stlgoalie

Iran will never finish that reactor. Israel will make a preemtive strike just like they did in 1983 with Iraq. A move that the world condemned Israel for, but realized six years later was really a good idea. Actually my major was in Political Science with a speciality in Middle East Politics. What isn't being widely reported and ignored is the fair amount of sucess that NATO has had in Afganistan. Things are not perfect, but they are much improved and going as smoothly as one could hope. The remaining Taliban there will be a problem for years to come, but so were the "Werewolves" after WWII. The werewolves were former SS that continued fighting a limited "gureilla" war really until the Berlin Crisis. So long as the international community remains engaged there in Afghanistan there will be hope.The first thing to realize about the Middle East is that United States just does not understand it and never really has understood the region. The first "contact" with the region started the Barbary Wars with the bombardment of Tripoli, etc. So just to say "Bush is an idiot" is really just ignorance of US history in the region. Now in more recent times there was the support of various regiemes during the Cold War. The problem with the Cold War was that the Third World Despots played both sides. Just look at Castro. Castro isn't a communist, he just said he was one after the US refused to support him to get weapons and aid from the USSR. He's just a dictator pure and simple. This went on for forty years. Back to Iraq: Why the US attacked Iraq was a vast combination of factors. Part of it was Bush II wanting to finish Bush I's war, oil, and test the new generation of military equipement and tactics. There is actually military theory that states you need to have a good war about once a decade to ensure the military having a core of experienced combat veterns. At any rate I digress. However here was the basic idea on attack Iraq as I understand it:The United States suddenly "woke-up" to the reality that militant Islam had spread further and posed more of a threat than they first had thought. The present Intel community believed that sucide bombers in shopping malls was the most likely threat. However, there was an FBI report in 1998 or 1999 (I can't remember which) that estimated that at least 1 major US city would be hit by a radiological device (ie Nuke bomb or dirty nuke) by 2010. The media and most people ignored the report. Well, we were struck, but by 767's turned into cruise missiles. Realizing that the threat of Terrorism would, at best, take a generation or more to "change the hearts and minds" of that part of the world the question was what to do? The United States, and Europe as well, is going to be attacked again. Countries in the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia, play to the spritiual leaders of the "Jihad" movement. Given the dependance on Oil there are no really "good" solutions, however can you sit back and try to play a defensive game? Having grown up around the intelligence community and Military industrial complex I can tell you that there probably are alot more attempted terrorist attacks that have been stopped and you never know about it. As one friend, and former FBI counter-terrorism agent, of mine said, "We save the world, and go home at the end of the day proud that [we john q. public] never know it". But the Security and Intel agencies are still fallible. Even if they stop 999 attacks the 1000th will get through. They can do a lot to stop attacks, but they can't bat 1.000. So what options are left? Here are just a few to consider:1) Announce to the World that if we are attacked with weapons of mass destruction, that our Thermonuclear counter attack will land on these country's: <<Insert list of countries that support terrorists>> front door first, we'll figure out who actually did it later? While there is some merit to openly stating the use of Nuclear Weapons worked for the Cold War I doubt it would work as well here. But then who do you go after? What if it was a stolen Russian nuke: do you nuke russia? Can you prove that it came from Iran or Syria or Iraq? However, during the first Gulf War, then Sectary of State James Bakker told the Iraqi representive: "If you use biological or chemical weapons on our troops, we have the means and the will to retaliate". Which is diplomatic speech for: "you use Bio-chem weapons we're going to nuke you"...without publically saying it. It was also established as part of the Clinton Doctrine that any attack with WMD on US soil could be met with our own nuclear response as we see fit....so....2) Sign a new executive order allowing for the assassination and let the CIA operate in the shadow. The old montra of "Do what you have to do: we just don't want to read about it in the Times". Actually this was probably the best method. Just announce through private channels and give a speech that says: "We don't care who you are or where you are: if you mean to do us harm, we will find you and hunt you down". It has been an effective tactic in the past for Mossad. In 1985, when terrorists took over the Soviet embassy in Beirut, a Spetsnaz strike team infiltrated the embassy, abducted four of the terrorists and sent one of their decapitated heads in a bag to the terrorists' leader. My $.02 is that this is probably the best way to proactively deal with terrorists themselves through direct action, but still it does not address the problem of malcontent in the population of the middle east.3) Invade a country that is known to have had, and cannot prove that it has not destroyed weapons of mass-destruction, one that is weak militarily and help set up a democracy. Support the people and hope they want to be free and work together so that in twenty years they can serve as a pillar of democracy in the middle east. Meanwhile, those holding to jihadist idealogy will most likely strike there because it is in reach. If terrorists want to attack M1 Tanks with AK-47's and die...let them. If the new government is sucessful, there is an alternate supply of oil allowing the US to apply pressure to other regiemes (ie Saudi Arbia) to clamp down on terrorist funding and to give their people more rights. Also, another neighboring country might undergo a new revolution and overthow their theocractic government (Iran). Now I have always agreed with #3. That is not to say that things were well planned out. The US military took the idea of liberators and not occupiers almost modelling after France in WWII instead of Japan at the end of WWII. There is still huge cultural non-understandings there too. The United States just doesn't comprehend the concept of holding a grudge for a 1000 years. Still, I will maintain that the attempt had to be made. As someone else said, this seems to be small wars that are brewing to one larger conflict in that region. Operation Iraq Freedom was an attempt to head it off at the pass and avoid a larger conflict. Personally, how this all gets resolved without the use nuclear weapons is still beyond me.

Especially with their cheaper stuff, I've been seeing more and more quality control issues with things like ethernet cards, on board sound cards, etc. biting the dust. What Dell seems to forget is that it was similar problems with Packard-Bell that doomed them when they tried to build the first sub-$1000 computers and almost doomed the once industry leading Gateway. Same with Dell laptops. I've seen more and more people having problems, especially with the cheaper models. This only ticks people off because even though its "cheaper" they still expect for Dell to mean quality. However, I did have problems with my iBook. It was the first "snowwhite" redeigned model and had the logic board issue that it was in the shop no less than 4 times in two years. All free repairs. ALthough I know better than to buy a first generation Apple (or technology) anything, but I was leaving for a year to live and work in another country and could not wait for the second gen snow white iBooks. Anymore when people ask me for a good PC brand, the only one I can ever think of is Sony. They are the only brand of "off-the-shelf" laptops and desktops that I've not heard any problems about. I used to have a sony laptop before switching to Mac and the only reason I stopped using it was the 233Mhz Pentium processor and 64MB of Ram wasn't enough to power the latest application plus it was needing a new battery.

Work...All work and no play....well some play....After being around computers 8 hours a day in the office as the techy guru, I come home and don't want to deal with it. That is why I have a Mac Mini at home. All I use it for is to check email. I also maintain a website for local ice hockey goalies so we can sign up for drop in times at the various Ice Rinks. We were having either one goalie show up or ten. You only need 2, but having 3 or 4 is nice because you can rotate in and out. I do own a PS2 for games and even then I don't play nearly as much as I did in college a few years ago.

I am not sure on the iMac's how much faster or better the Intel Duo chips are going to be especially since programs like Final Cut Pro can use the 64-bit G5 processor to numbercrunch. The MacBook Pro (horrible marketing name in my opinion) however looks awsome. The Intel chips are a definate upgrade in the laptop arena. I will be needing a new laptop this fall, and those look like a good buy for me when law school rolls around. Anyone else have thoughts/ideas.

What versions of Mac OS X are you using? 10.2, 10.3, or 10.4? That would help, although most of the networking settings should be the same. Something to consider is trying to find the program Zeroconf for Linux. It is also know as Rendevous or Bonjour for Mac and can help automatically detect other machines on a network. Now, can all the Mac systems conect to each other? If not, then try to get those units to talk to each other first. If you cannot, then there might be something screwy with the router configuration. Now if the Macs are working, but the Linux machine isn't, there could be some problem with the ethernet card settings or some other setting on the Linux box. Try and narrow it down and post back and I'll see if I can't help you trouble shoot the system.

We used to play 8v8 Halo on Xbox back when I lived in the Dorms a number years ago. It was a blast over the lan. Halo 2 was a good rent, but I thought the story was extremely weak. I remember just after beating it thinking "is that it, wow that was short". Now that I live in the Real World, I don't play multiplayer and plus I own a PS2. Sometimes I trade with a friend for an Xbox just to see the differences in some games. Personally I thought for single player games that Star Wars BattleFront, and now Battlefront II, are a lot more fun to play. Especially in coop on a single box.

AMD damn near cost me my job once. I've used a number of Intel chips and AMD chipsets over the years. I was working as an IT manager for a small company when I was in college. It came time to purchase some new computers and I recomended AMD 1.2Ghz Athlon T-bird processors beacuse they were about $75 cheaper per unit than their Intel couterparts. We purchased six units. Three of them were never stable and one even burnt up the processor. They constantly had heat issues and I had to go into the motherboard and actually clock some of the units down to 900Mhz to get them to run cool enough to work. I remember I added fans, drilled holes in the side of the case. Finally the company that built our machines offered us a good deal to take them back and replace with Intel units. We had all our PC's custom built by this outfit and had very good luck in the past. We were a $25k year account with them and they felt it was in their best interest to keep our business rather than have us call up Dell and order. (Which Dell was building good stuff at the time)The only thing that saved my job was the fact Adobe Premiere 6 was a POS. It wasn't stable on any version of Windows reguardless of processor and the decision was made to make the switch entirely to Mac and FCP on OSX. I was the only one in the Office with extensive Unix systems administration experience. Now when I moonlight as a consultant to small businesses and even for personal use, I tell people to go with Intel. And now I highly recommend waiting for MacTels.

Apple has Xgrid intergrated into OS 10.4 that makes setting up such systems simple. If you have all macs. Distributed computeing is extremely useful for rendering projects. I friend of mine that I play hockey with is trying to get a system set up for the OpenSource program Blender to using Xgrid. His site is http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/. (he's also the one that told me about this site to greate a goalie page so we don't have 6 goalies show up for 4 spots during drop-in) From what he told me, though, it doesn't look like there are any takers yet. He bought an extra Mac Mini and was going to through OS 10.4-Server on it and use it as the controller. He found a boxed copy of OS 10.4 Server still in the wrapping for like $500 on Ebay. Anyway, Xgrid makes it easy for us Mac users.

But what about laptops? I am guessing one would beable to download the app like OpenOffice, but when I'm travelling, especially on the road, I'm not around an internet connection 24/7.Maybe someday with wifi, but this is a few years off and assumes that MS doesn't do something else to counter it or Yahoo enters the game, etc...

The real question is: what are you going to be using it for? Apple is switching to Intel Chips starting in less than 2 months. So the PowerPC versus Intel debate is over. Now I've been using Apple notebooks (G3 iBook and G4 PowerBook) for the past four years. I love them. Great battery life, good performance, easy to use and other than I had one of those iBooks with the logic board problems, good solid reliablity. In the laptops, the thing that matters to me is battery life and heat. In those two catagories, I don't think AMD is close to touching Intel. Furthermore, if your just running office apps, surfing the net, and maybe light gaming, a 64-bit processor isn't going to buy you much.Back a number of years ago I worked at an engineering firm as the IT tech support guru. We ran on Sun systems. We purchased three 64-bit UltraSparc workstations and they were horrible at running applications. We quickly sent them back and got in 32-bit Sparc systems and everything was great. Why? The applications were designed for 32-bit and ran much smoother and better on the 32-bit versus the 64-bit systems. Now when we did simulations, we would send that to 64-bit UltraSparc servers to number crunch, which they did outperform the 32-bit systems. So while lots of people are hyping AMD because they are "64-bit" and not Intel, I'm still telling people to buy what ever is cheaper, usually intel, because for 95% of the PC users, 64-bits is not going to do diddley.

I've personally had bad luck with 2 HP notbooks. Also, Dell has some quality control issues with their newer and cheaper stuff. Seems like they forgot what doomed Packard Bell and nearly doomed Gateway...I use Mac notebooks now. However, rumor is that the Mactels (OSX on Intel) should be out by Feb. 2006. My iBook is actually dead (logic board) and I've been putting off buying a new one until I head off to Law School next fall. At work I have a powerbook and love it. I did own a Sony Vaio latop a number of years ago and had very good luck with it. Sony doesn't build crap. If your going to get a stock WIndows Notebook off the shelf, Sony would also be my first choice.If you can wait two more months, a Mactel iBook would be my first choice.

SG-1 I think has jumped the shark. They should have ended it last season when they neatly rapped up all the storylines. With Atlantis around, they could have brought back characters for guest appearances. Maybe have moved Micheal Shank's (Dr. Jackson's) Character over to Atlantis and I think things would have been better off. I will say though, getting Shank's wife, Lexa Doig, involved along with Ben Browder was a nice attempt at casting from two previous Sci-Fi shows. It also took me a while to realize that half the cast of the X-files seem to show up as well. (especially the former lone gunman)Season two of Atlantis has gotten better than the first, and the first was okay. Having Mitch Pelegi (sp) from the X-files was a nice follow up to Robert Patrick.

Desktop: Macintosh OS 10. Technically BSD with a MACH kernal, but much more comercial support plus the default iLife tools. From there it depends on what you want to do. BSD is designed as a Server OS first, maybe with execption of NetBSD...which is designed to run on anything including a toaster. I'm not joking about that either...From a developer's standpoint, Linux can be hell. The lack of standardized distros for where dependancies make it far more costly to provide tech support for Linux users. Even if you say: we only support RH or SuSE you will get Slackware and Mandrake users emailing and calling you asking why something won't work. Also the fact that Linux users tend to play and have farmore customized installs makes tech support a nightmare. Two users could have RH Fedora installed with two completely different configuration. The chaoticness that anyone can do anything they want with Linux is great for in house development when you'll be the internal user, not for those in the external devellopment world. BSD, especially FreeBSD and OpenBSD, is much easier to developer for because there is only 1 distro for any given version of FreeBSD. While some users customize their installs, most just us the defaults and yet even fewer change where the major dependencies are located. From a server and systems admin standpoint, BSD is far easier to maintain. Need to update the Kernal, CVSUP and leave, come back, restart. Need to install Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL? Go to the directory in the PORTS tree, type make && make install and leave. It will go fetch and install everything it needs. Most of that can apply to OpenBSD as well, but with more focus on security than features. OpenBSD lacked the ablity to run on SMP (multi-processor) machines for years compared to either FreeBSD or Linux and was a major draw back in the server room.

90%+ of the PC's, even higher if you just count home users, are running some kind of windows OS. Even then there are more Mac Users than Linux out there. While some companies have embraced Linux (think Doom and Quake), most do not because it doen't make business sense to spend large sums of money to develop and then support a platform that will account for less than 3% of sales. The other thing about Linux and the Linux Community is that a large majority of the users do so because they like the idea of getting something for nothing. The goal of software publishers are to make money. Now I am not talking about coporate IT users, I am talking about the home hobby crowd. I used to work for a software developement company. A lot of our products were for the SGI Irix platform (CGI work) and we seriously looked into porting and did port two of our applications to Linux in 1998/1999. They made up less than 8% of our sales and took up 28% of our tech support calls. Why? This was when there were basically no "standard" linux distro. Our stuff was ported and supported on RH 5, but we'd get calls from Slackware users, Turbo Linux users, Mandrake, and even SuSE folks wondering why they were getting errors like "XYZ binary not found in /var/etc/xyz.c". Most of the time it was because that binary wasn't installed on that distro or it was installed in another directory like /var/etc/video/xyz. The next versions of the software had no Linux ports. The company then jumped on the OS X bandwagon and ported all their tools to PPC/OS 10 when it was clear that SGI was dying and Apple had turned the corner. Eventually the company was purchased by a hollywood CGi FX company and I left to start my own consulting business and persue grad school work.

FreeBSD != LinuxFreeBSD is a true free Unix operating system and designed to be a server platform. If I was going to run a server and not use a Mac, FreeBSD is my personal choice. The Ports system for installing apps is a dream! If you want Linux, then SuSE has been the version I used to learn the Unix basics. Linux is "unix-like", but isn't truely Unix. If you can spend money, think about the Mac Mini. BSD based Unix with commerically supported programs. Today I use Macintosh because of OSX. To me it's the right balance between opensource, Unix, propitary, and commerical applications. Basically I get all my OSS goodies (Apache, MySQL, PHP, and PERL) with all my commerical software needs (photoshop, lightwave, and Quickbooks) along with some cool Mac only stuff (Final Cut Pro, Shake, DVD Studio Pro) all on one machine.