I can certainly emphasize with your view. OTOH, I'd never give even a penny to Microsoft. I hate those evil bastards! Also the Windows API is a sick joke! Talk about unnecessary complexity! And, they can't even make it 100% consistent across platforms and I am not talking about subsetting (I know this may not be a proper word) here either. And yes, I spent years developing Windows apps and quit a good job so that I could work on Linux. This was 11 years ago and I have never looked back. Give me Linux or OS X any time over that! At least there is jailbreaking on the iPhone/iPod Touch platforms and hopefully soon on the iPad, too. Again, it's by no means perfect but I am sure I will get a lot of enjoyment out of using it. Also, a good way to look at the $100 is to think of it as paying for support. And come on, you even get some of that back on your taxes. How much are MS development tools? Are they free??
Oh, and remind me what's the process for writing an application for the iPhone/iPad and distributing it to others again? Is it something you can do cheaply and easily?
In one word: "Yes!" I think that $100 + the cost of a device or devices for testing and a computer to develop on is cheap. Peanuts really when you're developing software. If you're willing to buy used equipment your ballpark figure is around $1,000. Of course you can use the computer for many other things, too. And I prefer UNIX any day to anything that Microsoft puts out. In fact, I spend about 10% of my time on my MacBook Pro in a terminal session. And Apple taking 30% for having immediately available to virtually all potential customers seems like a reasonable deal to me. Now, if only a similarly robust laptop running Linux with comparable battery life and first-class drivers for all the hardware was available for Linux, I'd probably be using that. I'd still want an iPad though. I have over 2,000 DVD's that are easily converted and imported into iTunes and therefore the iPad. I spend 1.5 hours on a bus every day and I would never consider using a laptop on the bus (too clunky) while I can readily see myself watching animé or James Bond on the iPad. I also look forward to read various technical PDF's and a few computer books on that thing, maybe even a science fiction nobel or two and I will definitely give the Marvel app a try. Way better than on a laptop IMNSHO! Finally I can easily see myself within within the 250MB/month ($15/month w/o a contract.) for the light browsing on the bus. Like many people I have free WiFi on both ends of my route. Furthermore, I know that I can buy a micro-SIM card for my annual visits to Germany to an have always-on Internet connection while I am there. Finally, I already know which terminal client and remote desktop app I will purchase so that I can long on to my MacBook pro at home or my Linux box at work. What's not to like, I ask? Wait, you don't think it's perfect?? Well, neither do I but it sure sounds pretty darn useful to me! And I am sure I will get some use out of the dozen or so iPod apps that I own, like the Kanjii-learning app.
Imagine a society in which the rich lived twice as long.
You mean like right now? How many of the 100's of millions of starving people are rich? What about expensive medical treatments? Getting the very best medical specialist? I think you are very naive! Also, why wouldn't we want to improve our genes? Frequently innovation is only accessible to the rich at first but then after the early adopters have paid for it and prices come down, the rest of us get to benefit, too. I don't know whether you have ever seen Gattaca, one of my two favourite SciFi movies. (The other one being Blade Runner.) I have seen it maybe a dozen times and I always ask myself what kind of moronic parents would not want the best genes possible for their son? I am near-sighted and have several chronic conditions at least one of which is likely to have a genetic basis. I have also always wanted to be smarter. Not because I feel dumb, I do have a Ph.D. in physics, and, yes, I do feel dumb, but, because I would love to understand more about math and the physical world around us because I get so much enjoyment out of these insights. In fact, I feel that improving ourselves is probably our only chance for long-term survival. Right now I am afraid that our animal natures will soon doom us. Look at the world we live in now: groupism (I know that's not a word, but I hope you understand anyway what I mean, for example people thinking their country is better than any other simply because they were born in it etc.) wherever you look and well over 90% still believing in some religious fantasy, billions denying scientific findings because it makes them feel uncomfortable or because they're afraid of the consequences of change etc. Read up on sociobiology in order to understand what I am talking about or maybe you already know?! I sure would love to give my offspring a better start. Also, this may finally be our chance to truly break away from natural selection and get us a little closer to true selfdetermination! Maybe we will experience a whole new acceleration where the luddites and troglodytes will finally be left far behind. And, good riddance to them! I want my descendants to be be the Newtypes of Gundam living amongst the stars while the old-style humans huddle in fear of their imaginary god or gods and predict the 2nd coming for the n-th time!
I think you need to read a book on sociobiology. What you take to be evidence of "universal sinfulness" is really just evidence of us having evolved from social animals.
Sorry, I wasn't very specific, but I can't use Powershell because, even though I used Windows 7 for development, the script needs to run on various older flavours of Windows. It's hard for me to describe in what way the shell lacked responsiveness when typing. It's not that it couldn't keep up with my typing. It just didn't feel very smooth more "jerky" if that makes any sense? Also the command-line editing is atrocious. I am an Emacs user and love how bash supports quite a few Emacs commands. The windows terminal window supports what, arrow keys, BS, DEL, HOME and END?? Hmm, I have to admit that I don't really know.
I feel sorry for you! I quit a really nice job about 12 years ago because I was fed up with Windows. I have been much happier since! Before then, I used CyWin which is freely available and offers the goodness of bash, find, grep and many other tools written by software developers for software developers. Recently I had the misfortune of having to write a short batch file on Windows 7 on a fairly powerful 4-processor machine with 8 GiB of RAM and noticed that a) the terminal (DOS?) window felt really unresponsive and b) that copying and pasting in it was bizarrely clunky. What's up with "mark"? Also, I am not someone who would claim that bash is an even remotely sane scripting environment, which is why I switched to Python for most my scripting needs, but Windows batch scripts are a friggin' nightmare! It seems that rather than improving on "sh", Microsoft decided to come up with something far worse. I now live in an OS X and Linux world and am much less frustrated. And you're right, of course, it does take time and effort to become familiar with a new code base. I felt pretty intimidated when I started out at my current job with a new build system and a new programming language. Now I feel like I can fix any bug in it and I have already added several new features!:)
Ha, ha! Just 4 months ago I joined a project with a code base of about 500k lines. I would call that (the 500k lines one) intermediate in size. There are code bases with many millions of lines. I now feel pretty comfortable finding things in it. And I mostly use find and grep.
In principle your idea "Why can't we just have education books just present multiple popular theories along with the pros and cons of each?" sounds good. But, there are serious problems with it. Take science for example, science is not a democracy. Do we really want to have populism as the decision basis for what goes into a science text book? The same argument likely holds in various other areas of study. Plenty of "myths" are held by a large portion of the general population and are propagated from generation to generation. This is bad enough as it is, I think it would be worse if text books would propagate even more myths and misconceptions. After all what do you think a child would pick given two "explanations" taught at school with one of them vigorously promoted by her/his parents? ID is an incredibly well debunked hypothesis while evolution is a scientific theory! If you don't believe me, read any number of references, e.g. "Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul" by Kenneth R. Miller (around $2 used), a practicing christian himself. I have quite a few biologist friends and they only laugh at ID and tell me that it holds virtually zero credibility in their community.
I honestly do not know about the MI6, but I positively know that the CIA participated in actions which very directly resulting in quite catastrophic consequences for human rights activists here in Latin America...
I was aware of that and that the CIA was involved in toppling of democratically elected governments, too. Evil scumbags!
Somehow I think that MI6, CIA, FSB, or other major security organizations, are committing countless similar attacks; they are just slightly better at hiding it. And such companies, or organizations, that they do attack wouldn't be investigated or reported by groups such as VeriSign.
What's your point? I hope not, that this somehow excuses this action possibly perpetrated by the Chineses government! I also doubt that MI-6 is going after human rights activists.
You are wrong, Microsoft is a just as free and able to implement open standards as anyone else, in fact, given their resources, it should be easier for them to do it that just about anyone else!
I appreciate your effort in trying to educate me. At this point I am willing to throw in the towel and to concede your point! I would also like to thank you to keep this exchange civil, unlike certain other people... So, in summary, I will mend my "evil" ways from now on and remember to be more accepting of the custom of calling the United States of America simply "America", no matter what the origin may be. Actually, I have many good friends that are Americans! And I usually don't give them a hard time about almost anything.:)
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/america. Also, according to several of my many U.S. American friends, my English is noticeably superior to that of the average U.S. American speaker. From what I understand, I wouldn't have been allowed into a German university with the typical lack of understanding of English grammar that is common in U.S. American high school graduates. When I was studying towards my doctorate in physics at the University of Oregon, I once had a competition with another graduate student, a native speaker, concerning the usage of grammar in English. From what I recall, it was a close call, but I won the competition. That was almost 20 years ago. I am fairly certain that my English skills have improved since then. I make most of the silly mistakes that native speakers make but, I make them in order to fit in and I am still keenly aware of them, when I make them! Examples are using "is" when it should be "are" or "me" when it should be "I", or "who" when it should be "whom." The last one may only be required in British English, I am not sure...
Myself, I call them U.S. Americans but then I've been known to be very specific and picky which serves me well in my chosen profession as a computer programmer!;)
Personally I was born in 1959 and had nothing to do with that whole "master race" thing. As far as things working out for Germany, I guess we're doing rather well. Last year we were the export world champion ahead of China. This year China may just beat us but we'll still be way ahead of the US, and even more so on a per capita rating. So, thanks for asking!:) I don't know how old you are, but I am wondering how you feel about all the atrocities your ancestors have perpetrated on American Indians, blacks and other minority groups and how you feel about all the racism and the internment camps for American citizens of Japanese descent during the 2nd World War. Or whatever your ancestors in Europe or wherever they came from might have done. Or all your raving lunatics that they show on German news, that compare your president to Adolf Hitler etc.
-noun (used with a plural verb) 1. Also called knee breeches. knee-length trousers, often having ornamental buckles or elaborate decoration at or near the bottoms, commonly worn by men and boys in the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries. 2. riding breeches. 3. Informal. trousers. --Idiom 4. too big for one's breeches, asserting oneself beyond one's authority or ability.
I think you're confused about the English language! "In America" certainly includes any country in either North or South America. You're probably US American and went to a horrible "school" and therefore can be forgiven.;)
Actually I was sick frequently when I still lived there and even spent some time in the hospital. All I ever here from people here, is how insurance companies deny claims and the huge amounts of co-pays. Also I have to pay $50 in co-pays for my meds every month while in Germany it would be capped at 10 euros irrespective of total amount. I also still visit Germany every year, watch German news every day and have strong contacts with friends and family over there. Here people constantly live in fear of being bankrupted by a serious illness but not there! And my insurance here is over $500/month of which my employer pays the bulk and yet, I still have to pay $20 every time I see a doctor. This kind of nonsense strongly discourages seeing a doctor especially for poor people which in the long term only increases costs because serious illnesses won't be caught early when they are typically much cheaper to treat. Also, I have never met a German here that didn't think that the health care "system" in the US was a sad joke!
Slashdot Mirror
I resemble that remark you young whipper-snapper!
What? You're similar to that remark?? English is not my native language, but that does strike me as very odd!
I can certainly emphasize with your view. OTOH, I'd never give even a penny to Microsoft. I hate those evil bastards! Also the Windows API is a sick joke! Talk about unnecessary complexity! And, they can't even make it 100% consistent across platforms and I am not talking about subsetting (I know this may not be a proper word) here either. And yes, I spent years developing Windows apps and quit a good job so that I could work on Linux. This was 11 years ago and I have never looked back. Give me Linux or OS X any time over that! At least there is jailbreaking on the iPhone/iPod Touch platforms and hopefully soon on the iPad, too. Again, it's by no means perfect but I am sure I will get a lot of enjoyment out of using it. Also, a good way to look at the $100 is to think of it as paying for support. And come on, you even get some of that back on your taxes. How much are MS development tools? Are they free??
Oops, should have proofread this better: read -> reading, nobel -> novel Hmm, too lazy to read it again, there may be even more typos...
Oh, and remind me what's the process for writing an application for the iPhone/iPad and distributing it to others again? Is it something you can do cheaply and easily?
In one word: "Yes!" I think that $100 + the cost of a device or devices for testing and a computer to develop on is cheap. Peanuts really when you're developing software. If you're willing to buy used equipment your ballpark figure is around $1,000. Of course you can use the computer for many other things, too. And I prefer UNIX any day to anything that Microsoft puts out. In fact, I spend about 10% of my time on my MacBook Pro in a terminal session. And Apple taking 30% for having immediately available to virtually all potential customers seems like a reasonable deal to me. Now, if only a similarly robust laptop running Linux with comparable battery life and first-class drivers for all the hardware was available for Linux, I'd probably be using that. I'd still want an iPad though. I have over 2,000 DVD's that are easily converted and imported into iTunes and therefore the iPad. I spend 1.5 hours on a bus every day and I would never consider using a laptop on the bus (too clunky) while I can readily see myself watching animé or James Bond on the iPad. I also look forward to read various technical PDF's and a few computer books on that thing, maybe even a science fiction nobel or two and I will definitely give the Marvel app a try. Way better than on a laptop IMNSHO! Finally I can easily see myself within within the 250MB/month ($15/month w/o a contract.) for the light browsing on the bus. Like many people I have free WiFi on both ends of my route. Furthermore, I know that I can buy a micro-SIM card for my annual visits to Germany to an have always-on Internet connection while I am there. Finally, I already know which terminal client and remote desktop app I will purchase so that I can long on to my MacBook pro at home or my Linux box at work. What's not to like, I ask? Wait, you don't think it's perfect?? Well, neither do I but it sure sounds pretty darn useful to me! And I am sure I will get some use out of the dozen or so iPod apps that I own, like the Kanjii-learning app.
Imagine a society in which the rich lived twice as long.
You mean like right now? How many of the 100's of millions of starving people are rich? What about expensive medical treatments? Getting the very best medical specialist? I think you are very naive! Also, why wouldn't we want to improve our genes? Frequently innovation is only accessible to the rich at first but then after the early adopters have paid for it and prices come down, the rest of us get to benefit, too. I don't know whether you have ever seen Gattaca, one of my two favourite SciFi movies. (The other one being Blade Runner.) I have seen it maybe a dozen times and I always ask myself what kind of moronic parents would not want the best genes possible for their son? I am near-sighted and have several chronic conditions at least one of which is likely to have a genetic basis. I have also always wanted to be smarter. Not because I feel dumb, I do have a Ph.D. in physics, and, yes, I do feel dumb, but, because I would love to understand more about math and the physical world around us because I get so much enjoyment out of these insights. In fact, I feel that improving ourselves is probably our only chance for long-term survival. Right now I am afraid that our animal natures will soon doom us. Look at the world we live in now: groupism (I know that's not a word, but I hope you understand anyway what I mean, for example people thinking their country is better than any other simply because they were born in it etc.) wherever you look and well over 90% still believing in some religious fantasy, billions denying scientific findings because it makes them feel uncomfortable or because they're afraid of the consequences of change etc. Read up on sociobiology in order to understand what I am talking about or maybe you already know?! I sure would love to give my offspring a better start. Also, this may finally be our chance to truly break away from natural selection and get us a little closer to true selfdetermination! Maybe we will experience a whole new acceleration where the luddites and troglodytes will finally be left far behind. And, good riddance to them! I want my descendants to be be the Newtypes of Gundam living amongst the stars while the old-style humans huddle in fear of their imaginary god or gods and predict the 2nd coming for the n-th time!
I think you need to read a book on sociobiology. What you take to be evidence of "universal sinfulness" is really just evidence of us having evolved from social animals.
D'oh! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hear,_hear
You know what makes one look silly, too? Writing "their" when it should be "there"!
Sorry, I wasn't very specific, but I can't use Powershell because, even though I used Windows 7 for development, the script needs to run on various older flavours of Windows. It's hard for me to describe in what way the shell lacked responsiveness when typing. It's not that it couldn't keep up with my typing. It just didn't feel very smooth more "jerky" if that makes any sense? Also the command-line editing is atrocious. I am an Emacs user and love how bash supports quite a few Emacs commands. The windows terminal window supports what, arrow keys, BS, DEL, HOME and END?? Hmm, I have to admit that I don't really know.
I feel sorry for you! I quit a really nice job about 12 years ago because I was fed up with Windows. I have been much happier since! Before then, I used CyWin which is freely available and offers the goodness of bash, find, grep and many other tools written by software developers for software developers. Recently I had the misfortune of having to write a short batch file on Windows 7 on a fairly powerful 4-processor machine with 8 GiB of RAM and noticed that a) the terminal (DOS?) window felt really unresponsive and b) that copying and pasting in it was bizarrely clunky. What's up with "mark"? Also, I am not someone who would claim that bash is an even remotely sane scripting environment, which is why I switched to Python for most my scripting needs, but Windows batch scripts are a friggin' nightmare! It seems that rather than improving on "sh", Microsoft decided to come up with something far worse. I now live in an OS X and Linux world and am much less frustrated. And you're right, of course, it does take time and effort to become familiar with a new code base. I felt pretty intimidated when I started out at my current job with a new build system and a new programming language. Now I feel like I can fix any bug in it and I have already added several new features! :)
Ha, ha! Just 4 months ago I joined a project with a code base of about 500k lines. I would call that (the 500k lines one) intermediate in size. There are code bases with many millions of lines. I now feel pretty comfortable finding things in it. And I mostly use find and grep.
In principle your idea "Why can't we just have education books just present multiple popular theories along with the pros and cons of each?" sounds good. But, there are serious problems with it. Take science for example, science is not a democracy. Do we really want to have populism as the decision basis for what goes into a science text book? The same argument likely holds in various other areas of study. Plenty of "myths" are held by a large portion of the general population and are propagated from generation to generation. This is bad enough as it is, I think it would be worse if text books would propagate even more myths and misconceptions. After all what do you think a child would pick given two "explanations" taught at school with one of them vigorously promoted by her/his parents? ID is an incredibly well debunked hypothesis while evolution is a scientific theory! If you don't believe me, read any number of references, e.g. "Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul" by Kenneth R. Miller (around $2 used), a practicing christian himself. I have quite a few biologist friends and they only laugh at ID and tell me that it holds virtually zero credibility in their community.
I honestly do not know about the MI6, but I positively know that the CIA participated in actions which very directly resulting in quite catastrophic consequences for human rights activists here in Latin America...
I was aware of that and that the CIA was involved in toppling of democratically elected governments, too. Evil scumbags!
Somehow I think that MI6, CIA, FSB, or other major security organizations, are committing countless similar attacks; they are just slightly better at hiding it. And such companies, or organizations, that they do attack wouldn't be investigated or reported by groups such as VeriSign.
What's your point? I hope not, that this somehow excuses this action possibly perpetrated by the Chineses government! I also doubt that MI-6 is going after human rights activists.
You are wrong, Microsoft is a just as free and able to implement open standards as anyone else, in fact, given their resources, it should be easier for them to do it that just about anyone else!
I appreciate your effort in trying to educate me. At this point I am willing to throw in the towel and to concede your point! I would also like to thank you to keep this exchange civil, unlike certain other people... So, in summary, I will mend my "evil" ways from now on and remember to be more accepting of the custom of calling the United States of America simply "America", no matter what the origin may be. Actually, I have many good friends that are Americans! And I usually don't give them a hard time about almost anything. :)
"None-native" illustrates my point just fine! Oh, and that's "Dr. Asshole" to you! :)
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/america. Also, according to several of my many U.S. American friends, my English is noticeably superior to that of the average U.S. American speaker. From what I understand, I wouldn't have been allowed into a German university with the typical lack of understanding of English grammar that is common in U.S. American high school graduates. When I was studying towards my doctorate in physics at the University of Oregon, I once had a competition with another graduate student, a native speaker, concerning the usage of grammar in English. From what I recall, it was a close call, but I won the competition. That was almost 20 years ago. I am fairly certain that my English skills have improved since then. I make most of the silly mistakes that native speakers make but, I make them in order to fit in and I am still keenly aware of them, when I make them! Examples are using "is" when it should be "are" or "me" when it should be "I", or "who" when it should be "whom." The last one may only be required in British English, I am not sure...
Then this must be wrong?
What do you call people from the U.S.?
Myself, I call them U.S. Americans but then I've been known to be very specific and picky which serves me well in my chosen profession as a computer programmer! ;)
Personally I was born in 1959 and had nothing to do with that whole "master race" thing. As far as things working out for Germany, I guess we're doing rather well. Last year we were the export world champion ahead of China. This year China may just beat us but we'll still be way ahead of the US, and even more so on a per capita rating. So, thanks for asking! :) I don't know how old you are, but I am wondering how you feel about all the atrocities your ancestors have perpetrated on American Indians, blacks and other minority groups and how you feel about all the racism and the internment camps for American citizens of Japanese descent during the 2nd World War. Or whatever your ancestors in Europe or wherever they came from might have done. Or all your raving lunatics that they show on German news, that compare your president to Adolf Hitler etc.
However, "America" *is* commonly used around the world as an abbreviated form of "The United States of America".
Not where I'm from, which is Germany. I always took it, and still take it, as a form of US American arrogance or at least myopia or self-centeredness.
breeches[brich-iz]
-noun (used with a plural verb)
1. Also called knee breeches. knee-length trousers, often having ornamental buckles or elaborate decoration at or near the bottoms, commonly worn by men and boys in the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries.
2. riding breeches.
3. Informal. trousers.
--Idiom
4. too big for one's breeches, asserting oneself beyond one's authority or ability.
I think you're confused about the English language! "In America" certainly includes any country in either North or South America. You're probably US American and went to a horrible "school" and therefore can be forgiven. ;)
Actually I was sick frequently when I still lived there and even spent some time in the hospital. All I ever here from people here, is how insurance companies deny claims and the huge amounts of co-pays. Also I have to pay $50 in co-pays for my meds every month while in Germany it would be capped at 10 euros irrespective of total amount. I also still visit Germany every year, watch German news every day and have strong contacts with friends and family over there. Here people constantly live in fear of being bankrupted by a serious illness but not there! And my insurance here is over $500/month of which my employer pays the bulk and yet, I still have to pay $20 every time I see a doctor. This kind of nonsense strongly discourages seeing a doctor especially for poor people which in the long term only increases costs because serious illnesses won't be caught early when they are typically much cheaper to treat. Also, I have never met a German here that didn't think that the health care "system" in the US was a sad joke!