Ah, I was thinking 2 pounds in the other direction:) I agree that for ultralights IBM spanks Apple. But a 15" screen was one of my requirements, and [a year ago] 15" Thinkpads were fucking heavy.
You know, I've been laptop shopping twice in the last year, once for me and once for my SO. I'm a serious geek -- I spend 90% of my time in a terminal -- and make my living with my hardware, so I spent a lot of time looking. My SO isn't a geek at all, and I'm her computer slave, so whatever she got had to be easy for me to support.
I'd never used a Mac before and was originally planning to get Thinkpad and run Debian on it. Both times, hands down, we got Macs. I have a 15" Powerbook and she has a 14" iBook. Both times I spent days on every major manufacturer's web sites, comparing every model I could find.
What I found was that there is no laptop, period, that matches anything Apple makes feature-for-feature at a comparable price point. Nothing even comes close. The only way to get the features I wanted in a Thinkpad was to pay $3,500 and gain an extra 2 pounds of travel weight. The only sub-optimal feature of the Powerbook is battery life -- after a year of constant use I get about 2 hours.
This comparison was done OS-agnostic, since I expected to run Debian on the Powerbook, too. After a week, though, I swore I'd never go back. OSX is amazing. It's the first time in 15 years of professional computer use that I haven't had to *think* about the operating system.
In short, Macs rule. if you don't believe me, do the research yourself. Anyone trotting out the "Macs are too expensive and slow" line is living in the past.
Secondly, the 'total experience' of the platform seems to include a "Well, now where do I find *software* for the damn thing?" right out of the box as well
That's funny, I got a Powerbook a little over a year ago and I've never had trouble finding software. Ever. For one thing, most of the stuff I use on Debian and FreeBSD runs just fine on OSX. For another thing, there's a large and active OSX development community.
There are, of course, specialized applications that just don't exist for OSX. Many of these run just fine in Virtual PC. Some of them probably don't and yes, that sucks, but how many apps are we really talking about? Go ahead -- reply and list all the things you use regularly that aren't available, or for which good or better substitutes aren't available, for OSX.
In May of 1980 I was flying from Argentina, where I'd lived for two years with my family (I was 9). We stopped in Portland on our way home to Ohio so my dad could visit his oldest daughter. We arrived on May 20, two days after the eruption, and stayed for a week.
I remember some people walking around in gas masks, the grey skies, ash everywhere. Really trippy. Now I actually live in Portland. Maybe if St. Helens goes again I can get bragging rights over my brother in LA. "Earthquakes? Call me when there's 6 inches of ash on your car, pansy!"
Tom Lord sounds like he got his argumentation skills by watching Beavis and Butthead, reading JeffK, and getting into flame wars with trolls on/.
Q: What's wrong with Subversion? A: It sucks. Q: What's wrong with CVS? A: It sucks. Q: Can you be more specific about Subversion? A: Yes. Subversion is teh suck. I realize that's a little inflamatory, so let me say that the sky is blue, dogs are hairy, and Subversion is TEH SUCK, fagg0t!!11 Q: Can you be more specific about CVS? A: Yes, allow me to be more specific. It sux0rs. Hard. CVS is teh sux0r. Q: What's good about Arch? A: It rules. Also, I have a large penis. Fagg0t.
I think you might be confusing two different stories. Frank died before The Ascension Factor was printed, and Bill Ransom (who was co-writing it with him) finished the book. You can tell; Ransom's a poor writer by comparison. The first two in that series, The Jesus Incident and The Lazarus Effect, are quite good though.
Brian Herbert, the talentlesss waste of oxygen currently raping the Dune franchise is Franks's son. How sad is that? Frank and Brian wrote one book together before Frank's death. I don't remember the name, but it was bad. I wouldn't cut the fucker too much slack.
Re:I might one day read the Baroque cycle...
on
The System of the World
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The ending is just like the endings of all other great works -- Asimov's Foundation, Herbet's Dune, Scott Card's Ender's Game and what not.
I'd agree with this, but for different reasons all around. The Foundation series never ended because (a) Asimov had painted himself into a corner, and (b) he believed that he wouldn't die until he finished it. Thank god he was wrong. Sorry, no tears for Isaac; he was a fucking horrible writer.
The Dune books finished in part because Herbert died not long after the sixth. One hopes that he would have left well enough alone. He'd spanned the genesis, life and aftermath of the most powerful human the universe has known, and finally the potential escape of humanity from his "endless dream." It's not clear that they have escaped Leto, but a desire for tidiness and unambiguity is the sign of poor writer.
Card illustrates what might have happened to Herbert if (a) he'd had no taste, and (b) wanted to beat the Dune series to death. Ender's Game, despite some flaws, was a beautiful book. The other two... eesh.
I've had a catch-all for years and I like it. I get a bit more spam than otherwise, but the thing I like is the ability to filter incoming mail based on how it's addressed. If I buy something online I always use $company_name as the address: "newegg@domain.com" for instance.
The catch-all means that I get this email. After I filter for spam, I have all mail sent to my primary, real, address put in one folder, and everything else in another.
You can filter by sender too, but this reverses the problem. As it stands I can proactively filter on my primary address instead of playing whack-a-mole by sender.
That's certainly true, but he's obviously made his boss aware of the problem (in writing, if he has any brains), so he seems fairly well covered. If the organization's so broken that it would nail him in the face of evidence that he tried to fix the problem and his boss told him to get stuffed, well, he's fucked no matter what.
I think we are possibly providing hosting for undetectable spammers but the boss thinks I'm paranoid, and says that I need to be working on paying work, not security. Has anybody else been in this situation? How can I detect these guys if their tools don't show in virus scans?
Not to be a dick, but did you miss the part where you got clear directions from your boss not to try to "detect these guys?" It seems like you identified a problem, brought it to management, and they told you to ignore it. Sounds like you need to decide if you want to be an employed web programmer or an unemployed security consultant.
... it seems that pressing issues are piling up on Earth: poverty, foundamentalism, ignorance, ecological destruction and pollution, failing economies, oil wars, huge military spendings, terrorism, and many other issues.
Most of these issues have been "piling up" for millenia. They're not new, only magnified by (a) the huge human population increase of the last several centuries, and (b) near-instant communication nearly anywhere in the world.
If all these issues are not dealt as soon as possible, then, I believe, we must prepare ourselves (or our children) about huge wars, especially over natural resources. Many knowledgable people say that the future wars will be about water.
And they're right, and there's nothing we can do to prevent those wars unless we eliminate human greed. Which we won't.
The human race is smart enough to walk and chew gum at the same time. We must pursue multiple goals simultaneously. Ultimately it's a stark choice: if we don't get off this rock, we will die here.
Hit UP-UP-DOWN-DOWN-LEFT-RIGHT at the splash screen to access a secret "Torture Iraqi Civilians" menu.
And when you try to quit, the game will force you to continue playing. (NYT story; should be a non-registration link)
I'm not trolling for any particular mods, just honestly disgusted. War is not a game. Death is not a game. This is explicitly a recruitment tool for the army. And while I don't buy the crackpot theories that games train people to kill, I'm grossed out at the two-facedness of it all.
I hope that eventually someone incorporates this code into a iTunes client for Linux, as it would be nice to be able to buy music from iTMS but I have no desire to buy a Mac.
--
I use Linux because it's like owning a chainsaw compared to owning a pen knife. Not always necessary, but much more fun
I use OS X because, compared with the pen knife of Windows and the chainsaw of Linux, it's a samurai sword.:)
Yeah, I've got a whole team of detectives on it. We're working in shifts.
The only way to enforce laws like this is to effectively remove any expectation of privacy from every Internet transaction. That's going to be very difficult.
A smarter way would be to have a smarter tax system, like a Value-Added Tax. Tacking sales tax on as an after-thought is stupid, and creates many more problems than it solves. With a fairly simple system (Person A hands a stack of bills to Entity B; B hands A a Widget; B makes an entry in a book) its worst flaws aren't really exposed. With side-spread digital transactions for digital goods it simply cannot be maintained.
Wake me up when they invent a way to block every singal except the ones to doctors on-call. This is a social problem, not a technical one. Throwing out the baby with the bathwater by blocking all cell signals is dangerous.
Why code for anything other than IE6? Because you care about the future. From now until the end of time, users accessing your web site from standard desktop machines will be a smaller and smaller part of your audience. What if you make an IE-only design and want to retool later for PDAs? If you've done it the right way your life will be easier.
If you write to IE6 then your markup will be hosed as soon as Microsoft updates. They have a history of changing rendering even in minor updates, and IE7 will certainly be different. Want to retool your entire site when IE7 comes out? Do you really want to play whack-a-mole with Microsoft?
What if you do ever want to make a site that's aimed at Mac or *nix users? You'll be screwed since you only know how to write for IE. If you write to standards, you have a known good base knowledge.
Here's another reason: writing to the standards is easier. They're published, and several good validators exist. You'll need to do very little to get a standards-compliant site to do what you want in IE. Also, any in-depth CSS design help you're likely to find online is targeted to the standards, not how they're broken by $proprietary_corp.
In practice, here's my advice:
Make your markup as clean and semantic as possible. Avoid all presentation (font tags and the like); put distinct sections in div tags with ids; use the markup the way it was designed.
Do a first style pass in your browser of choice. I use Safari. It's not the most standards-compliant, but it's easy for me to use. Every browser has quirks, but that's the next step.
Preview in Mozilla, Opera, IE, Safari and Konqueror. Most of these can be had for any platform. IE is hard on Mac, but I use Virtual PC. Safari is hard if you're on Windows, but you can use Konqeror, which is similar.
Ignore Netscape 4 entirely. It's a broken piece of shit, always has been, and getting something to look good in it is a total waste of time. By ignore it I mean import your styles:
@import "style.css";
If you're desperate, make a simple style sheet using no tricks or positioning and link that, then have your fancier imported style sheet override it.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, I was thinking 2 pounds in the other direction :) I agree that for ultralights IBM spanks Apple. But a 15" screen was one of my requirements, and [a year ago] 15" Thinkpads were fucking heavy.
What on earth is wrong with the trash can? Christ, I even have a script alias for 'rm' that *moves* things to the trash for me.
You know, I've been laptop shopping twice in the last year, once for me and once for my SO. I'm a serious geek -- I spend 90% of my time in a terminal -- and make my living with my hardware, so I spent a lot of time looking. My SO isn't a geek at all, and I'm her computer slave, so whatever she got had to be easy for me to support.
I'd never used a Mac before and was originally planning to get Thinkpad and run Debian on it. Both times, hands down, we got Macs. I have a 15" Powerbook and she has a 14" iBook. Both times I spent days on every major manufacturer's web sites, comparing every model I could find.
What I found was that there is no laptop, period, that matches anything Apple makes feature-for-feature at a comparable price point. Nothing even comes close. The only way to get the features I wanted in a Thinkpad was to pay $3,500 and gain an extra 2 pounds of travel weight. The only sub-optimal feature of the Powerbook is battery life -- after a year of constant use I get about 2 hours.
This comparison was done OS-agnostic, since I expected to run Debian on the Powerbook, too. After a week, though, I swore I'd never go back. OSX is amazing. It's the first time in 15 years of professional computer use that I haven't had to *think* about the operating system.
In short, Macs rule. if you don't believe me, do the research yourself. Anyone trotting out the "Macs are too expensive and slow" line is living in the past.
There are, of course, specialized applications that just don't exist for OSX. Many of these run just fine in Virtual PC. Some of them probably don't and yes, that sucks, but how many apps are we really talking about? Go ahead -- reply and list all the things you use regularly that aren't available, or for which good or better substitutes aren't available, for OSX.
- Subversion keeps a local "pristine" copy of your current version. This means that many operations don't require an accessible repository.
- Subversion actually deletes files (and moves) when you ask it to, rather than the two-step operation required with CVS.
- Subverison makes atomic commits -- if one part fails, it all fails.
- Subversion sends diffs to the server, not the entire bloody tree.
- Branches and tags are very simple and constant time -- they're kept not as complete trees but as diffs of their predecessors.
There are other reasons, to be sure, but these are what I like the most.In May of 1980 I was flying from Argentina, where I'd lived for two years with my family (I was 9). We stopped in Portland on our way home to Ohio so my dad could visit his oldest daughter. We arrived on May 20, two days after the eruption, and stayed for a week.
I remember some people walking around in gas masks, the grey skies, ash everywhere. Really trippy. Now I actually live in Portland. Maybe if St. Helens goes again I can get bragging rights over my brother in LA. "Earthquakes? Call me when there's 6 inches of ash on your car, pansy!"
Tom Lord sounds like he got his argumentation skills by watching Beavis and Butthead, reading JeffK, and getting into flame wars with trolls on /.
Q: What's wrong with Subversion?
A: It sucks.
Q: What's wrong with CVS?
A: It sucks.
Q: Can you be more specific about Subversion?
A: Yes. Subversion is teh suck. I realize that's a little inflamatory, so let me say that the sky is blue, dogs are hairy, and Subversion is TEH SUCK, fagg0t!!11
Q: Can you be more specific about CVS?
A: Yes, allow me to be more specific. It sux0rs. Hard. CVS is teh sux0r.
Q: What's good about Arch?
A: It rules. Also, I have a large penis. Fagg0t.
I think you might be confusing two different stories. Frank died before The Ascension Factor was printed, and Bill Ransom (who was co-writing it with him) finished the book. You can tell; Ransom's a poor writer by comparison. The first two in that series, The Jesus Incident and The Lazarus Effect, are quite good though.
Brian Herbert, the talentlesss waste of oxygen currently raping the Dune franchise is Franks's son. How sad is that? Frank and Brian wrote one book together before Frank's death. I don't remember the name, but it was bad. I wouldn't cut the fucker too much slack.
The Dune books finished in part because Herbert died not long after the sixth. One hopes that he would have left well enough alone. He'd spanned the genesis, life and aftermath of the most powerful human the universe has known, and finally the potential escape of humanity from his "endless dream." It's not clear that they have escaped Leto, but a desire for tidiness and unambiguity is the sign of poor writer.
Card illustrates what might have happened to Herbert if (a) he'd had no taste, and (b) wanted to beat the Dune series to death. Ender's Game, despite some flaws, was a beautiful book. The other two
I've had a catch-all for years and I like it. I get a bit more spam than otherwise, but the thing I like is the ability to filter incoming mail based on how it's addressed. If I buy something online I always use $company_name as the address: "newegg@domain.com" for instance.
The catch-all means that I get this email. After I filter for spam, I have all mail sent to my primary, real, address put in one folder, and everything else in another.
You can filter by sender too, but this reverses the problem. As it stands I can proactively filter on my primary address instead of playing whack-a-mole by sender.
Nice to see that Technocrat is back, Bruce.
Good idea Getting an ad for your product posted to Slashdot. Bad idea Hosting the site on DSL in your mom's basement.
You know, it's posts like these that keep you on my "Friends" list. They're like mini acid flashbacks :)
That's certainly true, but he's obviously made his boss aware of the problem (in writing, if he has any brains), so he seems fairly well covered. If the organization's so broken that it would nail him in the face of evidence that he tried to fix the problem and his boss told him to get stuffed, well, he's fucked no matter what.
The human race is smart enough to walk and chew gum at the same time. We must pursue multiple goals simultaneously. Ultimately it's a stark choice: if we don't get off this rock, we will die here.
- Hit UP-UP-DOWN-DOWN-LEFT-RIGHT at the splash screen to access a secret "Torture Iraqi Civilians" menu.
- And when you try to quit, the game will force you to continue playing. (NYT story; should be a non-registration link)
I'm not trolling for any particular mods, just honestly disgusted. War is not a game. Death is not a game. This is explicitly a recruitment tool for the army. And while I don't buy the crackpot theories that games train people to kill, I'm grossed out at the two-facedness of it all.i just marked you "friend" since you taught me a new word (pessimum). :) FYI local links on your site are prepended with 'http:', so none of them work.
A smarter way would be to have a smarter tax system, like a Value-Added Tax. Tacking sales tax on as an after-thought is stupid, and creates many more problems than it solves. With a fairly simple system (Person A hands a stack of bills to Entity B; B hands A a Widget; B makes an entry in a book) its worst flaws aren't really exposed. With side-spread digital transactions for digital goods it simply cannot be maintained.
Wake me up when they invent a way to block every singal except the ones to doctors on-call. This is a social problem, not a technical one. Throwing out the baby with the bathwater by blocking all cell signals is dangerous.
"But I'm not wearin' any pants!"
Blast it. I meant to unfuck those angle brackets. Here's what I meant:
<style type="text/css" media="all">@import "res/css/base.css";</style>
If you write to IE6 then your markup will be hosed as soon as Microsoft updates. They have a history of changing rendering even in minor updates, and IE7 will certainly be different. Want to retool your entire site when IE7 comes out? Do you really want to play whack-a-mole with Microsoft?
What if you do ever want to make a site that's aimed at Mac or *nix users? You'll be screwed since you only know how to write for IE. If you write to standards, you have a known good base knowledge.
Here's another reason: writing to the standards is easier. They're published, and several good validators exist. You'll need to do very little to get a standards-compliant site to do what you want in IE. Also, any in-depth CSS design help you're likely to find online is targeted to the standards, not how they're broken by $proprietary_corp.
In practice, here's my advice:
- Make your markup as clean and semantic as possible. Avoid all presentation (font tags and the like); put distinct sections in div tags with ids; use the markup the way it was designed.
- Do a first style pass in your browser of choice. I use Safari. It's not the most standards-compliant, but it's easy for me to use. Every browser has quirks, but that's the next step.
- Preview in Mozilla, Opera, IE, Safari and Konqueror. Most of these can be had for any platform. IE is hard on Mac, but I use Virtual PC. Safari is hard if you're on Windows, but you can use Konqeror, which is similar.
Ignore Netscape 4 entirely. It's a broken piece of shit, always has been, and getting something to look good in it is a total waste of time. By ignore it I mean import your styles: If you're desperate, make a simple style sheet using no tricks or positioning and link that, then have your fancier imported style sheet override it.Visit CSS Zen Garden for inspiration; ALA and the WASP for information.
Use the standards. It's better for you in the future, more flexible, better for your users, and just plain easier.