Also, when congress voted 98-0 against the Kyoto treaty near the end of Clinton's term, it shows you that whatever the sitting president thinks of the kyoto treaty is irrelevant.
Uh, yes, because the current administration that has been in power for years now has absolutely no power to change anything. Can you believe it, they are simply still completely controlled by democrats behind the scenes. They are powerless! Bound! They are trying really hard to fix the global warming problem, but it's just impossible, their hands are tied, they're powerless - the dems remain in control and they are just puppets! So terrible.
Good idea listen to the people who sold Manhattan island for some beads.
Ad hominem.
If people who sold Manhattan island for beads (assuming that was true which it isn't) claimed the sky was blue, I suppose you would argue that the sky wasn't blue too.
Hint, whether or not something is true has nothing to do with who is saying it.
Funny, I can confirm that with first-hand experience. I own a small business that creates a niche-market (essentially) text processing software product, and 90% of our customers demand full proper XML support - it's really make or break, if we don't support XML, the majority of our clients would tell us to get lost. And you can "feel" that the reason everyone feels so strongly about it it is that every one of them has been burned before at some stage or another by being locked into proprietary formats for which they ended up paying too much - almost always, by Microsoft! (But also sometimes by smaller vendors who disappeared.)
It's an insightful point you make --- the very fact that Microsoft has so much power in defining the limited terms on which they will sell their products, and that customers in general have so little power in bargaining for what they want (i.e. open formats, non lock in, decent prices), tells you that there is a problem with the market. After a decade or so of this, along comes OpenOffice, and you start seeing companies and other organisations clamouring for it even if just as a bargaining chip to get better terms from MS rather than as a real intention to switch. But the momentum behind OO is growing and probably unstoppable - it's only a matter of time before OO (or rather, OpenDocument) attains "critical mass".
So that's actually another "plus" for OpenOffice then, because you can use totally open image file formats like PNG, and still get the PNGs out again. If you've embedded them in some proprietary format, you may run into problems someday.
But that's exactly what MS's format is doing internally too --- the only difference is that the MS format is obfuscated to the point that you can't properly get the image out again, but the OO file is structured internally as a zip i.e. compressed block file system, making it superior to the Word format in every way possible. It can do everything you can do with the Word format, AND MORE, and in an open way, and it takes less disk space. There is nothing you can do with the Word format that you can't do with the OO format. (Either you've been tricked by FUD, or you're trying to spread it.)
*Sigh*.. how can parent possibly be 'flamebait'? It's 100% accurate and factual and makes a very good point. Slashdot need to change the system so you can see who moderated a post.
Perhaps you're not aware of this, but bandwidth costs money. Having a website hosted costs money. This will probably come as a surprise to you, but hosting companies do not generally provide their services and bandwidth for free. This means that when A embeds B's content into A's website, B pays for it.
Since you think it's not theft, can I come hook up to your telephone line at the junction box and make calls and just let you pay the bill? It's basically the same thing, I'm sure you won't mind! (Or is that suddenly different now because it's your money we're talking about?)
All because people like you think that threads provide zero benefit.
No, don't put words in my mouth, I actually agree with you in this case - Firefox search is definitely one of those cases where putting the search in a thread would be a good idea, and that happens to be one of the things that annoys me in Firefox. Another incredibly annoying case is Windows Explorer which if you click on a network drive that isn't available checks synchronously for it and then you can't do anything for two minutes until it times out - that's just pathetic. I put threads in my apps WHERE IT MAKES SENSE TO DO SO, and where development resource constraints allow.
But I didn't friggin say that threads have zero benefit. Please point out to me where I said that. I said that IN MOST CASES threads provide zero benefit. Consider that 99% of the time users are not busy searching in Firefox - the vast majority of time is just spent by users staring at web pages. I hardly see thousands of threads beings launched, and it certainly doesn't prove the original poster's attempted point that poor threading performance in Mac OS X will become a serious problem on the desktop, because even if Firefox did use one occasional separate thread to search the performance problem would be totally negligible.
The Windows UI is sluggish, sure, but not because it doesn't utilise threads properly, it's because it's a bloated inefficient mess of ActiveX controls.
That is certainly true, but on the flip side, threading related bugs are often much much harder to find and fix, because they tend to lead to "random" crashes that aren't predictable caught in a debugger.
I think your perspective is skewed by the fact that you work with complex development applications, and that most of the people you know also do development work. In the real world, 99% of people mainly use e-mail, word processors, spreadsheets and web browsers.
Also, expect desktop apps to start using threads heavily (in the future) to use multi-core CPUs
Unlikely. Just because you can, doesn't mean there is any good reason to, and most desktop application developers will have absolutely no reason to bother with threads at all. The vast majority of desktop apps just sit idle most the time, and even the odd moment when they're busy it's mostly just to do basic things like redraw buttons etc. Thus threads will provide a grand total of zero benefit in almost all desktop applications --- yet they come at a cost to developers in that they increase software design complexity and make debugging harder. Most desktop application functionality is inherently synchronous too (driven by user interaction), so I think very few applications will benefit from being multi-threaded. Applications that might are e.g. word processors with background spellchecking and grammar checking, but really, these are still only going to launch a small handful of threads at most. Even CAD apps and applications like Photoshop that do occasionally require lots of CPU when activating certain functions will draw comparatively little benefit from increased design complexity in making a few processor intensive functions utilise multiple threads.
I should be able to go from prototyping my web apps right to production, without a bunch of migration or guesstimation.
I agree with you in principle, but in practice nobody should ever be doing prototyping on the production system - period. Anyone who is doing that (or even doing general desktop tasks) on a server system that is intended for heavy-duty use has bigger problems. It's true that Apple have "focussed their resources on" the end-user experience for desktop use rather than on optimising for heavy-duty server us, but I'm not sure that this really matters in practice, because the typical desktop user is not going to feel a difference at all - so just use Linux on the server, and OS X on the desktop.
I counted at least half a dozen (modded up, mind you) posts before I even got to yours that cried "this study is just FUD/marketing". You seem to so desparately want to "prove" that slashdot is "unfairly biased" that you just ignored the facts (hmm.. how ironic - that's the very definition of "biased", isn't it?)
"the" PDF viewer? I don't know what you're referring to, PDFs load very quickly for me when I open into "the" PDF viewer on my Mac, or in "the" PDF viewer on Linux.
There are dozens of PDF viewers, even on Windows. Tthere is no such thing as "the" PDF viewer.
Uh, and the "slashbots" are so biased that "as usual" they just modded you +5 insightful. Right. Now will you stop trolling with us your "everyone here is teh biased!!11!" BS?
I always thought that message is completely idiotic and badly thought out. It assumes I want a disk in the drive (which is wrong 99% of the time - usually the user has just taken a disk out of the drive, or just clicked on "D:" in Windows Explorer). Why not just display (in the window, without an annoying message box) a simple message like "No disk in drive". That way there is no annoying popup message, users who want a disk can just insert one, and users who don't are not annoyed with stupid incorrect demands from the computer.
Specious argument - sounds like it makes sense, until you actually think about it for two seconds. According to your logic, there should not a "sleep" key on the keyboard because "why would you want your keyboard to sleep". Or a "delete" button because "why would you want to delete your keyboard". Etc. I think all people understand that the keys on the keyboard give instructions to the computer to do something.
Software costs money to make. You still pay for Firefox, even if rather indirectly. E.g. Google puts money into Firefox, Google get their money from advertisers, the advertisers get their money from people like you and me who buy their products. AOL, IBM, Novell etc. all contribute to the Mozilla Foundation, so the cost of Firefox development is very directly built into the cost of those companies' products - the sponsorship is just an operating cost and incorporated into the slightly higher margins. Now you say "that doesn't affect me, I don't use IBM's/Novell's products". But many of the companies you buy products from do - e.g. you buy a can of Pepsi, Pepsi uses (say) IBM supported servers - thus a part of Pepsi's operating costs is the portion they pay indirectly towards Firefox development, and they simply cover that cost by making the average can of Pepsi 0.02 cents more expensive. (Of course, multiply this effect through every company that uses any of the products of the sponsors of the Mozilla Foundation.) Nothing is free.
Great idea Opera - I wonder if other companies would consider doing this - i.e. get free Windows Vista registration on Bill Gates 50th birthday?
No, there is an important difference: Opera is essentially an "underdog" trying to gain more than just their currently small market share, while MS is a dominant monopoly and you most likely are going to (have to) use Vista eventually regardless of whether or not you want to or even whether or not you like it. So 'why should they' make an effort? It comes down to necessity: Opera needs to make extra effort to win new users, Bill Gates doesn't need to at all. If Microsoft were the underdog then sure, they'd also be doing clever marketing gimmicks to get you talking about them and increase market share.
You used a Mac for only one day and you "hated it"? That's insane. Do you think if you had never ever used Windows or Linux before, and had only one day on it, that you would be productive on that very first day? I don't know about you, but if I add up all the time I'm spent over the years learning all the things I know how to do in Windows, it's probably a few man-months.
I bought a Mac about six months ago, and although I use it fairly frequently I'm still learning new things all the time that make me 'more productive'. No way did I expect to be able to do anything useful with it after only one day though.
I think your problem was not the Mac but very unrealistic expectations --- that's not entirely your fault though, because Macs are marketed as "easy to use" after all, so people do start unrealistically expecting that they will just sit down and automatically know how to use it properly!
You can't make a good movie and then expect people to just magically arrive, you have to market the thing... how many ads (and "press releases") did you see for Star Wars? Now, how many did you see for Kurosawa? There is just no comparison, it's no wonder nobody watches the good movies, they don't even know they exist. The advertising budget alone for the mainstream movies is usually at least multiple times the entire production budget of the good movies.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, when congress voted 98-0 against the Kyoto treaty near the end of Clinton's term, it shows you that whatever the sitting president thinks of the kyoto treaty is irrelevant.
Uh, yes, because the current administration that has been in power for years now has absolutely no power to change anything. Can you believe it, they are simply still completely controlled by democrats behind the scenes. They are powerless! Bound! They are trying really hard to fix the global warming problem, but it's just impossible, their hands are tied, they're powerless - the dems remain in control and they are just puppets! So terrible.
Good idea listen to the people who sold Manhattan island for some beads.
Ad hominem.
If people who sold Manhattan island for beads (assuming that was true which it isn't) claimed the sky was blue, I suppose you would argue that the sky wasn't blue too.
Hint, whether or not something is true has nothing to do with who is saying it.
Because half of slashdot are 'l33t t33n5' who think Microsoft invented the spreadsheet with Excel? :)
Funny, I can confirm that with first-hand experience. I own a small business that creates a niche-market (essentially) text processing software product, and 90% of our customers demand full proper XML support - it's really make or break, if we don't support XML, the majority of our clients would tell us to get lost. And you can "feel" that the reason everyone feels so strongly about it it is that every one of them has been burned before at some stage or another by being locked into proprietary formats for which they ended up paying too much - almost always, by Microsoft! (But also sometimes by smaller vendors who disappeared.)
It's an insightful point you make --- the very fact that Microsoft has so much power in defining the limited terms on which they will sell their products, and that customers in general have so little power in bargaining for what they want (i.e. open formats, non lock in, decent prices), tells you that there is a problem with the market. After a decade or so of this, along comes OpenOffice, and you start seeing companies and other organisations clamouring for it even if just as a bargaining chip to get better terms from MS rather than as a real intention to switch. But the momentum behind OO is growing and probably unstoppable - it's only a matter of time before OO (or rather, OpenDocument) attains "critical mass".
So that's actually another "plus" for OpenOffice then, because you can use totally open image file formats like PNG, and still get the PNGs out again. If you've embedded them in some proprietary format, you may run into problems someday.
What multimedia can't be embedded into an OpenOffice file?
But that's exactly what MS's format is doing internally too --- the only difference is that the MS format is obfuscated to the point that you can't properly get the image out again, but the OO file is structured internally as a zip i.e. compressed block file system, making it superior to the Word format in every way possible. It can do everything you can do with the Word format, AND MORE, and in an open way, and it takes less disk space. There is nothing you can do with the Word format that you can't do with the OO format. (Either you've been tricked by FUD, or you're trying to spread it.)
*Sigh* .. how can parent possibly be 'flamebait'? It's 100% accurate and factual and makes a very good point. Slashdot need to change the system so you can see who moderated a post.
consent to link
Did you even read the post you're replying to!? This is NOT "linking". It's "embedding".
Hotlinking is theft? You've got to be kidding me.
Perhaps you're not aware of this, but bandwidth costs money. Having a website hosted costs money. This will probably come as a surprise to you, but hosting companies do not generally provide their services and bandwidth for free. This means that when A embeds B's content into A's website, B pays for it.
Since you think it's not theft, can I come hook up to your telephone line at the junction box and make calls and just let you pay the bill? It's basically the same thing, I'm sure you won't mind! (Or is that suddenly different now because it's your money we're talking about?)
You think people who didn't get this joke are the ones who need to get a life?? ;)
All because people like you think that threads provide zero benefit.
No, don't put words in my mouth, I actually agree with you in this case - Firefox search is definitely one of those cases where putting the search in a thread would be a good idea, and that happens to be one of the things that annoys me in Firefox. Another incredibly annoying case is Windows Explorer which if you click on a network drive that isn't available checks synchronously for it and then you can't do anything for two minutes until it times out - that's just pathetic. I put threads in my apps WHERE IT MAKES SENSE TO DO SO, and where development resource constraints allow.
But I didn't friggin say that threads have zero benefit. Please point out to me where I said that. I said that IN MOST CASES threads provide zero benefit. Consider that 99% of the time users are not busy searching in Firefox - the vast majority of time is just spent by users staring at web pages. I hardly see thousands of threads beings launched, and it certainly doesn't prove the original poster's attempted point that poor threading performance in Mac OS X will become a serious problem on the desktop, because even if Firefox did use one occasional separate thread to search the performance problem would be totally negligible.
The Windows UI is sluggish, sure, but not because it doesn't utilise threads properly, it's because it's a bloated inefficient mess of ActiveX controls.
most bugs are not due to threading issues
That is certainly true, but on the flip side, threading related bugs are often much much harder to find and fix, because they tend to lead to "random" crashes that aren't predictable caught in a debugger.
I think your perspective is skewed by the fact that you work with complex development applications, and that most of the people you know also do development work. In the real world, 99% of people mainly use e-mail, word processors, spreadsheets and web browsers.
Also, expect desktop apps to start using threads heavily (in the future) to use multi-core CPUs
Unlikely. Just because you can, doesn't mean there is any good reason to, and most desktop application developers will have absolutely no reason to bother with threads at all. The vast majority of desktop apps just sit idle most the time, and even the odd moment when they're busy it's mostly just to do basic things like redraw buttons etc. Thus threads will provide a grand total of zero benefit in almost all desktop applications --- yet they come at a cost to developers in that they increase software design complexity and make debugging harder. Most desktop application functionality is inherently synchronous too (driven by user interaction), so I think very few applications will benefit from being multi-threaded. Applications that might are e.g. word processors with background spellchecking and grammar checking, but really, these are still only going to launch a small handful of threads at most. Even CAD apps and applications like Photoshop that do occasionally require lots of CPU when activating certain functions will draw comparatively little benefit from increased design complexity in making a few processor intensive functions utilise multiple threads.
I should be able to go from prototyping my web apps right to production, without a bunch of migration or guesstimation.
I agree with you in principle, but in practice nobody should ever be doing prototyping on the production system - period. Anyone who is doing that (or even doing general desktop tasks) on a server system that is intended for heavy-duty use has bigger problems. It's true that Apple have "focussed their resources on" the end-user experience for desktop use rather than on optimising for heavy-duty server us, but I'm not sure that this really matters in practice, because the typical desktop user is not going to feel a difference at all - so just use Linux on the server, and OS X on the desktop.
I counted at least half a dozen (modded up, mind you) posts before I even got to yours that cried "this study is just FUD/marketing". You seem to so desparately want to "prove" that slashdot is "unfairly biased" that you just ignored the facts (hmm .. how ironic - that's the very definition of "biased", isn't it?)
Loading the PDF viewer is SLOW.
"the" PDF viewer? I don't know what you're referring to, PDFs load very quickly for me when I open into "the" PDF viewer on my Mac, or in "the" PDF viewer on Linux.
There are dozens of PDF viewers, even on Windows. Tthere is no such thing as "the" PDF viewer.
Uh, and the "slashbots" are so biased that "as usual" they just modded you +5 insightful. Right. Now will you stop trolling with us your "everyone here is teh biased!!11!" BS?
I always thought that message is completely idiotic and badly thought out. It assumes I want a disk in the drive (which is wrong 99% of the time - usually the user has just taken a disk out of the drive, or just clicked on "D:" in Windows Explorer). Why not just display (in the window, without an annoying message box) a simple message like "No disk in drive". That way there is no annoying popup message, users who want a disk can just insert one, and users who don't are not annoyed with stupid incorrect demands from the computer.
The admin would have to pry it out with a paper clip since the OS crashed, and there was no physical eject button on the floppy drive.
That doesn't make sense --- why not just reboot the machine, and eject once the OS is up again?
So now this problem still exists after all these years?
No, because OS X uses things like memory protection and is far more robust than OS 9. My Mac has not crashed in over six months of use.
Specious argument - sounds like it makes sense, until you actually think about it for two seconds. According to your logic, there should not a "sleep" key on the keyboard because "why would you want your keyboard to sleep". Or a "delete" button because "why would you want to delete your keyboard". Etc. I think all people understand that the keys on the keyboard give instructions to the computer to do something.
Software costs money to make. You still pay for Firefox, even if rather indirectly. E.g. Google puts money into Firefox, Google get their money from advertisers, the advertisers get their money from people like you and me who buy their products. AOL, IBM, Novell etc. all contribute to the Mozilla Foundation, so the cost of Firefox development is very directly built into the cost of those companies' products - the sponsorship is just an operating cost and incorporated into the slightly higher margins. Now you say "that doesn't affect me, I don't use IBM's/Novell's products". But many of the companies you buy products from do - e.g. you buy a can of Pepsi, Pepsi uses (say) IBM supported servers - thus a part of Pepsi's operating costs is the portion they pay indirectly towards Firefox development, and they simply cover that cost by making the average can of Pepsi 0.02 cents more expensive. (Of course, multiply this effect through every company that uses any of the products of the sponsors of the Mozilla Foundation.) Nothing is free.
Great idea Opera - I wonder if other companies would consider doing this - i.e. get free Windows Vista registration on Bill Gates 50th birthday?
No, there is an important difference: Opera is essentially an "underdog" trying to gain more than just their currently small market share, while MS is a dominant monopoly and you most likely are going to (have to) use Vista eventually regardless of whether or not you want to or even whether or not you like it. So 'why should they' make an effort? It comes down to necessity: Opera needs to make extra effort to win new users, Bill Gates doesn't need to at all. If Microsoft were the underdog then sure, they'd also be doing clever marketing gimmicks to get you talking about them and increase market share.
You used a Mac for only one day and you "hated it"? That's insane. Do you think if you had never ever used Windows or Linux before, and had only one day on it, that you would be productive on that very first day? I don't know about you, but if I add up all the time I'm spent over the years learning all the things I know how to do in Windows, it's probably a few man-months.
I bought a Mac about six months ago, and although I use it fairly frequently I'm still learning new things all the time that make me 'more productive'. No way did I expect to be able to do anything useful with it after only one day though.
I think your problem was not the Mac but very unrealistic expectations --- that's not entirely your fault though, because Macs are marketed as "easy to use" after all, so people do start unrealistically expecting that they will just sit down and automatically know how to use it properly!
You can't make a good movie and then expect people to just magically arrive, you have to market the thing ... how many ads (and "press releases") did you see for Star Wars? Now, how many did you see for Kurosawa? There is just no comparison, it's no wonder nobody watches the good movies, they don't even know they exist. The advertising budget alone for the mainstream movies is usually at least multiple times the entire production budget of the good movies.