Also, $30 is pretty steep for a CD's worth of music,
128MB is a pretty small CD. One of the odd things about the download culture is that people seem to have become used to the idea of paying more for a degraded (ie, lossily compressed) product.
You don't need to be worried about being tricked or DNS being compromised because that's exactly what a cert protects you against.
Not in the real world it doesn't. If the issuing company is, for example, full of mindless drones who are paid to issue certificates as quickly as possible, then they will - and do - occasionally issue the wrong certificate. IE, they will give Joe Bloggs a certificate saying that he is Citibank.
Certificates do nothing to fix human error at the issuer end and even leaving that aside, I don't trust Verisign any more than I would Richard Nixon.
The only certificates I'm interested is ones which I am sure were generated by the site themselves, not some junk handed out by Verisign to whoever faxed them a copy of something that looked vaguely like the company letterhead they were expecting.
The three explanations aren't even at odds unless someone's being so enormously thick as to ignore any explanation that isn't their own.
Well, yes. The word for that is "dogma" and its the foundation of all religions. They all claim to have an unchanging Truth of some kind and that's why they are incompatable in practise with science which ideally eschews all dogma. I often hear ID supporters say that if science was true it would never change.
Just because you can't deal with poetic and philosophycal matters
Solaris takes what seems like six hours to say what could be covered in five minutes (and still not be very insightful, but at least it would be over quickly). It does this partly by spending long periods saying nothing at all: deep or otherwise.
You must have very little else in the way of intellectual stimulation if you can sit through the whole dreadful thing.
You were going well until listing one of the most boring movies not to have the words "Andy Warhol" in its credits. Actually, it's now two of the most boring movies since they made that remake.
Your argument fails on two counts: firstly the idea that the companies want their product to be perceived as high-value by keeping the price up is one that they have actually stated in public, it is not some paranoid fantasy. The same goes for DVDs: recently the movie industry voiced its concern about DVD's being given away with Sunday papers saying that they wished DVDs to "remain aspirational".
Secondly: this is not a fluid market that is being discussed. It is a price-fixing cartel arrangement for the purposes of preserving the small number of vested interests in the marketplace and protecting those interests from natural market forces. The fact that they are wanting to have different price points set by the cartel does not make it fluid or market-driven.
Firstly, this is the first time I've seen anyone complain about the word "Brits". I can only assume he's what we call a "twat".
Secondly: "The States" is hardly a negative term either; your country is called the United States and is made up from States the last time I looked. Plus, I can't think of another country with "States" in its name. So, what's the problem?
Thirdly, the UK does stand for the United Kingdom, but the "Kindom" bit refers to the end product, not the original parts (ie, it's not the United Kindoms). In fact, Wales is a Principality and god alone knows what the Isle of Man was, while Northern Ireland is a province who's last king was sometime in the late Bronze Age. So it's a bit more subtle than it might look at first.
And finally: there's no way the US will get switched by 2009. The UK is smaller and started earlier and has had to move the date back; until the content is more alluring there's just no reason for people to change. I haven't - there isn't enough good TV to fill the five channels I've got let alone 100+.
Really finally: by 2012 TV will have changed beyond all recognition anyway and digital broadcast will be ready for phasing out. Even the BBC will be providing (or preparing to provide) all its programmes on-demand via broadband by then.
Basically, fearless soldiers will refuse to obey when given orders that they think are wrong, and cannot be forced to obey by fear of punishment.
My impression is that the vast majority of soldiers obey orders because they have been brainwashed into wanting to obey them. You only have to listen to US Marines or watch those Iraq training videos to see that fear of punishment is way down the line of motivations: these guys actually believe the bullshit their leaders feed them.
The difference here is that your comments are deliberately confrontational.
That's true.
You repeat tired and outdated mantras like the "one-button mouse" thing as if they were the nail in the coffin of OS X - I use a three-button mouse with scroll on my PowerBook all the time
So you agree with the tired mantra.
I don't know any OS X users who primarily use a one-button mouse.
And so do all your friends.
You yourself say that you only use OS X occasionally, which suggests rather strongly that your dislikes are more a matter of "difference" instead of "inferiority."
Just as those who use it all the time may be "used to" it rather than it being "superior".
Your approach is to attack anyone who disagrees with you FOR disagreeing with you, before they even get a chance to hear your point.
Having seen many people modded off the screen for saying what they don't like about OSX, I know that the people doing it are not interested in discussing the point. You are actually bothering to post a debate, by definition you are not one of the zealots I was referring to.
Honestly, opening a discussion with "The current Mac GUI stinks" IS a troll.
Well, it's an honest troll if it is. The subject of this thread was the new Intel Macs and the only reason to buy such a beast surely is the OS, and having had to use said OS this week I was feeling frustrated with it. So, I'm not trolling in the sense of taking a stance just to wind people up, but I was aware that that would be the effect. But then I get wound up when I read about how fantastic OSX is and how all us non-Mac users are just fools for not seeing the light. I reckon we're even.
Are you maintaining the position that you simply wanted a discussion of OS X, pros and cons?
Actually, I'd love to see any Mac user just admit that the current OS is not perfect, particularly in the GUI department. I meet people all the time that tell me that they pay the extra money for a Mac because Apple "know how to do" UI's, but I see no evidence that they know how to do anything any more other than make attractive UI, which is not the same thing at all. This has gone on for years. Indeed, decades - but at least in the 80's it was true.
BTW, what's wrong with talking about AMD?
The last time I suggested that Intel were having a very bad few years and that AMD would seem a better partner if you were going to jump processors I got modded off the board again. And that's partly the reason for the "what's the point?" - I wouldn't touch Intel with a 10' pole at the moment except perhaps in the mobile arena, and then only with caution. I can't see why Jobs tied his hands with the deal. Why not use both? Intel for laptops, AMD for desktops. The simple and obvious answer is that Intel bribed Apple with big discounts. Or, to put it another way, quality was not the deciding factor.
I'm off to listen to "I'm sorry I haven't a clue".
is that the Music Industry cartel (remember when price-fixing was illegal? Oh, it still is? How strange.) is telling Apple that they'll cut them off sometime in the next 12 months if they don't give up on the 99c price point. Will Apple give ground? I dunno. Depends on what mood Jobs was when he got up, really.
Interestingly, you and I can be on opposite sides of the "Is OS X better than Windows?" question and still both be right.
I agree. The difference is that I will get modded into oblivion and you won't. It is impossible to discuss any negative opinions of Apple on/. It is taken as gospel by many Mac users that there is nothing to be learnt from Windows and that Linux is in some prehistoric age. But, using a window manager where the windows can be moved without skimming right up to the top, or resized from any point inside the frame is fantasticly useful, to say nothing of a multi-button mouse. But such talk is verboten by the invisible hand of the zealots. And don't even mention AMD!!
I can buy an Intel based machine today. Why buy an Intel Mac?
Here's the bit that will get this modded off the map by the zealots: The current Mac GUI stinks. I have to use it occassionaly for work and it drives me nuts with frustration. Just moving the windows about or (much worse) resizing them is a nightmare on a large screen. The Dock is far too limited, the menu bar too far away, the general layout of the control panel, to say nothing of the madness which is the file tree with its "sometimes I'm Unix, sometimes I'm MacOS" tangle. I hate it.
I remember when OS7ish (it was a long time ago anyway) was THE OS to beat. OS/X doesn't match up to that, let alone Windows or Linux. Some of the problems are because display sizes have outgrown the UI design, but some of the problems (the ghastly Spotlight) are new.
Without American capitalism your self-realization would be impossible.
Yes, there's nowhere else he could play golf in a warm climate. In fact, much of American capitalism is geared specifically to prevent self-realisation.
Pointers are easy, stacks, heaps, io buffering, and bitfields are generic concepts which are not in any way specific to C.
Any idiot can do printf("hello world\n");,
The same idiot can easily grasp for loops, ++, --, subroutines and parameter passing, and a host of other syntax which allow the writing of useful programs in a very crude way, but they will work. And that's the problem. Once they get to this point the beginners think they are programmers and off they go to ply their trade. When they see C++ they think "Oh, I recognise this. There's some extra stuff about classes but that's just a way of organising your subroutines." and away they go. The end result is the sort of buggy code I see all the time, failed projects, cost overruns and unintelligable source.
You say that as if C++ isn't in use by the vast majority of software houses on the planet, and rather successfully for that matter.
I would dispute the second part: has code quality improved in these houses, or anywhere in the last 15 years for that matter? Has the number of late, canceled, or over-budget projects decreased?
I simply don't believe that the currently popular languages have anything substantial to offer when it comes to solving the big problems of computing. C++ is a hack, but it is a very popular hack which brought the concepts of OOP to a lot of people. Just enough of those concepts, in fact, to stop most of them asking for more.
Not having a GC, retaining the idea of keywords and primatives, the dire template system. These are all huge flaws in the OO model of C++. Some have been patched over the years and some are being patched as we speak, but I have little faith left in the language as anything other than a useful deadend, like COBOL was in its final years.
Excuse me? C may be many things , but easy isn't one of them.
Ask any beginner.
Compared to most languages, C is very easy to pick up the basics of. That's why C-like languages rule the programming world. There are some tricky parts but the basic structure of a C program is something even beginners grasp very quickly, and I've tutored quite a few.
If you have a mortgage and a family and your boss threatens you with the sack if you keep missing deadlines very few if any programmers will take the "moral" stand and get fired.
Which is why so much code stinks. Just because there is a good reason for it stinking doesn't mean it suddenly becomes good code or stops crashing. There's no "Blue screen of morally acceptable quality compromise" that pops up and then allows the program to continue on as if nothing had happened.
Slashdot Mirror
128MB is a pretty small CD. One of the odd things about the download culture is that people seem to have become used to the idea of paying more for a degraded (ie, lossily compressed) product.
TWW
Not in the real world it doesn't. If the issuing company is, for example, full of mindless drones who are paid to issue certificates as quickly as possible, then they will - and do - occasionally issue the wrong certificate. IE, they will give Joe Bloggs a certificate saying that he is Citibank.
Certificates do nothing to fix human error at the issuer end and even leaving that aside, I don't trust Verisign any more than I would Richard Nixon.
The only certificates I'm interested is ones which I am sure were generated by the site themselves, not some junk handed out by Verisign to whoever faxed them a copy of something that looked vaguely like the company letterhead they were expecting.
Verisign reliability bulletin from one of their customers.
TWW
Well, yes. The word for that is "dogma" and its the foundation of all religions. They all claim to have an unchanging Truth of some kind and that's why they are incompatable in practise with science which ideally eschews all dogma. I often hear ID supporters say that if science was true it would never change.
TWW
I'd sort of like a powerbook to try Linux and PPC assembly language on but I wouldn't normally spend the money. THIS is so cool I might be tempted.
TWW
Solaris takes what seems like six hours to say what could be covered in five minutes (and still not be very insightful, but at least it would be over quickly). It does this partly by spending long periods saying nothing at all: deep or otherwise.
You must have very little else in the way of intellectual stimulation if you can sit through the whole dreadful thing.
TWW
You were going well until listing one of the most boring movies not to have the words "Andy Warhol" in its credits. Actually, it's now two of the most boring movies since they made that remake.
Terrible, awful, mind-numbingly dull film.
TWW
Secondly: this is not a fluid market that is being discussed. It is a price-fixing cartel arrangement for the purposes of preserving the small number of vested interests in the marketplace and protecting those interests from natural market forces. The fact that they are wanting to have different price points set by the cartel does not make it fluid or market-driven.
The ticket point is irrelevant.
TWW
Secondly: "The States" is hardly a negative term either; your country is called the United States and is made up from States the last time I looked. Plus, I can't think of another country with "States" in its name. So, what's the problem?
Thirdly, the UK does stand for the United Kingdom, but the "Kindom" bit refers to the end product, not the original parts (ie, it's not the United Kindoms). In fact, Wales is a Principality and god alone knows what the Isle of Man was, while Northern Ireland is a province who's last king was sometime in the late Bronze Age. So it's a bit more subtle than it might look at first.
And finally: there's no way the US will get switched by 2009. The UK is smaller and started earlier and has had to move the date back; until the content is more alluring there's just no reason for people to change. I haven't - there isn't enough good TV to fill the five channels I've got let alone 100+.
Really finally: by 2012 TV will have changed beyond all recognition anyway and digital broadcast will be ready for phasing out. Even the BBC will be providing (or preparing to provide) all its programmes on-demand via broadband by then.
TWW
Well, the third episode was just on here, so I'd say three weeks.
TWW
That's because you believe it too.
TWW
This story won't be good news for him!
"Honey, there's 10,000 angry mice outside and the cat's missing. They don't seem to know the meaning of the word fear aaaaaghh..."
TWW
My impression is that the vast majority of soldiers obey orders because they have been brainwashed into wanting to obey them. You only have to listen to US Marines or watch those Iraq training videos to see that fear of punishment is way down the line of motivations: these guys actually believe the bullshit their leaders feed them.
TWW
What? It cut out your still-beating heart to appease the gods?!
TWW
That's true.
You repeat tired and outdated mantras like the "one-button mouse" thing as if they were the nail in the coffin of OS X - I use a three-button mouse with scroll on my PowerBook all the time
So you agree with the tired mantra.
I don't know any OS X users who primarily use a one-button mouse.
And so do all your friends.
You yourself say that you only use OS X occasionally, which suggests rather strongly that your dislikes are more a matter of "difference" instead of "inferiority."
Just as those who use it all the time may be "used to" it rather than it being "superior".
Your approach is to attack anyone who disagrees with you FOR disagreeing with you, before they even get a chance to hear your point.
Having seen many people modded off the screen for saying what they don't like about OSX, I know that the people doing it are not interested in discussing the point. You are actually bothering to post a debate, by definition you are not one of the zealots I was referring to.
Honestly, opening a discussion with "The current Mac GUI stinks" IS a troll.
Well, it's an honest troll if it is. The subject of this thread was the new Intel Macs and the only reason to buy such a beast surely is the OS, and having had to use said OS this week I was feeling frustrated with it. So, I'm not trolling in the sense of taking a stance just to wind people up, but I was aware that that would be the effect. But then I get wound up when I read about how fantastic OSX is and how all us non-Mac users are just fools for not seeing the light. I reckon we're even.
Are you maintaining the position that you simply wanted a discussion of OS X, pros and cons?
Actually, I'd love to see any Mac user just admit that the current OS is not perfect, particularly in the GUI department. I meet people all the time that tell me that they pay the extra money for a Mac because Apple "know how to do" UI's, but I see no evidence that they know how to do anything any more other than make attractive UI, which is not the same thing at all. This has gone on for years. Indeed, decades - but at least in the 80's it was true.
BTW, what's wrong with talking about AMD?
The last time I suggested that Intel were having a very bad few years and that AMD would seem a better partner if you were going to jump processors I got modded off the board again. And that's partly the reason for the "what's the point?" - I wouldn't touch Intel with a 10' pole at the moment except perhaps in the mobile arena, and then only with caution. I can't see why Jobs tied his hands with the deal. Why not use both? Intel for laptops, AMD for desktops. The simple and obvious answer is that Intel bribed Apple with big discounts. Or, to put it another way, quality was not the deciding factor.
I'm off to listen to "I'm sorry I haven't a clue".
TWW
TWW
I agree. The difference is that I will get modded into oblivion and you won't. It is impossible to discuss any negative opinions of Apple on /. It is taken as gospel by many Mac users that there is nothing to be learnt from Windows and that Linux is in some prehistoric age. But, using a window manager where the windows can be moved without skimming right up to the top, or resized from any point inside the frame is fantasticly useful, to say nothing of a multi-button mouse. But such talk is verboten by the invisible hand of the zealots. And don't even mention AMD!!
Ah, well, not my problem, I guess.
TWW
Here's the bit that will get this modded off the map by the zealots: The current Mac GUI stinks. I have to use it occassionaly for work and it drives me nuts with frustration. Just moving the windows about or (much worse) resizing them is a nightmare on a large screen. The Dock is far too limited, the menu bar too far away, the general layout of the control panel, to say nothing of the madness which is the file tree with its "sometimes I'm Unix, sometimes I'm MacOS" tangle. I hate it.
I remember when OS7ish (it was a long time ago anyway) was THE OS to beat. OS/X doesn't match up to that, let alone Windows or Linux. Some of the problems are because display sizes have outgrown the UI design, but some of the problems (the ghastly Spotlight) are new.
TWW
Well, we're working on that, so it's good to have a backup planned.
TWW
EULA's themselves are not legally enforcable so there's no need.
TWW
Yes, there's nowhere else he could play golf in a warm climate. In fact, much of American capitalism is geared specifically to prevent self-realisation.
TWW
TWW
Any idiot can do printf("hello world\n");,
The same idiot can easily grasp for loops, ++, --, subroutines and parameter passing, and a host of other syntax which allow the writing of useful programs in a very crude way, but they will work. And that's the problem. Once they get to this point the beginners think they are programmers and off they go to ply their trade. When they see C++ they think "Oh, I recognise this. There's some extra stuff about classes but that's just a way of organising your subroutines." and away they go. The end result is the sort of buggy code I see all the time, failed projects, cost overruns and unintelligable source.
TWW
I would dispute the second part: has code quality improved in these houses, or anywhere in the last 15 years for that matter? Has the number of late, canceled, or over-budget projects decreased?
I simply don't believe that the currently popular languages have anything substantial to offer when it comes to solving the big problems of computing. C++ is a hack, but it is a very popular hack which brought the concepts of OOP to a lot of people. Just enough of those concepts, in fact, to stop most of them asking for more.
Not having a GC, retaining the idea of keywords and primatives, the dire template system. These are all huge flaws in the OO model of C++. Some have been patched over the years and some are being patched as we speak, but I have little faith left in the language as anything other than a useful deadend, like COBOL was in its final years.
TWW
Compared to most languages, C is very easy to pick up the basics of. That's why C-like languages rule the programming world. There are some tricky parts but the basic structure of a C program is something even beginners grasp very quickly, and I've tutored quite a few.
If you have a mortgage and a family and your boss threatens you with the sack if you keep missing deadlines very few if any programmers will take the "moral" stand and get fired.
Which is why so much code stinks. Just because there is a good reason for it stinking doesn't mean it suddenly becomes good code or stops crashing. There's no "Blue screen of morally acceptable quality compromise" that pops up and then allows the program to continue on as if nothing had happened.
TWW
Not really, no.
Getting back to the original premise of the story, can you even do OS-level shared memory (SysV or POSIX) with Java?
I dunno. Never tried. I would imagine not, given the sandboxing that goes on.
TWW