Apple isn't perfect, but they usually get the interface right. I use iTunes and friends on my PowerBook at home. I also sometimes use Windows Media Player for various training videos at work.
The difference is like night and day. Both can play sound and video perfectly adequately - but Windows Media Player is just so awkward and cumbersome compared to iTunes. No, WMP isn't *hard* to use, it's just cumbersome. For example, when I watch video on my Mac, the screensaver doesn't kick in if I've not touched the keyboard and mouse. When watching video at work, I have to periodically waggle the mouse to stop the screensaver starting (or turn off automatic screen locking, which is also cumbersome). One training CD is made up of about a dozen WMV files with a menu. When you start the next WMV file, Windows Media Player forgets your last volume setting and blasts you through your headphones. By comparison, my PowerBook doesn't forget volume settings between files. (Even my Linux system doesn't forget volume settings between files - or turn on the screen saver when I'm watching video, for that matter). There are numerous other niggles with WMP that don't exist with the Apple product.
By your measure, Windows XP isn't ready for the mainstream desktop, either. With Windows, if you install from the XP CD, you DON'T get:
- a DVD player - a word processor/spreadsheet application - drivers for quite a lot of hardware (certainly no accelerated 3D drivers)
The only reason these things come by default is that most people do NOT install Windows XP. It comes pre-installed with their computer, and the maker of their computer did all of the hard work in installing, testing and building a Windows XP ghost image that included all these things.
What would help many Linux distributions a lot (including Ubuntu) is having a simple 'Start Here' application that allows a user to add more software repositories. For instance, Fedora Core does not come with a DVD player because of patent and DMCA issues. But it wouldn't kill them to add a "Third Party Software Repository" GUI tool that allowed users to choose Livna or DAG - both of which DO have DVD players - and because they are yum repositories, all the user has to do is select 'VLC Media Player' and all the dependencies are automatically installed too and their DVDs will now play. It would also mean you could just click on Livna's nVidia drivers, and have accelerated 3D drivers which get updated with the rest of your system (the nVidia and ATi drivers on that repository are a simple install - no editing configs required, they are prepackaged, and yum resolves dependencies automatically)
I've been to the Pepper Festival in Palestine, TX. a couple of times. I always liked watching the chili eating contest. One year there was this dude, who looked like a 50-year old hippie. He was just about the last man standing, and was eating the habanero as if it was an apple. Most of the rest of the survivors were writing in pain by now. Of course, the guy fronting the contest was forcing them all to chew.
I always wondered how hot the burning ring of fire would be when it had finally all passed through.
It's not a big challenge to configure BIND to serve recursive queries to some clients and not to others - it's just one line in the configuration file (and it's well documented).
Unfortunately it isn't that simple. If you did that, the programmer could still write buggy code that can overflow the returned buffer. Additionally, it would have a vast impact on performance since you'd no longer be passing things by reference (instead copying whole buffers around, and you can still get buffer sizes wrong).
A better approach for Microsoft would be to take the approach the OpenBSD developers take - build the operating system with something similar to W^X and ProPolice, have a safer malloc/free implementation - and effectively neuter buffer overflows. They can still happen but instead of allowing code injection, just cause the program with the bug to crash (so the machine doesn't get compromised).
Also if the Microsoft C compiler and associated tools gave warnings every time someone used one of the rather naive C functions (like strcpy) which don't do any bounds checking, it might help.
How is it going to be enforced? Now, say I'm a company in Timbuktoo, and I accept a US credit card as payment for a wager (which is entirely legal in Timbuktoo). How is the US going to prosecute my Timbuktoo company?
You don't have to use the Metacity window manager - you can use a WM that still does this. This is why Linux and BSD is different to Windows - you aren't stuck with a one size fits all desktop. You don't even have to use Gnome if you don't want to.
To me and quite a lot of people, music purchases are often impulse buys - we've heard something we like so we will buy it if the opportunity to buy it presents itself. I have never gone shopping specifically to go to a store and buy a CD, I only ever go in music stores because I happened to be passing and thought of something I heard that I enjoyed.
Same goes for shopping on the Internet. If I can't pay for a download, I'm unlikely to pay and wait for a week and half for a CD to come from the other side of the planet (and posibly get held up in customs). Allow me to purchase your music online and download the result straight away, and you will get paid. You don't do that - why are you surprised that no one is buying?
I have bought more albums in the last year than I have in the last 10 years. All but one of the albums I've bought in the last year were from independent artists. Only one was on CD. The reason I have *bought* so much is because the artist or label provided the convenience that it was an easy impulse buy either by being on the iTunes Music Store or sold on their own website or via Magnatune. I wouldn't have bothered if it meant mail ordering a CD then having to go collect that CD because it wouldn't fit through the letterbox so the postman had to drop in a 'delivery left' note. Sell your music as online downloads and I'm sure you'll get a lot more support.
You sound just like the GNU libc developers who are arguing against including the BSD strl* functions. Their argument basically goes "Well, developers should write perfect code instead".
In the real world this DOES NOT happen. That's why OpenBSD has implemented things like W^X and compiled everything with ProPolice, have built a much safer malloc()/free() implementation and continue to audit their code time and time again. They recognise that they are not perfect, and make mistakes - so therefore having a defence against the inevitable mistakes is better than leaving their users vulnerable.
What makes jokes funny is the way they are told. He didn't exactly tell it right. Here's the full thing about a horse having an infinte number of legs, and when told properly makes better sense, from/usr/games/fortune:
Every Horse has an Infinite Number of Legs (proof by intimidation):
Horses have an even number of legs. Behind they have two legs, and in front they have fore-legs. This makes six legs, which is certainly an odd number of legs for a horse. But the only number that is both even and odd is infinity. Therefore, horses have an infinite number of legs. Now to show this for the general case, suppose that somewhere, there is a horse that has a finite number of legs. But that is a horse of another color, and by the [above] lemma ["All horses are the same color"], that does not exist.
If the days of dogfighting are gone - why even bother building fighters? Just build bombers with all the fancy beyond visual range combat abilities, and load them with hundreds of missiles. Why bother training fighter pilots in aerobatics?
I think it's because the US still knows that dogfighting is still a reality in air to air combat.
The TSR.2 prototypes were not all destroyed - two of them are on public display (I've seen the one at Cosford, I think there's one at the IWM in Duxford too).
I've done a low pass over KSC's runway (in a Beech Bonanza - in about 2000). I've also flown into KDEN in a light plane. KSC's looks a lot bigger, that extra 100 feet of width makes the difference:-)
I've used SFU. It's like going back to the bad old days of Interactive Unix for the 386, around the early 1990s. It should in theory be much better than cygwin because it's an actual subsystem, but in practice I've found cygwin works far better.
When 'leaves on the line' was a frequent issue (up into the early 1990s) most of the rolling stock and traction had been built in the 50s/60s when anti skid brakes hadn't been invented. It's only the really new stock that has anti-skid. There's still a lot of old rolling stock out there, though. Last time I was in the south of England (probably about 2 years ago), the recently deceased Connex was still running old EMUs which were built in the mid 50s.
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Apple isn't perfect, but they usually get the interface right. I use iTunes and friends on my PowerBook at home. I also sometimes use Windows Media Player for various training videos at work.
The difference is like night and day. Both can play sound and video perfectly adequately - but Windows Media Player is just so awkward and cumbersome compared to iTunes. No, WMP isn't *hard* to use, it's just cumbersome. For example, when I watch video on my Mac, the screensaver doesn't kick in if I've not touched the keyboard and mouse. When watching video at work, I have to periodically waggle the mouse to stop the screensaver starting (or turn off automatic screen locking, which is also cumbersome). One training CD is made up of about a dozen WMV files with a menu. When you start the next WMV file, Windows Media Player forgets your last volume setting and blasts you through your headphones. By comparison, my PowerBook doesn't forget volume settings between files. (Even my Linux system doesn't forget volume settings between files - or turn on the screen saver when I'm watching video, for that matter). There are numerous other niggles with WMP that don't exist with the Apple product.
By your measure, Windows XP isn't ready for the mainstream desktop, either.
With Windows, if you install from the XP CD, you DON'T get:
- a DVD player
- a word processor/spreadsheet application
- drivers for quite a lot of hardware (certainly no accelerated 3D drivers)
The only reason these things come by default is that most people do NOT install Windows XP. It comes pre-installed with their computer, and the maker of their computer did all of the hard work in installing, testing and building a Windows XP ghost image that included all these things.
What would help many Linux distributions a lot (including Ubuntu) is having a simple 'Start Here' application that allows a user to add more software repositories. For instance, Fedora Core does not come with a DVD player because of patent and DMCA issues. But it wouldn't kill them to add a "Third Party Software Repository" GUI tool that allowed users to choose Livna or DAG - both of which DO have DVD players - and because they are yum repositories, all the user has to do is select 'VLC Media Player' and all the dependencies are automatically installed too and their DVDs will now play. It would also mean you could just click on Livna's nVidia drivers, and have accelerated 3D drivers which get updated with the rest of your system (the nVidia and ATi drivers on that repository are a simple install - no editing configs required, they are prepackaged, and yum resolves dependencies automatically)
I've been to the Pepper Festival in Palestine, TX. a couple of times. I always liked watching the chili eating contest. One year there was this dude, who looked like a 50-year old hippie. He was just about the last man standing, and was eating the habanero as if it was an apple. Most of the rest of the survivors were writing in pain by now. Of course, the guy fronting the contest was forcing them all to chew.
I always wondered how hot the burning ring of fire would be when it had finally all passed through.
It's not a big challenge to configure BIND to serve recursive queries to some clients and not to others - it's just one line in the configuration file (and it's well documented).
Unfortunately it isn't that simple. If you did that, the programmer could still write buggy code that can overflow the returned buffer. Additionally, it would have a vast impact on performance since you'd no longer be passing things by reference (instead copying whole buffers around, and you can still get buffer sizes wrong).
A better approach for Microsoft would be to take the approach the OpenBSD developers take - build the operating system with something similar to W^X and ProPolice, have a safer malloc/free implementation - and effectively neuter buffer overflows. They can still happen but instead of allowing code injection, just cause the program with the bug to crash (so the machine doesn't get compromised).
Also if the Microsoft C compiler and associated tools gave warnings every time someone used one of the rather naive C functions (like strcpy) which don't do any bounds checking, it might help.
I don't remember (other than it being expensive). There was four of us in a Piper Comanche so the pain was probably dulled by splitting it 4 ways.
How is it going to be enforced? Now, say I'm a company in Timbuktoo, and I accept a US credit card as payment for a wager (which is entirely legal in Timbuktoo). How is the US going to prosecute my Timbuktoo company?
You don't have to use the Metacity window manager - you can use a WM that still does this. This is why Linux and BSD is different to Windows - you aren't stuck with a one size fits all desktop. You don't even have to use Gnome if you don't want to.
On a point of pedantry, the wireless *is* proprietary - it's just proprietary Broadcom rather than proprietary Apple.
Coral Cache does not work from behind most corporate proxy servers and firewalls because it uses port 8080, not port 80.
To me and quite a lot of people, music purchases are often impulse buys - we've heard something we like so we will buy it if the opportunity to buy it presents itself. I have never gone shopping specifically to go to a store and buy a CD, I only ever go in music stores because I happened to be passing and thought of something I heard that I enjoyed.
Same goes for shopping on the Internet. If I can't pay for a download, I'm unlikely to pay and wait for a week and half for a CD to come from the other side of the planet (and posibly get held up in customs). Allow me to purchase your music online and download the result straight away, and you will get paid. You don't do that - why are you surprised that no one is buying?
I have bought more albums in the last year than I have in the last 10 years. All but one of the albums I've bought in the last year were from independent artists. Only one was on CD. The reason I have *bought* so much is because the artist or label provided the convenience that it was an easy impulse buy either by being on the iTunes Music Store or sold on their own website or via Magnatune. I wouldn't have bothered if it meant mail ordering a CD then having to go collect that CD because it wouldn't fit through the letterbox so the postman had to drop in a 'delivery left' note. Sell your music as online downloads and I'm sure you'll get a lot more support.
You sound just like the GNU libc developers who are arguing against including the BSD strl* functions. Their argument basically goes "Well, developers should write perfect code instead".
In the real world this DOES NOT happen. That's why OpenBSD has implemented things like W^X and compiled everything with ProPolice, have built a much safer malloc()/free() implementation and continue to audit their code time and time again. They recognise that they are not perfect, and make mistakes - so therefore having a defence against the inevitable mistakes is better than leaving their users vulnerable.
What makes jokes funny is the way they are told. He didn't exactly tell it right. Here's the full thing about a horse having an infinte number of legs, and when told properly makes better sense, from /usr/games/fortune:
Every Horse has an Infinite Number of Legs (proof by intimidation):
Horses have an even number of legs. Behind they have two legs, and in
front they have fore-legs. This makes six legs, which is certainly an
odd number of legs for a horse. But the only number that is both even
and odd is infinity. Therefore, horses have an infinite number of
legs. Now to show this for the general case, suppose that somewhere,
there is a horse that has a finite number of legs. But that is a horse
of another color, and by the [above] lemma ["All horses are the same
color"], that does not exist.
If the days of dogfighting are gone - why even bother building fighters? Just build bombers with all the fancy beyond visual range combat abilities, and load them with hundreds of missiles. Why bother training fighter pilots in aerobatics?
I think it's because the US still knows that dogfighting is still a reality in air to air combat.
The TSR.2 prototypes were not all destroyed - two of them are on public display (I've seen the one at Cosford, I think there's one at the IWM in Duxford too).
Alledgedly, it was also US pressure on Britain that had the TSR.2 canceled - http://www.thunder-and-lightnings.co.uk/tsr2/index .html
And to think one of our proper interstellar spaceports (Greater Green River Intergalactic Spaceport) up in Wyoming is only 5800 feet long.
http://www.airnav.com/airport/48U
I've done a low pass over KSC's runway (in a Beech Bonanza - in about 2000). I've also flown into KDEN in a light plane. KSC's looks a lot bigger, that extra 100 feet of width makes the difference :-)
I'd disagree there on the 'new and unstable' meme; I've been running production servers with Xen for over a year now. It has never crashed.
Drifting off topic...if a game requires tedious repetitive actions like that, isn't that a fault in the playability of the game?
Well, I guess I must be hallucinating when I do those case-insensitive regular expression queries on my Postgres database.
So from a casual coder's point of view, a database named 'MySQL' as if it was Fisher Price's My First Database for pre-school infants sounds better?
I've used SFU. It's like going back to the bad old days of Interactive Unix for the 386, around the early 1990s. It should in theory be much better than cygwin because it's an actual subsystem, but in practice I've found cygwin works far better.
If they are supporting telnet, they are obviously not very interested in the security angle. They'd be doing ssh if they were.
When 'leaves on the line' was a frequent issue (up into the early 1990s) most of the rolling stock and traction had been built in the 50s/60s when anti skid brakes hadn't been invented. It's only the really new stock that has anti-skid. There's still a lot of old rolling stock out there, though. Last time I was in the south of England (probably about 2 years ago), the recently deceased Connex was still running old EMUs which were built in the mid 50s.