The extra weight and wasted space would make this very inefficient. You'd have more stuff that would have to work every single time.
Also, hijackers can threaten passengers instead of just the crew. Making the cockpit inaccessible prevents 9/11 style situations but doesn't prevent old style "take us to ___ or everybody dies" hijackings.
How would it be safe in case of an airborne accident? What's the risk of an airborne accident anyway? Air travel is so overwhelmingly safe that building giant parachuting passenger escape pods seems like a really expensive solution to a virtually nonexistent problem.
What do you mean when you say there are efforts to finalize it? Are you talking about bug fixes? Even if you are, I don't think you should lump it in with WinFS since ReiserFS 4 is available now, and WinFS ain't (and won't be for several YEARS).
The 2 QA guys volunteered from September to October. Then they were assigned to the project officially in October, as were usability folks (who have a usability lab at their disposal). The story doesn't specify how many QA people were assigned, so maybe it was more than 2.
They also got free prototype hardware to develop on that made their app run 50 times as fast as it did on regular, publicly available hardware.
They shipped in January, so that's 1 month of 2 QA guys' free time, versus 4 months of full time QA, and an unknown amount of usability assistance.
This could certainly be made available to an open source project as well, of course. But don't overlook the big increase in resources that the project got when Apple managers decided to officially support it.
This is the leap that companies need to start making with open source, both in visualizing how it was made, and in investing in it. It isn't always a nights-and-weekends hobby project; sometimes it's a full time project with lots of people being paid to work on it. The fly-by-night image is one that Microsoft really, really wants people to believe, so they can say stuff like "there's no QA" or "there are no real releases" and make people scared to buy anything but Microsoft's incredibly high-quality, bug-free code. *cough*
I played FF 7, 8, 9, X, and X-2, and completed 7, and 9 only. I got bored about halfway through 8, didn't feel like spending a whole day winning X, and X-2 was just totally lame.
Now that you know a bit about my tastes for the series, I highly recommend that you play FF 9. I liked it best of all. X was exciting because of the voice overs and the tag teaming, and Uematsu's music is mingled with other composers, which I liked a lot. FF 9 is cuter, and Uematsu all the way.
But, make sure you have ~100 hours of your life to throw away playing a frickin' computer game.:)
>In fact, I am against any laws that dictate what must be taught or what cannot be taught. To limit education in such a way is to make it impotent. How else will children's minds grow?
Well the problem comes down to time and money. How many alternative philosophies and religions does a school have time to teach?
>a law that was being proposed to require that government and civics classes could only teach about democracy.
That's hilarious, or maybe really sad.
>Pay the taxes and pray for those in positions of authority.
Hmm. Caesar claims to be a born again Christian. Why not ask him to just outlaw the teaching of evolution? It's one thing for Jesus to keep his disciples out of trouble with the Romans; I don't think that applies today.
>but then both the naturalistic scientist and the creationist are on the same footing
Perhaps, but the motive and direction of reasoning differs. Someone who has an idea that they believe in, and who selects evidence based on whether or not it fits that idea, is not following the scientific method. They may call themselves a scientist, but they don't understand the definition of the word if they do.
>Should they be taught as 'truth' in the classroom?
I've taken anthropology, geology, biology (human and general) courses, physics, etc. and every single one of them had a heavy emphasis on the fact that the scientific method is more important than its outputs, and that those outputs often turn out to be wrong as we uncover new evidence that doesn't fit the old model.
At no point did anyone say "this is the incontravertible, eternal, absolute truth." That sort of language is reserved for religion.
People like easy answers, absolute truth, simple rules to live by, heaven and hell, and a universe that comes with an instruction manual. Science gives you a candle in the dark, and you have to decide whether you want the comforting fiction, or the best model that fits reality.
If the universe is the system you want to consider, then an infinitesmal sliver of it called the Earth can have wildly increasing order while the rest of the universe compensates for it (due to the energy of the Sun, for example). If you want to consider just the earth and the sun, the energy for life comes from the sun.
>I have history, archaeology, written records and changed lives that speak in concert with my beliefs.
Well, this comes down to a lower level than religion: epistemology. You may have seen some objects, heard some stories, read some books, and so have I. That doesn't make either of us right, or any of those ideas true.
If you start from a position of absolute faith in a particular book, then anything that disagrees is necessarily false and no amount of proof will change your mind. Picking and choosing some outputs from a different epistemology because they make your car run, or cure your diseases, just shows a weakness of faith on your part. Either you believe in the world around you, and what you can see, or you don't.
>Most people have not critically examined whether evolution is true or not - they accept it as fact in the same way that they accept that gravity works
Most adults in the US do not think evolution is correct. The majority of US adults are creationists.
Also, the majority of US adults believe that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time. 46% don't know that it takes a year for the earth to go around the sun.
Relax, you're in the majority.
>If you say "there's no way it can be proven" then you're really saying, "I refuse to accept any proof."
Again, you're confusing faith with reason. Proof in a context of faith means that you feel something, and know it to be true based on that feeling of divine presence. Proof in a scientific context is much harder, and it's entirely possible for something to be unprovable in the scientific meaning, and yet "provable" to a person of faith. A court of law in the US has something of an intermediate test (reasonable doubt).
Carl Sagan covered this distinction very well in Contact: try proving to a third party that you loved a deceased relative. You can convince someone, or maybe a jury, but scientifically, you can't go back and re-run the experiment, so it's not provable.
I guess IBM, Oracle, SAP, Intel, Novell, Red Hat, Wind River, and others desperately need you as a consultant to tell them that they should stop using Eclipse and rewrite their developer tools in C. Why don't you email them and suggest that?
GNOME is pretty slow too. What's that written in again?
This article isn't really informative or funny at all. It's just a plug for their buyer's guide.
Basically they took each category in their buyer's guide and said which product finished last (most of which nobody had heard of anyway, I imagine), and then flogged the buyer's guide.
>my beliefs are no excuse for me to forcibly impose my beliefs on others. >I think that government should stay out of matters like these as much as possible.
So what do you do when public schools want to teach your children that a literal interpretation of the biblical story of creation is provably false, and that evolution and the big bang are how the universe actually began?
Do you put your kids in a private religious school? Do you support laws that place evolution on an equal footing with creation (or that outlaw the teaching of evolution)? What do you do about the taxes you pay that go to teaching something that may directly contradict your religious beliefs?
Send your thank-you notes to Karl Rove and Ralph Reed for that one.
The idea of attacking separation of church and state, and particularly claiming that the Founding Fathers were fundie Christians and that the US is really a Christian theocracy that's gotten off track, has been most recently promoted by them. Facts that detract from that point of view (such as the fact that many of the founders were also Freemasons, which many fundies believe is a Satanic cult, and that separation of church and state is in the Constitution) are ignored.
Thank you, Captain Overgeneralization. Your superhuman ability to lump 300 million individuals into a single category that you can then disparage really helps promote reasoned debate.
>GEntoo and Debian are not for the average user and they are the onle ones "not brain-damaed" so to speak with rpm hell.
Slow down and fix your typos, cowboy. Geez.
Anyway, you're wrong about this. Fedora and Ubuntu also have similar package databases, since they use apt too.
>Whats wrong with a setup.bin? It's unnecessary, because modern open source OS's package managers eliminate the need to ship a 1MB app on a CD-ROM just so that you can drag along 400MB of dependencies and their various redistribution licenses.
It also won't work unless you include every version of the entire dependency tree going down to the kernel itself, for every version of every distro you want to support. Oh gee, they want to install Firefox on an old Slackware box that doesn't have X11 installed at all? I guess I'll have to bundle all of that stuff on my monster CD, and put up with the angry cries of "BLOATWARE!!!" from folks who don't need it.
Win98 is a known release (ok, small family of releases) with a very specific set of libraries included with it. Same thing with WinME, Win2K, WinXP, etc. Development tools insulate you from the fact that someone somewhere made a big table that says if you want to use feature X and you're targetting Windows 95, 98, ME, and 2000, you'll need to include a certain set of upgraded Windows libraries with your installer, and install them on a certain subset of those target OS's. This may fail spectacularly if the user is running some bizarro hacked library from a vendor (such as a weird TCP/IP stack, trackpad driver, etc.) in which case installing your app will hose their system. It's great to know that every installation of Win98SE is exactly the same, except that it's not. Every brand new installation of Win98SE US English Retail is the same, but people use other locales, other installation sources (hmm, what did Compaq preload on their PCs?), and install all sorts of new things on their system (will your installer be able to detect the updated Windows stuff that the Belkin wireless driver installer added?). Hence DLL hell. So, don't get too sentimental about how effortless it was to target Windows Back In The Good Old Days.
Open source apps can't just target a couple of known releases; they target many versions of many kernels in potentially many distros with unknown library upgrades, across many processor architectures. It's just not feasible to ship everything you might need to make your app install properly.
That's why modern open source operating systems have package managers. The OS handles dependencies and the developers just have to accurately specify what they need. This works really well *if* you can find those dependencies easily, otherwise you get "RPM hell". That's a problem that has been solved, but you have to install one of those package managers that is backed by a giant software repository (perhaps by migrating to a newer distro) in order to get out of RPM hell. A secondary benefit is that the package manager doesn't tie you to a processor architecture, kernel, distro, or set of installed libraries. Apt works equally well on my G4 PowerBook running Mac OS X and my home Athlon64 server running Debian 3.1.
With that in place, all you have to do is say: apt-get install mozilla-firefox...and It Just Works. (Or if you like GUIs, run 'synaptic', or if you like curses UIs, run 'aptitude'.)
>Its unacceptable today. Yes, it is, which is why Linux distros come with package managers that deal with these things for you, so that users don't have to, and so that developers only need to express their app's immediate dependencies.
This problem has been solved. Some people just don't know about it, and complain because of their ignorance.
>Most people *never* upgrade their operating system.
Right, they just buy a whole new computer every few years and reinstall everything on top of the new OS.
>It's a lot easier for the developer to permit the application to build properly on older systems than to force some poor smuck to try and compile something
That's exactly wrong. It's *much* easier to push effort onto the end-user than to make a build that supports all sorts of old stuff.
You probably meant "it'd take less effort for the developer to support old OSs than it would take me to backport all of the dependencies". You're overlooking the fact that from the developer's POV, his/her time and your time are not of equal value (or else he'd be happy to come to your house and install it for you; why not, since he knows it better?).
Maybe you should migrate yourself off of RH 7.3 and onto an OS that has an easy, incremental upgrade path. There's no reason that you should be wasting your time hunting for srpms and cobbling together a sorta-kinda up to date system. You'd save more time by just upgrading to Fedora or Debian or something else that uses apt. Then you wouldn't be wasting your time and whining to developers to either duplicate code that already exists in dependencies you're not willing to backport yourself, or to remove features so that their apps can use older versions of dependencies.
BTW, there's usually a *reason* that dependencies get updated. Have you ever considered that?
P.S. I really like your attitude of entitlement to open source developers' time. Damn them for focusing on users who actually keep their software up to date! They *owe* you their efforts specifically because you don't feel like upgrading, right?
There's only one A in "compatible". The possessive form of "it" is "its". Gecko and Netscape should be capitalized. Your second pseudo-sentence should end with a question mark, since it's a quesion.
Remind me never to hire you to write regular expressions.
>Well it did and they didn't. You don't think so? They're certainly on track for doing so.
Go back a few days and read some of the comments by IT manager types who complain that they can't switch to Firefox because they just have too many apps to support that require MSIE.
The only reason that Microsoft doesn't have a credible proprietary client+server web development platform yet is that they're so damn late with Longhorn.
There's a big difference between attention and sales. Lots of people want all kinds of mutated Macs - dual-G5 powerbooks, tablets, a new Cube, you name it, somebody has a concept sketch and is convinced that if Apple spent a ton on R&D and made them, they'd sell at least one.
If Apple made a turd-shaped Mac, a few people would buy it, and 1000 stories would talk about it, and everybody would clobber any web site that broke the story by going there all at once.
That doesn't mean that a turd-shaped Mac would make Apple any money.
>I recently lost about 60GB of music (and lots of other stuff too) when the mandrake 10 installer decided that it should reformat that windows partition without bothering to ask first.
I guess it just jumped into the CD drive and ran itself without giving you a chance to back up your hard disk before installing a new operating system, right?
The parent post is wrong. There's no way to make something detectable but not removeable. If you have code that can detect the signal, then that code can just remove that signal. Saying that technique X is too crude and therefore the signal cannot be removed is foolish; just use the same technique you used to detect the signal in the first place.
It's like saying that you can hide an invisible (to the human eye) watermark in an image, but if you try to remove the watermark by putting a big black rectangle over the whole image, it ruins the image quality. Well, duh.
If its presence isn't audible, its absence won't be audible either.
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The extra weight and wasted space would make this very inefficient. You'd have more stuff that would have to work every single time.
Also, hijackers can threaten passengers instead of just the crew. Making the cockpit inaccessible prevents 9/11 style situations but doesn't prevent old style "take us to ___ or everybody dies" hijackings.
How would it be safe in case of an airborne accident? What's the risk of an airborne accident anyway? Air travel is so overwhelmingly safe that building giant parachuting passenger escape pods seems like a really expensive solution to a virtually nonexistent problem.
Keep watching those made for TV movies, though.
You should just wear body armor and a helmet in case you're caught in a firefight or in case something heavy lands on your head.
And a tinfoil hat in case mind-control radio waves really are being beamed at you.
>there are efforts to finalize Reiser4
According to the ReiserFS 4 page, it's released.
What do you mean when you say there are efforts to finalize it? Are you talking about bug fixes? Even if you are, I don't think you should lump it in with WinFS since ReiserFS 4 is available now, and WinFS ain't (and won't be for several YEARS).
Did YOU read the story?
The 2 QA guys volunteered from September to October. Then they were assigned to the project officially in October, as were usability folks (who have a usability lab at their disposal). The story doesn't specify how many QA people were assigned, so maybe it was more than 2.
They also got free prototype hardware to develop on that made their app run 50 times as fast as it did on regular, publicly available hardware.
They shipped in January, so that's 1 month of 2 QA guys' free time, versus 4 months of full time QA, and an unknown amount of usability assistance.
This could certainly be made available to an open source project as well, of course. But don't overlook the big increase in resources that the project got when Apple managers decided to officially support it.
This is the leap that companies need to start making with open source, both in visualizing how it was made, and in investing in it. It isn't always a nights-and-weekends hobby project; sometimes it's a full time project with lots of people being paid to work on it. The fly-by-night image is one that Microsoft really, really wants people to believe, so they can say stuff like "there's no QA" or "there are no real releases" and make people scared to buy anything but Microsoft's incredibly high-quality, bug-free code. *cough*
I played FF 7, 8, 9, X, and X-2, and completed 7, and 9 only. I got bored about halfway through 8, didn't feel like spending a whole day winning X, and X-2 was just totally lame.
:)
Now that you know a bit about my tastes for the series, I highly recommend that you play FF 9. I liked it best of all. X was exciting because of the voice overs and the tag teaming, and Uematsu's music is mingled with other composers, which I liked a lot. FF 9 is cuter, and Uematsu all the way.
But, make sure you have ~100 hours of your life to throw away playing a frickin' computer game.
>Do people buy shrek 2?
11 million DVDs in the first three days... yes, people buy Shrek 2.
>In fact, I am against any laws that dictate what must be taught or what cannot be taught. To limit education in such a way is to make it impotent. How else will children's minds grow?
Well the problem comes down to time and money. How many alternative philosophies and religions does a school have time to teach?
>a law that was being proposed to require that government and civics classes could only teach about democracy.
That's hilarious, or maybe really sad.
>Pay the taxes and pray for those in positions of authority.
Hmm. Caesar claims to be a born again Christian. Why not ask him to just outlaw the teaching of evolution? It's one thing for Jesus to keep his disciples out of trouble with the Romans; I don't think that applies today.
>but then both the naturalistic scientist and the creationist are on the same footing
Perhaps, but the motive and direction of reasoning differs. Someone who has an idea that they believe in, and who selects evidence based on whether or not it fits that idea, is not following the scientific method. They may call themselves a scientist, but they don't understand the definition of the word if they do.
>Should they be taught as 'truth' in the classroom?
I've taken anthropology, geology, biology (human and general) courses, physics, etc. and every single one of them had a heavy emphasis on the fact that the scientific method is more important than its outputs, and that those outputs often turn out to be wrong as we uncover new evidence that doesn't fit the old model.
At no point did anyone say "this is the incontravertible, eternal, absolute truth." That sort of language is reserved for religion.
People like easy answers, absolute truth, simple rules to live by, heaven and hell, and a universe that comes with an instruction manual. Science gives you a candle in the dark, and you have to decide whether you want the comforting fiction, or the best model that fits reality.
If the universe is the system you want to consider, then an infinitesmal sliver of it called the Earth can have wildly increasing order while the rest of the universe compensates for it (due to the energy of the Sun, for example). If you want to consider just the earth and the sun, the energy for life comes from the sun.
>I have history, archaeology, written records and changed lives that speak in concert with my beliefs.
Well, this comes down to a lower level than religion: epistemology. You may have seen some objects, heard some stories, read some books, and so have I. That doesn't make either of us right, or any of those ideas true.
If you start from a position of absolute faith in a particular book, then anything that disagrees is necessarily false and no amount of proof will change your mind. Picking and choosing some outputs from a different epistemology because they make your car run, or cure your diseases, just shows a weakness of faith on your part. Either you believe in the world around you, and what you can see, or you don't.
>Most people have not critically examined whether evolution is true or not - they accept it as fact in the same way that they accept that gravity works
Most adults in the US do not think evolution is correct. The majority of US adults are creationists.
Also, the majority of US adults believe that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time. 46% don't know that it takes a year for the earth to go around the sun.
Relax, you're in the majority.
>If you say "there's no way it can be proven" then you're really saying, "I refuse to accept any proof."
Again, you're confusing faith with reason. Proof in a context of faith means that you feel something, and know it to be true based on that feeling of divine presence. Proof in a scientific context is much harder, and it's entirely possible for something to be unprovable in the scientific meaning, and yet "provable" to a person of faith. A court of law in the US has something of an intermediate test (reasonable doubt).
Carl Sagan covered this distinction very well in Contact: try proving to a third party that you loved a deceased relative. You can convince someone, or maybe a jury, but scientifically, you can't go back and re-run the experiment, so it's not provable.
>At the moment, Java gui apps are neat toys.
I guess IBM, Oracle, SAP, Intel, Novell, Red Hat, Wind River, and others desperately need you as a consultant to tell them that they should stop using Eclipse and rewrite their developer tools in C. Why don't you email them and suggest that?
GNOME is pretty slow too. What's that written in again?
This article isn't really informative or funny at all. It's just a plug for their buyer's guide.
Basically they took each category in their buyer's guide and said which product finished last (most of which nobody had heard of anyway, I imagine), and then flogged the buyer's guide.
Weak.
>my beliefs are no excuse for me to forcibly impose my beliefs on others.
>I think that government should stay out of matters like these as much as possible.
So what do you do when public schools want to teach your children that a literal interpretation of the biblical story of creation is provably false, and that evolution and the big bang are how the universe actually began?
Do you put your kids in a private religious school? Do you support laws that place evolution on an equal footing with creation (or that outlaw the teaching of evolution)? What do you do about the taxes you pay that go to teaching something that may directly contradict your religious beliefs?
Send your thank-you notes to Karl Rove and Ralph Reed for that one.
The idea of attacking separation of church and state, and particularly claiming that the Founding Fathers were fundie Christians and that the US is really a Christian theocracy that's gotten off track, has been most recently promoted by them. Facts that detract from that point of view (such as the fact that many of the founders were also Freemasons, which many fundies believe is a Satanic cult, and that separation of church and state is in the Constitution) are ignored.
Thank you, Captain Overgeneralization. Your superhuman ability to lump 300 million individuals into a single category that you can then disparage really helps promote reasoned debate.
The world thanks you!
>GEntoo and Debian are not for the average user and they are the onle ones "not brain-damaed" so to speak with rpm hell.
...and It Just Works. (Or if you like GUIs, run 'synaptic', or if you like curses UIs, run 'aptitude'.)
Slow down and fix your typos, cowboy. Geez.
Anyway, you're wrong about this. Fedora and Ubuntu also have similar package databases, since they use apt too.
>Whats wrong with a setup.bin?
It's unnecessary, because modern open source OS's package managers eliminate the need to ship a 1MB app on a CD-ROM just so that you can drag along 400MB of dependencies and their various redistribution licenses.
It also won't work unless you include every version of the entire dependency tree going down to the kernel itself, for every version of every distro you want to support. Oh gee, they want to install Firefox on an old Slackware box that doesn't have X11 installed at all? I guess I'll have to bundle all of that stuff on my monster CD, and put up with the angry cries of "BLOATWARE!!!" from folks who don't need it.
Win98 is a known release (ok, small family of releases) with a very specific set of libraries included with it. Same thing with WinME, Win2K, WinXP, etc. Development tools insulate you from the fact that someone somewhere made a big table that says if you want to use feature X and you're targetting Windows 95, 98, ME, and 2000, you'll need to include a certain set of upgraded Windows libraries with your installer, and install them on a certain subset of those target OS's. This may fail spectacularly if the user is running some bizarro hacked library from a vendor (such as a weird TCP/IP stack, trackpad driver, etc.) in which case installing your app will hose their system. It's great to know that every installation of Win98SE is exactly the same, except that it's not. Every brand new installation of Win98SE US English Retail is the same, but people use other locales, other installation sources (hmm, what did Compaq preload on their PCs?), and install all sorts of new things on their system (will your installer be able to detect the updated Windows stuff that the Belkin wireless driver installer added?). Hence DLL hell. So, don't get too sentimental about how effortless it was to target Windows Back In The Good Old Days.
Open source apps can't just target a couple of known releases; they target many versions of many kernels in potentially many distros with unknown library upgrades, across many processor architectures. It's just not feasible to ship everything you might need to make your app install properly.
That's why modern open source operating systems have package managers. The OS handles dependencies and the developers just have to accurately specify what they need. This works really well *if* you can find those dependencies easily, otherwise you get "RPM hell". That's a problem that has been solved, but you have to install one of those package managers that is backed by a giant software repository (perhaps by migrating to a newer distro) in order to get out of RPM hell. A secondary benefit is that the package manager doesn't tie you to a processor architecture, kernel, distro, or set of installed libraries. Apt works equally well on my G4 PowerBook running Mac OS X and my home Athlon64 server running Debian 3.1.
With that in place, all you have to do is say:
apt-get install mozilla-firefox
>Its unacceptable today.
Yes, it is, which is why Linux distros come with package managers that deal with these things for you, so that users don't have to, and so that developers only need to express their app's immediate dependencies.
This problem has been solved. Some people just don't know about it, and complain because of their ignorance.
>Most people *never* upgrade their operating system.
Right, they just buy a whole new computer every few years and reinstall everything on top of the new OS.
>It's a lot easier for the developer to permit the application to build properly on older systems than to force some poor smuck to try and compile something
That's exactly wrong. It's *much* easier to push effort onto the end-user than to make a build that supports all sorts of old stuff.
You probably meant "it'd take less effort for the developer to support old OSs than it would take me to backport all of the dependencies". You're overlooking the fact that from the developer's POV, his/her time and your time are not of equal value (or else he'd be happy to come to your house and install it for you; why not, since he knows it better?).
Maybe you should migrate yourself off of RH 7.3 and onto an OS that has an easy, incremental upgrade path. There's no reason that you should be wasting your time hunting for srpms and cobbling together a sorta-kinda up to date system. You'd save more time by just upgrading to Fedora or Debian or something else that uses apt. Then you wouldn't be wasting your time and whining to developers to either duplicate code that already exists in dependencies you're not willing to backport yourself, or to remove features so that their apps can use older versions of dependencies.
BTW, there's usually a *reason* that dependencies get updated. Have you ever considered that?
P.S. I really like your attitude of entitlement to open source developers' time. Damn them for focusing on users who actually keep their software up to date! They *owe* you their efforts specifically because you don't feel like upgrading, right?
There's only one A in "compatible".
The possessive form of "it" is "its".
Gecko and Netscape should be capitalized.
Your second pseudo-sentence should end with a question mark, since it's a quesion.
Remind me never to hire you to write regular expressions.
>Well it did and they didn't.
You don't think so? They're certainly on track for doing so.
Go back a few days and read some of the comments by IT manager types who complain that they can't switch to Firefox because they just have too many apps to support that require MSIE.
The only reason that Microsoft doesn't have a credible proprietary client+server web development platform yet is that they're so damn late with Longhorn.
Huh? Ask Iraqis how to fight bureaucrats?
Yeah, they were doing a bang-up job at resisting Saddam's regime.
I guess they should wait until all of their MCSEs spontaneously develop Linux skills, huh?
Switching to Linux on some desktops doesn't mean that you have no options whatsoever to run Windows-only apps.
Also, there are these things called "vendors", who support open source software with trained staff, training, books, patches, etc.
There's a big difference between attention and sales. Lots of people want all kinds of mutated Macs - dual-G5 powerbooks, tablets, a new Cube, you name it, somebody has a concept sketch and is convinced that if Apple spent a ton on R&D and made them, they'd sell at least one.
If Apple made a turd-shaped Mac, a few people would buy it, and 1000 stories would talk about it, and everybody would clobber any web site that broke the story by going there all at once.
That doesn't mean that a turd-shaped Mac would make Apple any money.
More likely:
"a zero, a one, a zero, one, one zero, one one!"
1) back up your data.
2) insure your property.
3) don't buy shitty devices and then bitch about how shitty they are.
>I recently lost about 60GB of music (and lots of other stuff too) when the mandrake 10 installer decided that it should reformat that windows partition without bothering to ask first.
I guess it just jumped into the CD drive and ran itself without giving you a chance to back up your hard disk before installing a new operating system, right?
The parent post is wrong. There's no way to make something detectable but not removeable. If you have code that can detect the signal, then that code can just remove that signal. Saying that technique X is too crude and therefore the signal cannot be removed is foolish; just use the same technique you used to detect the signal in the first place.
It's like saying that you can hide an invisible (to the human eye) watermark in an image, but if you try to remove the watermark by putting a big black rectangle over the whole image, it ruins the image quality. Well, duh.
If its presence isn't audible, its absence won't be audible either.