True, it was just an anecdote but when it comes to user interface issues Apple definitely tends to have good solutions (even if the iTunes requirement for iPods and iPhones is a bit of a pain in the ass), IMHO the main reason people tolerate the iTunes requirement is because unlike a lot of other applications required for syncing mp3 players it actually works quite well (although the Windows version is a bit sluggish and bloated). There's also the matter of the user interface of the mp3 player itself, most others I've tried have all had seriously quirky user interfaces (and no, my first mp3 player wasn't an iPod but I did eventually get an iPod after I tried a friend's iPod and realized that the user interface actually made sense compared immediately, unlike pretty much every other mp3 player I've owned or used).
It's actually funny you mentioned ipod here - the only reason everybody buys it because it's cool looking, and nothing to do with any functionality
Or they judge the sound quality to be "good enough" and the integration with their computer to be excellent compared to other offerings on the market (there are some pretty scary products out there, one I owned (and which was released in 2005) only worked with win2k and winxp, demanded a special "sync" application, installed a whole bunch of drivers and crashed the machine it connected to roughly 20-25% of the times I connected it. This was a major brand mp3 player btw. But hey, keep telling yourself that Steve Jobs is satan and Apple is teh evül empire if it helps you sleep better at night...
hilds' arguments reminded me of the kind of quasi-legal nitpicking one sees in Slashdot posts almost every day. It's the same kind of thing you see when you have two children in the back seat on a long road trip, and one or both of them are determined to pick a fight, so whatever rules you lay down, they interpret them as literally and selectively as possible in order to violate the spirit of the rule while keeping tenuously to the letter. Child A pokes child B, so you tell them not to touch each other, at which point A pokes B with some object, arguing that he didn't poke B, the object did. Similar rationales come up whenever copyright violations are discussed. It is, no pun intended, childish. Pirate all the mp3s you want, but show enough respect for other people's intelligence (and have enough balls) not to play word games about it.
Have you ever worked for a large company (let's say 2k+ employees)? I have, and in those environments the main reason IT and dev staff behave in the way you describe is because that's how management behaves and a lot of times it's actually safer to play along with their little power trip game than it is to use common sense. I'm not saying this is what Childs did but I've definitely seen it, PHB comes up with insanely literal interpretation of a corporate policy and everyone just reciprocates by also interpreting the rules to the letter (while ignoring the spirit), a few weeks or months later the first literal interpretation is quietly swept under the rug and everything is working properly again.
An example of this would be a standard fine print clause in the contracts of almost all employees stating that it is their responsibility to see to that they can work for their entire workday which is interpreted by the PHB as a way to force the employees to come to work 10-15 minutes early to log on to their workstations. The employees return the favor by noting that some of them who have been working for the company for a long time don't have that clause in their contracts and the rest also note that there's another clause which states that overtime pay is to paid to employees for all non-scheduled work and that it is calculated in whole hours and rounded up so they all start coming to work ten minutes early and putting in one hour of overtime every day on their timesheets.
Sure you can, just not on the iPhone. (Both because the Mozilla folks have chosen not to develop for the iPhone and because of the locked down environment)
I seem to recall that in pretty much every discussion about "rented" software, software that doesn't work without the developer's servers or online authentication there have been cadres of fanboys who have claimed that obviously the developers (including MS) would nevar!!1 just shut down their servers without first "opening" the game so that full functionality can be retained.
So how's that trust in corporations working out for you?
I know this is hard to believe but sometimes you don't have a choice!
When I was straight out of college I didn't have mommy and daddy to pay for everything until I found a $70k/year job so I took a job where I was working part-time (everyone but management was part-time, best to keep the slaves hungry and scared), after taxes I was making ~$950/month and every day was filled with examples of the employer abusing the employees while mostly not breaking the law (thankfully the union was pretty aggressive so when they tried to make people work insane shifts or fire someone for doing what they were told the union got involved and threatened with legal action).
So does that mean I'm an underqualified idiot? Well, no. These days I'm a software developer, but it took me two years of working shitty corporate troglodyte jobs with near-constant abuse before I found this job (it would have been slightly faster had I moved somewhere else but I didn't have the money for that since I was straight out of college and working jobs that barely paid food and rent (no, employers around here don't help pay for your move or help you find an apartment)).
Sorry but I think I've seen a few too many individuals on teh intarwebs claiming to be experts on Apple products yet they seem to pick names at random ("the apple", "mcintosh", "mac phone" and "small mac" are apparently all names of various Apple products according to these "experts"). If someone claimed to be an expert on IBM/Lenovo desktop/laptop computers yet referred to the Thinkpad series of computers as "ibmpad" and "thinkbook", would you take them seriously?
"the apple"? Should I assume you mean the Apple iPad or all Apple products? Because I can tell you right now that if you buy a mac you not only get the development tools for it (as well as the iPod touch, iPhone and iPad) for free (as you should) but you can also install 3rd party tools if you have some sort of "my gcc must be untainted" thing going.
But let's say you're talking about the iPad, well it is possible to write programs for it, it's just that the operating system is locked down in a way that requires your applications to be signed in order for it to allow you to install the applications. So it is probably a lot more programmable than your daughter's "barbie laptop toy" (although to be fair I have little knowledge of the state of the art when it comes to Barbie laptop toys, for all I know it runs plan 9).
Actually, my first argument was that we have no reason to believe that how humanity has developed is a good template for how intelligence elsewhere may have developed, "insufflate10mg" replied by stating that it must be that way because we have never met any aliens and lacking evidence to the contrary they must think like we do. At this point I threw the word "insects" out there, the comment about his/her high UID and nick was meant to point out that he/she clearly isn't the sharpest tool in the shed.
But there's the basic problem that if they have no problem with taking resources from another civilization, what problem do they have with taking resources from each other? Unless they are invincible they will almost certainly begin by taking resources from each other. If both you and I need a resource and one of us becomes short on it, we engage in conflict unless there is a sense of "ethics" or some basic moral guidelines
You're applying how the average human acts to how you expect aliens to act. If we assume hostile invaders here to take our resources it is entirely possible that they've never even considered the idea of attacking someone of their own species and once their own planet started running low on resources they decided to all band together so that they could go somewhere else for resources.
All the things you listed are things that could be done by now if they had taken the IPv6 transition into consideration when doing routine upgrades to their infrastructure, with the exception of the truly cheap ISP:s that don't do routine upgrades (this seems to mostly be smaller outfits who will gladly run half-broken networks on hardware that's ten years old and falling apart if they can just save a buck or two in the short term).
The page you linked is just DJB ranting as usual and I think I speak for most people when I say that I prefer replying to your own arguments instead of having to reply to everything someone links to.
As for IPv6 addresses being 128 bits, it makes a lot more sense than risking another CIDR-like mess when it comes to assigning blocks of addresses.
No, it's artificial scarcity because the demand only exceeds the supply because those who control the demand (e.g. ISPs) choose to limit the supply by not upgrading their networks to use IPv6.
Oh great, artificial scarcity caused by greedy bastards refusing to upgrade because they're either too cheap to upgrade or looking to make a buck selling unused addresses...
How is everyone seeing each others screens a good thing? One of the most annoying things I know is when people can "sneak up" behind me and look at my screen.
I know you were aiming for a "funny" mod but in my experience macs tend to be some of the most stable consumer computers (short of custom-built machines where the person who built it spent a lot of time researching the parts and then testing that everything worked satisfactory before beginning to actually use the machine). Compared to the average whitebox OEM Wintel machine (or even Dell, HP and similar desktops) I've had much less trouble with macs, sure there are still problems but when we bought 40+ Dell and Fujitsu-Siemens machines (various models) at work our helpdesk guys ended up having to return almost half of the machines in the first couple of months due to overheating issues, glitchy NICs and other stuff that should "just work". That's what you get when you consistently go with the cheapest possible parts (sometimes a few cents difference on a chip that costs ~$1 can make a big difference) and you're always hopping between different models and manufacturers to always get the lowest possible hardware cost.
The funny thing is that when comparing other monitors to my first-gen 24" iMac monitor I generally find that they have poor color reproduction, weird contrast and brightness (either they suck at both or it's a matter of good contrast or good brightness) even when the other monitor is brand new and has much better specs than the iMac monitor on paper.
This alone is a good reason for me to buy another iMac the next time I go looking for a main desktop.
The point in human vision where you can no longer distinguish individual pixels while viewing the entire screen is at about 4096x4096 pixels.
I'm pretty sure I could see the individual pixels on a 4k x 4k 200" screen. The metric you supplied is worthless, what's interesting is DPI and monitor size (as in, physical size of the monitor, not number of pixels).
27" monitors tend to be around 2560x1440, 24" monitors are generally 1920x1200 (except the really cheap ones that use HDTV panels running at 1920x1080).
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Sounds more like a typical *nix user setup, you did know that OS X is a UNIX system, right?
True, it was just an anecdote but when it comes to user interface issues Apple definitely tends to have good solutions (even if the iTunes requirement for iPods and iPhones is a bit of a pain in the ass), IMHO the main reason people tolerate the iTunes requirement is because unlike a lot of other applications required for syncing mp3 players it actually works quite well (although the Windows version is a bit sluggish and bloated). There's also the matter of the user interface of the mp3 player itself, most others I've tried have all had seriously quirky user interfaces (and no, my first mp3 player wasn't an iPod but I did eventually get an iPod after I tried a friend's iPod and realized that the user interface actually made sense compared immediately, unlike pretty much every other mp3 player I've owned or used).
It's actually funny you mentioned ipod here - the only reason everybody buys it because it's cool looking, and nothing to do with any functionality
Or they judge the sound quality to be "good enough" and the integration with their computer to be excellent compared to other offerings on the market (there are some pretty scary products out there, one I owned (and which was released in 2005) only worked with win2k and winxp, demanded a special "sync" application, installed a whole bunch of drivers and crashed the machine it connected to roughly 20-25% of the times I connected it. This was a major brand mp3 player btw. But hey, keep telling yourself that Steve Jobs is satan and Apple is teh evül empire if it helps you sleep better at night...
hilds' arguments reminded me of the kind of quasi-legal nitpicking one sees in Slashdot posts almost every day. It's the same kind of thing you see when you have two children in the back seat on a long road trip, and one or both of them are determined to pick a fight, so whatever rules you lay down, they interpret them as literally and selectively as possible in order to violate the spirit of the rule while keeping tenuously to the letter. Child A pokes child B, so you tell them not to touch each other, at which point A pokes B with some object, arguing that he didn't poke B, the object did. Similar rationales come up whenever copyright violations are discussed. It is, no pun intended, childish. Pirate all the mp3s you want, but show enough respect for other people's intelligence (and have enough balls) not to play word games about it.
Have you ever worked for a large company (let's say 2k+ employees)? I have, and in those environments the main reason IT and dev staff behave in the way you describe is because that's how management behaves and a lot of times it's actually safer to play along with their little power trip game than it is to use common sense. I'm not saying this is what Childs did but I've definitely seen it, PHB comes up with insanely literal interpretation of a corporate policy and everyone just reciprocates by also interpreting the rules to the letter (while ignoring the spirit), a few weeks or months later the first literal interpretation is quietly swept under the rug and everything is working properly again.
An example of this would be a standard fine print clause in the contracts of almost all employees stating that it is their responsibility to see to that they can work for their entire workday which is interpreted by the PHB as a way to force the employees to come to work 10-15 minutes early to log on to their workstations. The employees return the favor by noting that some of them who have been working for the company for a long time don't have that clause in their contracts and the rest also note that there's another clause which states that overtime pay is to paid to employees for all non-scheduled work and that it is calculated in whole hours and rounded up so they all start coming to work ten minutes early and putting in one hour of overtime every day on their timesheets.
So why don't you port Gecko to the iPhone OS then? Or pay someone to do it? Or at least offer a bounty for the first person to do so?
Sure you can, just not on the iPhone. (Both because the Mozilla folks have chosen not to develop for the iPhone and because of the locked down environment)
I seem to recall that in pretty much every discussion about "rented" software, software that doesn't work without the developer's servers or online authentication there have been cadres of fanboys who have claimed that obviously the developers (including MS) would nevar!!1 just shut down their servers without first "opening" the game so that full functionality can be retained.
So how's that trust in corporations working out for you?
I'm inclined to agree but since mateomiguel used that term I decided to stick with it.
Air pollution (gases like co2) accelerate global warming.
Air pollution (dust and other stuff that blocks sunlight) slow global warming (aka "global dimming").
Whether or not humans are contributing to this is not an issue I'll get into but these two points are fairly obvious to anyone with half a clue.
I know this is hard to believe but sometimes you don't have a choice!
When I was straight out of college I didn't have mommy and daddy to pay for everything until I found a $70k/year job so I took a job where I was working part-time (everyone but management was part-time, best to keep the slaves hungry and scared), after taxes I was making ~$950/month and every day was filled with examples of the employer abusing the employees while mostly not breaking the law (thankfully the union was pretty aggressive so when they tried to make people work insane shifts or fire someone for doing what they were told the union got involved and threatened with legal action).
So does that mean I'm an underqualified idiot? Well, no. These days I'm a software developer, but it took me two years of working shitty corporate troglodyte jobs with near-constant abuse before I found this job (it would have been slightly faster had I moved somewhere else but I didn't have the money for that since I was straight out of college and working jobs that barely paid food and rent (no, employers around here don't help pay for your move or help you find an apartment)).
Sorry but I think I've seen a few too many individuals on teh intarwebs claiming to be experts on Apple products yet they seem to pick names at random ("the apple", "mcintosh", "mac phone" and "small mac" are apparently all names of various Apple products according to these "experts"). If someone claimed to be an expert on IBM/Lenovo desktop/laptop computers yet referred to the Thinkpad series of computers as "ibmpad" and "thinkbook", would you take them seriously?
"the apple"? Should I assume you mean the Apple iPad or all Apple products? Because I can tell you right now that if you buy a mac you not only get the development tools for it (as well as the iPod touch, iPhone and iPad) for free (as you should) but you can also install 3rd party tools if you have some sort of "my gcc must be untainted" thing going.
But let's say you're talking about the iPad, well it is possible to write programs for it, it's just that the operating system is locked down in a way that requires your applications to be signed in order for it to allow you to install the applications. So it is probably a lot more programmable than your daughter's "barbie laptop toy" (although to be fair I have little knowledge of the state of the art when it comes to Barbie laptop toys, for all I know it runs plan 9).
Actually, my first argument was that we have no reason to believe that how humanity has developed is a good template for how intelligence elsewhere may have developed, "insufflate10mg" replied by stating that it must be that way because we have never met any aliens and lacking evidence to the contrary they must think like we do. At this point I threw the word "insects" out there, the comment about his/her high UID and nick was meant to point out that he/she clearly isn't the sharpest tool in the shed.
Insects. How's that for a counterargument? Also, why am I even replying to a comment from someone with a 1.5M+ UID and the nick "insufflate10mg"?
But there's the basic problem that if they have no problem with taking resources from another civilization, what problem do they have with taking resources from each other? Unless they are invincible they will almost certainly begin by taking resources from each other. If both you and I need a resource and one of us becomes short on it, we engage in conflict unless there is a sense of "ethics" or some basic moral guidelines
You're applying how the average human acts to how you expect aliens to act. If we assume hostile invaders here to take our resources it is entirely possible that they've never even considered the idea of attacking someone of their own species and once their own planet started running low on resources they decided to all band together so that they could go somewhere else for resources.
All the things you listed are things that could be done by now if they had taken the IPv6 transition into consideration when doing routine upgrades to their infrastructure, with the exception of the truly cheap ISP:s that don't do routine upgrades (this seems to mostly be smaller outfits who will gladly run half-broken networks on hardware that's ten years old and falling apart if they can just save a buck or two in the short term).
The page you linked is just DJB ranting as usual and I think I speak for most people when I say that I prefer replying to your own arguments instead of having to reply to everything someone links to.
As for IPv6 addresses being 128 bits, it makes a lot more sense than risking another CIDR-like mess when it comes to assigning blocks of addresses.
Oops, "control the demand" should be "control the supply".
No, it's artificial scarcity because the demand only exceeds the supply because those who control the demand (e.g. ISPs) choose to limit the supply by not upgrading their networks to use IPv6.
Oh great, artificial scarcity caused by greedy bastards refusing to upgrade because they're either too cheap to upgrade or looking to make a buck selling unused addresses...
How is everyone seeing each others screens a good thing? One of the most annoying things I know is when people can "sneak up" behind me and look at my screen.
I know you were aiming for a "funny" mod but in my experience macs tend to be some of the most stable consumer computers (short of custom-built machines where the person who built it spent a lot of time researching the parts and then testing that everything worked satisfactory before beginning to actually use the machine). Compared to the average whitebox OEM Wintel machine (or even Dell, HP and similar desktops) I've had much less trouble with macs, sure there are still problems but when we bought 40+ Dell and Fujitsu-Siemens machines (various models) at work our helpdesk guys ended up having to return almost half of the machines in the first couple of months due to overheating issues, glitchy NICs and other stuff that should "just work". That's what you get when you consistently go with the cheapest possible parts (sometimes a few cents difference on a chip that costs ~$1 can make a big difference) and you're always hopping between different models and manufacturers to always get the lowest possible hardware cost.
The funny thing is that when comparing other monitors to my first-gen 24" iMac monitor I generally find that they have poor color reproduction, weird contrast and brightness (either they suck at both or it's a matter of good contrast or good brightness) even when the other monitor is brand new and has much better specs than the iMac monitor on paper.
This alone is a good reason for me to buy another iMac the next time I go looking for a main desktop.
The point in human vision where you can no longer distinguish individual pixels while viewing the entire screen is at about 4096x4096 pixels.
I'm pretty sure I could see the individual pixels on a 4k x 4k 200" screen. The metric you supplied is worthless, what's interesting is DPI and monitor size (as in, physical size of the monitor, not number of pixels).
27" monitors tend to be around 2560x1440, 24" monitors are generally 1920x1200 (except the really cheap ones that use HDTV panels running at 1920x1080).