Are you similarly disinterested in hearing about all other aspects of your coworkers' lives? Their families, children, spouses, hobbies, sports, movies, and television? How do you feel about pictures of family members on desks?
My experience is that even in relatively focused and fast-paced work environments, people do still discuss their personal lives as a means of bonding with teammates. If you want to try to ban _all_ extraneous conversation, such that it's not possible to determine whether any single person is straight or not, that's at least internally consistent, but sounds as if it might make for a pretty oppresive workplace for everyone.
Well, right; that much is fairly self-evident. I think what he's asking, though, is what the advantage is to creating an artificially diverse workplace.
I don't think that the primary discussion here is about affirmative action style enforced diversity. (One could have an interesting discussion about whether that's a good idea, as the other reply to your comment did, but that'd be a different conversation.)
While I admit I haven't actually read the Washington bill, my understanding is that it just forbids discrimination based upon sexuality in the same way that discrimination based upon religion, age, race, and so on are currently forbidden. So the idea isn't that Microsoft wishes to force anyone to hire extra gay employees, they just want to make sure that any gay people they do choose to hire have equal access to housing, healthcare, and so on, and thus have the usual ability to do their jobs well.
Something that fails 10% of the time is a pretty crappy standard.
Do you feel that it's a good plan to allow entities with overwhelming market share to always make their own proprietary design choices without any external accountability or documentation? Without any thought given to interoperability, or indeed specifically so as to preclude interoperability?
Microsoft and Cisco could probably choose to collaborate on their own IP-like protocol, and move very aggressively toward deprecating IP in all their existing and future products. They could also easily arrange for that protocol to be unusual and dynamic enough that no one else's implementations of it would ever work very reliably. (Or just use the DMCA to the same effect. The point of the question is not about the technical details of how they would do such a thing, but rather about whether they _should_.)
Do you feel that this would be the best thing for technology? For the market? For users? Even, in the long run, for Microsoft and Cisco?
Only people above a surprisingly high threshold of technical savvy would even think of installing a tool of this type. That same set of people would find the addition of ads to be a vastly bigger deal than any modest speed gains. Approximately zero people would ever use such a tool.
So without even needing to raise the question of whether Google is good or ethical, we can just look to whether they're the very small amount of smart necessary to see that such a ploy would not work. Which, yes, I personally am willing to grant them.
Re:Sure I won't, but I am still annoyed I can't!
on
Google Web Accelerator
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
Considering Google works fine in the other 95% of browsers out there I would say it's a case of when will Opera start supporting Google.
Because we all know that marketshare is more important than standards.
Left-handedness is actually a great analogy. Somewhat similar percentage of the populace (roughly one in eight), somewhat similar effect on one's ability to perform most jobs (none), and somewhat similar moral implications (none). And it lacks the strong feelings associated with sexuality, so it can be discussed more clearly.
So to answer your question, I'd say that if there was a frequent occurrence of people being denied employment or treated differently in the workplace because of their left-handedness, then yes, I'd be in favor of legislation making that mistreatment illegal. So far as I know, that's not the case, so chirality-equality laws are not needed.
I suppose the question that comes to my mind is how you see this as being different from the illegality of some other forms of discrimination. Do you also feel that since black people need only the same rights and protections as white people, racial discrimination laws are unecessary?
While it's amusing that his "reverse engineering" was supposedly a single nc, what seems relevant to bitmover's decision is his intent, not his methods.
Unless I've missed something, bitmover isn't suing him. Their position seems to be more of, "look we can see where this is going, and it ends up with us not having a marketable product. kthxbye." Not a statement about whether what Tridge did was legal or moral or wise, just that they don't want to participate in it.
The problem with most such systems are that they arn't fun when you do die, and that is exactly the opposite of what you want a game to be.
Well, I think you need to have some occasional, semi-avoidable anti-fun in games, just to contrast the fun, and to make it possible to distinguish between doing well and doing poorly.
The problem with permdeath isn't that it's un-fun when you die, the problem is that it's un-fun the entire damn game because you're not willing to take any risks that might result in it coming up.
I do play WoW, and I was aghast at first at how painless death is. But the actual upshot of that seems to be that people are much more willing to attempt new and interesting things, rather than just conservatively grinding out the same tasks that they already know they can handle.
(And is anyone else amused that most of this discussion is people--unironically--going through the same steps detailed in tfa?)
Selling operating systems is a money-losing proposition, always has been. While Microsoft makes a little money on Windows just because of sheer economies of scale, even for them it's mostly a loss leader that draws people into Office, Exchange, and Server licenses on which they actually make serious money. (Think about the retail price difference between Windows ($100ish) and Office ($500ish). Even as vast and bloated as Office is, the development and support costs for an office suite are still miniscule compared to those for an operating system.)
So if macosx were Apple's primary product, they'd have the choice of either selling it for around $1k per copy (causing everyone to complain even more about expense, and encouraging widespread piracy), or constantly losing money without another profitable product line involved.
Well, there's the question of the consequences you face from any vulnerability being exploited; in particular, what _new_ consequences you face.
To give an absurd but clear example: "our internal supar-funny jokes mailing list is vulnerable to having messages injected into it from, and only from, the system on which we store all our credit card data."
That's not technically a false positive, there really is a risk of malicious or deceptive information being passed to your employees. But the _added_ risk beyond having all your credit card numbers stolen rounds to zero.
Perhaps they were happy with their last project meddling in trivia that's none of their concern. That stunt wore off after the feeding tube had been out for a couple of weeks, but and aide probably handed someone a Dvorak article claiming that Apple is in similar shape.
So your point is that Apple is making more progress more quickly than any other OS vendor you can name, frequently giving us the choice to upgrade to improved features, speed, security, and stability... and you for some reason feel that people would be upset by this?
Oh, I guess maybe you mean users of all non-Apple OSs. Yeah, I suppose they do have a pretty damn good reason to be grumpy.
Mice now come with more than two buttons and a scroll wheel. My mouse has four buttons...
While I'm generally a mouse minimalist (wheels are an abomination), I somewhat accidentally picked up some shiny logitech thing recently that seems to have around six buttons and a two-axis wheel. I plugged it into a macosx system and all of these worked, no driver installations, no odd configuration.
Yes, obviously a mouse could do such exotic things that it would need special software to understand it, but I've never yet met such a beast.
Dri-vers? What are these "mouse dri-vers" of which you speak?
Seriously, it's a mouse. You move it around an two axes, press some buttons, maybe spin a wheel; these things are very standardized. I can't imagine why I'd want to load some random third-party kernel modules just to "drive" a mouse in the exact same way that the OS would "drive" any other.
That's funny, Home and End work properly on all my osx machines: they scroll to the top and bottom respectively of the current window, just as they always have.
If what you're seeking is the wacky nonstandard thing whereby Windows moves the cursor around on the current line, allow me to refer to you ^a and ^e; they have a considerably longer pedigree for moving the cursor to the beginning and end of the line, and work as normal in all osx text fields.
The problem with this approach is that used macs hold their value absurdly well. And I do mean absurdly: it's not uncommon to see years-old machines selling for almost exactly the same price as much-updated brand new ones.
This is really bad for people looking into getting a mac for the first time; there's not much of a cheap trial version available. But it's good news for anyone who already has a mac, as upgrades can often be accomplished at very little net cost. And if you're willing to absorb some temporary cost, it can also work well for someone who's unsure whether they want a mac and wish to try it out. If you decide that it's not for you, you can most likely resell it for a very large fraction of what you paid.
Two reasons, really. The first is that one can move between using all variants of macs and 'books with minimal change in keyboard layout; needing to readjust every time you switched between, say, your albook at work and ibook at home would understandably drive everyone batty.
The second is that that extra space on the surface of the 15" and 17" isn't wasted; it's used by speakers, and to very good effect. The 17" has absurdly good speakers for the realm of laptops. It's not ridiculous to watch a movie on it without anything external.
Or are these just X-11 servers instead of being real cleints (using the bass-ackward X-11 speak)?
It's not backward, and it's not X11 specific. People just tend to have an inaccurate idea of what "client" and "server" actually mean.
The general tendency is to think of server as being "the big machine that does all the hard work for lots of little clients", or "the machine that provides some useful function, of which clients take advantage", and of course the client as the converse of these.
While these may often be true, the definitional difference is much simpler and clearer: the client is the system that initiates a connection. That's all. And the behaviour of X11 clients like xterm making connections to your X11 server is consistent with this.
And to answer your actual question, yes, an X11 server and set of standard clients is both an option from the standard osx install discs, and readily available via fink. I would imagine that this guide is not about the very basics of getting the server running ("You see that thing in your applications directory that looks like a big X? Doubleclick it."), but in how it quartz-wm differs from other common window managers, how X11 interacts with Quartz if they're both running, etc.
Yep. As much as I love my powerbooks, the one and only thing which causes me envy of other laptops is the powerbooks' relatively low display density.
And this would be a perfect problem for Apple of all people to solve. 200dpi lcds were first readily available in 1998. But most users don't even use the highest resolutions available with their crts because "it makes everything smaller". The hardware has been there for years; display density is entirely a software problem.
As the only desktop computer company that makes both the hardware and software, Apple is in a unique position to offer computers which are just magically clearer than any others in the world. I was desperately hoping that this would be part of the first release of osx... and have been continuing to hope for about five years now.
Javascript that detects if you have flash or not, if you don't they write a JPG version of the flash to the page instead. All of the little pop up effects and such are generated with javascript.
Great. So what about sane people, who have javascript disabled?
Actually, I 1) usually use w3m, and 2) purchased this application last month.
I find these to be entirely consistent. Being able to glance across a "shelf" of book covers scanning for a known one is quite functional. So is bypassing the "design" that so frequently impedes getting to content on web sites.
Sharing a religion with some people who chose to kill some Americans does not cause you to share responsibility for their acts. Even believing that Americans should be killed does not grant you any responsibility if it happens without any involvement on your part.
That's the ethical argument. But the practical argument is even more conclusive: do you genuinely believe that if the US nuked Mecca and Medina that all Muslims (or non-Muslims) who currently hate the US would just shrug their shoulders and say, "Oh well, we had a good run of it, but I guess there's nothing left to fight for any more. I'll just be moving along to pacifism now. Thanks for a good game, mate."?
Are you similarly disinterested in hearing about all other aspects of your coworkers' lives? Their families, children, spouses, hobbies, sports, movies, and television? How do you feel about pictures of family members on desks?
My experience is that even in relatively focused and fast-paced work environments, people do still discuss their personal lives as a means of bonding with teammates. If you want to try to ban _all_ extraneous conversation, such that it's not possible to determine whether any single person is straight or not, that's at least internally consistent, but sounds as if it might make for a pretty oppresive workplace for everyone.
While I admit I haven't actually read the Washington bill, my understanding is that it just forbids discrimination based upon sexuality in the same way that discrimination based upon religion, age, race, and so on are currently forbidden. So the idea isn't that Microsoft wishes to force anyone to hire extra gay employees, they just want to make sure that any gay people they do choose to hire have equal access to housing, healthcare, and so on, and thus have the usual ability to do their jobs well.
Something that fails 10% of the time is a pretty crappy standard.
Do you feel that it's a good plan to allow entities with overwhelming market share to always make their own proprietary design choices without any external accountability or documentation? Without any thought given to interoperability, or indeed specifically so as to preclude interoperability?
Microsoft and Cisco could probably choose to collaborate on their own IP-like protocol, and move very aggressively toward deprecating IP in all their existing and future products. They could also easily arrange for that protocol to be unusual and dynamic enough that no one else's implementations of it would ever work very reliably. (Or just use the DMCA to the same effect. The point of the question is not about the technical details of how they would do such a thing, but rather about whether they _should_.)
Do you feel that this would be the best thing for technology? For the market? For users? Even, in the long run, for Microsoft and Cisco?
Only people above a surprisingly high threshold of technical savvy would even think of installing a tool of this type. That same set of people would find the addition of ads to be a vastly bigger deal than any modest speed gains. Approximately zero people would ever use such a tool.
So without even needing to raise the question of whether Google is good or ethical, we can just look to whether they're the very small amount of smart necessary to see that such a ploy would not work. Which, yes, I personally am willing to grant them.
Left-handedness is actually a great analogy. Somewhat similar percentage of the populace (roughly one in eight), somewhat similar effect on one's ability to perform most jobs (none), and somewhat similar moral implications (none). And it lacks the strong feelings associated with sexuality, so it can be discussed more clearly.
So to answer your question, I'd say that if there was a frequent occurrence of people being denied employment or treated differently in the workplace because of their left-handedness, then yes, I'd be in favor of legislation making that mistreatment illegal. So far as I know, that's not the case, so chirality-equality laws are not needed.
I suppose the question that comes to my mind is how you see this as being different from the illegality of some other forms of discrimination. Do you also feel that since black people need only the same rights and protections as white people, racial discrimination laws are unecessary?
While it's amusing that his "reverse engineering" was supposedly a single nc, what seems relevant to bitmover's decision is his intent, not his methods.
Unless I've missed something, bitmover isn't suing him. Their position seems to be more of, "look we can see where this is going, and it ends up with us not having a marketable product. kthxbye." Not a statement about whether what Tridge did was legal or moral or wise, just that they don't want to participate in it.
Okay, let me ruminate on Samba for a moment...
Hm, seems to be another example of reimplimenting someone's existing crappy product rather than writing something actually good from scratch.
A good point you have there. Thanks for clarifying things.
Selling operating systems is a money-losing proposition, always has been. While Microsoft makes a little money on Windows just because of sheer economies of scale, even for them it's mostly a loss leader that draws people into Office, Exchange, and Server licenses on which they actually make serious money. (Think about the retail price difference between Windows ($100ish) and Office ($500ish). Even as vast and bloated as Office is, the development and support costs for an office suite are still miniscule compared to those for an operating system.)
So if macosx were Apple's primary product, they'd have the choice of either selling it for around $1k per copy (causing everyone to complain even more about expense, and encouraging widespread piracy), or constantly losing money without another profitable product line involved.
Well, there's the question of the consequences you face from any vulnerability being exploited; in particular, what _new_ consequences you face.
To give an absurd but clear example: "our internal supar-funny jokes mailing list is vulnerable to having messages injected into it from, and only from, the system on which we store all our credit card data."
That's not technically a false positive, there really is a risk of malicious or deceptive information being passed to your employees. But the _added_ risk beyond having all your credit card numbers stolen rounds to zero.
Perhaps they were happy with their last project meddling in trivia that's none of their concern. That stunt wore off after the feeding tube had been out for a couple of weeks, but and aide probably handed someone a Dvorak article claiming that Apple is in similar shape.
So your point is that Apple is making more progress more quickly than any other OS vendor you can name, frequently giving us the choice to upgrade to improved features, speed, security, and stability... and you for some reason feel that people would be upset by this?
Oh, I guess maybe you mean users of all non-Apple OSs. Yeah, I suppose they do have a pretty damn good reason to be grumpy.
I first misread the summary as, "...has a vocabulary of about 100 words and could be trained for political office use..."
(Of course, my first thought was that that's vastly overqualified for what it apparently takes to be elected President these days.)
While I'm generally a mouse minimalist (wheels are an abomination), I somewhat accidentally picked up some shiny logitech thing recently that seems to have around six buttons and a two-axis wheel. I plugged it into a macosx system and all of these worked, no driver installations, no odd configuration.
Yes, obviously a mouse could do such exotic things that it would need special software to understand it, but I've never yet met such a beast.
Seriously, it's a mouse. You move it around an two axes, press some buttons, maybe spin a wheel; these things are very standardized. I can't imagine why I'd want to load some random third-party kernel modules just to "drive" a mouse in the exact same way that the OS would "drive" any other.
That's funny, Home and End work properly on all my osx machines: they scroll to the top and bottom respectively of the current window, just as they always have.
If what you're seeking is the wacky nonstandard thing whereby Windows moves the cursor around on the current line, allow me to refer to you ^a and ^e; they have a considerably longer pedigree for moving the cursor to the beginning and end of the line, and work as normal in all osx text fields.
The problem with this approach is that used macs hold their value absurdly well. And I do mean absurdly: it's not uncommon to see years-old machines selling for almost exactly the same price as much-updated brand new ones.
This is really bad for people looking into getting a mac for the first time; there's not much of a cheap trial version available. But it's good news for anyone who already has a mac, as upgrades can often be accomplished at very little net cost. And if you're willing to absorb some temporary cost, it can also work well for someone who's unsure whether they want a mac and wish to try it out. If you decide that it's not for you, you can most likely resell it for a very large fraction of what you paid.
Two reasons, really. The first is that one can move between using all variants of macs and 'books with minimal change in keyboard layout; needing to readjust every time you switched between, say, your albook at work and ibook at home would understandably drive everyone batty.
The second is that that extra space on the surface of the 15" and 17" isn't wasted; it's used by speakers, and to very good effect. The 17" has absurdly good speakers for the realm of laptops. It's not ridiculous to watch a movie on it without anything external.
The general tendency is to think of server as being "the big machine that does all the hard work for lots of little clients", or "the machine that provides some useful function, of which clients take advantage", and of course the client as the converse of these.
While these may often be true, the definitional difference is much simpler and clearer: the client is the system that initiates a connection. That's all. And the behaviour of X11 clients like xterm making connections to your X11 server is consistent with this.
And to answer your actual question, yes, an X11 server and set of standard clients is both an option from the standard osx install discs, and readily available via fink. I would imagine that this guide is not about the very basics of getting the server running ("You see that thing in your applications directory that looks like a big X? Doubleclick it."), but in how it quartz-wm differs from other common window managers, how X11 interacts with Quartz if they're both running, etc.
And this would be a perfect problem for Apple of all people to solve. 200dpi lcds were first readily available in 1998. But most users don't even use the highest resolutions available with their crts because "it makes everything smaller". The hardware has been there for years; display density is entirely a software problem.
As the only desktop computer company that makes both the hardware and software, Apple is in a unique position to offer computers which are just magically clearer than any others in the world. I was desperately hoping that this would be part of the first release of osx... and have been continuing to hope for about five years now.
Actually, I 1) usually use w3m, and 2) purchased this application last month.
I find these to be entirely consistent. Being able to glance across a "shelf" of book covers scanning for a known one is quite functional. So is bypassing the "design" that so frequently impedes getting to content on web sites.
That's the ethical argument. But the practical argument is even more conclusive: do you genuinely believe that if the US nuked Mecca and Medina that all Muslims (or non-Muslims) who currently hate the US would just shrug their shoulders and say, "Oh well, we had a good run of it, but I guess there's nothing left to fight for any more. I'll just be moving along to pacifism now. Thanks for a good game, mate."?