Obama's plan was to tax American corporations for outsourcing, which would have the effect of them moving overseas entirely. It's one of the most fucktarded ideas ever conceived.
Yes, it is a most fucktarded idea that taxing corporations would lead to them leaving the US entirely.
Do you really think IBM is going to just say, "screw it, we'll relocate to India, and do no business in the US whatsoever"?
Instead of blaming them for leaving, why don't we stop chasing them away?
How about instead of letting them run off, we impose heavy import tariffs that negate (and then some) any savings? That's what other countries to to keep jobs and wealth in their nation (and it's what we used to do until Ronald Reagan came along).
This is the fundamental flaw with "free market" capitalism, and this worshipping at the altar of absolute individual (as if a corporation is a human, deserving of human rights!) freedom. It worked for a short while, because there was a lot of room for domestic growth. But once that ran out, those monsters that we unleashed which served us well now must go on and find growth that they can no longer find here.
20 years ago, the Conservative mantra was "buy 'made in America'", now it's "outsource, baby. outsource".
The Democrats may not be a whole lot better on this, but at least they *are* better, and one of Obama's promises was to punish companies which move jobs overseas. Hopefully we can get the healthcare issue taken care of so we can move onto this. Although, looking at how the Republicans have gotten people to take up arms in protest of giving them healthcare, I don't think they'll have any problem convincing the peanut gallery that keeping jobs in America means slave labor camps or some such nonsense.
I have a shiny blue LED that says "WiFi," and when the switch is off this led turns off. Cryptic, I know, but I think I've got it figured out now.
Some are better than others. The best ones are soft switches which can be overridden in the OS, and are located just about anywhere other than along one of the edges.
The worst ones, well, they are along the edges, have tiny little icons and are hard to spot. Even worse are those that are lit (sometimes blue, often white) when enabled, and are dark when disabled, so even an unusually inquisitive user is going to have a hard time spotting it.
All these options, all these buttons, all these damned decisions. It's like, I didn't pay you a thousand bucks so I can sit here and decide for myself which method suits me better. I want you to save me from myself and tell me how I'm supposed to do it.
Oh, those oppressive Apple fascists! They chose not to include a button in order to make their product better! Oooooh, they make me so mad!!!
Some options create more problems than they solve. Those switches are an example. They are marginally simpler to use, for people who even know they exist. For everyone else, they're a landmine waiting to "break" their WiFi.
I don't know if you've ever noticed this, but it's like there is some kind of fundamental difference between Apple and everyone else.
It's like there is some kind of fundamental difference between Apple and everyone else; why don't those PC manufacturing jerks get it?
Spoken like someone who has never used Windows. Windows puts a little icon in the system tray (which is viewable all the time) for the wireless connection. It looks like a little computer with radio waves coming out of it. Right-click it, choose Disconnect or Disable. Just because some (not all) hardware vendors choose to put a switch on the chassis to give the user a choice, doesn't mean Windows has bad design.
Spoken like someone who has only used one PC notebook.
Many notebooks have a physical toggle switch which completely disables the WiFi card. You can't right-click to enable it. Even if the switch is a soft switch which can be overridden by the OS, if it's easy to hit, there are going to be situations where the user disables WiFi without knowing it (and "right-click" to fix is *not* an answer that a *lot* of people are going to be able to discover on their own).
The fact that Mac computers don't have a physical switch certainly doesn't make their design better.
Yes, it does, for most people.
Those switches a bad design. In fact, they're downright terrible design, because they lead to situations that are impossible on a Mac, where WiFi has been accidentally disabled merely by picking up your notebook or putting it into a bag.
The WiFi button on my laptop is clearly marked. You should learn not to post about things you know absolutely nothing about. But you won't.
Yet I encounter people who have "broken" laptops, where WiFi doesn't work.
Many laptops have those WiFi switches along the edges where it's easy to switch them by simply picking up the laptop or putting it into a bag. Further, they *aren't* clearly marked. They are marked with small icons along a thin edge cluttered with a bunch of other crap people don't look at.
Which brings this all back to my original point. People tend to prefer simpler/minimalist designs for their tech products.
Have you switched between ethernet and wifi on the imacs ?
Assuming you don't want to let the OS do it for you automatically, which it does very well, all you have to do is click on the AirPort menu, then "Turn AirPort Off".
Are you saying that wifi switches on notebook are useless ?
No. I said they get in the way of usability. Just ask anyone who has ever had "broken" WiFi, when it was actually just turned off via the switch (which they didn't even know was there).
It also demonstrates a fundamental difference in design between Apple and most everyone else. There are no such switches on any Mac. Instead, it's an option in the AirPort menu. You get prominent visual indication of the state, it's where you'd normally look, it's in the menu in clear verbiage, and it's not solely buried in some control panel somewhere, which is the reason Windows notebooks have those switches in the first place.
What you're missing is that form is integral with the function, and the minimalist form directly impacts function in such a way that people really, really like.
Most tech companies get this backwards and try to produce products based on "function over form", which is why they end up making devices with a million buttons that people never use and functions that get in the way of usability (those WiFi switches on notebooks are a prime example).
I was going to moderate your complaint down (offtopic, not flamebait or anything) but decided a response would be better in this case.
Your post may have been ironic (a sig doesn't actually label any particular post), but I didn't find it funny or interesting in the least, and it was rather abrasive. I could almost tell it was meant to be funny.
But, just like Lucas did with Jar Jar, sometimes you just miss. Surely he didn't intend for everyone to hate Jar Jar, in fact, you have to assume the opposite. He just got it wrong. Your initial post, according to the mods so far was a miss. Just accept your "-5 Jar Jar Binks" and move on.
Whenever someone says something like, "I'm wrong", or "you're right, I messed up", or whatever, every extra thing you add translates to, "but I'm not really wrong".
I believe you're being honest, but even here, you aren't saying, "you're right, I said Apple, shoulda said Tom Tom" or whatever, you're saying, "you're right, I'm selfish and write for myself", which is not the accusation.
I realize your defenses are up, and the next step often goes, "ok, I was wrong. Satisfied?" and it's that "satisfied?" at the end that ruins it, like it's still my fault your post was wrong and I shouldn't be making a fuss about it.
But we don't have to play this dance out forever. I'll be fine if you never apologize (you don't even need to) without qualifying it somehow. All I'm saying is that if you are going to apologize (or cop to a mistake or whatever), don't qualify it. It just makes things worse.
And I wouldn't have even said anything in the first place except that your original qualification was rather... ambitious:D
I really don't care that you made a mistake. It's just your owning up to it that I was commenting on. Your defensiveness is not making it any better. First it was the reader's fault for not catching your subtlety, now it's my fault for being overly critical and demanding you post to slashdot as though it were a PhD thesis.
You never had to respond to the first person who pointed out that Apple didn't set the prices, but if you're going to, don't blame the poster if his point is valid.
The specific thing that struck me was when you said you weren't clear enough, about something you didn't include even a sliver of indication of. No big deal, you don't (necessarily) suck, you don't have to kill yourself.
Owning up to a mistake without the defensiveness, on the other hand, would be nice, but not required.
But whatever you do, don't blame me (or your other readers), your post wasn't our fault.
it was submitted at 10:59 UK time, when the USA is sleeping
The USA never sleeps. Not with Putin constantly peeking over at Alaska and illegals coming from the south trying to pick our lettuce and clean rich people's houses. That's why we're so tired all the time, and easily exhausted by trying to keep track of £ and € and such.
Heck, most of us can't even keep pounds and ounces straight, and those things hardly ever change.
Shh! Quiet! I think I just heard someone trying to help sick people. I gotta grab my gun...
Good point, it s tom tom not apple setting the pricing. I was aware of that, but I didn't make it clear enough in the post.
Yeah, if by "didn't make it clear enough" you mean "didn't mention it at all". The only proper noun you used at all in your post was "Apple".
I'm sure you knew that Tom Tom set the price, not Apple (although I'm not convinced you were consciously thinking that when you wrote your post), but either way, your "my bad" was very Bushian, where you say something that sounds like you're saying you messed up, but is really saying you didn't mess up at all, except perhaps in overestimating the intelligence of the reader ("I *thought* you knew what I was saying, but I guess I wasn't clear enough...").
If it's a foreign government willing to do a molecular scale image of the entire disk with a scanning tunnelling electron microscope and then have a large team of people painstakingly apply heuristics and get back some small fraction of the stored data in a few years time
Even that is impossible. The first problem is that an electron microscope can even read a drive in the first place. It can't. You need a magnetic reading device of some sort. You can't even read a normal, non-wiped drive with an electron microscope.
The second problem is using the term "small fraction". Unless you mean really, really small, on the level of maybe a few random bytes out of a terabyte drive small, even with the best existing reading/recovery device, one pass zero is sufficient.
This is an old geek's tale. All you need to do is overwrite the drive once with zeros and that's it.
Data isn't written to drives in a series of ones and zeros along tracks like some sort of black/white paint pattern where you can just look at the overlaps or the differences in blackness/whiteness to see what might have been written underneath. Data is encoded and written as a complex analog signal that is later read and decoded. All you really have to do is make that signal sufficiently unreliable. By writing any pattern to the drive (well, I suppose writing the same pattern over the old pattern would be silly, but you get the idea) will render the original signal unrecoverable.
Zeros make for a fairly quick pattern. Unless you cannot live with even the most remote possibility that someone might recover a random byte or two out of billions, anything more than one pass zero is a waste of time.
According to the Rayleigh scattering theory, the light at sunset is red because all the blue is gone (it was scattered away before it got to you). If this is the case, then the mountains would be redder, not bluer.
This is often stated, but what about the notion that air is blue? Very minimally blue, such that it appears clear over most commonly encountered distances. For a few hundreds, even thousands, of feet, it looks clear, but once you get into tens of miles, you start to see the blue tint. Ever notice how mountains in the distance take on a blueish hue?
Slashdot Mirror
Obama's plan was to tax American corporations for outsourcing, which would have the effect of them moving overseas entirely. It's one of the most fucktarded ideas ever conceived.
Yes, it is a most fucktarded idea that taxing corporations would lead to them leaving the US entirely.
Do you really think IBM is going to just say, "screw it, we'll relocate to India, and do no business in the US whatsoever"?
Instead of blaming them for leaving, why don't we stop chasing them away?
How about instead of letting them run off, we impose heavy import tariffs that negate (and then some) any savings? That's what other countries to to keep jobs and wealth in their nation (and it's what we used to do until Ronald Reagan came along).
This is the fundamental flaw with "free market" capitalism, and this worshipping at the altar of absolute individual (as if a corporation is a human, deserving of human rights!) freedom. It worked for a short while, because there was a lot of room for domestic growth. But once that ran out, those monsters that we unleashed which served us well now must go on and find growth that they can no longer find here.
20 years ago, the Conservative mantra was "buy 'made in America'", now it's "outsource, baby. outsource".
The Democrats may not be a whole lot better on this, but at least they *are* better, and one of Obama's promises was to punish companies which move jobs overseas. Hopefully we can get the healthcare issue taken care of so we can move onto this. Although, looking at how the Republicans have gotten people to take up arms in protest of giving them healthcare, I don't think they'll have any problem convincing the peanut gallery that keeping jobs in America means slave labor camps or some such nonsense.
I have a shiny blue LED that says "WiFi," and when the switch is off this led turns off. Cryptic, I know, but I think I've got it figured out now.
Some are better than others. The best ones are soft switches which can be overridden in the OS, and are located just about anywhere other than along one of the edges.
The worst ones, well, they are along the edges, have tiny little icons and are hard to spot. Even worse are those that are lit (sometimes blue, often white) when enabled, and are dark when disabled, so even an unusually inquisitive user is going to have a hard time spotting it.
All these options, all these buttons, all these damned decisions. It's like, I didn't pay you a thousand bucks so I can sit here and decide for myself which method suits me better. I want you to save me from myself and tell me how I'm supposed to do it.
Oh, those oppressive Apple fascists! They chose not to include a button in order to make their product better! Oooooh, they make me so mad!!!
Some options create more problems than they solve. Those switches are an example. They are marginally simpler to use, for people who even know they exist. For everyone else, they're a landmine waiting to "break" their WiFi.
I don't know if you've ever noticed this, but it's like there is some kind of fundamental difference between Apple and everyone else.
It's like there is some kind of fundamental difference between Apple and everyone else; why don't those PC manufacturing jerks get it?
Exactly.
Spoken like someone who has never used Windows.
Windows puts a little icon in the system tray (which is viewable all the time) for the wireless connection. It looks like a little computer with radio waves coming out of it. Right-click it, choose Disconnect or Disable. Just because some (not all) hardware vendors choose to put a switch on the chassis to give the user a choice, doesn't mean Windows has bad design.
Spoken like someone who has only used one PC notebook.
Many notebooks have a physical toggle switch which completely disables the WiFi card. You can't right-click to enable it. Even if the switch is a soft switch which can be overridden by the OS, if it's easy to hit, there are going to be situations where the user disables WiFi without knowing it (and "right-click" to fix is *not* an answer that a *lot* of people are going to be able to discover on their own).
The fact that Mac computers don't have a physical switch certainly doesn't make their design better.
Yes, it does, for most people.
Those switches a bad design. In fact, they're downright terrible design, because they lead to situations that are impossible on a Mac, where WiFi has been accidentally disabled merely by picking up your notebook or putting it into a bag.
The WiFi button on my laptop is clearly marked. You should learn not to post about things you know absolutely nothing about. But you won't.
Yet I encounter people who have "broken" laptops, where WiFi doesn't work.
Many laptops have those WiFi switches along the edges where it's easy to switch them by simply picking up the laptop or putting it into a bag. Further, they *aren't* clearly marked. They are marked with small icons along a thin edge cluttered with a bunch of other crap people don't look at.
Which brings this all back to my original point. People tend to prefer simpler/minimalist designs for their tech products.
Have you switched between ethernet and wifi on the imacs ?
Assuming you don't want to let the OS do it for you automatically, which it does very well, all you have to do is click on the AirPort menu, then "Turn AirPort Off".
Are you saying that wifi switches on notebook are useless ?
No. I said they get in the way of usability. Just ask anyone who has ever had "broken" WiFi, when it was actually just turned off via the switch (which they didn't even know was there).
It also demonstrates a fundamental difference in design between Apple and most everyone else. There are no such switches on any Mac. Instead, it's an option in the AirPort menu. You get prominent visual indication of the state, it's where you'd normally look, it's in the menu in clear verbiage, and it's not solely buried in some control panel somewhere, which is the reason Windows notebooks have those switches in the first place.
No, I'm pretty sure it's because people actually want iPods. Hype alone wouldn't keep them so phenomenally popular after 8 years.
What you're missing is that form is integral with the function, and the minimalist form directly impacts function in such a way that people really, really like.
Most tech companies get this backwards and try to produce products based on "function over form", which is why they end up making devices with a million buttons that people never use and functions that get in the way of usability (those WiFi switches on notebooks are a prime example).
I dick around with software for a living - when I get home I just want to relax.
Which totally explains all the work you put into your XBox 360... :)
I was going to moderate your complaint down (offtopic, not flamebait or anything) but decided a response would be better in this case.
Your post may have been ironic (a sig doesn't actually label any particular post), but I didn't find it funny or interesting in the least, and it was rather abrasive. I could almost tell it was meant to be funny.
But, just like Lucas did with Jar Jar, sometimes you just miss. Surely he didn't intend for everyone to hate Jar Jar, in fact, you have to assume the opposite. He just got it wrong. Your initial post, according to the mods so far was a miss. Just accept your "-5 Jar Jar Binks" and move on.
Whenever someone says something like, "I'm wrong", or "you're right, I messed up", or whatever, every extra thing you add translates to, "but I'm not really wrong".
I believe you're being honest, but even here, you aren't saying, "you're right, I said Apple, shoulda said Tom Tom" or whatever, you're saying, "you're right, I'm selfish and write for myself", which is not the accusation.
I realize your defenses are up, and the next step often goes, "ok, I was wrong. Satisfied?" and it's that "satisfied?" at the end that ruins it, like it's still my fault your post was wrong and I shouldn't be making a fuss about it.
But we don't have to play this dance out forever. I'll be fine if you never apologize (you don't even need to) without qualifying it somehow. All I'm saying is that if you are going to apologize (or cop to a mistake or whatever), don't qualify it. It just makes things worse.
And I wouldn't have even said anything in the first place except that your original qualification was rather... ambitious :D
I really don't care that you made a mistake. It's just your owning up to it that I was commenting on. Your defensiveness is not making it any better. First it was the reader's fault for not catching your subtlety, now it's my fault for being overly critical and demanding you post to slashdot as though it were a PhD thesis.
You never had to respond to the first person who pointed out that Apple didn't set the prices, but if you're going to, don't blame the poster if his point is valid.
The specific thing that struck me was when you said you weren't clear enough, about something you didn't include even a sliver of indication of. No big deal, you don't (necessarily) suck, you don't have to kill yourself.
Owning up to a mistake without the defensiveness, on the other hand, would be nice, but not required.
But whatever you do, don't blame me (or your other readers), your post wasn't our fault.
it was submitted at 10:59 UK time, when the USA is sleeping
The USA never sleeps. Not with Putin constantly peeking over at Alaska and illegals coming from the south trying to pick our lettuce and clean rich people's houses. That's why we're so tired all the time, and easily exhausted by trying to keep track of £ and € and such.
Heck, most of us can't even keep pounds and ounces straight, and those things hardly ever change.
Shh! Quiet! I think I just heard someone trying to help sick people. I gotta grab my gun...
Congratulations on discovering that there's an entire world outside your country's borders!
And now there even is an app to show him how to get there!
'Turn. right.'
'Drive. three thousand. six hundred and. twenty-eight. miles.'
'Turn. left.'
Good point, it s tom tom not apple setting the pricing. I was aware of that, but I didn't make it clear enough in the post.
Yeah, if by "didn't make it clear enough" you mean "didn't mention it at all". The only proper noun you used at all in your post was "Apple".
I'm sure you knew that Tom Tom set the price, not Apple (although I'm not convinced you were consciously thinking that when you wrote your post), but either way, your "my bad" was very Bushian, where you say something that sounds like you're saying you messed up, but is really saying you didn't mess up at all, except perhaps in overestimating the intelligence of the reader ("I *thought* you knew what I was saying, but I guess I wasn't clear enough...").
If it's a foreign government willing to do a molecular scale image of the entire disk with a scanning tunnelling electron microscope and then have a large team of people painstakingly apply heuristics and get back some small fraction of the stored data in a few years time
Even that is impossible. The first problem is that an electron microscope can even read a drive in the first place. It can't. You need a magnetic reading device of some sort. You can't even read a normal, non-wiped drive with an electron microscope.
The second problem is using the term "small fraction". Unless you mean really, really small, on the level of maybe a few random bytes out of a terabyte drive small, even with the best existing reading/recovery device, one pass zero is sufficient.
This is an old geek's tale. All you need to do is overwrite the drive once with zeros and that's it.
Data isn't written to drives in a series of ones and zeros along tracks like some sort of black/white paint pattern where you can just look at the overlaps or the differences in blackness/whiteness to see what might have been written underneath. Data is encoded and written as a complex analog signal that is later read and decoded. All you really have to do is make that signal sufficiently unreliable. By writing any pattern to the drive (well, I suppose writing the same pattern over the old pattern would be silly, but you get the idea) will render the original signal unrecoverable.
Zeros make for a fairly quick pattern. Unless you cannot live with even the most remote possibility that someone might recover a random byte or two out of billions, anything more than one pass zero is a waste of time.
having a cloud of smoke go up is frowned upon in most places these days.
Oh shit, someone might frown at you!
According to the Rayleigh scattering theory, the light at sunset is red because all the blue is gone (it was scattered away before it got to you). If this is the case, then the mountains would be redder, not bluer.
It is blue due to Rayleigh scattering
This is often stated, but what about the notion that air is blue? Very minimally blue, such that it appears clear over most commonly encountered distances. For a few hundreds, even thousands, of feet, it looks clear, but once you get into tens of miles, you start to see the blue tint. Ever notice how mountains in the distance take on a blueish hue?
For example: Apple's Mac OS didn't offer preemptive multitasking until Mac OS X.
You mean NeXTSTEP? That came out in 1989.
Cyborgic death? Sounds Swedish.
Finnish, actually.
Und der shwooshy-wooshy over der head.
WTF? Netscape rendered HTML just fine, regardless of what web server was on the other end.
Saying Apache killed Netscape is like saying Seagate killed OS/2.
You see it wasn't that IE was all that and a bag of chips, it was that it didn't crash and freeze and shit itself every 5 minutes like Netscape 4 did.
No, but using IE helped ensure that Windows did!