maybe I have it all wrong for DVD +R/W; I will have to look on a
machine I have one of those drives in. But I would swear it's just another
disk drive. Slow.
BUT it turns out I was wrong, wrong,
wrong. I guess
Dear Dr Pournelle, Our Mac-fanatic staff occasionally
need to do something beyond the fairly simple capabilities of iTunes or the
native CD/DVD burning software, such as multisession burning.
At such times I run into the same "Think Different"
Apple world view that you have trouble with. Like you I was thrown by the
way the Mac fools you into thinking you have burned a CD when all you have
really done is created a cached copy or image. It wouldn't have been so bad
if this had been explicitly made clear, the way a UNIX-based toolset would
do, but I suppose Apple thinks "mustn't confuse the poor babies". On the
other hand, I found the Apple help system particularly well done, and in
fact allowed me to get to grips with the issue very quickly.
This CD authoring business is particularly fraught for
another reason. Recalling your comment that "...all my Mac expert friends
tell me that the Roxio Toast program is the one you need. Pity Apple didn't
put something as good into the OS and have done with it." Well said, though
I do have some sympathy for their efforts to leave something for third-party
developers to sell.
Apple is not even true to the spirit of earlier
incarnations of Mac OS here. I noticed that my Mac staff were completely
baffled. Only those with a UNIX background were able to twig the fundamental
idea without assistance.
On the other hand, when I compare what is going on
with what Windows provides, it's not clear to me that XP's tools are
significantly better than the Apple offering, though I suppose your mileage
may vary. A lot of time is spent giving PC-based staff a brief introduction
to the fundamental concepts.
I would also remark that the major Linux distributions
have stopped providing any significant uncrippled CD or DVD copying tools on
the base distribution media. X-CDroast and k3b are very good of their kind,
but such tools - and the multimedia extensions to things like mplayer or
xine - are usually hived off to some third-party outfit or website. Fedora,
for example, directs you to rpm.livna.org:
"According to fedora.us, the merger between Fedora.us
and Red Hat necessitated the removal of certain problematic packages
(including but not limited to mplayer, xine, videolan-client and xmms-mp3)
due to licensing issues".
Now, I wonder just how much such "licensing issues"
played a part in Apple's decision to let Roxio et al. take the heat for
providing such tools?
Regards, TC
-- Terry Cole admin@maths.otago.ac.nz System
Administrator Dept. of Maths and Stats, Otago University PO. Box 56, Dunedin
tel:64-3-4797739 NEW ZEALAND fax:64-3-4798427
and
Like you needed another vioce in this frog chorus, but
here's my two cents:
The deal here is that most CD-R/W media is going to be
formatted for packet writing using UDF. this is supported through any number
of third party packages, and Windows XP can natively read from but not write
to this format. The mac is going to use the ISO 9660 format for optical
media, which essentially requires an image be created, since it can be
written to one session at a time. the UDF format is essentially an open
ended session, for the purposes of writing data to disc.
Coming from a perspective similar to yours, I
initially found this behavior irritating, until I realized that my dell was
only acting different because I had ecdc, nero, and a couple of other udf
writing systems installed.
RE accessing the mac remotely from windows, I've been
dinking around with samba for a while and still can't get it to act right.
the right daemons are started, and can see my windows domain controllers,
but can't get the UID for the trust accounts. this means that the mac can't
authenticate remote users from AD. if I can get this worked around, I'll try
and document it for you and your readers.
Matt Fulghum
Which bodes ill for my networking unless I
pay Thursby the $99. Apparently that ought to be included in the price of a
Mac: pay extra to Apple and get a working networking program.
Regarding DVD, I guess the Sony
application that came with the DVD writer, and whatever comes with Plextor
writers, just does all that invisibly so I thought it was part of Windows
XP. All I know is that I can make incremental backups to a DVD +RW disk over
my network and while it is slow, it acts exactly like a slow hard drive.
I prefer DVD-RAM because that is the most
stable of the lot, but it's being phased out. Pity because it really makes
archive quality copies. I also have Magneto-Optical drives which are slower
still but make nearly eternal copies...
I'll investigate using a DVD-R drive as a
WORM for the Mac.
=======================
From Sue Ferarra
http://www.syracuse.com/news/poststandard/index.ssf?/base/news-1/1072085924261980.xml
Is Handwriting on the Wall? Some say schools should
stop teaching cursive writing
December 23, 2003 By Kevin Conway Contributing writer
Pupils in David Rufo's third- and fourth-grade class
at Manlius Pebble Hill School must use cursive writing when they write in
their journals.
But Rufo says the pupils shouldn't have spent the time
learning cursive writing - handwriting that uses flowing letters connected
to each other to form words - in the first place. <snip>
Hmmm
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