Seriously though, after using LaunchBar for many moons I switched to QuickSilver after giving it a whirl. It's much more elegant, and on a personal level it fits my workflow habits better. Your mileage may vary, of course, but if you haven't tried it, do. Very tasty.
It is the free market, and it does work. Like gravity, it is a natural law and always functions with specific parameters.
That's the stupidest goddamn thing I've read all day. The free market is an illusion. Something invented by people. There is no Santa Claus, there is no spoon, and there is no fucking free market.
Fundie Christians have Jesus and libertarians have the free market. Yay for humanity.
Know why I hate Microsoft? It's really simple. It's because they make crap products that are successful. It goes against the principles of the marketplace, and about what is supposed to make it work. But because Microsoft has gamed the system via exclusive distribution agreements and other legal agreements, their products have succeeded nonetheless.
Now, while I am by no means a capitalist, I nevertheless hold the notion of "quality wins" to be rather important to a healthy market. When crap products like Windows, IE, WMP, Visual Studio, etc. dominate the market, it leads to inefficiencies and hinders growth. Resources that would otherwise be dedicated to advancing the human race are instead focused upon keeping shit working.
I mean, look at Vista. Instead of being able to move forward Microsoft is by all reports merely trying to ship something that will hold together. The list of dropped features for Vista is long and well documented, yet despite this constant drumbeat they nonetheless keep having problems getting the thing out the door.
Meanwhile, Apple has been able to ship something like 4 versions of their OS in the duration. And with far fewer resources, I might add.
Now, I don't know about you but that tells me that the fundamentals of those operating systems are vastly different in quality. And based upon the history of both organizations, I think it would be foolish to either expect either Vista to be high quality or Leopard to be poor.
Sounds neat; just out of curiosity, what are you using for the virtualization?
A friend of mine sent me a link to Parallels, which allows you to run different OSes under OS X. Haven't tried it yet, but the guy who sent it to me did. "It works", says he.
More than that I don't know. He's not exactly chatty.:)
So you say this movie does not reflect the human condition. Well, I'm all too happy to argue with that. David had a wish that the odds were against him attaining. Guess what? This is a VERY human condition.
Certainly. But if the movie is about David becoming human, and yet it denies making available to him the penultimate human moment -- death -- then it has not lived up to its premise.
The people who are successful in life are the ones that pursue their dreams. This is an important message that many many people out there just do not seem to get.
But for every human success is ultimately irrelevant. Pursuing your dreams will not postpone the inevitable conclusion to life. Humans die, yet David didn't, and so he did not complete his journey. Had he ended his journey eternally gazing at the Blue Fairy, the movie would have been consistent, poignant, and accurate. Instead it turned into a fairy tale, with no applicability towards what it means to be human.
You are absolutely right. This is why you have to stand up and do something about it.
You can't, though. No matter how hard we may try death still awaits us. If the movie was about the humanity in a robot, yet he doesn't die at the end, then he has failed to become truly human, and the movie failed to show the audience that such a thing -- a "human" robot -- is possible. In other words, its entire premise is contradicted.
You have been corrected on this numerous times already, but those were not aliens. They were robots.
Unfortunately irrelevant.
Ask anybody who has ever pursued their wishes to fruition. They will tell you that they ended up in a far different place than they EVER expected to be.
Not at the end. The end is the same for everyone: death. The movie did not end with death. It ended with a feel-good fairy tale ending that does not reflect the human condition.
I know you didn't like the movie. I don't have a problem with that. I'm not replying to make you like it. I'm replying mainly because I think you missed the critical details that could lead to you liking it.
Actually I loved the movie and thought it was a beautiful work of art... right up until the alien/robot deus ex machina scene. I own it, and continue to enjoy it. I am in the minority.
The super robots found a creative solution to a seemingly unsolvable endless loop. Cool.
Boring, unoriginal, uninspired, and banal.
David dies at the bottom of the ocean sitting in front of the statue of the Blue Fairy. Big journey that comes to a pointless end. Dumb.
Your last two sentences just described life for the vast majority of humans on this planet now and throughout history. But we avoid such conclusions at all costs, consciously and unconsciously, and lash out when we are reminded of it. The reality is, however, that the universe rarely works out nicely those who inhabit it. Most creatures die violent deaths, more often than not when they are very young. So while fairy tales with neat, happy endings are nice and make us feel good, they do not reflect the human condition. But people do not like to be reminded of the ultimate pointlessness of it all, so you have endings like A.I.'s.
There is no angel to step in and rescue us from death. David's journey was one of finding out what it means to be human. By selling out on the most important defining characteristics OF humans -- their denial of death, but its eventual, unavoidable arrival -- the movie failed utterly instead of triumphing gloriously.
Separately, although less important, the ending of A.I. broke the rules that it set up for itself at the beginning. Here is this universe, with people, and androids, and it basically follows this timeline... And then all of a sudden what do we have? Aliens, hundreds of years in the future. It lost its internal consistency at that point.
Finally, the deus ex machina device has been around for thousands of years, and has been considered a cheap writer's trick for just as long.
Ok geeks: Yes, that movie should have ended when he found the Blue Fairy. We all know this. It's been beat to death. I know. You know. We all know. And yes, I too would like to kick Spielberg in the balls for that one. And if it wasn't his fault, then I would want to do it anyway because Kubrick is dead and kicking corpses isn't all that satisfying.
But ALL THAT ASIDE I think that this is a great choice because (a) in my mind, the movie DOES end when he finds the Blue Fairy, and (b) it was an excellent, emotionally moving robot. While the "robotic existential angst" thing has been done numerous times (both Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell also come to mind), this one was done quite well, and David was a compelling, sympathetic, and very human character.
Put another way: evil never thinks it is. Adolf HItler thought he was doing the German people a huge favor by having millions of Jews murdered. Stalin felt he was doing good for the Soviet state. George Bush believes he is serving America, Christ, and the free market.
A fictional example is the X-Men villain Magneto. He is interesting because you can understand where he is coming from, instead of being some simplistic "take over the world" villain like Dr. Doom or Lex Luthor. While he has megalomaniacal tendencies, his underlying motivation is defensive and almost messianic: "the humans are out to destroy the mutants, I can, should, and will keep that from happening." He is evil, but he certainly doesn't think so, and his stance is logical and consistent.
Ain't you cute. Trotting out tired old strawmen that have been beaten, like the proverbial horse, to death.
Yesterday's wrong answers do not discount today's correct ones, and painting "scientists" in such an overly-broad manner serves no one but the gods of rhetoric.
Global warming is a fact. It is dangerous. It is happening right now. Your ego-protection measures may allow you to sit in your chair and chuckle, patting yourself on the bag in smug superiority, but unfortunately that serves precious little good for the longer term safety of your physical form.
Ok, so what do you suggest? I don't want to give up. I don't want to throw my hands up in disgust and say "fuck it". I want to win. The EFF doesn't have a strong history there. So, if their mission is important, which I believe it is, we need to either do something different or do something in addition to supporting the EFF.
Serious, if cynical, question for you. Ok, now we know about this. It sucks. It's criminal and about as much as an exercise in fascism as you could ask for.
What can be done?
I don't give to the EFF simply because they have lost far more cases than they have one. Yes, making information public is important. But it hasn't seemed to stop any of this.
Have fun. Beat me. Slap me. Mod me down. I know someone will get their jollies. I'd hate to deny it to you just because Martorana pointed out where this was going and tried to stop it.
I think the underlying problem with your post is the assumption that those who believe in evolution want to persecute or suppress those who do not. I believe evolution is a fact similar in its obviousness to gravity. I do not, however, wish to prevent you in any way from believing what you wish in any way, nor do I hope others will do so.
The problem for most people arises when creationists try and force their religious beliefs upon the population as a whole. I am not a Christian, I am a Unitarian, and I do not wish to raise my children as Christians. That is my fundamental right as a parent, and indeed a fundamental right of all humans. Science, civics, math, and literature should be taught in schools, religion at home or in church. And however much it may annoy fundamentalists to say so evolution is a scientific fact and as such deserves a prominent place in schools.
Secular governments work best. Mixing religious beliefs within that framework leads to hardship and oppression that could otherwise be avoided.
Now, having said all this that does not mean I do not think creationism isn't ridiculous, because it is. I also think Ba'hai and Scientology are ridiculous, and were they to attempt to inject their creation myths into the public education system
I would be similarly opposed, as I assume you would be as well.
? If you reinstall your OS is that another "machine" down the drain?
I would burn them first, then rip them in whatever format I choose.
If you have a different OS installed on another partition of your hard drive and want to play the files from there, does that count as "another machine"?
If I did that then it would certainly be an annoyance. I don't.
For that matter, I've never even heard of a player for GNU/Linux capable of playing iTMS files, and it's a pretty common operating system these days.
Then obviously Linux users will not use iTMS. However, I am not a Linux user. If I were, I am sure I would have chosen differently.
I think you've been had. "Enough for your needs" now can easily become a headache when you are faced with the artificial restrictions of DRM.
It's certainly possible. It hasn't affected me to date, however, and the market has apparently expressed its approval. It could also be that there is a sweet spot between OGG and heavy DRM such as WMV that keeps both end consumers and producers happy.
To be fair you can rip using a lossless codec using iTunes, and the DRM it and the iTMS imposes allows you to copy the song to up to 5 different machines. This has been enough for my needs.
That my experience differed from the grandparent's. Can't you read?
t's not an isolated experience with a good customer service rep and it's not indicative of the company.
My experiences differ and that is all I offered. And it is indicative of the company if formal surveys indicate that most people have had positive experiences.
Does that mean Dell now has better support than Apple or vice versa? Probably not, they both have similar support, but it's the individuals that make most of the difference.
That's about as juvenile a comment as I've seen. Individual effort matters in the long run, but institutional mores affect the behavior of individuals in ways both direct and indirect, from which project they are working on, to how much time is dedicated to QA, to whatever.
(one friend has to hide is iRiver when he walks into the Apple store.
Your friend is either an idiot or a pussy, probably both. What, is he scared the Apple employees are gonna jack his ass if he dares show it off?
I don't think the equation is as simple as all that. Yes, quality is extremely important. But if you make a high quality product, but do not adequately support your customers when they have problems, then they will tend to not be as loyal as they would otherwise have been. Word-of-mouth will also be poor. "Yeah, I like it and all, but I had to call customer service a couple of weeks ago and..."
Sometimes I wonder if there is a causal link of some sort between the two, because companies that have high quality products also tend to have excellent customer service. I'm not sure why this is, but I don't feel that it is entirely due to higher profit margins.
This article is simple shilling for Apple. Anyone who has actually had an encounter with Apple's customer service would know that they're exactly the same as any other manufacturer.
My experiences have been different.
A few weeks ago I needed to order a battery for my wife's laptop, a slightly older Powerbook. I had ordered one from their website, but it was the wrong one, so I called them to replace it. Well, they had a hard time figuring out which battery I needed, and so after being put on hold for 15 minutes I hung up with the intention of calling them back the next Monday (this was on a Saturday.)
Well, about 10 minutes later they called me back to tell me my battery was on its way. FedEx delivered it that coming *Monday*. I have never had a company call me back, and I think that ranks right up there with the best customer services experiences I have ever had.
Really? Windows has excellent development tools (almost all 3rd party tools run on Windows, and Visual Studio is usually considered one of the best if not the best IDE for development).
*cough* Ok, I'm not going to get into a debate about VS with you. It's been about two yearsa since I used it and it may have changed. But my residual opinion of it is vastly different from yours.
Having said that, I don't think Windows is a good development environment for the very non-scientific, non-quantifiable reason that I feel more productive under OS X. Yes, you can get many of the same tools that come with OS X for Windows, such as GNU Screen, vim, and others.
But like the author of the article in question, I started out with MS operating systems back on DOS 3.0. I used MS OS's for almost 20 years before I switched to OS X, and I was amazed at the cohesiveness of that OS. I get more done because of things both small and large.
The application menu is always at the top of the screen, so (a) with a glance I can tell what app is foremost and (b) my eyes dont have to jump around to find it
QuickSilver. An app launcher on steroids. With this the whole "one button mouse" joke becomes irrelevant because my hands don't need to leave the keyboard.
Alt-Tab vs. Cmd-Tab. On Windows, when you hit Alt-Tab you can only go one way in the list of apps that pop up: left to right. Cmd-Tab is much more robust: Shift-Cmd-Tab takes you to the left, and the arrow keys work as well. You can also quit an app by Cmd-Tabbing to it and hitting Q. i.e. Cmd-Tab-Tab-Q. I use this a lot.
Terminal.app is just far superior to the command window.
Spotlight. I have the JavaDocs for my company's entire application setup to be searchable through Spotlight, as well as the J2EE JavaDocs and others. Finding documentation involves the following: Ctrl-Space first few characters of class name. The end.
PDF integration. I deal with a lot of documentation, and since Word is still the de facto standard they tend to be in Word format. Since that's resource hog when dealing with large documents, I save them as PDFs, something that you can natively do in OS X. Much less troublesome that way, plus then THEY can be searched with Spotlight.
And so forth. None of these things are killers in and of themselves, but taken together they tend to make your development efforts far less time intensive.
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QuickSilver. LaunchBar is for has-beens. :)
Seriously though, after using LaunchBar for many moons I switched to QuickSilver after giving it a whirl. It's much more elegant, and on a personal level it fits my workflow habits better. Your mileage may vary, of course, but if you haven't tried it, do. Very tasty.
It is the free market, and it does work. Like gravity, it is a natural law and always functions with specific parameters.
That's the stupidest goddamn thing I've read all day. The free market is an illusion. Something invented by people. There is no Santa Claus, there is no spoon, and there is no fucking free market.
Fundie Christians have Jesus and libertarians have the free market. Yay for humanity.
You know, I would, except libertarianism is a complete failure. See sig.
Know why I hate Microsoft? It's really simple. It's because they make crap products that are successful. It goes against the principles of the marketplace, and about what is supposed to make it work. But because Microsoft has gamed the system via exclusive distribution agreements and other legal agreements, their products have succeeded nonetheless.
Now, while I am by no means a capitalist, I nevertheless hold the notion of "quality wins" to be rather important to a healthy market. When crap products like Windows, IE, WMP, Visual Studio, etc. dominate the market, it leads to inefficiencies and hinders growth. Resources that would otherwise be dedicated to advancing the human race are instead focused upon keeping shit working.
I mean, look at Vista. Instead of being able to move forward Microsoft is by all reports merely trying to ship something that will hold together. The list of dropped features for Vista is long and well documented, yet despite this constant drumbeat they nonetheless keep having problems getting the thing out the door.
Meanwhile, Apple has been able to ship something like 4 versions of their OS in the duration. And with far fewer resources, I might add.
Now, I don't know about you but that tells me that the fundamentals of those operating systems are vastly different in quality. And based upon the history of both organizations, I think it would be foolish to either expect either Vista to be high quality or Leopard to be poor.
Sounds neat; just out of curiosity, what are you using for the virtualization?
A friend of mine sent me a link to Parallels, which allows you to run different OSes under OS X. Haven't tried it yet, but the guy who sent it to me did. "It works", says he.
More than that I don't know. He's not exactly chatty. :)
So you say this movie does not reflect the human condition. Well, I'm all too happy to argue with that. David had a wish that the odds were against him attaining. Guess what? This is a VERY human condition.
Certainly. But if the movie is about David becoming human, and yet it denies making available to him the penultimate human moment -- death -- then it has not lived up to its premise.
The people who are successful in life are the ones that pursue their dreams. This is an important message that many many people out there just do not seem to get.
But for every human success is ultimately irrelevant. Pursuing your dreams will not postpone the inevitable conclusion to life. Humans die, yet David didn't, and so he did not complete his journey. Had he ended his journey eternally gazing at the Blue Fairy, the movie would have been consistent, poignant, and accurate. Instead it turned into a fairy tale, with no applicability towards what it means to be human.
You are absolutely right. This is why you have to stand up and do something about it.
You can't, though. No matter how hard we may try death still awaits us. If the movie was about the humanity in a robot, yet he doesn't die at the end, then he has failed to become truly human, and the movie failed to show the audience that such a thing -- a "human" robot -- is possible. In other words, its entire premise is contradicted.
You have been corrected on this numerous times already, but those were not aliens. They were robots.
Unfortunately irrelevant.
Ask anybody who has ever pursued their wishes to fruition. They will tell you that they ended up in a far different place than they EVER expected to be.
Not at the end. The end is the same for everyone: death. The movie did not end with death. It ended with a feel-good fairy tale ending that does not reflect the human condition.
I know you didn't like the movie. I don't have a problem with that. I'm not replying to make you like it. I'm replying mainly because I think you missed the critical details that could lead to you liking it.
Actually I loved the movie and thought it was a beautiful work of art... right up until the alien/robot deus ex machina scene. I own it, and continue to enjoy it. I am in the minority.
The super robots found a creative solution to a seemingly unsolvable endless loop. Cool.
Boring, unoriginal, uninspired, and banal.David dies at the bottom of the ocean sitting in front of the statue of the Blue Fairy. Big journey that comes to a pointless end. Dumb.
Your last two sentences just described life for the vast majority of humans on this planet now and throughout history. But we avoid such conclusions at all costs, consciously and unconsciously, and lash out when we are reminded of it. The reality is, however, that the universe rarely works out nicely those who inhabit it. Most creatures die violent deaths, more often than not when they are very young. So while fairy tales with neat, happy endings are nice and make us feel good, they do not reflect the human condition. But people do not like to be reminded of the ultimate pointlessness of it all, so you have endings like A.I.'s.
There is no angel to step in and rescue us from death. David's journey was one of finding out what it means to be human. By selling out on the most important defining characteristics OF humans -- their denial of death, but its eventual, unavoidable arrival -- the movie failed utterly instead of triumphing gloriously.
Separately, although less important, the ending of A.I. broke the rules that it set up for itself at the beginning. Here is this universe, with people, and androids, and it basically follows this timeline... And then all of a sudden what do we have? Aliens, hundreds of years in the future. It lost its internal consistency at that point.
Finally, the deus ex machina device has been around for thousands of years, and has been considered a cheap writer's trick for just as long.
Ok geeks: Yes, that movie should have ended when he found the Blue Fairy. We all know this. It's been beat to death. I know. You know. We all know. And yes, I too would like to kick Spielberg in the balls for that one. And if it wasn't his fault, then I would want to do it anyway because Kubrick is dead and kicking corpses isn't all that satisfying.
But ALL THAT ASIDE I think that this is a great choice because (a) in my mind, the movie DOES end when he finds the Blue Fairy, and (b) it was an excellent, emotionally moving robot. While the "robotic existential angst" thing has been done numerous times (both Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell also come to mind), this one was done quite well, and David was a compelling, sympathetic, and very human character.
A fictional example is the X-Men villain Magneto. He is interesting because you can understand where he is coming from, instead of being some simplistic "take over the world" villain like Dr. Doom or Lex Luthor. While he has megalomaniacal tendencies, his underlying motivation is defensive and almost messianic: "the humans are out to destroy the mutants, I can, should, and will keep that from happening." He is evil, but he certainly doesn't think so, and his stance is logical and consistent.
Yesterday's wrong answers do not discount today's correct ones, and painting "scientists" in such an overly-broad manner serves no one but the gods of rhetoric.
Global warming is a fact. It is dangerous. It is happening right now. Your ego-protection measures may allow you to sit in your chair and chuckle, patting yourself on the bag in smug superiority, but unfortunately that serves precious little good for the longer term safety of your physical form.
The question is "what"?
What can be done?
I don't give to the EFF simply because they have lost far more cases than they have one. Yes, making information public is important. But it hasn't seemed to stop any of this.
Have fun. Beat me. Slap me. Mod me down. I know someone will get their jollies. I'd hate to deny it to you just because Martorana pointed out where this was going and tried to stop it.
I think the underlying problem with your post is the assumption that those who believe in evolution want to persecute or suppress those who do not. I believe evolution is a fact similar in its obviousness to gravity. I do not, however, wish to prevent you in any way from believing what you wish in any way, nor do I hope others will do so.
The problem for most people arises when creationists try and force their religious beliefs upon the population as a whole. I am not a Christian, I am a Unitarian, and I do not wish to raise my children as Christians. That is my fundamental right as a parent, and indeed a fundamental right of all humans. Science, civics, math, and literature should be taught in schools, religion at home or in church. And however much it may annoy fundamentalists to say so evolution is a scientific fact and as such deserves a prominent place in schools.
Secular governments work best. Mixing religious beliefs within that framework leads to hardship and oppression that could otherwise be avoided.
Now, having said all this that does not mean I do not think creationism isn't ridiculous, because it is. I also think Ba'hai and Scientology are ridiculous, and were they to attempt to inject their creation myths into the public education system I would be similarly opposed, as I assume you would be as well.
Now, if we were talking about Exxon, I might agree with you.
The debate is not and never has been about whether or not she is hot. It's about how that is even relevant.
? If you reinstall your OS is that another "machine" down the drain?
I would burn them first, then rip them in whatever format I choose.
If you have a different OS installed on another partition of your hard drive and want to play the files from there, does that count as "another machine"?
If I did that then it would certainly be an annoyance. I don't.For that matter, I've never even heard of a player for GNU/Linux capable of playing iTMS files, and it's a pretty common operating system these days.
Then obviously Linux users will not use iTMS. However, I am not a Linux user. If I were, I am sure I would have chosen differently.
I think you've been had. "Enough for your needs" now can easily become a headache when you are faced with the artificial restrictions of DRM.
It's certainly possible. It hasn't affected me to date, however, and the market has apparently expressed its approval. It could also be that there is a sweet spot between OGG and heavy DRM such as WMV that keeps both end consumers and producers happy.To be fair you can rip using a lossless codec using iTunes, and the DRM it and the iTMS imposes allows you to copy the song to up to 5 different machines. This has been enough for my needs.
In your heart, you know it's true.
What's your point?
That my experience differed from the grandparent's. Can't you read?
t's not an isolated experience with a good customer service rep and it's not indicative of the company.
My experiences differ and that is all I offered. And it is indicative of the company if formal surveys indicate that most people have had positive experiences.
Does that mean Dell now has better support than Apple or vice versa? Probably not, they both have similar support, but it's the individuals that make most of the difference.
That's about as juvenile a comment as I've seen. Individual effort matters in the long run, but institutional mores affect the behavior of individuals in ways both direct and indirect, from which project they are working on, to how much time is dedicated to QA, to whatever.
(one friend has to hide is iRiver when he walks into the Apple store.
Your friend is either an idiot or a pussy, probably both. What, is he scared the Apple employees are gonna jack his ass if he dares show it off?
Quality of product is the most important.
I don't think the equation is as simple as all that. Yes, quality is extremely important. But if you make a high quality product, but do not adequately support your customers when they have problems, then they will tend to not be as loyal as they would otherwise have been. Word-of-mouth will also be poor. "Yeah, I like it and all, but I had to call customer service a couple of weeks ago and..."Sometimes I wonder if there is a causal link of some sort between the two, because companies that have high quality products also tend to have excellent customer service. I'm not sure why this is, but I don't feel that it is entirely due to higher profit margins.
This article is simple shilling for Apple. Anyone who has actually had an encounter with Apple's customer service would know that they're exactly the same as any other manufacturer.
My experiences have been different.
A few weeks ago I needed to order a battery for my wife's laptop, a slightly older Powerbook. I had ordered one from their website, but it was the wrong one, so I called them to replace it. Well, they had a hard time figuring out which battery I needed, and so after being put on hold for 15 minutes I hung up with the intention of calling them back the next Monday (this was on a Saturday.)
Well, about 10 minutes later they called me back to tell me my battery was on its way. FedEx delivered it that coming *Monday*. I have never had a company call me back, and I think that ranks right up there with the best customer services experiences I have ever had.
Google for DarwinPorts for more info.
Really? Windows has excellent development tools (almost all 3rd party tools run on Windows, and Visual Studio is usually considered one of the best if not the best IDE for development).
*cough* Ok, I'm not going to get into a debate about VS with you. It's been about two yearsa since I used it and it may have changed. But my residual opinion of it is vastly different from yours.
Having said that, I don't think Windows is a good development environment for the very non-scientific, non-quantifiable reason that I feel more productive under OS X. Yes, you can get many of the same tools that come with OS X for Windows, such as GNU Screen, vim, and others.
But like the author of the article in question, I started out with MS operating systems back on DOS 3.0. I used MS OS's for almost 20 years before I switched to OS X, and I was amazed at the cohesiveness of that OS. I get more done because of things both small and large.
And so forth. None of these things are killers in and of themselves, but taken together they tend to make your development efforts far less time intensive.