Because our nation's actions since 2001 have been shameful. An invasion and occupation based on lies, detentions without due process, torture, kidnapping, fiscal irresponsibility, the subjugation of science for political ends, etc. I was proud of my nation before, and with luck I'll be proud of it again someday. But I'm not proud of it now.
and we are doing the right thing, even if you dont think we are
It may be comforting to tell yourself that, but saying it doesn't make it so.
So why do your Mac OS X screenshots on the front page appear to use Swing's Metal theme?
There were two reasons we forced the Mac version to use a non-Mac theme: (1) The non-Mac buttons were a bit smaller, so we could fit more of them into a given amount of screen real estate (our app needs to display lots of controls so this is important), and (2) The windows opened a bit faster when using the simpler non-Aqua theme. (Dunno if this is still true, but it was true at the time we made that decision, about 18 months ago).
You can argue that it's ugly, and I'd be the first to agree with you -- but that was a conscious decision. We chose better functionality over better looks.
Developers (not all, just many) are too stuck up if they cannot fathom paying $5000 for a tool which will take care of just about every tedious problem with their GUI program.
I wouldn't use the rather inflammatory phrase "stuck up", but it basically comes down to a business decision: is it less expensive to pay TrollTech a multi-thousand dollar fee, or to get the necessary functions implemented without using Qt? For my company, the Qt was by far the cheaper, better option. Our Qt license paid for itself in the first year. We now have an app that runs well on every major platform, that was straightforward to write and is easy to maintain. Using a cheaper, less well-designed GUI toolkit would probably have doubled our development time, and coding our own portable GUI toolkit from scratch would have made things ten times harder. (of course making our app GPL would have given us the best of both worlds... but I couldn't quite convince management of that;^))
(Not associated with TrollTech, just a satisfied customer)
Maybe a giant ring around the earth actually would be a better solution to prevent ill effects from global warming
It would be a bit of a bummer for astronomers and astronauts though... lots of little particles getting in the way of your telescope, or eroding the skin of your spaceship...
The top two would be HD Video and high quality audio.
I don't think that either of those two functions require the use of swap space, though. In fact, programs that do video and audio typically go to great length to avoid using swap, since swapping destroys their ability to play back in real time. They do use up lots of disk space, but that's a separate issue.
You are joking, right? Somebody will find a way of using all that space up, and more
Perhaps, but what? Even Microsoft can't think of any more features to add to Office these days. At some point, 99.99% of people's everyday needs will be addressable by the amount of RAM in their machines, without using swap. The question is, have we reached that point yet?
I don't buy into it, cause my father is blind, yet very intelligent
Your father evolved from a long line of sighted people, and so he still has the physical brain structures evolved for use with sight, even if he can't use them.
Bullshit. In this dystopia you've described, who do you think these corporations are selling their products to?
People with the money to pay for the products, presumably. That includes the rich (who keep getting richer), and the poor (who still scrape together some money from non-outsourcable minimum-wage service jobs)
Hmmm, perhaps your argument is not logical?
Perhaps it is, perhaps it isn't, but since you responded to the argument you assumed I had made instead of what I actually said, it's hard to say. In particular, I didn't say "everyone is out of work except for the Ethiopians", but rather that everyone will be made to work harder for less compensation in order to compete.
Ah yes, the race to the bottom... in a few years we'll hear about jobs moving from India to Ethiopia, because the Indians are too picky about things like "wanting food feed their children" and "reducing the work week to 80 hours" to be competitive in the global marketplace.
Let's say this happened in the US. The entire project would be shitcanned and study after study would be performed to show why and how the rocket exploded
It sounds like you are comparing the explosion of a $100 billion space shuttle (and the loss of 7 lives) to the failure of a $4 million unmanned ICBM. Apples and oranges.
That's easy to say, but harder to do. Any non-trivial program that connects to the Internet is going to download something... that's what makes it useful. And if the program wasn't 100% correctly written, there may be a way to make it execute the thing it downloaded. Voila, all the conditions are there to catch a virus, without the user ever realizing he was "downloading random crap" at all. (For examples, see: every web browser ever written)
When MacOS is compatible with x86 processors, Apple would be fool not to sell it as an individual product.
That depends. MacOS is popular because it works really well, and one reason it works really well is because Apple has strict control over the hardware environment on which it runs. If OS/X is changed to try to run on all the cheap-ass half-broken Taiwanese no-name hardware that is available, it's quite likely that they would end up with softare that works only about as well as Windows... i.e., it mostly works, most of the time. At that point people might decide that OS/X isn't really any better than Windows after all, and so why pay more for an OS that runs less software? Then Apple would be screwed. (And this doesn't even count the fact that an OS/X with support for non-Apple hardware would make Apple just as vulnerable to piracy as Microsoft is)
So, what happens when your nice point and click interface that just works, well, doesn't work?
If the nice point and click interface always works, then the issue never comes up. And that, I believe, is the business Apple is in... making GUIs that work well enough and reliably enough that you never need to fallback to anything else.
(I'm reminded of people who scoffed at early automobiles as impractical, because you would need to buy a horse anyway to tow the car home every time it broke down. Of course, the eventual solution was: cars that rarely break down)
If it means a good current distro goes Fischer-Price, it's a bad thing
Well, that's the beauty of a free market in Linux distros, innit? If a Fischer-Price version of Linux is indeed a bad thing, nobody will buy/use it and it will disappear. If it turns out it is a good thing, then people will like using it and it sell, and the Linux market will be expanded. We can't lose:^)
I don't see what the concern is. If Apple had announced that they were going to sell OS/X as a software-only product that you could install on any PC, then perhaps it would be competing with Linux. But they are only going to be selling OS/X to run on their own Apple branded hardware, which means that for the vast majority of people (i.e. those that already own an x86 PC and those that just want to buy a cheap machine, and aren't willing to pay the "Apple cool design surcharge"), OS/X will continue not to be an option.
Even if someone hacks OS/X to run on non-Apple hardware, it won't have much of an effect, because you can bet that OS/X will not run well on non-Apple hardware. And having an OS that runs well is the whole point of running OS/X -- if people want a broken OS with missing-driver hell, they already have Windows installed for that.
I guess it might become problematic for Linux if Apple started to take over the computer hardware market and the majority of PCs sold were Apples with OS/X pre-installed... but I'll believe that when I see it happen.
The other main thing I have noticed from close personal contact is that, while Republicans vote and then go on with life, Democrats never let the election end.
... except, of course, in Washington State, where the Republicans are still crying foul and pursuing legal redress against the narrow Democratic victory for Governor. I think it's more accurate to say "in an extremely close election, the winners go on with life and the losers whine". Presumably if and when the Democrats start winning elections, they will handle the election results more gracefully:^)
The Democrats have devolved into being an group of people driven by hatred. They are just angry all the time. It is impossible to have a rational debate with people that reached this level of paranoid mania.
Funny, I am tempted to say the same thing about Republicans. However, in doing so I would be guilty of stereotyping/overgeneralizing, just as I think you are in the text above. A more accurate description of the situation might be that a significant number of Americans (of various political stripes) have "devolved into being driven by hatred" and "are angry all the time". I think the following factors may be responsible for this phenomenon:
September 11th, and all the resulting paranoia and counter-paranoia that came with it
The splintering of media into many different channels, so that if you prefer a particular type of political slant it's easy to feed yourself a diet of that and nothing else 24/7, so that you never have to seriously confront an idea or argument that is at odds with your pre-chosen worldview.
Various factions (be they political, religious, or commercial) who actively fan the flames of fear, hatred, and irrational emotion as a means of bolstering support for their own agendas.
An educational system that does not teach sufficient critical thinking skills to students, leaving them open to pandering and intellectual manipulation
So what I think is happening is that your media outlets have presented your with a "straw man" caricature of what Democrats are like, and my media outlets have presented me with a "straw man" caricature of what Republicans are like. In both cases, we know what the people in our own towns are like, and they are by and large decent people, but people in far-off places (the Bible belt or LA) we only hear about in the news, and what we hear (from the politically slanted reports we read) isn't flattering. But if you (or I) were to spend time with "those people" in person, you'd realize that the people there are by and large decent and reasonable also -- it's just that people like that don't get talked about in the news.
That said, I do think that the Bush Administration has done more to damage America's future than Al Qaeda ever could have. We were once a role model to other nations, the "Shining City on a Hill" as Reagan put it. Now we are universally reviled as hypocrites who preach about human rights and democracy, but can't or won't live up to our own standards. Americans are a good people, and we may someday re-acquire our onetime reputation for decency and idealism, but in order to improve our behaviour we'd have to first admit that our behaviour was wrong -- something the Bush administration seems unable to do. Until then, the emperor has no clothes. Pre-emptive invasion on false pretenses, torture and sexual humiliation of prisoners, "disappearing" citizens, holding suspects indefinitely without due process of law, trampling of civil rights, political cronyism, publically revealing the names of undercover CIA agents in order to "get revenge" on their husbands, rewriting scientific reports to suit political ends, rewriting intelligence reports to suit political ends, environmental destruction, irresponsible financial policies that run up huge deficits to reward the rich while cutting social services for the poor... these are all immoral actions, regardless of who does them. One doesn't need to be "driven by irrational hatred" to see the damage being done and become upset about it.
The prosecution can easily prove they viewed pr0n, but that may not be illegal. To posess something requires an act of knowingly taking possession. IANAL.
I should hope so, otherwise it is possible to get anyone sent to prison just by emailing them a kiddy-porn JPG. By the time they see it, it's already on their hard drive and thus they are "in possession"...
That is my "player" plugged into BT, would know that the next 30 seconds of content is Very high priority, the following 30 seconds is high priority, the next 30 seconds is low priority and the following 30 seconds is very low priority.
That would be good, but another possibility would be a subscription model: tell BT what shows you are interested in, and it downloads the latest episodes whenever they become available... then the next day you come in to see what's on and everything is already on your hard drive for instant watching. Of course it would require that you leave your computer on 24/7 with an always-on connection.... but having lots of full-time sharing computers would make BT faster anyway.
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Having a viable fish population is more important still, unless you want the hungry people to become starving people.
1983 is nothing -- a pretty good C to C++ translator has been included with every Unix since the 70's. They call it "cat".
Because our nation's actions since 2001 have been shameful. An invasion and occupation based on lies, detentions without due process, torture, kidnapping, fiscal irresponsibility, the subjugation of science for political ends, etc. I was proud of my nation before, and with luck I'll be proud of it again someday. But I'm not proud of it now.
and we are doing the right thing, even if you dont think we are
It may be comforting to tell yourself that, but saying it doesn't make it so.
There were two reasons we forced the Mac version to use a non-Mac theme: (1) The non-Mac buttons were a bit smaller, so we could fit more of them into a given amount of screen real estate (our app needs to display lots of controls so this is important), and (2) The windows opened a bit faster when using the simpler non-Aqua theme. (Dunno if this is still true, but it was true at the time we made that decision, about 18 months ago).
You can argue that it's ugly, and I'd be the first to agree with you -- but that was a conscious decision. We chose better functionality over better looks.
I wouldn't use the rather inflammatory phrase "stuck up", but it basically comes down to a business decision: is it less expensive to pay TrollTech a multi-thousand dollar fee, or to get the necessary functions implemented without using Qt? For my company, the Qt was by far the cheaper, better option. Our Qt license paid for itself in the first year. We now have an app that runs well on every major platform, that was straightforward to write and is easy to maintain. Using a cheaper, less well-designed GUI toolkit would probably have doubled our development time, and coding our own portable GUI toolkit from scratch would have made things ten times harder. (of course making our app GPL would have given us the best of both worlds... but I couldn't quite convince management of that
(Not associated with TrollTech, just a satisfied customer)
It would be a bit of a bummer for astronomers and astronauts though... lots of little particles getting in the way of your telescope, or eroding the skin of your spaceship...
I don't think that either of those two functions require the use of swap space, though. In fact, programs that do video and audio typically go to great length to avoid using swap, since swapping destroys their ability to play back in real time. They do use up lots of disk space, but that's a separate issue.
Perhaps, but what? Even Microsoft can't think of any more features to add to Office these days. At some point, 99.99% of people's everyday needs will be addressable by the amount of RAM in their machines, without using swap. The question is, have we reached that point yet?
No, but perhaps their children are...
I don't buy into it, cause my father is blind, yet very intelligent
Your father evolved from a long line of sighted people, and so he still has the physical brain structures evolved for use with sight, even if he can't use them.
People with the money to pay for the products, presumably. That includes the rich (who keep getting richer), and the poor (who still scrape together some money from non-outsourcable minimum-wage service jobs)
Hmmm, perhaps your argument is not logical?
Perhaps it is, perhaps it isn't, but since you responded to the argument you assumed I had made instead of what I actually said, it's hard to say. In particular, I didn't say "everyone is out of work except for the Ethiopians", but rather that everyone will be made to work harder for less compensation in order to compete.
Ah yes, the race to the bottom... in a few years we'll hear about jobs moving from India to Ethiopia, because the Indians are too picky about things like "wanting food feed their children" and "reducing the work week to 80 hours" to be competitive in the global marketplace.
And of course, there is the theme song for this topic
Somehow I don't see that happening any time soon.
It sounds like you are comparing the explosion of a $100 billion space shuttle (and the loss of 7 lives) to the failure of a $4 million unmanned ICBM. Apples and oranges.
That's easy to say, but harder to do. Any non-trivial program that connects to the Internet is going to download something... that's what makes it useful. And if the program wasn't 100% correctly written, there may be a way to make it execute the thing it downloaded. Voila, all the conditions are there to catch a virus, without the user ever realizing he was "downloading random crap" at all. (For examples, see: every web browser ever written)
That depends. MacOS is popular because it works really well, and one reason it works really well is because Apple has strict control over the hardware environment on which it runs. If OS/X is changed to try to run on all the cheap-ass half-broken Taiwanese no-name hardware that is available, it's quite likely that they would end up with softare that works only about as well as Windows... i.e., it mostly works, most of the time. At that point people might decide that OS/X isn't really any better than Windows after all, and so why pay more for an OS that runs less software? Then Apple would be screwed. (And this doesn't even count the fact that an OS/X with support for non-Apple hardware would make Apple just as vulnerable to piracy as Microsoft is)
If the nice point and click interface always works, then the issue never comes up. And that, I believe, is the business Apple is in... making GUIs that work well enough and reliably enough that you never need to fallback to anything else.
(I'm reminded of people who scoffed at early automobiles as impractical, because you would need to buy a horse anyway to tow the car home every time it broke down. Of course, the eventual solution was: cars that rarely break down)
Well, that's the beauty of a free market in Linux distros, innit? If a Fischer-Price version of Linux is indeed a bad thing, nobody will buy/use it and it will disappear. If it turns out it is a good thing, then people will like using it and it sell, and the Linux market will be expanded. We can't lose
Even if someone hacks OS/X to run on non-Apple hardware, it won't have much of an effect, because you can bet that OS/X will not run well on non-Apple hardware. And having an OS that runs well is the whole point of running OS/X -- if people want a broken OS with missing-driver hell, they already have Windows installed for that.
I guess it might become problematic for Linux if Apple started to take over the computer hardware market and the majority of PCs sold were Apples with OS/X pre-installed... but I'll believe that when I see it happen.
Funny, I am tempted to say the same thing about Republicans. However, in doing so I would be guilty of stereotyping/overgeneralizing, just as I think you are in the text above. A more accurate description of the situation might be that a significant number of Americans (of various political stripes) have "devolved into being driven by hatred" and "are angry all the time". I think the following factors may be responsible for this phenomenon:
So what I think is happening is that your media outlets have presented your with a "straw man" caricature of what Democrats are like, and my media outlets have presented me with a "straw man" caricature of what Republicans are like. In both cases, we know what the people in our own towns are like, and they are by and large decent people, but people in far-off places (the Bible belt or LA) we only hear about in the news, and what we hear (from the politically slanted reports we read) isn't flattering. But if you (or I) were to spend time with "those people" in person, you'd realize that the people there are by and large decent and reasonable also -- it's just that people like that don't get talked about in the news.
That said, I do think that the Bush Administration has done more to damage America's future than Al Qaeda ever could have. We were once a role model to other nations, the "Shining City on a Hill" as Reagan put it. Now we are universally reviled as hypocrites who preach about human rights and democracy, but can't or won't live up to our own standards. Americans are a good people, and we may someday re-acquire our onetime reputation for decency and idealism, but in order to improve our behaviour we'd have to first admit that our behaviour was wrong -- something the Bush administration seems unable to do. Until then, the emperor has no clothes. Pre-emptive invasion on false pretenses, torture and sexual humiliation of prisoners, "disappearing" citizens, holding suspects indefinitely without due process of law, trampling of civil rights, political cronyism, publically revealing the names of undercover CIA agents in order to "get revenge" on their husbands, rewriting scientific reports to suit political ends, rewriting intelligence reports to suit political ends, environmental destruction, irresponsible financial policies that run up huge deficits to reward the rich while cutting social services for the poor... these are all immoral actions, regardless of who does them. One doesn't need to be "driven by irrational hatred" to see the damage being done and become upset about it.
I should hope so, otherwise it is possible to get anyone sent to prison just by emailing them a kiddy-porn JPG. By the time they see it, it's already on their hard drive and thus they are "in possession"...
That would be good, but another possibility would be a subscription model: tell BT what shows you are interested in, and it downloads the latest episodes whenever they become available... then the next day you come in to see what's on and everything is already on your hard drive for instant watching. Of course it would require that you leave your computer on 24/7 with an always-on connection.... but having lots of full-time sharing computers would make BT faster anyway.
There are others who would say this has already happened.
Yes, but have you ever tried to program one of those things? I can't even patch mine to keep me away from the ice cream....