It's nowhere near the situation during, for example, maccarthyism. Read something about the period. People were out of jobs (or forced out of the country!) for no reason at all, other that they were untruthfully accused of sympathizing with communists.
Today, people have been "disappeared" and locked up in the gulag in Gitmo, for no other reason than that they were untruthfully accused of sympathizing with terrorists. This is not theory, it's documented fact.
Sorry, this is better than McCarthyism how, exactly? Oh, right, McCarthyism was directed against white people like you, whereas this is only directed against Muslims...
I think, It's insulting for the tortured to death victims in Iran, or China, or Russia, to even compare the minor inconveniences that Americans suffer with the police state actions.
And what about the tortured to death victims of the American military? Again, documented fact. Oh, right, most of them aren't American, so they don't count, right?
- The UK has a network of surveillance cameras that America's authoritarians can only dream about.
- The UK just had an election in which electoral fraud is strongly suspected, because the postal vote system was left open to abuse.
- In 2001 the Home Secretary described civil liberties as an "airy fairy" concern.
- The RIP Act makes routine surveillance of ordinary citizens a reality. It goes even further than the PATRIOT act, in that it requires ISPs to develop and install monitoring software at their expense, and makes it a criminal offense to refuse to incriminate yourself by handing over your encryption keys on demand. Oh, and it also makes it an offense to tell anyone you're being investigated or that you have been forced to hand over your keys, so much for freedom of speech.
- The UK also amended the law in the 90s so that refusing to incriminate yourself could be used as evidence against you in court--i.e. there is no "right to silence".
- The current government is set on introducing a mandatory identity card with biometric features.
- The UK Official Secrets act allows people to be put on trial for crimes against the state, without being told what they actually did. (i.e. the evidence against them can be ruled secret under the act).
- Even though the ruling party deliberately lied to the country to support a war on Iraq, they were still voted back in with a huge majority--just like the situation in the US.
- The Criminal Justice Act of 2003 suspended the right to trial by jury, and suspended the "double jeopardy" limits, allowing the state to continue to harass people indefinitely.
- The new Home Secretary is now trying to undermine the right to a fair trial.
- The UK government handed over power over intellectual property legislation to the WTO, just like America did. Tough luck if you don't like software patents; the government doesn't have the power to decide not to allow them, because of the GATT TRIPS treaties signed in the 90s. (Signed even though many of us wrote letters to politicians, protested, etc.)
One of the reasons I left the UK is because the country is so damn complacent. For some reason, UK citizens don't care about the UK's lurch towards fascism; they're too busy looking at America and feeling smug. At least Americans seem to be aware of, and care about, their country becoming a fascist state, even if they are powerless to stop it.
We don't have (for example) a state-run media. We also have a people who are very proud of their 229 history of elections and aren't going to throw it out.
The problem is that people don't think that they matter.
The problem is, they're often right. Both Kerry and Bush supported the PATRIOT Act, and Nader and the Libertarian never had a chance of winning. Almost every Democratic and Republican candidate supported the PATRIOT act. So what were people expected to do on voting day?
The first thing that needs to be fixed is the broken electoral system that prevents third parties. Then people's votes will always be important, and we'll have a chance of fixing the rest of the problems. And the problem, of course, is that no party that gets elected wants to fix the system that got them elected.
(America isn't unique in this respect either. The UK has exactly the same problem.)
But a lot of people don't realize that you can't just say "You're doing it wrong.". Because when you're in leadership you have to do *something*.
Well, that's a big piece of the problem right there.
The PATRIOT act is a classic case where in reality, politicians didn't need to do something. They needed to be SEEN to be doing something, but none of what they actually did needed to be done.
Sometimes premature action is worse than no action at all. But unfortunately, the way politicians reason is "We must do something! This is something! Therefore we must do this!"
Considering the majority of Americans are categorized as "overweight" or "obese", please define "not enough food".
The real issue is not enough nutritious food; obesity is a manifestation of the problem. As "Super Size Me" demonstrates, if you're poor and can't afford to eat anywhere but McDonalds, you can eat every day until you die of malnutrition, and you'll be huge and likely have diabetes at death.
Since you mention C#, I'm assuming you have a bunch of Windows servers.
That being the case, anyone who thinks you can do sysadmin for 30 people in 30 minutes a week is just smoking crack. You can easily spend 30 minutes a week just keeping a couple of servers up to date with the weekly Microsoft security patches and watching the net for security problems. (Been there, done that.)
And of course, that's assuming an experienced sysadmin. Starting from zero knowledge, if you spend your 30 minutes a week studying, you'll be ready to go in a year or two. A single routine problem, like learning how to configure a firewall, can soak up a couple of hours of inexperienced sysadmin time.
Basically, you're being set up to fail. If you decide to stick around, make damn sure you start tracking how much time you spend on what, to a 5 minute granularity. That way when he asks why the Windows servers keep crashing and are infested with this month's worm, you'll be able to point to the logs to justify why you didn't get around to securing them in time.
I hate to be in any way sticking up for Microsoft, but don't underestimate the value of starting from a clean slate.
There are plenty of Unix shells that have started from a clean slate. rc, for example. The fact that they have failed to catch on suggests that the advantages you get from starting from a clean slate really aren't that compelling.
For instance, I use bash. Why? Because for an interactive shell, it's good enough. It sucks for scripting, but I don't care about that, because I'd never write anything non-trivial in shell script anyway--that's what real scripting languages like Ruby are for. On the other hand, bash supports Unicode, has OK command completion and aliasing, and command line editing. That's really all I need.
In fact, if there is a niche for a new shell, it's for one that provides the best possible interactive experience in the least memory and CPU, and completely ignores scripting. (Or uses an existing perfectly good scripting language for extending it.) I'd switch to that.
I don't see either behavior as inherently more reasonable. I often want to replace a folder with a newer one--for example, when replacing an application's documentation folder with the latest version. The user action is ambiguous, and the optimum thing to do is to provide the user with a choice.
In fact, neither OS X nor Windows allows you to choose whether you want "replace" or "merge", so both OSs fall down there...
If you drag a bunch of files into a window or folder, they are added to the ones already there. If you drag a folder into a window or folder, it's added to the stuff already there.
The only case where anything is ever deleted is if you drag a folder into a window that already has a folder with the exact same name. In that case, the dragged-in folder replaces the one already there. This is true on OS X, Windows and KDE. Also, all three systems tell you that the dragged-in folder will replace the one already there.
More to the point, if you're using a Mac chances are you're using iTunes, so you shouldn't have to drag around folders full of MP3s anyway... iTunes will handle consolidating libraries of MP3 files for you, and sort them into a neat folder structure automatically.
what apple moved to was not so much the intel CPUs, but the intel instruction set.
And basically, that instruction set is dominant-
Yes, it's dominant, and it blows. That's what makes the move so hard for many Mac-heads to accept. The Mac has always been about doing what's technically right, not what's most popular.
For instance, I vastly prefer the clean simplicity of the 6502 to the ugliness of the Z80, having written code for both. The 680x0 was a joy to write for compared to the 8086 thru 80486.
Moving up out of the realm of processors, SCSI was clearly superior to IDE. USB was obviously the right thing, even if serial ports and ADB were far more popular and USB peripherals were initially almost impossible to find. Firewire is better in every way than USB 2.0 HiSpeed.
In the software layer, the way the Mac filesystem works is a pain in the ass to write for, but the way the system behaves to the end user as a result is clearly the right way. (Programs don't break when you move them, files launch to the application you last edited them with, and so on.)
In short, the Mac has always been about picking the best technology. But now suddenly there's going to be an x86 CPU in the middle of it all--kludge after kludge piled on top of the original 8086 design. And recall, IBM chose that because it sucked, they didn't want to choose something that might threaten their real computer systems.
Worse, it's not even going to be a leading-edge AMD 64 bit x86 CPU, it's going to be an Intel processor.
The Mac community is being served a shit sandwich. It may still be the finest ciabatta bread, the freshest pickles and lettuce--but there's going to be a huge turd in the middle, and some of us are having a hard time preparing to swallow it.
Case in point: my screensaver does its 3D geometry using the Apple-supplied BLAS library. On G4 machines, that's translated straight to AltiVec; the OpenGL graphics is handled by the graphics card, and the CPU barely even ticks over. There are people who run the thing as their desktop backdrop.
On an old G3, the BLAS library runs PowerPC code for the same functions. The graphics are handled by driver code. The same software still runs, but the CPU chews like mad.
I'm sure that when the x86 Mac comes out, I'll compile the same source code and the BLAS stuff will be converted to whatever the hell Intel uses for vector mathematics acceleration, and the OpenGL will be acclerated again.
I suspect that very few AltiVec accelerated applications actually have AltiVec source code involved.
There's nothing politically incorrect about saying that there's something wrong with intelligent people in America, fercrissakes. I mean, look at who was elected President last time. America loves a moron and hates people who appear intelligent, saying that they're also genetically diseased will just confirm what most Americans already seem to think.
I use KDE every day. I use OS X every day. There are just so many things that OS X does better.
Menus are faster to access on OS X, because there's one menu bar at the top of the screen. File management is better on OS X. There's a button to size windows to the optimum size on OS X. Contextual menus allow me to pull data into applications quickly and easily, for example to file bits of information away in a notebook.
Actually, the single best thing OS X has going for it over KDE is that the fucking clipboard works properly, always, in all applications...
Want to know how Linux could benefit from the momentum behind OS X, and vice versa?
Simple. The Linux community should get behind OpenStep, port KDE applications over to OpenStep, and leave Gnome to the Microsoft.NET people.
Imagine: OpenStep and Cocoa actively kept in sync. Most Mac applications would be trivial to port to Linux, and vice versa. KOffice everywhere, applications like Circus Ponies Notebook and SubEthaEdit running on Linux.
But no, we can't even settle on one desktop environment, let alone move in the direction of one that has serious momentum behind it...
Frankly, I'm not going to take any lessons in package management from anyone responsible for the abortion called AutoPackage.
There is absolutely no way anyone competent would design a package format that consisted of an executable shell script containing more executable shell scripts, with no way to unpack other than to execute unknown code. It's just screaming out for trojanizing.
My new laser printer has a prominent red "Cancel" button on the top, which cancels the job...
Another good feature would be if printer drivers had a "cost per page" config parameter, so when people asked to print something it would bring up a dialog saying "Printing this 400 page document on the printer EPSON Color Stylus will cost $1200, are you sure?"
NeXT made some other huge mistakes, though, so it's not entirely clear that the move to selling just the OS for x86 computers was the cause of their demise.
For starters, the decision not to sell NeXT machines in Europe was pretty dumb, as it drastically reduced the software base for the system.
I'm not disputing that the number of buildings you could enter in Vice City was limited. I'm stating that the proportion of enterable buildings to non-enterable buildings was higher than it is in San Andreas.
Also, you conveniently omit that some of the categories of building on that list aren't enterable any more in San Andreas. Like, the airport doors just cut to a ticket purchase screen, rather than an actual airport departure area inside.
Slashdot Mirror
Today, people have been "disappeared" and locked up in the gulag in Gitmo, for no other reason than that they were untruthfully accused of sympathizing with terrorists. This is not theory, it's documented fact.
Sorry, this is better than McCarthyism how, exactly? Oh, right, McCarthyism was directed against white people like you, whereas this is only directed against Muslims...
And what about the tortured to death victims of the American military? Again, documented fact. Oh, right, most of them aren't American, so they don't count, right?
Well, on the other hand...
- The UK has a network of surveillance cameras that America's authoritarians can only dream about.
- The UK just had an election in which electoral fraud is strongly suspected, because the postal vote system was left open to abuse.
- In 2001 the Home Secretary described civil liberties as an "airy fairy" concern.
- The RIP Act makes routine surveillance of ordinary citizens a reality. It goes even further than the PATRIOT act, in that it requires ISPs to develop and install monitoring software at their expense, and makes it a criminal offense to refuse to incriminate yourself by handing over your encryption keys on demand. Oh, and it also makes it an offense to tell anyone you're being investigated or that you have been forced to hand over your keys, so much for freedom of speech.
- The UK also amended the law in the 90s so that refusing to incriminate yourself could be used as evidence against you in court--i.e. there is no "right to silence".
- The current government is set on introducing a mandatory identity card with biometric features.
- The UK Official Secrets act allows people to be put on trial for crimes against the state, without being told what they actually did. (i.e. the evidence against them can be ruled secret under the act).
- Even though the ruling party deliberately lied to the country to support a war on Iraq, they were still voted back in with a huge majority--just like the situation in the US.
- The Criminal Justice Act of 2003 suspended the right to trial by jury, and suspended the "double jeopardy" limits, allowing the state to continue to harass people indefinitely.
- The new Home Secretary is now trying to undermine the right to a fair trial.
- The UK government handed over power over intellectual property legislation to the WTO, just like America did. Tough luck if you don't like software patents; the government doesn't have the power to decide not to allow them, because of the GATT TRIPS treaties signed in the 90s. (Signed even though many of us wrote letters to politicians, protested, etc.)
One of the reasons I left the UK is because the country is so damn complacent. For some reason, UK citizens don't care about the UK's lurch towards fascism; they're too busy looking at America and feeling smug. At least Americans seem to be aware of, and care about, their country becoming a fascist state, even if they are powerless to stop it.
So how come he was left to serve his first 4 years in office, even after an independent non-partisan count of the votes determined that he lost the election?
...and that John Kerry supported it, and during his presidential campaign said that he still supported it.
South Park had it right--a turd sandwich, or a giant douche?
The problem is, they're often right. Both Kerry and Bush supported the PATRIOT Act, and Nader and the Libertarian never had a chance of winning. Almost every Democratic and Republican candidate supported the PATRIOT act. So what were people expected to do on voting day?
The first thing that needs to be fixed is the broken electoral system that prevents third parties. Then people's votes will always be important, and we'll have a chance of fixing the rest of the problems. And the problem, of course, is that no party that gets elected wants to fix the system that got them elected.
(America isn't unique in this respect either. The UK has exactly the same problem.)
Well, that's a big piece of the problem right there.
The PATRIOT act is a classic case where in reality, politicians didn't need to do something. They needed to be SEEN to be doing something, but none of what they actually did needed to be done.
Sometimes premature action is worse than no action at all. But unfortunately, the way politicians reason is "We must do something! This is something! Therefore we must do this!"
The real issue is not enough nutritious food; obesity is a manifestation of the problem. As "Super Size Me" demonstrates, if you're poor and can't afford to eat anywhere but McDonalds, you can eat every day until you die of malnutrition, and you'll be huge and likely have diabetes at death.
Since you mention C#, I'm assuming you have a bunch of Windows servers.
That being the case, anyone who thinks you can do sysadmin for 30 people in 30 minutes a week is just smoking crack. You can easily spend 30 minutes a week just keeping a couple of servers up to date with the weekly Microsoft security patches and watching the net for security problems. (Been there, done that.)
And of course, that's assuming an experienced sysadmin. Starting from zero knowledge, if you spend your 30 minutes a week studying, you'll be ready to go in a year or two. A single routine problem, like learning how to configure a firewall, can soak up a couple of hours of inexperienced sysadmin time.
Basically, you're being set up to fail. If you decide to stick around, make damn sure you start tracking how much time you spend on what, to a 5 minute granularity. That way when he asks why the Windows servers keep crashing and are infested with this month's worm, you'll be able to point to the logs to justify why you didn't get around to securing them in time.
There are plenty of Unix shells that have started from a clean slate. rc, for example. The fact that they have failed to catch on suggests that the advantages you get from starting from a clean slate really aren't that compelling.
For instance, I use bash. Why? Because for an interactive shell, it's good enough. It sucks for scripting, but I don't care about that, because I'd never write anything non-trivial in shell script anyway--that's what real scripting languages like Ruby are for. On the other hand, bash supports Unicode, has OK command completion and aliasing, and command line editing. That's really all I need.
In fact, if there is a niche for a new shell, it's for one that provides the best possible interactive experience in the least memory and CPU, and completely ignores scripting. (Or uses an existing perfectly good scripting language for extending it.) I'd switch to that.
I've never seen a package of Apache for any Linux distribution that has PHP bundled in. What are you talking about?
OK, they changed that in Windows then.
I don't see either behavior as inherently more reasonable. I often want to replace a folder with a newer one--for example, when replacing an application's documentation folder with the latest version. The user action is ambiguous, and the optimum thing to do is to provide the user with a choice.
In fact, neither OS X nor Windows allows you to choose whether you want "replace" or "merge", so both OSs fall down there...
If you drag a bunch of files into a window or folder, they are added to the ones already there. If you drag a folder into a window or folder, it's added to the stuff already there.
The only case where anything is ever deleted is if you drag a folder into a window that already has a folder with the exact same name. In that case, the dragged-in folder replaces the one already there. This is true on OS X, Windows and KDE. Also, all three systems tell you that the dragged-in folder will replace the one already there.
More to the point, if you're using a Mac chances are you're using iTunes, so you shouldn't have to drag around folders full of MP3s anyway... iTunes will handle consolidating libraries of MP3 files for you, and sort them into a neat folder structure automatically.
Yes, it's dominant, and it blows. That's what makes the move so hard for many Mac-heads to accept. The Mac has always been about doing what's technically right, not what's most popular.
For instance, I vastly prefer the clean simplicity of the 6502 to the ugliness of the Z80, having written code for both. The 680x0 was a joy to write for compared to the 8086 thru 80486.
Moving up out of the realm of processors, SCSI was clearly superior to IDE. USB was obviously the right thing, even if serial ports and ADB were far more popular and USB peripherals were initially almost impossible to find. Firewire is better in every way than USB 2.0 HiSpeed.
In the software layer, the way the Mac filesystem works is a pain in the ass to write for, but the way the system behaves to the end user as a result is clearly the right way. (Programs don't break when you move them, files launch to the application you last edited them with, and so on.)
In short, the Mac has always been about picking the best technology. But now suddenly there's going to be an x86 CPU in the middle of it all--kludge after kludge piled on top of the original 8086 design. And recall, IBM chose that because it sucked, they didn't want to choose something that might threaten their real computer systems.
Worse, it's not even going to be a leading-edge AMD 64 bit x86 CPU, it's going to be an Intel processor.
The Mac community is being served a shit sandwich. It may still be the finest ciabatta bread, the freshest pickles and lettuce--but there's going to be a huge turd in the middle, and some of us are having a hard time preparing to swallow it.
Case in point: my screensaver does its 3D geometry using the Apple-supplied BLAS library. On G4 machines, that's translated straight to AltiVec; the OpenGL graphics is handled by the graphics card, and the CPU barely even ticks over. There are people who run the thing as their desktop backdrop.
On an old G3, the BLAS library runs PowerPC code for the same functions. The graphics are handled by driver code. The same software still runs, but the CPU chews like mad.
I'm sure that when the x86 Mac comes out, I'll compile the same source code and the BLAS stuff will be converted to whatever the hell Intel uses for vector mathematics acceleration, and the OpenGL will be acclerated again.
I suspect that very few AltiVec accelerated applications actually have AltiVec source code involved.
There's also IBM's Lotus Instant Messaging (the product formerly known as Sametime), which has archiving solutions for legal compliance.
There's nothing politically incorrect about saying that there's something wrong with intelligent people in America, fercrissakes. I mean, look at who was elected President last time. America loves a moron and hates people who appear intelligent, saying that they're also genetically diseased will just confirm what most Americans already seem to think.
I use KDE every day. I use OS X every day. There are just so many things that OS X does better.
Menus are faster to access on OS X, because there's one menu bar at the top of the screen. File management is better on OS X. There's a button to size windows to the optimum size on OS X. Contextual menus allow me to pull data into applications quickly and easily, for example to file bits of information away in a notebook.
Actually, the single best thing OS X has going for it over KDE is that the fucking clipboard works properly, always, in all applications...
Want to know how Linux could benefit from the momentum behind OS X, and vice versa?
.NET people.
Simple. The Linux community should get behind OpenStep, port KDE applications over to OpenStep, and leave Gnome to the Microsoft
Imagine: OpenStep and Cocoa actively kept in sync. Most Mac applications would be trivial to port to Linux, and vice versa. KOffice everywhere, applications like Circus Ponies Notebook and SubEthaEdit running on Linux.
But no, we can't even settle on one desktop environment, let alone move in the direction of one that has serious momentum behind it...
Frankly, I'm not going to take any lessons in package management from anyone responsible for the abortion called AutoPackage.
There is absolutely no way anyone competent would design a package format that consisted of an executable shell script containing more executable shell scripts, with no way to unpack other than to execute unknown code. It's just screaming out for trojanizing.
Yes, spend $150 and buy yourself a laser printer.
Or $500 if you want color.
And don't buy an HP, their drivers are awful.
I just got a Konica Minolta 2430DL. Plugged it in and it worked with Linux, no problems. The only thing it lacks is duplex printing.
Since we're talking inkjet, I want to know what the cost per page is for that mother. It might be more efficient than burning a stack of $20 bills.
My new laser printer has a prominent red "Cancel" button on the top, which cancels the job...
Another good feature would be if printer drivers had a "cost per page" config parameter, so when people asked to print something it would bring up a dialog saying "Printing this 400 page document on the printer EPSON Color Stylus will cost $1200, are you sure?"
Of course it's not true. He's trolling.
NeXT made some other huge mistakes, though, so it's not entirely clear that the move to selling just the OS for x86 computers was the cause of their demise.
For starters, the decision not to sell NeXT machines in Europe was pretty dumb, as it drastically reduced the software base for the system.
I'm not disputing that the number of buildings you could enter in Vice City was limited. I'm stating that the proportion of enterable buildings to non-enterable buildings was higher than it is in San Andreas.
Also, you conveniently omit that some of the categories of building on that list aren't enterable any more in San Andreas. Like, the airport doors just cut to a ticket purchase screen, rather than an actual airport departure area inside.