After reading that article, and being, like almost evryone else here, a victim and perpetrator, on more than one project, of bad planning and coding standards, I must say that it was enlightening. I wonder why such standards can't be set in the real world. After all, selling a product on quality would certainly not be a bad idea.
She wants to know why her wardrobe malfunction set off such huge amounts of hysteria and resulted in FCC legal action against CBS.
The point is that one man's meat (pun intented) is another man's poison. In this case, it's a woman's nipples on the one hand and Nazi hate media and kiddie porn on the other.
If he had read the article, you AC shitbag, he would have quoted something more than the first line, and claiming that he's the only one who understands French here is pure and utter bullshit.
I have read TFA, and the guy IN NO WAY attacks Google. He is simply worried about the availability of primarily European literature online and argues that an effort should be made by Europeans to digitise non English languages as well, because, as he says, American English dominates this field completely and offers a very American centric view of the world.
That's all he says. Nothing more and nothing less. It's not an attack on Google, and it's not an attack on English and it's not an attack on the US.
But that wouldn't stop the rabid morons from posting an inflammatory anti-French article, now would it.
The fact that the term "anti-Americanism" even exists is much more interesting to me than the periodic flamefests of Francophobia here on/. The term was coined by Americans to describe the sometimes rational opposition to US policies and the sometimes irrational opposition to anything emanating in the US, i.e. a blanket term. Your description refers to the latter, not the former, and even that is suspect since he seems, from actually reading the original article, worried about losing his language's literary heritage.
I'm not a Red Hat user anymore, and, as you would have noticed if you'd have seen the adhoc poll that someone further down did, there are really A LOT of people who left Red Hat when the Fedora fiasco and the dropping of a cheap consumer distro happened along with your CEO's advice to us normal humans to go fuck ourselves.
An intelligent company would TAKE NOTE of user comments and act on them. FC has the smell of a throwaway distro even if it ISN'T. Users EXPECT a large commercial house to stand behind its products.
And lastly, Red Hat would do itself an enormous favour if it were to sell boxed versions of FC, along with up2date and support for a decent consumer payable price, aka not some exhorbitant enterprise support robbery.
We are the real marketing spokespeople of Red hat or whatever distro we are currently using, as word of mouth is what makes a company live or die.
I started out using Linux quite late, only in 1999 in fact, and the first distro I used was RH6. I was amazed at the number of Redhat boxed versions floating around our company, and, in most companies to be honest. RH was looked at as being cheap, powerful and flexible compared to Windows. It was fun learning the ropes of the commandline with RH.
Later, a few years back, I had to use Linux for a company internal project, which I mightily fucked up, sadly, but because RH had just gone on to the FC1 story, there was no way in hell we were paying for RHEL for something that was just a test bed installation. I tried SuSE, but dropped it when, for the life of me, I just couldn't get MySQL to run, and eventually went with pure debian sarge and no GUI. It ran solidly for months with no down time.
The project was a disaster, which is my fault, but debian sarge, despite its age, was fantastic in terms of stability.
I'm an OSX user these days, but I'm thinking of installing debian on my old PC simply for that amazing stability which no other distro has had for me.
Keeping an up to date hosts file - good one's with hundreds of ad server entries can be found on the net such as here - is probably still the most effective way of killing most ads on your computer.
I too noticed this, but contrary to most, realised that they must simply be doing what has been possible for a long time but which no one had really bothered with, with the exception of porn sites and other spyware "value adders", until now.
Basically, it just uses the age old technique of using the document.write method, but obfuscated, to write other, obfuscated tags which are not recognized by the blocker as being new script tags, which themselves call a new obfuscated pop.js code that actually, in yet another round of obfuscation, produces the actual pop-under code: In essence, if one can block any request for the server of the obfuscated pop.js, or pop.cgi or whatever code, one will be in peace for a while. This can be done via adding the following lines to the hosts file on Windows (C:Windows(or WinNT)\System32\drivers\etc\HOSTS) or on Linux or MacOSX (/etc/hosts) or simply via your firewall software, which I'm sure we all use, don't we?
I have the code from the above server, as used by scienceblog.com, but I won't post it, as it's copyrighted, because the last thing I want is some internet low life trying to sue me for their own low life purposes.
The US R&D expenditure is bigger than the next five countries put together, and India is nowhere in the picture.
Was there a special reason for the submitter to put that line in, since I actually RTFA and couldn't find it anywhere, or was it just his sense of nationalistic angst getting the better of him because some brown people are growing faster than whitey?
That line kind of spoiled the article for me, because it brought me straight back to the reality of nationalist bullshit and the way it colours perception, although I'm sure you'll find that in almost any nation, including India.
Reading this article where RMS states the blindingly obvious, i.e. that Microsoft is trying to put a legal stranglehold on the net and all software development with their usual avaricious and rapacious greed in order to milk computer using human society of their every last penny, an idea occured to me that makes me wonder: Why have the MPAA and tthe RIAA, two organisations easily as evil and filled with shit filled scum like Microsoft's management is, not yet tried to patent songs and movies?
I'm pretty sure they must have thought of it, but then decided against it when they realised that easily 80% of todays crap pop and movie blandness are simply lifting ideas from other musicians and movies.
I used to admin a Navision db at the last place I worked at, here in Switzerland. I even did a training course at the Navison central in Lucerne. I aksed the boss of Navision Switzerland if they had ever had plans to port Navision to Linux, since Navision has been around a long time, from the DOS days, and also used to run on AIX and up until recently didn't even use the Windows GUI toolkit but had its own proprietry one. He said that Microsoft had told the various European regional CEO's of Navision that they were not even allowed to mention Linux, never mind think about porting it to Linux.
Navsision is quite popular in Europe as it's very easy to install and admin, has a huge set of CRM and ERP modules and is small enough to be useful for companies of up to around 250 people or so. Navision was quite clever in their set up in that they have a network of so called Navision Solution Centers in Europe where customisation specialists sit around and write add on modules and customise existing db scripts for local businesses. Imagine if MySQL or PostgreSQL had a similar setup!
This was Microsoft's way of gaining a foothold in Europe with the hope of competing eventually with SAP (Navision also has a larger db product called Axapta).
Navision being Danish helped because Denmark (and Holland) have very much become the USA's bitches in Europe in the last few decades, probably because they thought they could use the USA to balance out the weight of their larger European neighbours.
On the whole this has also worked out as Holland and Denmark are doing pretty well economically (They're also much smaller than their neighbours and thus much more flexible). The problem is that they have thus also become the USA's bitches to a certain extent in that their militaries and sections of their economies are more dependent on American good will than others. The JSF fighter fiasco where loads of countries get to pay for development of the fighter in return for industrial contracts which never materialised is a good example.
This open extortion (blackmail isn't really the word) of a Danish national politician is what they get for their trouble. Microsoft would not do the same in Germany, for example, as the resulting scandal would kill Microsoft in Germany. (Let's leave Germany's economic mess out of this for now)
This should be awake up call to Europeans that sucking up to large corporations, especially large foreign corporations, is like handing away your birthright in the long run.
(Actually, I suppose this applies to all countries, really)
Homeworld 2 uses LUA as well for modding, and in fact for all config files. I prefer it to Python as the whole whitespace thing in Python drives me crazy.
The solution could very well be that closed social networking systems such as Orkut, where invitation is by invite only, have the same efect as inbreeding and exclusive clubs do in the real world: produce weaker offspring and jealousy and envy.
I personally think that slashdot, with its quirky, yet working and egalatarian modding system, where irritating posts are almost always sent to the bottom of the heap very quickly, is a much better social networking system than Orkut.
His stock answer to every fucking question vis a vis security and alternative platforms is that Windows is more targeted because it is more popular, and that is pure bullshit. Apache being used more than IIs and yet being more secure proved that one false fucking years ago, and no one thinks about actually mailing the interviewers and giving them the facts, so that, next time they interview BIllG, they can ask real questions.
Apart form that what was so fucking difficult about those questions, Taco? Just because the American media in general is so scared of losing ad revenue that they will NEVER ask direct and difficult questions doesn't fucking make it normal.
Fuck, 800 plus comments as of now, and no one with any real insight gets modded up? Perhaps that is the problem, in itself? No one, not one person that I saw, attempted to take the arrticle and make a decent discussion out of it.
Premise 1: We have a computer user, who is a journalist, has been using Macs for nigh on 15 years, is not extremely tech savy (Get to that in a mo') and sees that his fellow computers users, most of them on one of the millions of brands of PC and one of the various flavours of Windows, be it from Win98 to WinXP, have, in general, more problems with their computers than he does.
What does all that tell me?
I am a Mac user myself (well, I use a PC as well with Linux and Win2000 on it and I used to be a Windows shop sys admin). I agree with his OBSERVATIONS 100%. I mean observations because apart from his subjective ranting on why the world doesn't string BillG up from the rafters, which is his OPINION, his article has a good point.
I have seen and expereienced the same problems with Windows machines, until learning better, such as the 20 seconds till being hacked when first going online with WinXP and the numerous bugs in the OS over the years. Yes, I know as well as you that putting a simple router in front of the machine stops 90% of the bugs and being careful about mails and what you download and keeping up with pacthces will stop the rest, but it is a real pain and, in my experience, one has to ask the simple question: why?
In that I agree with the article. Using Windows is more complex than a Mac with OSX. Now on to the tech savy bit. The author writes about the prize that was offered for hacking the webserver Webstar, which was the only real webserver on classic Mac OS. It was never used widely in the server world and thus is not a good example of application security. The guy reveals his lack of expertise because, all those who know that OSX is based on BSD know that the webserver shipped with OSX is Apache, the same one that upsets the numbers game of OSS with respect to commercial offerings when compared to IIS.
Also, the argument that Windows has more software available is a real one, especially for gamers and for CAD and specialised business applications and the situation will stay that way while Windows has such a dominating marketshare.
And that is a reason for staying with Windows, but it isn't the reason why 90% of the world's computer using public uses PC's and Windows. That reason is simply because PC's are more available and most people have no idea that there are alternatives and are only interested in getting a "computer" with which they can chat, browse, mail, write letters, store photos, listen to music etc. Although a Mac arguably, in my experience, does all of this much better than Windows does, most people will simply go to the nearest shop and use what is there.
As is usual this topic, a guarnateed comment generator, will have the following set of replies:
1. The usual group of people who have little or no experience of the Mac will make comments to the effect that Windows and Linux live off multi button mice, to the extent that certain applications have functionality in the CM that exists no where else in the programme.
2. Those same people will make comments to the effect that a three year old child can learn to use the right mouse button (They've obviously never done tech support!) and that Apple is therefore treating its user as being mentally defecient.
3. The people who actually use Macs will make the usual response that you can tack any two button mouse with scroll wheel and USB onto your Mac. (There is even one PC guy here who says that he feels insulted that Apple doesn't sell multi button mice and that's his reason for not buying a Mac, although I suspect that his problem has more to do with his rigid views)
4. The people who have done tech support for family and friends will know that most NORMAL people do not know what the right mouse button does.
And this last group is the one that has the point and it is the reason Apple does so well with its Mac, but more importantly with the iPod and iTunes: Your average NORMAL consumer is NOT interested in whether a gadget can has all sorts of myriad options. Your average NORMAL person wants a gadget that makes their life easier, not more complex, and computers, for the most part, make their lives more complex.
In spite of this and in spite of the fact that you can use any multi button mouse with OSX (The crowd that thinks Apple should offer multi button mice because any "three year old can use them" is ironically unable to fathom the fact that any USB mouse with two buttons and a scroll wheel works in OSX), such as I do (McAlly mouse), I think Apple should offer two buttoned mice with scroll wheels of their own design and brand on their store website as an option for those who want them.
Not default, but as an option in a popup menu, the same as choosing more RAM or another HD.
That will effectively kill these arguments once and for all. It won't make that much difference, I think, to those who complain about Apple all the time, because those people will always complain, no matter what Apple, Microsoft or Linus does.
This is true, but it's becoming less so over time. Apple is moving away from netinfo these days and there is a lot less usage of it moving from 10.1 to 10.3. To be fair, files that are maintained by the system, such as hostconfig, have a warning in them to that effect:
## #/etc/hostconfig ## # This file is maintained by the system control panels ##
I'm not a pro in all the config files in the system, but I'm glad that Apple is moving away from netinfo. Stephan Somogyi, the guy who helped write BBEdit and MacPerl and who used to have a column on ZDNet, warned in the beginning that netinfo was a single point of failure similar to the register when OSX 10.0 first came out. Other people must have taken this to heart because there is definitely less reliance on it these days.
Copyright infringment, the most devastating crime against mankind the universe has ever known, but one which the righteous courts will righteously punish by giving these henious destroyers of civilisation, as we know it, harsher punishments than is given to war criminals accused of genocide.
All hail the almighty dollar and the lords of money.
In case you missed it in my other post, I wonder how much effort you really put in to the problem of your default browser. You can change the default browser in Internet Explorer as well, and there are at least two third party apps that do this as well.
I agree that the reasons I gave look like your average Mac zealot, but the guy asked why the original would prefer OSX over Linux.
Those reasons, cliched or not, are real.
I should have put in a disclaimer that OSX is not perfect and that there are occasional hardware problems, but my experience on the whole over 15 years of using PC's (from Windows 2.11) and Macs (System 6) is that Apple's hardware is among the best there is overall.
I've had PC hardware from no name chinese brands that fail rapidly, Dell stuff that fails often enough to be a real problem (I used to be a Sysadmin for Windows and dell machines) and IBM stuff that is as good as or better than Apples, but really, only HP and IBM are as good as Apple in terms of hardware quality in my experience.
And your comment about a Linuc head only going for the hardware is simplistic, don't you think. OSX has a lot of features and gimmicks that are nowhere to be found in Linux (and vice versa, of course) and those could be valid reasons for wanting to use it as well. It's not just the hardware.
At last you're actually posting something like dialog yourself.
I'm not a heavy X11 user myself in OSX, but I'll take your word for it, and will agree that you'll have a more unified experience using Linux with OpenOffice.
However, I still have to wonder how much time and effort you put into the default browser problem. 5 minutes on google would have told you that you can change the default browser through myriad other means, one of which, simply opening up Internet Explorer and changing the http and https helper apps, would have done the trick, and there are also at least two third party apps that do the same thing.
But anyway, if you're happy with Gentoo, then all the power to you. I still use Debian on my x86 machine and I'm happy with that too.
Slashdot Mirror
After reading that article, and being, like almost evryone else here, a victim and perpetrator, on more than one project, of bad planning and coding standards, I must say that it was enlightening. I wonder why such standards can't be set in the real world. After all, selling a product on quality would certainly not be a bad idea.
Post an article by John, "The clueless one", Dvorak.
She wants to know why her wardrobe malfunction set off such huge amounts of hysteria and resulted in FCC legal action against CBS.
The point is that one man's meat (pun intented) is another man's poison. In this case, it's a woman's nipples on the one hand and Nazi hate media and kiddie porn on the other.
You decide which form of censorship is worse.
If he had read the article, you AC shitbag, he would have quoted something more than the first line, and claiming that he's the only one who understands French here is pure and utter bullshit.
I have read TFA, and the guy IN NO WAY attacks Google. He is simply worried about the availability of primarily European literature online and argues that an effort should be made by Europeans to digitise non English languages as well, because, as he says, American English dominates this field completely and offers a very American centric view of the world.
That's all he says. Nothing more and nothing less. It's not an attack on Google, and it's not an attack on English and it's not an attack on the US.
But that wouldn't stop the rabid morons from posting an inflammatory anti-French article, now would it.
The fact that the term "anti-Americanism" even exists is much more interesting to me than the periodic flamefests of Francophobia here on /. The term was coined by Americans to describe the sometimes rational opposition to US policies and the sometimes irrational opposition to anything emanating in the US, i.e. a blanket term. Your description refers to the latter, not the former, and even that is suspect since he seems, from actually reading the original article, worried about losing his language's literary heritage.
I'm not a Red Hat user anymore, and, as you would have noticed if you'd have seen the adhoc poll that someone further down did, there are really A LOT of people who left Red Hat when the Fedora fiasco and the dropping of a cheap consumer distro happened along with your CEO's advice to us normal humans to go fuck ourselves.
An intelligent company would TAKE NOTE of user comments and act on them. FC has the smell of a throwaway distro even if it ISN'T. Users EXPECT a large commercial house to stand behind its products.
And lastly, Red Hat would do itself an enormous favour if it were to sell boxed versions of FC, along with up2date and support for a decent consumer payable price, aka not some exhorbitant enterprise support robbery.
We are the real marketing spokespeople of Red hat or whatever distro we are currently using, as word of mouth is what makes a company live or die.
I started out using Linux quite late, only in 1999 in fact, and the first distro I used was RH6. I was amazed at the number of Redhat boxed versions floating around our company, and, in most companies to be honest. RH was looked at as being cheap, powerful and flexible compared to Windows. It was fun learning the ropes of the commandline with RH.
Later, a few years back, I had to use Linux for a company internal project, which I mightily fucked up, sadly, but because RH had just gone on to the FC1 story, there was no way in hell we were paying for RHEL for something that was just a test bed installation. I tried SuSE, but dropped it when, for the life of me, I just couldn't get MySQL to run, and eventually went with pure debian sarge and no GUI. It ran solidly for months with no down time.
The project was a disaster, which is my fault, but debian sarge, despite its age, was fantastic in terms of stability.
I'm an OSX user these days, but I'm thinking of installing debian on my old PC simply for that amazing stability which no other distro has had for me.
"you're" is the word you're looking for.
Keeping an up to date hosts file - good one's with hundreds of ad server entries can be found on the net such as here - is probably still the most effective way of killing most ads on your computer.
I too noticed this, but contrary to most, realised that they must simply be doing what has been possible for a long time but which no one had really bothered with, with the exception of porn sites and other spyware "value adders", until now.
Basically, it just uses the age old technique of using the document.write method, but obfuscated, to write other, obfuscated tags which are not recognized by the blocker as being new script tags, which themselves call a new obfuscated pop.js code that actually, in yet another round of obfuscation, produces the actual pop-under code: In essence, if one can block any request for the server of the obfuscated pop.js, or pop.cgi or whatever code, one will be in peace for a while. This can be done via adding the following lines to the hosts file on Windows (C:Windows(or WinNT)\System32\drivers\etc\HOSTS) or on Linux or MacOSX (/etc/hosts) or simply via your firewall software, which I'm sure we all use, don't we?
127.0.0.1 www.fastclick.net
127.0.0.1 media.fastclick.net
I have the code from the above server, as used by scienceblog.com, but I won't post it, as it's copyrighted, because the last thing I want is some internet low life trying to sue me for their own low life purposes.
The US R&D expenditure is bigger than the next five countries put together, and India is nowhere in the picture.
Was there a special reason for the submitter to put that line in, since I actually RTFA and couldn't find it anywhere, or was it just his sense of nationalistic angst getting the better of him because some brown people are growing faster than whitey?
That line kind of spoiled the article for me, because it brought me straight back to the reality of nationalist bullshit and the way it colours perception, although I'm sure you'll find that in almost any nation, including India.
Reading this article where RMS states the blindingly obvious, i.e. that Microsoft is trying to put a legal stranglehold on the net and all software development with their usual avaricious and rapacious greed in order to milk computer using human society of their every last penny, an idea occured to me that makes me wonder: Why have the MPAA and tthe RIAA, two organisations easily as evil and filled with shit filled scum like Microsoft's management is, not yet tried to patent songs and movies?
I'm pretty sure they must have thought of it, but then decided against it when they realised that easily 80% of todays crap pop and movie blandness are simply lifting ideas from other musicians and movies.
I used to admin a Navision db at the last place I worked at, here in Switzerland. I even did a training course at the Navison central in Lucerne. I aksed the boss of Navision Switzerland if they had ever had plans to port Navision to Linux, since Navision has been around a long time, from the DOS days, and also used to run on AIX and up until recently didn't even use the Windows GUI toolkit but had its own proprietry one. He said that Microsoft had told the various European regional CEO's of Navision that they were not even allowed to mention Linux, never mind think about porting it to Linux.
Navsision is quite popular in Europe as it's very easy to install and admin, has a huge set of CRM and ERP modules and is small enough to be useful for companies of up to around 250 people or so. Navision was quite clever in their set up in that they have a network of so called Navision Solution Centers in Europe where customisation specialists sit around and write add on modules and customise existing db scripts for local businesses. Imagine if MySQL or PostgreSQL had a similar setup!
This was Microsoft's way of gaining a foothold in Europe with the hope of competing eventually with SAP (Navision also has a larger db product called Axapta).
Navision being Danish helped because Denmark (and Holland) have very much become the USA's bitches in Europe in the last few decades, probably because they thought they could use the USA to balance out the weight of their larger European neighbours.
On the whole this has also worked out as Holland and Denmark are doing pretty well economically (They're also much smaller than their neighbours and thus much more flexible). The problem is that they have thus also become the USA's bitches to a certain extent in that their militaries and sections of their economies are more dependent on American good will than others. The JSF fighter fiasco where loads of countries get to pay for development of the fighter in return for industrial contracts which never materialised is a good example.
This open extortion (blackmail isn't really the word) of a Danish national politician is what they get for their trouble. Microsoft would not do the same in Germany, for example, as the resulting scandal would kill Microsoft in Germany. (Let's leave Germany's economic mess out of this for now)
This should be awake up call to Europeans that sucking up to large corporations, especially large foreign corporations, is like handing away your birthright in the long run.
(Actually, I suppose this applies to all countries, really)
Homeworld 2 uses LUA as well for modding, and in fact for all config files. I prefer it to Python as the whole whitespace thing in Python drives me crazy.
From the article: What does Oracle's stubbornness imply for the industry as a whole, with multicore chips coming to the fore so strongly?
That IBM's DB2 and MS' MSSQL Server will get more customers than Oracle in the future.
Bye bye, Larry.
The solution could very well be that closed social networking systems such as Orkut, where invitation is by invite only, have the same efect as inbreeding and exclusive clubs do in the real world: produce weaker offspring and jealousy and envy.
I personally think that slashdot, with its quirky, yet working and egalatarian modding system, where irritating posts are almost always sent to the bottom of the heap very quickly, is a much better social networking system than Orkut.
His stock answer to every fucking question vis a vis security and alternative platforms is that Windows is more targeted because it is more popular, and that is pure bullshit. Apache being used more than IIs and yet being more secure proved that one false fucking years ago, and no one thinks about actually mailing the interviewers and giving them the facts, so that, next time they interview BIllG, they can ask real questions.
Apart form that what was so fucking difficult about those questions, Taco? Just because the American media in general is so scared of losing ad revenue that they will NEVER ask direct and difficult questions doesn't fucking make it normal.
Fuck, 800 plus comments as of now, and no one with any real insight gets modded up? Perhaps that is the problem, in itself? No one, not one person that I saw, attempted to take the arrticle and make a decent discussion out of it.
Premise 1: We have a computer user, who is a journalist, has been using Macs for nigh on 15 years, is not extremely tech savy (Get to that in a mo') and sees that his fellow computers users, most of them on one of the millions of brands of PC and one of the various flavours of Windows, be it from Win98 to WinXP, have, in general, more problems with their computers than he does.
What does all that tell me?
I am a Mac user myself (well, I use a PC as well with Linux and Win2000 on it and I used to be a Windows shop sys admin). I agree with his OBSERVATIONS 100%. I mean observations because apart from his subjective ranting on why the world doesn't string BillG up from the rafters, which is his OPINION, his article has a good point.
I have seen and expereienced the same problems with Windows machines, until learning better, such as the 20 seconds till being hacked when first going online with WinXP and the numerous bugs in the OS over the years. Yes, I know as well as you that putting a simple router in front of the machine stops 90% of the bugs and being careful about mails and what you download and keeping up with pacthces will stop the rest, but it is a real pain and, in my experience, one has to ask the simple question: why?
In that I agree with the article. Using Windows is more complex than a Mac with OSX. Now on to the tech savy bit. The author writes about the prize that was offered for hacking the webserver Webstar, which was the only real webserver on classic Mac OS. It was never used widely in the server world and thus is not a good example of application security. The guy reveals his lack of expertise because, all those who know that OSX is based on BSD know that the webserver shipped with OSX is Apache, the same one that upsets the numbers game of OSS with respect to commercial offerings when compared to IIS.
Also, the argument that Windows has more software available is a real one, especially for gamers and for CAD and specialised business applications and the situation will stay that way while Windows has such a dominating marketshare.
And that is a reason for staying with Windows, but it isn't the reason why 90% of the world's computer using public uses PC's and Windows. That reason is simply because PC's are more available and most people have no idea that there are alternatives and are only interested in getting a "computer" with which they can chat, browse, mail, write letters, store photos, listen to music etc. Although a Mac arguably, in my experience, does all of this much better than Windows does, most people will simply go to the nearest shop and use what is there.
Ahmen.
As is usual this topic, a guarnateed comment generator, will have the following set of replies:
1. The usual group of people who have little or no experience of the Mac will make comments to the effect that Windows and Linux live off multi button mice, to the extent that certain applications have functionality in the CM that exists no where else in the programme.
2. Those same people will make comments to the effect that a three year old child can learn to use the right mouse button (They've obviously never done tech support!) and that Apple is therefore treating its user as being mentally defecient.
3. The people who actually use Macs will make the usual response that you can tack any two button mouse with scroll wheel and USB onto your Mac. (There is even one PC guy here who says that he feels insulted that Apple doesn't sell multi button mice and that's his reason for not buying a Mac, although I suspect that his problem has more to do with his rigid views)
4. The people who have done tech support for family and friends will know that most NORMAL people do not know what the right mouse button does.
And this last group is the one that has the point and it is the reason Apple does so well with its Mac, but more importantly with the iPod and iTunes: Your average NORMAL consumer is NOT interested in whether a gadget can has all sorts of myriad options. Your average NORMAL person wants a gadget that makes their life easier, not more complex, and computers, for the most part, make their lives more complex.
In spite of this and in spite of the fact that you can use any multi button mouse with OSX (The crowd that thinks Apple should offer multi button mice because any "three year old can use them" is ironically unable to fathom the fact that any USB mouse with two buttons and a scroll wheel works in OSX), such as I do (McAlly mouse), I think Apple should offer two buttoned mice with scroll wheels of their own design and brand on their store website as an option for those who want them.
Not default, but as an option in a popup menu, the same as choosing more RAM or another HD.
That will effectively kill these arguments once and for all. It won't make that much difference, I think, to those who complain about Apple all the time, because those people will always complain, no matter what Apple, Microsoft or Linus does.
This is true, but it's becoming less so over time. Apple is moving away from netinfo these days and there is a lot less usage of it moving from 10.1 to 10.3. To be fair, files that are maintained by the system, such as hostconfig, have a warning in them to that effect:
/etc/hostconfig
##
#
##
# This file is maintained by the system control panels
##
I'm not a pro in all the config files in the system, but I'm glad that Apple is moving away from netinfo. Stephan Somogyi, the guy who helped write BBEdit and MacPerl and who used to have a column on ZDNet, warned in the beginning that netinfo was a single point of failure similar to the register when OSX 10.0 first came out. Other people must have taken this to heart because there is definitely less reliance on it these days.
Copyright infringment, the most devastating crime against mankind the universe has ever known, but one which the righteous courts will righteously punish by giving these henious destroyers of civilisation, as we know it, harsher punishments than is given to war criminals accused of genocide.
All hail the almighty dollar and the lords of money.
In case you missed it in my other post, I wonder how much effort you really put in to the problem of your default browser. You can change the default browser in Internet Explorer as well, and there are at least two third party apps that do this as well.
5 minutes in Google would have told you that.
I agree that the reasons I gave look like your average Mac zealot, but the guy asked why the original would prefer OSX over Linux.
Those reasons, cliched or not, are real.
I should have put in a disclaimer that OSX is not perfect and that there are occasional hardware problems, but my experience on the whole over 15 years of using PC's (from Windows 2.11) and Macs (System 6) is that Apple's hardware is among the best there is overall.
I've had PC hardware from no name chinese brands that fail rapidly, Dell stuff that fails often enough to be a real problem (I used to be a Sysadmin for Windows and dell machines) and IBM stuff that is as good as or better than Apples, but really, only HP and IBM are as good as Apple in terms of hardware quality in my experience.
And your comment about a Linuc head only going for the hardware is simplistic, don't you think. OSX has a lot of features and gimmicks that are nowhere to be found in Linux (and vice versa, of course) and those could be valid reasons for wanting to use it as well. It's not just the hardware.
At last you're actually posting something like dialog yourself.
I'm not a heavy X11 user myself in OSX, but I'll take your word for it, and will agree that you'll have a more unified experience using Linux with OpenOffice.
However, I still have to wonder how much time and effort you put into the default browser problem. 5 minutes on google would have told you that you can change the default browser through myriad other means, one of which, simply opening up Internet Explorer and changing the http and https helper apps, would have done the trick, and there are also at least two third party apps that do the same thing.
But anyway, if you're happy with Gentoo, then all the power to you. I still use Debian on my x86 machine and I'm happy with that too.