Yes, Apple locks down their stuff. You want to know why people don't care too much? Because Apple locks stuff down the right way, for the right reasons. They're not too intrusive, they don't overreach, they make sure 95% of their users will never even notice the lock-in, and they make sure it provides benefit to the users as well as to themselves and their partners.
Most people just want to share songs with a few close friends and family--and Apple's AAC protection allowed that. Most people just want to download reliable, trustworthy apps to their phones-- and Apple's mobile app store lets them do that. Both of these things bring revenue to Apple, but they also bring better content to users, by allowing music companies and app developers to get their money and thereby giving them incentives to produce more and better content.
Music, movie and television studios think that allowing users to do anything with their media will be the end of the world. Free-software evangelists thing being unable to do everything with their media will be the end of the world. Apple recognizes that for most people, it's good enough to be able to do the common things.
The term for freeing an iPhone is "jailbreaking", but here's the question: is it a jail if the user never notices the walls?
As a random comment... I played a lot of Hero's Quest (later renamed Quest for Glory) on my PC with its crappy little speaker. It had a great soundtrack--I can still remember the main theme. One day my uncle installed it on his PC which was hooked up to his keyboard via MIDI. When the game started up and it played that same music through the keyboard, my first reaction was: that's not how it sounds. I was so used to the tinny PC bleeps and bloops...
The best passwords I've used are non-dictionary but pronounceable words. The simplest way to generate one is to alternate consonants and vowels, for example 'lasopedi'. It's easy to remember because your brain can store it as a word, not as a random series of letters. You can add uppercase letters, symbols, or numbers if you want it more complex, like 'lasoPedi2!', which is still pretty easy to remember.
The apostrophe was not there as a contraction. It was there for exactly the reason Dave Barry was making fun of: frequently people insert an apostrophe when they add an S to the end of a word because they're not sure of the rules involved and seem to think it's better to err on the side of the apostrophe.
I think what you've just proven is that a moderate amount of learning is a dangerous thing.
Dear Mister Language Person: What is the purpose of the apostrophe?
Answer: The apostrophe is used mainly in hand-lettered small business signs to alert the reader than an "S" is coming up at the end of a word, as in: WE DO NOT EXCEPT PERSONAL CHECK'S, or: SUPREME'S THROW OUT BILSKI PATENT. Another important grammar concept to bear in mind when creating hand- lettered small-business signs is that you should put quotation marks around random words for decoration, as in "TRY" OUR HOT DOG'S, or even TRY "OUR" HOT DOG'S.
-- Dave Barry, "Tips for Writer's"
I'm guessing that one of the goals of this debugger is to allow embedding it in higher-level tools or scripts, meaning an IDE like KDevelop could load the debugger as a shard library and communicate with it through an API, instead of spawning a process and interacting with it via stdin/stdout. Similarly it could load the compiler and get access to the parsed symbol tree for a source file or library, so it could do more interesting things like tooltips, autocompletion, etc.
So, the 'visual overlays' for LLDB could theoretically be faster and more feature-rich than those for GDB.
1. Original hackers in the 60s on early mainframes and minicomputers like PDPs 2. Homebrew hardware hackers in the 70s putting together their own microcomputers 3. Sierra game programmers in the 80s writing King's Quest
When I read it, my reaction to the third section was: wha? Sierra programmers were pretty cool and the stories are neat (especially the stuff about the partying and the (unsuccessful) effort by Ken Williams to try to get one of his programmers laid) but didn't rank anywhere near the top of the "cool hackers of the world" list. It was obvious in retrospect that he should have waited until the open source hacking community really took off; GNU and Linux are the obvious third generation of hackers. Of course, hindsight is 20/20 and the book is nonetheless excellent.
You're right, most people have a hard time saturating the CPUs on their new computers. But they have a very easy time saturating a physical hard disk. I think that 90% of the time a person is waiting on a computer to do something, it's because the processor is waiting on IO (either reading from the filesystem or from the page file). Making IO faster is by far the best way to make a PC feel faster and more responsive.
I know a lot of people hate the binary prefixes kibi-, mibi-, etc., but really, do you ever need to SAY them or write them out? When I tell someone verbally that a file I'm sending them is 4 megabytes, they probably don't care whether I mean 4 x 10e6 or 2e12. If they do, I can tell them the exact number of bytes. When it's written down it often needs to be more precise, but it's always abbreviated, and KiB isn't any harder to read or write than KB.
So just use the SI standard names when it doesn't matter, and use the SI standard abbreviations when you need to be precise. Of course, people who conveniently use KB to mean 1,000 bytes in order to make something appear larger need have some not-too-fine print clarifying the meaning they're using.
Of course it does, but that's different from having RAID or VFS layers which are designed to work with filesystems other than ZFS. The advantage Sun has was that they could basically make those layers interdependent, while Linux needs to worry about keeping the layers independent since other filesystems will need to use them.
It's fantastic that bandwidth in densely-populated areas (or in countries which have invested more in network infrastructure) have cheaper network plans, but that's orthogonal to this discussion.
Another way of looking at that is that if your provider currently guarantees you 6Mb, for the same price they might be able to give you anywhere from 3Mb to 12Mb, with caps which kick in after 15 minutes of 9Mb usage.
It sounds reasonable to me. If it doesn't, you may need to accept the fact that you're not at all guaranteed that you can get your full 6Mb download bandwidth 24/7. If you thought you did, sorry; you misunderstood, possibly because of shady (but probably not illegal) advertising, in which case I don't blame you for being angry. But a reliably 6Mb connection is vastly more expensive than the $50/month you're paying, so your anger is akin to being disappointed that the 120 MPH car you bought isn't guaranteed to make your 10 mile commute in 5 minutes during rush hour.
Will it install on a clean hard drive? I'm honestly curious here; from what I understand, even the "full retail" version won't. If that's the case, then I think it's an upgrade, regardless of what the box says.
Reporters may leave if their newspaper starts charging for content, yes. However, I think a few more reporters might leave if the newspaper goes bankrupt. People aren't buying newspapers any more. They may not want to pay for online content now, but that's mostly because the 'free' online content is being subsidized by papers which are rather quickly going out of business. As that happens, the remaining papers will end up charging for online content (since how else will they make any money) and people will either pay for it (because there's no other option for getting good journalism) or not pay for it (because they'd rather read free blogosphere crap). But if there's one thing I'll lay odds on, it's that expensive content (like good journalism) isn't going to be available for free. TANSTAAFL, you know.
I'm working on getting a Buffalo Linkstation Pro Duo set up with Debian Lenny. It's mostly complete, I'm rebuilding the kernel as I type to get USB printer support working. It's very compact and low-power, and has mirrored 500 GB disks, which I think is essential for any home server.
The downside is that I had to solder on a serial connection in order to get access to uboot (a bootloader similar in concept to GRUB) so I could view early kernel output and diagnose problems, log in if networking didn't come up, etc. If you can find a NAS device which supports a serial console (or at least can use netcat instead), that would be good.
One thing to be aware of is that you get a lot less CPU power with these low-watt ARM CPUs. The Linkstation Duo is great for fileserving, printing, and light email and webserving duties, but when I installed Gallery and postgres to view my photos over the web, it ran extremely slowly. That's not too surprising given it's a NAS not a full-fledged server, but it's something to keep in mind. You may only need a low-power device for 90% of your apps, but that last 10% can use a surprising amount of CPU.
For this very reason I hate mandatory seatbelt laws, if there's the possibility someone will burn to death they should have the choice as to whether or not they will wear a seatbelt. The only thing worse than burning to death is surviving having your body burned.
I'm fine with repealing mandatory seatbelt laws (for adults), but only under the condition that the ambulance and emergency room are not required to treat anyone who was stupid enough to get in a car wreck when they weren't wearing a seatbelt.
A sound or phrase or name is in violation of a trademark if it's similar enough that most people would be confused. The NBC chimes are three particular notes, but if I started my competing network "MBC" with three notes a half-step lower than the NBC chimes, I'm certainly in violation.
In this case, is any reasonable person going to be able to distinguish between one amphibious tour company with a Red Crested Pochard duck call and another with a Ringed Teal duck call?
The second company is obviously trying to make tourists equate their company with the original, and you can't do that with a trademarked phrase or sound.
The quacking sound is an original concept (for an amphibious tour) which is an integral part of the company's brand. What's the problem with them defending their sound mark? It's not like they got a sound mark on a car horn honking and are now suing all taxi drivers.
You know, not all trademarks, copyrights, businesses, or lawsuits are bad. Sometimes you need to actually use your brain to determine which are which.
Is a Battle.Net connection required to play for the entire game? Are unique accounts required for each client which plays in the LAN game?
We don't know the answer to these questions. Personally, if the answer is "no" to both of them, then I'm happy. Perhaps you wouldn't be. But the main point is that you don't know and you're jumping to the conclusion that a company who has done better than anyone else at making online and LAN games fun and accessible has suddenly (thanks to some vague comments about requiring Battle.Net) turned into an evil monster who wants to take the first-born children of gamers.
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Yes, Apple locks down their stuff. You want to know why people don't care too much? Because Apple locks stuff down the right way, for the right reasons. They're not too intrusive, they don't overreach, they make sure 95% of their users will never even notice the lock-in, and they make sure it provides benefit to the users as well as to themselves and their partners.
Most people just want to share songs with a few close friends and family--and Apple's AAC protection allowed that. Most people just want to download reliable, trustworthy apps to their phones-- and Apple's mobile app store lets them do that. Both of these things bring revenue to Apple, but they also bring better content to users, by allowing music companies and app developers to get their money and thereby giving them incentives to produce more and better content.
Music, movie and television studios think that allowing users to do anything with their media will be the end of the world. Free-software evangelists thing being unable to do everything with their media will be the end of the world. Apple recognizes that for most people, it's good enough to be able to do the common things.
The term for freeing an iPhone is "jailbreaking", but here's the question: is it a jail if the user never notices the walls?
As a random comment... I played a lot of Hero's Quest (later renamed Quest for Glory) on my PC with its crappy little speaker. It had a great soundtrack--I can still remember the main theme. One day my uncle installed it on his PC which was hooked up to his keyboard via MIDI. When the game started up and it played that same music through the keyboard, my first reaction was: that's not how it sounds. I was so used to the tinny PC bleeps and bloops...
I live in a major city in a state near yours. Homicides are becoming more common.
That doesn't mean a whole lot if nearly everything you're unhappy about in D is better in C++. Frequently that's the case.
If you have any rolls of Kodachrome sitting around not yet exposed, better expose them before sending them to Dwayne's before December 10, 2010.
The best passwords I've used are non-dictionary but pronounceable words. The simplest way to generate one is to alternate consonants and vowels, for example 'lasopedi'. It's easy to remember because your brain can store it as a word, not as a random series of letters. You can add uppercase letters, symbols, or numbers if you want it more complex, like 'lasoPedi2!', which is still pretty easy to remember.
The apostrophe was not there as a contraction. It was there for exactly the reason Dave Barry was making fun of: frequently people insert an apostrophe when they add an S to the end of a word because they're not sure of the rules involved and seem to think it's better to err on the side of the apostrophe.
I think what you've just proven is that a moderate amount of learning is a dangerous thing.
Dear Mister Language Person: What is the purpose of the apostrophe?
Answer: The apostrophe is used mainly in hand-lettered small business signs to alert the reader than an "S" is coming up at the end of a word, as in: WE DO NOT EXCEPT PERSONAL CHECK'S, or: SUPREME'S THROW OUT BILSKI PATENT. Another important grammar concept to bear in mind when creating hand- lettered small-business signs is that you should put quotation marks around random words for decoration, as in "TRY" OUR HOT DOG'S, or even TRY "OUR" HOT DOG'S.
-- Dave Barry, "Tips for Writer's"
I'm guessing that one of the goals of this debugger is to allow embedding it in higher-level tools or scripts, meaning an IDE like KDevelop could load the debugger as a shard library and communicate with it through an API, instead of spawning a process and interacting with it via stdin/stdout. Similarly it could load the compiler and get access to the parsed symbol tree for a source file or library, so it could do more interesting things like tooltips, autocompletion, etc.
So, the 'visual overlays' for LLDB could theoretically be faster and more feature-rich than those for GDB.
I despise that, and yes it's still there. But you can disable it via the preference panel (somewhere).
As I recall, the book had three sections:
1. Original hackers in the 60s on early mainframes and minicomputers like PDPs
2. Homebrew hardware hackers in the 70s putting together their own microcomputers
3. Sierra game programmers in the 80s writing King's Quest
When I read it, my reaction to the third section was: wha? Sierra programmers were pretty cool and the stories are neat (especially the stuff about the partying and the (unsuccessful) effort by Ken Williams to try to get one of his programmers laid) but didn't rank anywhere near the top of the "cool hackers of the world" list. It was obvious in retrospect that he should have waited until the open source hacking community really took off; GNU and Linux are the obvious third generation of hackers. Of course, hindsight is 20/20 and the book is nonetheless excellent.
You're right, most people have a hard time saturating the CPUs on their new computers. But they have a very easy time saturating a physical hard disk. I think that 90% of the time a person is waiting on a computer to do something, it's because the processor is waiting on IO (either reading from the filesystem or from the page file). Making IO faster is by far the best way to make a PC feel faster and more responsive.
And Windows did preemptive multitasking (you know, the real kind) before MacOS! ;-)
Heh... see, this is why we need SI units. I meant to say 2e22, or better yet, 4 x 2e20.
I know a lot of people hate the binary prefixes kibi-, mibi-, etc., but really, do you ever need to SAY them or write them out? When I tell someone verbally that a file I'm sending them is 4 megabytes, they probably don't care whether I mean 4 x 10e6 or 2e12. If they do, I can tell them the exact number of bytes. When it's written down it often needs to be more precise, but it's always abbreviated, and KiB isn't any harder to read or write than KB.
So just use the SI standard names when it doesn't matter, and use the SI standard abbreviations when you need to be precise. Of course, people who conveniently use KB to mean 1,000 bytes in order to make something appear larger need have some not-too-fine print clarifying the meaning they're using.
Of course it does, but that's different from having RAID or VFS layers which are designed to work with filesystems other than ZFS. The advantage Sun has was that they could basically make those layers interdependent, while Linux needs to worry about keeping the layers independent since other filesystems will need to use them.
It's fantastic that bandwidth in densely-populated areas (or in countries which have invested more in network infrastructure) have cheaper network plans, but that's orthogonal to this discussion.
Another way of looking at that is that if your provider currently guarantees you 6Mb, for the same price they might be able to give you anywhere from 3Mb to 12Mb, with caps which kick in after 15 minutes of 9Mb usage.
It sounds reasonable to me. If it doesn't, you may need to accept the fact that you're not at all guaranteed that you can get your full 6Mb download bandwidth 24/7. If you thought you did, sorry; you misunderstood, possibly because of shady (but probably not illegal) advertising, in which case I don't blame you for being angry. But a reliably 6Mb connection is vastly more expensive than the $50/month you're paying, so your anger is akin to being disappointed that the 120 MPH car you bought isn't guaranteed to make your 10 mile commute in 5 minutes during rush hour.
Will it install on a clean hard drive? I'm honestly curious here; from what I understand, even the "full retail" version won't. If that's the case, then I think it's an upgrade, regardless of what the box says.
Reporters may leave if their newspaper starts charging for content, yes. However, I think a few more reporters might leave if the newspaper goes bankrupt. People aren't buying newspapers any more. They may not want to pay for online content now, but that's mostly because the 'free' online content is being subsidized by papers which are rather quickly going out of business. As that happens, the remaining papers will end up charging for online content (since how else will they make any money) and people will either pay for it (because there's no other option for getting good journalism) or not pay for it (because they'd rather read free blogosphere crap). But if there's one thing I'll lay odds on, it's that expensive content (like good journalism) isn't going to be available for free. TANSTAAFL, you know.
I'm working on getting a Buffalo Linkstation Pro Duo set up with Debian Lenny. It's mostly complete, I'm rebuilding the kernel as I type to get USB printer support working. It's very compact and low-power, and has mirrored 500 GB disks, which I think is essential for any home server.
The downside is that I had to solder on a serial connection in order to get access to uboot (a bootloader similar in concept to GRUB) so I could view early kernel output and diagnose problems, log in if networking didn't come up, etc. If you can find a NAS device which supports a serial console (or at least can use netcat instead), that would be good.
One thing to be aware of is that you get a lot less CPU power with these low-watt ARM CPUs. The Linkstation Duo is great for fileserving, printing, and light email and webserving duties, but when I installed Gallery and postgres to view my photos over the web, it ran extremely slowly. That's not too surprising given it's a NAS not a full-fledged server, but it's something to keep in mind. You may only need a low-power device for 90% of your apps, but that last 10% can use a surprising amount of CPU.
For this very reason I hate mandatory seatbelt laws, if there's the possibility someone will burn to death they should have the choice as to whether or not they will wear a seatbelt. The only thing worse than burning to death is surviving having your body burned.
I'm fine with repealing mandatory seatbelt laws (for adults), but only under the condition that the ambulance and emergency room are not required to treat anyone who was stupid enough to get in a car wreck when they weren't wearing a seatbelt.
A sound or phrase or name is in violation of a trademark if it's similar enough that most people would be confused. The NBC chimes are three particular notes, but if I started my competing network "MBC" with three notes a half-step lower than the NBC chimes, I'm certainly in violation.
In this case, is any reasonable person going to be able to distinguish between one amphibious tour company with a Red Crested Pochard duck call and another with a Ringed Teal duck call?
The second company is obviously trying to make tourists equate their company with the original, and you can't do that with a trademarked phrase or sound.
The quacking sound is an original concept (for an amphibious tour) which is an integral part of the company's brand. What's the problem with them defending their sound mark? It's not like they got a sound mark on a car horn honking and are now suing all taxi drivers.
You know, not all trademarks, copyrights, businesses, or lawsuits are bad. Sometimes you need to actually use your brain to determine which are which.
Is a Battle.Net connection required to play for the entire game? Are unique accounts required for each client which plays in the LAN game?
We don't know the answer to these questions. Personally, if the answer is "no" to both of them, then I'm happy. Perhaps you wouldn't be. But the main point is that you don't know and you're jumping to the conclusion that a company who has done better than anyone else at making online and LAN games fun and accessible has suddenly (thanks to some vague comments about requiring Battle.Net) turned into an evil monster who wants to take the first-born children of gamers.