While pejorative in tone, this is essentially true. There's little practical difference between ghosts, angels, demons, and gods, other than how much power they have and their moral alignment. If you find any of them plausible, there's no reason you shouldn't believe in them all, other than peer pressure and social convention.
It's being manufactured by a US company who have chosen to release a cheap version in Thailand
And there's nothing new or novel about that. Gray market goods were being imported into the US long before "software" existed. It's never been considered immoral or "ripping off" the company to buy an American product in Hong Kong for a few hundred dollars less and bring it back to the USA.
I'm just trying to figure out why gray market goods have always been considered acceptable, DVD region encoding has always been considered a ridiculous market price discrimination tool (indeed, many countries allow circumvention of it precisely because it is used solely for price discrimination), yet for some reason Valve is considered a victim in this situation and the people trying to import the cheaper product are suddenly considered "bad" by so many otherwise rational people.
It is indeed tough shit for the customers, simply because Valve has the ability to enforce their preferences in a way that no other company does, and has the DMCA on their side to prevent their own customers from exercising their legal rights (much the same way it's perfectly legal to use clips of video, yet illegal to obtain them from a protected DVD).
It's a perfect intersection of legal and technical abuse of customers, yet it seems nobody cares because it's Valve and we like their games.
if you are in column view (my favorite), and you click on a "special" location, like your home directory, the Applications folder, Documents, etc., you are rooted to that spot. That is, your horizontal scroll bar disappears.
10.5 doesn't do this. The Finder didn't change much at all (IMHO) between 10.1 and 10.4, but it's been totally rebuilt in 10.5. If the Finder has annoyed you in the past for any other reasons, chances are you'll like 10.5 much, much better (it has it's own quirks, but they're not the kind that make you want to kill the programmers).
When I think of "backups", I tend to think "this will help me recover my files if my computer dies, is stolen, or is unexpectedly repossessed by nature".
That's what Time Machine does. If you put the Leopard install DVD into a new Mac, one of your options is to plug in a Time Machine disk and restore your whole old system to the new computer. That's as backed up as any backup system I've ever used (and a hell of a lot easier).
So when Vista needs beefier hardware and some Windows 98 apps are broken on it, the reason is because Microsoft sucks and it's their fault for requiring a current computer to run their current OS. But when Leopard needs beefier specs, it's the user's fault they haven't upgraded by now and it's all taken in stride.
There's a slight difference between Apple saying that systems from 1999 won't run the latest software and MS saying that systems released 30 days ago won't run the latest (with all options on).
If you have a Mac that runs Tiger well, it will run Leopard well. If it's borderline on Tiger, it might or might not run Leopard. But for most semi-recent systems, Leopard is faster. I don't think there's any hardware in existence on which Vista is faster than XP, and that's what people are complaining about.
will I need to dedicate an entire drive (or partition) for Time Machine's exclusive use, or is it possible/okay to tell Time Machine to put its data into a subdirectory inside a drive/partition that is also used for storing other data?
You don't need to dedicate a drive or partition to it, but you can't put it in a subdirectory, it will create a database in the root of whatever partition you use. And it will work on any drive other than the system drive (so you can use a second internal drive if you have a tower).
Can they please please please rewrite the Finder and the associated Open/Save controls from scratch? Managing files on OS X feels so awkward compared to every other OS out there. Hopefully the leopard finder will at the very least be properly multithreaded.
It is! The Finder is vastly, vastly improved in most ways with 10.5. They haven't completely FTFF, but pretty much all performance issues and many of the usability problems are gone completely. There are a few new UI annoyances, which I expect them to be fixing over the next few.x releases, but I think most Mac users will be very very happy with the new Finder.
No more network drive stupidity, no more spurious error messages when trying to do operations to different items in the same folder -- the Finder team finally found multithreading religion! For me, the Finder is the biggest reason to upgrade (Quick look, which I thought was silly, turns out to be amazingly fast and useful. Coverflow, which I expected to be useful, turns out to be silly compared to the utility of Quick Look!). If only they'd allow a method of merging folders rather than only offering replace, I'd say it was unconditionally better than Explorer.
You seem completely ignorant of Young-Earth Creationism, yet felt completely comfortable accusing the original poster (and everyone who agrees with him) of being ignorant, making things up, and cherry-picking some obscure doctrine when he mentioned it, all because you didn't realize he was talking about a very commonly taught and popular (at least in the Protestant US) Biblical analysis.
You never addressed it at all, you just called everyone buying the gray-market games a lot of names and said they were ripping off Valve.
Valve was selling a product for a price, and a lot of people bought it for that price. If Valve wanted more money, they should have charged more money. You can't be "ripped off" if people are paying the retail price for your goods.
I'm not confusing anything. The issue of gray market goods competing with "official" goods on the basis of price is not new, the only thing that's changed is that Valve has the ability to enforce their price discrimination.
But it has nothing to do with the comment you were responding to. You can provide evidence (and predictions) for or against specific historical theories. The lack of time travel doesn't mean every theory is equally (in)valid regardless of the evidence, which is how I read your comment.
Do you think people should be able to buy 500 copies of the the Thai version for the equivalent of $5 USD each, and turn around and sell the keys online for $20 a piece, and have them work just as well as a $50 US key?
Well, yes, why not? Wal*Mart can buy shoes from Thailand for $5 and sell them here for $20, when American-made shoes of the same quality and materials would cost $50. That's supposed to be a good thing, at least that's what we tell the Americans when we close down all the shoe factories here because the shoes are cheaper from Thailand.
I'm far more comfortable with the source material a young-earth creationist uses (we read the same scriptures everyday), and therefore am far less reluctant to debate them than an evolutionist, as we have mutually passing knowledges of each other's sources of information.
That's fantastic for you. It still doesn't correct the fact that you claimed your opponent was ignorant and untruthful, and in the process showed that you were in fact the one ignorant of what was being discussed.
Is the assertion "Life arose from non-life around three billion years ago on the prehistoric earth" falsifiable without resorting to some form of the anthropic principle?
No statement of historical fact is falsifiable without a time machine. That has nothing to do with science.
However Evolution isn't PART of the scientific method, because it hasn't predicted ANYTHING.
Scientists use evolution every day to form successful predictions about what bacteria will grow at what rate under which conditions, where to find particular fossils in the geological record, what the genetic relationship will be between organisms, etc, etc etc. Evolutionary theory makes literally billions and billions of predictions in almost every field of science, and those predictions are universally correct. That's why scientists consider it as much a fact as gravity (which is also "still a theory").
When scientists can create life from inert matter, I'll agree that evolution...
Abiogenesis is not a part of evolutionary theory. You're evolution when you clearly don't even know what it is.
It is long past the time for us to pretend to have expertise in each other's fields of interest.
The problem here seems to be that you don't have any expertise in your OWN field of interest. Young Earth Creationism is not some obscure new idea. It's a very popular belief among Protestants (in the US), and has been for centuries. Indeed, the Creationist museum that recently opened is built with Young-Earth Creationism as its timeline, hence Dinosaurs and humans living side-by-side.
Pretty much every person I've ever shown the GIMP to has the same issue, which is that the window behavior is insane and baffling. Yes, if you use specific window managers with specific settings, you can make it less insane, but that doesn't make it any less of an issue. First off, because most computer users don't have the slightest clue what a window manger is, much less have the ability to change it, and secondly because no other program on any system behaves like the GIMP.
It's one thing to come up with new window behavior because you think you have a usability improvement, but the GIMP devs seem to have developed the application behavior to spite any user that doesn't run X with the dev's choice of window manger. The idea that it should be functional out of the box on all supported systems just seems to be something they can't comprehend despite the years of criticism.
A lot of the key algorithms, particularly for color space conversion, are patented. Guess who holds a bunch of those patents?
Oh please. That is not and never has been the problem. The problem is that the program was initially created with the assumption that all images would be 8-bit RGB, and then a huge amount of code was built on top of that silly assumption.
Yes, you can run into IP issues with things like Pantone, DIC, Toyo, or a particular set of CMYK transforms, etc, but that has nothing to do with the limitations of the GIMP. There are plenty of other image editors that have no problem doing color space conversions or dealing with >8-bit images because they were written by programmers who actually listen to graphics professionals.
And I confess I'm simply dying of curiosity at what system you think type designers are using, if not Fontlab Studio or Fontographer (mostly on the Mac)? Are the designers "pushing the field forward" creating glyphs in assembly language on TRS-80s?
I'm seriously beginning to think you're just pulling my leg about this whole thing, in which case you did a great job.
Oh goodie, you spoke for me, that indeed went well. Those poor straw men never knew what hit 'em!
I guess I'll just have to tell Ed Benguiat to throw out his Mac, some guy on Slashdot says he's not a real er..."fontographer" (not that he'd have any idea what the fuck I was talking about, and he'd say as much) because he worries about stupid things like color and character rather than important things like how a particular OS release handles antialiasing at 9pts (of course Ed's kind of old so he zooms in a little closer than 9 pts when he's digitizing his work).
Again, you sound like a computer nerd with an interest in type algorithms rather than a designer who happens to use a computer as a tool.
I also find it highly amusing that typing "fontography" into google gives zero results that anyone would associate with any sort of professional type design or production, and in fact the very first result is to an article complaining that the easiest way to tell non-designers are learning about type is that they use the word "fontography".
So to summarize, Myriad is not a well-designed face, Helvetica is useless and boring over 10 pts, and nobody does type design on OS X?
I would love to hear more about your study of..."fontography" (is that like typography but only for people who use Fontographer?)
To a designer, you sound a lot like a programmer. Paragraph after paragraph of 100% correct technical reasons why a particular design/implementation *should* be better than another, but in the end not realizing that theory and reality don't align as much as theory would suggest. I feel like I'm reading yet another rant from the 1990s about why Truetype fonts *must* be inherently better than Postscript, which focus entirely on technology while completely ignoring the market reality of what type designers and foundries were actually releasing in each format.
Given 100 people, half men, half women, I would expect that they have the same distribution of salaries.
Assuming salaries are fixed, yes. But most salaries are negotiable -- and it has been shown that women generally wind up with worse deals from negotiations than men do. Whether that is because of cultural issues (women taught not to be assertive, others thinking they can always talk a woman down and therefore pushing harder) or not is a totally separate question from whether actual bias exists in salary offers.
Slashdot Mirror
While pejorative in tone, this is essentially true. There's little practical difference between ghosts, angels, demons, and gods, other than how much power they have and their moral alignment. If you find any of them plausible, there's no reason you shouldn't believe in them all, other than peer pressure and social convention.
And there's nothing new or novel about that. Gray market goods were being imported into the US long before "software" existed. It's never been considered immoral or "ripping off" the company to buy an American product in Hong Kong for a few hundred dollars less and bring it back to the USA.
I'm just trying to figure out why gray market goods have always been considered acceptable, DVD region encoding has always been considered a ridiculous market price discrimination tool (indeed, many countries allow circumvention of it precisely because it is used solely for price discrimination), yet for some reason Valve is considered a victim in this situation and the people trying to import the cheaper product are suddenly considered "bad" by so many otherwise rational people.
It is indeed tough shit for the customers, simply because Valve has the ability to enforce their preferences in a way that no other company does, and has the DMCA on their side to prevent their own customers from exercising their legal rights (much the same way it's perfectly legal to use clips of video, yet illegal to obtain them from a protected DVD).
It's a perfect intersection of legal and technical abuse of customers, yet it seems nobody cares because it's Valve and we like their games.
10.5 doesn't do this. The Finder didn't change much at all (IMHO) between 10.1 and 10.4, but it's been totally rebuilt in 10.5. If the Finder has annoyed you in the past for any other reasons, chances are you'll like 10.5 much, much better (it has it's own quirks, but they're not the kind that make you want to kill the programmers).
Good to know. And they wouldn't have been ripping anybody off by purchasing the gun.
That's what Time Machine does. If you put the Leopard install DVD into a new Mac, one of your options is to plug in a Time Machine disk and restore your whole old system to the new computer. That's as backed up as any backup system I've ever used (and a hell of a lot easier).
There's a slight difference between Apple saying that systems from 1999 won't run the latest software and MS saying that systems released 30 days ago won't run the latest (with all options on).
If you have a Mac that runs Tiger well, it will run Leopard well. If it's borderline on Tiger, it might or might not run Leopard. But for most semi-recent systems, Leopard is faster. I don't think there's any hardware in existence on which Vista is faster than XP, and that's what people are complaining about.
You don't need to dedicate a drive or partition to it, but you can't put it in a subdirectory, it will create a database in the root of whatever partition you use. And it will work on any drive other than the system drive (so you can use a second internal drive if you have a tower).
Yes, it does. All of that kind of stupidity is gone, rejoice!
It is! The Finder is vastly, vastly improved in most ways with 10.5. They haven't completely FTFF, but pretty much all performance issues and many of the usability problems are gone completely. There are a few new UI annoyances, which I expect them to be fixing over the next few
No more network drive stupidity, no more spurious error messages when trying to do operations to different items in the same folder -- the Finder team finally found multithreading religion! For me, the Finder is the biggest reason to upgrade (Quick look, which I thought was silly, turns out to be amazingly fast and useful. Coverflow, which I expected to be useful, turns out to be silly compared to the utility of Quick Look!). If only they'd allow a method of merging folders rather than only offering replace, I'd say it was unconditionally better than Explorer.
You seem completely ignorant of Young-Earth Creationism, yet felt completely comfortable accusing the original poster (and everyone who agrees with him) of being ignorant, making things up, and cherry-picking some obscure doctrine when he mentioned it, all because you didn't realize he was talking about a very commonly taught and popular (at least in the Protestant US) Biblical analysis.
You never addressed it at all, you just called everyone buying the gray-market games a lot of names and said they were ripping off Valve.
Valve was selling a product for a price, and a lot of people bought it for that price. If Valve wanted more money, they should have charged more money. You can't be "ripped off" if people are paying the retail price for your goods.
I'm not confusing anything. The issue of gray market goods competing with "official" goods on the basis of price is not new, the only thing that's changed is that Valve has the ability to enforce their price discrimination.
But it has nothing to do with the comment you were responding to. You can provide evidence (and predictions) for or against specific historical theories. The lack of time travel doesn't mean every theory is equally (in)valid regardless of the evidence, which is how I read your comment.
Really? The article I read said they bought the game for the price Valve asked for.
Well, yes, why not? Wal*Mart can buy shoes from Thailand for $5 and sell them here for $20, when American-made shoes of the same quality and materials would cost $50. That's supposed to be a good thing, at least that's what we tell the Americans when we close down all the shoe factories here because the shoes are cheaper from Thailand.
That's fantastic for you. It still doesn't correct the fact that you claimed your opponent was ignorant and untruthful, and in the process showed that you were in fact the one ignorant of what was being discussed.
No statement of historical fact is falsifiable without a time machine. That has nothing to do with science.
Scientists use evolution every day to form successful predictions about what bacteria will grow at what rate under which conditions, where to find particular fossils in the geological record, what the genetic relationship will be between organisms, etc, etc etc. Evolutionary theory makes literally billions and billions of predictions in almost every field of science, and those predictions are universally correct. That's why scientists consider it as much a fact as gravity (which is also "still a theory").
Abiogenesis is not a part of evolutionary theory. You're evolution when you clearly don't even know what it is.
The problem here seems to be that you don't have any expertise in your OWN field of interest. Young Earth Creationism is not some obscure new idea. It's a very popular belief among Protestants (in the US), and has been for centuries. Indeed, the Creationist museum that recently opened is built with Young-Earth Creationism as its timeline, hence Dinosaurs and humans living side-by-side.
Pretty much every person I've ever shown the GIMP to has the same issue, which is that the window behavior is insane and baffling. Yes, if you use specific window managers with specific settings, you can make it less insane, but that doesn't make it any less of an issue. First off, because most computer users don't have the slightest clue what a window manger is, much less have the ability to change it, and secondly because no other program on any system behaves like the GIMP.
It's one thing to come up with new window behavior because you think you have a usability improvement, but the GIMP devs seem to have developed the application behavior to spite any user that doesn't run X with the dev's choice of window manger. The idea that it should be functional out of the box on all supported systems just seems to be something they can't comprehend despite the years of criticism.
Oh please. That is not and never has been the problem. The problem is that the program was initially created with the assumption that all images would be 8-bit RGB, and then a huge amount of code was built on top of that silly assumption.
Yes, you can run into IP issues with things like Pantone, DIC, Toyo, or a particular set of CMYK transforms, etc, but that has nothing to do with the limitations of the GIMP. There are plenty of other image editors that have no problem doing color space conversions or dealing with >8-bit images because they were written by programmers who actually listen to graphics professionals.
And I confess I'm simply dying of curiosity at what system you think type designers are using, if not Fontlab Studio or Fontographer (mostly on the Mac)? Are the designers "pushing the field forward" creating glyphs in assembly language on TRS-80s?
I'm seriously beginning to think you're just pulling my leg about this whole thing, in which case you did a great job.
Oh goodie, you spoke for me, that indeed went well. Those poor straw men never knew what hit 'em!
I guess I'll just have to tell Ed Benguiat to throw out his Mac, some guy on Slashdot says he's not a real er..."fontographer" (not that he'd have any idea what the fuck I was talking about, and he'd say as much) because he worries about stupid things like color and character rather than important things like how a particular OS release handles antialiasing at 9pts (of course Ed's kind of old so he zooms in a little closer than 9 pts when he's digitizing his work).
Again, you sound like a computer nerd with an interest in type algorithms rather than a designer who happens to use a computer as a tool.
I also find it highly amusing that typing "fontography" into google gives zero results that anyone would associate with any sort of professional type design or production, and in fact the very first result is to an article complaining that the easiest way to tell non-designers are learning about type is that they use the word "fontography".
So to summarize, Myriad is not a well-designed face, Helvetica is useless and boring over 10 pts, and nobody does type design on OS X?
I would love to hear more about your study of..."fontography" (is that like typography but only for people who use Fontographer?)
To a designer, you sound a lot like a programmer. Paragraph after paragraph of 100% correct technical reasons why a particular design/implementation *should* be better than another, but in the end not realizing that theory and reality don't align as much as theory would suggest. I feel like I'm reading yet another rant from the 1990s about why Truetype fonts *must* be inherently better than Postscript, which focus entirely on technology while completely ignoring the market reality of what type designers and foundries were actually releasing in each format.
Assuming salaries are fixed, yes. But most salaries are negotiable -- and it has been shown that women generally wind up with worse deals from negotiations than men do. Whether that is because of cultural issues (women taught not to be assertive, others thinking they can always talk a woman down and therefore pushing harder) or not is a totally separate question from whether actual bias exists in salary offers.