I have owner an Acer Travelmate for 18 months - it works great. A lovely big screen, firewire, 3 USB ports, wireless lan, spacious keyboard. If I had to find fault with it, it would be that Acer support, especially drivers is pretty minimal, meaning that the graphics performance especially in games is very patchy.
I certainly don't think Apple branded kit is any more reliable for all the visual appeal it might possess. I've had to replace components of my G4 desktop mac including the harddrive and keyboard because they've inexplicably failed. I'm not saying the gear is flakey, but pretty looks don't necessarily equate to reliability.
I think if I were after a reliable laptop I'd be looking at something like a Thinkpad. They're pretty robust and if they do go wrong, you can strip them down and replace virtually any component.
The sad thing is that most hardcore / power users are probably more interested in AMD over Intel chips, especially for dual core since they're better performing and consume less power. But Dell is stuck with Intel which means that their high end & gaming PCs look somewhat lame. I know myself that my next PC will be a kickass system and having bought a Dell the last time around I think the next I will just build it myself. Dell makes reasonable PCs but I am sick of their site basically forcing me to buy certain hardware and software components that I do not want. I expect my next machine will be based around AMD.
Someone has obviously never tried running a.NET application under Mono. More often than not, it calls Win32 via PInvoke, uses an ActiveX control / COM interop, or does something else which renders it unusable on other platforms. Some apps might work, particularly command line tools, but it is by no means guaranteed or even probable.
And this is probably what MS had in mind all along. And I don't see it changing either. Microsoft make it easy to slap together apps with their stack and tools. Mono makes it hard to do the same with theirs. That means Mono will constantly be playing catch-up with Microsoft, reaching for but never getting close to 100% compatibility.
I can use it to read particular selected books that Sony has done a deal with Random House on. And PDF files. That are on a Sony(r) brand memory stick. In other words, no attempt is made to make it useful as a general purpose display device -- the focus is a game console like business model where they make the money on licensing someone else's content to me.
And don't forget the books will cost nearly as much as print editions and will be DRM'ed up to the eyeballs so you can't use your book on any other device or sell it on when you're done. What is the point of that I wonder? I would expect an ebook to cost half as much as a print edition simply because all materials, printing and shipping are eliminated. On top of that I would expect it to be discounted further if I, the reader am not able to pass the book to someone else or sell it on and recoup my losses.
No matter how cool the device might be, you can rely on Sony to shoot themselves in the head. In a space of five years they have gone from being hip and cool to being evil. They must be losing more through lost sales than they'll ever recoup through DRM. I wonder how long it will be and how many failed products before that clue sinks in.
As a rule, most counterfeit stuff no resemblance to the real thing at all except for the logo. It is totally and completely different in terms of quality, materials and functionality. Thus I reckon that these counterfeits were probably cheap OEM parts which had been stamped with a logo, thus rendering them counterfeit. You'd probably see the same parts being sold elsewhere with a no-name logo.
As long as you the purchaser know they're counterfeit, and accept all the risks which go along with that (e.g. your laptop PSU burning your house to the ground), I don't see a big problem. It's not like you're depriving the real company of profit since you know it's a fake and bought it on that basis. You're not even materially harming them that much either assuming their real kit is better quality than the fake.
What would harm the real manufacturer is when you *don't* know it is counterfeit. I expect that there are enough tech-illiterate people out there who couldn't tell the real thing from the fake that it would be easy to set up shop in a market or elsewhere and shift these things. eBay is a counterfeiter's wet dream and it wouldn't surprise me at all if most of the stuff is destined for there or similar sites. The Register has an amusing piece about fake handycams.
Still, this is not some new phenomena. Cameras, tape decks etc. have long been using been branded Sony or soundalikes (or courtesy of the Simpsons) such as Sorny, Panaphonics etc.. If you're stupid enough to believe some cheap piece of shit you buy from a dodgy dealer is genuine brand name product then you should hold yourself partly to blame.
Well that depends on the issue? I would never say "resinstall" on Linux if an app was broken or their desktop had some bad links, but if some helpful person had decided to delete files from/etc or something equally catastrophic then I might
For implementing Win32 so closely that you can actually be infected with Win32 exploits. I suspect that the effects wouldn't be as bad as the real thing though.
On a serious note, I wonder what this means for emulation projects. If you recognize an exploit in the original environment (as possibly someone did when writing a WMF parser for WINE), do you implement the exploit in your emulator or do you introduce a potential incompatibility?
That is people having their entire retirement thrown away.
This is just personal experience, not financial advice... My experience is that when the market drops (e.g. following 9/11 or whatever), your funds might drop but they generally rebound in time, assuming the fund managers have a clue as to what they're doing. i.e. any fund worth its salt will closely track and possibly exceed the major market indices. Why? Because the fund is spread over many equities and the managers use computerised triggers and other safeguards to sell / buy when the market dips. And since the indices go up over the long term, so therefore do the funds. My pension and other savings tanked after 9/11 but are very healthy now since I chose to wait for the market decompress rather than panic and cash in.
The operative phrase here is "long term", the closer you are to retirement, the less risk you should be taking. The closer you are to retiring, the more you should be investing in more stable instruments like municipal bonds, bluechips, property etc. Again there are funds that do all this for you. In some ways those kinds of funds are actually preferable since their management fees are much lower due to the reduced amount of effort required to administer them. You might gain 1.5% extra income simply from the reduced fees.
I doubt many sensible people had their pensions 'wiped out' unless they were dumb enough to invest their future in a online dog biscuit delivery site, Bolivian tin mines or something equally dubious. In which case its their own fault.
Anyway, I thought the dot com bubble was a hoot. I got laid off (while on holiday no less) got a very decent severance, went contracting for a bit and now I'm back in full employment. Jobs may have briefly disappeared after the bubble burst but the industry seems more healthy and certainly more wiser than before (perhaps with the exception of Google stock).
Actually it isn't. I said quite clearly virtually a superset since I am well aware that there are mostly minor differences that can be and are controlled by switches in most compilers. The differences for what they are, certainly are not compelling reasons at all to use C over C++ unless you have some constraint which demands you must avoid an overhead associated with C++.
If they actually had to prove that the user was sharing the file itself and not just on this list they got through some unspecified and magical means, then they'd lose every case.
True, they could threaten someone and some might pay out. But if the number of people supposedly sharing a song doubled or tripled, yet most of them weren't at all, you can sure as hell bet that they'd soon be up against numerous class action lawsuits in no time. They would soon have to pick their fights extremely carefully.
The problem with such a scheme (which I still admit is naive), is convincing people to use it since conceivably you could be unwittingly be downloading stuff far worse than music, not to mention using up some bandwidth. If it were to happen, it would have to be such that people have no idea what they're downloading. Data should be sent encrypted and then discarded, cached temporarily or decrypted / saved by the client. While the bandwidth hit sounds like a sucky idea (though not compared to Freenet), it might have unexpected benefits such as increasing the number of peers and thus improving download rates.
C++ is virtually a superset of ANSI C so I don't make the distinction between the two. C++ is C with classes, exceptions & rtti to me. The difference that exist are mostly irrelevant to modern programming. These days as far as most programmers or indeed compilers go, C++ and C are one and the same with a few switches to control stack unwinding or other behaviour for.c or.cpp extensions but little else.
As long as your library's entry points are not mangled, and use a standard calling convention it makes no odds what language it is implemented in on the other side. And even if it were C++ mangled, it would be hardly a supreme effort to write some stubs around them. I do think that using C is better for the APIs but QT has bindings so clearly it's not strictly necessary. Personally I prefer the GTK approach to its API and would call Win32 directly than through MFC any day, but I don't care how it works internally.
Arguably the principle thing which is "broken" about C / C++ is that nowadays it is far more powerful than many programs or programmers actually need. If you want to screw around beyond the end of an array or write to some arbitrary place in memory, or keep allocating memory forever without releasing it, then C and C++ will let you. The problem is that most apps don't need to do these things and any crashes are usually through code which unwittingly invokes these "features". Hence the reason that Java et al have taken off since they protect developers from themselves in many cases.
Obviously if you're writing a number crunching app, a game, a driver, a kernel, a shared library or something with high performance, low level or compatibility requirements then you need C++. Otherwise I'd go elsewhere.
Java works plenty well for most things. C# is fine too but is nowhere near as portable by any stretch.
Mine and most of NTL's Scottish customers. Haven't these spackers heard of transparent proxies?
Which I assume covers web traffic only on port 80. When you start hitting sites with random, proprietary protocols on other ports, the chances are that the other end see your real IP address.
Your only chance of anonymity on a P2P network was if there were proxies set up between you and the powers that be that prevented you from following the trail. This in itself is non-trivial and requires lots of benevolent people to cover your tracks when you use them as a conduit for your illegal activites. Even such people existed (and weren't RIAA plants), performance would go the tubes. Hence the reason that Freenet sucks.
I would say that you're never going to cover yourself completely but it occurs to me (a naive thought no doubt) that a bittorrent-esque protocol could be formulated that made it a lot harder to prosecute people if all clients allocated 15% of their bandwidth for proxying some other data aside from the data requested. To make statistical analysis harder, the data you proxy would not change over time so all intents and purposes you would look like you were downloading it, except you're not.
Oh please. First I said I've never had to pay more than £100 and frequently less for a decent hotel room. Secondly, visit New York at any time of the year and the rates are comparable - worse even. Besides which, £100 (or less) includes all taxes, the practice in the US is to slap the taxes on aftwards usually boosting your bill by a good 10-15%
Not every hotel. There are some very decent chains and plenty of decent independents out a bit. Go at the right time of year and you'll even find decent offers in more upmarket places. I've never had to spend more than £100 a night and frequently spend a lot less for a decent place. but if you're foolish enough to rent a "tourist class" room around Picadilly Circus then you can expect to stay in a rathole. The same is true of Amsterdam, but even worse since the narrow building construction means you'll be hauling your bags up 3 flights of steep stairs.
The smart thing to realise about London is that the Tube is your friend. It's easy enough to find somewhere lying out a bit which is only 15 minutes away from all of the attractions.
EasyHotel runs a hotel in London where each room is essentially a box with a door. Windows, room service and the remote control which turns on the TV are extra. Prices vary from very cheap to much more than a conventional hotel room depending on when you book. It's a great idea assuming you don't plan to be in the room much and pick up a good rate, otherwise I'm not so sure. There are plenty of cheap chains like Travel Inn, TravelLodge, Ibis etc. who provide a full hotel service without the swingeing.
The concept of a small room does appeal to me though. Assuming it was well designed and contains all the amenities, I'd have no problem with it. But the price must be substantially cheaper than a regular room to reflect the higher number of people they're cramming into the same space.
I disagree. The Sage extension for Firefox is excellent. It works off bookmarks to RSS URLs, and does exactly what I need, namely show me headlines from various sites in an unobtrusive and integrated way. I've used RSS Owl and other standalone clients and frankly none of them does anything so compelling that I would think of using them over Sage.
Why don't you think there is revenu from clicks? I run a technical site and about 0.5% of visitors click on an advert on my site. It might not sound much but I bet just this level of revenue from a slashdotting would run into the hundreds, possibly thousands of dollars.
SQL Server Express is not really meant for any serious production environments.
Actually it is. It's meant for workstation and small work group database deployments in the sort of role that the MS Access / Jet engine used to fill. The problem with Access was that while it's a fine for simple things, it was not related to SQL Server. MSDE & and SQL Server Express are. This means that it's considerably easier to code apps that work in a local and a network mode since the databases you use (and the ODBC drivers etc.) are to all intents and purposes identical.
That's the attractiveness of SQL Server Express / MSDE to developers and to Microsoft. For developers it means we can bundle MSDE / SSE with the app and use that but also that our code scales up for networks. For Microsoft it means a shoe-in sale for anyone who needs a larger DB.
Aside from being free (beer), I don't really see anything compelling about SQL Server Express. It works okay but it the only upgrade path costs a lot of money and locks you into Microsoft Windows. To be honest I'd be just as happy to use PostgreSQL. I'd consider MySQL too of course but Postgres seems more suitable to the kind of operations I'd be using it for.
In fact since version 8.0 it has become a very attractive solution - a modern, fast, unencumbered, uncrippled database costing nothing. If I were writing an scalable application from scratch I would seriously consider it simply because it could save customers a ton of money. I'd ship Postgres with the app but allow the customer to centralize a version if they like on whatever hardware and OS they like. But what Postgres really needs for this to be effective is a redistributable version of the database - a version without the tools, online help, headers or libs that can be bundled with an app and installed with a few command line params - just like MSDE. I reckon it would be a 7Mb distributable at most which would be another compelling reason to use it over SQL Server Express which is much larger.
Tell you what - you give me a suitable evolutionary "pressure" for your challenge, e.g. a million dollars and I'll turn any program you like into a car. The PC running the program will form part of the dash.
A portion of the creationists (I use this henceforth to refer to everyone who beleives in some sort of ID nonsense) came up with "Micro" and "Macro" evolution to compensate for this.
What is amazing is that such people can compartmentalize evolution in this way and do so in a poor attempt to defend their unsupported beliefs.
When I build a computer programme, I do it a handful of lines at a time until the program is complete. Sometimes I even modify existing lines and others I cannibalize code I already have for other tasks. The net result of all this "micro" programming is a fully fledged computer program. I might consider a program that runs to be a generation, so that after dozens or hundreds of generations my program is actually quite sophisticated and functional. Even then I will still fix bugs as they arise and improve the program in an incremental fashion. So my "macro" program is really just a bunch of incremental changes.
Obviously the analogy only stretches so far since evolution has no end goal in mind and can't rewrite code wholesale but mutation and selective pressure still incrementally add up especially with massive concurrent "development". A thousand generations later and the changes are quantifiable. I think that creationists know this obvious truth but they will do anything including lie to suppress any logical disconnect it causes in their own minds. Hence "micro" and "macro" evolution with "micro" evolution allowing them to squirm out of observable evolution in bacteria, insects, mice etc. and "macro" evolution being something that can't possibly happen (to them) despite fossil evidence that proves otherwise.
Slashdot Mirror
I have owner an Acer Travelmate for 18 months - it works great. A lovely big screen, firewire, 3 USB ports, wireless lan, spacious keyboard. If I had to find fault with it, it would be that Acer support, especially drivers is pretty minimal, meaning that the graphics performance especially in games is very patchy.
I certainly don't think Apple branded kit is any more reliable for all the visual appeal it might possess. I've had to replace components of my G4 desktop mac including the harddrive and keyboard because they've inexplicably failed. I'm not saying the gear is flakey, but pretty looks don't necessarily equate to reliability.
I think if I were after a reliable laptop I'd be looking at something like a Thinkpad. They're pretty robust and if they do go wrong, you can strip them down and replace virtually any component.
The sad thing is that most hardcore / power users are probably more interested in AMD over Intel chips, especially for dual core since they're better performing and consume less power. But Dell is stuck with Intel which means that their high end & gaming PCs look somewhat lame. I know myself that my next PC will be a kickass system and having bought a Dell the last time around I think the next I will just build it myself. Dell makes reasonable PCs but I am sick of their site basically forcing me to buy certain hardware and software components that I do not want. I expect my next machine will be based around AMD.
And this is probably what MS had in mind all along. And I don't see it changing either. Microsoft make it easy to slap together apps with their stack and tools. Mono makes it hard to do the same with theirs. That means Mono will constantly be playing catch-up with Microsoft, reaching for but never getting close to 100% compatibility.
And don't forget the books will cost nearly as much as print editions and will be DRM'ed up to the eyeballs so you can't use your book on any other device or sell it on when you're done. What is the point of that I wonder? I would expect an ebook to cost half as much as a print edition simply because all materials, printing and shipping are eliminated. On top of that I would expect it to be discounted further if I, the reader am not able to pass the book to someone else or sell it on and recoup my losses.
No matter how cool the device might be, you can rely on Sony to shoot themselves in the head. In a space of five years they have gone from being hip and cool to being evil. They must be losing more through lost sales than they'll ever recoup through DRM. I wonder how long it will be and how many failed products before that clue sinks in.
I once bought (knowingly) a fake Polo shirt. When I got it home, I discovered it had Tommy Hillfiger buttons sewn onto it :)
As long as you the purchaser know they're counterfeit, and accept all the risks which go along with that (e.g. your laptop PSU burning your house to the ground), I don't see a big problem. It's not like you're depriving the real company of profit since you know it's a fake and bought it on that basis. You're not even materially harming them that much either assuming their real kit is better quality than the fake.
What would harm the real manufacturer is when you *don't* know it is counterfeit. I expect that there are enough tech-illiterate people out there who couldn't tell the real thing from the fake that it would be easy to set up shop in a market or elsewhere and shift these things. eBay is a counterfeiter's wet dream and it wouldn't surprise me at all if most of the stuff is destined for there or similar sites. The Register has an amusing piece about fake handycams.
Still, this is not some new phenomena. Cameras, tape decks etc. have long been using been branded Sony or soundalikes (or courtesy of the Simpsons) such as Sorny, Panaphonics etc.. If you're stupid enough to believe some cheap piece of shit you buy from a dodgy dealer is genuine brand name product then you should hold yourself partly to blame.
Well that depends on the issue? I would never say "resinstall" on Linux if an app was broken or their desktop had some bad links, but if some helpful person had decided to delete files from /etc or something equally catastrophic then I might
On a serious note, I wonder what this means for emulation projects. If you recognize an exploit in the original environment (as possibly someone did when writing a WMF parser for WINE), do you implement the exploit in your emulator or do you introduce a potential incompatibility?
This is just personal experience, not financial advice... My experience is that when the market drops (e.g. following 9/11 or whatever), your funds might drop but they generally rebound in time, assuming the fund managers have a clue as to what they're doing. i.e. any fund worth its salt will closely track and possibly exceed the major market indices. Why? Because the fund is spread over many equities and the managers use computerised triggers and other safeguards to sell / buy when the market dips. And since the indices go up over the long term, so therefore do the funds. My pension and other savings tanked after 9/11 but are very healthy now since I chose to wait for the market decompress rather than panic and cash in.
The operative phrase here is "long term", the closer you are to retirement, the less risk you should be taking. The closer you are to retiring, the more you should be investing in more stable instruments like municipal bonds, bluechips, property etc. Again there are funds that do all this for you. In some ways those kinds of funds are actually preferable since their management fees are much lower due to the reduced amount of effort required to administer them. You might gain 1.5% extra income simply from the reduced fees.
I doubt many sensible people had their pensions 'wiped out' unless they were dumb enough to invest their future in a online dog biscuit delivery site, Bolivian tin mines or something equally dubious. In which case its their own fault.
Anyway, I thought the dot com bubble was a hoot. I got laid off (while on holiday no less) got a very decent severance, went contracting for a bit and now I'm back in full employment. Jobs may have briefly disappeared after the bubble burst but the industry seems more healthy and certainly more wiser than before (perhaps with the exception of Google stock).
Actually it isn't. I said quite clearly virtually a superset since I am well aware that there are mostly minor differences that can be and are controlled by switches in most compilers. The differences for what they are, certainly are not compelling reasons at all to use C over C++ unless you have some constraint which demands you must avoid an overhead associated with C++.
True, they could threaten someone and some might pay out. But if the number of people supposedly sharing a song doubled or tripled, yet most of them weren't at all, you can sure as hell bet that they'd soon be up against numerous class action lawsuits in no time. They would soon have to pick their fights extremely carefully.
The problem with such a scheme (which I still admit is naive), is convincing people to use it since conceivably you could be unwittingly be downloading stuff far worse than music, not to mention using up some bandwidth. If it were to happen, it would have to be such that people have no idea what they're downloading. Data should be sent encrypted and then discarded, cached temporarily or decrypted / saved by the client. While the bandwidth hit sounds like a sucky idea (though not compared to Freenet), it might have unexpected benefits such as increasing the number of peers and thus improving download rates.
C++ is virtually a superset of ANSI C so I don't make the distinction between the two. C++ is C with classes, exceptions & rtti to me. The difference that exist are mostly irrelevant to modern programming. These days as far as most programmers or indeed compilers go, C++ and C are one and the same with a few switches to control stack unwinding or other behaviour for .c or .cpp extensions but little else.
As long as your library's entry points are not mangled, and use a standard calling convention it makes no odds what language it is implemented in on the other side. And even if it were C++ mangled, it would be hardly a supreme effort to write some stubs around them. I do think that using C is better for the APIs but QT has bindings so clearly it's not strictly necessary. Personally I prefer the GTK approach to its API and would call Win32 directly than through MFC any day, but I don't care how it works internally.
Obviously if you're writing a number crunching app, a game, a driver, a kernel, a shared library or something with high performance, low level or compatibility requirements then you need C++. Otherwise I'd go elsewhere.
Java works plenty well for most things. C# is fine too but is nowhere near as portable by any stretch.
Which I assume covers web traffic only on port 80. When you start hitting sites with random, proprietary protocols on other ports, the chances are that the other end see your real IP address.
Your only chance of anonymity on a P2P network was if there were proxies set up between you and the powers that be that prevented you from following the trail. This in itself is non-trivial and requires lots of benevolent people to cover your tracks when you use them as a conduit for your illegal activites. Even such people existed (and weren't RIAA plants), performance would go the tubes. Hence the reason that Freenet sucks.
I would say that you're never going to cover yourself completely but it occurs to me (a naive thought no doubt) that a bittorrent-esque protocol could be formulated that made it a lot harder to prosecute people if all clients allocated 15% of their bandwidth for proxying some other data aside from the data requested. To make statistical analysis harder, the data you proxy would not change over time so all intents and purposes you would look like you were downloading it, except you're not.
Oh please. First I said I've never had to pay more than £100 and frequently less for a decent hotel room. Secondly, visit New York at any time of the year and the rates are comparable - worse even. Besides which, £100 (or less) includes all taxes, the practice in the US is to slap the taxes on aftwards usually boosting your bill by a good 10-15%
Not every hotel. There are some very decent chains and plenty of decent independents out a bit. Go at the right time of year and you'll even find decent offers in more upmarket places. I've never had to spend more than £100 a night and frequently spend a lot less for a decent place. but if you're foolish enough to rent a "tourist class" room around Picadilly Circus then you can expect to stay in a rathole. The same is true of Amsterdam, but even worse since the narrow building construction means you'll be hauling your bags up 3 flights of steep stairs.
The smart thing to realise about London is that the Tube is your friend. It's easy enough to find somewhere lying out a bit which is only 15 minutes away from all of the attractions.
The concept of a small room does appeal to me though. Assuming it was well designed and contains all the amenities, I'd have no problem with it. But the price must be substantially cheaper than a regular room to reflect the higher number of people they're cramming into the same space.
I disagree. The Sage extension for Firefox is excellent. It works off bookmarks to RSS URLs, and does exactly what I need, namely show me headlines from various sites in an unobtrusive and integrated way. I've used RSS Owl and other standalone clients and frankly none of them does anything so compelling that I would think of using them over Sage.
Why don't you think there is revenu from clicks? I run a technical site and about 0.5% of visitors click on an advert on my site. It might not sound much but I bet just this level of revenue from a slashdotting would run into the hundreds, possibly thousands of dollars.
Why is it a good move from Anandtech's perspective. They get slashdotted and don't even get to recoup that expense through advertising views / clicks.
Actually it is. It's meant for workstation and small work group database deployments in the sort of role that the MS Access / Jet engine used to fill. The problem with Access was that while it's a fine for simple things, it was not related to SQL Server. MSDE & and SQL Server Express are. This means that it's considerably easier to code apps that work in a local and a network mode since the databases you use (and the ODBC drivers etc.) are to all intents and purposes identical.
That's the attractiveness of SQL Server Express / MSDE to developers and to Microsoft. For developers it means we can bundle MSDE / SSE with the app and use that but also that our code scales up for networks. For Microsoft it means a shoe-in sale for anyone who needs a larger DB.
Aside from being free (beer), I don't really see anything compelling about SQL Server Express. It works okay but it the only upgrade path costs a lot of money and locks you into Microsoft Windows. To be honest I'd be just as happy to use PostgreSQL. I'd consider MySQL too of course but Postgres seems more suitable to the kind of operations I'd be using it for.
In fact since version 8.0 it has become a very attractive solution - a modern, fast, unencumbered, uncrippled database costing nothing. If I were writing an scalable application from scratch I would seriously consider it simply because it could save customers a ton of money. I'd ship Postgres with the app but allow the customer to centralize a version if they like on whatever hardware and OS they like. But what Postgres really needs for this to be effective is a redistributable version of the database - a version without the tools, online help, headers or libs that can be bundled with an app and installed with a few command line params - just like MSDE. I reckon it would be a 7Mb distributable at most which would be another compelling reason to use it over SQL Server Express which is much larger.
Tell you what - you give me a suitable evolutionary "pressure" for your challenge, e.g. a million dollars and I'll turn any program you like into a car. The PC running the program will form part of the dash.
So aside from being an asshole, he is now a hypocrite. I wonder what ultra violent games his shares make him a party to producing.
Xfree86, Emacs & Hurd demonstrate there are right ways to run a community project and terribly, terribly wrong ways.
What is amazing is that such people can compartmentalize evolution in this way and do so in a poor attempt to defend their unsupported beliefs.
When I build a computer programme, I do it a handful of lines at a time until the program is complete. Sometimes I even modify existing lines and others I cannibalize code I already have for other tasks. The net result of all this "micro" programming is a fully fledged computer program. I might consider a program that runs to be a generation, so that after dozens or hundreds of generations my program is actually quite sophisticated and functional. Even then I will still fix bugs as they arise and improve the program in an incremental fashion. So my "macro" program is really just a bunch of incremental changes.
Obviously the analogy only stretches so far since evolution has no end goal in mind and can't rewrite code wholesale but mutation and selective pressure still incrementally add up especially with massive concurrent "development". A thousand generations later and the changes are quantifiable. I think that creationists know this obvious truth but they will do anything including lie to suppress any logical disconnect it causes in their own minds. Hence "micro" and "macro" evolution with "micro" evolution allowing them to squirm out of observable evolution in bacteria, insects, mice etc. and "macro" evolution being something that can't possibly happen (to them) despite fossil evidence that proves otherwise.