So use a real database instead of Access? I mean, seriously, MS Access is a toy. Its only usefulness on the Windows side of the equation is as a front-end to a real database back end such as MS SQL Server or another ODBC compliant datastore.
If you need a lightweight database for a single user, there's Filemaker (which exists cross platform), and it's by most accounts better than Access. If you need a real database, take your pick of MySQL or PostgresQL or any of a number of other databases.
There's no reason WebLogic shouldn't run on OS X. It's written entirely in Java (although I know the Windows NT version has some accelerator stuff for the network portion, utilizing JNI). BEA might not support such a configuration, but it should work.
Tuxedo... bleh... it's a transaction server, and supposedly a good one, but I mainly see it used in shops (like McKesson) where there's a lot of legacy code in COBOL and C.
Care to back up your claims about high reliability, or lack thereof, with Apple Xserves?
I wonder how Apple insists on being a platform by themselves. If Mac OS X was -- all of it -- free software, or if they used the X Window Server, or if they just used Debian, or if they licensed it, then they would have a viable platform.
Ah, your real argument emerges. It ain't Free or 100% Open Source, and it doesn't use your favorite Linux distro, so it must be crap. Get over it. I'd rather use BSD (which OS X is) instead of Linux for enterprise applications. X11 is currently available for OS X, and will ship standard with the next release of the OS.
I guess making Darwin's source freely available isn't "Open" enough.
I might point out that, even if WebSphere isn't available on OS X, other J2EE application servers are. Having said that, I don't see why WebSphere shouldn't run on OS X, since IIRC it's written entirely in Java, and OS X has a top-notch JRE which is JDK 1.4.1 compliant.
Hum, this mouse is weird. Something's missing. Oh right, it has just one button. How strange. Context-sensitive menus and mousewheels nowhere to be seen.
Which is why Mac power users buy their favorite replacement mouse with multiple buttons and scroll wheels. If you can scrape together at least $15 to $30, you can buy a decent mouse.
Mac OS X has full support for multiple buttons (right mouse button works for contextual menus) and scroll wheels.
If you want to pop up a contextual menu without the right mouse button, you hold down the Control key and click with the mouse. Simple.
Beyond that, the thread earlier today about Apple's refund policy pointed out that, in several instances, Apple hardware had horrible design mistakes, too.
What horrible design mistakes? You are clearly ignorant of the history behind the class action lawsuit that brought about this refund.
Certain early model G3 Macintosh computers (such as the beige G3 tower) do not have full support under MacOS X. Either Apple decided to not support certain features of the hardware, such as hardware-accelerated DVD playback (a feature on most of the early G3 machines, later dropped), or they didn't have drivers that fully accelerated graphics on the video hardware that shipped by default with the machine (such as the ATI Rage hardware that came in the Wallstreet Powerbooks).
This wasn't really a design mistake. The hardware wasn't botched. Apple just decided to not support some hardware configurations which they led consumers to believe they would. It's not that the machines won't work at all under MacOS X, just some hardware features.
Sure you can upgrade the ram in an x-serve, or the processor. But at what price?
From Pricewatch: G4 1.2GHZ upgrade: $465 Athlon XP 2100: $61
Why is this modded as informative? It's misleading at the very least.
First off, the XServe is already running at 1.33 GHz (single or dual processor), so what's the frelling point of putting a 1.2 GHz processor in there? The upgrade you cite is designed specifically to fit in one of the older-model G4 machines (running significantly slower than 1 GHz).
The price difference is not just the chip. The G4 upgrade is a daughter card with a processor and cache memory (including L3 cache on most G4 daughter cards, these days). If the card contains L3 cache, that's about a megabyte or more of expensive high-speed SRAM.
The Athlon XP 2100 is a stand-alone chip, which I might add still requires a heat sink. No L3 cache, though, and no daughter card, so of course it's going to be cheaper.
Of course, FSF picks what to uphold. They are a movement. They make strategic decisions that will further their ideals. That's why Free Software is different from open-source software. For instance, their decisions over whether to use LPL of GPL for license is a strategic decision. If you didn't know that all this time, it's time you realized it.
Of course I realize it. I'm just pointing out that the FSF comes across as hypocritical at times because of this fact. Furthermore, I might point out that "Open Source" is a superset of "Free Software." Just because a particular license doesn't get the FSF's political stamp of approval doesn't mean it isn't a valid Open Source license. IIRC, the FSF doesn't like Apple's own home-grown Open Source license. That's fine with me. There are some projects on which I'd release code under the GPL, if it suited me to do so, but not others. I've got a ton of different Open Source compliant licenses to choose from, not the least of which is the BSD license.
So the real question is which side you are on: Free Software? Open-Source? Proprietary? Pick your side and stay on it.
I'm on my side. I don't have to support someone else's agenda if it doesn't dovetail with my agenda. There's room in this world for all different models of software development. I develop proprietary software every day for my current client, but I've also written Open Source code. Don't presume to give me orders because I refuse to be pinned to one specific group's dogma and ideology.
Also, again, I point out that your distinction between "Free" and "Open" software is at best arbitrary, and that by definition Free Software is a subset of Open Source.
I guess Steve Ballmer and Steve Jobs are your role models huh?
What the f*ck does that have to do with the price of tea in China? I merely stated my personal opinion, that Richard Stallman has the emotional maturity of a small child. I can back this up with personal observations and those of my peers. His temper tantrums are widely spoken of with great amusement at MIT. The man took a frigging sledge hammer to a Symbolics LISP machine, for crying out loud. He has crying fits when his code doesn't compile. And he's a slime bag when it comes to recruiting for the FSF, IMHO; I'm basing that opinion on my personal e-mail exchanges with the man when I was an undergrad at MIT.
What this has to do with my personal role models is a mystery to me.
Ironic that you'd lump Ballmer and Jobs together, considering that they're very different human beings with vastly different personalities and decidedly different grasps on technology issues. I guess if you wear FSF-sanctioned glasses, everything is colored "them" or "us." Considering that Apple has done a good job of making much of OS X Open Source (the Darwin BSD core, and I believe the ZeroConf implementation called Rendezvous), I think Jobs is of a different stripe than Ballmer; they've even contributed back to many open source projects, including KHTML.
As far as I know, Ballmer's done nothing but denigrate Open Source, claiming it's all commie crap and anti-capitalist.
I don't think I'd pattern myself after either Jobs or Ballmer, but I wouldn't be stupid enough to liken one to the other. Sounds like an attempt on your part at character assassination through unsavory association.
One might think that I dislike the FSF and the GNU project, but nothing could be farther from the truth. I like what the FSF and the GNU project does for the world. I just temper that enthusiasm with the realization that they have a political agenda that doesn't always intersect with mine. If Stallman and his cohorts had their way, there wouldn't be any proprietary software left, and that's simply not practical or realistic. Nor do I want to give away every single piece of software I write.
Show some proper gratitude to those who choose to give away source code freely, but don't demand or expect it as an entitlement!
IIRC, Microsoft has already indicated that the next generation XBox (XBox 2) would include PVR functionality. It woudln't be hard for them to include DVD burning as well, if they could justify the cost. So this speculation is right on target, and tracks well with prior announcements.
So, I guess that makes their Linux drivers better than the current crop of drivers for Windows 2000?
FWIW, I have had no problems with Catalyst drivers for Windows 2000! I have a Radeon 9600 Pro, and it works flawlessly under Windows.
I have tried the Catalyst drivers under Gentoo -- it's as simple as emerge ati-drivers -- but they don't seem to work exactly right under Quake 3. Not sure why. Seems the bottom half of the screen is corrupted somehow. This is the kind of stuff ATI is trying to fix with their new Linux driver initiative. I'm all for it!
Specifically, they said they were temporarily halting production to allow their inventory to shrink to more reasonable levels. It costs money to store unsold merchandise in warehouses. I imagine once the number of unsold GameCubes drops to a certain level, they'll resume production.
This could happen soon if Soul Calibur II moves a lot of GameCube units.
How'd this wind up as a comment for the article on a Windows virus? The parent comment clearly belongs to today's article about growing synthetic diamonds.
You're saying it
might be a good thing if Apple had won established IP rights on critical GUI elements?
Then Microsoft would have either had to cease shipping Windows, or redesign it completely, or pay royalties or other licensing fees to Apple. This would recompense Apple for all the hard work they did in human factors research; after all, the Mac GUI wasn't a one-for-one duplicate of the Xerox GUI that inspired it. I might also point out that Apple didn't steal; they paid Xerox, partially in Apple stock IIRC.
Of course, since Apple was claiming a look-and-feel copyright, they'd have an essentially perpetual monopoly on the concepts behind their unique look-and-feel. This could be a really Bad Thing, because everyone who wanted a GUI in their product would have to invent brand new metaphors, and there would be no standardization in even the most general areas of GUI design. This was Stallman's fear; I remember when, as an MIT undergrad, students recruited by the FSF handed out leaflets warning of the evils of this lawsuit. The leaflets showed the logical extremes of this kind of thinking. Imagine a world where every manufacturer produces a keyboard with a different layout of keys. You couldn't transfer your typing skills, you'd have to re-learn how to type every time you switched equipment vendors.
We'd all be living in a happy smile Apple owned GUI environment now. It's scary just to contemplate.
Yes, it is, in that we'd be living with a monopoly. Of course, the situation we're in right now is so much better. (And yes, that's sarcasm.) I hate using Windows, but I am forced to use it at every job I work at. I am constantly derided as an owner of Apple equipment. I live in fear that my OS of choice and my UI of choice will be stomped into oblivion by the Redmond Giant. And it galls me to think that Apple helped make Windows what it is today, by doing all the hard research and acting like the technology leader it is.
So please forgive me for having a flight of fancy in which I dream of a different outcome of that particular lawsuit. Perhaps the result would have been terrible. Perhaps not.
It's not as though companies don't still sue each other over copying UI widgets -- the only difference is, they're now doing this with patents (e.g., Adobe's recent spat with Macromedia). The benefit here is that patents expire, so eventually (within a decade), anyone can implement the widgets in question without paying a fee of any kind.
To tie this back to the original discussion of GCC compiler support for SCO, I'll reiterate what I said before: I think the FSF picks and chooses when to take the moral high ground. I personally think Richard Stallman has the emotional maturity of a small child, and I bet he's one of those clamoring to yank SCO support from GCC. I mean, come on, this is the same guy who was telling KDE developers that they had to beg forgiveness from their GNOME/FSF counterparts due to his beef over the licensing of Qt and the cooption of GNU code into KDE versions of applications.
What's really weird is pondering why anybody would run emacs on a Mac in the first place.
Emacs is a great text editor. It's the first real programmer's editor I ever used, and my favorite. Of course I want to use it on whatever computing platform I'm on.
That said, all Mac OS X systems ship with emacs and gcc now. Amazing how the wheel turns, sometimes.
Stallman was POed at Apple for look-and-feel copyright lawsuits against Microsoft. I agree that look-and-feel isn't something you should sue over, but maybe the world would have been a better place if Microsoft had been knocked down a peg or two by this. I think Stallman, and the FSF in general, picks and chooses which things to get morally indignant about -- specifically, if something runs contrary to his agenda.
While it may or may not hurt SCO to yank GCC support, it will make the FSF (and Open Source advocates in general) look infantile. It's about as infantile as denying FSF products to the Mac platform (old or new) because Stallman has a beef with one of Apple's political stances. I think, therefore, the Open Source community should take the moral high road and continue to support SCO's OS products with GCC, while perhaps also including the README.SCO to educate users and administrators about the current situation.
i'm not insinuating that the american way is wrong (although it obviously is - if my knowledge is correct, Mr. Webster chose to drop those silent "u"s more or less arbitrarily, for no other reason than to show Britain that the states weren't part of it)
Webster wasn't alone; Benjamin Franklin also was a champion of simplified spelling, according to this article. It wasn't all about thumbing our noses at the British or misguided demonstrations of patriotism.
I might also point out that the "simplified" spellings in many cases predate the version used in contemporary British prose.
I found more information on the history of spelling reform (on both sides of the Atlantic) in this article.
I don't know if they're pushing ethernet as the preferred connection method. But the device supports both ethernet and USB 2.0 (presumably HiSpeed). So you have your choice of traditional style syncing (via direct connection to the PC) or docked syncing. What could be better?
The description of how the ethernet stuff works in another comment is really slick, and makes me want one... especially if that can work for me in Linux and Mac OS X!
Otherwise, you just point a web browser at it: there's a web server in it which will serve you a completely cross-platform Java applet to do your transfers.
So does this mean I could theoretically use the Karma with any ethernet-enabled computer with a compliant web browser and a decent Java implementation? I ask this because the web site for the Karma implies Windows compatibility, but not Mac OS X compatibility.
What I'd really like to see is iTunes integration on the OS X side. Since many of the other players that were announced by Rio seem to be OS X compatible out of the box, I'm hopeful.
I might say "I couldn't care less". Americans say they "could care less" but mean the same thing. A negative seems to be lost somewhere there.
I'm American, and I use the logically and grammatically correct "I couldn't care less." Americans who say they "could care less" are either ignorant, or stupid, or... careless. Just because many Americans screw this up doesn't mean it's any more grammatically correct by the rules of American English.
I mean, come on, if you could care less, then you're not at the least point of caring!
In case you're wondering, center/centre is from the Latin centrum, so the French were right.
Right about what? English is not a Romance language, despite what some Latin pedagogs might try to brainwash you into believing. So Latin (or French) spellings should not define what is considered "correct" in English. Therefore, using Latin as a basis for determining what spellings are right and wrong is utterly stupid.
English is, in fact, a Germanic language, and as such, Germanic spellings would make more sense (if I were to use your logic). German and its ancestors tend to use -er rather than -re. Of course, if we wanted to preserve spellings based on where a word was borrowed from, English would be even less uniform than it currently is.
You might recall that some things were changed just as a nice little #$@# off to the Commonwealth. Case in point: driving on the right side of the road (not to start a flame war, but economically and logically it doesn't make sense)
Poor example. I might point out that much of Europe drives the way Americans do; only the British and their colonies insist on driving on the left.
Well between Webster's desire to change the language himself, and the desire to reduce the number of letters in commonly used words (letters = money for printers) Webster started changing shit just cause he could.
I've heard this before, and it couldn't be more wrong. Nice revisionist history. Most "simplified" American spellings predate Noah Webster, and by a lot. I might also point out that there are some uses of words in America that persisted even though they fell out of use in England -- case in point, the word "mad" in the sense of being angry (rather than insane). Shakespeare used "mad" in this sense, but it subsequently fell out of favor in England, whereas this sense of the word persists in America to this day.
Noah Webster wasn't perfect, but he was a lot more rational and scientific than you give him credit for.
In any case, if your target audience is wider than the US (and maybe Japan as the English they use there tends toward American), it is best to use the international spellings - colour, flavour - than our utterly made up spellings.
U.S. spellings are no more "made up" than British spellings. In many cases, the American spelling is derived from a more conservative orthography than the British version, which by any rational metric would make the American spelling perfectly "standard," as you put it.
It isn't just that our spellings are simpler in the U.S. Noah Webster did a good job of figuring out what was in common use and pruning out variant spellings. That the British made different choices in their standardization efforts isn't surprising, considering the centuries of cultural drift between the Americas and the British Isles (even before the revolution).
It's established fact that the English didn't care much for standardized spellings in their early colonial years. Even British monarchs would spell their own names multiple different ways in the same document. (I believe Henry V is the one I'm thinking of, but my memory's starting to fail me.)
Seriously, "proper" implies superiority or correctness. In fact, however, many American spellings are derived from more conservative orthographies than their British counterparts (e.g., words ending in -ize here in the States, versus words ending in -ise in Britain; the suffix is derived from the Greek -izo). One might conclude, then, that the American spellings are in some cases more "proper" than their British counterparts.
Or you could simply avoid using inflammatory words that imply value judgment, such as the word "proper," and everyone would be happier.
Well, I found the European fetish for referring to British English as "proper" English to be objectionable. Words like "proper" are bothersome because they imply superiority, when in reality, the differences in spelling on either side of the Atlantic Ocean are almost all attributable to a lack of standardized spellings prior to the British colonizing North America. (Well, that, and divergent efforts in England and America to rectify the situation after war had separated the two entities politically.)
Still, referring to people who are born and raised in the U.S. as "unfortunate" is probably a bit more overtly inflammatory.
Slashdot Mirror
So use a real database instead of Access? I mean, seriously, MS Access is a toy. Its only usefulness on the Windows side of the equation is as a front-end to a real database back end such as MS SQL Server or another ODBC compliant datastore.
If you need a lightweight database for a single user, there's Filemaker (which exists cross platform), and it's by most accounts better than Access. If you need a real database, take your pick of MySQL or PostgresQL or any of a number of other databases.
So why this ridiculous fixation with Access?
Tuxedo... bleh... it's a transaction server, and supposedly a good one, but I mainly see it used in shops (like McKesson) where there's a lot of legacy code in COBOL and C.
Care to back up your claims about high reliability, or lack thereof, with Apple Xserves?
Ah, your real argument emerges. It ain't Free or 100% Open Source, and it doesn't use your favorite Linux distro, so it must be crap. Get over it. I'd rather use BSD (which OS X is) instead of Linux for enterprise applications. X11 is currently available for OS X, and will ship standard with the next release of the OS.
I guess making Darwin's source freely available isn't "Open" enough.
A platform by itself? Puh-leeze.
I might point out that, even if WebSphere isn't available on OS X, other J2EE application servers are. Having said that, I don't see why WebSphere shouldn't run on OS X, since IIRC it's written entirely in Java, and OS X has a top-notch JRE which is JDK 1.4.1 compliant.
Which is why Mac power users buy their favorite replacement mouse with multiple buttons and scroll wheels. If you can scrape together at least $15 to $30, you can buy a decent mouse.
Mac OS X has full support for multiple buttons (right mouse button works for contextual menus) and scroll wheels.
If you want to pop up a contextual menu without the right mouse button, you hold down the Control key and click with the mouse. Simple.
What horrible design mistakes? You are clearly ignorant of the history behind the class action lawsuit that brought about this refund.
Certain early model G3 Macintosh computers (such as the beige G3 tower) do not have full support under MacOS X. Either Apple decided to not support certain features of the hardware, such as hardware-accelerated DVD playback (a feature on most of the early G3 machines, later dropped), or they didn't have drivers that fully accelerated graphics on the video hardware that shipped by default with the machine (such as the ATI Rage hardware that came in the Wallstreet Powerbooks).
This wasn't really a design mistake. The hardware wasn't botched. Apple just decided to not support some hardware configurations which they led consumers to believe they would. It's not that the machines won't work at all under MacOS X, just some hardware features.
Why is this modded as informative? It's misleading at the very least.
First off, the XServe is already running at 1.33 GHz (single or dual processor), so what's the frelling point of putting a 1.2 GHz processor in there? The upgrade you cite is designed specifically to fit in one of the older-model G4 machines (running significantly slower than 1 GHz).
The price difference is not just the chip. The G4 upgrade is a daughter card with a processor and cache memory (including L3 cache on most G4 daughter cards, these days). If the card contains L3 cache, that's about a megabyte or more of expensive high-speed SRAM.
The Athlon XP 2100 is a stand-alone chip, which I might add still requires a heat sink. No L3 cache, though, and no daughter card, so of course it's going to be cheaper.
Apple's running just about all of its web servers on OS X, which as you know is BSD underneath. Not Linux.
Of course I realize it. I'm just pointing out that the FSF comes across as hypocritical at times because of this fact. Furthermore, I might point out that "Open Source" is a superset of "Free Software." Just because a particular license doesn't get the FSF's political stamp of approval doesn't mean it isn't a valid Open Source license. IIRC, the FSF doesn't like Apple's own home-grown Open Source license. That's fine with me. There are some projects on which I'd release code under the GPL, if it suited me to do so, but not others. I've got a ton of different Open Source compliant licenses to choose from, not the least of which is the BSD license.
I'm on my side. I don't have to support someone else's agenda if it doesn't dovetail with my agenda. There's room in this world for all different models of software development. I develop proprietary software every day for my current client, but I've also written Open Source code. Don't presume to give me orders because I refuse to be pinned to one specific group's dogma and ideology.
Also, again, I point out that your distinction between "Free" and "Open" software is at best arbitrary, and that by definition Free Software is a subset of Open Source.
What the f*ck does that have to do with the price of tea in China? I merely stated my personal opinion, that Richard Stallman has the emotional maturity of a small child. I can back this up with personal observations and those of my peers. His temper tantrums are widely spoken of with great amusement at MIT. The man took a frigging sledge hammer to a Symbolics LISP machine, for crying out loud. He has crying fits when his code doesn't compile. And he's a slime bag when it comes to recruiting for the FSF, IMHO; I'm basing that opinion on my personal e-mail exchanges with the man when I was an undergrad at MIT.
What this has to do with my personal role models is a mystery to me.
Ironic that you'd lump Ballmer and Jobs together, considering that they're very different human beings with vastly different personalities and decidedly different grasps on technology issues. I guess if you wear FSF-sanctioned glasses, everything is colored "them" or "us." Considering that Apple has done a good job of making much of OS X Open Source (the Darwin BSD core, and I believe the ZeroConf implementation called Rendezvous), I think Jobs is of a different stripe than Ballmer; they've even contributed back to many open source projects, including KHTML.
As far as I know, Ballmer's done nothing but denigrate Open Source, claiming it's all commie crap and anti-capitalist.
I don't think I'd pattern myself after either Jobs or Ballmer, but I wouldn't be stupid enough to liken one to the other. Sounds like an attempt on your part at character assassination through unsavory association.
One might think that I dislike the FSF and the GNU project, but nothing could be farther from the truth. I like what the FSF and the GNU project does for the world. I just temper that enthusiasm with the realization that they have a political agenda that doesn't always intersect with mine. If Stallman and his cohorts had their way, there wouldn't be any proprietary software left, and that's simply not practical or realistic. Nor do I want to give away every single piece of software I write.
Show some proper gratitude to those who choose to give away source code freely, but don't demand or expect it as an entitlement!
IIRC, Microsoft has already indicated that the next generation XBox (XBox 2) would include PVR functionality. It woudln't be hard for them to include DVD burning as well, if they could justify the cost. So this speculation is right on target, and tracks well with prior announcements.
Thanks for the link! I applied today as a Linux Catalyst beta tester. I encourage other Linux users with recent ATI cards to do the same.
FWIW, I have had no problems with Catalyst drivers for Windows 2000! I have a Radeon 9600 Pro, and it works flawlessly under Windows.
I have tried the Catalyst drivers under Gentoo -- it's as simple as emerge ati-drivers -- but they don't seem to work exactly right under Quake 3. Not sure why. Seems the bottom half of the screen is corrupted somehow. This is the kind of stuff ATI is trying to fix with their new Linux driver initiative. I'm all for it!
Specifically, they said they were temporarily halting production to allow their inventory to shrink to more reasonable levels. It costs money to store unsold merchandise in warehouses. I imagine once the number of unsold GameCubes drops to a certain level, they'll resume production.
This could happen soon if Soul Calibur II moves a lot of GameCube units.
How'd this wind up as a comment for the article on a Windows virus? The parent comment clearly belongs to today's article about growing synthetic diamonds.
Broken slashcode?
Nope, not kidding. Just speculating.
Then Microsoft would have either had to cease shipping Windows, or redesign it completely, or pay royalties or other licensing fees to Apple. This would recompense Apple for all the hard work they did in human factors research; after all, the Mac GUI wasn't a one-for-one duplicate of the Xerox GUI that inspired it. I might also point out that Apple didn't steal; they paid Xerox, partially in Apple stock IIRC.
Of course, since Apple was claiming a look-and-feel copyright, they'd have an essentially perpetual monopoly on the concepts behind their unique look-and-feel. This could be a really Bad Thing, because everyone who wanted a GUI in their product would have to invent brand new metaphors, and there would be no standardization in even the most general areas of GUI design. This was Stallman's fear; I remember when, as an MIT undergrad, students recruited by the FSF handed out leaflets warning of the evils of this lawsuit. The leaflets showed the logical extremes of this kind of thinking. Imagine a world where every manufacturer produces a keyboard with a different layout of keys. You couldn't transfer your typing skills, you'd have to re-learn how to type every time you switched equipment vendors.
Yes, it is, in that we'd be living with a monopoly. Of course, the situation we're in right now is so much better. (And yes, that's sarcasm.) I hate using Windows, but I am forced to use it at every job I work at. I am constantly derided as an owner of Apple equipment. I live in fear that my OS of choice and my UI of choice will be stomped into oblivion by the Redmond Giant. And it galls me to think that Apple helped make Windows what it is today, by doing all the hard research and acting like the technology leader it is.
So please forgive me for having a flight of fancy in which I dream of a different outcome of that particular lawsuit. Perhaps the result would have been terrible. Perhaps not.
It's not as though companies don't still sue each other over copying UI widgets -- the only difference is, they're now doing this with patents (e.g., Adobe's recent spat with Macromedia). The benefit here is that patents expire, so eventually (within a decade), anyone can implement the widgets in question without paying a fee of any kind.
To tie this back to the original discussion of GCC compiler support for SCO, I'll reiterate what I said before: I think the FSF picks and chooses when to take the moral high ground. I personally think Richard Stallman has the emotional maturity of a small child, and I bet he's one of those clamoring to yank SCO support from GCC. I mean, come on, this is the same guy who was telling KDE developers that they had to beg forgiveness from their GNOME/FSF counterparts due to his beef over the licensing of Qt and the cooption of GNU code into KDE versions of applications.
Emacs is a great text editor. It's the first real programmer's editor I ever used, and my favorite. Of course I want to use it on whatever computing platform I'm on.
That said, all Mac OS X systems ship with emacs and gcc now. Amazing how the wheel turns, sometimes.
Stallman was POed at Apple for look-and-feel copyright lawsuits against Microsoft. I agree that look-and-feel isn't something you should sue over, but maybe the world would have been a better place if Microsoft had been knocked down a peg or two by this. I think Stallman, and the FSF in general, picks and chooses which things to get morally indignant about -- specifically, if something runs contrary to his agenda.
While it may or may not hurt SCO to yank GCC support, it will make the FSF (and Open Source advocates in general) look infantile. It's about as infantile as denying FSF products to the Mac platform (old or new) because Stallman has a beef with one of Apple's political stances. I think, therefore, the Open Source community should take the moral high road and continue to support SCO's OS products with GCC, while perhaps also including the README.SCO to educate users and administrators about the current situation.
Webster wasn't alone; Benjamin Franklin also was a champion of simplified spelling, according to this article. It wasn't all about thumbing our noses at the British or misguided demonstrations of patriotism.
I might also point out that the "simplified" spellings in many cases predate the version used in contemporary British prose.
I found more information on the history of spelling reform (on both sides of the Atlantic) in this article.
I don't know if they're pushing ethernet as the preferred connection method. But the device supports both ethernet and USB 2.0 (presumably HiSpeed). So you have your choice of traditional style syncing (via direct connection to the PC) or docked syncing. What could be better?
The description of how the ethernet stuff works in another comment is really slick, and makes me want one... especially if that can work for me in Linux and Mac OS X!
So does this mean I could theoretically use the Karma with any ethernet-enabled computer with a compliant web browser and a decent Java implementation? I ask this because the web site for the Karma implies Windows compatibility, but not Mac OS X compatibility.
What I'd really like to see is iTunes integration on the OS X side. Since many of the other players that were announced by Rio seem to be OS X compatible out of the box, I'm hopeful.
I'm American, and I use the logically and grammatically correct "I couldn't care less." Americans who say they "could care less" are either ignorant, or stupid, or
I mean, come on, if you could care less, then you're not at the least point of caring!
Thank you for sharing that! I just had my first smile of the day.
Right about what? English is not a Romance language, despite what some Latin pedagogs might try to brainwash you into believing. So Latin (or French) spellings should not define what is considered "correct" in English. Therefore, using Latin as a basis for determining what spellings are right and wrong is utterly stupid.
English is, in fact, a Germanic language, and as such, Germanic spellings would make more sense (if I were to use your logic). German and its ancestors tend to use -er rather than -re. Of course, if we wanted to preserve spellings based on where a word was borrowed from, English would be even less uniform than it currently is.
Poor example. I might point out that much of Europe drives the way Americans do; only the British and their colonies insist on driving on the left.
I've heard this before, and it couldn't be more wrong. Nice revisionist history. Most "simplified" American spellings predate Noah Webster, and by a lot. I might also point out that there are some uses of words in America that persisted even though they fell out of use in England -- case in point, the word "mad" in the sense of being angry (rather than insane). Shakespeare used "mad" in this sense, but it subsequently fell out of favor in England, whereas this sense of the word persists in America to this day.
Noah Webster wasn't perfect, but he was a lot more rational and scientific than you give him credit for.
U.S. spellings are no more "made up" than British spellings. In many cases, the American spelling is derived from a more conservative orthography than the British version, which by any rational metric would make the American spelling perfectly "standard," as you put it.
It isn't just that our spellings are simpler in the U.S. Noah Webster did a good job of figuring out what was in common use and pruning out variant spellings. That the British made different choices in their standardization efforts isn't surprising, considering the centuries of cultural drift between the Americas and the British Isles (even before the revolution).
It's established fact that the English didn't care much for standardized spellings in their early colonial years. Even British monarchs would spell their own names multiple different ways in the same document. (I believe Henry V is the one I'm thinking of, but my memory's starting to fail me.)
And who, pray tell, decides what is "proper?"
Seriously, "proper" implies superiority or correctness. In fact, however, many American spellings are derived from more conservative orthographies than their British counterparts (e.g., words ending in -ize here in the States, versus words ending in -ise in Britain; the suffix is derived from the Greek -izo). One might conclude, then, that the American spellings are in some cases more "proper" than their British counterparts.
Or you could simply avoid using inflammatory words that imply value judgment, such as the word "proper," and everyone would be happier.
Well, I found the European fetish for referring to British English as "proper" English to be objectionable. Words like "proper" are bothersome because they imply superiority, when in reality, the differences in spelling on either side of the Atlantic Ocean are almost all attributable to a lack of standardized spellings prior to the British colonizing North America. (Well, that, and divergent efforts in England and America to rectify the situation after war had separated the two entities politically.)
Still, referring to people who are born and raised in the U.S. as "unfortunate" is probably a bit more overtly inflammatory.