Well at least the OS X 'service packs' always seem to add stuff that makes using your hardware faster and easier, as in: desirable upgrades to the system. Windows service packs (even SP2) normally only plug holes, add all kinds of new security layers to plug other holes and basic updates to the driver database and library API's. I really appreciated XP SP2 for example, but you can hardly say it added anything to actually improve my experience working with it. Vista actually degraded it in many ways, and 7 doesn't appear to be particularly impressive in terms of advancing the platform.
I'm really sorry but that just doesn't match my experience of reality.
The stuff I run on linux and solaris is about as FPU-bound as it gets, it does non-linear regression of sets of very complex, multi-dimensional model functions, inside the fitting loop it's all linear arithmetic (using LAPACK/BLAS on x86 and sunperf on Sun), lots of large matrix/vector operations, etc. I think I'd estimate the ratio of FPU code vs. control logic + system calls around 90%-10%. Since the model functions are separable over their output grid, they're easily parallized into strips, which we tried with 1, 2, 4 and 8 threads. The results on the 8-core M3000 where so disappointing we could hardly believe it, the performance simply scaled up with the extra Mhz, compared to our old Sun Netra 240, no more no less. Compared to our development machines (simple C2D laptops) or the Opteron servers running linux, fitting times on Sparc where literally 8 to 10 times slower. Clock-for-clock Sparc FPU performance was down 5 times over the x86 systems.
It's not that I hate Sparc or anything (I just hate solaris), in fact I do agree with something you posted earlier in this topic, that it's actually a good thing to have many different architectures (just for different reasons than you mentioned). But nowadays you just can't deny that the role for Sparc architectures has been reduced to massively parallel server tasks, and that's it.
What OS did the Opteron run? I guess Sun puts a lot of effort to tweak Solaris for optimal performance in server tasks, so a desktop linux install on x86 with a low-latency kernel might in fact fall apart under high load, and comparing the two setups like that might be misleading. There's lots of ways to configure a linux kernel that really sucks under high load, even on the fastest of hardware. Try an early 2.6 kernel with the old VM, and you can slow a brand-new machine to a crawl by simply spawning a lot of processes that allocate/deallocate lots of large memory blocks.
Anyway, a 450Mhz Sparc beating a 2.4Ghz Opteron sounds like a fairy tale in my book. Of course compiling code or running FPU-heavy tasks isn't exactly comparable to serving webpages or querying a database, but seeing that an 1.5Ghz UltraSparc III takes over an hour compile the same source tree that keeps an el-cheapo Dell laptop busy for only a few minutes makes it very, very hard for me to believe your Opteron really didn't blow the sparc out of the water in any scenario imaginable.
Yes, and all these threads you get have access to crappy fpu's and horrible memory bandwith.
It's true that you can easily slap a lot of Sparc CPU's into a single machine than you can do so with x86, but since you're actually going to need all those CPU's to match even an off-the-shelf dual quad-core Opteron system for most tasks, the end result is that you're still spending much, much more money and probably suck more power too. For tasks that cannot be parallelized or executed concurrently Sparc is rubbish in every aspect imaginable.
I work at one of those companies that got lured into standardizing on Sparc hardware years ago, and now we're kind of stuck on it because we have all those systems in the field, with customers. A while ago we investigated upgrading to newer Sparc hardware (M3000) and we leased a test system to assess it's performance. For compationally intensive (FPU) tasks running 8-threads, the ~$11,000 Sparc64 IV with 8 cores / 16 hardware threads was about as fast as a $400 Core 2 Duo laptop. I'm not kidding....
So unless you want to run an enterprise database that has to handle 1000s of requests a second, Sparc has zero added value. If you really need a Sparc system for high-load, high-availability server tasks, I don't know. I'd guess a Power6 server or a rack of Opterons or Xeons wouldn't do much worse.
Discounting x86 for big-iron server systems because they would otherwise attract viruses -much like the potato famine- is ridiculous. I think you're paranoia.
[quote]Doom ran on pretty much everything, even the Super Nintendo (which was "less capable" than the equivalent PC required to make it run at bare minimum.)[/quote]
Doom on the SNES isn't exactly the best example to make that point: it came as a cartridge with a separate graphics chip in it, because the SNES itself wasn't capable to render the 2.5-dimensional graphics. Much like Star Fox and Stunt Race FX which had extra vector processors in the cartridge.
You don't get it, the game isn't impressive because it's a puzzle game, but because it's a whole new idea that seems impossible to implement, but apparently works pretty well.
1) Exclusives are often also system sellers 2) Developing an exclusive title for 1 system requires less effort and money 3) An exclusive title can make better use of the hardware of the target system, and thus be of higher quality
In case of the PS3 especially #2 and #3 are interesting, because the hardware architecture of the console differs so much from a PC or 360. Porting from 360 or PC to PS3 (like most multiplatform titles) will result in a crappy port (see HL:Orange Box or Fifa 2009, which both have frame rate issues on the PS3 but none on the 360). Developing for PC/360 and PS3 seperately is too expensive.
Well, compared to Japanase/Korean/European engines, the engines built in the US aren't particularly well-known for their sophistication or efficiency. Just for their cubic inches. Seeing that some European 1.6 litre 4-cylinder engines already churn out 275 bhp and 240 Nm, 350 bhp from a 4+ litre V8 isn't particularly impressive. Especially if you look at the mileage.
"Today, 20+ parallel sessions are quite common; the browser is more of an operating system than a data display application; we use it to manage the web as a shared hard drive. However, if you have more than seven or eight tabs open they become pretty much useless."
Sure, maybe the Mozilla folks like their browser so much they use it as an OS and open up 20+ tabs at once with it, but I'm pretty confident the average user just browses the web with it, and doesn't open more than 3 or 4 tabs at once. At least I don't (or anyone I know, for that matter) and I even consider myself a power user, I spend about 2 hours a day in my browser.
Maybe the Mozilla devs should consider gathering some statistics to back up their assumptions about browser use because this really sounds like they don't really get the difference between the 1% power users and the 99% casual users that just visit the same few websites they visit everyday.
I've looked at the chumby, but I don't like the design and form factor. Also you'd more or less need to 'hack' it to have it do more than it's supposed to do, which is showing chumby applets in Flash. But they're nice devices though, only not what I'm looking for.
External small displays with dvi-d are hard to find and ridiculously expensive, I've not found a single one for less then $300. The Samsung U70 7" screen I can get for less than $80. The USB connection is not really an issue, as with my revision of the Beagleboard you need to attach a powered HUB anyway, to power the board and to get the port in USB host mode (it's an USB on-the-go port that acts as a slave otherwise).
Maybe, but now that these screens seem to get linux support you can also do some pretty cool stuff with them. Get a really small ARM board like a Gumstix Overo or Beagleboard and you can make a pretty cool computer out of it that acts as a digital picture frame, clock, micro webserver, RSS reader, whatever you can think of.
I've actually been looking for a small USB screen that works with Linux for ages, so this is pretty cool news. Maybe now I can put my ARM board to use as a wireless DPF annex information display:-)
The Africans have been subject to tyranny of countless nations, and now they face the oppression of their own dictators. And I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but one's scientific success is heavily dependent on luck and ambition, not just intelligence.
There's even more to it, Africa's major axis is north-south instead of east-west, which means the continent has a lot of variance in climate with a lot of natural barriers (think about the Sahara) for species, knowledge and trade to cross. This as opposed to North America or Eurasia, both of which have east-west axes with a steady climate that's good for agriculture and diffusion of technology and trade.
Also, Africa has virtually no domesticable large mammals and large parts of Africa have been (or still are) not fit for agriculture at all. Finally, when Europeans started colonizing African countries they had a head-start in technology, and resistance to many diseases they were exposed to living next to their domesticated animals (pigs, horses, sheep), resistance the Africans never had a chance to develop. The same holds for South America, people still like to think the Inca's and the Aztecs where conquered by military force, while in fact their population was decimated by germs like the flu, bubonic pest etc.
Mandatory reading for the guy you responded to and for anyone interested to know why North America and Europe became the most developed societies, and not Africa, South-America or Polynesia (all of which at one point in history had a lead):
For those who don't like reading, the spoiler: it has nothing to do with intelligence/inventiveness, genetic superiority, laziness or any other form of inherited or acquired traits.
Where the train goes off the rails is where a conspiracy theory requires that massive numbers of people are keeping their mouths shut about some grand plan that they're a small part of.
Although you're right when it comes to 99% of conspiracy theories, in this case _your_ train goes off the rails assuming you need 'massive numbers of people' to pull off engineering a new influenza virus and setting it free. All it takes is a few execs who know a few scientists they can blindly trust, and if everyone involved knows that all the others share the same evil ethics, it isn't unlikely at all a scheme could be devised to create a virus like this without anyone else knowing about it. I'd say you'd need no more than 10 people, probably less.
Try googling seroquel if you think the pharmacy industry doesn't do evil things and tries to cover them up afterwards. It's an anti-deprissant that showed serious health risks and side-effects in preliminary lab studies. These studies somehow dissappeared, the side-effects where never mentioned on any package leaflet, and the drug was approved in multiple countries. Many people who used this drug developed diabetes or ended up seriously overweight, exactly the side-effects described in the lab studies, until these studies somehow surfaced, years later. You explain me how it would be more difficult to cover up creating a new strain of influence, than to have lab studies dissappear in order to get your drug approved.
Re:What do you get combining Apple + gaming compan
on
Apple Eyeing EA?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Who gave you the impression making a living writing good software should be an easy ride? In the end it's the customers who buy the products, not the developers, so throwing crap out for better stuff at least benefits the people paying for the stuff. Them, and future developers who don't have to keep working with outdated API's that do not take full advantage of the latest hardware and software infrastructure.
Yes, maybe a lot of developers might move off the Apple platforms because they don't want to adjust to newer tech, and this will leave all the more room for other developers who are willing to invest some extra time to make the better app. It's always been my impression that there's a lot less freeware/shareware/OSS for Apple (compared to windows and linux), but that the overall quality is a lot higher. Personally, I'd like to keep it that way.
The MS dev tools are pretty good indeed, but they're not freely available like on OS X. As for the quality of the Apple dev tools themselves: you might not like Xcode but in the end it's simply gcc and friends that you'll be working with, and I think there's hardly any developers who think gcc is crap. Apple's performance tools are pretty good too, I still haven't found any usable *nix alternative for Shark.
1) insert ubuntu live cd, 2) enter your name, 3) choose guided install, 4) wait,
Really is a bridge to far for average Joe...:-/
Only thing Joe has to make sure if he wants his old PC to work right out of the box is to have someone check his wireless chipset if he even has one. That's about the only piece of commodity hardware that's sometimes a problem with modern linux distro's.
And does it have an IDE that doesn't crash randomly by now? I gave up after Delphi 5, 6, 7 and 2005, which were all utter crap in terms of stability...
Seriously, if I pay Apple for a copy of Leopard, I'll damn well use it wherever I please - with the full understanding that it is unsupported.
And you can damn well do exactly that without a problem, Apple won't come after you because as long as your hackintosh simply stays exactly that: you personal OS X toy, they don't really care that much.
Apple have said time and time again that they don't care about what individual users do with OS X. Only when shady businesses like Psystar start selling Apple clones they call in the lawyers.
Ok, I think I know what you mean. I've always thought americans to be rude and unfriendly because it's a stereotype that Europeans in general like to adhere to. When I went there a while ago it turned out to be completely the other way around, compared to the dutch guy in the street people were much more friendly, helpful and polite over there. I guess it's all a matter of perception, and somehow people everywhere like the occational stranger better than their everyday compatriot.
That said, you just can't have it all. You'll find assholes and idiots wherever you go. In general, I do think the dutch have a very open, direct attitude and a good sense of humor, and are not hampered by any kind of misplaced pride or sense of superiority, which makes it easy to set aside and accept differences, but still be to-the-point when necessary. Foreigners appreciate this attitude, something I hear all the time from my US colleagues, in telecons or when they visit our office, on a regular basis. But like you said, we're no angels, but I think you won't find angels anywhere.
Although you're mostly right, the current situation is still much, much better than criminalizing cannabis. Also, I don't think we should try to harmonize all drugs legislation in the EU, because it wouldn't work, sadly some of the most influential countries of the EU will never, ever, change their point of view that prohibition of any substance classified as 'drugs' is the only way to go. Hence, trying to attack drug-related problems as a pan-European problem is idealistic, naive and suboptimal. I'd say just work out a scheme to prevent drug tourism, which should be perfectly possible, ways of limiting drug tourism from Belgium and France are already being proposed. Let all the other member states have the freedom to implement their own point of view as long as they don't pressurize us to change our policy.
Also, your referral to the insane idiot that drove into the crowd at queens day, which has absolutely nothing to do with this discussion, does not really support anything you said on-topic.
That's an interesting argument that's made on a regular basis by many people here. Not by mayors, politicians or coffeeshop owners though, because they're not only sensible enough to see that full-force war on cannabis does much more harm than good, but also sensible enough to interpret factual data and knowledge about hard drugs, to know that legalizing e.g. coke or heroin would result in a lot of people devastating their lives.
It's funny how some governments (the Bush adminstration to name on) think or thought the best way to prevent drug abuse is to keep hammering on cannabis as a 'gateway drug', which when tolerated would lead to more hard drugs users, effectively treating it just like heroin or cocaine. All this while here in the Netherlands we think completely the other way around: tolerating mostly harmless substances like cannabis actually prevents people getting the much more dangerous stuff, because they don't need to incriminate themselves to get heroin if they can just smoke a joint every now and then.
You could argue which of the 2 ways of dealing with the unsolvable drug problem (people will keep using drugs whatever you try to prevent them) would be 'more utalitarian' so to say. The facts seem to favour the dutch approach: we have less cannabis users, less drug-related crimes, and most importantly *much* less harddrugs users than all countries surrounding us, and most of the rest of the western world. Compared to France for example, where they've tradinionally always had a zero-tolerance attitude towards drugs, the harddrugs problems in the Netherlands are virtually non-existent.
Maybe the Obama administration will get to a somewhat more opportunistic, utalitarian view of drugs legislation. He does seem to be more of a "it doesn't have to be perfect if it's better than before, jus get things done" kind of guy than Bush.
Last but not least you're mostly right about the Netherlands playing little bitch to the EU and US, sadly. I wouldn't be surprised if eventually the dutch government will bend over and destroy everything we've built for decades to limit drug-related problems and go the way of the French or the US. Probably in exchange of a little extra influence in the EU, some cuts to the EU contributions or some other stupid exchange of ideals to hold up the illusion of a 'united Europe'.
You're not just buying the thing being offered in many cases though. With advertising and PR you're also buying into the image that comes with it.
I really hate that argument.
You tell me, how and why would I pay good money to show-off with my freaking laptop or computer, which are both inside my house, not visible to anyone but me, and completely uninteresting to the kind of people who I'd like to impress or 'look cool' to. I'll buy some overpriced fancy clothes or a nice aftershave for that purpose, works much better than 'overpriced' computer hardware.
I really don't see how anyone in their right mind would fork over any kind of unjustifiable 'Apple tax' because having a Mac makes you feel cool and part of the trendy crowd. It sounds so ridiculous it's actually laughable. I have Macs because I like the form factor, the build quality and most of all: the OS and the way it just works. I like Linux almost equally well and have it running on both my macs. Also, I like how I can sell them 2nd-hand after 3 years, for half the price I paid for them new.
I don't think iPods are only a success because they are cool either. They typically simply do the job for most people and hence are a safe bet if you want an MP3 player. Sure you can buy MP3 players for 1/4th the price, but there's a lot of crap sold in that price range, which is why a lot of people prefer to spend a few more $$ and be done with it.
Kudos to the developers and for someone who likes this kind of games it's probably good fun to play, but seriously, you can't really call this 'impressive graphics' or 'raising the bar for OSS gaming', can you?
It looks like they just took the Quake 2 engine with Quake 3 sound clips and recreated all the levels en textures.... badly...
Worst of all: from the video it appears there is literally zero innovation in the gameplay, its just adhd shooting and running with the same futuristic weapons all over again.
I can understand it's hard to create something that compares to a commercial game in terms of graphics and content, but you'd excpect some more creativity in the gameplay. There must be some guys with really crazy ideas they can try out.
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Well at least the OS X 'service packs' always seem to add stuff that makes using your hardware faster and easier, as in: desirable upgrades to the system. Windows service packs (even SP2) normally only plug holes, add all kinds of new security layers to plug other holes and basic updates to the driver database and library API's. I really appreciated XP SP2 for example, but you can hardly say it added anything to actually improve my experience working with it. Vista actually degraded it in many ways, and 7 doesn't appear to be particularly impressive in terms of advancing the platform.
I'm really sorry but that just doesn't match my experience of reality.
The stuff I run on linux and solaris is about as FPU-bound as it gets, it does non-linear regression of sets of very complex, multi-dimensional model functions, inside the fitting loop it's all linear arithmetic (using LAPACK/BLAS on x86 and sunperf on Sun), lots of large matrix/vector operations, etc. I think I'd estimate the ratio of FPU code vs. control logic + system calls around 90%-10%. Since the model functions are separable over their output grid, they're easily parallized into strips, which we tried with 1, 2, 4 and 8 threads. The results on the 8-core M3000 where so disappointing we could hardly believe it, the performance simply scaled up with the extra Mhz, compared to our old Sun Netra 240, no more no less. Compared to our development machines (simple C2D laptops) or the Opteron servers running linux, fitting times on Sparc where literally 8 to 10 times slower. Clock-for-clock Sparc FPU performance was down 5 times over the x86 systems.
It's not that I hate Sparc or anything (I just hate solaris), in fact I do agree with something you posted earlier in this topic, that it's actually a good thing to have many different architectures (just for different reasons than you mentioned). But nowadays you just can't deny that the role for Sparc architectures has been reduced to massively parallel server tasks, and that's it.
What OS did the Opteron run? I guess Sun puts a lot of effort to tweak Solaris for optimal performance in server tasks, so a desktop linux install on x86 with a low-latency kernel might in fact fall apart under high load, and comparing the two setups like that might be misleading. There's lots of ways to configure a linux kernel that really sucks under high load, even on the fastest of hardware. Try an early 2.6 kernel with the old VM, and you can slow a brand-new machine to a crawl by simply spawning a lot of processes that allocate/deallocate lots of large memory blocks.
Anyway, a 450Mhz Sparc beating a 2.4Ghz Opteron sounds like a fairy tale in my book. Of course compiling code or running FPU-heavy tasks isn't exactly comparable to serving webpages or querying a database, but seeing that an 1.5Ghz UltraSparc III takes over an hour compile the same source tree that keeps an el-cheapo Dell laptop busy for only a few minutes makes it very, very hard for me to believe your Opteron really didn't blow the sparc out of the water in any scenario imaginable.
Yes, and all these threads you get have access to crappy fpu's and horrible memory bandwith.
It's true that you can easily slap a lot of Sparc CPU's into a single machine than you can do so with x86, but since you're actually going to need all those CPU's to match even an off-the-shelf dual quad-core Opteron system for most tasks, the end result is that you're still spending much, much more money and probably suck more power too. For tasks that cannot be parallelized or executed concurrently Sparc is rubbish in every aspect imaginable.
I work at one of those companies that got lured into standardizing on Sparc hardware years ago, and now we're kind of stuck on it because we have all those systems in the field, with customers. A while ago we investigated upgrading to newer Sparc hardware (M3000) and we leased a test system to assess it's performance. For compationally intensive (FPU) tasks running 8-threads, the ~$11,000 Sparc64 IV with 8 cores / 16 hardware threads was about as fast as a $400 Core 2 Duo laptop. I'm not kidding....
So unless you want to run an enterprise database that has to handle 1000s of requests a second, Sparc has zero added value. If you really need a Sparc system for high-load, high-availability server tasks, I don't know. I'd guess a Power6 server or a rack of Opterons or Xeons wouldn't do much worse.
Discounting x86 for big-iron server systems because they would otherwise attract viruses -much like the potato famine- is ridiculous. I think you're paranoia.
[quote]Doom ran on pretty much everything, even the Super Nintendo (which was "less capable" than the equivalent PC required to make it run at bare minimum.)[/quote]
Doom on the SNES isn't exactly the best example to make that point: it came as a cartridge with a separate graphics chip in it, because the SNES itself wasn't capable to render the 2.5-dimensional graphics. Much like Star Fox and Stunt Race FX which had extra vector processors in the cartridge.
You don't get it, the game isn't impressive because it's a puzzle game, but because it's a whole new idea that seems impossible to implement, but apparently works pretty well.
1) Exclusives are often also system sellers
2) Developing an exclusive title for 1 system requires less effort and money
3) An exclusive title can make better use of the hardware of the target system, and thus be of higher quality
In case of the PS3 especially #2 and #3 are interesting, because the hardware architecture of the console differs so much from a PC or 360. Porting from 360 or PC to PS3 (like most multiplatform titles) will result in a crappy port (see HL:Orange Box or Fifa 2009, which both have frame rate issues on the PS3 but none on the 360). Developing for PC/360 and PS3 seperately is too expensive.
Well, compared to Japanase/Korean/European engines, the engines built in the US aren't particularly well-known for their sophistication or efficiency. Just for their cubic inches. Seeing that some European 1.6 litre 4-cylinder engines already churn out 275 bhp and 240 Nm, 350 bhp from a 4+ litre V8 isn't particularly impressive. Especially if you look at the mileage.
"Today, 20+ parallel sessions are quite common; the browser is more of an operating system than a data display application; we use it to manage the web as a shared hard drive. However, if you have more than seven or eight tabs open they become pretty much useless."
Sure, maybe the Mozilla folks like their browser so much they use it as an OS and open up 20+ tabs at once with it, but I'm pretty confident the average user just browses the web with it, and doesn't open more than 3 or 4 tabs at once. At least I don't (or anyone I know, for that matter) and I even consider myself a power user, I spend about 2 hours a day in my browser.
Maybe the Mozilla devs should consider gathering some statistics to back up their assumptions about browser use because this really sounds like they don't really get the difference between the 1% power users and the 99% casual users that just visit the same few websites they visit everyday.
Until that, just keep the tabs please.
I've looked at the chumby, but I don't like the design and form factor. Also you'd more or less need to 'hack' it to have it do more than it's supposed to do, which is showing chumby applets in Flash. But they're nice devices though, only not what I'm looking for.
External small displays with dvi-d are hard to find and ridiculously expensive, I've not found a single one for less then $300. The Samsung U70 7" screen I can get for less than $80. The USB connection is not really an issue, as with my revision of the Beagleboard you need to attach a powered HUB anyway, to power the board and to get the port in USB host mode (it's an USB on-the-go port that acts as a slave otherwise).
Is it any more then a small display gimmick ?
Maybe, but now that these screens seem to get linux support you can also do some pretty cool stuff with them. Get a really small ARM board like a Gumstix Overo or Beagleboard and you can make a pretty cool computer out of it that acts as a digital picture frame, clock, micro webserver, RSS reader, whatever you can think of.
I've actually been looking for a small USB screen that works with Linux for ages, so this is pretty cool news. Maybe now I can put my ARM board to use as a wireless DPF annex information display :-)
The Africans have been subject to tyranny of countless nations, and now they face the oppression of their own dictators. And I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but one's scientific success is heavily dependent on luck and ambition, not just intelligence.
There's even more to it, Africa's major axis is north-south instead of east-west, which means the continent has a lot of variance in climate with a lot of natural barriers (think about the Sahara) for species, knowledge and trade to cross. This as opposed to North America or Eurasia, both of which have east-west axes with a steady climate that's good for agriculture and diffusion of technology and trade.
Also, Africa has virtually no domesticable large mammals and large parts of Africa have been (or still are) not fit for agriculture at all. Finally, when Europeans started colonizing African countries they had a head-start in technology, and resistance to many diseases they were exposed to living next to their domesticated animals (pigs, horses, sheep), resistance the Africans never had a chance to develop. The same holds for South America, people still like to think the Inca's and the Aztecs where conquered by military force, while in fact their population was decimated by germs like the flu, bubonic pest etc.
Mandatory reading for the guy you responded to and for anyone interested to know why North America and Europe became the most developed societies, and not Africa, South-America or Polynesia (all of which at one point in history had a lead):
http://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies/dp/0393061310/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1242498876&sr=8-1
For those who don't like reading, the spoiler: it has nothing to do with intelligence/inventiveness, genetic superiority, laziness or any other form of inherited or acquired traits.
It's not the jeans that make you look fat, it's the fat that makes you look fat. (my apologies to whichever comedian I heard tell this joke)
My guess would be http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricky_Gervais ;-)
Where the train goes off the rails is where a conspiracy theory requires that massive numbers of people are keeping their mouths shut about some grand plan that they're a small part of.
Although you're right when it comes to 99% of conspiracy theories, in this case _your_ train goes off the rails assuming you need 'massive numbers of people' to pull off engineering a new influenza virus and setting it free. All it takes is a few execs who know a few scientists they can blindly trust, and if everyone involved knows that all the others share the same evil ethics, it isn't unlikely at all a scheme could be devised to create a virus like this without anyone else knowing about it. I'd say you'd need no more than 10 people, probably less.
Try googling seroquel if you think the pharmacy industry doesn't do evil things and tries to cover them up afterwards. It's an anti-deprissant that showed serious health risks and side-effects in preliminary lab studies. These studies somehow dissappeared, the side-effects where never mentioned on any package leaflet, and the drug was approved in multiple countries. Many people who used this drug developed diabetes or ended up seriously overweight, exactly the side-effects described in the lab studies, until these studies somehow surfaced, years later. You explain me how it would be more difficult to cover up creating a new strain of influence, than to have lab studies dissappear in order to get your drug approved.
Who gave you the impression making a living writing good software should be an easy ride? In the end it's the customers who buy the products, not the developers, so throwing crap out for better stuff at least benefits the people paying for the stuff. Them, and future developers who don't have to keep working with outdated API's that do not take full advantage of the latest hardware and software infrastructure.
Yes, maybe a lot of developers might move off the Apple platforms because they don't want to adjust to newer tech, and this will leave all the more room for other developers who are willing to invest some extra time to make the better app. It's always been my impression that there's a lot less freeware/shareware/OSS for Apple (compared to windows and linux), but that the overall quality is a lot higher. Personally, I'd like to keep it that way.
The MS dev tools are pretty good indeed, but they're not freely available like on OS X. As for the quality of the Apple dev tools themselves: you might not like Xcode but in the end it's simply gcc and friends that you'll be working with, and I think there's hardly any developers who think gcc is crap. Apple's performance tools are pretty good too, I still haven't found any usable *nix alternative for Shark.
Yeah because
1) insert ubuntu live cd,
2) enter your name,
3) choose guided install,
4) wait,
Really is a bridge to far for average Joe... :-/
Only thing Joe has to make sure if he wants his old PC to work right out of the box is to have someone check his wireless chipset if he even has one. That's about the only piece of commodity hardware that's sometimes a problem with modern linux distro's.
And does it have an IDE that doesn't crash randomly by now? I gave up after Delphi 5, 6, 7 and 2005, which were all utter crap in terms of stability...
Seriously, if I pay Apple for a copy of Leopard, I'll damn well use it wherever I please - with the full understanding that it is unsupported.
And you can damn well do exactly that without a problem, Apple won't come after you because as long as your hackintosh simply stays exactly that: you personal OS X toy, they don't really care that much.
Apple have said time and time again that they don't care about what individual users do with OS X. Only when shady businesses like Psystar start selling Apple clones they call in the lawyers.
Ok, I think I know what you mean. I've always thought americans to be rude and unfriendly because it's a stereotype that Europeans in general like to adhere to. When I went there a while ago it turned out to be completely the other way around, compared to the dutch guy in the street people were much more friendly, helpful and polite over there. I guess it's all a matter of perception, and somehow people everywhere like the occational stranger better than their everyday compatriot.
That said, you just can't have it all. You'll find assholes and idiots wherever you go. In general, I do think the dutch have a very open, direct attitude and a good sense of humor, and are not hampered by any kind of misplaced pride or sense of superiority, which makes it easy to set aside and accept differences, but still be to-the-point when necessary. Foreigners appreciate this attitude, something I hear all the time from my US colleagues, in telecons or when they visit our office, on a regular basis. But like you said, we're no angels, but I think you won't find angels anywhere.
Although you're mostly right, the current situation is still much, much better than criminalizing cannabis. Also, I don't think we should try to harmonize all drugs legislation in the EU, because it wouldn't work, sadly some of the most influential countries of the EU will never, ever, change their point of view that prohibition of any substance classified as 'drugs' is the only way to go. Hence, trying to attack drug-related problems as a pan-European problem is idealistic, naive and suboptimal. I'd say just work out a scheme to prevent drug tourism, which should be perfectly possible, ways of limiting drug tourism from Belgium and France are already being proposed. Let all the other member states have the freedom to implement their own point of view as long as they don't pressurize us to change our policy.
Also, your referral to the insane idiot that drove into the crowd at queens day, which has absolutely nothing to do with this discussion, does not really support anything you said on-topic.
(Yeah, also dutch and mostly proud of it)
That's an interesting argument that's made on a regular basis by many people here. Not by mayors, politicians or coffeeshop owners though, because they're not only sensible enough to see that full-force war on cannabis does much more harm than good, but also sensible enough to interpret factual data and knowledge about hard drugs, to know that legalizing e.g. coke or heroin would result in a lot of people devastating their lives.
It's funny how some governments (the Bush adminstration to name on) think or thought the best way to prevent drug abuse is to keep hammering on cannabis as a 'gateway drug', which when tolerated would lead to more hard drugs users, effectively treating it just like heroin or cocaine. All this while here in the Netherlands we think completely the other way around: tolerating mostly harmless substances like cannabis actually prevents people getting the much more dangerous stuff, because they don't need to incriminate themselves to get heroin if they can just smoke a joint every now and then.
You could argue which of the 2 ways of dealing with the unsolvable drug problem (people will keep using drugs whatever you try to prevent them) would be 'more utalitarian' so to say. The facts seem to favour the dutch approach: we have less cannabis users, less drug-related crimes, and most importantly *much* less harddrugs users than all countries surrounding us, and most of the rest of the western world. Compared to France for example, where they've tradinionally always had a zero-tolerance attitude towards drugs, the harddrugs problems in the Netherlands are virtually non-existent.
Maybe the Obama administration will get to a somewhat more opportunistic, utalitarian view of drugs legislation. He does seem to be more of a "it doesn't have to be perfect if it's better than before, jus get things done" kind of guy than Bush.
Last but not least you're mostly right about the Netherlands playing little bitch to the EU and US, sadly. I wouldn't be surprised if eventually the dutch government will bend over and destroy everything we've built for decades to limit drug-related problems and go the way of the French or the US. Probably in exchange of a little extra influence in the EU, some cuts to the EU contributions or some other stupid exchange of ideals to hold up the illusion of a 'united Europe'.
You're not just buying the thing being offered in many cases though. With advertising and PR you're also buying into the image that comes with it.
I really hate that argument.
You tell me, how and why would I pay good money to show-off with my freaking laptop or computer, which are both inside my house, not visible to anyone but me, and completely uninteresting to the kind of people who I'd like to impress or 'look cool' to. I'll buy some overpriced fancy clothes or a nice aftershave for that purpose, works much better than 'overpriced' computer hardware.
I really don't see how anyone in their right mind would fork over any kind of unjustifiable 'Apple tax' because having a Mac makes you feel cool and part of the trendy crowd. It sounds so ridiculous it's actually laughable. I have Macs because I like the form factor, the build quality and most of all: the OS and the way it just works. I like Linux almost equally well and have it running on both my macs. Also, I like how I can sell them 2nd-hand after 3 years, for half the price I paid for them new.
I don't think iPods are only a success because they are cool either. They typically simply do the job for most people and hence are a safe bet if you want an MP3 player. Sure you can buy MP3 players for 1/4th the price, but there's a lot of crap sold in that price range, which is why a lot of people prefer to spend a few more $$ and be done with it.
Kudos to the developers and for someone who likes this kind of games it's probably good fun to play, but seriously, you can't really call this 'impressive graphics' or 'raising the bar for OSS gaming', can you?
It looks like they just took the Quake 2 engine with Quake 3 sound clips and recreated all the levels en textures.... badly...
Worst of all: from the video it appears there is literally zero innovation in the gameplay, its just adhd shooting and running with the same futuristic weapons all over again.
I can understand it's hard to create something that compares to a commercial game in terms of graphics and content, but you'd excpect some more creativity in the gameplay. There must be some guys with really crazy ideas they can try out.