The funny thing about the "security mindset" common among IT people is that it doesn't even work. IT security managers are like fundamentalist Christians, dividing the world into "bad" and "good" and trying to stamp out all the "bad" stuff. What they should be doing instead is think about harm reduction and communications.
Does Apple have anything to back up their claims that their UI is the best?
If we're talking 'installing hacks' you honestly think that Macs need that more than Linux? You've never had to mess with xorg.conf or samba configs then?
No.
I have to do it every single time I install Ubuntu in a virtual machine.
Have you tried installing OS X on Xen?
Once again, I'm sorry but I disagree. One anecdote I have about Ubuntu and it's lack of consistency is with the system tray. All the little widgets can be right clicked and 'locked' to the bar so that you can't move them. All except the network widget that is...
Ubuntu doesn't have a "system tray", it has a panel and a notification area. The resolution sits in the notification area. You can lock things in the panel, but not in the notification area. You know, like OS X has a menu bar, a bunch of menus, and a dock, and they all behave differently?
Huh? You say that C is a lousy language for performance and then commence to list the reasons why it is a good language for performance?
No, I list the reasons why C programs benchmark well even though the language is hard to optimize.
Anyway... it seems C can be optimized better than Fortran [...] but real-world examples and benchmarks do not agree with you.
The fact that you think that those numbers are in any way relevant to what we are talking about just shows that you know absolutely nothing about benchmarking or high performance computing.
You are ABSOLUTELY wrong! C# by its very nature can not be as fast as C.
The C# JIT has all the information that a C compiler has (essentially, the entire source code). In addition, it has a lot of global program information and it has runtime statistics. And, the C# language has better defined semantics. All of this taken together means that C# can be optimized better than C.
In terms of performance, C is a lousy language; Fortran is a "faster language" than C.
The only reason C even runs as well as it does is because people have invested 20 years in making compilers squeeze out the last cycle, because C compilers play fast and loose with C semantics at high optimization, and because even CPUs have been tuned to accommodate its semantics.
The catch is that you pay two penalties: startup time and memory.
That's a problem with the JVM, not JITs in general. The reason the JVM is slow is because of Java's bloated libraries and Java's idiotic way of storing and organizing libraries.
Does that also mean it's NOT as fast as native C/C++ code because C# is blatantly not and thus is part of the marketing guff that you were gulliable to believe?
First of all, both C# implementations and C/C++ implementations generally generate native code.
Now, you have to separate languages and implementations. C/C++ implementations are still somewhat faster than C# implementations. Why? Because people have been optimizing compilers and processors for C/C++ for 20 years.
However, intrinsically, C# is the "faster language": C/C++ is a bitch to optimize, and equivalent C# code tends to have more opportunities for optimization.
Furthermore, a JIT implementation is intrinsically the faster implementation for long-running, compute-intensive software: C/C++ batch compilers lack information about runtime types and runtime statistics.
C/C++ have always been horrible from the point of efficiency. One of the most "efficient languages" (in the sense of being able to compile it into efficient code) is Fortran. However, numerical software may be moving to JIT-based systems because it's so much more efficient.
That's bullshit. The iPhone is tied to a single carrier in every market. That's not because the carriers want it that way, it's because Apple wants it that way.
When people in Europe sued and locking the iPhone was declared illegal, Apple fought that ruling (they weren't contractually obligated to do that) and priced the iPhone at a ridiculous EU 1000.
The iPhone is locked down because of Apple. The carriers would love unlocked iPhones.
Apple is far worse than cell phone carriers have been in recent times.
I fail to see your point. Are you saying that because more money goes to what you call "education" than "prisons", universities are well-funded? That's a ridiculous way of looking at it.
There is little justification for agricultural subsidies, so that's $25 billion too much.
There are clearly far too many prisons and prisoners in the US compared with other nations, so the prison budget should be a fraction of whatever it is. Furthermore, you're apparently just looking at the federal budget.
I don't know where you get your education numbers from, but it looks like you are using something like the budget of the US Department of Education. I have no idea why you think that has anything to do with university budgets.
In different words, you numbers are bogus, and your analysis is bogus, too.
I certainly didn't hear Apple complaining about millions of iPhones going overseas and out of the USA at $400 a pop
Apple didn't "complain" about it (what good would that have done?), they created technological means of stopping it.
Steve Jobs was asked about what he though of the unlocking and jailbreaking and like he usually replies, he said with a casual voice, "it's a cat and mouse game".
He's telling you that they are actively working on stopping it, and they have.
If you want more evidence that it's the carriers and not Apple, just look at the 3G iPhone. You can't buy it without signing a contract in the USA and then you're locked to AT&T.
Bullshit. I have several unlocked 3G phones that work fine on several US carriers. Those phones allow application installs, can be used as tethered or bluetooth modems, etc. I pay less for Internet access with them than iPhone users.
The reason the 3G iPhone is locked is because Apple wants it to be, period.
Could someone please explain to me why the American cell carriers are so damn closed?
They aren't; that's a marketing myth created by Apple. Many major US carriers allow unlocked phones.
Why Americans living in the land of the free have to jailbreak their phones?
The same way Germans, French, and others have to: because Apple has managed to create a situation in which they tie their phone to a carrier and make it impossible to unlock in the traditional sense.
If Apple sold unlocked iPhones, the carriers would be happy to allow them on their networks.
I'm not sure I follow. Are you saying that the carriers rejected the iPhone because they thought its closed nature would make it unsuccessful in the market? Or maybe they were making a moral stand for consumer openness?
No, I'm saying that Apple's closed approach prevents carriers from shipping the iPhone.
Consumers, empirically, ended up somewhat better off.
No, consumers ended up much worse off: they are paying a high premium for a phone that does much less.
Carriers complained bitterly about unlocking. It took a class action lawsuit and a visit to the Supreme Court to end AT&T's policies against unlocking.
Whoosh, that really went over your head, didn't it? Carriers didn't complain about people unlocking iPhones and running them on their networks.
Apple has to make a good faith effort to prevent unlocking as part of their contract with AT&T. To Apple, an unlocked phone is another sale, and they have no reason to care if you do so.
That's just an assumption on your part, and it's probably wrong. Indications are that Apple is getting money from AT&T for every sign-up.
It took a class action lawsuit and a visit to the Supreme Court to end AT&T's policies against unlocking.
Yeah, and Apple is now attempting to do an end-run around that. Let's hope they get sued into oblivion for it.
According to the Ayatollahs, does Allah approve of putting people into orbit? I mean, according to them, most other things that have happened since the 15th century seem to be bad.
One uni pressured me to assign my IP rights to them for spurious reasons involving the fact that my research was partly sponsored by an industry partner.
What's "spurious" about it? If it's true that the company paid for lab equipment and (part of) your salary, why shouldn't they own the results?
Universities used to be about learning and donating knowledge that would benefit mankind back to the creative commons.
That's when universities were reasonably well funded and were left to do academic work.
These days, research groups are measured by commercial relevance and how much money they bring in. Professors even end up having to subsidize teaching from research grants.
I don't know where all the money is going in the UK, but in the US, it's pretty simple: it's primarily going to the military, agricultural and other subsidies, and prisons.
What makes people think that the mobile network operators, who have resisted this sort of openness in their handsets before, will embrace it now?
T-Mobile, Cingular, AT&T, and others have allowed unrestricted, fully programmable handsets on their networks for many years.
Apple's iPhone is a huge step backwards in terms of openness. Apple's misrepresentation of the facts is adding insult to injury.
Apple had to struggle to find a single carrier willing to allow the iPhone.
That's because the iPhone is locked down and controlled by Apple. If the iPhone were as open as Palm, Symbian, or Windows Mobile, every major carrier would be shipping it.
I mean, people have been unlocking the iPhone and using it on other carriers. The carriers didn't complain, Apple did.
Choice is often overrated. A team of professional interface designers should make the choice for me instead of giving me tons of options to figure out.
Quite right. And with Linux, all you have to do is pick one of the major Linux desktop distributions and you get a consistent and fully integrated desktop with a complete set of desktop applications.
In contrast, most people buying a Mac end up having to fiddle around for hours choosing and installing the applications they need. And many people end up buying and installing one little Macintosh hack after another to work around the limitations and annoyances of the Mac interface.
So, if you want a no-hassles, consistent user interface that just works, go with a major Linux distribution, don't waste your time on the Mac.
The only two that are legitimately Net Neutrality are
Even if that were true, it doesn't change what I said: people actually disagree with you on what the term means. That's just a fact. Whether you think those other usages of the terms are "legitimate" is irrelevant (and I don't see why you should determine "legitimacy").
I'm accusing you of muddying the waters.
It's you who's muddying the waters, by trying to claim all the good will that the term "net neutrality" has among geeks for your particular view of net neutrality.
Making it easy to contribute to an open source software project is really important. The Linux kernel is veering further and further from that goal: it's highly complex, with lots of coupling between modules, it's written in a language with almost no abstractions, and it has almost no runtime checks.
Valid points that don't agree with you and you result to name calling?
Name calling? Where?
Tell tell signs you aren't on the winning side of things.
You seem to have trouble with the English language, but piecing together your ungrammatical tidbits, it seems to me that you disagree with me on the facts.
If we add up all of Google's downtime and extrapolate to a year, it's about eight hours. Everywhere I have worked, we've had a lot more Windows downtime than that per year.
coming from a Google Rep?
I think your posting history tells us just the kind of person you are:
None of these should keep everyone from getting their work done. I can still use my computer and almost everything I need is on that computer.
A lot of companies have centralized file servers and servers like SharePoint or Notes. When the servers or the network goes down, everything stops: nobody can get at their files, etc.
Worms rarely kill machines although they may kill the network. See above.... which stops everything. See above.
Slashdot Mirror
The funny thing about the "security mindset" common among IT people is that it doesn't even work. IT security managers are like fundamentalist Christians, dividing the world into "bad" and "good" and trying to stamp out all the "bad" stuff. What they should be doing instead is think about harm reduction and communications.
Note that OS X essentially has the same concepts and the same "inconsistencies".
Do you actually have anything to back that up?
Does Apple have anything to back up their claims that their UI is the best?
If we're talking 'installing hacks' you honestly think that Macs need that more than Linux? You've never had to mess with xorg.conf or samba configs then?
No.
I have to do it every single time I install Ubuntu in a virtual machine.
Have you tried installing OS X on Xen?
Once again, I'm sorry but I disagree. One anecdote I have about Ubuntu and it's lack of consistency is with the system tray. All the little widgets can be right clicked and 'locked' to the bar so that you can't move them. All except the network widget that is...
Ubuntu doesn't have a "system tray", it has a panel and a notification area. The resolution sits in the notification area. You can lock things in the panel, but not in the notification area. You know, like OS X has a menu bar, a bunch of menus, and a dock, and they all behave differently?
Huh? You say that C is a lousy language for performance and then commence to list the reasons why it is a good language for performance?
No, I list the reasons why C programs benchmark well even though the language is hard to optimize.
Anyway... it seems C can be optimized better than Fortran [...] but real-world examples and benchmarks do not agree with you.
The fact that you think that those numbers are in any way relevant to what we are talking about just shows that you know absolutely nothing about benchmarking or high performance computing.
You are ABSOLUTELY wrong! C# by its very nature can not be as fast as C.
The C# JIT has all the information that a C compiler has (essentially, the entire source code). In addition, it has a lot of global program information and it has runtime statistics. And, the C# language has better defined semantics. All of this taken together means that C# can be optimized better than C.
In terms of performance, C is a lousy language; Fortran is a "faster language" than C.
The only reason C even runs as well as it does is because people have invested 20 years in making compilers squeeze out the last cycle, because C compilers play fast and loose with C semantics at high optimization, and because even CPUs have been tuned to accommodate its semantics.
The catch is that you pay two penalties: startup time and memory.
That's a problem with the JVM, not JITs in general. The reason the JVM is slow is because of Java's bloated libraries and Java's idiotic way of storing and organizing libraries.
Does that also mean it's NOT as fast as native C/C++ code because C# is blatantly not and thus is part of the marketing guff that you were gulliable to believe?
First of all, both C# implementations and C/C++ implementations generally generate native code.
Now, you have to separate languages and implementations. C/C++ implementations are still somewhat faster than C# implementations. Why? Because people have been optimizing compilers and processors for C/C++ for 20 years.
However, intrinsically, C# is the "faster language": C/C++ is a bitch to optimize, and equivalent C# code tends to have more opportunities for optimization.
Furthermore, a JIT implementation is intrinsically the faster implementation for long-running, compute-intensive software: C/C++ batch compilers lack information about runtime types and runtime statistics.
C/C++ have always been horrible from the point of efficiency. One of the most "efficient languages" (in the sense of being able to compile it into efficient code) is Fortran. However, numerical software may be moving to JIT-based systems because it's so much more efficient.
Because they're contractually obligated.
That's bullshit. The iPhone is tied to a single carrier in every market. That's not because the carriers want it that way, it's because Apple wants it that way.
When people in Europe sued and locking the iPhone was declared illegal, Apple fought that ruling (they weren't contractually obligated to do that) and priced the iPhone at a ridiculous EU 1000.
The iPhone is locked down because of Apple. The carriers would love unlocked iPhones.
Apple is far worse than cell phone carriers have been in recent times.
I fail to see your point. Are you saying that because more money goes to what you call "education" than "prisons", universities are well-funded? That's a ridiculous way of looking at it.
There is little justification for agricultural subsidies, so that's $25 billion too much.
There are clearly far too many prisons and prisoners in the US compared with other nations, so the prison budget should be a fraction of whatever it is. Furthermore, you're apparently just looking at the federal budget.
I don't know where you get your education numbers from, but it looks like you are using something like the budget of the US Department of Education. I have no idea why you think that has anything to do with university budgets.
In different words, you numbers are bogus, and your analysis is bogus, too.
I certainly didn't hear Apple complaining about millions of iPhones going overseas and out of the USA at $400 a pop
Apple didn't "complain" about it (what good would that have done?), they created technological means of stopping it.
Steve Jobs was asked about what he though of the unlocking and jailbreaking and like he usually replies, he said with a casual voice, "it's a cat and mouse game".
He's telling you that they are actively working on stopping it, and they have.
If you want more evidence that it's the carriers and not Apple, just look at the 3G iPhone. You can't buy it without signing a contract in the USA and then you're locked to AT&T.
Bullshit. I have several unlocked 3G phones that work fine on several US carriers. Those phones allow application installs, can be used as tethered or bluetooth modems, etc. I pay less for Internet access with them than iPhone users.
The reason the 3G iPhone is locked is because Apple wants it to be, period.
Could someone please explain to me why the American cell carriers are so damn closed?
They aren't; that's a marketing myth created by Apple. Many major US carriers allow unlocked phones.
Why Americans living in the land of the free have to jailbreak their phones?
The same way Germans, French, and others have to: because Apple has managed to create a situation in which they tie their phone to a carrier and make it impossible to unlock in the traditional sense.
If Apple sold unlocked iPhones, the carriers would be happy to allow them on their networks.
I'm not sure I follow. Are you saying that the carriers rejected the iPhone because they thought its closed nature would make it unsuccessful in the market? Or maybe they were making a moral stand for consumer openness?
No, I'm saying that Apple's closed approach prevents carriers from shipping the iPhone.
Consumers, empirically, ended up somewhat better off.
No, consumers ended up much worse off: they are paying a high premium for a phone that does much less.
Carriers complained bitterly about unlocking. It took a class action lawsuit and a visit to the Supreme Court to end AT&T's policies against unlocking.
Whoosh, that really went over your head, didn't it? Carriers didn't complain about people unlocking iPhones and running them on their networks.
Apple has to make a good faith effort to prevent unlocking as part of their contract with AT&T. To Apple, an unlocked phone is another sale, and they have no reason to care if you do so.
That's just an assumption on your part, and it's probably wrong. Indications are that Apple is getting money from AT&T for every sign-up.
It took a class action lawsuit and a visit to the Supreme Court to end AT&T's policies against unlocking.
Yeah, and Apple is now attempting to do an end-run around that. Let's hope they get sued into oblivion for it.
According to the Ayatollahs, does Allah approve of putting people into orbit? I mean, according to them, most other things that have happened since the 15th century seem to be bad.
One uni pressured me to assign my IP rights to them for spurious reasons involving the fact that my research was partly sponsored by an industry partner.
What's "spurious" about it? If it's true that the company paid for lab equipment and (part of) your salary, why shouldn't they own the results?
Universities used to be about learning and donating knowledge that would benefit mankind back to the creative commons.
That's when universities were reasonably well funded and were left to do academic work.
These days, research groups are measured by commercial relevance and how much money they bring in. Professors even end up having to subsidize teaching from research grants.
I don't know where all the money is going in the UK, but in the US, it's pretty simple: it's primarily going to the military, agricultural and other subsidies, and prisons.
What makes people think that the mobile network operators, who have resisted this sort of openness in their handsets before, will embrace it now?
T-Mobile, Cingular, AT&T, and others have allowed unrestricted, fully programmable handsets on their networks for many years.
Apple's iPhone is a huge step backwards in terms of openness. Apple's misrepresentation of the facts is adding insult to injury.
Apple had to struggle to find a single carrier willing to allow the iPhone.
That's because the iPhone is locked down and controlled by Apple. If the iPhone were as open as Palm, Symbian, or Windows Mobile, every major carrier would be shipping it.
I mean, people have been unlocking the iPhone and using it on other carriers. The carriers didn't complain, Apple did.
Choice is often overrated. A team of professional interface designers should make the choice for me instead of giving me tons of options to figure out.
Quite right. And with Linux, all you have to do is pick one of the major Linux desktop distributions and you get a consistent and fully integrated desktop with a complete set of desktop applications.
In contrast, most people buying a Mac end up having to fiddle around for hours choosing and installing the applications they need. And many people end up buying and installing one little Macintosh hack after another to work around the limitations and annoyances of the Mac interface.
So, if you want a no-hassles, consistent user interface that just works, go with a major Linux distribution, don't waste your time on the Mac.
The only two that are legitimately Net Neutrality are
Even if that were true, it doesn't change what I said: people actually disagree with you on what the term means. That's just a fact. Whether you think those other usages of the terms are "legitimate" is irrelevant (and I don't see why you should determine "legitimacy").
I'm accusing you of muddying the waters.
It's you who's muddying the waters, by trying to claim all the good will that the term "net neutrality" has among geeks for your particular view of net neutrality.
OTPs are meant to help against eavesdropping.
Anybody who feels the need to point out that they don't protect against MITM hasn't been paying attention somewhere in Security 101.
Making it easy to contribute to an open source software project is really important. The Linux kernel is veering further and further from that goal: it's highly complex, with lots of coupling between modules, it's written in a language with almost no abstractions, and it has almost no runtime checks.
Valid points that don't agree with you and you result to name calling?
Name calling? Where?
Tell tell signs you aren't on the winning side of things.
You seem to have trouble with the English language, but piecing together your ungrammatical tidbits, it seems to me that you disagree with me on the facts.
If we add up all of Google's downtime and extrapolate to a year, it's about eight hours. Everywhere I have worked, we've had a lot more Windows downtime than that per year.
coming from a Google Rep?
I think your posting history tells us just the kind of person you are:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=468416&cid=22572924
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=634461&cid=24463119
None of these should keep everyone from getting their work done. I can still use my computer and almost everything I need is on that computer.
A lot of companies have centralized file servers and servers like SharePoint or Notes. When the servers or the network goes down, everything stops: nobody can get at their files, etc.
Worms rarely kill machines although they may kill the network. See above. ... which stops everything. See above.
No, it can't.
Bullshit. Wikipedia alone lists four different definitions:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_neutrality
I think you're either confused, or you're being disingenuous. If it's the former, google is your friend.
It's you who is "confused". Get your facts straight before trying to correct people.
I think you're forgetting a platform, like maybe the one that 95%+ of all Flash users use.
Which part of "Flash doesn't work completely reliably on any platform I have tried." do you not understand?
Let me spell it out for you: Flash doesn't work completely reliably on Windows either. Period.