It's perfectly simple. They're slaves. Many other narratives that occupy the same class of universe - which normally means people running around with swords accompanied by wizards - also feature slaves. There's no overt or even sub-textual racism here, R2 and 3PO are pretty diverse just by themselves, to say nothing of the other driods that appear in the background.
Just as most, if not all (Game of Thrones notwithstanding) swords-n-sorcery epics do not concern themselves with the emancipation of slaves, neither does Star Wars. I don't think it's any the lesser for it.
Looking slightly further, perhaps the thesis is that 'artificial life is no life at all', and the droid's apparent emotions are just programmed responses designed to make the robots easier for humans to work with.
Again with the unsubstantiated claims. What fundamentals of computer science does Apple ignore? Algorithmic complexities? What standards of computer science do they ignore? Actually, I can't think of any standards of computer science.
And why is performing someone else's music necassarily anti-art (for lack of a better term, sorry)? People have done so throughout the centuries, and in fact performing one's own music is a relatively new idea. Actors do not generally speak their own words, nor do dancers typically perform their own moves. Janis Joplin didn't write this, but if you can listen to it without being moved then you're a tougher person than me.
Anyway, arguing musical tastes is pointless, but I will say that one should not generally dismiss entire genres because 'auto-tune' or 'not-original'.
If you're swapping, there's a very good chance that you're about to hit some other area of the disk in very short order. Given that the subsequent disk access is certainly guaranteed to be random, the optimum position for the swap partition is probably in the centre of the disk. Unless the heads changing direction is expensive (I've no idea), in which case the position of the swap partition may have no impact in the general case at all.
Good call, we don't. Let's not. I like things slimmed down, simplified. With too many options, I fail to get work done. It's kind of like an easily-distracted thing. A failing, no doubt. I like the smoothness too - like a car with a gearbox that doesn't grind when you change, and doors that don't squeak when you open then, and an ignition that you don't have to twist just so in order to get the blasted thing to start.
Should the proposal be accepted, which was submitted by the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund in the Eurogroup of 25 June 2015 and consists of two parts that together constitute their comprehensive proposal? The first document is entitled ‘Reforms for the completion of the Current Programme and beyond’ and the second ‘Preliminary Debt Sustainability Analysis.
Now, I don't know about you, but that doesn't seem to me to mean "Do you ever want to be helped out during a humanitarian crisis?".
Yes, fluffemutter, please do say more. What's wrong with Miley Cyrus exactly? You don't like her music, I presume, can't say I know much about it myself but I imagine it's quite well-produced and it seems to upset the cultural elite quite a bit, which I always think is a good thing.
Maybe, when things are popular, we shouldn't automatically assume that they are generally rubbish in consequence. I'm certainly guilty of this from time to him (Transformers movie? Pah! Although I did see that and it was rubbish).
It's like telling me I have to drive a certain route to my workplace and I can't use any other streets other than specified.
No it isn't. It's like there only being one way to make the car go faster, and one way to slow it down. Of course, like all analogies, this is imperfect since one can use the engine to slow the car, or use the brake pedal, or even the handbrake.
OS X is full of complex features. Folder actions, automation, launchd for user and system daemons, usable system backup for everyone (no other OS has this out of the box), network locations (unlimited sets of network configurations for when you use your machine in different places that require different setups), custom scripting for applications, services, unix command line, timer coalescing for low power, mach microkernel. Not to mention higher level features like airplay, and the server package.
Which OS features are you referring to when you suggest they lack features that other OS's have?
Not via USB, and it'll have to be an MP4 I believe, but over wifi you could use this : Air sharing
Anyway, I don't dispute that if you want to use an iPhone or iPad (which I don't personally, but plenty of people do) then you'll need either a Windows machine or a Mac or that airsharing thingy. Or neither of course, if you just want to use the thing as a mobile device without moving files around, which is also perfectly fine for lots of people.
I don't think that there's any evidence that the linux swapfile performs better - and in any case why would it being unfragmented be an advantage? Memory access is random, and so swapfile access is random, and so why does having it non-contiguous cause an issue? Added to which, SSDs are becoming much more widespread, meaning the fragmentation issue vanishes.
In any case, can you make Linux use a swapfile permanently? One system I look after needs more swap, and I really don't want to repartition the entire drive just to increase the available virtual memory.
Windows threading and synchronisation primitives Windows memory management, and flexible swapfile (linux's swap partition is bonkers). Linux low-overhead processes and fast filesystems OS X use of launchd, and its UI
in case you don't know this, public sector workers contribute NOTHING to the economy or society as a whole.
That probably depends on what you believe constitutes public sector workers, and whether or not you imagine running the tax system (say) is of no value. If public sector workers build roads, for instance, then I'd argue that they are contributing. But I'm just a crazy lefty.
No. But thanks for writing a bunch of words about it that was safely able to avoid reading. It meant that I could avoid the bit about aesthetics being the opposite of usability, which is fortunate because it was such complete nonsense that I might have had to write something about it.
So you've seen lots of Apple advertising in movies, entertainment news, slashdot stories, and music videos.
And I've seen lots of Dell and Samsung too. Are you suggesting that they buy slashdot stories? And I don't watch music videos because I don't see the point, but I wouldn't think that Apple are the only people placing their products.
Greece F***ed up royal, and now the time has come to pay the piper.
You speak of Greece as though it were not comprised of people. What do you think the Greeks will do if they 'drown in it'? They won't stay within their borders, and it most assuredly will not be pretty. We, as humans, will have a moral obligation to do something about what will happen to the people of Greece. That is very likely to be much more expensive than solving the problem today while Greece is still a country.
In what sense? Another thing I hear a lot is 'vendor lock-in', but it's never clearly described. In what sense am I 'locked in'? I could go out tomorrow, and buy a wintel laptop, and continue doing all the things I do today. My photographs are stored as RAW files, and I can export everything easily. All the source code is just text, of course. Recorded music is stored as AIFF files, also perfects standard. And all my email would just be redownloaded from google of course.
What does vendor lock-in really, actually, mean? And in what sense is Apple any different from any other OS with respect to whatever the meaning of 'vendor lock-in' actually is.
iPhoto doesn't compress all your files into a single database either. It doesn't necessarily store them in a format that you'd like, but they are stored as individual files and they always have been. Can we all try to stick to the facts please.
Think about it, which is easier from a software engineering point of view?
A: Use the database-like features of the filesystem to store your assets, and index into that from an actual database to store all the metadata that the filesystem either doesn't support or doesn't support efficient indexing into.
B: Re-invent the database-like features of the filesystem, but the rest is the same.
So *not* using the filesystem to store *files* is a poor engineering decision, and not one that I believe Apple have made in any of their software products. Unlike Microsoft, I'm looking at you Outlook and your PST file....
It's not just eye candy, but I am yet to understand why people hate the the idea that things ought to look nice. I also like regular candy, and prefer things to taste nice even though from a purely nutritional point of view this is completely unnecessary.
OS X is about things looking nice, and about there being as few ways of doing a particular thing as possible. This reduces testing, UI design and software engineering costs. People generally like that, I know I do, but you evidently don't. That's completely fine, I hope you enjoy modifying the behaviour of desktop Linux to better suit your needs. I used to do exactly the same, back in the 90's, but when the time came to do actual work with my computer I decided to go for something simpler. I have never looked back.
No - you're not reading the post you just replied to.
Apple have never stored their music as 'one big blob'. Ever. On any system or device. They didn't 'add' a feature to organise their files sensibly, iTunes has always organised your files sensibly, and has always given you the option to organise them yourself in you prefer.
So this, like the great majority of the nonsense about how Apple products work that's being thrown around in this thread, is completely false;
I found it very distasteful that iTunes seems to put all the music in a big glob on the disk and expects you to use their UI to access it.
Did you seriously believe that this was true? And how did you arrive at that incorrect conclusion?
Apple don't actually spend as much on advertising as people seem to believe. From here Apple spend half as much as microsoft. And judging by the huge Samsung stands that have started to appear at the local hardware stores, I'd guess that they spend less than Samsung too. I've only seen a couple of Apple TV ads over the years, but I haven't watched broadcast television for quite a long time so I don't really know.
I don't use itunes so I wouldn't know how the music gets on the device
If you don't use iTunes, and admit to this level of ignorance about how it works, then please stop providing your baseless opinions about it. For example this;
So as long as you have an itunes to manage it, I don't think it is so easy to step out of the walled garden once you step into it.
Is false. All your purchased and ripped music is stored in a nice folder called 'Music', helpfully organised by artist. The files within are un-protected AAC or MP3 files. You can delete iTunes, it's just an application after all, and the music is all still there. What happens with the streamed music I have no idea, and so I will refrain from guessing about it. I will say that streaming music is a very bad deal for artists though, so I think I'll stick to CDs.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to mention hideous.
It's perfectly simple. They're slaves. Many other narratives that occupy the same class of universe - which normally means people running around with swords accompanied by wizards - also feature slaves. There's no overt or even sub-textual racism here, R2 and 3PO are pretty diverse just by themselves, to say nothing of the other driods that appear in the background.
Just as most, if not all (Game of Thrones notwithstanding) swords-n-sorcery epics do not concern themselves with the emancipation of slaves, neither does Star Wars. I don't think it's any the lesser for it.
Looking slightly further, perhaps the thesis is that 'artificial life is no life at all', and the droid's apparent emotions are just programmed responses designed to make the robots easier for humans to work with.
These questions we may one day face ourselves.
Note that the above being true, and the original statement being a joke, are not mutually exclusive propositions.
Webvan and Pets.com were both pretty good jokes, after all.
I have the ability, and knowledge, to do so
Gosh. You are clever.
Thanks. You are very mature.
I love that we're getting on so well.
Again with the unsubstantiated claims. What fundamentals of computer science does Apple ignore? Algorithmic complexities? What standards of computer science do they ignore? Actually, I can't think of any standards of computer science.
And why is performing someone else's music necassarily anti-art (for lack of a better term, sorry)? People have done so throughout the centuries, and in fact performing one's own music is a relatively new idea. Actors do not generally speak their own words, nor do dancers typically perform their own moves. Janis Joplin didn't write this, but if you can listen to it without being moved then you're a tougher person than me.
Anyway, arguing musical tastes is pointless, but I will say that one should not generally dismiss entire genres because 'auto-tune' or 'not-original'.
I wonder about that though.
If you're swapping, there's a very good chance that you're about to hit some other area of the disk in very short order. Given that the subsequent disk access is certainly guaranteed to be random, the optimum position for the swap partition is probably in the centre of the disk. Unless the heads changing direction is expensive (I've no idea), in which case the position of the swap partition may have no impact in the general case at all.
Good call, we don't. Let's not. I like things slimmed down, simplified. With too many options, I fail to get work done. It's kind of like an easily-distracted thing. A failing, no doubt. I like the smoothness too - like a car with a gearbox that doesn't grind when you change, and doors that don't squeak when you open then, and an ignition that you don't have to twist just so in order to get the blasted thing to start.
This is the question that was asked:
Should the proposal be accepted, which was submitted by the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund in the Eurogroup of 25 June 2015 and consists of two parts that together constitute their comprehensive proposal? The first document is entitled ‘Reforms for the completion of the Current Programme and beyond’ and the second ‘Preliminary Debt Sustainability Analysis.
Now, I don't know about you, but that doesn't seem to me to mean "Do you ever want to be helped out during a humanitarian crisis?".
Yes, fluffemutter, please do say more. What's wrong with Miley Cyrus exactly? You don't like her music, I presume, can't say I know much about it myself but I imagine it's quite well-produced and it seems to upset the cultural elite quite a bit, which I always think is a good thing.
Maybe, when things are popular, we shouldn't automatically assume that they are generally rubbish in consequence. I'm certainly guilty of this from time to him (Transformers movie? Pah! Although I did see that and it was rubbish).
It's like telling me I have to drive a certain route to my workplace and I can't use any other streets other than specified.
No it isn't. It's like there only being one way to make the car go faster, and one way to slow it down. Of course, like all analogies, this is imperfect since one can use the engine to slow the car, or use the brake pedal, or even the handbrake.
OS X is full of complex features. Folder actions, automation, launchd for user and system daemons, usable system backup for everyone (no other OS has this out of the box), network locations (unlimited sets of network configurations for when you use your machine in different places that require different setups), custom scripting for applications, services, unix command line, timer coalescing for low power, mach microkernel. Not to mention higher level features like airplay, and the server package.
Which OS features are you referring to when you suggest they lack features that other OS's have?
Not via USB, and it'll have to be an MP4 I believe, but over wifi you could use this :
Air sharing
Anyway, I don't dispute that if you want to use an iPhone or iPad (which I don't personally, but plenty of people do) then you'll need either a Windows machine or a Mac or that airsharing thingy. Or neither of course, if you just want to use the thing as a mobile device without moving files around, which is also perfectly fine for lots of people.
I have the ability, and knowledge, to do so
Gosh. You are clever.
Well yeah, but it's still a pain, and requires a contiguous file, and multiple commands to set up, and isn't the default.
So I'm sticking with - Windows-like swapfile support.
I don't think that there's any evidence that the linux swapfile performs better - and in any case why would it being unfragmented be an advantage? Memory access is random, and so swapfile access is random, and so why does having it non-contiguous cause an issue? Added to which, SSDs are becoming much more widespread, meaning the fragmentation issue vanishes.
In any case, can you make Linux use a swapfile permanently? One system I look after needs more swap, and I really don't want to repartition the entire drive just to increase the available virtual memory.
You're joking, but:
Windows threading and synchronisation primitives
Windows memory management, and flexible swapfile (linux's swap partition is bonkers).
Linux low-overhead processes and fast filesystems
OS X use of launchd, and its UI
in case you don't know this, public sector workers contribute NOTHING to the economy or society as a whole.
That probably depends on what you believe constitutes public sector workers, and whether or not you imagine running the tax system (say) is of no value. If public sector workers build roads, for instance, then I'd argue that they are contributing. But I'm just a crazy lefty.
Do you find Apple products "sexy"?
No. But thanks for writing a bunch of words about it that was safely able to avoid reading. It meant that I could avoid the bit about aesthetics being the opposite of usability, which is fortunate because it was such complete nonsense that I might have had to write something about it.
So you've seen lots of Apple advertising in movies, entertainment news, slashdot stories, and music videos.
And I've seen lots of Dell and Samsung too. Are you suggesting that they buy slashdot stories? And I don't watch music videos because I don't see the point, but I wouldn't think that Apple are the only people placing their products.
Greece F***ed up royal, and now the time has come to pay the piper.
You speak of Greece as though it were not comprised of people. What do you think the Greeks will do if they 'drown in it'? They won't stay within their borders, and it most assuredly will not be pretty. We, as humans, will have a moral obligation to do something about what will happen to the people of Greece. That is very likely to be much more expensive than solving the problem today while Greece is still a country.
There's also vendor-lockin
In what sense? Another thing I hear a lot is 'vendor lock-in', but it's never clearly described. In what sense am I 'locked in'? I could go out tomorrow, and buy a wintel laptop, and continue doing all the things I do today. My photographs are stored as RAW files, and I can export everything easily. All the source code is just text, of course. Recorded music is stored as AIFF files, also perfects standard. And all my email would just be redownloaded from google of course.
What does vendor lock-in really, actually, mean? And in what sense is Apple any different from any other OS with respect to whatever the meaning of 'vendor lock-in' actually is.
iPhoto doesn't compress all your files into a single database either. It doesn't necessarily store them in a format that you'd like, but they are stored as individual files and they always have been. Can we all try to stick to the facts please.
Think about it, which is easier from a software engineering point of view?
A: Use the database-like features of the filesystem to store your assets, and index into that from an actual database to store all the metadata that the filesystem either doesn't support or doesn't support efficient indexing into.
B: Re-invent the database-like features of the filesystem, but the rest is the same.
So *not* using the filesystem to store *files* is a poor engineering decision, and not one that I believe Apple have made in any of their software products. Unlike Microsoft, I'm looking at you Outlook and your PST file....
It's not just eye candy, but I am yet to understand why people hate the the idea that things ought to look nice. I also like regular candy, and prefer things to taste nice even though from a purely nutritional point of view this is completely unnecessary.
OS X is about things looking nice, and about there being as few ways of doing a particular thing as possible. This reduces testing, UI design and software engineering costs. People generally like that, I know I do, but you evidently don't. That's completely fine, I hope you enjoy modifying the behaviour of desktop Linux to better suit your needs. I used to do exactly the same, back in the 90's, but when the time came to do actual work with my computer I decided to go for something simpler. I have never looked back.
Favourite troll.
No - you're not reading the post you just replied to.
Apple have never stored their music as 'one big blob'. Ever. On any system or device. They didn't 'add' a feature to organise their files sensibly, iTunes has always organised your files sensibly, and has always given you the option to organise them yourself in you prefer.
So this, like the great majority of the nonsense about how Apple products work that's being thrown around in this thread, is completely false;
I found it very distasteful that iTunes seems to put all the music in a big glob on the disk and expects you to use their UI to access it.
Did you seriously believe that this was true? And how did you arrive at that incorrect conclusion?
Not marketing,
Apple don't actually spend as much on advertising as people seem to believe. From here Apple spend half as much as microsoft. And judging by the huge Samsung stands that have started to appear at the local hardware stores, I'd guess that they spend less than Samsung too. I've only seen a couple of Apple TV ads over the years, but I haven't watched broadcast television for quite a long time so I don't really know.
I don't use itunes so I wouldn't know how the music gets on the device
If you don't use iTunes, and admit to this level of ignorance about how it works, then please stop providing your baseless opinions about it. For example this;
So as long as you have an itunes to manage it, I don't think it is so easy to step out of the walled garden once you step into it.
Is false. All your purchased and ripped music is stored in a nice folder called 'Music', helpfully organised by artist. The files within are un-protected AAC or MP3 files. You can delete iTunes, it's just an application after all, and the music is all still there. What happens with the streamed music I have no idea, and so I will refrain from guessing about it. I will say that streaming music is a very bad deal for artists though, so I think I'll stick to CDs.