You have very blinkered view of terrorists. The ones who blow themselves up are the bottom of the food chain. Above them are people planning attacks, recruiting people, training them, making bombs, raising and moving money, implementing secure communications and all the other things you need to make a terrorist organisation function effectively. Many of these are intelligent, pragmatic people who realise that terrorism may well be the only effective tool they have to influence the political process. It's not like terrorism has never worked where political means have failed. If some superpower came and shat all over your country I suspect you'd consider being a freedom fighter (which is what terrorists typically consider themselves) too.
The whole thing reminds me about the comparison between Walmart and online companies; a single Walmart pulls in more profits in one DAY than most silicon valley companies do in a YEAR. That's how completely insignificant most "Web 2.0" crap truly is.
And Google pulls in more in profits in one DAY than most stores do in their ENTIRE EXISTENCE. Most companies are small and most startups fail, whatever the industry.
You can buy a decent used piano, or a nice guitar, for the price of all that stuff. Want music? Go play some.
I tried that, but once I managed to get the piano set up I had difficulty working out which pedals did what and I couldn't see through the windscreen very well. Frankly, I thought it was a little dangerous. Now I only drive while playing the oboe.
iTunes DRM doesn't stop you playing your music on multiple devices. With DRM-ed iTunes tracks the devices would have to be computers or iPods; with DRM-free music (which plenty of people, including iTunes, sell) they'd have to be computers or any old MP3 player. You could burn a CD using either and use the CD player you already have. Not that I like DRM, I don't, but in this example iTunes reasonably permissive DRM doesn't present a very big hurdle.
i know you computer scientists like playing mathematician, but there's a reason why you're the butt of mathematicians jokes. because you guys are nothing more than glorified engineers.
Adapted from a joke I saw on Jester the other day:
A physicist, a computer scientist and a mathematician are sharing a hotel room. It must have bad wiring or something.
Late at night when they're all asleep a small fire starts in the room. The smell of smoke wakes the physicist. He gets up, notices the fire and looking round the room, sees a bucket and a sink. He calculates how much water will be required, fills the bucket with precisely that much, douses the flames and goes back to bed.
A little later, another small fire starts. This time the smell of smokes wakes the computer scientist. He wakes up and sees the flames. He looks around and sees the bucket and the sink. He reasons that calculating the quantity of water required would take at least as long as filling the bucket, so he fills it right up, douses the flames and goes back to bed.
Again there is a fire. This time the mathematician smells the smoke and wakes up. He sees the flames, sees the bucket and the sink. He exclaims "there is a solution!" and goes back to bed.
The energy from the sun is free in the form of photons. However, you can't reasonably expect the people who build the devices which covert those photons into electricity to work for you for nothing. You can't reasonably expect the people to develop the technology, refine the raw materials, build the tools and so on to give their effort to you for free either.
Energy in the form of photons from the sun may be free, but the effort of those who make it useful is not. It's only fair that you do something for them in return. You could barter with them, but you may not have anything they want - a common occurrence in our highly specialised technological world. So we have a medium for the exchange of effort. We call it money. That's why if you want electricity you have to exchange some of your own effort for money and exchange some of that money for electricity.
You have a very broad view of what you're entitled to. Try to grow a little bit.
Overusing resources? Wait a minute here.. Last time I checked, Verizon is selling me a DSL connection capable of 3 Mbps down, 1 Mbps up. They advertise it as such, and I am billed for this service. Am I not allowed to use the service I'm paying for?
Verizon may advertise a 3 Mbps down / 1 Mbps up service, but the advertisement is not your contract with Verizon. Your contract with Verizon is, uh, your contract with Verizon. I presume you have some kind of regulation over there so that advertising claims aren't wildly different from the service offered, but if the pipe is 3Mbps down, 1Mbps and you can actually get close to that some of the time it fits the advertising. If the contract says it's contended and/or they might throttle it and contention or throttling means you get less than the headline figures, you are still getting what you agreed to pay for. If you want guaranteed bandwidth find a company that says they'll provide guaranteed bandwidth in the contract. Be prepared to pay a lot more.
The service you buy is defined by the contract. If you can't be bothered to read the contracts you're agreeing to that's your problem, not Verizon's.
So true. This is why a la carte cable TV is a bad idea too. If you're "saving money" by buying fewer channels, the cable company is going to have to make that up somewhere. Their costs of doing business are the same whether you get one channel or 50.
Are you claiming that $cable_company pays exactly the same to $tv_channel whether they have 50 0000 customers or 1 000 000 customers subscribed to $tv_channel? I doubt that very much.
You do realise that Nazi is a proper noun, not an acronym, and therefore should not be capitalised?
In this usage, isn't it about time we dropped the capitalisation entirely? Save Nazi (big N) for memebers of the Nazi Party. Use nazi (little n) for someone who is uptight, particular and pushes their views on others, but doesn't typically have the desire to commit genocide.
No. It's fucking awful. On a 1024 high screen in FF, you can't even see the first comment. That's just insane. I daren't even try on my eee or 770 with their 480 pixel high screens (which usually manage an ad-free Slashdot just fine).
I was using myself as an example of a generic hacker / power user (as far as such a thing exists), substitute that for "I/me". My point is that I've not found anything that isn't possible, except hacking the GUI layer, on OS X that is possible on Linux. I was just looking for a concrete example of why you claim Linux is a better choice. From all my own experience and from reading the experiences of others I haven't found much in the way of concrete examples, it's all hyperbole, which is exactly what your complete-with-car-analogy post was.
Here are some concrete examples of why OS X is better: WiFi works and works properly Suspend/hibernate work and are fast Desktop applications don't have interdependencies Can use industry-standard commercial applications (Office, Photoshop...) or FOSS alternatives Parallels is the nicest VM implementation for desktop use I've seen Whatever the reasons, people don't seem that interested in hacking it HFS+ (self-optimizing on-disk format, useful metadata...) Fast, pervasive desktop search
That's just 10.4, I've not tried 10.5 yet. File versioning and ZFS support sound pretty pleasant though.
Most coding in the real world isn't writing performance critical distributed applications which are the cornerstone of multi-billion-dollar corporations. It's writing business apps and websites. For those, Java and C# shit all over C++, because they make not fucking up much, much easier.
It is annoying and slow, but the fact that you can't as easily just hack together a quick and dirty test makes writing a proper unit test comparatively less unattractive. Annoying, but perhaps not such a bad thing in the long run.
Nice repetition of groupthink. Have you actually, you know, used all three as a desktop system for a reasonable period? I have (except Vista, I stuck with XP and no job has forced me to use it so far).
My Mac gives me a bash shell (which I use), source for the kernel (which I've only ever wanted to once - mostly stuff just works and works the right way) and configuration files I can read with a text editor (which I have used, but the plist editor, an XML editor or the defaults CLI system are nicer). I write code in whatever language I fancy, run Apache with whatever modules I fancy and use the supplied GCC to build my cross-compilers and have scripts do my system administration tasks for me. That'll all the same stuff I do on my Linux boxen, but I don't have to fuck about making WiFi, suspend/hibernate and other basic things work. I admit that NetInfo isn't the greatest, but for a desktop I hardly ever have to use it - I can only remember using it for setting up NFS automounts and changing my UID (again for NFS).
Can you give me an example of something I might actually want to do (I don't want to rewrite my GUI, thanks, I just want one which works fairly consistently) which I can't do on my Mac?
Why would they need to? They only needed to read a file to win the competition and every OS is pretty permissive about reading files. It's not like they had to install a rootkit.
Where do they serve beer at room temperature? Cellar temperature, sure, but room temperature? In summer? Everything tastes like piss when it's at 28 C. Well, except cheapo supermarket 2% bitter, which in normal life is probably about as close to the "warm beer" us Britons used to drink as I've encountered. That's actually no less vile when warm than when cold. Perhaps I'm wrong and you can get delicious ale at refreshingly low strengths somewhere in the world, if so I want to know about it. Once you get up towards 4% it needs to be below room temperature (but never actually cold, of course).
All the US can do is try to stop importing of atomic bombs, then again by then it may be too late.
I have a mental image of a security guy floating next to metal detector at 80 000 feet asking the rapidly approaching ICMB warhead to remove its shoes.
If I'm building an atomic bomb, the threat of being hit by a patent lawsuit seems somewhat lower than, say, the threat of being bombed into a metaphor.
You wouldn't be violating the patents (the unexpired ones, that is) if you only built the device for research anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
You have very blinkered view of terrorists. The ones who blow themselves up are the bottom of the food chain. Above them are people planning attacks, recruiting people, training them, making bombs, raising and moving money, implementing secure communications and all the other things you need to make a terrorist organisation function effectively. Many of these are intelligent, pragmatic people who realise that terrorism may well be the only effective tool they have to influence the political process. It's not like terrorism has never worked where political means have failed. If some superpower came and shat all over your country I suspect you'd consider being a freedom fighter (which is what terrorists typically consider themselves) too.
I hate them because of the blanket assertion that engineers have no social sills.
And Google pulls in more in profits in one DAY than most stores do in their ENTIRE EXISTENCE. Most companies are small and most startups fail, whatever the industry.
Clue: 6 million is more than 4.5 million.
I tried that, but once I managed to get the piano set up I had difficulty working out which pedals did what and I couldn't see through the windscreen very well. Frankly, I thought it was a little dangerous. Now I only drive while playing the oboe.
iTunes DRM doesn't stop you playing your music on multiple devices. With DRM-ed iTunes tracks the devices would have to be computers or iPods; with DRM-free music (which plenty of people, including iTunes, sell) they'd have to be computers or any old MP3 player. You could burn a CD using either and use the CD player you already have. Not that I like DRM, I don't, but in this example iTunes reasonably permissive DRM doesn't present a very big hurdle.
Adapted from a joke I saw on Jester the other day:
A physicist, a computer scientist and a mathematician are sharing a hotel room. It must have bad wiring or something.
Late at night when they're all asleep a small fire starts in the room. The smell of smoke wakes the physicist. He gets up, notices the fire and looking round the room, sees a bucket and a sink. He calculates how much water will be required, fills the bucket with precisely that much, douses the flames and goes back to bed.
A little later, another small fire starts. This time the smell of smokes wakes the computer scientist. He wakes up and sees the flames. He looks around and sees the bucket and the sink. He reasons that calculating the quantity of water required would take at least as long as filling the bucket, so he fills it right up, douses the flames and goes back to bed.
Again there is a fire. This time the mathematician smells the smoke and wakes up. He sees the flames, sees the bucket and the sink. He exclaims "there is a solution!" and goes back to bed.
The energy from the sun is free in the form of photons. However, you can't reasonably expect the people who build the devices which covert those photons into electricity to work for you for nothing. You can't reasonably expect the people to develop the technology, refine the raw materials, build the tools and so on to give their effort to you for free either.
Energy in the form of photons from the sun may be free, but the effort of those who make it useful is not. It's only fair that you do something for them in return. You could barter with them, but you may not have anything they want - a common occurrence in our highly specialised technological world. So we have a medium for the exchange of effort. We call it money. That's why if you want electricity you have to exchange some of your own effort for money and exchange some of that money for electricity.
You have a very broad view of what you're entitled to. Try to grow a little bit.
Verizon may advertise a 3 Mbps down / 1 Mbps up service, but the advertisement is not your contract with Verizon. Your contract with Verizon is, uh, your contract with Verizon. I presume you have some kind of regulation over there so that advertising claims aren't wildly different from the service offered, but if the pipe is 3Mbps down, 1Mbps and you can actually get close to that some of the time it fits the advertising. If the contract says it's contended and/or they might throttle it and contention or throttling means you get less than the headline figures, you are still getting what you agreed to pay for. If you want guaranteed bandwidth find a company that says they'll provide guaranteed bandwidth in the contract. Be prepared to pay a lot more.
The service you buy is defined by the contract. If you can't be bothered to read the contracts you're agreeing to that's your problem, not Verizon's.
Are you claiming that $cable_company pays exactly the same to $tv_channel whether they have 50 0000 customers or 1 000 000 customers subscribed to $tv_channel? I doubt that very much.
In this usage, isn't it about time we dropped the capitalisation entirely? Save Nazi (big N) for memebers of the Nazi Party. Use nazi (little n) for someone who is uptight, particular and pushes their views on others, but doesn't typically have the desire to commit genocide.
ITYM "semantics nazi".
No. It's fucking awful. On a 1024 high screen in FF, you can't even see the first comment. That's just insane. I daren't even try on my eee or 770 with their 480 pixel high screens (which usually manage an ad-free Slashdot just fine).
Plugging together a machine from commodity parts is hardware hacking? Ha ha, you are funny. Really you are.
I was using myself as an example of a generic hacker / power user (as far as such a thing exists), substitute that for "I/me". My point is that I've not found anything that isn't possible, except hacking the GUI layer, on OS X that is possible on Linux. I was just looking for a concrete example of why you claim Linux is a better choice. From all my own experience and from reading the experiences of others I haven't found much in the way of concrete examples, it's all hyperbole, which is exactly what your complete-with-car-analogy post was.
Here are some concrete examples of why OS X is better:
WiFi works and works properly
Suspend/hibernate work and are fast
Desktop applications don't have interdependencies
Can use industry-standard commercial applications (Office, Photoshop...) or FOSS alternatives
Parallels is the nicest VM implementation for desktop use I've seen
Whatever the reasons, people don't seem that interested in hacking it
HFS+ (self-optimizing on-disk format, useful metadata...)
Fast, pervasive desktop search
That's just 10.4, I've not tried 10.5 yet. File versioning and ZFS support sound pretty pleasant though.
Most coding in the real world isn't writing performance critical distributed applications which are the cornerstone of multi-billion-dollar corporations. It's writing business apps and websites. For those, Java and C# shit all over C++, because they make not fucking up much, much easier.
According to Wikipedia (well, the redirect for "the white book") it's a synonym for K&R. I didn't know what it was, despite owning it.
There's a big difference between a sprawling standard library and a sprawling language definition.
First step toward OOP? Smalltalk started development in 1969 and was published in 1980. C++ started development in 1979 and was published in 1983.
It is annoying and slow, but the fact that you can't as easily just hack together a quick and dirty test makes writing a proper unit test comparatively less unattractive. Annoying, but perhaps not such a bad thing in the long run.
Nice repetition of groupthink. Have you actually, you know, used all three as a desktop system for a reasonable period? I have (except Vista, I stuck with XP and no job has forced me to use it so far).
My Mac gives me a bash shell (which I use), source for the kernel (which I've only ever wanted to once - mostly stuff just works and works the right way) and configuration files I can read with a text editor (which I have used, but the plist editor, an XML editor or the defaults CLI system are nicer). I write code in whatever language I fancy, run Apache with whatever modules I fancy and use the supplied GCC to build my cross-compilers and have scripts do my system administration tasks for me. That'll all the same stuff I do on my Linux boxen, but I don't have to fuck about making WiFi, suspend/hibernate and other basic things work. I admit that NetInfo isn't the greatest, but for a desktop I hardly ever have to use it - I can only remember using it for setting up NFS automounts and changing my UID (again for NFS).
Can you give me an example of something I might actually want to do (I don't want to rewrite my GUI, thanks, I just want one which works fairly consistently) which I can't do on my Mac?
Why would they need to? They only needed to read a file to win the competition and every OS is pretty permissive about reading files. It's not like they had to install a rootkit.
Where do they serve beer at room temperature? Cellar temperature, sure, but room temperature? In summer? Everything tastes like piss when it's at 28 C. Well, except cheapo supermarket 2% bitter, which in normal life is probably about as close to the "warm beer" us Britons used to drink as I've encountered. That's actually no less vile when warm than when cold. Perhaps I'm wrong and you can get delicious ale at refreshingly low strengths somewhere in the world, if so I want to know about it. Once you get up towards 4% it needs to be below room temperature (but never actually cold, of course).
I have a mental image of a security guy floating next to metal detector at 80 000 feet asking the rapidly approaching ICMB warhead to remove its shoes.
You wouldn't be violating the patents (the unexpired ones, that is) if you only built the device for research anyway.