> MS Office solutions (Excel/Access) amount to only poor working prototypes. They rarely support more than 1 user and security, performance and maintainability is aweful. It also gives the illusion that software development is quick and easy.
What about the 90% of cases that only need to be working prototypes? They rarely need more than 1 user, and security, performance, and maintainability don't matter. MS Office gives the user the ability to develop simple programs quickly and easily.
Sure, it means less work for us programmers, but I mean... if they can do it, and it's good enough... then let them. Save your skills for the problems that they can't solve... there's enough of them for you to make a career of.
I'll agree that RT is lacking in many areas (but it works)... but what's the problem with the UI? The user logs in, types the text of his ticket, hits submit. Couldn't be better.
> That's not a small matter when it could put a very expensive license on the line -- I'll be paying $700/month in student loans for the next 25 years for mine and my loans aren't that bad compared to others'.
This is why I love America. "So what that this company is rigging the elections and trying to destroy democracy and all American ideals? I paid a lot of money for my license!" With this kind of thinking, in 25 years democracy will be gone. 2034 will be 1984.
It depends on what you want out of your system. If you want to enjoy the audio portion of movies (and music), then spending money on the 2 front speakers and upgrading the rear channel (etc.) later might be a good strategy. If you are generally excited by the prospect of sounds occurring behind you, then maybe getting a crappy Worst Buy system is a good idea. (Surround in movies is mostly boring, but being able to hear the rockets in UT2004 coming from behind can be good for your server ranking:)
Personally, I can't afford a pair of speakers that I think sounds good*, so I use headphones exclusively. Spend $500 on a pair of headphones and a good amp, and you'll question throwing thousands of dollars at a speaker system.
* And trust me, I've wasted plenty of money on Worst Buy-esque speaker systems. Don't buy the damn things, they all sound like shit.
You're confusing "monopoly" and "trust". In this case, the discussion is conceivably about a "trust" (and the related "antitrust" business). Some other posters have used the word monopoly, but that's not really what they mean.
Your local electric company has a monopoly because it's the only company that bothered to build the wires. Your local Microsoft is a trust because they use illegal business practices to put their competitors out of business.
Now I'm not sure Apple/Disney would be either a monopoly or a trust, but your original point about monopolies being legal is misguided at best.
> announce the address of their computer to the webserver after they got the download
The problem is that the Internet is one-way these days. Most home users (i.e. the consumers of this content) don't have a real IP address, so this won't work.
What's so "high-quality" about "Desperate Housewives" or "Lost"? Most of the photos on Flikr are infinitely more interesting than the crappy TV that's forcing us to have DRM-ed everything.
> eBay is of the main advertisers on Google, they bought over 600,000 keywords last year alone. eBay doesnt have enough static pages for Google to index it properly so this is a nesscessary evil. Without eBay's support of Google, you're taking a loss of about 10M+. That's a pretty big hand to bite.
Even if Google does do exactly what eBay is doing, eBay will have to advertise more. If you're searching Google, and all you get are Google Auction results, you're going to forget about eBay completely. If there are some eBay ads, you might click them and eBay might stay in business for a few more weeks.
Either way, eBay is fucked -- they're just more fucked if they pull their ad campaign to spite Google.
> Maybe your getting confused with the play protected songs on 5 authorized computers at a time?
That's also easy to deal with. Backup your/Users/Shared/SC\ Info/SC\ Info.sidb. Deauthorize your computer. Replace the SC Info.sidb. Now you have authorized 0 of 5 computers but can still play the music.
Did you know that instead of typing [QUOTE] and [/QUOTE], you can type " instead? It's the key right next to the semicolon (at least on a US keyboards).
If you'd like to be extra verbose, you can use the ``backticks and single quotes'' method.
> First of all, it is not "crippled" to disable "certain core UNIX functionality" for Apple's DRM "apps".
Every other UNIX I've ever used -- Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, AIX, and Solaris -- has ptrace setup this way: when the super user requests that the kernel ptrace a process, the kernel ptraces that process -- no questions asked. The point of being the superuser is that YOU control the computer, not the other way around. So in this case, "Darwin" is in the wrong -- it has no right to tell me what to do with MY computer running MY process. If I want to ptrace iTunes, I'm going to ptrace iTunes. (Fortunately, Apple's crippled software calls ptrace via a library call, which is trivial to rewrite to ignore PT_DENY_ATTACH. Doing this was a complete waste of my time, though.)
> (there's only one, and it's iTunes).
And the entire QuickTime library. Would you like to debug a program that uses QuickTime? Fuck you -- the RIAA doesn't approve of that. Why program when you could just download a nice TV show from iTunes and watch that instead?
> Second, it's called P_DENY_ATTACH
When correcting someone else's typo, don't make one yourself. It's PT_DENY_ATTACH.
> fully documented in the ptrace man page, which allows a process to avoid being debugged
Okay then, this makes it fine. Microsoft's EULA says they don't have to worry about Windows being secure, so they should just release some viruses. Sony's rootkit man page says that they will be spying on any and all personal information on your machine -- if it's documented it must be OK!
> Third, this flag isn't set in the OS X kernel, it's set in the application.
But the kernel is crippled in the sense that it grants the application the flawed request. Other kernels would return EFUCKYOU or perhaps terminate the application outright.
> Fourth, Darwin is open source, so you only have to remove the if statement in ptrace().
Where's the source for the Intel version? "Darwin"/OS X is not open source, it's proprietary crippleware / malware. But hey... at least it has widgets and iChat!
> Next time, get a little informed before passing along what someone told you was true on the Internet.
Next time, pull the stick out of your ass before posting... and be sure not to get a splinter.:)
Actually, the OS X kernel is deliberately crippled to disable certain core UNIX functionality when running Apple's DRM apps. Google PTRACE_DENY_ATTACH.
> "Mozilla is not an HTML user agent" comment for bug 915.
"... it is a CSS user agent that happens to have knwoledge [sic] of some HTML semantics. Thus when the two specifications conflict, as they do in this case, CSS has priority in deciding for which specification the design should be optimised."
Way to take that out of context, though. Good work.
Slashdot Mirror
> MS Office solutions (Excel/Access) amount to only poor working prototypes. They rarely support more than 1 user and security, performance and maintainability is aweful. It also gives the illusion that software development is quick and easy.
What about the 90% of cases that only need to be working prototypes? They rarely need more than 1 user, and security, performance, and maintainability don't matter. MS Office gives the user the ability to develop simple programs quickly and easily.
Sure, it means less work for us programmers, but I mean... if they can do it, and it's good enough... then let them. Save your skills for the problems that they can't solve... there's enough of them for you to make a career of.
I'll agree that RT is lacking in many areas (but it works)... but what's the problem with the UI? The user logs in, types the text of his ticket, hits submit. Couldn't be better.
> This mug is a silly solution to a problem that doesn't exist.
Tell that to the coffee-stained carpet.
Yup, absolutely no mathematics involved when calculating the trajectory of a projectile. Except, you know, the calculating part.
> That's a pretty far departure from what a certain group of people had in mind 200-odd years ago...
Those guys were *terrorists*.
> That's not a small matter when it could put a very expensive license on the line -- I'll be paying $700/month in student loans for the next 25 years for mine and my loans aren't that bad compared to others'.
This is why I love America. "So what that this company is rigging the elections and trying to destroy democracy and all American ideals? I paid a lot of money for my license!" With this kind of thinking, in 25 years democracy will be gone. 2034 will be 1984.
It depends on what you want out of your system. If you want to enjoy the audio portion of movies (and music), then spending money on the 2 front speakers and upgrading the rear channel (etc.) later might be a good strategy. If you are generally excited by the prospect of sounds occurring behind you, then maybe getting a crappy Worst Buy system is a good idea. (Surround in movies is mostly boring, but being able to hear the rockets in UT2004 coming from behind can be good for your server ranking :)
Personally, I can't afford a pair of speakers that I think sounds good*, so I use headphones exclusively. Spend $500 on a pair of headphones and a good amp, and you'll question throwing thousands of dollars at a speaker system.
* And trust me, I've wasted plenty of money on Worst Buy-esque speaker systems. Don't buy the damn things, they all sound like shit.
> Great movie refrence, you should be modded up.
I must have missed the part of the slashdot FAQ that says to moderate up movie references.
You're confusing "monopoly" and "trust". In this case, the discussion is conceivably about a "trust" (and the related "antitrust" business). Some other posters have used the word monopoly, but that's not really what they mean.
Your local electric company has a monopoly because it's the only company that bothered to build the wires. Your local Microsoft is a trust because they use illegal business practices to put their competitors out of business.
Now I'm not sure Apple/Disney would be either a monopoly or a trust, but your original point about monopolies being legal is misguided at best.
> They even have the right to be a monopoly.
True, in the same way you have the right to rape or murder anyone you want. Nothing is stopping you, after all... and it would sure be fun!
> I bet you didn't know Maynard James Keenan of Tool is against illegal music piracy.
I bet you didn't know that Maynard James Keenan of Tool is a tool.
Pick up a Duke Nukem Forever while you're at it.
> announce the address of their computer to the webserver after they got the download
The problem is that the Internet is one-way these days. Most home users (i.e. the consumers of this content) don't have a real IP address, so this won't work.
What we need is multicast and IPv6.
What's so "high-quality" about "Desperate Housewives" or "Lost"? Most of the photos on Flikr are infinitely more interesting than the crappy TV that's forcing us to have DRM-ed everything.
If you're properly backing up your computer, this will be done automatically.
If you're not backing up your computer -- then why are you posting to slashdot?
> eBay is of the main advertisers on Google, they bought over 600,000 keywords last year alone. eBay doesnt have enough static pages for Google to index it properly so this is a nesscessary evil. Without eBay's support of Google, you're taking a loss of about 10M+. That's a pretty big hand to bite.
Even if Google does do exactly what eBay is doing, eBay will have to advertise more. If you're searching Google, and all you get are Google Auction results, you're going to forget about eBay completely. If there are some eBay ads, you might click them and eBay might stay in business for a few more weeks.
Either way, eBay is fucked -- they're just more fucked if they pull their ad campaign to spite Google.
Wouldn't a pirate burn one copy, rip that as an ISO, and have it sent off to be pressed?
> Maybe your getting confused with the play protected songs on 5 authorized computers at a time?
/Users/Shared/SC\ Info/SC\ Info.sidb. Deauthorize your computer. Replace the SC Info.sidb. Now you have authorized 0 of 5 computers but can still play the music.
That's also easy to deal with. Backup your
MP3s and iTunes weren't very popular in 1970. Times change. Technology changes.
Where the hell do you get a 4% savings account? Most around here are like 0.2%... which is pretty much zero unless you're a millionaire.
Did you know that instead of typing [QUOTE] and [/QUOTE], you can type " instead? It's the key right next to the semicolon (at least on a US keyboards).
If you'd like to be extra verbose, you can use the ``backticks and single quotes'' method.
> First of all, it is not "crippled" to disable "certain core UNIX functionality" for Apple's DRM "apps".
:)
Every other UNIX I've ever used -- Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, AIX, and Solaris -- has ptrace setup this way: when the super user requests that the kernel ptrace a process, the kernel ptraces that process -- no questions asked. The point of being the superuser is that YOU control the computer, not the other way around. So in this case, "Darwin" is in the wrong -- it has no right to tell me what to do with MY computer running MY process. If I want to ptrace iTunes, I'm going to ptrace iTunes. (Fortunately, Apple's crippled software calls ptrace via a library call, which is trivial to rewrite to ignore PT_DENY_ATTACH. Doing this was a complete waste of my time, though.)
> (there's only one, and it's iTunes).
And the entire QuickTime library. Would you like to debug a program that uses QuickTime? Fuck you -- the RIAA doesn't approve of that. Why program when you could just download a nice TV show from iTunes and watch that instead?
> Second, it's called P_DENY_ATTACH
When correcting someone else's typo, don't make one yourself. It's PT_DENY_ATTACH.
> fully documented in the ptrace man page, which allows a process to avoid being debugged
Okay then, this makes it fine. Microsoft's EULA says they don't have to worry about Windows being secure, so they should just release some viruses. Sony's rootkit man page says that they will be spying on any and all personal information on your machine -- if it's documented it must be OK!
> Third, this flag isn't set in the OS X kernel, it's set in the application.
But the kernel is crippled in the sense that it grants the application the flawed request. Other kernels would return EFUCKYOU or perhaps terminate the application outright.
> Fourth, Darwin is open source, so you only have to remove the if statement in ptrace().
Where's the source for the Intel version? "Darwin"/OS X is not open source, it's proprietary crippleware / malware. But hey... at least it has widgets and iChat!
> Next time, get a little informed before passing along what someone told you was true on the Internet.
Next time, pull the stick out of your ass before posting... and be sure not to get a splinter.
My monkey was surgically removed, you insensitive clod. (Actually, I'm probably the insensitive one.)
Actually, the OS X kernel is deliberately crippled to disable certain core UNIX functionality when running Apple's DRM apps. Google PTRACE_DENY_ATTACH.
> "Mozilla is not an HTML user agent" comment for bug 915.
"... it is a CSS user agent that happens
to have knwoledge [sic] of some HTML semantics. Thus when the two specifications
conflict, as they do in this case, CSS has priority in deciding for which
specification the design should be optimised."
Way to take that out of context, though. Good work.
That's how Darwin keeps the human race around.