Maybe we could open up some kind of channel where people with the urge to abuse children could be accepted and rehabilitized? You know, since threats and social stigmatism don't seem to be working at all. Maybe I'm a bit too much of an engineer here, but if a bolt doesn't loosen no matter how hard you turn it, I usually give it a good hard tug in the other direction too. Just to be sure.
Kids are fun to be around. We're hard wired to like kids -- when you're a species that is born unable to even sit up on its own and that remains completely helpless for the first five or so years of life, you'd better have a strong familial instinct or you won't survive. The problem is, this instict is getting twisted for some people and we need to figure out why, and how to fix it. Driving the urge deeper and deeper underground isn't healthy and it isn't protecting our kids. It's only encouraging children to distrust everybody...not how I would have wanted to live!
What slippery slope is this? Companies of all sizes have always volutarily censored themselves. In fact, at least in the US, the government has been mostly out of the censorship loop. The MPAA self censors and categorizes films, as have radio stations. Some of them bleep out the line "Making love in the green grass behind the stadium with you" from Van Morrison's Brown Eyed Girl. Private schools are often preferred by parents over public schools because they are willing to eschew sex education or potentially ofensive literature like "Catcher in the Rye" or "The Great Santini."
In fact, being able to rely on a specific company to police the content they provide is important to a lot of people, myself included. I won't watch a TV station unless they're willing to censor mind numbing cliches delivered in a flat manner by unintersting actors with typically attractive features to further a hackneyed plot. I just think that bland, flashy media with no intrinsic value is leading to an intense boredom in our youth, causing them to look to intoxication, sexuality, violence and intollerably shitty music as a way out of an evening staring at checklist sitcom, reality program hell. Since no TV station is willing to censor themselves thusly, I spend a lot of time posting on Slashdot.
YMMV? Boy I'll say. I have never seen a server that ran better with postfix than qmail. What I have seen is one underpowered qmail server do the work of three Exchange boxes. Getting it to work with active directory was hella tricky, but that's a samba thing, not qmail's fault.
qmail lends itself handsomely to domain management because it groups standard functions together. You can create all of the information in a standard BIND record -- A records, MX records, PTR records, SOA data, etc -- with only two short lines in a qmail config file. Once you figure out what the hell you're doing (not easy...took me three days to figure how to get it working the way *I* wanted it), doing it again is simple.
And as for why my "webserver" is running DNS and IMAP -- we handle virtual hosting for many low traffic domains. The easiest way for us to control them is to manage all of the services and all of the data for a domain on a single server. One server can comfortably handle a hundred or so such domains without feeling the load in the least. And if that domain gets too big for its britches, it can be moved to a new server very quickly...in fact, we assemble the data in a sort of a "packet," so you can copy the directory foo.domain.com from one server to the next and (after a rebuild of dynamicly generated config files and a graceful reload) have the new server take over all the functionality of serving the domain.
So really, each server is a webserver/email server/dns server/database/ftp server. It's not the most efficient way to handle any of these functions, and I suppose if I were a CCNA or some gibberish like that I'd be appalled...but this is just a part time thing and it seems to work very well.
Not every teenager who wants a fast gaming machine is a geek either.
And some gamers are middle aged executives who just want to buy the best machine that will play City of Heroes. If $5000 sounds like less of a waste than reading six months of Maximum PC back issues to find out the effect of different CAS latencies on system performance.
Not every person who is ignorant of PC hardware is an idiot. Some of us just don't have the time, or the ambition, to memorize the details of componets that will be outmoded in three months.
Or maybe they just want to plunk down whatever it costs to get the best machine from the best brand name, and hang the sense of it. Sometimes you get a windfall and you want to start enjoying it immediately...and the whole idea of hunting for a reputable local nerd isn't appealing.
I personally would never do this with a computer...but I did it with a boat. Received a big gift certificate to the boat shop, bought th boat that looked nice. Come to find out later it wasn't the best boat ever, but it was still a really nice boat...and since I had some beautiful weather the first two weeks I had it that I would have missed in researching boats, it all came out okay.
But of course, I'm the idiot who bought a Powerbook 15" that was the same price as a faster Sager 17", just because it was a lot lighter and didn't run XP.
So why not use tinyDNS...which is both simple AND powerful, AND fast, AND secure.
A good answer is "because the syntax is occasionally inscruitable." another would be "because DJB expects you by default to conform to HIS way of doing things, which is quite different from the bind way."
But if you don't already know the BIND syntax...and you want a DNS server you will NEVER have to think about...tinyDNS is goddamn fabulous. So is qmail. The combination of the two means the only things *I* think about on my webservers are Apache, Tomcat and Courier-IMAP (which loves to crap out unprovoked, once every three months or so).
Actually, it would be more like not getting a free copy of the guy's book when you buy a copy of "Hunt for Red October." A lot of people would see this as a good thing...I often receive "promotional" material in magazines, and even with CDs, and it's rarely any good.
If I bought a PC that had two operating systems on it, I'd probably just want to know the quickest way to delete the other one.
Volume commitment is only a premium if you can't MOVE the volume. Think of it like shopping for groceries in bulk. Sure, for some people buying 3 pounds of premium bacon for $8 is overkill, because it'll go bad before it's used. For me, that's a week's worth...
You know, people pay a lot of money for vacations. And this is just stupid. Why would you spend GOOD MONEY to go on a cruise? You don't OWN the boat! You don't even get a claim on the water!
This is as stupid as those people who pay to eat at restaurants. SAVE YOUR FOOD, IDIOT! You just spent $50 on it, don't just ingest it! That's $50 you could have spent on rocks.
I don't understand why, on SLASHDOT of all places, people can't understand that if a digital experience is pleasurable, it's worth the money. I mean, if it wasn't worth the money, people wouldn't pay for it.
er, that was supposed to be 1.0 gig of space (I was typing while waiting for the info window to count it all up). And it wasn't just from XCode and the OS...it was also from the iLife apps and their tutorials. In fact, most of that space was freed from the iDVD/iMovie tutorials...and I gained a few hundred meg deleting useless stuff like the slideshow screen savers (which embed all their images in the executable pacakge...Abstract was 6 meg!), desktop pictures, obscure modem drivers, hardware extensions for ADB, QTVR, etc, the 45 meg "Vicki" voice, all stuff I can get back from the 10.3 installer disk if I need to...but I won't need to.
Actually, the secret to selling an OS is to add MORE bloat. Shit most people don't need, but that appeal to a tiny segment with a large purse. For example, OS X by default installs some 20 languages for everything, including tutorials and help files. Removing these afforded me 10 gig of space. Removing extraneous versions of Java (I had seven!!) and "receipts" (caches of installed packages) grabbed me another 2.5 gig.
Forcing me to remove this stuff after the fact also forced me to learn what it was and prevented me from removing essential files. Compare this with Gentoo Linux -- where you have to know what everything does BEFORE you install it, and where you can easily leave out essential modules because they are poorly marked -- and you see which provides a more reliable operating system without sacrificing customizability. And all it takes are a few extra gigs; in a time when even expensive micronized hardware is less than $2 per gig, that's no big deal.
See, I don't know that they DO pay a premium. More like, they tell company X they can buy every single unit they produce at a rate which is reasonable, but way cheaper than what they'd go for on the open market. Company X would like to maximize profits, but sees that the first run of the technology is basically paid for in its entirety with the Apple deal. If they sold in smaller numbers, they could get more per unit but it would take more work and have a higher risk factor...and during the initial run, they'll have their hands full perfecting the process.
Apple's use of cutting edge technology is good for them AND for manufacturers. I doubt they pay a lot for them.
Re:How long is the iPod thing going to last?
on
60GB iPod Coming?
·
· Score: 1
No. When the design becomes dated, Apple will change the look. They're well on their way to becoming the technology Prada. Doesn't MacWorld seem a bit like a fashion show these days? I look at the beautiful, functional applications they're selling at relatively high prices, and realize: Apple isn't technology, it's couture. Probably always was, and that's what they forgot in the early 1990s.
Which is why so many Slashdotters, in their soiled Polo shirts, scoff at them. "The iPod/Powerbook/Powermac/Xserve is overrated; look my device does the same thing with more features and it was cheaper!", even though it is the size of a coffee table and has the intuitive interface of a ring puzzle.
You occasionally can get the 10 and 15 gig models from Apple for $199, refurbished.
Incidentally, 5 gig drives are not $100 cheaper than $15 gig drives on the open market. In fact, Toshiba stopped making them when they discovered the new 15 gig process (hence the wierd iPod price structure), which costs as much as making a 5 gig drive.
If it's true that Apple won't bend on their margins, iPods are as cheap as they will ever be. If you really want one, and can't see yourself going with another vendor with slimmer margins, try dealmac. You can often find good third party deals and bundles, save on shipping and taxes, and even get wierd reburb deals.
Actually, I think he means that you can just drop files on to the iRiver without creating an optimized index of them first. Hence the "silly database" comment.
Personally, i don't see where this is a feature -- do you REALLY want your music player searching for iD3 tags in all of your files on its own? I'd rather have that task tax my PC processor, and I'd rather have it do it once per track -- but then again I don't use some obscure OS to access it.
Oh, interesting hack: when I bought VirtualPC, rather than create a hard drive container, I just installed Windows 2000 on the iPod (which has a FAT-32 file system). I see pretty good performance out of that.
Re:July or August, eh?
on
60GB iPod Coming?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Oh, you'll be able to buy one right away. They just won't ship until 2005.
Boxen actually is a word. It's used to test retardation in adults.
DOCTOR: You have 1 box. A friend gives you another box. How many do you have? PATIENT: Um...2 boxen! It said 'Windows 98 or better' so I installed Linux! Tux si a very cute mascot! Friends don't let friends install Windows! Lol! Bill Gates is a borg lol! DOCTOR: Nurse, we found another one.
Don't forget live shows! A good show at eTree runs in the 1-2 gigabyte range, and though you can generally squeeze it down to 400-600 meg with Apple Lossless, it's still a lot of space.
Anyhow, I would like a 60 gig iPod, because my iTunes library takes up 55.86 gig right now. And I'm tired of being out of space (where is my 100 gig laptop hard drive, please?), tired of having to burn off whole swaths of my collection to DVD so I can have room to encode video or install a UT mod.
These 128 kbit Elvis Costello records I ripped back in '98 are impossible to listen to anymore. That man's voice just doesn't stand up to MP3 compression. Now, in 128 kbit AAC he's crystal clear, scratches and all. Still, I pumped it up to 192, even though I don't really need it...
Although if forced to use Windows for any length of time I would HAVE to find a patch to kill click to focus and give me the focus follows mouse behaviour that God intended us to have.
See, I always hated that...because often I want to drag from a deactive window to an active window. Or I let the mouse slip a little and find myself typing in a different window (happened ALL the time with the old laser-and-grid optical mice on the UltraSparcs at school). If mousing were an exact science, I suppose it'd be a good thing, but it isn't. Mousing is pretty random and you're more likely to fatfinger a cursor placement than you are to accidentally click on something.
Of course, now that I'm using a Mac almost full time, I've become addicted to quite another form of window control...specifically, Expose. Expose is a neat side effect of Quartz Extreme...basically, it a) instantly slides all windows off the screen, showing the desktop (which RETURNS when you press it again) or b) scales and tiles all the windows currently open and unhidden for an application or c) the whole desktop next to each other, allowing you to select the one you want at the foreground by clicking (or releasing, if you held down the button). It's a little bit of the best of both worlds with all new funk flavor...you have to use it to understand its power, but after you map it to your middle moust button, you'll wonder where it's been all your life. And you won't miss the retarded cut and paste at all.
Expost beats the hell out of virtual desktops (in which I'm always losing things, even WITH a map). Give me one desktop I can work with, thanks!
Also, being able to handle just about any file in any context that feels right is nice, too. If you have a way of doing things that's intuitive for you, the Mac OS probably supports it...including dragging to the dock icon, dragging to an open window, right clicking and selecting the app from a menu, File->Open, etc. Hold down the alt key and you're copying data, hold down the option key and you're linking to it, drag it regular and you're moving it. Furthermore, the clipboard will guess what you want to do with something if you paste data that isn't natively supported. Copy and paste a JPEG from Safari to the desktop, it saves it as a JPEG. Paste it to Photoshop, it opens it as an uncompressed image. Paste it to an icon representation, it reencodes it as an icon bitmap. As far as I know, there's no Linux OS that has this kind of flexibility...treating the clipboard as a way to use data the way you probably WANT to use it, instead of treating it as a "one media type, one purpose" repository. Oh yeah...you can still save the contents of the clipboard as a "clipping" file, too...just select something, hold down alt (to copy it) and drag it to the desktop or any finder window. Desktop not visible? HIT THE EXPOSE DESKTOP BUTTON, which I map to F12...
You're right. The sun rises and sets over Cupertino, which is where Meta-Z,X,C,V were invented.
Anyhow, the reason people are complaining is that the UNIX way of copying is fucking stupid. Selecting something shouldn't AUTOMATICALLY clear your clipboard and replace it with what you selected. Nor should there be two separate clipboards on a system. These are design flaws...side effects that are overly complicated and completely unnecessary, as evidenced by the millions of Windows and Mac users who don't have them and the relative obscurity of third party applications which replicate the functionality in Windows. I mean, think of all the functionality that you're missing out on by having these two methodologies.
Incidentally, I have used Windows machines for 16 years and have never contributed to the Outlook worm problem, the macro virus problem, or anything else. A little knowledge and a healthy amount of distrust are all you need to secure ANY system...
The problem with ctrl/shift insert is that you were always hovering around the insert button...which IMO is a piece of shit. I never want typeover -- ever -- but slipping off ctrl or shift for a second would result in switching modes and me typing over whole paragraphs.
Ctrl-C/V allowed me to pop the insert key off my keyboard for good, so i'm also not hitting it accidentally when I go for Del or PgUp.
See, it would be worthwhile if they could sell enough EOS models to make up for the lower pricetag. But if they released a camera that was dramatically cheaper than the ones they have now, they wouldn't necessarily increase demand at all. Hence, they would lose money. Companies like Canon do research to find out exactly who their market is at each stage and what they can afford to pay. As such, the market for the EOS is different from that of the 1D...the former probably marketted to students (hence the cheap lens and plastic construction) and the latter to advanced hobbiests (who already have lenses and just want a fast, reliable digital body without a $2000+ pro pricetag).
It's just like Apple. Yes, more people would buy the iPod Mini if it were $200, or even $100. But since they can't meet demand at $250, selling it for less would result in less money for the company.
Well, for one thing, some people toiled twelve to fifteen hours a day while others sat around doing fuck all. Now, we toil less, and for less time. Individual citizens have better health care, better homes, better economic rights. It is much easier for the average person to hold property, start a business, or move forward in industry.
In short: everything's better now. And it's all thanks to the market driven cost of goods.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe we could open up some kind of channel where people with the urge to abuse children could be accepted and rehabilitized? You know, since threats and social stigmatism don't seem to be working at all. Maybe I'm a bit too much of an engineer here, but if a bolt doesn't loosen no matter how hard you turn it, I usually give it a good hard tug in the other direction too. Just to be sure.
Kids are fun to be around. We're hard wired to like kids -- when you're a species that is born unable to even sit up on its own and that remains completely helpless for the first five or so years of life, you'd better have a strong familial instinct or you won't survive. The problem is, this instict is getting twisted for some people and we need to figure out why, and how to fix it. Driving the urge deeper and deeper underground isn't healthy and it isn't protecting our kids. It's only encouraging children to distrust everybody...not how I would have wanted to live!
What slippery slope is this? Companies of all sizes have always volutarily censored themselves. In fact, at least in the US, the government has been mostly out of the censorship loop. The MPAA self censors and categorizes films, as have radio stations. Some of them bleep out the line "Making love in the green grass behind the stadium with you" from Van Morrison's Brown Eyed Girl. Private schools are often preferred by parents over public schools because they are willing to eschew sex education or potentially ofensive literature like "Catcher in the Rye" or "The Great Santini."
In fact, being able to rely on a specific company to police the content they provide is important to a lot of people, myself included. I won't watch a TV station unless they're willing to censor mind numbing cliches delivered in a flat manner by unintersting actors with typically attractive features to further a hackneyed plot. I just think that bland, flashy media with no intrinsic value is leading to an intense boredom in our youth, causing them to look to intoxication, sexuality, violence and intollerably shitty music as a way out of an evening staring at checklist sitcom, reality program hell. Since no TV station is willing to censor themselves thusly, I spend a lot of time posting on Slashdot.
YMMV? Boy I'll say. I have never seen a server that ran better with postfix than qmail. What I have seen is one underpowered qmail server do the work of three Exchange boxes. Getting it to work with active directory was hella tricky, but that's a samba thing, not qmail's fault.
qmail lends itself handsomely to domain management because it groups standard functions together. You can create all of the information in a standard BIND record -- A records, MX records, PTR records, SOA data, etc -- with only two short lines in a qmail config file. Once you figure out what the hell you're doing (not easy...took me three days to figure how to get it working the way *I* wanted it), doing it again is simple.
And as for why my "webserver" is running DNS and IMAP -- we handle virtual hosting for many low traffic domains. The easiest way for us to control them is to manage all of the services and all of the data for a domain on a single server. One server can comfortably handle a hundred or so such domains without feeling the load in the least. And if that domain gets too big for its britches, it can be moved to a new server very quickly...in fact, we assemble the data in a sort of a "packet," so you can copy the directory foo.domain.com from one server to the next and (after a rebuild of dynamicly generated config files and a graceful reload) have the new server take over all the functionality of serving the domain.
So really, each server is a webserver/email server/dns server/database/ftp server. It's not the most efficient way to handle any of these functions, and I suppose if I were a CCNA or some gibberish like that I'd be appalled...but this is just a part time thing and it seems to work very well.
Not every teenager who wants a fast gaming machine is a geek either.
And some gamers are middle aged executives who just want to buy the best machine that will play City of Heroes. If $5000 sounds like less of a waste than reading six months of Maximum PC back issues to find out the effect of different CAS latencies on system performance.
Not every person who is ignorant of PC hardware is an idiot. Some of us just don't have the time, or the ambition, to memorize the details of componets that will be outmoded in three months.
Or maybe they just want to plunk down whatever it costs to get the best machine from the best brand name, and hang the sense of it. Sometimes you get a windfall and you want to start enjoying it immediately...and the whole idea of hunting for a reputable local nerd isn't appealing.
I personally would never do this with a computer...but I did it with a boat. Received a big gift certificate to the boat shop, bought th boat that looked nice. Come to find out later it wasn't the best boat ever, but it was still a really nice boat...and since I had some beautiful weather the first two weeks I had it that I would have missed in researching boats, it all came out okay.
But of course, I'm the idiot who bought a Powerbook 15" that was the same price as a faster Sager 17", just because it was a lot lighter and didn't run XP.
So why not use tinyDNS...which is both simple AND powerful, AND fast, AND secure.
A good answer is "because the syntax is occasionally inscruitable." another would be "because DJB expects you by default to conform to HIS way of doing things, which is quite different from the bind way."
But if you don't already know the BIND syntax...and you want a DNS server you will NEVER have to think about...tinyDNS is goddamn fabulous. So is qmail. The combination of the two means the only things *I* think about on my webservers are Apache, Tomcat and Courier-IMAP (which loves to crap out unprovoked, once every three months or so).
Actually, it would be more like not getting a free copy of the guy's book when you buy a copy of "Hunt for Red October." A lot of people would see this as a good thing...I often receive "promotional" material in magazines, and even with CDs, and it's rarely any good.
If I bought a PC that had two operating systems on it, I'd probably just want to know the quickest way to delete the other one.
Volume commitment is only a premium if you can't MOVE the volume. Think of it like shopping for groceries in bulk. Sure, for some people buying 3 pounds of premium bacon for $8 is overkill, because it'll go bad before it's used. For me, that's a week's worth...
You know, people pay a lot of money for vacations. And this is just stupid. Why would you spend GOOD MONEY to go on a cruise? You don't OWN the boat! You don't even get a claim on the water!
This is as stupid as those people who pay to eat at restaurants. SAVE YOUR FOOD, IDIOT! You just spent $50 on it, don't just ingest it! That's $50 you could have spent on rocks.
I don't understand why, on SLASHDOT of all places, people can't understand that if a digital experience is pleasurable, it's worth the money. I mean, if it wasn't worth the money, people wouldn't pay for it.
er, that was supposed to be 1.0 gig of space (I was typing while waiting for the info window to count it all up). And it wasn't just from XCode and the OS...it was also from the iLife apps and their tutorials. In fact, most of that space was freed from the iDVD/iMovie tutorials...and I gained a few hundred meg deleting useless stuff like the slideshow screen savers (which embed all their images in the executable pacakge...Abstract was 6 meg!), desktop pictures, obscure modem drivers, hardware extensions for ADB, QTVR, etc, the 45 meg "Vicki" voice, all stuff I can get back from the 10.3 installer disk if I need to...but I won't need to.
Actually, the secret to selling an OS is to add MORE bloat. Shit most people don't need, but that appeal to a tiny segment with a large purse. For example, OS X by default installs some 20 languages for everything, including tutorials and help files. Removing these afforded me 10 gig of space. Removing extraneous versions of Java (I had seven!!) and "receipts" (caches of installed packages) grabbed me another 2.5 gig.
Forcing me to remove this stuff after the fact also forced me to learn what it was and prevented me from removing essential files. Compare this with Gentoo Linux -- where you have to know what everything does BEFORE you install it, and where you can easily leave out essential modules because they are poorly marked -- and you see which provides a more reliable operating system without sacrificing customizability. And all it takes are a few extra gigs; in a time when even expensive micronized hardware is less than $2 per gig, that's no big deal.
See, I don't know that they DO pay a premium. More like, they tell company X they can buy every single unit they produce at a rate which is reasonable, but way cheaper than what they'd go for on the open market. Company X would like to maximize profits, but sees that the first run of the technology is basically paid for in its entirety with the Apple deal. If they sold in smaller numbers, they could get more per unit but it would take more work and have a higher risk factor...and during the initial run, they'll have their hands full perfecting the process.
Apple's use of cutting edge technology is good for them AND for manufacturers. I doubt they pay a lot for them.
Holographic porn?
No. When the design becomes dated, Apple will change the look. They're well on their way to becoming the technology Prada. Doesn't MacWorld seem a bit like a fashion show these days? I look at the beautiful, functional applications they're selling at relatively high prices, and realize: Apple isn't technology, it's couture. Probably always was, and that's what they forgot in the early 1990s.
Which is why so many Slashdotters, in their soiled Polo shirts, scoff at them. "The iPod/Powerbook/Powermac/Xserve is overrated; look my device does the same thing with more features and it was cheaper!", even though it is the size of a coffee table and has the intuitive interface of a ring puzzle.
You occasionally can get the 10 and 15 gig models from Apple for $199, refurbished.
Incidentally, 5 gig drives are not $100 cheaper than $15 gig drives on the open market. In fact, Toshiba stopped making them when they discovered the new 15 gig process (hence the wierd iPod price structure), which costs as much as making a 5 gig drive.
If it's true that Apple won't bend on their margins, iPods are as cheap as they will ever be. If you really want one, and can't see yourself going with another vendor with slimmer margins, try dealmac. You can often find good third party deals and bundles, save on shipping and taxes, and even get wierd reburb deals.
Actually, I think he means that you can just drop files on to the iRiver without creating an optimized index of them first. Hence the "silly database" comment.
Personally, i don't see where this is a feature -- do you REALLY want your music player searching for iD3 tags in all of your files on its own? I'd rather have that task tax my PC processor, and I'd rather have it do it once per track -- but then again I don't use some obscure OS to access it.
Oh, interesting hack: when I bought VirtualPC, rather than create a hard drive container, I just installed Windows 2000 on the iPod (which has a FAT-32 file system). I see pretty good performance out of that.
Oh, you'll be able to buy one right away. They just won't ship until 2005.
Boxen actually is a word. It's used to test retardation in adults.
DOCTOR: You have 1 box. A friend gives you another box. How many do you have?
PATIENT: Um...2 boxen! It said 'Windows 98 or better' so I installed Linux! Tux si a very cute mascot! Friends don't let friends install Windows! Lol! Bill Gates is a borg lol!
DOCTOR: Nurse, we found another one.
Don't forget live shows! A good show at eTree runs in the 1-2 gigabyte range, and though you can generally squeeze it down to 400-600 meg with Apple Lossless, it's still a lot of space.
Anyhow, I would like a 60 gig iPod, because my iTunes library takes up 55.86 gig right now. And I'm tired of being out of space (where is my 100 gig laptop hard drive, please?), tired of having to burn off whole swaths of my collection to DVD so I can have room to encode video or install a UT mod.
These 128 kbit Elvis Costello records I ripped back in '98 are impossible to listen to anymore. That man's voice just doesn't stand up to MP3 compression. Now, in 128 kbit AAC he's crystal clear, scratches and all. Still, I pumped it up to 192, even though I don't really need it...
Although if forced to use Windows for any length of time I would HAVE to find a patch to kill click to focus and give me the focus follows mouse behaviour that God intended us to have.
See, I always hated that...because often I want to drag from a deactive window to an active window. Or I let the mouse slip a little and find myself typing in a different window (happened ALL the time with the old laser-and-grid optical mice on the UltraSparcs at school). If mousing were an exact science, I suppose it'd be a good thing, but it isn't. Mousing is pretty random and you're more likely to fatfinger a cursor placement than you are to accidentally click on something.
Of course, now that I'm using a Mac almost full time, I've become addicted to quite another form of window control...specifically, Expose. Expose is a neat side effect of Quartz Extreme...basically, it a) instantly slides all windows off the screen, showing the desktop (which RETURNS when you press it again) or b) scales and tiles all the windows currently open and unhidden for an application or c) the whole desktop next to each other, allowing you to select the one you want at the foreground by clicking (or releasing, if you held down the button). It's a little bit of the best of both worlds with all new funk flavor...you have to use it to understand its power, but after you map it to your middle moust button, you'll wonder where it's been all your life. And you won't miss the retarded cut and paste at all.
Expost beats the hell out of virtual desktops (in which I'm always losing things, even WITH a map). Give me one desktop I can work with, thanks!
Also, being able to handle just about any file in any context that feels right is nice, too. If you have a way of doing things that's intuitive for you, the Mac OS probably supports it...including dragging to the dock icon, dragging to an open window, right clicking and selecting the app from a menu, File->Open, etc. Hold down the alt key and you're copying data, hold down the option key and you're linking to it, drag it regular and you're moving it. Furthermore, the clipboard will guess what you want to do with something if you paste data that isn't natively supported. Copy and paste a JPEG from Safari to the desktop, it saves it as a JPEG. Paste it to Photoshop, it opens it as an uncompressed image. Paste it to an icon representation, it reencodes it as an icon bitmap. As far as I know, there's no Linux OS that has this kind of flexibility...treating the clipboard as a way to use data the way you probably WANT to use it, instead of treating it as a "one media type, one purpose" repository. Oh yeah...you can still save the contents of the clipboard as a "clipping" file, too...just select something, hold down alt (to copy it) and drag it to the desktop or any finder window. Desktop not visible? HIT THE EXPOSE DESKTOP BUTTON, which I map to F12...
You're right. The sun rises and sets over Cupertino, which is where Meta-Z,X,C,V were invented.
Anyhow, the reason people are complaining is that the UNIX way of copying is fucking stupid. Selecting something shouldn't AUTOMATICALLY clear your clipboard and replace it with what you selected. Nor should there be two separate clipboards on a system. These are design flaws...side effects that are overly complicated and completely unnecessary, as evidenced by the millions of Windows and Mac users who don't have them and the relative obscurity of third party applications which replicate the functionality in Windows. I mean, think of all the functionality that you're missing out on by having these two methodologies.
Incidentally, I have used Windows machines for 16 years and have never contributed to the Outlook worm problem, the macro virus problem, or anything else. A little knowledge and a healthy amount of distrust are all you need to secure ANY system...
The problem with ctrl/shift insert is that you were always hovering around the insert button...which IMO is a piece of shit. I never want typeover -- ever -- but slipping off ctrl or shift for a second would result in switching modes and me typing over whole paragraphs.
Ctrl-C/V allowed me to pop the insert key off my keyboard for good, so i'm also not hitting it accidentally when I go for Del or PgUp.
Here's the mystical answer to your question:
See, it would be worthwhile if they could sell enough EOS models to make up for the lower pricetag. But if they released a camera that was dramatically cheaper than the ones they have now, they wouldn't necessarily increase demand at all. Hence, they would lose money. Companies like Canon do research to find out exactly who their market is at each stage and what they can afford to pay. As such, the market for the EOS is different from that of the 1D...the former probably marketted to students (hence the cheap lens and plastic construction) and the latter to advanced hobbiests (who already have lenses and just want a fast, reliable digital body without a $2000+ pro pricetag).
It's just like Apple. Yes, more people would buy the iPod Mini if it were $200, or even $100. But since they can't meet demand at $250, selling it for less would result in less money for the company.
Well, for one thing, some people toiled twelve to fifteen hours a day while others sat around doing fuck all. Now, we toil less, and for less time. Individual citizens have better health care, better homes, better economic rights. It is much easier for the average person to hold property, start a business, or move forward in industry.
In short: everything's better now. And it's all thanks to the market driven cost of goods.