Exactly -- It's just like corporate taxes. Corporations don't pay them, they count them as part of the cost of doing business and recoup those expenses by raising prices on their products. But I expect to be modded down, as the Slashdot crowd doesn't like the natural end result of that line of reasoning.:)
You could just as easily say people don't pay taxes either, they just consider them a cost of living and recoup those expenses by demanding higher salaries. Therefore, companies really pay for all the personal income taxes.
Arguing that companies don't really pay taxes ignores the reality of the economic cycle just as much as thinking corporate taxes come out of thin air does.
Of course, corporations are only taxed on profits, so they don't have to compensate for taxes in any way whatsoever. They just choose to in order to make more profit. Whether that is a good or bad decision is left to individual companies, but the implication that taxes are some fundamental expense of doing business and must be recouped through price increases is just plain false.
Eh, you do realize that NeXTSTEP's Dock (at the time Windows 95 was released) did not have "task switcher" functionality (like Windows 95) but was pretty much just a quick launch bar on the right side of the screen (not the bottom like in OS X).
Eh, have you ever actually used the systems you're talking about? If you click on an application on the NeXTSTEP Dock, it will bring that application to the foreground if it is running, or launch it if it isn't. That's exactly what the OSX Dock does, and exactly what the Windows taskbar does NOT do.
The NeXT/OSX Docks are based -- as I said in the first post, I don't know how you missed it -- on the principle that a modern computer system should make the user not have to care if an app is running or not. With enough processing power, memory and advanced scheduling ability, you should have your apps running all the time and simply click on them when you want to use them. Obviously that's more the ideal than reality, but it's the basic principle of the design.
Microsoft chose the exact opposite approach -- providing a task-switcher only for apps/documents already opened through other means, and then years later adding a separate area for launching applications in the first place. The sheer redundancy of it all is kind of silly.
As for why the Dock moved to the bottom in OSX, that was because the Mac OS always had the desktop populated from the upper right corner, making that corner a pretty bad spot to put a major new interface element. The upper left is the location of toolbars in just about every app ever made, so that corner is out. The bottom left probably would make more sense than centering, but that was presumably an aesthetic decision -- I confess despite pinning it to the corners from time to time, I do keep going back to centered due to it looking more balanced. What would have been interesting is if they left the dock on the right hand side and populated the desktop from the lower left, but they were trying hard to keep it as close to the classic Mac OS as possible.
Eh, I'm not convinced my inbox represents me. I'm very messy and certainly nobody has ever accused me of being organized, but just setting up a few simple rules keeps me from having more than a few emails in my inbox at any given time.
Get yourself a good IMAP provider (try www.fastmail.fm), set up spam filering and some Seive filtering on the server side and you'll never see clutter again. Mailing lists go into their folders, family stuff goes into a family folder, and clients go to their own place. Setting aside time each week to do that would mean it was never done for most people. The only thing I ever do manually is drag old messages to an "archive" folder once they're too old to worry about.
You can use any email client you like this way (Mail.app does insanely fast text searching thanks to spotlight), or just check from your phone or web browser and not have to download lots of junk. All other mail solutions (gmail, etc) seem positivly archaic because they require you to *do* stuff on a regular basis, or they lock you into a particular interface, or are impossible to backup.
If I could just write a seive filter to auto-reply to all my messages in an intelligent manner, I could finally go back to playing video games all the time!
No. I'm comparing Apple with Microsoft on the basis of their respective sins. Apple's sins are FAR FAR FAR greater than Microsoft's.
really? I'm trying to think of how many federal courts have found Apple guilty of violating federal criminal law. Or blatant, willful patent violation. Apple has certainly reproduced third-party functionality over the years, but I don't recall them ever inviting a company in to show a tech for possible purchase, and then actually stealing the source code from them for the next OS release and telling the company to go screw themselves.
No amount of marketing rah-rah can hold a candle to those sins.
The miserable Dock is functionally very much like the WIndows 95 taskbar, the Finder and OS now handle file extensions about the same way Windows does, and so forth.
eh, you do realize that the Dock was built in NeXTSTEP in the 1980s, at the same time Windows 3.0 was being developed? Suggesting that it copied or was "moving towards" the windows taskbar half a decade before the taskbar existed is just silly. Especially since it behaves totally differently, being based on the principle that the user shouldn't have to care if an application is running. The windows taskbar was strictly a task switcher, although they bolted on the quick launch bar soon afterwards and have added support for application-specific context menu functionality to the task switcher. If anything, the taskbar has become much more like the dock over the years.
Similarly, filename extensions were inherited from the NeXTSTEP system, though I suspect you don't know much about how file types are handled in Mac OS if you think it handles extensions the same way Windows does. It has several layers of file typing, some based on unix methods (magic numbers), some based on the Mac OS legacy resource forks, and others that use straight extension mapping. The classic Mac OS also supported file extensions, they just weren't the preferred method of identification -- but as networks became more common in the 90s and other systems kept stripping the resource forks from files, extension mapping became more commonly used.
Regardless, it's not as if MS had anything to do with developing file extension behavior, they directly copied the function and behavior of CP/M, which copied from other systems going back several decades before Microsoft even existed.
So we should excuse Apple for releasing faulty first gen products?
I don't think anyone is excusing them, but it is a fact of life to a certain degree, regardless of what manufactured good you're talking about. The first product line off a new design will always have flaws, whether it is a new computer or a new car. You think it sucks to spend $1500 on a computer that has some issues, buy a new car model in its first year -- you'll get to pay $25k+ for the privlidge of bringing it back to the dealer several times to get things fixed, and knowing that the next year's model will be significantly better because they'll fix everything at the manufacturing stage.
I want to thank all the hard-working beta testers out there for the fantastic reliability that my second model year car has had.
The think I most fondly remember about Borladn was their no-nonsense user license. Instead of 20 pages of legalspeak, they had two or three paragraphs that said "Don't copy this, don't give it to your friends. you know you want to be nice, but we'd like to stay in business."
It was very human and gave a good first impression.
I don't know which professional artists you know, but most in my industry experience avoid drawing directly on the computer precisely because it is a huge Pain In The Ass. Tablets are great, I've been using them for almost 15 years now, and still find them to be as similar to drawing on paper as canoeing is to flying a 747. It's a completely different experience and skill set, but tablet PCs close about 75% of that gap.
It's actually quite funny, my girlfriend is also an artist but had always done her finished work directly on the computer with a big tablet (after scanning in roughs). She's a speed demon on the thing and can make much more natural lines than I've ever been able to. She's got hotkeys set up so that rotating the document works well enough for her to get those funny angles and curves, but despite it all I've kept telling her she'd be faster drawing on traditional media because of all the futzing she has to do to fight the limitations of the tablet/monitor setup.
As we approached the deadline for her latest book, she was panicking because there was simply no way she'd finish all the work in time, so in a fit of desperation she actually tried using my low-tech drawing board with bristol and a pen. She did work three times as fast as normal and was constantly stopping to comment on how she was amazed at how much easier it was to work in real natural media.
Another artist i know purhased one of the really high-end Windows Tablet PCs and uses it for most everything. The few times I've used it, I've simply drooled over how much like real drawing it can be -- actual continuous visual feedback on pressure and where your strokes are and will be going! A crosshair on a monitor is nothing like seeing the shadow under the pen tip and knowing exactly when it will start to draw a line, and being able to look ahead to where you want that line to end and guiding your hand towards that spot.
IMO, there's an exponential difference between adjusting brightness, contrast, or other filters that apply to the entire shot. Images themselves are just a lens's interpretation of a scene, just in that people's eyes are just their interpretation. Everyone sees a scene differently, it's not just cameras. Our eyes aren't the same.
I'm not really disagreeing with you, but remember that one of the first big stories about "photo manipulation" was the cover of Time (Newsweek?) with OJ Simpson, where the contrast of the image itself was considered a "lie" -- making him appear darker-skinned and "blacker", presumably to make whites less sympathetic or more hateful than they would otherwise be.
So even the simplest of changes can be widely criticised -- imagine that the phographer had, instead of cloning smoke, simply exposed for it at a super-high shutter speed and let the smoke and clouds mingle together with much more contrast and darkness, appearing to be a shadowy landscape with incredibly dark smoke filling the sky when perhaps it was really a lovely day with light grey smoke?
Ultimately people just have to learn at a visceral level that photos don't represent "reality" more accurately than anything else.
Well, if you have 62 online comics you want to keep track with like me, dashboard really isn't up to the task. I keep a bookmark auto-open folder with all my online comics; at the press of a button, all 62 of them load in tabs in the Safari window.
Actually, I wound up buying a proclip:) But I was talking about building something into the dash more like a cassette slot -- you push the ipod into a receiver (probably more like an 8-track, really, since it would stick out a bit). I started working on it in early 2003, and I think the iPod Proclips came out later in the year.
It doesn't require a conspiracy to change hardware, just economies of scale. If someday both Windows and the Mac OS require hardware with TPM/DRM at the boot level, then that's what 99% of the hardware available will have built-in. other options will be more expensive due to their niche status (and I'm sure Linux will be really popular when it requires a more expensive computer to run than Windows does!).
If you find such a situation impossible to believe, just compare the price of a winmodem to a real modem and imagine the whole computer were built with the same marketing principles.
Because people want to put it in there, close it, and have it completely invisible to thieves. You have to break into the car and pry open the glove compartment to even know if there's an iPod in there. Several aftermarket units already locate the iPod there for these reasons, and because it's usually an easy place to access all the wiring and the car's antenna if you want to do a passthrough.
I agree, I'd like to have a slot I loaded my iPod into (I even started building one a few years ago), but it's not like putting it in the glove compartment is some crazy counter-intuitive place that nobody would ever want.
Mac people say this all the time, and it's such a damn lie (and I say "damn lie", as in, you know it's not true, but you say it anyway).
Oh, no! He's found out our grand plan for world domination! You see, years ago the mac users all got together and decided to tell everyone else we were really efficient using the system, but of course it was a lie. Not just a lie, a DAMN lie, because of course Macs don't even run software, they are simply a box filled with rocks that we try to convince everyone is a computer!
Our plan might have worked if it wasn't for those meddling slashdot kids!
As for an actual answer to your troll, Macs don't have a registry or DLLs spread all over the place. That alone eliminates about 90% of the maintenance bullshit required by Windows and Windows applications. Of course, the difference between us and most trolls is that we've actually used and maintained Windows systems over the years, while you've already admitted you don't have the slightest idea how the Mac OS works, much less how it works better.
While I agree with you in this case, there certainly are trees that have historical significance and are protected more than the average backyard spruce (or ants). For example, here in Austin we have the Treaty Oak, which was victim to vandalism in the 90s that made international news. I would imagine the Japanese cherry trees in Washington DC would be vigilantly protected against vandalism as well.
Well, as I said I specifically avoid any cancer studies, so I'm obviously ignorant about them aside from talking to fellow volunteers who have done them in the past. I didn't realize that healthy volunteer studies were the minority, though it does make a great deal of sense given how incredibly powerful the treatments are and confirms my strong commitment to never participate in one:)
That said, there is a certain amount of semantics in saying whether a Phase I study is "about" testing side-effects or MTD, as both are recorded and used to inform the later phases where both will be measured again in larger populations. MTD is essentially the measurement of whether or not the side effects are so bad the person can't (or shouldn't) take any more. So no, they aren't taking the side-effects from the Phase I study and just pasting it on the prescription bottle ten years later after FDA approval, but that is on a day to day basis what is being measured (and watched closely by the sponsor) -- what are the side effects at this dosing level, how bad are they, are they threatening your health, and can more be tolerated or do we need to stop dosing?
You're right, I'd forgotten that some terminal HIV or Cancer patients are given access to drugs even in the earliest trial stages (because, after all, the drug can't make it much worse). But that is clearly not the case with the study this story is about (and of course, British policies may be more or less leniant, though I suspect the companies function mostly the same in procedure just because any drug company will want to use results for FDA approval someday)
And I wasn't really questioning the person's claim they had cancer and were in a study, I had assumed they were mistaken in the terminology and wanted to clarify for anyone else reading the thread that this wasn't a case of terminally ill patients claiming to get sick from an experimental drug (how could you tell?) and then trying to get rich off of it. These were completely healthy people who will likely be robbed of decades of life due to the lack of oversight by both the study staff and sponsor.
Ah, that makes much more sense. One of the issues we have here is that we do let people do some frankly crazy and offensive things in public that isn't allowed in most other places (hate speech being the easiest example). The idea of course is that if you don't like what the person is saying, you can leave, or argue with him, or whatever.
But because students are required by law to attend school, they CAN'T simply get up and leave if they feel humiliated or threatened, so we use in loco parentis as the legal principle to say that since students all have to be here, we'll let the school do what they need to for the sake of keeping order.
I find it wonderful that you have 100% free speech and no clothing restrictions at your school and in your country. May I ask where you live? Most Western European nations I've been to have, for example, hate speech limitations and stronger regulations on publication of state secrets. I'm not familiar with any country that doesn't have some concept of libel or slander or incitement to violence.
You are allowed to attend school in the nude? Or wearing nothing but thong underwear and a t-shirt that says "kill the Jews first, then the blacks."?
I've always loved those stupid signs. Like just putting up a sign disclaiming responsibility for your actions could ever stand up legally.
I'll just wear a T-shirt that says "not responsible for bullets leaving my gun's barrel", that way when I shoot people they won't be able to sue and those cops will feel stupid when they realize they can't arrest me!
this was an experimental drug for the treatment of leukemia in Phase I testing. They don't just pull people off the streets for that. Phase I cancer drugs are tested on terminal, or near terminal patients who WILL die from their disease.
How do I know these things? I am a stage IVa cancer patient participating is a Phase I study. Hope is more powerful than fear.
Uh, no. Phase I testing is when drugs are tested on 100% healthy subjects for the sole purpose of determining what side-effects and health problems a drug can cause. You can't use sick people to test for side-effects, because then you don't have any idea what is caused by their disease and what is caused by the drug.
The most cursory glance at a Google search on clinical trials will verify what i've said here. (heck: Wikipedia clinical trials)
I've been a participant in many Phase I drug trials and this story is pretty scary but also a great example of how the ignorance of volunteers can be taken advantage of -- I always researched the drugs before joining a trial, and flat-out refused to do anything that was a cancer/leukemia treatment. Indeed, American testing labs generally limit healthy volunteers to only testing a single cancer treatment EVER in their lifetime because they are one of the few kinds of treatments that can cause real damage in the few short weeks of a trial.
Unfortunately, I've met several people who would go to different labs and lie, because the payments can be fantastic -- $15,000+ for a few weeks in a facility testing a cancer drug. That's pretty tempting to a financially stable person, nearly irresistable to someone with no education or professional qualifications. Fortunately there are few enough labs that do such studies that it would be tough to do more than a handful without going to foreign labs (indeed London is a popular destination -- I confess I expected their liability standards to be similar to ours, now I'm glad I never went).
All you've admitted is that you don't have any particularly unconventional opinions or clothing, not that you have free speech or the freedom to choose what you wear. The Supreme Court has already said without ambiguitiy that you don't have free speech inside school the way you have outside.
That sounds great! Although I already have both things in kubuntu and it is free can run WINE (so If I want photoshop I can use it) and that's for free. Not saying that Macs are bad or anything just that you can find those features elsewhere so better focus on the other advantages macs have.
The thing is, he WAS talking about things that are specific to the Mac, it's just that what you're seeing as two functionally separate things are, on a Mac, a single integrated feature. Yes, under a good Linux you can jury-rig a major app to run under Wine, and you can run unix command line tools.
But on the Mac, you can run that major application, and a command-line tool, and they interact with each other in a completely supported manned. You could script Photoshop using normal Bash commands (via OSAScript) under OSX, and you could write an Applescript to export information from Photoshop directly into four different ImageMagick processes running in separate terminal windows. Of course there's much more mundane stuff, like dragging and dropping between applications and command lines.
That's the sort of thing Mac users mean when they say how great it is to have a real Unix with great commercial software together on the same box. It isn't just about the convenience of not having to SSH or KVM to another system to run the full variety of apps you may need during a day's work, they become an actual SYSTEM working together in a unified way that no other OS I know of can match with any amount of hacking.
Most Apple applications have proprietary data formats
Factally correct, but misleading. While several Apple apps maintain their configuration data in a specific optimized binary format, they support exporting the data in XML and other open, easily readable formats. There is no "vendor lock-in", assuming you don't buy anything with DRM. The idea that iLife apps somehow lock up user data (or configurations, like playlists or user ratings) is pure FUD, easily disproven with even a cursory use of Google.
heck, if you wanted to, you could easily write or download an Applescript or perl script to back up most of the configuration data to the files themselves as metadata, by using the abilities built into the application and 100% blessed Apple themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly -- It's just like corporate taxes. Corporations don't pay them, they count them as part of the cost of doing business and recoup those expenses by raising prices on their products. But I expect to be modded down, as the Slashdot crowd doesn't like the natural end result of that line of reasoning. :)
You could just as easily say people don't pay taxes either, they just consider them a cost of living and recoup those expenses by demanding higher salaries. Therefore, companies really pay for all the personal income taxes.
Arguing that companies don't really pay taxes ignores the reality of the economic cycle just as much as thinking corporate taxes come out of thin air does.
Of course, corporations are only taxed on profits, so they don't have to compensate for taxes in any way whatsoever. They just choose to in order to make more profit. Whether that is a good or bad decision is left to individual companies, but the implication that taxes are some fundamental expense of doing business and must be recouped through price increases is just plain false.
Eh, you do realize that NeXTSTEP's Dock (at the time Windows 95 was released) did not have "task switcher" functionality (like Windows 95) but was pretty much just a quick launch bar on the right side of the screen (not the bottom like in OS X).
Eh, have you ever actually used the systems you're talking about? If you click on an application on the NeXTSTEP Dock, it will bring that application to the foreground if it is running, or launch it if it isn't. That's exactly what the OSX Dock does, and exactly what the Windows taskbar does NOT do.
The NeXT/OSX Docks are based -- as I said in the first post, I don't know how you missed it -- on the principle that a modern computer system should make the user not have to care if an app is running or not. With enough processing power, memory and advanced scheduling ability, you should have your apps running all the time and simply click on them when you want to use them. Obviously that's more the ideal than reality, but it's the basic principle of the design.
Microsoft chose the exact opposite approach -- providing a task-switcher only for apps/documents already opened through other means, and then years later adding a separate area for launching applications in the first place. The sheer redundancy of it all is kind of silly.
As for why the Dock moved to the bottom in OSX, that was because the Mac OS always had the desktop populated from the upper right corner, making that corner a pretty bad spot to put a major new interface element. The upper left is the location of toolbars in just about every app ever made, so that corner is out. The bottom left probably would make more sense than centering, but that was presumably an aesthetic decision -- I confess despite pinning it to the corners from time to time, I do keep going back to centered due to it looking more balanced. What would have been interesting is if they left the dock on the right hand side and populated the desktop from the lower left, but they were trying hard to keep it as close to the classic Mac OS as possible.
Eh, I'm not convinced my inbox represents me. I'm very messy and certainly nobody has ever accused me of being organized, but just setting up a few simple rules keeps me from having more than a few emails in my inbox at any given time.
Get yourself a good IMAP provider (try www.fastmail.fm), set up spam filering and some Seive filtering on the server side and you'll never see clutter again. Mailing lists go into their folders, family stuff goes into a family folder, and clients go to their own place. Setting aside time each week to do that would mean it was never done for most people. The only thing I ever do manually is drag old messages to an "archive" folder once they're too old to worry about.
You can use any email client you like this way (Mail.app does insanely fast text searching thanks to spotlight), or just check from your phone or web browser and not have to download lots of junk. All other mail solutions (gmail, etc) seem positivly archaic because they require you to *do* stuff on a regular basis, or they lock you into a particular interface, or are impossible to backup.
If I could just write a seive filter to auto-reply to all my messages in an intelligent manner, I could finally go back to playing video games all the time!
No. I'm comparing Apple with Microsoft on the basis of their respective sins. Apple's sins are FAR FAR FAR greater than Microsoft's.
really? I'm trying to think of how many federal courts have found Apple guilty of violating federal criminal law. Or blatant, willful patent violation. Apple has certainly reproduced third-party functionality over the years, but I don't recall them ever inviting a company in to show a tech for possible purchase, and then actually stealing the source code from them for the next OS release and telling the company to go screw themselves.
No amount of marketing rah-rah can hold a candle to those sins.
The miserable Dock is functionally very much like the WIndows 95 taskbar, the Finder and OS now handle file extensions about the same way Windows does, and so forth.
eh, you do realize that the Dock was built in NeXTSTEP in the 1980s, at the same time Windows 3.0 was being developed? Suggesting that it copied or was "moving towards" the windows taskbar half a decade before the taskbar existed is just silly. Especially since it behaves totally differently, being based on the principle that the user shouldn't have to care if an application is running. The windows taskbar was strictly a task switcher, although they bolted on the quick launch bar soon afterwards and have added support for application-specific context menu functionality to the task switcher. If anything, the taskbar has become much more like the dock over the years.
Similarly, filename extensions were inherited from the NeXTSTEP system, though I suspect you don't know much about how file types are handled in Mac OS if you think it handles extensions the same way Windows does. It has several layers of file typing, some based on unix methods (magic numbers), some based on the Mac OS legacy resource forks, and others that use straight extension mapping. The classic Mac OS also supported file extensions, they just weren't the preferred method of identification -- but as networks became more common in the 90s and other systems kept stripping the resource forks from files, extension mapping became more commonly used.
Regardless, it's not as if MS had anything to do with developing file extension behavior, they directly copied the function and behavior of CP/M, which copied from other systems going back several decades before Microsoft even existed.
So we should excuse Apple for releasing faulty first gen products?
I don't think anyone is excusing them, but it is a fact of life to a certain degree, regardless of what manufactured good you're talking about. The first product line off a new design will always have flaws, whether it is a new computer or a new car. You think it sucks to spend $1500 on a computer that has some issues, buy a new car model in its first year -- you'll get to pay $25k+ for the privlidge of bringing it back to the dealer several times to get things fixed, and knowing that the next year's model will be significantly better because they'll fix everything at the manufacturing stage.
I want to thank all the hard-working beta testers out there for the fantastic reliability that my second model year car has had.
The think I most fondly remember about Borladn was their no-nonsense user license. Instead of 20 pages of legalspeak, they had two or three paragraphs that said "Don't copy this, don't give it to your friends. you know you want to be nice, but we'd like to stay in business."
It was very human and gave a good first impression.
I don't know which professional artists you know, but most in my industry experience avoid drawing directly on the computer precisely because it is a huge Pain In The Ass. Tablets are great, I've been using them for almost 15 years now, and still find them to be as similar to drawing on paper as canoeing is to flying a 747. It's a completely different experience and skill set, but tablet PCs close about 75% of that gap.
It's actually quite funny, my girlfriend is also an artist but had always done her finished work directly on the computer with a big tablet (after scanning in roughs). She's a speed demon on the thing and can make much more natural lines than I've ever been able to. She's got hotkeys set up so that rotating the document works well enough for her to get those funny angles and curves, but despite it all I've kept telling her she'd be faster drawing on traditional media because of all the futzing she has to do to fight the limitations of the tablet/monitor setup.
As we approached the deadline for her latest book, she was panicking because there was simply no way she'd finish all the work in time, so in a fit of desperation she actually tried using my low-tech drawing board with bristol and a pen. She did work three times as fast as normal and was constantly stopping to comment on how she was amazed at how much easier it was to work in real natural media.
Another artist i know purhased one of the really high-end Windows Tablet PCs and uses it for most everything. The few times I've used it, I've simply drooled over how much like real drawing it can be -- actual continuous visual feedback on pressure and where your strokes are and will be going! A crosshair on a monitor is nothing like seeing the shadow under the pen tip and knowing exactly when it will start to draw a line, and being able to look ahead to where you want that line to end and guiding your hand towards that spot.
IMO, there's an exponential difference between adjusting brightness, contrast, or other filters that apply to the entire shot. Images themselves are just a lens's interpretation of a scene, just in that people's eyes are just their interpretation. Everyone sees a scene differently, it's not just cameras. Our eyes aren't the same.
I'm not really disagreeing with you, but remember that one of the first big stories about "photo manipulation" was the cover of Time (Newsweek?) with OJ Simpson, where the contrast of the image itself was considered a "lie" -- making him appear darker-skinned and "blacker", presumably to make whites less sympathetic or more hateful than they would otherwise be.
So even the simplest of changes can be widely criticised -- imagine that the phographer had, instead of cloning smoke, simply exposed for it at a super-high shutter speed and let the smoke and clouds mingle together with much more contrast and darkness, appearing to be a shadowy landscape with incredibly dark smoke filling the sky when perhaps it was really a lovely day with light grey smoke?
Ultimately people just have to learn at a visceral level that photos don't represent "reality" more accurately than anything else.
Well, if you have 62 online comics you want to keep track with like me, dashboard really isn't up to the task. I keep a bookmark auto-open folder with all my online comics; at the press of a button, all 62 of them load in tabs in the Safari window.
Download a copy of Comictastic. It is to your Safari solution what your Safari solution is to a Widget solution. Set it to start every morning at 8 and your comics are waiting for you when you start work!
Actually, I wound up buying a proclip :) But I was talking about building something into the dash more like a cassette slot -- you push the ipod into a receiver (probably more like an 8-track, really, since it would stick out a bit). I started working on it in early 2003, and I think the iPod Proclips came out later in the year.
It doesn't require a conspiracy to change hardware, just economies of scale. If someday both Windows and the Mac OS require hardware with TPM/DRM at the boot level, then that's what 99% of the hardware available will have built-in. other options will be more expensive due to their niche status (and I'm sure Linux will be really popular when it requires a more expensive computer to run than Windows does!).
If you find such a situation impossible to believe, just compare the price of a winmodem to a real modem and imagine the whole computer were built with the same marketing principles.
Because people want to put it in there, close it, and have it completely invisible to thieves. You have to break into the car and pry open the glove compartment to even know if there's an iPod in there. Several aftermarket units already locate the iPod there for these reasons, and because it's usually an easy place to access all the wiring and the car's antenna if you want to do a passthrough.
I agree, I'd like to have a slot I loaded my iPod into (I even started building one a few years ago), but it's not like putting it in the glove compartment is some crazy counter-intuitive place that nobody would ever want.
Mac people say this all the time, and it's such a damn lie (and I say "damn lie", as in, you know it's not true, but you say it anyway).
Oh, no! He's found out our grand plan for world domination! You see, years ago the mac users all got together and decided to tell everyone else we were really efficient using the system, but of course it was a lie. Not just a lie, a DAMN lie, because of course Macs don't even run software, they are simply a box filled with rocks that we try to convince everyone is a computer!
Our plan might have worked if it wasn't for those meddling slashdot kids!
As for an actual answer to your troll, Macs don't have a registry or DLLs spread all over the place. That alone eliminates about 90% of the maintenance bullshit required by Windows and Windows applications. Of course, the difference between us and most trolls is that we've actually used and maintained Windows systems over the years, while you've already admitted you don't have the slightest idea how the Mac OS works, much less how it works better.
While I agree with you in this case, there certainly are trees that have historical significance and are protected more than the average backyard spruce (or ants). For example, here in Austin we have the Treaty Oak, which was victim to vandalism in the 90s that made international news. I would imagine the Japanese cherry trees in Washington DC would be vigilantly protected against vandalism as well.
with 46 percent doing their own computer trouble-shooting
Well, geez, women are only 51% of the population, so that leaves only 5% of the women that we can impress with our intelligence!
Well, as I said I specifically avoid any cancer studies, so I'm obviously ignorant about them aside from talking to fellow volunteers who have done them in the past. I didn't realize that healthy volunteer studies were the minority, though it does make a great deal of sense given how incredibly powerful the treatments are and confirms my strong commitment to never participate in one :)
That said, there is a certain amount of semantics in saying whether a Phase I study is "about" testing side-effects or MTD, as both are recorded and used to inform the later phases where both will be measured again in larger populations. MTD is essentially the measurement of whether or not the side effects are so bad the person can't (or shouldn't) take any more. So no, they aren't taking the side-effects from the Phase I study and just pasting it on the prescription bottle ten years later after FDA approval, but that is on a day to day basis what is being measured (and watched closely by the sponsor) -- what are the side effects at this dosing level, how bad are they, are they threatening your health, and can more be tolerated or do we need to stop dosing?
You're right, I'd forgotten that some terminal HIV or Cancer patients are given access to drugs even in the earliest trial stages (because, after all, the drug can't make it much worse). But that is clearly not the case with the study this story is about (and of course, British policies may be more or less leniant, though I suspect the companies function mostly the same in procedure just because any drug company will want to use results for FDA approval someday)
And I wasn't really questioning the person's claim they had cancer and were in a study, I had assumed they were mistaken in the terminology and wanted to clarify for anyone else reading the thread that this wasn't a case of terminally ill patients claiming to get sick from an experimental drug (how could you tell?) and then trying to get rich off of it. These were completely healthy people who will likely be robbed of decades of life due to the lack of oversight by both the study staff and sponsor.
Ah, that makes much more sense. One of the issues we have here is that we do let people do some frankly crazy and offensive things in public that isn't allowed in most other places (hate speech being the easiest example). The idea of course is that if you don't like what the person is saying, you can leave, or argue with him, or whatever.
But because students are required by law to attend school, they CAN'T simply get up and leave if they feel humiliated or threatened, so we use in loco parentis as the legal principle to say that since students all have to be here, we'll let the school do what they need to for the sake of keeping order.
US Supreme Court is nothing here (I am European) - but anyway: isn't freedom of speech guaranteed by constitution?
Ah, the posts you were replying to were talking about the situation of students at American high schools, so that's what my reply was based on.
And yes, Freedom of Speech is guaranteed by the Constitution, but schools to a certain extent legally function as parents of children while they are attending (), and as such the school may regulate the speech and behavior of students (so long as they can show that the restriction is necessary to achieve the educational mission, they can't just do it because of the personal preferences of a school administrator).
I find it wonderful that you have 100% free speech and no clothing restrictions at your school and in your country. May I ask where you live? Most Western European nations I've been to have, for example, hate speech limitations and stronger regulations on publication of state secrets. I'm not familiar with any country that doesn't have some concept of libel or slander or incitement to violence.
You are allowed to attend school in the nude? Or wearing nothing but thong underwear and a t-shirt that says "kill the Jews first, then the blacks."?
I've always loved those stupid signs. Like just putting up a sign disclaiming responsibility for your actions could ever stand up legally.
I'll just wear a T-shirt that says "not responsible for bullets leaving my gun's barrel", that way when I shoot people they won't be able to sue and those cops will feel stupid when they realize they can't arrest me!
this was an experimental drug for the treatment of leukemia in Phase I testing. They don't just pull people off the streets for that. Phase I cancer drugs are tested on terminal, or near terminal patients who WILL die from their disease.
How do I know these things? I am a stage IVa cancer patient participating is a Phase I study. Hope is more powerful than fear.
Uh, no. Phase I testing is when drugs are tested on 100% healthy subjects for the sole purpose of determining what side-effects and health problems a drug can cause. You can't use sick people to test for side-effects, because then you don't have any idea what is caused by their disease and what is caused by the drug.
The most cursory glance at a Google search on clinical trials will verify what i've said here. (heck: Wikipedia clinical trials)
I've been a participant in many Phase I drug trials and this story is pretty scary but also a great example of how the ignorance of volunteers can be taken advantage of -- I always researched the drugs before joining a trial, and flat-out refused to do anything that was a cancer/leukemia treatment. Indeed, American testing labs generally limit healthy volunteers to only testing a single cancer treatment EVER in their lifetime because they are one of the few kinds of treatments that can cause real damage in the few short weeks of a trial.
Unfortunately, I've met several people who would go to different labs and lie, because the payments can be fantastic -- $15,000+ for a few weeks in a facility testing a cancer drug. That's pretty tempting to a financially stable person, nearly irresistable to someone with no education or professional qualifications. Fortunately there are few enough labs that do such studies that it would be tough to do more than a handful without going to foreign labs (indeed London is a popular destination -- I confess I expected their liability standards to be similar to ours, now I'm glad I never went).
All you've admitted is that you don't have any particularly unconventional opinions or clothing, not that you have free speech or the freedom to choose what you wear. The Supreme Court has already said without ambiguitiy that you don't have free speech inside school the way you have outside.
That sounds great! Although I already have both things in kubuntu and it is free can run WINE (so If I want photoshop I can use it) and that's for free. Not saying that Macs are bad or anything just that you can find those features elsewhere so better focus on the other advantages macs have.
The thing is, he WAS talking about things that are specific to the Mac, it's just that what you're seeing as two functionally separate things are, on a Mac, a single integrated feature. Yes, under a good Linux you can jury-rig a major app to run under Wine, and you can run unix command line tools.
But on the Mac, you can run that major application, and a command-line tool, and they interact with each other in a completely supported manned. You could script Photoshop using normal Bash commands (via OSAScript) under OSX, and you could write an Applescript to export information from Photoshop directly into four different ImageMagick processes running in separate terminal windows. Of course there's much more mundane stuff, like dragging and dropping between applications and command lines.
That's the sort of thing Mac users mean when they say how great it is to have a real Unix with great commercial software together on the same box. It isn't just about the convenience of not having to SSH or KVM to another system to run the full variety of apps you may need during a day's work, they become an actual SYSTEM working together in a unified way that no other OS I know of can match with any amount of hacking.
Most Apple applications have proprietary data formats
Factally correct, but misleading. While several Apple apps maintain their configuration data in a specific optimized binary format, they support exporting the data in XML and other open, easily readable formats. There is no "vendor lock-in", assuming you don't buy anything with DRM. The idea that iLife apps somehow lock up user data (or configurations, like playlists or user ratings) is pure FUD, easily disproven with even a cursory use of Google.
heck, if you wanted to, you could easily write or download an Applescript or perl script to back up most of the configuration data to the files themselves as metadata, by using the abilities built into the application and 100% blessed Apple themselves.