It is your computer, yes, but their Network and Educational System. You can still run whatever the hell you want be it Windows 7, Snow Leopard, Ubuntu 9, Windows ME, DOS 6.0 but you better make sure you can run their "Exam4" software.
Yes, that's implied when I said, "I'm not saying that schools should fully support Linux. I think that's an unreasonable expectation".
That's a seriously tenuous thread you've followed there. It's almost like you started with a conclusion and then looked to retrofit a connection from A to B to justify it.
Some would call that "bias"...
You're right. The people biased against Microsoft would call my comment biased.
My problem is that I cannot seem to set defaults for files without an extension. Some perl scripts for example that look like commands, leave off the.pl extension. My mac wants to execute them instead of opening them in a text editor.
Get Info works just fine for me, as does right-click "Open With"
That's a seriously tenuous thread you've followed there. It's almost like you started with a conclusion and then looked to retrofit a connection from A to B to justify it.
Yes, you do. Got a bug in Windows? Can you fix it in the source, and recompile? Can you give a copy of Windows to a friend? Can you reinstall Windows on a second PC? If MS's WGA decides your license is invalid, even though it is valid, can you get MS to restore your license?
No? What freedoms did you have in mind when you wrote that?
I am fully of the opinion that once you've been convicted and served your time, you're free to go and no stigma should accrue to you. I don't blame Microsoft for having been convicted regarding their business practices any more than I would refuse to associate with someone who, in the past, had been convicted of shoplifting.
MS was convicted of a felony, and have not shown any sense of remorse or rehabilitation. If someone was a repeat shoplifter, and continued to engage in shoplifting after conviction, I wouldn't necessarily "refuse to associate" with them, but if I were a shop owner, I'd definitely keep my eye on them if not ban them from my store outright.
Probably the form that requires me not to be an insane zealot.
Insanity is often cited as holding a world-view that is inconsistent with reality. While "zealot" may apply to the OP, I don't think insanity is terribly apt. Your views, on the other hand, do seem to contradict reality rather squarely...
At which point you get Windows and write it off as a cost of attending school, like a textbook (have you seen how much textbooks cost these days?)
Really, your operating system choice should not be so totally ingrained with your personality that you can't change to adapt to situations where you may be required to use something else.
It's one thing when you're talking about using other's computers (like at the office, or at school), but when it's your own computer, there's definitely grounds to be concerned about it.
Sure, reality is rarely ideal, but that doesn't mean someone shouldn't wish otherwise, or look into alternatives. You're acting like people shouldn't have personal preferences, and should always accede to the whims of others.
Put yourself in the reverse situation. What if your school/workplace required you to run Linux at home, when you're currently using Windows? (and your home situation is dorm-like in that having multiple computers is not a terribly straightforward option). You'd have to switch your iTunes or WinAmp or whatever over to Linux. No photoshop, different camera software, OpenOffice instead of Word, no games, etc., etc.
I'm not saying that schools should fully support Linux. I think that's an unreasonable expectation (although the amount of Windows-only requirements should be fairly limited, as most things are naturally multi-platform, like WiFi, and shouldn't be locked in to Windows at all), and the poster's daughter is likely going to need to either dual-boot or run Windows in a VM.
Even so, there's nothing wrong with asking. Treating him like his preference in OS's is some sort of character flaw ("Really, your operating system choice should not be so totally ingrained with your personality that you can't change to adapt to situations where you may be required to use something else.") is uncalled for.
Yes, it's such an "entirely new operating system" that is has the same bugs.
MS astroturfers are so busy these days. If you put down a bug in Windows 7, responses that say, "hey, don't pick on MS, it was in Vista too!" get upmodded, and then if you say, "well, 7 is an update to Vista", responses rebutting it get upmodded.
Windows kinda sucks. Vista was pretty awful, 7 is better, and is really what Vista *should* have been (and it is completely based on Vista, modding this fact down doesn't make it untrue).
Mac OS X and Linux both have their flaws, but ignoring apps and computers they support and just looking at the systems themselves, Windows really is the worst of the lot. Throw in games and apps and ubiquitous inexpensive PCs, and Windows is a contender, but it's *not* because Windows itself is all that great.
I hate to tell you this, but there are many more things other than corporations and natural persons that are considered persons under the law. In addition, there are many different types of corporations and they are not all giant multinational mega-conglomerates like IBM or Microsoft.
You mean there are legal entities other than mega-corporations and human beings? Thanks for clearing that up!?
Finally, there are responsibilities and liabilities that corporations have that people do not have and that most common penalty for corporations is the "death penalty" or disillusion and revoking of their articles of incorporation.
If you live in the late 18th century and early 19th century, yes, that is true. This is no longer the case. In the past, corporations had to be sanctioned by the state in which they operated, and had to be created for a specific purpose and limited duration. Once the supreme court decided that states were persons, then reciprocity came into play and if a corporation existed in one state, it had to be accepted by any other state. So the first state to decide corporations could exist indefinitely got all the business, and in order to compete, all other states had to follow suit.
Now, as to the "corporate death penalty", when was the last time any major corporation was "put to death" for having killed anyone? I suspect even small business don't get that treatment, and they mostly "die" due to financial failure from resulting lawsuits.
But even if small corporations are legally revoked as a punishment for criminal wrongdoing (other than financial, as I stated in my original post, the one true "crime" for which corporations can be harshly punished for is one of financial wrongdoing), the fact that major corporations are immune from such concerns is applicable to the discussion at hand.
I wasn't bullying him for using the term. He was using the term to hide the fact that corporations are treated as persons.
Analogy:
Poster A: I don't like mountain lions. They are cats, and cats have sharp claws. Poster B: Mountain lions aren't domestic cats.
The original poster didn't say corporations were natural persons. He said they were persons, which is actually 100% true. By rebutting with, "they aren't natural persons, and don't have the rights of natural persons" is a deliberate attempt to misdirect. It is true, but in no way rebuts what the original poster stated.
The fact remains, however, that it is a legal term, with a legal distinction from "natural person". If you want it to be changed, then don't try to bully people for using the term, educate them and get them to change the wording of the law through petition or something.
I wasn't bullying him for using it. I was "bullying" (shaming, really) for using it to mislead.
Actually, they can't eat cake, because they don't really exist. It's the same reason you can't really punish them.
It's called a metaphor. Very seldom does it actually rain cats and dogs. Do you find you have trouble talking with people at times?
So, can a corporation have free speech? No, because it doesn't have a mouth. Can a corporation carry a gun? No, because it doesn't have any hands to hold it with. Etc.
Bull Shit. The reason we have lobbyists running so rampant in Washington is that the Supreme Court decided that corporations are people, and because people, not "natural persons", have the right to free speech, then so to do corporations.
And back to your lack of English comprehension, free speech doesn't require a mouth. The newspapers have the right of free speech (and actually *are* mentioned by name in the Constitution, which would be unnecessary if the Constitution meant for corporations to be included as persons).
Ah, now we get to it. You don't like executives and think they should go to jail when a large group of people all get together and make an agreement to undertake a risky venture and said venture goes south.
I said no such thing. When a bunch of people take a risk and they fail and they suffer the consequences, I don't hate them. In fact, although they failed, I applaud them for trying (assuming their venture wasn't completely idiotic or deliberately detrimental to others).
On the other hand, when executives make decisions which will knowingly and unnecessarily lead to significant bodily harm, and even death, like the Pinto. Then yes, fuck them hard. They belong in jail for the remainder of their lives.
Stated again, with the Pinto example, the executives knew the car had a defect that would absolutely lead to the deaths and severe injury to their customers. They knew small children would burn to death, but they green lighted the project because those deaths were cheaper than either fixing the car or scrapping it altogether. Men who make such decisions do not deserve to interact with society unless they're wearing orange jump suits and cleaning the side of the highway.
Yes, that's how it used to be before incorporation, and the trouble with that system is that no one will take charge of those risky ventures because they'd be afraid of going to jail.
I'm not talking against incorporation. I'm talking against treating corporations as people and giving them rights which they were never meant to have. I made this very clear in my post. Your local community college will be glad to enroll you in remedial reading comprehension classes. It's rather inexpensive.
You talk about class and rights, but really you're just feeling vengeful and envious of people you don't even know, and I think you're pretty hypocritical in feigning concern for the little guy when under your system he'd be mired in poverty right now.
Corporations do not have the same rights as natural persons in the USA.
That is a deliberately misleading statement. Shame on you for using it.
Corporations have rights as persons. The distinction of "natural persons" is silly. It should be that persons are human beings. Period. Calling corporations "persons" (but not "natural persons") leads to a class system were some "persons" (corporations) have rights/indemnities that actual human persons do not.
That is [management going to jail for crimes the company commits] already the law in the USA.
Not really. There are situations where that happens, but tell me, how many Ford executives went to prison for the Pinto? Or that guy that owns the peanut factory that was responsible for killing people a year or so ago? Or Gates and Ballmer over MS's anti-trust conviction?
Sure, an executive might go to jail, but unless their crime involves financial misconduct, the odds of them going to jail is infinitesimal. And even in the case of financial misconduct, if their misconduct only ruins the lives of their human customers it's no big deal, only if they defrauded either the "market", the company itself, or rich people, do actual humans go to jail for the crimes of their company.
The fact is, corporations get to have their cake and eat it too. They get rights as persons, but they don't have the responsibilities and liabilities of persons. The notion that people are "natural persons" and corporations are just "persons" is absurd.
Seriously, did you ever need to? I've been in IT since 1998 and I cannot remember ONE situation where I thought "This is so inconvenient, I need a calculator for this shit. Couldn't they just make a Gigabyte 1000'000'000 Bytes?"
Gigabyte does mean 1,000,000,000 bytes. Giga means billion. It doesn't not mean 1024 * 1024 * 1024 bytes. Mega means million, kilo means thousand.
I can't understand why people are actually arguing that doing it wrong is right.
There are even proper units for the 1024 units. Kibi-, mebi-, gibi-, and so on.
So we've had a defined standard that was, arguably, not the easiest to understand. THEN harddrive manufacturers started their fraud. And THEN people started complaining. So what, and please think about this, would be the right decision here?
Kilo, mega, giga, etc., all had established values long before the first hard drive was created. The "fraud" was the first computer scientists who decided to co-opt terms that just happened to be somewhat close to powers of two.
The silly thing about claiming that hard drive manufacturers are engaged in fraud is that they all do it. If it were a fraud, you'd buy a Seagate 1TB drive instead of a 931.3 "GB" WD drive, thinking you were getting a slightly larger drive. But if they are all in proper units, there's no competitive advantage.
But this is a side issue. The fact remains that kilo-, mega-, giga-, tera-, etc., all have formal meanings, and those meanings are in base 10, not base 2.
There are many places where computers would need to make the calculation and integer division by a power of 10 is non-trivial in base 2, in many cases requiring a dozen or more cycles even on modern architectures, whereas division (or multiplication) by any power of 2 will compile to a bit shifting operation, which on many architectures isn't even 1 cycle.
Compared to the processing required to turn the file size info into a text string and draw it to the screen?
Market share does matter when it comes to investing time and money into exploiting flaws in a product. To say it is the only factor in operating system security is false, but saying it doesn't matter at all is just as wrong.
No one is saying that it's not a factor. On the other hand, there are countless people who make the reverse mistake and state that Macs don't have exploits solely due to market share.
This is easily debunked by:
1. IIS exploits. 2. Linux exploits (Linux market share is to Macs as Mac market share is to Windows) 3. Mac apps. People still write apps for the Mac, why not viruses? 4. There are plenty of viruses for the classic Mac OS. 5. There are tens of millions of Mac users. Even though Windows has hundreds of millions, tens of millions is still a large and lucrative group to attack.
The key isn't that Mac OS X is flawless or too low of a market share, it's that Windows is so easy to exploit. Design decisions made decades ago are still impacting Windows today. If you look at the typical Mac OS X bug and the typical Windows bug, you'll see that the Mac bugs tend to be very Unix-like in nature, that they are some part of the system can be tricked into crashing by being passed data in a specific way. Many a Windows bug is not due to getting something to crash, but by using some feature in a way that tricks it to allow unwanted things to happen.
Nature grants them, the Constitution enumerates and defends them.
By, "nature grants them", I mean that the state of being human on planet Earth creates certain natural needs and freedoms required to optimize the individual's life as a human. It's not perfect nor is it complete, but the Constitution, if followed, tends to serve humanity better than any other invention ever. All these "expediencies" concocted (sometimes honestly, I'm sure), degrade the quality of existence for of all of us.
It's also important to note that the Constitution doesn't say anything about only applying to Americans, or to American soil. It applies to persons (which should be limited to human persons, but has horrifically been applied to artificial "persons" known as corporations). It's not an American thing, it's a human thing.
Comparable and better in some respects than OS/X, however
OS/X? Assuming you mean OS X (I don't normally nitpick, but your sig implies you should know better), your statement is only true because you added the clause "in some respects". Hell, "in some respects" Win 3.1 is better than [your favorite OS goes here].
Besides, there was very little wrong with vista, post SP1
Except for UAC, spyware, systray overload, can't drag-and-drop documents into the taskbar, slower than XP in most cases, software/hardware compatibility issues, DRM (WPA in particular), and the other million little papercuts compared with using other OS's.
Now, you might not care about these things or whatever. No big deal. But for most people, "there was very little wrong with Vista, post SP1" is not an altogether accurate statement.
Just mongoloids who bitch about it because they think it makes them cool to whine how it wont run on their 7 year old hardware.
Try three year old hardware.
And mongoloids, really? Racial slurs against people who don't like Vista?
Before anyone gets down on me, let me say I am a big-time Apple junkie. I have an iPhone, an iMac, a Macbook, hell, even an Apple TV. I code in Perl and Objective-C.
And I thought, "I know I'm going to get downmodded for this, but..." was a silly way to start a post.
That said, this is totally unconscionable. Apple has an obligation to its users not to break things that used to work for no good reason, and suddenly killing Palm sync support with no good reason other than a big Nelson Muntz "ha-ha" is kind of a red flag.
They aren't breaking anything. Palm syncing still works in Leopard just as it always has. And, you know what else doesn't work with Snow Leopard? All non-Intel Macs.
Even Palm is ending support for Palm OS. But you expect Apple to keep supporting it?
Anyone who had a serious Palm jones already used The Missing Sync anyhow, but this is seriously irresponsible.
Oh, ffs. This "irresponsible, unconscionable" act isn't even going to affect anyone? What terms do you have left for things that do matter?
Slashdot Mirror
It is your computer, yes, but their Network and Educational System. You can still run whatever the hell you want be it Windows 7, Snow Leopard, Ubuntu 9, Windows ME, DOS 6.0 but you better make sure you can run their "Exam4" software.
Yes, that's implied when I said, "I'm not saying that schools should fully support Linux. I think that's an unreasonable expectation".
How is it inconsistent? The first case is the person having to switch, the second case is the person hosting Windows (either dual-booting or in a VM).
And the fact is, neither of those cases are ideal for someone who has no interest in running the second OS in the first place.
Honest people would have seen the humor in what I said. ;)
Well, I suppose it would be funny if you get to make up your own meanings for words...
Are you an AI bot?
You use words without any apparent understanding of their meaning.
That's a seriously tenuous thread you've followed there. It's almost like you started with a conclusion and then looked to retrofit a connection from A to B to justify it.
Some would call that "bias"...
You're right. The people biased against Microsoft would call my comment biased.
Or even just honest people.
Yup, perception doesn't match reality: check.
My problem is that I cannot seem to set defaults for files without an extension. Some perl scripts for example that look like commands, leave off the .pl extension. My mac wants to execute them instead of opening them in a text editor.
Get Info works just fine for me, as does right-click "Open With"
That's a seriously tenuous thread you've followed there. It's almost like you started with a conclusion and then looked to retrofit a connection from A to B to justify it.
Some would call that "bias"...
I don't give up any freedoms.
Yes, you do. Got a bug in Windows? Can you fix it in the source, and recompile? Can you give a copy of Windows to a friend? Can you reinstall Windows on a second PC? If MS's WGA decides your license is invalid, even though it is valid, can you get MS to restore your license?
No? What freedoms did you have in mind when you wrote that?
I am fully of the opinion that once you've been convicted and served your time, you're free to go and no stigma should accrue to you. I don't blame Microsoft for having been convicted regarding their business practices any more than I would refuse to associate with someone who, in the past, had been convicted of shoplifting.
MS was convicted of a felony, and have not shown any sense of remorse or rehabilitation. If someone was a repeat shoplifter, and continued to engage in shoplifting after conviction, I wouldn't necessarily "refuse to associate" with them, but if I were a shop owner, I'd definitely keep my eye on them if not ban them from my store outright.
Probably the form that requires me not to be an insane zealot.
Insanity is often cited as holding a world-view that is inconsistent with reality. While "zealot" may apply to the OP, I don't think insanity is terribly apt. Your views, on the other hand, do seem to contradict reality rather squarely...
At which point you get Windows and write it off as a cost of attending school, like a textbook (have you seen how much textbooks cost these days?)
Really, your operating system choice should not be so totally ingrained with your personality that you can't change to adapt to situations where you may be required to use something else.
It's one thing when you're talking about using other's computers (like at the office, or at school), but when it's your own computer, there's definitely grounds to be concerned about it.
Sure, reality is rarely ideal, but that doesn't mean someone shouldn't wish otherwise, or look into alternatives. You're acting like people shouldn't have personal preferences, and should always accede to the whims of others.
Put yourself in the reverse situation. What if your school/workplace required you to run Linux at home, when you're currently using Windows? (and your home situation is dorm-like in that having multiple computers is not a terribly straightforward option). You'd have to switch your iTunes or WinAmp or whatever over to Linux. No photoshop, different camera software, OpenOffice instead of Word, no games, etc., etc.
I'm not saying that schools should fully support Linux. I think that's an unreasonable expectation (although the amount of Windows-only requirements should be fairly limited, as most things are naturally multi-platform, like WiFi, and shouldn't be locked in to Windows at all), and the poster's daughter is likely going to need to either dual-boot or run Windows in a VM.
Even so, there's nothing wrong with asking. Treating him like his preference in OS's is some sort of character flaw ("Really, your operating system choice should not be so totally ingrained with your personality that you can't change to adapt to situations where you may be required to use something else.") is uncalled for.
Well, duh, Finland is going to be receptive to Linux.
Yes, it's such an "entirely new operating system" that is has the same bugs.
MS astroturfers are so busy these days. If you put down a bug in Windows 7, responses that say, "hey, don't pick on MS, it was in Vista too!" get upmodded, and then if you say, "well, 7 is an update to Vista", responses rebutting it get upmodded.
Windows kinda sucks. Vista was pretty awful, 7 is better, and is really what Vista *should* have been (and it is completely based on Vista, modding this fact down doesn't make it untrue).
Mac OS X and Linux both have their flaws, but ignoring apps and computers they support and just looking at the systems themselves, Windows really is the worst of the lot. Throw in games and apps and ubiquitous inexpensive PCs, and Windows is a contender, but it's *not* because Windows itself is all that great.
I hate to tell you this, but there are many more things other than corporations and natural persons that are considered persons under the law. In addition, there are many different types of corporations and they are not all giant multinational mega-conglomerates like IBM or Microsoft.
You mean there are legal entities other than mega-corporations and human beings? Thanks for clearing that up!?
Finally, there are responsibilities and liabilities that corporations have that people do not have and that most common penalty for corporations is the "death penalty" or disillusion and revoking of their articles of incorporation.
If you live in the late 18th century and early 19th century, yes, that is true. This is no longer the case. In the past, corporations had to be sanctioned by the state in which they operated, and had to be created for a specific purpose and limited duration. Once the supreme court decided that states were persons, then reciprocity came into play and if a corporation existed in one state, it had to be accepted by any other state. So the first state to decide corporations could exist indefinitely got all the business, and in order to compete, all other states had to follow suit.
Now, as to the "corporate death penalty", when was the last time any major corporation was "put to death" for having killed anyone? I suspect even small business don't get that treatment, and they mostly "die" due to financial failure from resulting lawsuits.
But even if small corporations are legally revoked as a punishment for criminal wrongdoing (other than financial, as I stated in my original post, the one true "crime" for which corporations can be harshly punished for is one of financial wrongdoing), the fact that major corporations are immune from such concerns is applicable to the discussion at hand.
I wasn't bullying him for using the term. He was using the term to hide the fact that corporations are treated as persons.
Analogy:
Poster A: I don't like mountain lions. They are cats, and cats have sharp claws.
Poster B: Mountain lions aren't domestic cats.
The original poster didn't say corporations were natural persons. He said they were persons, which is actually 100% true. By rebutting with, "they aren't natural persons, and don't have the rights of natural persons" is a deliberate attempt to misdirect. It is true, but in no way rebuts what the original poster stated.
The fact remains, however, that it is a legal term, with a legal distinction from "natural person". If you want it to be changed, then don't try to bully people for using the term, educate them and get them to change the wording of the law through petition or something.
I wasn't bullying him for using it. I was "bullying" (shaming, really) for using it to mislead.
Actually, they can't eat cake, because they don't really exist. It's the same reason you can't really punish them.
It's called a metaphor. Very seldom does it actually rain cats and dogs. Do you find you have trouble talking with people at times?
So, can a corporation have free speech? No, because it doesn't have a mouth. Can a corporation carry a gun? No, because it doesn't have any hands to hold it with. Etc.
Bull Shit. The reason we have lobbyists running so rampant in Washington is that the Supreme Court decided that corporations are people, and because people, not "natural persons", have the right to free speech, then so to do corporations.
And back to your lack of English comprehension, free speech doesn't require a mouth. The newspapers have the right of free speech (and actually *are* mentioned by name in the Constitution, which would be unnecessary if the Constitution meant for corporations to be included as persons).
Ah, now we get to it. You don't like executives and think they should go to jail when a large group of people all get together and make an agreement to undertake a risky venture and said venture goes south.
I said no such thing. When a bunch of people take a risk and they fail and they suffer the consequences, I don't hate them. In fact, although they failed, I applaud them for trying (assuming their venture wasn't completely idiotic or deliberately detrimental to others).
On the other hand, when executives make decisions which will knowingly and unnecessarily lead to significant bodily harm, and even death, like the Pinto. Then yes, fuck them hard. They belong in jail for the remainder of their lives.
Stated again, with the Pinto example, the executives knew the car had a defect that would absolutely lead to the deaths and severe injury to their customers. They knew small children would burn to death, but they green lighted the project because those deaths were cheaper than either fixing the car or scrapping it altogether. Men who make such decisions do not deserve to interact with society unless they're wearing orange jump suits and cleaning the side of the highway.
Yes, that's how it used to be before incorporation, and the trouble with that system is that no one will take charge of those risky ventures because they'd be afraid of going to jail.
I'm not talking against incorporation. I'm talking against treating corporations as people and giving them rights which they were never meant to have. I made this very clear in my post. Your local community college will be glad to enroll you in remedial reading comprehension classes. It's rather inexpensive.
You talk about class and rights, but really you're just feeling vengeful and envious of people you don't even know, and I think you're pretty hypocritical in feigning concern for the little guy when under your system he'd be mired in poverty right now.
Are there unicorns in the world you live in?
Corporations do not have the same rights as natural persons in the USA.
That is a deliberately misleading statement. Shame on you for using it.
Corporations have rights as persons. The distinction of "natural persons" is silly. It should be that persons are human beings. Period. Calling corporations "persons" (but not "natural persons") leads to a class system were some "persons" (corporations) have rights/indemnities that actual human persons do not.
That is [management going to jail for crimes the company commits] already the law in the USA.
Not really. There are situations where that happens, but tell me, how many Ford executives went to prison for the Pinto? Or that guy that owns the peanut factory that was responsible for killing people a year or so ago? Or Gates and Ballmer over MS's anti-trust conviction?
Sure, an executive might go to jail, but unless their crime involves financial misconduct, the odds of them going to jail is infinitesimal. And even in the case of financial misconduct, if their misconduct only ruins the lives of their human customers it's no big deal, only if they defrauded either the "market", the company itself, or rich people, do actual humans go to jail for the crimes of their company.
The fact is, corporations get to have their cake and eat it too. They get rights as persons, but they don't have the responsibilities and liabilities of persons. The notion that people are "natural persons" and corporations are just "persons" is absurd.
Seriously, did you ever need to? I've been in IT since 1998 and I cannot remember ONE situation where I thought "This is so inconvenient, I need a calculator for this shit. Couldn't they just make a Gigabyte 1000'000'000 Bytes?"
Gigabyte does mean 1,000,000,000 bytes. Giga means billion. It doesn't not mean 1024 * 1024 * 1024 bytes. Mega means million, kilo means thousand.
I can't understand why people are actually arguing that doing it wrong is right.
There are even proper units for the 1024 units. Kibi-, mebi-, gibi-, and so on.
So we've had a defined standard that was, arguably, not the easiest to understand. THEN harddrive manufacturers started their fraud. And THEN people started complaining. So what, and please think about this, would be the right decision here?
Kilo, mega, giga, etc., all had established values long before the first hard drive was created. The "fraud" was the first computer scientists who decided to co-opt terms that just happened to be somewhat close to powers of two.
The silly thing about claiming that hard drive manufacturers are engaged in fraud is that they all do it. If it were a fraud, you'd buy a Seagate 1TB drive instead of a 931.3 "GB" WD drive, thinking you were getting a slightly larger drive. But if they are all in proper units, there's no competitive advantage.
But this is a side issue. The fact remains that kilo-, mega-, giga-, tera-, etc., all have formal meanings, and those meanings are in base 10, not base 2.
There are many places where computers would need to make the calculation and integer division by a power of 10 is non-trivial in base 2, in many cases requiring a dozen or more cycles even on modern architectures, whereas division (or multiplication) by any power of 2 will compile to a bit shifting operation, which on many architectures isn't even 1 cycle.
Compared to the processing required to turn the file size info into a text string and draw it to the screen?
Market share does matter when it comes to investing time and money into exploiting flaws in a product. To say it is the only factor in operating system security is false, but saying it doesn't matter at all is just as wrong.
No one is saying that it's not a factor. On the other hand, there are countless people who make the reverse mistake and state that Macs don't have exploits solely due to market share.
This is easily debunked by:
1. IIS exploits.
2. Linux exploits (Linux market share is to Macs as Mac market share is to Windows)
3. Mac apps. People still write apps for the Mac, why not viruses?
4. There are plenty of viruses for the classic Mac OS.
5. There are tens of millions of Mac users. Even though Windows has hundreds of millions, tens of millions is still a large and lucrative group to attack.
The key isn't that Mac OS X is flawless or too low of a market share, it's that Windows is so easy to exploit. Design decisions made decades ago are still impacting Windows today. If you look at the typical Mac OS X bug and the typical Windows bug, you'll see that the Mac bugs tend to be very Unix-like in nature, that they are some part of the system can be tricked into crashing by being passed data in a specific way. Many a Windows bug is not due to getting something to crash, but by using some feature in a way that tricks it to allow unwanted things to happen.
Nature grants them, the Constitution enumerates and defends them.
By, "nature grants them", I mean that the state of being human on planet Earth creates certain natural needs and freedoms required to optimize the individual's life as a human. It's not perfect nor is it complete, but the Constitution, if followed, tends to serve humanity better than any other invention ever. All these "expediencies" concocted (sometimes honestly, I'm sure), degrade the quality of existence for of all of us.
It's also important to note that the Constitution doesn't say anything about only applying to Americans, or to American soil. It applies to persons (which should be limited to human persons, but has horrifically been applied to artificial "persons" known as corporations). It's not an American thing, it's a human thing.
Comparable and better in some respects than OS/X, however
OS/X? Assuming you mean OS X (I don't normally nitpick, but your sig implies you should know better), your statement is only true because you added the clause "in some respects". Hell, "in some respects" Win 3.1 is better than [your favorite OS goes here].
Besides, there was very little wrong with vista, post SP1
Except for UAC, spyware, systray overload, can't drag-and-drop documents into the taskbar, slower than XP in most cases, software/hardware compatibility issues, DRM (WPA in particular), and the other million little papercuts compared with using other OS's.
Now, you might not care about these things or whatever. No big deal. But for most people, "there was very little wrong with Vista, post SP1" is not an altogether accurate statement.
Just mongoloids who bitch about it because they think it makes them cool to whine how it wont run on their 7 year old hardware.
Try three year old hardware.
And mongoloids, really? Racial slurs against people who don't like Vista?
Except the only universal praise ("all sensible accounts") is that it's better than Vista.
Compared to XP, it's not so clear a winner.
Before anyone gets down on me, let me say I am a big-time Apple junkie. I have an iPhone, an iMac, a Macbook, hell, even an Apple TV. I code in Perl and Objective-C.
And I thought, "I know I'm going to get downmodded for this, but..." was a silly way to start a post.
That said, this is totally unconscionable. Apple has an obligation to its users not to break things that used to work for no good reason, and suddenly killing Palm sync support with no good reason other than a big Nelson Muntz "ha-ha" is kind of a red flag.
They aren't breaking anything. Palm syncing still works in Leopard just as it always has. And, you know what else doesn't work with Snow Leopard? All non-Intel Macs.
Even Palm is ending support for Palm OS. But you expect Apple to keep supporting it?
Anyone who had a serious Palm jones already used The Missing Sync anyhow, but this is seriously irresponsible.
Oh, ffs. This "irresponsible, unconscionable" act isn't even going to affect anyone? What terms do you have left for things that do matter?
This definitely would impact me if I upgraded to Snow Leopard.
Except you don't seem to be the type that's in any rush to upgrade to current technology.
The problem sort of solves itself.
Is there a special place in hell for morons like you who just bash MS?
Windows 7 is a very good operating system by all sensible accounts.
"Better than Vista" is not a very high bar.