Switzerland is a rich country and, perhaps not surprisingly, it has one of the world's highest percentages of Mac users. Partially, I think it's because the Swiss often really do enjoy flaunting their wealth, but partially it's also because of the word of mouth advertising: Macs have a reputation of having less troubles and being easier to use than Windows, true or not. I admin a 50 plus user company here that is 80% Mac and Macs certainly do give me the impression of needing less admin overhead than Windows. That said, even though I own a Mac Pro myself (I am extremely happy with this computer and plan to get another one when this one eventually dies), I find the Mac snobbishness and the mindless Buy-Whatever-New-Apple-Gadget-Comes-Out mentality tiring.
I will not go to the US again either. Not that I dislike the country but the treatment and procedures at borders and airports by border officials and customs makes it simply not worth the effort.
I lived in West Berlin in the 80s and I've crossed the border from Canada to the US numerous times. The East German border guards were most certainly better educated, more polite and much more civil than the trash that the US employs to defend itself against that terrorist state to its north.
ONE guy killed all five of them at once. It wasn't 5 separate incidents. Additionally, that case is scandalous because the guy was a known felon who had been released from jail despite his record of violence and mental instability.
Way to go, man. Conflating Hans Reisen's murder case with Peter Watts case of being stopped and beaten while LEAVING your country for no special reason whatsoever. Fucking idiot.
Ahmen! I feel great sorrow for the American and allied soldiers that face the daily danger of death in Afghanistan and Iraq. And I feel great sorrow for the peoples of those countries. And I agree absolutely with your view; the war cannot be won.
Re:This is what linguists have been waiting for
on
Monkeys With Syntax
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I find it hilarious that a slashdot piece on monkey syntax gets derailed into a flamefest on Dubya and Obama.
No, you're trying to troll the forums, and you're succeeding too. There's a famous argument that is used to defend Microsoft's OS costs: No one is forcing you to use it. The same applies to the GPL. You are free to choose whatever license you want for your software. Forcing you to choose a certain license would, however, not necessarily be communist, since communism entails forced redistribution of property. It would be tyrannical, but the American cultural meme is that communism=authoritarianism. Police states like that which Argentina and Chile used to be were just as tyrannical as Cuba or modern Venezuela.
I've read the GPL and I haven't seen anything relating to the redistribution of wealth or any quote from Das Kapital. You just throw buzzwords like "communist philosophy" out there because a) you're american (yours is the only country where anyone would take you seriously with rubbish like that, due to a cultural meme that has no base in reality) and b) you're hoping to excite the masses, i.e. troll the forums. I don't have mod points today, but you would get a -1 Troll if I did.
Calling Michelle Obama a monkey is more offensive than calling George Bush a monkey because in her case it is because of her race, not because of her person. In Bush's case it is a personal insult because of certain people's perception of him, personally, being clumsy and lacking intelligence.
The problem with propriety software is not necessarily the quality, but the cost. The price of 3DS Max may be a painful but possible one for you, but that is certainly not the case in most of the world outside of developed countries. If someone in South Africa, for instance, where the price of 3DS Max is the equivalent of 3/4 of a years salary in some cases, were to wish to do 3D, he would have to either use a pirated copy of 3DS Max, or use something like Blender.
That is because Illustrator's native format is pdf. Honestly, mate, I own and use Illustrator and it is NOT the case that illustrator doesn't have gotchas or strange UI decisions.
Autocad, Solidworks, ProEng, about almost all 3D and CAD/engineering software for starters . Apple's situation is much better than it used to be, but Apple has become so enthused with its successes over the past few years that it has started becoming more and more like Microsoft, i.e. it makes things so difficult for third party developers that many just don't bother, and I'm not talking about the iPhone, but about Apple's dropping of the Carbon APIs. Those were incidentally the ones that most developers of cross platform software used to port their apps to the Mac. Developers like Adobe have had to rewrite ALL their software. Many have decided that with the uptake around Windows 7 after the Vista desaster, it isn't worth bothering about the Mac anymore, and have left the platform for all those hobby prgrammers coding in XCode to make pretty but useless apps that working people cannot use.
And I say that as some who is a Mac system administrator, writing this on his home Mac Pro (dual quad core).
Wow, I don't know if you noticed, but a) there's a recession out there, and b)his is certainly not the only company with extreme limits on spending in it and even harsher limits on support staff. I honestly think I wouldn't hire someone like you. An employee who has so little financial savvy doesn't deserve employment.
I'm writing this on a Mac pro, with Adobe CS3 installed (and not a cracked version), and yet I also have an Ubuntu Linux install on my Lenovo Laptop where I do a fair amount of development because Linux has less to hinder you being flexible with the software. On Ubuntu, I use the GIMP for graphics. The latest Versions, 2.6.x have changed quite a bit from the terrible versions you're used to. It's now much more similar to the way Photoshop works on Windows.
I find this whole GIMP isn't Photoshop OH Noes business tiresome. It's free and does an excellent job for most of what I need. If you need pre-press, you're not going to do it on Linux anyway, so what is the argument again? I think the biggest mistakes ever made with the GIMP were a)the name, which is really juvenile and b)porting it to the Mac and Windows, where it gets compared with a host of other software which either cost a lot of money (and no, cracks do honestly not count) or do not offer the same flexibility. Neither Pixelmator on the Mac (which costs money) or Paint.Net offer the same flexibility. They do, however, offer somewhat better interfaces, although that is a matter of opinion, because especially Paint.Net is so damn slow it cannot handle large images at all well, and I personally hate the interface.
The argument that Photoshop can group layers is also bogus. Photoshop has had that for some time, since version 7 or 6, I think, but I've been using Photoshop since version 1.0.7 and all of us who used it until the modern versions were quite happy at the time , more happy than now, in fact, since the modern Adobe suites are massive bloatware fests in place of the fast reliable software that we used to have. Photoshop 7 ran well on a 300MHz machine. Version CS3 is practically unusable on a 1.8GHz Mac Mini. And are the extra features stuff you use every day, and if so, how did you do it back in 1999?
I live in Switzerland and the Swiss plugs are indeed very good, as they are modular and almost all extenders are recessed so your kid can't stick anything in there. The best, however, that I've ever seen are the German plugs. They are all recessed. Very, very good design.
On the other hand, this is The Register we're talking about, and they will "bash" anything they can, including Microsoft. That's how you do business as the IT version of the Sun or Daily Mirror tabloid newspapers.
Neal Asher and Richard Morgan, two relatively new British SF authors of hard SciFi, both just as bloody and violent as Alastair Reynolds yet with much better characterisation, and less waste ; they get to the point very fast and keep the pace through much of the book. Seriously, give them both a try, starting with Asher's Grid-Linked and Morgan's Altered Carbon.
This is a terrible idea. It reminds me strongly of the Dune prequels written by Brian Herbert and company, which are simply terrible. The books have no depth and simplistic plots and less-than-one-dimensional characters. All this has cheapened the legacy of Frank Herbert's original Dune series, which were masterpieces, especially the first two books. Asimov himself mess up badly by overextending the Foundation franchise and his estate will destroy the I, Robot franchise a little bit more than the movie did, which was so bad, it's not funny.
I don't think Apple will lose this case, given the current legal situation, but if by some slim chance Psystar wins its case on the grounds that Apple should have no control over how their product is used as long as the software license is paid for, i.e. that the EULA doesn't hold in this case, then Apple will have to contend with a legion of people and companies doing this. On the one hand this would be the thing that would enable Apple to break Microsoft's stranglehold on the PC market, on the other it weigh Apple down with an enormous amount of support costs (unless they specifically exclude this in their EULA) and also do damage to their brand as it would get watered down. The latter is an important part of Apple's strength and I can understand them fighting this for dear life.
If Microsoft didn't help make computers standardized and way cheap, we would still be running $3000 computers, especially if IBM or Apple was at the helm. There might not be even Intel today.
Microsoft had nothing to do with the price fall in personal computers, IMO. If I remember correctly, that was a result of the price war that Compaq started back in 1993 or 1994. And fat lot of good it did them because look what happened to Compaq. Microsoft's OS costs MORE than it did back in 1994, and Windows 7 is more expensive, once again. In real terms, adjusted for inflation, it's probably not changed much, but I don't think that Microsoft has ever reduced prices on its software unless there was serious competition, such as with browsers, or with its terrible MSN service.
No, the Russians saved us from the Nazis, and they would've gotten around to demolishing Japan as well given time. In fact, that's *why* the US threw the nukes at them, they didn't want Japan to lose against Russia as that would've tipped the post-war's world balance in their favor. Communism you did, but I'm not sure that Imperialism is much better.
This needs to be highlighted. The Russians would have won the war against the Germans on their own, had the allies not opened another front. And the Russians would surely have beaten the Japanese on their own as well. Some two thirds of all Nazi troops were deployed on the eastern front and two thirds of all casualties happened there as well. I'm personally of the opinion that a Russian dominated Europe would have been very bad, much like the Warsaw pact countries were.
However, all that is some 60 years ago, and this 2009. Time has passed and things have changed. Russia is no paradise, but the Soviet Union is gone and America has gotten itself into such deep financial straights as a nation that I find it very difficult to see the US maintaining its global place in the long run.
Slashdot Mirror
Switzerland is a rich country and, perhaps not surprisingly, it has one of the world's highest percentages of Mac users. Partially, I think it's because the Swiss often really do enjoy flaunting their wealth, but partially it's also because of the word of mouth advertising: Macs have a reputation of having less troubles and being easier to use than Windows, true or not. I admin a 50 plus user company here that is 80% Mac and Macs certainly do give me the impression of needing less admin overhead than Windows. That said, even though I own a Mac Pro myself (I am extremely happy with this computer and plan to get another one when this one eventually dies), I find the Mac snobbishness and the mindless Buy-Whatever-New-Apple-Gadget-Comes-Out mentality tiring.
I will not go to the US again either. Not that I dislike the country but the treatment and procedures at borders and airports by border officials and customs makes it simply not worth the effort.
I lived in West Berlin in the 80s and I've crossed the border from Canada to the US numerous times. The East German border guards were most certainly better educated, more polite and much more civil than the trash that the US employs to defend itself against that terrorist state to its north.
ONE guy killed all five of them at once. It wasn't 5 separate incidents. Additionally, that case is scandalous because the guy was a known felon who had been released from jail despite his record of violence and mental instability.
Way to go, man. Conflating Hans Reisen's murder case with Peter Watts case of being stopped and beaten while LEAVING your country for no special reason whatsoever. Fucking idiot.
Ahmen! I feel great sorrow for the American and allied soldiers that face the daily danger of death in Afghanistan and Iraq. And I feel great sorrow for the peoples of those countries. And I agree absolutely with your view; the war cannot be won.
I find it hilarious that a slashdot piece on monkey syntax gets derailed into a flamefest on Dubya and Obama.
No, you're trying to troll the forums, and you're succeeding too. There's a famous argument that is used to defend Microsoft's OS costs: No one is forcing you to use it. The same applies to the GPL. You are free to choose whatever license you want for your software. Forcing you to choose a certain license would, however, not necessarily be communist, since communism entails forced redistribution of property. It would be tyrannical, but the American cultural meme is that communism=authoritarianism. Police states like that which Argentina and Chile used to be were just as tyrannical as Cuba or modern Venezuela.
I've read the GPL and I haven't seen anything relating to the redistribution of wealth or any quote from Das Kapital. You just throw buzzwords like "communist philosophy" out there because a) you're american (yours is the only country where anyone would take you seriously with rubbish like that, due to a cultural meme that has no base in reality) and b) you're hoping to excite the masses, i.e. troll the forums. I don't have mod points today, but you would get a -1 Troll if I did.
Calling Michelle Obama a monkey is more offensive than calling George Bush a monkey because in her case it is because of her race, not because of her person. In Bush's case it is a personal insult because of certain people's perception of him, personally, being clumsy and lacking intelligence.
There is a difference
The problem with propriety software is not necessarily the quality, but the cost. The price of 3DS Max may be a painful but possible one for you, but that is certainly not the case in most of the world outside of developed countries. If someone in South Africa, for instance, where the price of 3DS Max is the equivalent of 3/4 of a years salary in some cases, were to wish to do 3D, he would have to either use a pirated copy of 3DS Max, or use something like Blender.
That is because Illustrator's native format is pdf. Honestly, mate, I own and use Illustrator and it is NOT the case that illustrator doesn't have gotchas or strange UI decisions.
Autocad, Solidworks, ProEng, about almost all 3D and CAD/engineering software for starters . Apple's situation is much better than it used to be, but Apple has become so enthused with its successes over the past few years that it has started becoming more and more like Microsoft, i.e. it makes things so difficult for third party developers that many just don't bother, and I'm not talking about the iPhone, but about Apple's dropping of the Carbon APIs. Those were incidentally the ones that most developers of cross platform software used to port their apps to the Mac. Developers like Adobe have had to rewrite ALL their software. Many have decided that with the uptake around Windows 7 after the Vista desaster, it isn't worth bothering about the Mac anymore, and have left the platform for all those hobby prgrammers coding in XCode to make pretty but useless apps that working people cannot use.
And I say that as some who is a Mac system administrator, writing this on his home Mac Pro (dual quad core).
Wow, I don't know if you noticed, but a) there's a recession out there, and b)his is certainly not the only company with extreme limits on spending in it and even harsher limits on support staff. I honestly think I wouldn't hire someone like you. An employee who has so little financial savvy doesn't deserve employment.
I'm writing this on a Mac pro, with Adobe CS3 installed (and not a cracked version), and yet I also have an Ubuntu Linux install on my Lenovo Laptop where I do a fair amount of development because Linux has less to hinder you being flexible with the software. On Ubuntu, I use the GIMP for graphics. The latest Versions, 2.6.x have changed quite a bit from the terrible versions you're used to. It's now much more similar to the way Photoshop works on Windows.
I find this whole GIMP isn't Photoshop OH Noes business tiresome. It's free and does an excellent job for most of what I need. If you need pre-press, you're not going to do it on Linux anyway, so what is the argument again? I think the biggest mistakes ever made with the GIMP were a)the name, which is really juvenile and b)porting it to the Mac and Windows, where it gets compared with a host of other software which either cost a lot of money (and no, cracks do honestly not count) or do not offer the same flexibility. Neither Pixelmator on the Mac (which costs money) or Paint.Net offer the same flexibility. They do, however, offer somewhat better interfaces, although that is a matter of opinion, because especially Paint.Net is so damn slow it cannot handle large images at all well, and I personally hate the interface.
The argument that Photoshop can group layers is also bogus. Photoshop has had that for some time, since version 7 or 6, I think, but I've been using Photoshop since version 1.0.7 and all of us who used it until the modern versions were quite happy at the time , more happy than now, in fact, since the modern Adobe suites are massive bloatware fests in place of the fast reliable software that we used to have. Photoshop 7 ran well on a 300MHz machine. Version CS3 is practically unusable on a 1.8GHz Mac Mini. And are the extra features stuff you use every day, and if so, how did you do it back in 1999?
I think the only breathtakingly stupid things here are Kdawson and Timothy, who both seem to have never read Slashdot before, despite being editors.
I live in Switzerland and the Swiss plugs are indeed very good, as they are modular and almost all extenders are recessed so your kid can't stick anything in there. The best, however, that I've ever seen are the German plugs. They are all recessed. Very, very good design.
On the other hand, this is The Register we're talking about, and they will "bash" anything they can, including Microsoft. That's how you do business as the IT version of the Sun or Daily Mirror tabloid newspapers.
Neal Asher and Richard Morgan, two relatively new British SF authors of hard SciFi, both just as bloody and violent as Alastair Reynolds yet with much better characterisation, and less waste ; they get to the point very fast and keep the pace through much of the book. Seriously, give them both a try, starting with Asher's Grid-Linked and Morgan's Altered Carbon.
This is a terrible idea. It reminds me strongly of the Dune prequels written by Brian Herbert and company, which are simply terrible. The books have no depth and simplistic plots and less-than-one-dimensional characters. All this has cheapened the legacy of Frank Herbert's original Dune series, which were masterpieces, especially the first two books. Asimov himself mess up badly by overextending the Foundation franchise and his estate will destroy the I, Robot franchise a little bit more than the movie did, which was so bad, it's not funny.
I don't think Apple will lose this case, given the current legal situation, but if by some slim chance Psystar wins its case on the grounds that Apple should have no control over how their product is used as long as the software license is paid for, i.e. that the EULA doesn't hold in this case, then Apple will have to contend with a legion of people and companies doing this. On the one hand this would be the thing that would enable Apple to break Microsoft's stranglehold on the PC market, on the other it weigh Apple down with an enormous amount of support costs (unless they specifically exclude this in their EULA) and also do damage to their brand as it would get watered down. The latter is an important part of Apple's strength and I can understand them fighting this for dear life.
If Microsoft didn't help make computers standardized and way cheap, we would still be running $3000 computers, especially if IBM or Apple was at the helm. There might not be even Intel today.
Microsoft had nothing to do with the price fall in personal computers, IMO. If I remember correctly, that was a result of the price war that Compaq started back in 1993 or 1994. And fat lot of good it did them because look what happened to Compaq. Microsoft's OS costs MORE than it did back in 1994, and Windows 7 is more expensive, once again. In real terms, adjusted for inflation, it's probably not changed much, but I don't think that Microsoft has ever reduced prices on its software unless there was serious competition, such as with browsers, or with its terrible MSN service.
I simply cannot believe this. This insanity needs to be stopped right now. My next vote will go to the Pirate Party.
No, the Russians saved us from the Nazis, and they would've gotten around to demolishing Japan as well given time. In fact, that's *why* the US threw the nukes at them, they didn't want Japan to lose against Russia as that would've tipped the post-war's world balance in their favor. Communism you did, but I'm not sure that Imperialism is much better.
This needs to be highlighted. The Russians would have won the war against the Germans on their own, had the allies not opened another front. And the Russians would surely have beaten the Japanese on their own as well. Some two thirds of all Nazi troops were deployed on the eastern front and two thirds of all casualties happened there as well. I'm personally of the opinion that a Russian dominated Europe would have been very bad, much like the Warsaw pact countries were.
However, all that is some 60 years ago, and this 2009. Time has passed and things have changed. Russia is no paradise, but the Soviet Union is gone and America has gotten itself into such deep financial straights as a nation that I find it very difficult to see the US maintaining its global place in the long run.
So they're going from a back rub to a butt rob?