Well, for CS, there are few places in the world that can give you an education on par with the top US universities: CMU, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley. When I was in grad school for CS at UW-Madison (a school with a top-notch CS dept AND a good football team), I noticed a LOT of foreign-born students. How many Americans are going to India, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and China for their graduate Computer Science education?
So, yeah, if you don't want an education, a large American university will happily accomodate you and give you a worthless piece of paper. But if you DO want an education, the US is a good place to be. It's all up to you.
4) Last I saw, Linux was about on par with MacOS for a regular user-base.
There is no way in heck that there are as many Linux DESKTOP installs as there are Macintosh DESKTOP installs. Likewise, there's no way that there are as many Macintosh SERVER installs as there are Linux SERVER installs. Each OS functions best in a certain place.
Since it's unlikely that MS expects people to run MS Office on a server, it's those Linux desktop numbers that count. They're insignificant. It's not going to grow significant any time in the next two years.
Again, no non-US citizen should ever worry about being sued in a US court.
Except this isn't true anymore. The US has passed several laws which enable people to sue foreign countries (and companies) for confiscated property (Cuba, in the Helm-Burton law) or sponsoring terrorism (Iran). What happens is that the assets of these countries which are in the US can then be used to pay the damages.
Helms-Burton has never gone into effect; Clinton has been signing off on the 6-month delays built into the law ever since it was passed. But Iran was sued for funding Hamas (Iran actually lists, in its official budget, line items that show exactly how much money they give to groups like Hamas and Hizbolah), after a Hamas bomb killed an American in Israel. I don't know if the money was actually taken from impounded Iranian funds, though.
Anyway, the point of the story is that if you have ANY assets in the US (such as banks that are US-chartered), you could end up paying out in a civil claim.
There is no "high priest" any more. The line has been broken for nearly 2,000 years. While Jews who are Cohanim are members of the priestly class, they only serve vestigal ceremonial functions. As I said in another post, no animal sacrifices have been performed since the destruction of the Holy Temple in the year 70.
Advocating slavery and raping of the environment, as a means to a questionable end is disturbing.
And yet, you profit from the benefits of this awful past. You hypocrite.
Please point out the time, date, and place where the average person had more of a say in how their government worked.
America - July 4, 1776. I suggest you read a little about John Lock, and his ideals that Jefferson based your Declaration of Independence. Familiarize yourself with Social Contract that it was based on.
In 1776, there were millions of slaves in this country. Women couldn't vote. People who didn't own land couldn't vote. I guess you don't count blacks, women, or the landless as people. There was also taxation without representation in 1776, as the US was still under British law. The Revolution ended in 1783, IIRC. The Constitution passed in 1789. Women didn't get to vote until 1920. Most Blacks couldn't vote until the 1960's.
By the by, the revolution was only supported by roughly a third of the population of the American colonies. During and after the war, Tories were forced to flee to Canada, and their property was confiscated by those freedom and right-to-property-loving patriots. Funny how Locke (learn how to spell the names of those you quote) and his principals fell by the wayside...
So far, you're not impressing me.
You think the world is rich enough? What a spoiled, pompous idiot you are. Spend some time in Africa or Asia and ask them if they'd like the standard of living that comes with industrialization. You bitch and whine about its effects, but you live in a country that has a high standard of living, partially due to its awful behavior in the past. If you give it all up and move to, say, Tanzania or Cuba, that'd be at least living up to your beliefs. You want to help out your "brothers and sisters" around the world? MOVE THERE AND BUILD THEIR COUNTRIES! Use some of that government-paid education to actually benefit the downtrodden. After all, you want everyone else to.
But you'd rather whine from your safe, protected, rich home. How Mighty White of you. How many babies died of malnutrition while you wrote your screed? I guess the important thing is that you felt better about yourself by writing it.
Third, if you can't figure out how to find a boat to get your family out of the US, you're too dumb, anyway.
Fourth, if you're already talking about a way to weasel out of it, you aren't serious.
And fifth, there is zero comparison between Nazi Germany and the US in the year 2000. And Nazi Germany actually tried to send its Jews away before it started gassing them; no country in the world would take them in, including the US. If only there had been a last train out of Germany (and Poland and France and all of the other countries that couldn't wait to turn their own citizens over to the Nazi butchers)...
What your saying hear is 'because most of the price advantage from Third World labor and products is due to the lower standards. Where we are able to profit from their misfortune.'.
Are you an American? If so, you are profiting from the WAY lower standards in the US during the 1800s and first part of this century. How were the railroads built (hint: cheap Chinese labor)? How many people died building the bridges and canals that helped make this country prosperous (hint: a lot)? I could mention the wiping out of pesky indiginous animals, plants and people, too. Do you live on land that used to have an American Indian tribe on it? Seen them lately?
Is that not enough? How about Child labor? Unsafe factory conditions? Wholesale devastation of content-wide forests? Labor problems put down via government thugs? The US had all of these things in spades. So did other countries, but I'm most familar with US history.
All that the Third World countries are saying is "Look at how your countries developed! You had no standards for safety and labor until you could AFFORD it! Why can't we have the same chance?" Then a bunch of rich, white, idiot teenagers come along and tell them, "We know what's best for you."
This is yet another reason why the rest of the world hates Americans.
What political process? America is no longer a Democracy, the state is ruled by corporate interests. The system is fixed. Simple.
Please point out the time, date, and place where the average person had more of a say in how their government worked.
If you think the US is such a hopeless, awful place to live, I will pay for your one-way ticket to any country on the planet if you promise to never return to the US.
What sickens me the most about these protests (WTO in Seattle, IMF/World Bank in DC, now the RNC in Philly) is that the protesters are basically complaining without offering a competing solution. Most of the time, they aren't even sure what they are protesting in the first place.
Near as I can tell, they want to stop free trade (which would seriously damage the US economy, since we're the largest exporting nation on the planet), cancel third-world debt (which really means paying off large banks like Citibank, who made those bad loans in the first place. Most of the countries that need debt relief have long since defaulted, anyway), and enact worldwide envrionmental restrictions and labor laws (which the Third World nations don't want, because most of the price advantage from Third World labor and products is due to the lower standards).
No one has yet explained how any of these ideas are going to actually help people. No one has explained how to implement these things. The important thing is that white, upper-middle-class teenagers and 20-somethings who are drowning in their white, upper-middle-class guilt feel good about themselves. Oh, and they get to be on TV.
If they want to make a difference, let them go organize unions in China. Maybe they could spend some time teaching US immigrants to read and write English so they can be part of the political process. Blocking traffic doesn't impress me.
I'm also wondering where *BSD fits in -- I assume under UNIX, but it's unfortunate that they weren't broken out separately.
Remember, the core of Mac OS X is BSD running on top of Mach. Within a year or two, it'll probably have more installed seats than all of the other *BSD distributions combined.
(Imagine writing a disk defragger in Java, for instance).
In a cross-platform way or just a single platform? If someone wanted to write the JNI wrapper code to access low-level disk read/write mechanisms on multiple platforms, it'd be trivial to do a disk defragger in Java. It's simply a matter of API, not language. It seems that the average anti-Java/. troll doesn't understand the difference.
Gosling was taken out of context, and the MS flack who made the comment knows it. For calls that are exposed in the standard Java API, portability is amazing. If you don't think Java is, by and large, portable, I'd like for you to guess how long it take to move a pure Java server from a Win 95 PC to an AS/400.
Made your guess yet?
I did that, 2 1/2 years ago, in about a day (this includes the time I needed to learn the commands to connect to an AS/400, upload the files, and set up the AS/400 equivalent of java.exe). That meets any reasonable person's definition of portable.
Unless you've got some sort of counter experience, I'd keep your mouth shut.
I wasn't aware of an OpenBSD port to the Mac Plus. It's a 68000 with no MMU and a max of 4MB of RAM. How do you get BSD running on it (the 4MB isn't a problem, but the lack of an MMU is a killer)?
Um, no. The iMacs have a minijack audio in (along with audio in via USB, the CD/DVD, and the internal modem).
Your comment reminds me of a line in one of the Red Dwarf books (which I can't quote right now, since the book is about 20 miles away from me). After the engines on Red Dwarf are stopped, Rimmer is going on and on about why there couldn't be a "restart engine" button. He doesn't even consider the cost of the infrastructure to support a restart engine button on a ship that was never meant to stop.
If Apple left out the analog circuitry, just adding a 5 cent part isn't going to give you audio in. There's other stuff in that magic box, you know.
You may now return to making up reasons to piss on Apple.
I'm just saying that in my opinion, some things just aren't worth risking.
Ah, but do get into cars? Your risk of injury from an auto accident is tremendous compared to the chance of cancer from a cell phone.
The fact is that people are scared of technology because they don't understand it and they don't feel like they have control. And there's no consistency here, either. Other people have mentioned electric blankets. Electric razors for men have got to be just shooting radiation right at a very important set of glands, but no one is whining on the evening news about them.
So, there are two options: actually learn enough science to make an informed decision on your very own, or keep running around like Chicken Little. Personally, I'll take the science.
So, now that you are the official Emily Post of/., it's OK to call people stupid and a jerk if YOU disagree with them, but woe unto those who might (gasp) use such language to describe something you agree with. What a pompous ass you are.
Your condescending attitude almost makes me want to spend the time harassing you on/. But, like I said, I have better things to do.
1. I wasn't trolling. Dragonfly was complaning that Apple didn't include a programming language with their computers, rendering them useless closed boxes suited for bed-wetters and the like. Clearly, he was wrong. According to you, disagreeing with the/. majority is now trolling. All hail groupthink.
2. I've had a/. account for about a year.
3. I have plenty of better things to do than "plan" to ruin/. I happen to like it quite a bit; I've basically abandoned USENET for/. Unfortunately, idiots like you are still a problem. C'est la vie.
4. I don't post constantly, because unlike the apparent majority on/., I work for a living and have things to do besides comment on others. But, since today was a slow day at work, I thought I'd write. I'll ask for your permission next time.
5. My statements were completely consistent. HyperCard was the equivalent of AppleSoft or Integer or CBM BASIC. It was vastly more powerful (as someone pointed out, the hardware was vastly more powerful). But they are TOYS, not PROFESSIONAL TOOLS. Can anyone name a widely sold HyperCard stack? Can anyone name a widely sold AppleSoft BASIC program? Sure, someone might whip something up for a narrow vertical market, but nothing on the Word/Excel/Visicalc level.
No, I was being consistent. HyperCard, while a LOT more powerful than CBM or Integer Basic, was its equivalent. Was Visicalc or Multiplan or Bard's Tale written in BASIC? Likewise, you'd be daft to do Word or Excel in HyperCard. They are for hobbists.
Eh? Please tell me about the visual hypertext technologies that were given away with MS-DOS (or, heck, I'll be generous, SunOS) in 1988. Since HyperCard was clearly inferior to these amazing products, you should be able to name them quickly.
That just means you are a shitty programmer. Only the bottom of the barrel would try to make money from HyperCard stacks. At the time, Real Programmers wrote Real Programs in C and Pascal on the Mac. HyperCard was for middle school kids in the late 80s to build toys, just as all of the various BASICs in the late 70s and early 80s were for building toys.
But someone as stupid and worthless as you probably can't figure out that analogy.
Eh? There were several companies that cloned and extended HyperCard's functionality, so it wasn't exactly closed. And it had a very active hobbiest dev community for a long time.
Now, the GUI issues. Apparently, he has never used GNOME or KDE, and never heard of Eazel. Not only that, but he fails to remember the overall crappiness of elder GUI's.
And I think you missed the point. By the time Linux was invented, there had been more than 10 YEARS of end-user GUI experience. At this point, there have been 16 years since the first Macintosh. It is clear to all but the ostriches of the software world that GUIs are better suited for most people for most tasks than CLIs.
What have the legions of OS programmers done with all of this experience? Nothing. You can't find a usability expert who thinks that GNOME or KDE or whatever is better than the Mac OS was 10 years ago. There's lots of ranting about the superiority of the command line, and lots of promises about how well the next version of GUI foo will work. But customers want GUIs that have at least the functionality of Windows. Until Linux delivers, it isn't going to be on the desktop in mass quantities. With the piss-poor attitude of Linux developers, it won't happen. Ever.
And by the way, can you show me some running Eazel code? Or are you citing vaporware as proof of current functionality? How very Microsoft of you...
Gee, and which company was it that released HyperCard and bundled it (and a developer's guide) with every computer for 5 years?
Oh, that's right. Apple.
HyperCard was a billion times more powerful than either of the BASICs bunded with the Apple ][s. It was better than the CBM BASIC and 6510 ASM that I grew up with on my C=64.
So, you're full of crap. But that's OK. I expect that from highly-moderated posts on/. when Apple is the subject.
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So, yeah, if you don't want an education, a large American university will happily accomodate you and give you a worthless piece of paper. But if you DO want an education, the US is a good place to be. It's all up to you.
-jon
There is no way in heck that there are as many Linux DESKTOP installs as there are Macintosh DESKTOP installs. Likewise, there's no way that there are as many Macintosh SERVER installs as there are Linux SERVER installs. Each OS functions best in a certain place.
Since it's unlikely that MS expects people to run MS Office on a server, it's those Linux desktop numbers that count. They're insignificant. It's not going to grow significant any time in the next two years.
-jon
Except this isn't true anymore. The US has passed several laws which enable people to sue foreign countries (and companies) for confiscated property (Cuba, in the Helm-Burton law) or sponsoring terrorism (Iran). What happens is that the assets of these countries which are in the US can then be used to pay the damages.
Helms-Burton has never gone into effect; Clinton has been signing off on the 6-month delays built into the law ever since it was passed. But Iran was sued for funding Hamas (Iran actually lists, in its official budget, line items that show exactly how much money they give to groups like Hamas and Hizbolah), after a Hamas bomb killed an American in Israel. I don't know if the money was actually taken from impounded Iranian funds, though.
Anyway, the point of the story is that if you have ANY assets in the US (such as banks that are US-chartered), you could end up paying out in a civil claim.
-jon
By the by, are you a troll or a moron?
-jon
Jews do not perform animal sacrifice since the destruction of the Holy Temple in the year 70.
If/When the Temple is rebuilt, sacrifices will resume.
-jon
Please do your part to solve the problem and kill yourself at your earliest convenience.
-jon
Um, no. The FBI has been exonerated repeatedly for what happened at Waco.
Not that I would trust the FBI to keep its nose clean, but at least blame them for things that are actually their fault.
-jon
And yet, you profit from the benefits of this awful past. You hypocrite.
Please point out the time, date, and place where the average person had more of a say in how their government worked.
America - July 4, 1776. I suggest you read a little about John Lock, and his ideals that Jefferson based your Declaration of Independence. Familiarize yourself with Social Contract that it was based on.
In 1776, there were millions of slaves in this country. Women couldn't vote. People who didn't own land couldn't vote. I guess you don't count blacks, women, or the landless as people. There was also taxation without representation in 1776, as the US was still under British law. The Revolution ended in 1783, IIRC. The Constitution passed in 1789. Women didn't get to vote until 1920. Most Blacks couldn't vote until the 1960's.
By the by, the revolution was only supported by roughly a third of the population of the American colonies. During and after the war, Tories were forced to flee to Canada, and their property was confiscated by those freedom and right-to-property-loving patriots. Funny how Locke (learn how to spell the names of those you quote) and his principals fell by the wayside...
So far, you're not impressing me.
You think the world is rich enough? What a spoiled, pompous idiot you are. Spend some time in Africa or Asia and ask them if they'd like the standard of living that comes with industrialization. You bitch and whine about its effects, but you live in a country that has a high standard of living, partially due to its awful behavior in the past. If you give it all up and move to, say, Tanzania or Cuba, that'd be at least living up to your beliefs. You want to help out your "brothers and sisters" around the world? MOVE THERE AND BUILD THEIR COUNTRIES! Use some of that government-paid education to actually benefit the downtrodden. After all, you want everyone else to.
But you'd rather whine from your safe, protected, rich home. How Mighty White of you. How many babies died of malnutrition while you wrote your screed? I guess the important thing is that you felt better about yourself by writing it.
-jon
Second of all, your kids, your responsibility.
Third, if you can't figure out how to find a boat to get your family out of the US, you're too dumb, anyway.
Fourth, if you're already talking about a way to weasel out of it, you aren't serious.
And fifth, there is zero comparison between Nazi Germany and the US in the year 2000. And Nazi Germany actually tried to send its Jews away before it started gassing them; no country in the world would take them in, including the US. If only there had been a last train out of Germany (and Poland and France and all of the other countries that couldn't wait to turn their own citizens over to the Nazi butchers)...
-jon
Are you an American? If so, you are profiting from the WAY lower standards in the US during the 1800s and first part of this century. How were the railroads built (hint: cheap Chinese labor)? How many people died building the bridges and canals that helped make this country prosperous (hint: a lot)? I could mention the wiping out of pesky indiginous animals, plants and people, too. Do you live on land that used to have an American Indian tribe on it? Seen them lately?
Is that not enough? How about Child labor? Unsafe factory conditions? Wholesale devastation of content-wide forests? Labor problems put down via government thugs? The US had all of these things in spades. So did other countries, but I'm most familar with US history.
All that the Third World countries are saying is "Look at how your countries developed! You had no standards for safety and labor until you could AFFORD it! Why can't we have the same chance?" Then a bunch of rich, white, idiot teenagers come along and tell them, "We know what's best for you."
This is yet another reason why the rest of the world hates Americans.
What political process? America is no longer a Democracy, the state is ruled by corporate interests. The system is fixed. Simple.
Please point out the time, date, and place where the average person had more of a say in how their government worked.
If you think the US is such a hopeless, awful place to live, I will pay for your one-way ticket to any country on the planet if you promise to never return to the US.
-jon
Near as I can tell, they want to stop free trade (which would seriously damage the US economy, since we're the largest exporting nation on the planet), cancel third-world debt (which really means paying off large banks like Citibank, who made those bad loans in the first place. Most of the countries that need debt relief have long since defaulted, anyway), and enact worldwide envrionmental restrictions and labor laws (which the Third World nations don't want, because most of the price advantage from Third World labor and products is due to the lower standards).
No one has yet explained how any of these ideas are going to actually help people. No one has explained how to implement these things. The important thing is that white, upper-middle-class teenagers and 20-somethings who are drowning in their white, upper-middle-class guilt feel good about themselves. Oh, and they get to be on TV.
If they want to make a difference, let them go organize unions in China. Maybe they could spend some time teaching US immigrants to read and write English so they can be part of the political process. Blocking traffic doesn't impress me.
-jon
Remember, the core of Mac OS X is BSD running on top of Mach. Within a year or two, it'll probably have more installed seats than all of the other *BSD distributions combined.
-jon
Please point me to some benchmarks that back up this claim. Or did you pull that number out of your butt?
-jon
In a cross-platform way or just a single platform? If someone wanted to write the JNI wrapper code to access low-level disk read/write mechanisms on multiple platforms, it'd be trivial to do a disk defragger in Java. It's simply a matter of API, not language. It seems that the average anti-Java /. troll doesn't understand the difference.
Gosling was taken out of context, and the MS flack who made the comment knows it. For calls that are exposed in the standard Java API, portability is amazing. If you don't think Java is, by and large, portable, I'd like for you to guess how long it take to move a pure Java server from a Win 95 PC to an AS/400.
Made your guess yet?
I did that, 2 1/2 years ago, in about a day (this includes the time I needed to learn the commands to connect to an AS/400, upload the files, and set up the AS/400 equivalent of java.exe). That meets any reasonable person's definition of portable.
Unless you've got some sort of counter experience, I'd keep your mouth shut.
-jon
-jon
Your comment reminds me of a line in one of the Red Dwarf books (which I can't quote right now, since the book is about 20 miles away from me). After the engines on Red Dwarf are stopped, Rimmer is going on and on about why there couldn't be a "restart engine" button. He doesn't even consider the cost of the infrastructure to support a restart engine button on a ship that was never meant to stop.
If Apple left out the analog circuitry, just adding a 5 cent part isn't going to give you audio in. There's other stuff in that magic box, you know.
You may now return to making up reasons to piss on Apple.
-jon
Ah, but do get into cars? Your risk of injury from an auto accident is tremendous compared to the chance of cancer from a cell phone.
The fact is that people are scared of technology because they don't understand it and they don't feel like they have control. And there's no consistency here, either. Other people have mentioned electric blankets. Electric razors for men have got to be just shooting radiation right at a very important set of glands, but no one is whining on the evening news about them.
So, there are two options: actually learn enough science to make an informed decision on your very own, or keep running around like Chicken Little. Personally, I'll take the science.
-jon
Your condescending attitude almost makes me want to spend the time harassing you on /. But, like I said, I have better things to do.
-jon
2. I've had a /. account for about a year.
3. I have plenty of better things to do than "plan" to ruin /. I happen to like it quite a bit; I've basically abandoned USENET for /. Unfortunately, idiots like you are still a problem. C'est la vie.
4. I don't post constantly, because unlike the apparent majority on /., I work for a living and have things to do besides comment on others. But, since today was a slow day at work, I thought I'd write. I'll ask for your permission next time.
5. My statements were completely consistent. HyperCard was the equivalent of AppleSoft or Integer or CBM BASIC. It was vastly more powerful (as someone pointed out, the hardware was vastly more powerful). But they are TOYS, not PROFESSIONAL TOOLS. Can anyone name a widely sold HyperCard stack? Can anyone name a widely sold AppleSoft BASIC program? Sure, someone might whip something up for a narrow vertical market, but nothing on the Word/Excel/Visicalc level.
Sigh.
-jon
-jon
Eh? Please tell me about the visual hypertext technologies that were given away with MS-DOS (or, heck, I'll be generous, SunOS) in 1988. Since HyperCard was clearly inferior to these amazing products, you should be able to name them quickly.
-jon
But someone as stupid and worthless as you probably can't figure out that analogy.
Loser.
-jon
And I own a Palm. Never owned a Newton.
-jon
And I think you missed the point. By the time Linux was invented, there had been more than 10 YEARS of end-user GUI experience. At this point, there have been 16 years since the first Macintosh. It is clear to all but the ostriches of the software world that GUIs are better suited for most people for most tasks than CLIs.
What have the legions of OS programmers done with all of this experience? Nothing. You can't find a usability expert who thinks that GNOME or KDE or whatever is better than the Mac OS was 10 years ago. There's lots of ranting about the superiority of the command line, and lots of promises about how well the next version of GUI foo will work. But customers want GUIs that have at least the functionality of Windows. Until Linux delivers, it isn't going to be on the desktop in mass quantities. With the piss-poor attitude of Linux developers, it won't happen. Ever.
And by the way, can you show me some running Eazel code? Or are you citing vaporware as proof of current functionality? How very Microsoft of you...
-jon
Oh, that's right. Apple.
HyperCard was a billion times more powerful than either of the BASICs bunded with the Apple ][s. It was better than the CBM BASIC and 6510 ASM that I grew up with on my C=64.
So, you're full of crap. But that's OK. I expect that from highly-moderated posts on /. when Apple is the subject.
-jon