I think the frequency of jury duty in the USA is less than Space cowboy suggests. I just turned 46 yo, have always been registered to vote (in various jurisdictions), and have served on a jury once. Obviously, I know other people who have done so, a couple of them more than once. But it's hardly like being called up every year. Of course, jurisdictions are bound to vary somewhat depending on how many cases come up, but it's a pretty minimal obligation of citizenship.
FWIW, you really cannot give up UK citizenship by getting US citizenship. I know a number of dual (or multiple) citizenship people between those jurisdictions. None of which, of course, means that there's any particular reason for the commenter to seek US citizenship if it doesn't have any particular benefit in his/her case.
Parent is basically correct. However, pedantically, Dalvik does not, in general, run programs written in the Java language. The language is defined not just by its syntax, but also by a certain set of standard libraries being present and implemented according to Sun/Oracle specification. Dalvik doesn't support all of those, and hence doesn't run Java.
However, Dalvik does run a very Java-like language. One that has all the syntax of Java, and *many* of the same libraries. Moreover (as everyone here knows, I'm sure), programs compiled by 'javac' to.class file may be converted to Dalvik executables (as long as they contain only the subset of Java that Dalvik supports).
It would be proper to prevent Google from claiming that Android "Runs Java"... but then, I'm pretty sure they never claimed that to start with. Indeed mostly--almost entirely--it's claims about patents that should never have been granted, or really just about lawsuits to try to mess up competition and technical progress just for the sake of disruption (I doubt Oracle actually cares that much about the outcome, it's mostly FUD).
Good graphic designers do good work, and should (and generally do) get paid well for doing so. The problem is that most client have no real ability to tell good work from mediocre work. Something that looks bearably OK, is not dramatically unattractive, nothing is outright wrong about, may well be "good enough" for a client with no eye for design. But in the end, it won't be something memorable that sticks in the minds of consumers and helps differentiate the product or company it's attached to. The distinction between adequate and brilliant can be subtle, but that subtle difference can make a BIG difference in the longer run.
Similarly, and maybe more familiar to slashdot readers, the very worst programmers can write some lines of code that "look" pretty much the same as what the best programmers can write. The failures and problems of bad code won't even necessarily be obvious on first impression. The code might well do the one thing it initially needs to, but just be fragile, difficult to maintain, break as soon as unexpected cases arise, etc.
Distinguishing good from bad often requires expertise. Exactly the sort of expertise you should be willing to pay for.
Hemoglobin, because I work for some folks doing amazing stuff in molecular dynamics (and it's easy to spin some superficial symbolism about hemoglobin on top of my heart):
I'm sure the research modeling is interesting and worthwhile, and it's just the writeup that is idiotic. But y'know *computer* models do not ever show anything *conclusively*. The model is only as good as the assumptions that went into designing it. Those might be good and reasonable guesses, but you are only doing the model because you *haven't* (or can't) observe the actual phenomenon.
I consider the suggestion of using a proportional font for programming frivolous and a bit juvenile. In fact, I'm of an age where it seems a little off if my SSH backgrounds are not green-on-black (and hence make them so).
That said, a *good* fixed font really makes a lot of difference. Not too long ago, I found one called Anonymous Pro, that I have become very fond of:
It's freely available, TTF, and I've installed it most places. As much as I hate being forced onto Windows machines, in the few cases where I am, I actually think Consolas is pretty good quality too.
Is anyone conducting something to counter Monty's money-grabbing schemes. A counter-petition (in particular, one that got more signatures) that said "We FOSS developers oppose efforts (by Monty) to weaken or violate the protections of the GPL, and insist that MySQL code base remain free, and not be proprietarized by its former developers". Wording could be better, but something to that effect.
I would sign in a second, and I suspect thousands of/. readers would too.
Notice that the story, complete with the completely false, yellow journalism, headline, is only being run by Fox News. I saw the story on Google News earlier, and wanted to read the actual facts. However, so far no reputable news organization has bothered to report it. Something to keep in mind.
What seems to be the actual story is that the Congressman sent a rather routine notice to the FEC about a likely violation of PAC status and election law. All the "trying to send to prison" bit is just a deceptive way of saying that, well yes, laws do have legal force (including ultimately penalties).
I remember reading almost all of these exact same marketing buzzwords and hype ten years ago. The only difference was that then the "amazing, revolutionary language" was called REBOL.
Exact same business plan, as far as I can tell. Exact same hyperbolic language. Enough so that I wonder if the same copywriter did a search/replace on the old pamphlets. It's yet another moderately OK high-level language, but that comes in three versions:
(1) Free (of cost), but fairly crippled (2) Expensive (3) "Enterprise", i.e. REALLY expensive.
And just like REBOL ten years ago, it promises "revolutionary" cross-platform support, while dropping or being slow to update the non-Windows versions.
The linked blog/review of the language seemed to have comments solely from paid-shills. The reviewer himself was interesting, but all the comment at foot read like almost certain astroturfuing.... gee, just like REBOL did back in the 1990s. When you actually look at the "amazingly readable and compact" code... well, it looks a lot like AppleScript and a few other similar approaches to syntax. But one thing I noticed in particular is that the "unbelievably short" code samples were about the same as the ones I'd use in Python, or Ruby, or Perl, or AWK. At least in length; Python feels more readable to me... once you give up the silly conceit that Rev syntax isn't syntax because it kinda-sorta-a-little-bit reads like English. Rev *is* shorter than Java or C++, but that's not exactly anything amazing.
It does NOT "beg the question"! It might RAISE the question (perhaps not even that), but it certainly does not claim that the question itself is evidence for its truth.
Give us a break: "Spent 331 days looking at porn"! This isn't the fault of the summary, the article itself has the same silliness. I am certain that the executive in question didn't *spend* 331 days looking at porn, but rather that there were 331 days *when* he looked at porn. Not sure the time interval, but even assuming a year, sure he looked at some porn every day. So what?!
If the guy (or any employee) isn't performing is job duties, worry about that. But that's a matter of specifying duties, not of stupid prurience about pornography. It's no better if he's looking at Facebook, or Slashdot, or a vacation planning site, or (god forbid) Fox News... nor even if he's just spending all day sharpening pencils.
I actually mostly agree that porn seems banal and boring, and fairly pointless. But unless employees expose other employees to what they're looking at unwillingly, it makes no differences whatsoever *what* someone is wasting time on. And it's not obvious that looking at porn actually means wasting time. In the real world, humans can't concentrate on work for 10 hours a day without interruption, or at least a lot of otherwise excellent employees can't. Taking little breaks to distract oneself "during work time" is just the human condition and part of our mental limits.
Most of the comments here are annoying riffs on the theme, "I can read the word 'manipulation' in a pedantically absurd way and pretend there is no distinction". In fact, law and courts can use common sense, definitions, and human reasoning. They are not constrained to crudely written algorithms (even sophisticated algorithms could do better than most posts here allow, but that's a digression too).
As TFA says, photojournalism already has a fairly well defined standard about what "modifications" are merely technical versus which alter the meaning of the material presented. Part of this is a question of particular transformations that may or may not be applied, but much of it is a matter of judgment about meaning. Clearly, at the edges, you can try to subvert some overly narrow and hyper-technical construal. For example, Man Ray (and other photographers of the early 20th C) created some strikingly abstract and recontextualizing images using only techniques that would no per-se bump against the technical "modification" techniques... his purpose was obviously much different than fashion magazines, but if a modern photographer applies the same devices, the law and courts would reasonably call that "manipulation" within the spirit of the proposed law (whether labeling was required would presumably depend on the publication context). On the flip side, there are no doubt other photographs that could be "manipulated" in a formal sense without intending to present artificial meaning. For example, photos (digital or film) that are damaged in various ways might need to be "manipulated" to produce the "true" image. Again, courts and laws can make that distinction on a case-by-case basis.
I run mostly Apple machines myself. I have installed Linux distributions on them, but I wind up running OSX in the end. It does indeed "just work" better when it comes to peripherals and hardware features (sound, external video, power modes, etc).
Here are my favorite applications for the Mac (as measured by frequency of usage):
* Firefox * bash (and all those lovely utilities one uses in bash: ls, grep, cut, head, vim, cat, find, wget, etc) * Python (often iPython) * jEdit * OpenOffice.org (or NeoOffice)
Notice anything they have in common? They are all Free Software
There are a few proprietary applications I also keep in my Dock:
These have something in common too. They are proprietary, but they are applications whose whole purpose is to manipulate or utilize files in non-proprietary data formats (HTML, mbox, PDF, png, jpg, CAL, mp3, etc... OK, I know mp3 is a little bit proprietary). If I were to need to give up any of these, nothing would stand in the way of manipulating the data files I had created using other tools.
There are a few other applications I use that are less clear, and that I don't feel quite so good about:
* Dictionary.app * VirtualBox * Acquisition * Skype * Finder
Well, the dictionary is handy, and the way the data is stored is probably not very open. But if I didn't have it, I'd use some other dictionary; there's not any bad lock-in there. VirtualBox is free-of-cost, but proprietary format; I'm not so happy about that, but it does let me run Linux in a VM. Acquisition is a nice (shareware/nagware) fileshare program that I paid for... well, I use to download non-proprietary data files. I could use something else if I wanted to to get the same data. Finder is... well, I could use a different file manager if I wanted. I don't love it, but it's there and is basically fine. The only really locked-in program on my list is Skype. It's hard to get around that... but it's the same story on my Linux machines.
I am in general agreement with a number of posters about the effectiveness of Gmail's spam filtering. However, the claims of only getting uncaught spam once on the order of weeks or months baffles me. I get at least several spams a day that make it through Gmail's filter. Of course, next to that, I also get hundreds of spams that are caught correctly (and once in a while false positives too though, so I really need to review the spam folder manually, which is a fairly quick visual scan). It's manageable, but not completely negligible, work.
It's possible (quite likely) that I have a more public identity than many posters (I'm widely known, and never hide or disguise my email address). But I still have to wonder if their accuracy claims about Gmail filtering are a bit exaggerated.
The difference between HTTP and Gopher has NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with ability to serve multimedia content, nor with bandwidth. HTTP, or really HTML, just allows more diverse linking patterns than Gopher's hierarchical format. But there's nothing non-graphical or content specific about gopher. I RAN graphical Gopher clients perfectly happily (well, including early Web browsers that supported that protocol.
I guess the summary is technically correct, since it mentions "through its teeth". But platypus is notable for also having venomous spurs. Certainly that doesn't change the observation that venomous mammals are rare.
Personally, I've been boycotting iTMS for a couple years. I got so fed up with being repeatedly stung by DRM bugs, that I decided it would never be worth it to buy from them. The nail in the coffin was Amazon MP3 coming out with an equally good interface to easily download a similarly broad range of music. I'm sure there are songs here and there that are at one site but not the other, but it's easier to do without those specific tracks that to expose myself to DRM crap again.
The parent suggests a fun game. I'm trying to count in my head the computers that run in my house:
* 2 wireless routers, both running Linux (Ativa and D-Link). I assume so anyway; I honestly haven't interacted with them except via their web interfaces. * G1 phone, running Linux/Android * Razr2 v9 phone, running Linux * An old-ish Pentium-M laptop running Linux (Ubuntu 8.10) * A MacBook Pro (old-ish, Core Duo, not Core2 Duo) running OSX 10.4 Tiger * A MacBook (pretty new) running OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard * A Mac Mini G4 running OSX 10.4 Tiger * A horrible laptop that belongs to work that runs Windows XP (wouldn't be a bad machine physically, if I could install Linux on it though)
Technically, I also have two big tower desktops sitting in closets, that haven't actually been plugged in for over a year. One runs/ran OS/2; the other some version of Linux from 2 years ago (maybe Slackware, I forget what I last put on it).
I just *wish* that devices actually used some sort of standard USB plug. Sure, electrically USB is USB, but I personally own FIVE g*dd**n different USB cables for different devices. All of them have one full sized USB end, and one "micro" end for the small device... but the rub is that they took great pains to make each one a slightly different shape than the others.
I've seen other versions of this monstrosity too, but in my own possession are: 1) The RAZR telephone that I killed by dropping it in water (oops, but not a criticism of the device); 2) The RAZR2 I bought to replace it; 3) The new digital camera I bought a month ago; 4) The old digital camera I bought a few years ago; 5) A digital voice recorder. Finding just the right USB cable to charge or transfer data from each device is a completely unnecessary PITA!
There's lots of good material on Literacy Bridge's own site, and elsewhere. But a little plug: I had a change to speak with Cliff for about an hour and a half when I was reporting from OSCon. He was an interesting guy with a really good project. I wrote up my impressions of the conversation at: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/davidmertz?entry=project_leaders
BeOS really was pretty amazing in this respect, and some others. Multithreading was far ahead of anything else at the time, and probably since, as well. On some older machine (P3-ish; much slower HDD than nowadays) I clocked boot time at 15 seconds, OS/2 and Linux distros of the time were more like 1-1.5 minutes on the same hardware.
The way it booted so fast was largely by deferring a lot of the "initialization" stuff until the system was "booted". This is nothing like the awful way Windows (and to a lesser extent KDE/Gnome desktops) keep loading stuff for a good while, letting you see the desktop for a minute before you can really do anything. Under BeOS, said multithreading was well utilized to give you a responsive GUI right at that 15 seconds, but still do background loads of various background processes that you didn't *really* need immediately.
Of course, if you immediately launched something that *did* need the services of something loading in a background thread, you'd obviously have to wait a few more seconds. But even all that background loading was very efficient, and practically, by the time you could make a few clicks, it was loaded.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the frequency of jury duty in the USA is less than Space cowboy suggests. I just turned 46 yo, have always been registered to vote (in various jurisdictions), and have served on a jury once. Obviously, I know other people who have done so, a couple of them more than once. But it's hardly like being called up every year. Of course, jurisdictions are bound to vary somewhat depending on how many cases come up, but it's a pretty minimal obligation of citizenship.
FWIW, you really cannot give up UK citizenship by getting US citizenship. I know a number of dual (or multiple) citizenship people between those jurisdictions. None of which, of course, means that there's any particular reason for the commenter to seek US citizenship if it doesn't have any particular benefit in his/her case.
Parent is basically correct. However, pedantically, Dalvik does not, in general, run programs written in the Java language. The language is defined not just by its syntax, but also by a certain set of standard libraries being present and implemented according to Sun/Oracle specification. Dalvik doesn't support all of those, and hence doesn't run Java.
However, Dalvik does run a very Java-like language. One that has all the syntax of Java, and *many* of the same libraries. Moreover (as everyone here knows, I'm sure), programs compiled by 'javac' to .class file may be converted to Dalvik executables (as long as they contain only the subset of Java that Dalvik supports).
It would be proper to prevent Google from claiming that Android "Runs Java"... but then, I'm pretty sure they never claimed that to start with. Indeed mostly--almost entirely--it's claims about patents that should never have been granted, or really just about lawsuits to try to mess up competition and technical progress just for the sake of disruption (I doubt Oracle actually cares that much about the outcome, it's mostly FUD).
I know a number of owners of Priuses. Not one of them makes >$200k, and the only one that perhaps makes more than $125k is my 80 yo landlord.
There may be some skew in the direction the article claims, but its actual claims are wildly hyperbolic to the point of being best simply to ignore.
Good graphic designers do good work, and should (and generally do) get paid well for doing so. The problem is that most client have no real ability to tell good work from mediocre work. Something that looks bearably OK, is not dramatically unattractive, nothing is outright wrong about, may well be "good enough" for a client with no eye for design. But in the end, it won't be something memorable that sticks in the minds of consumers and helps differentiate the product or company it's attached to. The distinction between adequate and brilliant can be subtle, but that subtle difference can make a BIG difference in the longer run.
Similarly, and maybe more familiar to slashdot readers, the very worst programmers can write some lines of code that "look" pretty much the same as what the best programmers can write. The failures and problems of bad code won't even necessarily be obvious on first impression. The code might well do the one thing it initially needs to, but just be fragile, difficult to maintain, break as soon as unexpected cases arise, etc.
Distinguishing good from bad often requires expertise. Exactly the sort of expertise you should be willing to pay for.
A couple of my science/geek tattoos:
Hemoglobin, because I work for some folks doing amazing stuff in molecular dynamics (and it's easy to spin some superficial symbolism about hemoglobin on top of my heart):
http://picasaweb.google.com/david.mertz/HemoglobinTattoo
A Julia set sleeve (just for fun):
http://picasaweb.google.com/david.mertz/FractalTattoo#
There's also perhaps something a little bit geeky about writing a tattoo in proto-Indoeuropean (and International Phonetic Alphabet):
http://picasaweb.google.com/david.mertz/IAmNot#
Gee, what's wrong with this sentence:
Now a computer model shows conclusively...
I'm sure the research modeling is interesting and worthwhile, and it's just the writeup that is idiotic. But y'know *computer* models do not ever show anything *conclusively*. The model is only as good as the assumptions that went into designing it. Those might be good and reasonable guesses, but you are only doing the model because you *haven't* (or can't) observe the actual phenomenon.
I consider the suggestion of using a proportional font for programming frivolous and a bit juvenile. In fact, I'm of an age where it seems a little off if my SSH backgrounds are not green-on-black (and hence make them so).
That said, a *good* fixed font really makes a lot of difference. Not too long ago, I found one called Anonymous Pro, that I have become very fond of:
http://www.ms-studio.com/FontSales/anonymouspro.html
It's freely available, TTF, and I've installed it most places. As much as I hate being forced onto Windows machines, in the few cases where I am, I actually think Consolas is pretty good quality too.
Is anyone conducting something to counter Monty's money-grabbing schemes. A counter-petition (in particular, one that got more signatures) that said "We FOSS developers oppose efforts (by Monty) to weaken or violate the protections of the GPL, and insist that MySQL code base remain free, and not be proprietarized by its former developers". Wording could be better, but something to that effect.
I would sign in a second, and I suspect thousands of /. readers would too.
Notice that the story, complete with the completely false, yellow journalism, headline, is only being run by Fox News. I saw the story on Google News earlier, and wanted to read the actual facts. However, so far no reputable news organization has bothered to report it. Something to keep in mind.
What seems to be the actual story is that the Congressman sent a rather routine notice to the FEC about a likely violation of PAC status and election law. All the "trying to send to prison" bit is just a deceptive way of saying that, well yes, laws do have legal force (including ultimately penalties).
I liked this comment so much, causality, that I made it my FB status for today (properly attributed).
I remember reading almost all of these exact same marketing buzzwords and hype ten years ago. The only difference was that then the "amazing, revolutionary language" was called REBOL.
Exact same business plan, as far as I can tell. Exact same hyperbolic language. Enough so that I wonder if the same copywriter did a search/replace on the old pamphlets. It's yet another moderately OK high-level language, but that comes in three versions:
(1) Free (of cost), but fairly crippled
(2) Expensive
(3) "Enterprise", i.e. REALLY expensive.
And just like REBOL ten years ago, it promises "revolutionary" cross-platform support, while dropping or being slow to update the non-Windows versions.
The linked blog/review of the language seemed to have comments solely from paid-shills. The reviewer himself was interesting, but all the comment at foot read like almost certain astroturfuing.... gee, just like REBOL did back in the 1990s. When you actually look at the "amazingly readable and compact" code... well, it looks a lot like AppleScript and a few other similar approaches to syntax. But one thing I noticed in particular is that the "unbelievably short" code samples were about the same as the ones I'd use in Python, or Ruby, or Perl, or AWK. At least in length; Python feels more readable to me... once you give up the silly conceit that Rev syntax isn't syntax because it kinda-sorta-a-little-bit reads like English. Rev *is* shorter than Java or C++, but that's not exactly anything amazing.
It does NOT "beg the question"! It might RAISE the question (perhaps not even that), but it certainly does not claim that the question itself is evidence for its truth.
Kids these days!
Read: http://begthequestion.info/ (or just a frickin' dictionary).
Give us a break: "Spent 331 days looking at porn"! This isn't the fault of the summary, the article itself has the same silliness. I am certain that the executive in question didn't *spend* 331 days looking at porn, but rather that there were 331 days *when* he looked at porn. Not sure the time interval, but even assuming a year, sure he looked at some porn every day. So what?!
If the guy (or any employee) isn't performing is job duties, worry about that. But that's a matter of specifying duties, not of stupid prurience about pornography. It's no better if he's looking at Facebook, or Slashdot, or a vacation planning site, or (god forbid) Fox News... nor even if he's just spending all day sharpening pencils.
I actually mostly agree that porn seems banal and boring, and fairly pointless. But unless employees expose other employees to what they're looking at unwillingly, it makes no differences whatsoever *what* someone is wasting time on. And it's not obvious that looking at porn actually means wasting time. In the real world, humans can't concentrate on work for 10 hours a day without interruption, or at least a lot of otherwise excellent employees can't. Taking little breaks to distract oneself "during work time" is just the human condition and part of our mental limits.
Most of the comments here are annoying riffs on the theme, "I can read the word 'manipulation' in a pedantically absurd way and pretend there is no distinction". In fact, law and courts can use common sense, definitions, and human reasoning. They are not constrained to crudely written algorithms (even sophisticated algorithms could do better than most posts here allow, but that's a digression too).
As TFA says, photojournalism already has a fairly well defined standard about what "modifications" are merely technical versus which alter the meaning of the material presented. Part of this is a question of particular transformations that may or may not be applied, but much of it is a matter of judgment about meaning. Clearly, at the edges, you can try to subvert some overly narrow and hyper-technical construal. For example, Man Ray (and other photographers of the early 20th C) created some strikingly abstract and recontextualizing images using only techniques that would no per-se bump against the technical "modification" techniques... his purpose was obviously much different than fashion magazines, but if a modern photographer applies the same devices, the law and courts would reasonably call that "manipulation" within the spirit of the proposed law (whether labeling was required would presumably depend on the publication context). On the flip side, there are no doubt other photographs that could be "manipulated" in a formal sense without intending to present artificial meaning. For example, photos (digital or film) that are damaged in various ways might need to be "manipulated" to produce the "true" image. Again, courts and laws can make that distinction on a case-by-case basis.
If you are running Windows, you are part of a botnet. If you are running a real operating system, your system is clean. Simple, huh?
I run mostly Apple machines myself. I have installed Linux distributions on them, but I wind up running OSX in the end. It does indeed "just work" better when it comes to peripherals and hardware features (sound, external video, power modes, etc).
Here are my favorite applications for the Mac (as measured by frequency of usage):
* Firefox
* bash (and all those lovely utilities one uses in bash: ls, grep, cut, head, vim, cat, find, wget, etc)
* Python (often iPython)
* jEdit
* OpenOffice.org (or NeoOffice)
Notice anything they have in common? They are all Free Software
There are a few proprietary applications I also keep in my Dock:
* Safari
* Mail.app
* GraphicConverter
* Preview
* iCal
* iTunes
These have something in common too. They are proprietary, but they are applications whose whole purpose is to manipulate or utilize files in non-proprietary data formats (HTML, mbox, PDF, png, jpg, CAL, mp3, etc... OK, I know mp3 is a little bit proprietary). If I were to need to give up any of these, nothing would stand in the way of manipulating the data files I had created using other tools.
There are a few other applications I use that are less clear, and that I don't feel quite so good about:
* Dictionary.app
* VirtualBox
* Acquisition
* Skype
* Finder
Well, the dictionary is handy, and the way the data is stored is probably not very open. But if I didn't have it, I'd use some other dictionary; there's not any bad lock-in there. VirtualBox is free-of-cost, but proprietary format; I'm not so happy about that, but it does let me run Linux in a VM. Acquisition is a nice (shareware/nagware) fileshare program that I paid for... well, I use to download non-proprietary data files. I could use something else if I wanted to to get the same data. Finder is... well, I could use a different file manager if I wanted. I don't love it, but it's there and is basically fine. The only really locked-in program on my list is Skype. It's hard to get around that... but it's the same story on my Linux machines.
I am in general agreement with a number of posters about the effectiveness of Gmail's spam filtering. However, the claims of only getting uncaught spam once on the order of weeks or months baffles me. I get at least several spams a day that make it through Gmail's filter. Of course, next to that, I also get hundreds of spams that are caught correctly (and once in a while false positives too though, so I really need to review the spam folder manually, which is a fairly quick visual scan). It's manageable, but not completely negligible, work.
It's possible (quite likely) that I have a more public identity than many posters (I'm widely known, and never hide or disguise my email address). But I still have to wonder if their accuracy claims about Gmail filtering are a bit exaggerated.
The difference between HTTP and Gopher has NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with ability to serve multimedia content, nor with bandwidth. HTTP, or really HTML, just allows more diverse linking patterns than Gopher's hierarchical format. But there's nothing non-graphical or content specific about gopher. I RAN graphical Gopher clients perfectly happily (well, including early Web browsers that supported that protocol.
I guess the summary is technically correct, since it mentions "through its teeth". But platypus is notable for also having venomous spurs. Certainly that doesn't change the observation that venomous mammals are rare.
Personally, I've been boycotting iTMS for a couple years. I got so fed up with being repeatedly stung by DRM bugs, that I decided it would never be worth it to buy from them. The nail in the coffin was Amazon MP3 coming out with an equally good interface to easily download a similarly broad range of music. I'm sure there are songs here and there that are at one site but not the other, but it's easier to do without those specific tracks that to expose myself to DRM crap again.
The parent suggests a fun game. I'm trying to count in my head the computers that run in my house:
* 2 wireless routers, both running Linux (Ativa and D-Link). I assume so anyway; I honestly haven't interacted with them except via their web interfaces.
* G1 phone, running Linux/Android
* Razr2 v9 phone, running Linux
* An old-ish Pentium-M laptop running Linux (Ubuntu 8.10)
* A MacBook Pro (old-ish, Core Duo, not Core2 Duo) running OSX 10.4 Tiger
* A MacBook (pretty new) running OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard
* A Mac Mini G4 running OSX 10.4 Tiger
* A horrible laptop that belongs to work that runs Windows XP (wouldn't be a bad machine physically, if I could install Linux on it though)
Technically, I also have two big tower desktops sitting in closets, that haven't actually been plugged in for over a year. One runs/ran OS/2; the other some version of Linux from 2 years ago (maybe Slackware, I forget what I last put on it).
This is the SOWPODS international scrabble tournament dictionary /usr/local/share/scrabble
% egrep '^[qwertasdfgzxcvb]{12,}$'
abracadabras
aftereffects
decerebrated
decerebrates
desegregated
desegregates
extravagated
extravagates
extravasated
extravasates
reaggregated
reaggregates
resegregated
resegregates
reverberated
reverberates
stewardesses
sweaterdress
sweaterdresses
watercresses
I just *wish* that devices actually used some sort of standard USB plug. Sure, electrically USB is USB, but I personally own FIVE g*dd**n different USB cables for different devices. All of them have one full sized USB end, and one "micro" end for the small device... but the rub is that they took great pains to make each one a slightly different shape than the others.
I've seen other versions of this monstrosity too, but in my own possession are: 1) The RAZR telephone that I killed by dropping it in water (oops, but not a criticism of the device); 2) The RAZR2 I bought to replace it; 3) The new digital camera I bought a month ago; 4) The old digital camera I bought a few years ago; 5) A digital voice recorder. Finding just the right USB cable to charge or transfer data from each device is a completely unnecessary PITA!
There's lots of good material on Literacy Bridge's own site, and elsewhere. But a little plug: I had a change to speak with Cliff for about an hour and a half when I was reporting from OSCon. He was an interesting guy with a really good project. I wrote up my impressions of the conversation at: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/davidmertz?entry=project_leaders
BeOS really was pretty amazing in this respect, and some others. Multithreading was far ahead of anything else at the time, and probably since, as well. On some older machine (P3-ish; much slower HDD than nowadays) I clocked boot time at 15 seconds, OS/2 and Linux distros of the time were more like 1-1.5 minutes on the same hardware.
The way it booted so fast was largely by deferring a lot of the "initialization" stuff until the system was "booted". This is nothing like the awful way Windows (and to a lesser extent KDE/Gnome desktops) keep loading stuff for a good while, letting you see the desktop for a minute before you can really do anything. Under BeOS, said multithreading was well utilized to give you a responsive GUI right at that 15 seconds, but still do background loads of various background processes that you didn't *really* need immediately.
Of course, if you immediately launched something that *did* need the services of something loading in a background thread, you'd obviously have to wait a few more seconds. But even all that background loading was very efficient, and practically, by the time you could make a few clicks, it was loaded.