Even more lockdown on travel for Chinesse, it is easier for a forgiener to travel around the country then it is for a citizen.
I just want to address this last point. It's always easier for a foreigner to do just about anything than it is for a citizen. China is backwards from many countries, particularly from the US, in this respect. Most places, natives have it easy and foreigners are viewed with suspicion, given more difficulty by the government, etc. In China it's the other way around. If you're a foreigner then everything is much easier. Police and government officials are much nicer, the places you're likely to visit are usually cleaner, people in general tend to be more polite. A major exception is prices; things tend to spontaneously become more expensive the moment somebody notices that you're not Chinese.
I think that a lot of people underestimate the utility of usability even for technical nerdy types.
I'm pretty nerdy. I can tell you the two things wrong with the tar command you showed and exactly why Time Machine is different. I can tell you how Time Machine works, the hacks that Apple has done on their filesystem to accommodate it and many other UNIXy things, and a great many deep system internals. I am perfectly at home with the UNIX command line.
And yet, I think Time Machine is the best thing ever.
Why? Because it makes backups easy. Before TM, my backups were sporadic. Once a week, if I could remember. When Leopard was released, I went out and bought a new 500GB hard drive, pointed TM to it, and suddenly I'm getting backups constantly throughout the day with no human intervention. Sure, I could have set up a cron job, but it would have been annoying and error prone and it wouldn't have done the cool incremental backups that TM does.
I could duplicate a lot of what Apple has done for me. But that would mean that I would spend all day tinkering with my computer instead of actually getting things done with it. Since Apple has done it for me, and made it really easy to use, I can use their work and use my time to do more useful things.
The great thing about OS X is that it's powerful enough to satisfy a UNIX geek, but it offers enough usability that a UNIX geek who just wants to get some work done can do so.
Re:But more importantly
on
Apple After Jobs
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Getting bought out for a ton of money, getting their CEO installed as CEO of the purchasing company, and having their operating system become the #2 desktop OS sounds like a huge success to me.
I would love to have 10% of the success that NeXT had.
salaries in places like Beijing are competitive with Westerners now.
Not quite. I know a guy who got hired as a computer programmer out of school with a master's degree. His salary is literally 10% of what mine is. This is quite typical. And yes, it's cheaper to live there, but he has to share an apartment with a couple of roommates just to make the rent, and that's with a government housing subsidy. Prices in Beijing are now much more competitive with the West than salaries are.
There are a few people in Beijing making the equivalent of several thousand dollars a month. But somebody who's really well-off may only be making the equivalent of $1,000/month, and more typical or average for a white-collar job would be a few hundred per month.
Movies almost always make the most money they're going to make on opening weekend. There is the occasional sleeper which becomes a hit later on, but TDK is most definitely not one of those.
Maybe scientists should stop announcing such trivial threats, then.
Journalists aren't out digging through the trash behind observatories to find out about these low-threat asteroids. They find out about them because the scientists hold a press conference and tell them. Blame the scientists; the journalists are just passing the message on.
Project Orion would get around this problem by using thousands of little charges, detonated close to the reflector - and it would still take years to accelerate.
I'm afraid you are confused. An Orion craft would be able to launch directly from Earth if people didn't care about the contamination problem. It could go anywhere in the solar system in months at most.
When I throw that SIM away, do they then come after me? Do I have to give it back to them when I'm finished with it?
This just makes no sense to me. I don't recall anything in the terms of service which said that they still owned the SIM (although I didn't read them very carefully) and it certainly appears to be mine as far as what I can do with it and who will or will not prosecute me if I do certain things with it.
SETI is not trying to find civilizations like ours. It is trying to find significantly more advanced civilizations which are deliberately trying to contact civilizations like ours.
It said quite clearly that the iPod was locked to the music store. That is the wording used in the post. If the intent was the opposite then the order of the two should have been switched. I cannot be held responsible for failed expression of thoughts.
In any case, complaining that the iTunes Music Store is locked to the iPod is hardly grounds for complaint about the iPod. No matter how you cut it, the original criticism I responded to made no sense.
I don't know what Apple wants for iTMS DRM and I don't really care. I don't buy tracks from there, and the tracks I get elsewhere work just fine on my iPod precisely because my iPod is not locked to any music store.
SETI is not searching for accidental transmissions or leakage. SETI is only searching for deliberate beacons being sent by alien civilizations. SETI's techniques cannot detect random radio chatter and are not intended to.
According to the question, there was some misunderstanding involved. If your landlord goes peeking through your underwear drawer because he thought you said that the plugged drain was in there, you have no grounds for a privacy complaint, although you may well have a reasonable case for saying that he needs to listen better.
For whatever reason this hosting provider thought that the database was relevant to the question being asked, so they looked at it. You may be able to fault them for being dumb but you can't fault them for violating your privacy.
If you ask your landlord to check on a blocked drain, you can't very well complain if he happens to find the porno magazines you stashed under the sink.
When you ask him to come, the place becomes fair game.
This is very much not the case. Computing developed for entirely practical reasons, performing computations which were either difficult or impossible to perform without them: brute forcing the Enigma codes, calculating artillery tables, etc.
In any case, the summary (I haven't bothered to read the article) makes it sound like they're presenting it as a practical, useful device, in which case saying that it's too weak to be useful is an entirely valid criticism.
Do you seriously think that Britain and Russia have better regulatory environments? I bet they both have carbon copies of this bill, and many other stupid requirements besides. The US is hardly special in the "you need a permit" department. In fact it's better than most, in most areas.
There is a big difference between an automobile or an iPod Shuffle, and an iPhone or iPod Touch. The iPhone/iPod Touch are designed to allow arbitrary third-party software. Apple then added an additional lock-and-key system so that only Apple-approved software will be accepted by the device.
Your shuffle probably has no such restrictions, there are just no tools available to write software for it. The iPhone and iPod Touch have all the tools available free for anyone to download, but then you have to pay Apple a fee for the privilege of loading the results onto your own device.
This meme that you must either love every aspect of a product or you must avoid purchasing it is destructive and stupid. Please stop perpetuating it. I like my iPod Touch, I think it's a nice device, but there are certain things about it that I wish were different. Rather than abandon the entire thing, I prefer to work for change. Part of this involves complaining about it. If we did things your way, nobody would ever complain about anything, they would just not buy stuff, and then nobody would ever know what was wrong with all of these products that never succeeded. Customer feedback is the lifeblood of any good business. If you don't want to read my complaints, stop opening my posts.
For the record, I agree with you completely that what the FSF is doing here is absolutely stupid, and borderline criminal, and it just reinforces for me the fact that the FSF is simply out of touch with what we like to call reality. But while I'm not on the FSF's side, neither am I completely on Apple's side. I know that it's not an open platform but I think that it should be, and I have no qualms about making my opinion known.
It doesn't support any of the other music stores that support DRM.
Big shock. Other music players don't support Apple's store. Most music players don't support most DRM'd stores. That's what DRM does, you know, it prevents interoperability. If other stores don't work on the iPod, that's the fault of those other stores for insisting on DRM. Likewise, if Apple's tracks don't work on a Rio or whatever then that's Apple's fault for insisting on DRM, although I doubt they care very much.
In any case, nothing stops you from buying from the many stores which sell naked MP3s, or from simply buying CDs. Doesn't seem like much of a lock in to me.
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Even more lockdown on travel for Chinesse, it is easier for a forgiener to travel around the country then it is for a citizen.
I just want to address this last point. It's always easier for a foreigner to do just about anything than it is for a citizen. China is backwards from many countries, particularly from the US, in this respect. Most places, natives have it easy and foreigners are viewed with suspicion, given more difficulty by the government, etc. In China it's the other way around. If you're a foreigner then everything is much easier. Police and government officials are much nicer, the places you're likely to visit are usually cleaner, people in general tend to be more polite. A major exception is prices; things tend to spontaneously become more expensive the moment somebody notices that you're not Chinese.
I can't tell you about the laws, but I can tell you that SSL, ssh, and Tor connections all work perfectly fine from China.
I think that a lot of people underestimate the utility of usability even for technical nerdy types.
I'm pretty nerdy. I can tell you the two things wrong with the tar command you showed and exactly why Time Machine is different. I can tell you how Time Machine works, the hacks that Apple has done on their filesystem to accommodate it and many other UNIXy things, and a great many deep system internals. I am perfectly at home with the UNIX command line.
And yet, I think Time Machine is the best thing ever.
Why? Because it makes backups easy. Before TM, my backups were sporadic. Once a week, if I could remember. When Leopard was released, I went out and bought a new 500GB hard drive, pointed TM to it, and suddenly I'm getting backups constantly throughout the day with no human intervention. Sure, I could have set up a cron job, but it would have been annoying and error prone and it wouldn't have done the cool incremental backups that TM does.
I could duplicate a lot of what Apple has done for me. But that would mean that I would spend all day tinkering with my computer instead of actually getting things done with it. Since Apple has done it for me, and made it really easy to use, I can use their work and use my time to do more useful things.
The great thing about OS X is that it's powerful enough to satisfy a UNIX geek, but it offers enough usability that a UNIX geek who just wants to get some work done can do so.
Getting bought out for a ton of money, getting their CEO installed as CEO of the purchasing company, and having their operating system become the #2 desktop OS sounds like a huge success to me.
I would love to have 10% of the success that NeXT had.
salaries in places like Beijing are competitive with Westerners now.
Not quite. I know a guy who got hired as a computer programmer out of school with a master's degree. His salary is literally 10% of what mine is. This is quite typical. And yes, it's cheaper to live there, but he has to share an apartment with a couple of roommates just to make the rent, and that's with a government housing subsidy. Prices in Beijing are now much more competitive with the West than salaries are.
There are a few people in Beijing making the equivalent of several thousand dollars a month. But somebody who's really well-off may only be making the equivalent of $1,000/month, and more typical or average for a white-collar job would be a few hundred per month.
Movies almost always make the most money they're going to make on opening weekend. There is the occasional sleeper which becomes a hit later on, but TDK is most definitely not one of those.
Maybe scientists should stop announcing such trivial threats, then.
Journalists aren't out digging through the trash behind observatories to find out about these low-threat asteroids. They find out about them because the scientists hold a press conference and tell them. Blame the scientists; the journalists are just passing the message on.
I guess going to the Moon makes you crazy.
Project Orion would get around this problem by using thousands of little charges, detonated close to the reflector - and it would still take years to accelerate.
I'm afraid you are confused. An Orion craft would be able to launch directly from Earth if people didn't care about the contamination problem. It could go anywhere in the solar system in months at most.
When I throw that SIM away, do they then come after me? Do I have to give it back to them when I'm finished with it?
This just makes no sense to me. I don't recall anything in the terms of service which said that they still owned the SIM (although I didn't read them very carefully) and it certainly appears to be mine as far as what I can do with it and who will or will not prosecute me if I do certain things with it.
The card belongs to the operator? Really? When I gave T-Mobile $5 and they gave me a SIM, they were actually... what? Renting it to me?
I suppose you make your own RAM, know exactly how every one of the 500 million transistors on your CPU is wired, and bake your own bread?
It's perfectly acceptable to simply accept that an IC does what it's specced to do without knowing why. Comparing it to a Wal-Mart shopper is asinine.
SETI is not trying to find civilizations like ours. It is trying to find significantly more advanced civilizations which are deliberately trying to contact civilizations like ours.
It said quite clearly that the iPod was locked to the music store. That is the wording used in the post. If the intent was the opposite then the order of the two should have been switched. I cannot be held responsible for failed expression of thoughts.
In any case, complaining that the iTunes Music Store is locked to the iPod is hardly grounds for complaint about the iPod. No matter how you cut it, the original criticism I responded to made no sense.
I don't know what Apple wants for iTMS DRM and I don't really care. I don't buy tracks from there, and the tracks I get elsewhere work just fine on my iPod precisely because my iPod is not locked to any music store.
It's better than setting off real live nuclear weapons in the desert like they used to do.
SETI is not searching for accidental transmissions or leakage. SETI is only searching for deliberate beacons being sent by alien civilizations. SETI's techniques cannot detect random radio chatter and are not intended to.
Every time you use "Fixed that for you", more people think you're an asshole.
According to the question, there was some misunderstanding involved. If your landlord goes peeking through your underwear drawer because he thought you said that the plugged drain was in there, you have no grounds for a privacy complaint, although you may well have a reasonable case for saying that he needs to listen better.
For whatever reason this hosting provider thought that the database was relevant to the question being asked, so they looked at it. You may be able to fault them for being dumb but you can't fault them for violating your privacy.
If you ask your landlord to check on a blocked drain, you can't very well complain if he happens to find the porno magazines you stashed under the sink.
When you ask him to come, the place becomes fair game.
This is very much not the case. Computing developed for entirely practical reasons, performing computations which were either difficult or impossible to perform without them: brute forcing the Enigma codes, calculating artillery tables, etc.
In any case, the summary (I haven't bothered to read the article) makes it sound like they're presenting it as a practical, useful device, in which case saying that it's too weak to be useful is an entirely valid criticism.
You can die if you consume enough of anything. For example, water.
Your desire for absolute safety does not override my right to liberty.
Do you seriously think that Britain and Russia have better regulatory environments? I bet they both have carbon copies of this bill, and many other stupid requirements besides. The US is hardly special in the "you need a permit" department. In fact it's better than most, in most areas.
There is a big difference between an automobile or an iPod Shuffle, and an iPhone or iPod Touch. The iPhone/iPod Touch are designed to allow arbitrary third-party software. Apple then added an additional lock-and-key system so that only Apple-approved software will be accepted by the device.
Your shuffle probably has no such restrictions, there are just no tools available to write software for it. The iPhone and iPod Touch have all the tools available free for anyone to download, but then you have to pay Apple a fee for the privilege of loading the results onto your own device.
This meme that you must either love every aspect of a product or you must avoid purchasing it is destructive and stupid. Please stop perpetuating it. I like my iPod Touch, I think it's a nice device, but there are certain things about it that I wish were different. Rather than abandon the entire thing, I prefer to work for change. Part of this involves complaining about it. If we did things your way, nobody would ever complain about anything, they would just not buy stuff, and then nobody would ever know what was wrong with all of these products that never succeeded. Customer feedback is the lifeblood of any good business. If you don't want to read my complaints, stop opening my posts.
For the record, I agree with you completely that what the FSF is doing here is absolutely stupid, and borderline criminal, and it just reinforces for me the fact that the FSF is simply out of touch with what we like to call reality. But while I'm not on the FSF's side, neither am I completely on Apple's side. I know that it's not an open platform but I think that it should be, and I have no qualms about making my opinion known.
It doesn't support any of the other music stores that support DRM.
Big shock. Other music players don't support Apple's store. Most music players don't support most DRM'd stores. That's what DRM does, you know, it prevents interoperability. If other stores don't work on the iPod, that's the fault of those other stores for insisting on DRM. Likewise, if Apple's tracks don't work on a Rio or whatever then that's Apple's fault for insisting on DRM, although I doubt they care very much.
In any case, nothing stops you from buying from the many stores which sell naked MP3s, or from simply buying CDs. Doesn't seem like much of a lock in to me.