Windows and Linux at work [1]; OS X at home [2]; iOS on my iPhone, iPad, and new Apple TV; and whatever iPod Nanos run [3].

If you get into versions, it's XP for all the Windows work; Redhat 4, 5, and 6 for Linux at work; currently straight Debian (I think Sid?) at for Linux at home; mostly Leopard through Lion for OS X [4]; and iOS 5.

Oh, and I have a dev edition of an Intel tablet I got for free that I've booted exactly once. I think it runs Maemo or Meego or something?

Do we count firmware? I'm pretty sure my receiver, TV, Blu-ray player, and cameras all run things sophisticated enough to be called OSs....

[1] And very occasionally Solaris (8, mostly, I think).

[2] With occasional interludes of Windows or Linux at home, mostly via VMs.

[3] Also miscellaneous earlier iPods, from original up to 3rd gen Shuffle, that get used an average of once a year.

[4] And one ancient Tiger box I boot maybe once a year.

the problem is that the vast majority of recordings of classical music are under copyright (to the orchestra or whatever). anything old enough to be public domain by sheer age is going to sound terrible (mono 78s at best, and almost certainly recorded "acoustically" through a horn) and there's not going to be much because of the format limitations of the time. (10-inch 78s hold 3min a side, that's about right for a piano etude. hard to put a symphony on those....)

there's a similar issue actually with sheet music--most of the good sheet music for those same pieces is under some degree of copyright control. i wonder if anyone's looking at doing the same thing there? you could transcribe whole swaths of the canon to MusicXML or ABC and release them under CC-SA or GFDL pretty cheaply, i'd think.

iirc definition 2 was originally supposed to relate to "classical" in its primary definition of the time--"relating to Classical Civilization", i.e. ancient greece and rome (cf. classical architecture). i think the idea was that this music was a simplification from the baroque period that preceded it.

actually (in short/american count) it's quadrillions. (10e15 is ten quadrillion.)

a ringworld as wide as the earth and at our orbit would have roughly 5 trillion square miles (~8000 miles * ~100e6 miles * 2 * pi) (inside) surface area.

10e15/5e12 is 2000 people per square mile, slightly less than bangladesh, and about 24x america -- feasible, if not terribly probably.

Ringworld itself is unlikely to have anything close to this "now", given what the Puppeteers did to it, but i suppose it might have back when the Pak were running things.

a (solid) dyson sphere at our orbit would have about 125 quadrillion (4 * pi * ~100e6 miles^2) square miles (inside) surface area, and could thus accommodate 10e15 people at 1 per ~12.5 square miles (~0.08 per square mile), just slightly more than greenland, and 15x less than alaska.

the one at the end of an arm shouldn't make you puke if it's set up properly and you know what you're doing. the spinning chair on the other hand....

how does this relate to "advocate against"?

of course you can, you just have to be a hunter-gatherer. you're perfectly free to move to the alaskan bush any time you like. just remember, some days you eat the bear, some days the bear eats you.

fnord

Will Gary Johnson do?

+1

(tho i'd've said github)

/bow

(coincidentally, the fortune at the moment is "'From there to here, from here to there, funny things are everywhere.' -- Dr. Seuss"

yo dawg....

my mistake, i have a pro with 8 hyper-threaded cores.

reminds me of pre-OS X Macs--on the extremely rare occasions i have to boot OS 9 on bare metal, I'm always amazed by how much more responsive it is, on a single 300MHz core, than Snow Leopard is on 16 3GHz+ cores with more RAM than that box has disk space. (right up to the Type 2 bomb, failed attempt at typing "g finder" into the interrupt box, and four-minute reboot....)