Then there are the people who schedule their lives around shows, making themselves slaves of the TV schedule.
And what is wrong with that, in moderation?
I only watch 3 television shows on a regular basis and I make a point to schedule my life around them. (Unfortunately, they are all on at 9 pm sunday this week thanks to dubya.)
My family and friends have known for years that I will never answer the phone between 9-10 pm on Sunday nights. First it was X-Files, then the Sopranos, now Alias. I really don't think there is anything wrong with that, either. What's the problem with having two scheduled hours a week for watching television? (now I watch the Sopranos later in the week on HBO-on-demand).
I try to watch the Daily Show every night, but I miss it frequently. Watching a daily show is too hard without a DVR.
That is pure myth. The only adminstration in the last 25 years to not run a deficit was Clinton. The Clinton adminstration is the one that saw the smallest increase in federal employees in the last 25 years.
Republicans are not for smaller government. They are for having government intrude in my bedroom and personal life. They are for giving big tax cuts to their rich buddies. The are for gouging the government with fat contracts to their contributors (Haliburton).
And I'm saying this as a Libertarian, not a Democrat. Republicans claim to be better for the economy, but the past 25 years show that to be wrong. At least the democrats aren't as happy to take away my rights.
Notice how the Republicans are the ones always proposing constitutional amendments to take away people's rights. Smaller government my ass.
In that respect, he is wrong. The MacOSX printing proves that he is wrong. MacOSX uses the same CUPS core that Fedora uses, but it has a better GUI slapped on top. The GUI was slapped on top after CUPS had been written.
No, you are incorrect. CUPS was added in 10.2 while the printing system had been in place since the beginning. Apple designed the GUI first, along with a proprietary (and to be kind, poor) back-end system. Then they decided they could keep the same GUI and switch the back-end to a standardized, open source implementation.
One of the big changes from Rhapsody to OS X was that adhering to Apple UI become more important than adhering to the NeXT UI. Apple users were not willing to accept NeXT/Unix with a Apple compatibility layer. And with each release you are seeing more of the NeXT implementations replaced with Carbon implementations (though the interface stays the same).
For example, originally Cocoa and Carbon's menu systems were very differerent. But in a later release (10.1 I believe), the Cocoa system was rewritten on top of the Carbon one. Concepts like tear-off menus were abandonded because they weren't the Mac-way. Also, the Cocoa text system was rewritten to use ATSUI.
Apple also tells developers not to depend on command line tools. Installation of the BSD environment is optional. So in most cases, you are not suppose to just wrap up OSS tools. You can write new ones using OSS libraries, but Mac applications are not (supposed) to be wrappers around a command-line tool.
Then he rants on how OSS can never deliver the brilliant GUI designs of MacOSX and Windows.
That's not what he said. The current development model of OSS can't deliver the GUI designs of closed source software. It certainly could change, and he points out his observations on what the problem is. OSS is great and no one (besides MS and SCO) is knocking it. But there are areas where it can't compete in the current market. GUI is the most glaring.
As to market share, that is entirely irrelevant. What matters is install base. And Linux on the desktop won't be passing Apple on that for a while, if ever. Especially if you count desktop, which does not include POS and other situations where the computer is being used for 1 purpose only as opposed to running multiple general/business software packages. While some POS systems are built with Mac OS X, that isn't Apple's market so their market share in that segment doesn't matter. But unfortunately, PC sales figures include that. So you're comparing Apples to Oranges.
When the iTunes store first came out, Apple's website linked the word Fairplay to the veridisc website. I'm not sure when they removed that link, but it was there at one point. It probably can be found in the way back machine.
Flash excludes using that site from my Treo. Pretty lame when I go to someones website for an address/phone number and am unable to get it on my mobile browser (pda, phone, etc). Same goes for restaurant menus, hours of operation, etc.
Too many sites today just contain a big flash file.
I've been using subversion on Mac OS X for 1 1/2 years with no problem. The only issue is that by default, IB and EOModeler don't copy the.svn directories over automatically. But you can download plugins to fix that from runtime labs.
You can also tell IB to support it by using the command
I think that is a horrible idea. I never play multigame machines because they don't have the original controls and they just don't feel right.
Why play MAME at an arcade? Play it at home. For an arcade, I want the big box with the original controls and artwork.
I doubt you'd ever see a MAME machine be popular in a bar. But put an original Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, or Asteriods and you'll find it making a lot of quarters. A generic box isn't going to bring back nostalga.
Also, any games with unique controls won't work. Guantlet, Rampart, Spy Hunter, Paperboy, Gorf, Centipede. Those need to be in the original case.
Java code under the LGPL acts just like regular software under the GPL, so I've had to reject a lot of third party projects for work I've done. The GPL can be effective when a commercial license is also offered, but since java is already free that would mean most businesses would have to pay for what was free. Makes.NET look a lot more enticing.
Now, I'm all for Sun releasing Java under a license similar to Mozilla or Apple's open source license. Then they still maintain control but also get a number of benifits of open source.
I like C/R. I think it's a good idea. I wish that everyone would get accustomed to it.
It is never going to happen. I hate C/R and refuse to work with it. I know many others who feel the same way. If you send me an email and I reply, I'm not going to jump through hoops for you to get my reply.
Also, I've yet to hear of a C/R system that doesn't cause a nightmare for automated messages, like reciepts from online purchases. And if you were to add one address, what if I decided to switch mail servers and the address changes? (I've seen this many times with addresses I whitelist in SpamAssassin).
The real solution is the yahoo-proposed one -- only accept SMTP traffic from a server authorized (via DNS) to send mail for that domain.
The proposal is very simple and most of the posts are just plain wrong about what it means.
All mail servers will have a public/private key of some type. The public key will be stored in the DNS system as extra data.
When an SMTP server connects to another SMTP server, the sending server will encrypt something (likely a checksum) with the private key for the domain the mail is from (likley the envelope from, not the From: header) and place it in a header.
The receiving server will then grab the public key for the domain in the envelope and verify the message is being sent by a server that is authoritative for that domain name.
Very simple. Now spammers can't send spam and make it look like it came from my domain. I'm currently getting flooded with bounces from a spammer doing this, so I really want this proposal adopted.
The implementation can be phased in, too. The mail server could add a header saying if the domain was verified and spamassassin could then adjust the spam rating of the message appropriately. Eventually servers would be configured to refuse mail from unverified domains.
So if you own a domain name, you just have to generate a key pair, add the public key to DNS, and add the private key to any SMTP server you send through.
Once this is required, you theoretically will always be able to contact a person responsible for the sending of the spam (whoever is listed in the whois database for the domain). Contacting them (or abuse@) would solve the problem with any major email provider, and you can just ban email from any small provider that doesn't give an adequate response.
Aside from the possible computational requirements for all the crypto work, I don't see any downsides to this. If by some chance a spammer broke/acquired your private key, you'd just generate a new one and update your DNS entry.
Maybe that works for you. I check email twice a day and I never answer the phone, so neither of those are options for quickly contacting me. If a coworker needs to ask a question, IM works best. Especially when I'm working from home.
For example, if someone wants me to come into their office to show me something or to join a meeting, they IM me. Email is not a solution for that kind of need.
Plus, it works great for my clients. If they notice a problem with their website, they IM so I can immediately take a look at it. Same thing happens when someone doesn't have the database privileges they need. They IM, and I grant them the privileges. They can get back to work immediately.
I also know that the Wall Street Journal Online uses IM extensively between their U.S. and Europe offices. Editors at both locations will be working on the website and use it to make sure two people aren't working on the same story that just came over the wire. They used to run up huge phone bills between the offices but that all disappeared with IM.
I just read all 56 pages of the law. Here are some points people are misunderstanding.
1) Creating 5 hotmail accounts with false info or 5 domains with false info isn't illegal. It is illegal to do so by script or other automated means and then send spam from it.
2) While opt-out lists only apply to the specific line of business (if the rcpt sees on that name and not the parent company), once a user opts-out it is illegal to give/sell that email address to anyone. So you can't take the address and start a new company to send spam as another post suggested.
3) The FTC gets to decide on a subject label for all porn spam.
4) Address harvesting off websites is illegal. I think that is a good thing.
5) Not just the FTC can prosecute. The SEC can prosecute mesages related to investments, FDIC for banks, etc.
6) Any state agency or official can bring a civil action.
7) The FTC is required to develop a plan for offering rewards to those who report violators of the act. Hopefully, Congress would then implement it.
8) The FCC can make harsher regulations for delivery of email over wireless service. So if you read your email on your phone, that sounds pretty good.
I agree that this law really sucks and doesn't do much. But it does do something. It makes it illegal to fake headers, use a mail relay without permission, and not honor opt-out requests. It won't stop every person, but I would hope it would help stop those few top spammers who are responsible for most of the spam out there. They are U.S. citizens and we have plenty of people who can track the spam back to them.
One problem is with the ISP civil action limitation. While I can understand not wanting the court system flooded by a lawsuit for every spam message sent, I think it should have been written to apply to anyone running a mail server. That is who has the real problem with spam, not just ISPs. (For many businesses, their ISPs have nothing to do with email.)
The only thing that bothers me is the requirement for a physical postal address in all spam. For businesses that don't have a physical presense, I'd prefer to see website, email, and/or phone required.
The cheapest price they could find for a wedding photographer was $1200 in the Houston area.
My dad was named the 2003 Houston-area professional photographer of the year, so I know a little bit about this subject.
For a good photographer, 1200 is way too low. When my dad shot a wedding, he'd bring an assistant. Some wedding photographers I know bring 2-3 assistants.
They are at the wedding beforehand to shoot pictures because there will be no time during the wedding for posed family shots. They stay throughout most of the reception. That is easily 6 hours of work. Normally on a weekend. I don't think $100/hour for a freelancing professional on the weekend is that outrageous.
Now add in the massive costs for a professional. For my dad, that meant bringing a professional lighting setup and multiple hasselblad cameras and lenses (easily over $10,000) so there is no chance at missing a shot. Then throw in processing costs, proofs (4x5 proofs of all shots are made), basic administrative/advertising overhead, travel, planning sessions, profit, etc.
And don't understimate the fact that it normally is weekend work. My parents would work all week long and then not be around on the weekend because they were shooting weddings. That's one of the main reasons they closed their studio -- it was too taxing on their personal lives.
You are paying for an expert to capture one of the most important days of your life, and you get what you pay for. Sure you can trust your wedding to a college student with a single 35mm camera. But is a few thousand more really not worth it to get a trained professional who uses redundent, top-of-the-line equipment?
But then again, look at how much of the world uses Windoze because it is "good enough".
And the premier program is awesome for businesses. $3500 gets you a ticket to WWDC ($1500 normally) and 10 20% hardware discounts. Purchase 1 maxed out XRaid and you've paid for the cost of the program.
SInce the first days of NeXT. There's a program called class-dump that will give you header files for system frameworks. I've used them numerous times to work around OS problems.
As to Apple breaking things, they've done this plenty in the past, fortunately Panther isn't as bad (in my case). With Jaguar, one of my applications would no longer launch. And I wasn't using any private APIs.
Panther also will break the look and feel of numerous Carbon applications because of the changes made to Aqua.
How much marketshare Apple has it irrelevant. The question was who is an agenda setter?
Jobs brought us firewire, no-floppy computers, usb (never would have taken off without the iMac), iMovie, iPhoto, iPod, iTunes music store, largest vendor of Unix computers, the Aqua look and feel. And don't forget the advertising which has caused a lot of people to talk about Apple over the last 5 years.
All of these are things that other companies have since adopted or tried to copy. What has any one person at Sony done that compares to that list (and is copied by others in the industry)?
We're not looking for innovation or power, but setting the agenda. Jobs certainly does that.
Apple seemed to find a way to interoperate with XMLized Word documents. In Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther), any application using the Cocoa text classes can read MS Word files, including the latest XML variants.
I've spent time trying to decipher the Excel file format, and I'd much rather have the XML version than the binary version.
As for physical products, there's an entirely different environment happens.
No they aren't. You can be damn sure that Ford would be sued if there was a bug in the software that controls a car's breaks. The same applies to software on the space shuttle, elevators, and medical equipment.
Just like car companies are required to keep spare parts for years after a model is discontinued, I think software needs the same. I should be able to get bug fixes without having to fork up money every year for an upgrade (especially when I don't want any of the new features, just the bug fixes).
It is all a matter of how you approach programming. I was trained at a school that was grooming people to work for the DOD and other places doing embedded work. When I compare programming practices with others I'm very often apalled at the way the program.
How much business did France and Germany do with Iraq in violation of UN resolutions?
Read the articles and you'll find that one is covered. The US government stripped out 8000 of the 11,200 pages Iraq sent to UN. Fortunately, Iraq also gave a copy to some Europian reporters who wrote stories about those pages. Pages that provided dirt on France, Germany, Russia, and the US. It also gave evidence that Cheney should be indicted for war crimes.
I never heard that story reported in the US, which frightens me. And I would call it censorship when the corporate-owned media doesn't report a story because it would make their parent company look bad.
I got my degree in Journalism and worked in DC for a few years. I gave up on it because of the self-censorship that all reporters were expected to perform.
For more details, see Conspiracy Theory Rock: Quicktime | AVI.
I know a lawyer involved in the lawsuit against Replay for commercial skip and sharing recorded programs. Anytime we get into a debate about IP and Fair Use, he always points out that personal use is not a part of fair use.
While courts have ruled favorably for consumers in the Betamax and Rio cases, those decisions also have many conditions and footnotes that limit their application to other areas.
On a positive note, he told me the industry has tried numerous ways to cirumvent commercial skip and none have worked. A legal solution appears to be the only way to prevent it.
I agree with the article's assesment of programming, too. But for a language, I avoid PHP largely for the same reasons as Perl (and because is is largely for web stuff, and I've grown to hate web-stuff).
If you haven't given Objective-C or Cocoa a try, you should. The language is truly dynamic and very powerful. Sometimes I wish there was garbage collection, but the retain/release/autorelease mechanism is very easy to use and gives you the ability to release objects when you want to (closing file descriptors, etc.).
Naming arguments makes things much easier -- rarely is there a need to hit the documentation or use code completion to figure out what arguments are -- they are explicit in the names. This makes the code very readable.
either the price needs to drop on the payware upgrades, or the incompatible major version upgrades need to be spread to two years or more, so that developers can reach their audience.
Jaguar did a lot to help with this problem. Apple added conditional macros to allow compiling for specific versions, and they added weak linking so you use new features on new versions of the OS but still run on older versions.
The solutions are nowhere near as easy to use as they were in CFM (starting with the first PowerPCs), but at least they've added the capability to MachO.
It is now months later and I have yet to see even a beta of the MacOS client. Not only that, but they have also said that there will be NO toolset for MacOS.
At MWSF the developer there said the client was pretty much ready, and they were waiting on the tools so they could package them all together.
I hadn't heard that the tools were canceled, but if they were, then the client should certainly be ready by now.
Historically in the U.S., unions were created to correct the horrible treatment of workers by large, overpowerful corporations during the robber-baron era circa 1920's and 1930's. The relevance of unions today has been questioned by big business, citing numerous government regulations that work to protect employees from hazards in the workplace, discrimination, work hours, etc. What these government regulations don't protect you from is being treated like shit by companies that cut hours, push for unpaid overtime, cut perks, cut staffing, cut benefits - All while operating profitably.
The big difference now is that you can now start your own business with virtually no capital. Don't like how your employer treats you, leave and start your own business!
I've never liked unions because they equalize everyone, meaning that the talented are treated like the idiots. Unions are the biggest advocates of seniority over merit-based pay, which is one of the biggest evils of our society. Our education system wouldn't be such a mess if teachers were paid based on performance.
In high school, I worked as a grocery clerk. I worked as hard as I could and tried to make the job fun, which resulted in my checking out, on average, twice as many items per minute as everyone else.
Unfortunately, I couldn't get paid more because of unions regulations. And all the other checkers gave me hell because I was making their lazy asses look bad. At least I was able to get better hours on the schedule.
If I don't like the job you are doing, I should be able to fire you. If you don't like the terms of employment, work somewhere else or start your own business.
It is for vector graphics, not animation, sound, and other crap that I refuse to allow my browser to display. And because the player isn't closed-source, a plugin can be written allowing users to disable annoying features like sound, animation, and ad banner sized displays (if it had such features).
I have to disable flash everytime I update a browser or macromedia program, which is very annoying. I have no problem with SVG, since it doesn't make my computer start playing annoying music when I load a web page.
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And what is wrong with that, in moderation?
I only watch 3 television shows on a regular basis and I make a point to schedule my life around them. (Unfortunately, they are all on at 9 pm sunday this week thanks to dubya.)
My family and friends have known for years that I will never answer the phone between 9-10 pm on Sunday nights. First it was X-Files, then the Sopranos, now Alias. I really don't think there is anything wrong with that, either. What's the problem with having two scheduled hours a week for watching television? (now I watch the Sopranos later in the week on HBO-on-demand).
I try to watch the Daily Show every night, but I miss it frequently. Watching a daily show is too hard without a DVR.
That is pure myth. The only adminstration in the last 25 years to not run a deficit was Clinton. The Clinton adminstration is the one that saw the smallest increase in federal employees in the last 25 years.
Republicans are not for smaller government. They are for having government intrude in my bedroom and personal life. They are for giving big tax cuts to their rich buddies. The are for gouging the government with fat contracts to their contributors (Haliburton).
And I'm saying this as a Libertarian, not a Democrat. Republicans claim to be better for the economy, but the past 25 years show that to be wrong. At least the democrats aren't as happy to take away my rights.
Notice how the Republicans are the ones always proposing constitutional amendments to take away people's rights. Smaller government my ass.
One of the big changes from Rhapsody to OS X was that adhering to Apple UI become more important than adhering to the NeXT UI. Apple users were not willing to accept NeXT/Unix with a Apple compatibility layer. And with each release you are seeing more of the NeXT implementations replaced with Carbon implementations (though the interface stays the same).
For example, originally Cocoa and Carbon's menu systems were very differerent. But in a later release (10.1 I believe), the Cocoa system was rewritten on top of the Carbon one. Concepts like tear-off menus were abandonded because they weren't the Mac-way. Also, the Cocoa text system was rewritten to use ATSUI.
Apple also tells developers not to depend on command line tools. Installation of the BSD environment is optional. So in most cases, you are not suppose to just wrap up OSS tools. You can write new ones using OSS libraries, but Mac applications are not (supposed) to be wrappers around a command-line tool.
That's not what he said. The current development model of OSS can't deliver the GUI designs of closed source software. It certainly could change, and he points out his observations on what the problem is. OSS is great and no one (besides MS and SCO) is knocking it. But there are areas where it can't compete in the current market. GUI is the most glaring.As to market share, that is entirely irrelevant. What matters is install base. And Linux on the desktop won't be passing Apple on that for a while, if ever. Especially if you count desktop, which does not include POS and other situations where the computer is being used for 1 purpose only as opposed to running multiple general/business software packages. While some POS systems are built with Mac OS X, that isn't Apple's market so their market share in that segment doesn't matter. But unfortunately, PC sales figures include that. So you're comparing Apples to Oranges.
And what makes that guy an expert?
When the iTunes store first came out, Apple's website linked the word Fairplay to the veridisc website. I'm not sure when they removed that link, but it was there at one point. It probably can be found in the way back machine.
Flash excludes using that site from my Treo. Pretty lame when I go to someones website for an address/phone number and am unable to get it on my mobile browser (pda, phone, etc). Same goes for restaurant menus, hours of operation, etc.
Too many sites today just contain a big flash file.
You can also tell IB to support it by using the commandThere is no GUI support in xcode, but I'm hopeful that Apple will add support soon (or release the API so someone else can add it).
I think that is a horrible idea. I never play multigame machines because they don't have the original controls and they just don't feel right.
Why play MAME at an arcade? Play it at home. For an arcade, I want the big box with the original controls and artwork.
I doubt you'd ever see a MAME machine be popular in a bar. But put an original Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, or Asteriods and you'll find it making a lot of quarters. A generic box isn't going to bring back nostalga.
Also, any games with unique controls won't work. Guantlet, Rampart, Spy Hunter, Paperboy, Gorf, Centipede. Those need to be in the original case.
And then die a painful death.
Java code under the LGPL acts just like regular software under the GPL, so I've had to reject a lot of third party projects for work I've done. The GPL can be effective when a commercial license is also offered, but since java is already free that would mean most businesses would have to pay for what was free. Makes
Now, I'm all for Sun releasing Java under a license similar to Mozilla or Apple's open source license. Then they still maintain control but also get a number of benifits of open source.
I like C/R. I think it's a good idea. I wish that everyone would get accustomed to it.
It is never going to happen. I hate C/R and refuse to work with it. I know many others who feel the same way. If you send me an email and I reply, I'm not going to jump through hoops for you to get my reply.
Also, I've yet to hear of a C/R system that doesn't cause a nightmare for automated messages, like reciepts from online purchases. And if you were to add one address, what if I decided to switch mail servers and the address changes? (I've seen this many times with addresses I whitelist in SpamAssassin).
The real solution is the yahoo-proposed one -- only accept SMTP traffic from a server authorized (via DNS) to send mail for that domain.
The proposal is very simple and most of the posts are just plain wrong about what it means.
All mail servers will have a public/private key of some type. The public key will be stored in the DNS system as extra data.
When an SMTP server connects to another SMTP server, the sending server will encrypt something (likely a checksum) with the private key for the domain the mail is from (likley the envelope from, not the From: header) and place it in a header.
The receiving server will then grab the public key for the domain in the envelope and verify the message is being sent by a server that is authoritative for that domain name.
Very simple. Now spammers can't send spam and make it look like it came from my domain. I'm currently getting flooded with bounces from a spammer doing this, so I really want this proposal adopted.
The implementation can be phased in, too. The mail server could add a header saying if the domain was verified and spamassassin could then adjust the spam rating of the message appropriately. Eventually servers would be configured to refuse mail from unverified domains.
So if you own a domain name, you just have to generate a key pair, add the public key to DNS, and add the private key to any SMTP server you send through.
Once this is required, you theoretically will always be able to contact a person responsible for the sending of the spam (whoever is listed in the whois database for the domain). Contacting them (or abuse@) would solve the problem with any major email provider, and you can just ban email from any small provider that doesn't give an adequate response.
Aside from the possible computational requirements for all the crypto work, I don't see any downsides to this. If by some chance a spammer broke/acquired your private key, you'd just generate a new one and update your DNS entry.
Maybe that works for you. I check email twice a day and I never answer the phone, so neither of those are options for quickly contacting me. If a coworker needs to ask a question, IM works best. Especially when I'm working from home.
For example, if someone wants me to come into their office to show me something or to join a meeting, they IM me. Email is not a solution for that kind of need.
Plus, it works great for my clients. If they notice a problem with their website, they IM so I can immediately take a look at it. Same thing happens when someone doesn't have the database privileges they need. They IM, and I grant them the privileges. They can get back to work immediately.
I also know that the Wall Street Journal Online uses IM extensively between their U.S. and Europe offices. Editors at both locations will be working on the website and use it to make sure two people aren't working on the same story that just came over the wire. They used to run up huge phone bills between the offices but that all disappeared with IM.
I just read all 56 pages of the law. Here are some points people are misunderstanding.
1) Creating 5 hotmail accounts with false info or 5 domains with false info isn't illegal. It is illegal to do so by script or other automated means and then send spam from it.
2) While opt-out lists only apply to the specific line of business (if the rcpt sees on that name and not the parent company), once a user opts-out it is illegal to give/sell that email address to anyone. So you can't take the address and start a new company to send spam as another post suggested.
3) The FTC gets to decide on a subject label for all porn spam.
4) Address harvesting off websites is illegal. I think that is a good thing.
5) Not just the FTC can prosecute. The SEC can prosecute mesages related to investments, FDIC for banks, etc.
6) Any state agency or official can bring a civil action.
7) The FTC is required to develop a plan for offering rewards to those who report violators of the act. Hopefully, Congress would then implement it.
8) The FCC can make harsher regulations for delivery of email over wireless service. So if you read your email on your phone, that sounds pretty good.
I agree that this law really sucks and doesn't do much. But it does do something. It makes it illegal to fake headers, use a mail relay without permission, and not honor opt-out requests. It won't stop every person, but I would hope it would help stop those few top spammers who are responsible for most of the spam out there. They are U.S. citizens and we have plenty of people who can track the spam back to them.
One problem is with the ISP civil action limitation. While I can understand not wanting the court system flooded by a lawsuit for every spam message sent, I think it should have been written to apply to anyone running a mail server. That is who has the real problem with spam, not just ISPs. (For many businesses, their ISPs have nothing to do with email.)
The only thing that bothers me is the requirement for a physical postal address in all spam. For businesses that don't have a physical presense, I'd prefer to see website, email, and/or phone required.
The cheapest price they could find for a wedding photographer was $1200 in the Houston area.
My dad was named the 2003 Houston-area professional photographer of the year, so I know a little bit about this subject.
For a good photographer, 1200 is way too low. When my dad shot a wedding, he'd bring an assistant. Some wedding photographers I know bring 2-3 assistants.
They are at the wedding beforehand to shoot pictures because there will be no time during the wedding for posed family shots. They stay throughout most of the reception. That is easily 6 hours of work. Normally on a weekend. I don't think $100/hour for a freelancing professional on the weekend is that outrageous.
Now add in the massive costs for a professional. For my dad, that meant bringing a professional lighting setup and multiple hasselblad cameras and lenses (easily over $10,000) so there is no chance at missing a shot. Then throw in processing costs, proofs (4x5 proofs of all shots are made), basic administrative/advertising overhead, travel, planning sessions, profit, etc.
And don't understimate the fact that it normally is weekend work. My parents would work all week long and then not be around on the weekend because they were shooting weddings. That's one of the main reasons they closed their studio -- it was too taxing on their personal lives.
You are paying for an expert to capture one of the most important days of your life, and you get what you pay for.
Sure you can trust your wedding to a college student with a single 35mm camera. But is a few thousand more really not worth it to get a trained professional who uses redundent, top-of-the-line equipment?
But then again, look at how much of the world uses Windoze because it is "good enough".
And the premier program is awesome for businesses. $3500 gets you a ticket to WWDC ($1500 normally) and 10 20% hardware discounts. Purchase 1 maxed out XRaid and you've paid for the cost of the program.
Hmm, since when is it possible to "cheat" APIs?
SInce the first days of NeXT. There's a program called class-dump that will give you header files for system frameworks. I've used them numerous times to work around OS problems.
As to Apple breaking things, they've done this plenty in the past, fortunately Panther isn't as bad (in my case). With Jaguar, one of my applications would no longer launch. And I wasn't using any private APIs.
Panther also will break the look and feel of numerous Carbon applications because of the changes made to Aqua.
How much marketshare Apple has it irrelevant. The question was who is an agenda setter?
Jobs brought us firewire, no-floppy computers, usb (never would have taken off without the iMac), iMovie, iPhoto, iPod, iTunes music store, largest vendor of Unix computers, the Aqua look and feel. And don't forget the advertising which has caused a lot of people to talk about Apple over the last 5 years.
All of these are things that other companies have since adopted or tried to copy. What has any one person at Sony done that compares to that list (and is copied by others in the industry)?
We're not looking for innovation or power, but setting the agenda. Jobs certainly does that.
Apple seemed to find a way to interoperate with XMLized Word documents. In Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther), any application using the Cocoa text classes can read MS Word files, including the latest XML variants.
I've spent time trying to decipher the Excel file format, and I'd much rather have the XML version than the binary version.
No they aren't. You can be damn sure that Ford would be sued if there was a bug in the software that controls a car's breaks. The same applies to software on the space shuttle, elevators, and medical equipment.
Just like car companies are required to keep spare parts for years after a model is discontinued, I think software needs the same. I should be able to get bug fixes without having to fork up money every year for an upgrade (especially when I don't want any of the new features, just the bug fixes).
It is all a matter of how you approach programming. I was trained at a school that was grooming people to work for the DOD and other places doing embedded work. When I compare programming practices with others I'm very often apalled at the way the program.
Read the articles and you'll find that one is covered. The US government stripped out 8000 of the 11,200 pages Iraq sent to UN. Fortunately, Iraq also gave a copy to some Europian reporters who wrote stories about those pages. Pages that provided dirt on France, Germany, Russia, and the US. It also gave evidence that Cheney should be indicted for war crimes.
I never heard that story reported in the US, which frightens me. And I would call it censorship when the corporate-owned media doesn't report a story because it would make their parent company look bad.
I got my degree in Journalism and worked in DC for a few years. I gave up on it because of the self-censorship that all reporters were expected to perform.
For more details, see Conspiracy Theory Rock: Quicktime | AVI.
I know a lawyer involved in the lawsuit against Replay for commercial skip and sharing recorded programs. Anytime we get into a debate about IP and Fair Use, he always points out that personal use is not a part of fair use.
While courts have ruled favorably for consumers in the Betamax and Rio cases, those decisions also have many conditions and footnotes that limit their application to other areas.
On a positive note, he told me the industry has tried numerous ways to cirumvent commercial skip and none have worked. A legal solution appears to be the only way to prevent it.
I agree with the article's assesment of programming, too. But for a language, I avoid PHP largely for the same reasons as Perl (and because is is largely for web stuff, and I've grown to hate web-stuff).
If you haven't given Objective-C or Cocoa a try, you should. The language is truly dynamic and very powerful. Sometimes I wish there was garbage collection, but the retain/release/autorelease mechanism is very easy to use and gives you the ability to release objects when you want to (closing file descriptors, etc.).
Naming arguments makes things much easier -- rarely is there a need to hit the documentation or use code completion to figure out what arguments are -- they are explicit in the names. This makes the code very readable.
Mark
Jaguar did a lot to help with this problem. Apple added conditional macros to allow compiling for specific versions, and they added weak linking so you use new features on new versions of the OS but still run on older versions.
The solutions are nowhere near as easy to use as they were in CFM (starting with the first PowerPCs), but at least they've added the capability to MachO.
Mark
At MWSF the developer there said the client was pretty much ready, and they were waiting on the tools so they could package them all together.
I hadn't heard that the tools were canceled, but if they were, then the client should certainly be ready by now.
Mark
The big difference now is that you can now start your own business with virtually no capital. Don't like how your employer treats you, leave and start your own business!
I've never liked unions because they equalize everyone, meaning that the talented are treated like the idiots. Unions are the biggest advocates of seniority over merit-based pay, which is one of the biggest evils of our society. Our education system wouldn't be such a mess if teachers were paid based on performance.
In high school, I worked as a grocery clerk. I worked as hard as I could and tried to make the job fun, which resulted in my checking out, on average, twice as many items per minute as everyone else.
Unfortunately, I couldn't get paid more because of unions regulations. And all the other checkers gave me hell because I was making their lazy asses look bad. At least I was able to get better hours on the schedule.
If I don't like the job you are doing, I should be able to fire you. If you don't like the terms of employment, work somewhere else or start your own business.
It is for vector graphics, not animation, sound, and other crap that I refuse to allow my browser to display. And because the player isn't closed-source, a plugin can be written allowing users to disable annoying features like sound, animation, and ad banner sized displays (if it had such features).
I have to disable flash everytime I update a browser or macromedia program, which is very annoying. I have no problem with SVG, since it doesn't make my computer start playing annoying music when I load a web page.