Most recently, it has been the package management. I have been all but forced to use the "commercial" RedHat up at work, and I still cannot believe that Redhat uses a lame package manager that requires you to "solve your own" dependencies.
They don't. Up2date resolves dependencies.
Redhat is another problem. rpm doesn't have the smarts to do anything for you. If you want any kind of 'immediate' commands, you have to 'yum' them. This isn't acceptable in a corporate environment.
Well, sure - but that's because the whole "dependency hell" thing Linux has developed isn't really acceptable in a corporate environment, not because of anything specific to yum. It's not like Debian is meaningfully different in that regard.
yum is a bastard that is excluded from RedHat so they can maximize acceptable up2date profits.
Yum isn't "excluded" from Red Hat (indeed, RHEL5 has replaced up2date with yum).
I could really care less if RedHat goes out business or not.
Considering how much kernel development they fund and how important their product is to adoption of Linux in the enterprise, you probably should.
Debian is at least 1 full generation ahead of RedHat. Redhat Enterprise is still redhat 9 with updates.
Just like the current version of Debian is the previous version with updates, you mean ?
I have spent the last three days teaching someone how to use windows XP when all they used to use was windows 98. Every interface is different.
Rubbish. Some, yes. Every ? Not even close.
I can sit down in front of any computer and begin to figure it out. i wasn't taught windows, I learned about windows from windows. I learned about OS X from OS X. and I figured out how to make a custom kde setup from KDE.
Yes, but most people can't. Primarily because they simply don't care, but also because the conceptual abstraction necessary is, for a very large chunk of people, very difficult to grasp.
Non-trivial proportions of society have trouble with TV remote controls, setting alarm clocks or doing anything more complicated with a microwave than "X minutes on HIGH". The problem isn't that the interfaces suck, per se, it's that computers are complicated, flexible tools that lots of people simply don't have the capacity to operate.
I don't want my primary school age daughter indoctrinated with religious dogma. Period. Why is that so hard to understand?
It's not. At all. Indeed, I can sympathise.
HOWEVER, the discussion here is about the separation of Church and State. One anecdote does not constitute evidence that the State is forcing religious education on students.
The Constitutional separation of Church and State in Australia is *at least* as clear as it is in America, es evidenced by the relevance clauses from each country's constitution (which I quoted elsewhere). Arguably, the wording in the Australian Constitution is even stronger.
I think the point he's trying to make is that you get full eye-candy on a 32Mb ATI or NVidia card on the mac, and you need a 256Mb DX9 compliant card to get full eye-candy under vista...
Then his "point" is wrong.
To get "full eye-candy" (meaning the Mac is CoreImage-capable) in OSX requires the same level of GPU hardware support that Aero does in Vista (Geforce 5200, 5600, Radeon 9600XT, 9700, etc - "DirectX9" cards). From memory, the oldest Macs that would have had such a card from the factory were the last of the dual G4s, and it was the highest-end video card option at the time.
No, it's not. Benchmarks have proven that XP is faster. One of Vista's own devs called the Windows codebase overly complicated, bloated, and full of circular dependencies. It's a mass of crufty spaghetti code dating back to 1985.
Considering Windows NT didn't even start the *design* phase until 1988, that's hard to believe.
Not only do Microsoft fans call everything they disagree with "FUD" because they can't address it, but they're being very ironic by using a Microsoft-coined term.
Firstly, the term was originally coined in reference to IBM.
Secondly, your comment above is a shining example of FUD - negative, vague, likely inaccurate if not an outright fabrication, but still believable by anyone with little to no knowledge of the facts.
Thirdly, the vast majority of the criticism levied against Vista - *especially* on Slashdot - is, similarly, FUD.
Although we're only talking about 1-2% in most cases, these can be explain by immature drivers. Give it a few months and those drivers will likely be up to par with XP's.
It's also worth pointing out the typical rule of thumb is that any difference of less than 10% is imperceptible without measuring tools.
While I am sure that both Aero and Aqua are using the GPU for rendering effects, why does Vista need such a high-powered video card compared to the video cards that Macs come with [...]
It doesn't. You need a DX9-capable video card. They debuted ca. 2003-2004 and can be bought new for ca. US$30. These days, they're not even *close* to be "high-powered".
To actually get all the Aqua features (eg: that nice ripple effect when dropping a Dashboard Widget) you also need an equivalent card in your Mac. The difference is OS X can fallback to a software renderer while Vista doesn't have one. Why doesn't Vista have a software renderer ? Because developing one, given the context of the systems Vista will mostly be running on (new, or relatively powerful enthusiast machines), would be a stupid and pointless waste of time and money. That argument does (more accurately, did) not apply to OS X, because OS X has been around since there wasn't sufficient consumer-level 3D hardware to do any acceleration - ie: it debuted with a software renderer.
[...] (people post that Aqua has reasonable performance on G4 macs, which aren't what you can call the latest hardware).
Anyone who considers OS X performance on a G4 "reasonable", will (or should, if they're being honest and not picking out specific corner cases) find Vista's performance *at least* similarly "reasonable" on equivalent hardware (ie: P3s and low-end P4s). Personally I find OS X annoyingly unresponsive on anything less than a G5 based machine, and even my mum's G5 iMac stumbles more often than I like.
The short version is that Vista and OS X have basically equivalent hardware requirements to deliver basically equivalent performance and features. Like most criticisms of Vista, the "it needs monstrous hardware" is nothing more than FUD.
(The "slowest" machine I've used Vista on that could actually handle Aero was a 900Mhz P3 with a GeForce 5600 and a gig of RAM. This PC dates from around the beginning of 2001, with the exception of the video card, which I bought second hand around the beginning of 2005. It runs Vista *at least* as well as my Mum's G5 iMac runs OS X (although these days I typically only use it for running old DOS and Windows 95 games, since it's the only machine I still have with an ISA slot that can drive my AWE64).)
i'm no programmer, but the fact that Aqua renders nicely on my ancient G4 tower whilst Aero requires a box on steroids probably points to the underlying issue.
Firstly, if you find OS X "nice" on a G4 (personally, I don't), you will find Vista equally as "nice" on equivalent hardware.
Secondly, Vista doesn't need anything close to "a box on steriods" to run. It is quite usable on ~1Ghz P3 class machines with 1G RAM and a $30 video card. To clarify, that's a PC dating from roughly 2001.
Vista and OS X need roughly the same hardware to do roughly the same thing and deliver roughly the same performance on roughly the same hardware (personally I find Vista to be quicker, but I've been complaining about OS X's poor UI responsiveness since it existed).
The simple fact is an entry-level $500 PC can run Vista quite nicely. At least as well as an entry level Mac can run OS X. Further, this situation does not change as you compare equivalent hardware from different times over the last ~7 years or so.
Short version: Vista's hardware requirements are not unreasonable - and criticism thereof is both little more than FUD, and mostly irrelevant.
That would be funny if it were true. Perhaps you lack reading comprehension because of too much time spent learning about sky gods.
I'm an Atheist. Further, I see no reason whatsoever to be ashamed of knowing about a few different religions. That knowledge is, after all, one of the reasons I'm an Atheist.
I rang the school to ensure my child did not attend religious classes.
Was your daughter specifically *sent* to one of the religious classes, against *documented* instructions, or did someone ask her which one she wanted to go to (or was there a clerical error) ?
Schools are big, bureaucratic places, accidents happen.
I did not say anything to my child about her attending them.
Maybe that was part of the problem.
As for making her own decisions... well... I don't know about other children of primary school age, but my daughter has trouble deciding what she will eat for breakfast, which socks she will wear, whether she will attend camp or not, so forgive my surprise at your assertion that she is able to choose a lifelong spiritual belief system right now.
Who said anything about "choosing a lifeling spiritual belief system" ? This is about whether she is exposed to an important and significant aspect of human culture.
You do *have* children?
How unsurprising. The good old "you don't have children so you wouldn't understand" argument.
The State is providing facilities for religious instruction.
Yes. Inside a school. You do realise the *point* of a school is to educate, right ?
It is facilitating the teaching of religion by providing location and access to young minds in their formative years.
It is also facilitating the teaching of no religion.
This is an important point you seem to be having a great deal of trouble grasping. NO-ONE IS MAKING YOUR CHILD PARTICIPATE IN RELIGIOUS EDUCATION.
You might have a point IF that was ACTUALLY WHAT OCCURRED. However, each parent is required to nominate A SINGLE FAITH that their child is to attend. Capish?
Which can be CHANGED, NOT NOMINATED (ie: no "faith") and even IGNORED by the student in question.
Capiche ?
You forgot "In my opinion...".
No, I didn't, because it isn't opinion, it's fact. The State is neither carrying out the education, nor requiring participation. They _are_ providing a venue, but they are doing so indiscriminately and as a reasonable part of the educational process.
My opinion is that it is a breach, however this can only be tested in a court of law, something no Australian would be willing to do (myself included, I don't have the time or the resources).
That's because "no Australian" gives a shit when there's nothing to give a shit about. There is no coercion, there is no requirement, there is the ability to opt out.
Yes, the Americans are a little crazy, but at least they will defend their constitution against even perceived infringements.
They'll defend certain parts of the constituion. A few others seem to have fallen by the wayside without too much opposition.
Aussies just don't care.
Aussies care when it's important to care. Ie: when bad things are actually happening and problems actually exist.
Well, I'd say the concept is about as close to identical as it can be, given NT's lack of SUID capabilities (a GOOD thing from a security perspective). Although, obviously, the execution is much more primitive there's nothing that would stop it being extended to the equivalent of 'MakeMeAdmin [blah]' to launch [blah] instead of the command prompt.
They're different security models, essentially. In Windows, you are granted the permissions necessary to do something. In UNIX, you temporarily "assume the identity" of a user (typically root) that already has the permissions to do something.
That is a trade off where MS chose to make easier design decisions, rather than expensive but correct design decisions.
These are configuration, not design, decisions. *Very* different things. And I doubt they were any easier (there was a large amount of agonising about making the default user in XP an Administrator, for example).
There are very few "incorrect" design decisions in Windows. Certainly no more than any of its contemporaries.
In any case, MS does respond to the demands of customers to some degree, just not usually to end users. You'll note their customers are purchasing agents for OEMs and enterprise businesses, not users.
This separation is artificial and unrealistic.
Do you truly and honestly believe that if there were two manufacturers of Windows in competition with one another, both would not be working a hell of a lot harder on bringing security to users in a usable way?
I believe that an unmanaged, general purpose computer is - practically speaking - an unsecurable device, with our current levels of technology and knowledge. Add in the actual requirements for legacy software and hardware support, acessibility by non-professional/small-shop developers and it is _unquestionably_ an insecurable device.
There is very little technically wrong with Windows. There are parts of the UI that could have been improved (and have been in Vista - eg: privilege escalation with UAC), but the vast, vast majority of "problems" in Windows, both past and present, are the direct result of poorly-written applications and the subsequent workarounds that have been instituted to make them function transparently *so end users don't have to worry about it*.
If ever you needed evidence that Microsoft listen to their customers, then you need look no further than the (often ridiculous) lengths they go to so that existing, typically badly written software continues to run on newer versions of Windows where, by all rights, it should break horribly (and for external verification of how the rest of the industry perceives this level of support, look no further than the "outrage" when XP SP2 (quick justifiably) broke 0.0001% of the software out there). Microsoft are *acutely* aware that to most users, the OS is little more than a vehicle for the application(s) and, therefore, they need to keep the applications working.
The one we live in, of course. Anyone can use such software; because the uses begin with people who have an image they are interested in changing somehow such as removing redeye, cropping, or resizing, and they extend all the way to Hollywood setting someone's hair on fire in HD as they run down a hall, or shooting lightning from someone's fingertips. In between are a massive number of potential users and uses. So to describe our image manipulation software as "niche or specialized" is quite naive.
You obviously travel in very, very different circles to me if you find there are more than a handful of people lining up to buy software that offers more "image manipulation" capabilities than iPhoto, or the tools that come with pretty much every digital camera sold.
No, you haven't. In fact, you're *still* trying to dodge the question with semantics.
You're just ignoring, or misunderstanding, the answer: I identify them when, and because, they pay me. You give me money for my product, you become my customer. Prior to that, at best, you were only a potential customer, and probably not even that. All of my customers are treated the same. Get it now?
When someone calls up your support line, how do you identify if they are a "paying customer" ?
It's not just the US either. France loved its African colonies; the early African emigrants were all talented and beautiful. When the desperate refugees started showing up however, France decided it hated dark skinned people and needed emigration control. The UK, Germany, and pretty much any other country with a functional economy similarly has a love (cheap labor) / hate (benefits for foreigners) relationship with émigrés.
Fantastic logic you have there:
They like them when they're "talented and beautiful".
They don't like them when they're "desparate refugees".
*Obviously* it's all because of the colour of their skin. Clearly the massively different capabilities the two types of people described above to both support themselves and contribute to the country as a whole has no bearing on the decision whether or not to let them into the country.
Firstly the problem is that the feedback is largely anonymous. You have to ask would these students walk up to the school principal and make these complaints in person? In a lot of cases they would not. Any derogatory comment made anonymously is a comment made by a coward.
Anonymity is a cornerstone of free speech. Without it, criticism without fear of reprisal cannot be made.
Is the Iranian blogger who prefers to remain anonymous so he doesn't get dragged off in the middle of the night and shot a coward ?
Not that the two situations are more than superficially comparable, but if you think certain teachers won't single out certain students for attention, you're very naive.
With that said, I agree with everything else you have said. I, too, have friends and family who are - or were - teachers.
The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth.
Is all that much different from:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...
Further, in actual reality, the presence of religion in Australian society, and especially in Government, is *far* less prominent than it is in the US.
The presence of religious education in publicly-funded schools is in no way a breach of the separation between Church and State, so long as no specific religion must be taught and opting-out is allowed.
First of all, I did elect for my child not to attend the scripture session, and my child attended anyway, at least until she spouted off some offensive catholic dogma and I rang the school and put in a 'special order' to ensure she no longer attended that.
Indeed. Perish the thought your little darling make her own decisions instead of following your anti-religion dogma.
Not in a public school it doesn't. The public school is an instrument of the State, engaged in State activities, paid for by the State (i.e. my taxes). It is NOT, I repeat NOT, an institution for the teaching of religion. That is the role of private religious institutions such as religious schools and churchs (mosques, temples, synagogues etc).
The "State" isn't teaching religion. The various faiths have to provide a representative.
Further, a system that allows children to sample the teachings of numerous faiths - or none - at their discretion, is an excellent form of exposure to the various belief systems. Making it part of the typical educational process is a perfectly reasonable path to take.
There is no breach of the separation between Church and State in this system.
Maybe it's the result of having a constant work environment where the principle relationship with people is one of authority and, perhaps, a lack of firm grounding in that authority, that results in such hypersensitivity to criticism. Whatever the reason, they should get a bleedin' grip.
Probably has more to do with the constant public criticism they face from idiots who don't realise how valuable a service they provide.
Heck, look no further than Slashdot. The typical article involving teachers usually has the obligatory "those who can, do - those who can't, teach" quote before the number of posts even hits double figures.
For example, many Americans would be outraged to learn that scripture is being taught in Australian Public Schools.
Which ones ? Maybe things have changed in the last 15 years, but back when I was at school, "Religious Education" offered a choice of faiths *and* allowed for those wanted to opt-out and use it as free time.
I personally find this highly offensive, and it makes me long for a US style constitution that guarantees separation of church (blech) and State.
We do (in this context). The Australian Constitution guarantees freedom of religion.
Slashdot Mirror
Most recently, it has been the package management. I have been all but forced to use the "commercial" RedHat up at work, and I still cannot believe that Redhat uses a lame package manager that requires you to "solve your own" dependencies.
They don't. Up2date resolves dependencies.
Redhat is another problem. rpm doesn't have the smarts to do anything for you. If you want any kind of 'immediate' commands, you have to 'yum' them. This isn't acceptable in a corporate environment.
Well, sure - but that's because the whole "dependency hell" thing Linux has developed isn't really acceptable in a corporate environment, not because of anything specific to yum. It's not like Debian is meaningfully different in that regard.
yum is a bastard that is excluded from RedHat so they can maximize acceptable up2date profits.
Yum isn't "excluded" from Red Hat (indeed, RHEL5 has replaced up2date with yum).
I could really care less if RedHat goes out business or not.
Considering how much kernel development they fund and how important their product is to adoption of Linux in the enterprise, you probably should.
Debian is at least 1 full generation ahead of RedHat. Redhat Enterprise is still redhat 9 with updates.
Just like the current version of Debian is the previous version with updates, you mean ?
I have spent the last three days teaching someone how to use windows XP when all they used to use was windows 98. Every interface is different.
Rubbish. Some, yes. Every ? Not even close.
I can sit down in front of any computer and begin to figure it out. i wasn't taught windows, I learned about windows from windows. I learned about OS X from OS X. and I figured out how to make a custom kde setup from KDE.
Yes, but most people can't. Primarily because they simply don't care, but also because the conceptual abstraction necessary is, for a very large chunk of people, very difficult to grasp.
Non-trivial proportions of society have trouble with TV remote controls, setting alarm clocks or doing anything more complicated with a microwave than "X minutes on HIGH". The problem isn't that the interfaces suck, per se, it's that computers are complicated, flexible tools that lots of people simply don't have the capacity to operate.
Who said anything about being ashamed?
Sorry. Must have been the sneering tone.
I don't want my primary school age daughter indoctrinated with religious dogma. Period. Why is that so hard to understand?
It's not. At all. Indeed, I can sympathise.
HOWEVER, the discussion here is about the separation of Church and State. One anecdote does not constitute evidence that the State is forcing religious education on students.
The Constitutional separation of Church and State in Australia is *at least* as clear as it is in America, es evidenced by the relevance clauses from each country's constitution (which I quoted elsewhere). Arguably, the wording in the Australian Constitution is even stronger.
I think the point he's trying to make is that you get full eye-candy on a 32Mb ATI or NVidia card on the mac, and you need a 256Mb DX9 compliant card to get full eye-candy under vista...
Then his "point" is wrong.
To get "full eye-candy" (meaning the Mac is CoreImage-capable) in OSX requires the same level of GPU hardware support that Aero does in Vista (Geforce 5200, 5600, Radeon 9600XT, 9700, etc - "DirectX9" cards). From memory, the oldest Macs that would have had such a card from the factory were the last of the dual G4s, and it was the highest-end video card option at the time.
No, it's not. Benchmarks have proven that XP is faster. One of Vista's own devs called the Windows codebase overly complicated, bloated, and full of circular dependencies. It's a mass of crufty spaghetti code dating back to 1985.
Considering Windows NT didn't even start the *design* phase until 1988, that's hard to believe.
Not only do Microsoft fans call everything they disagree with "FUD" because they can't address it, but they're being very ironic by using a Microsoft-coined term.
Firstly, the term was originally coined in reference to IBM.
Secondly, your comment above is a shining example of FUD - negative, vague, likely inaccurate if not an outright fabrication, but still believable by anyone with little to no knowledge of the facts.
Thirdly, the vast majority of the criticism levied against Vista - *especially* on Slashdot - is, similarly, FUD.
Although we're only talking about 1-2% in most cases, these can be explain by immature drivers. Give it a few months and those drivers will likely be up to par with XP's.
It's also worth pointing out the typical rule of thumb is that any difference of less than 10% is imperceptible without measuring tools.
While I am sure that both Aero and Aqua are using the GPU for rendering effects, why does Vista need such a high-powered video card compared to the video cards that Macs come with [...]
It doesn't. You need a DX9-capable video card. They debuted ca. 2003-2004 and can be bought new for ca. US$30. These days, they're not even *close* to be "high-powered".
To actually get all the Aqua features (eg: that nice ripple effect when dropping a Dashboard Widget) you also need an equivalent card in your Mac. The difference is OS X can fallback to a software renderer while Vista doesn't have one. Why doesn't Vista have a software renderer ? Because developing one, given the context of the systems Vista will mostly be running on (new, or relatively powerful enthusiast machines), would be a stupid and pointless waste of time and money. That argument does (more accurately, did) not apply to OS X, because OS X has been around since there wasn't sufficient consumer-level 3D hardware to do any acceleration - ie: it debuted with a software renderer.
[...] (people post that Aqua has reasonable performance on G4 macs, which aren't what you can call the latest hardware).
Anyone who considers OS X performance on a G4 "reasonable", will (or should, if they're being honest and not picking out specific corner cases) find Vista's performance *at least* similarly "reasonable" on equivalent hardware (ie: P3s and low-end P4s). Personally I find OS X annoyingly unresponsive on anything less than a G5 based machine, and even my mum's G5 iMac stumbles more often than I like.
The short version is that Vista and OS X have basically equivalent hardware requirements to deliver basically equivalent performance and features. Like most criticisms of Vista, the "it needs monstrous hardware" is nothing more than FUD.
(The "slowest" machine I've used Vista on that could actually handle Aero was a 900Mhz P3 with a GeForce 5600 and a gig of RAM. This PC dates from around the beginning of 2001, with the exception of the video card, which I bought second hand around the beginning of 2005. It runs Vista *at least* as well as my Mum's G5 iMac runs OS X (although these days I typically only use it for running old DOS and Windows 95 games, since it's the only machine I still have with an ISA slot that can drive my AWE64).)
i'm no programmer, but the fact that Aqua renders nicely on my ancient G4 tower whilst Aero requires a box on steroids probably points to the underlying issue.
Firstly, if you find OS X "nice" on a G4 (personally, I don't), you will find Vista equally as "nice" on equivalent hardware.
Secondly, Vista doesn't need anything close to "a box on steriods" to run. It is quite usable on ~1Ghz P3 class machines with 1G RAM and a $30 video card. To clarify, that's a PC dating from roughly 2001.
Vista and OS X need roughly the same hardware to do roughly the same thing and deliver roughly the same performance on roughly the same hardware (personally I find Vista to be quicker, but I've been complaining about OS X's poor UI responsiveness since it existed).
The simple fact is an entry-level $500 PC can run Vista quite nicely. At least as well as an entry level Mac can run OS X. Further, this situation does not change as you compare equivalent hardware from different times over the last ~7 years or so.
Short version: Vista's hardware requirements are not unreasonable - and criticism thereof is both little more than FUD, and mostly irrelevant.
Your post is yet another pointless "gee I wish I could find yet one more way to promote MS" posting.
It's not, because it's not promoting Microsoft.
Yours, however, is clearly just another "if it's not criticising Microsoft, it's astroturf" post.
That would be funny if it were true. Perhaps you lack reading comprehension because of too much time spent learning about sky gods.
I'm an Atheist. Further, I see no reason whatsoever to be ashamed of knowing about a few different religions. That knowledge is, after all, one of the reasons I'm an Atheist.
I rang the school to ensure my child did not attend religious classes.
Was your daughter specifically *sent* to one of the religious classes, against *documented* instructions, or did someone ask her which one she wanted to go to (or was there a clerical error) ?
Schools are big, bureaucratic places, accidents happen.
I did not say anything to my child about her attending them.
Maybe that was part of the problem.
As for making her own decisions ... well ... I don't know about other children of primary school age, but my daughter has trouble deciding what she will eat for breakfast, which socks she will wear, whether she will attend camp or not, so forgive my surprise at your assertion that she is able to choose a lifelong spiritual belief system right now.
Who said anything about "choosing a lifeling spiritual belief system" ? This is about whether she is exposed to an important and significant aspect of human culture.
You do *have* children?
How unsurprising. The good old "you don't have children so you wouldn't understand" argument.
If you conflate 'refugees' with 'undesireable,' perhaps you are more of a bigot that you even understand.
What about someone like you who conflates "undesirable" with "refugee" ?
The State is providing facilities for religious instruction.
Yes. Inside a school. You do realise the *point* of a school is to educate, right ?
It is facilitating the teaching of religion by providing location and access to young minds in their formative years.
It is also facilitating the teaching of no religion.
This is an important point you seem to be having a great deal of trouble grasping. NO-ONE IS MAKING YOUR CHILD PARTICIPATE IN RELIGIOUS EDUCATION.
You might have a point IF that was ACTUALLY WHAT OCCURRED. However, each parent is required to nominate A SINGLE FAITH that their child is to attend. Capish?
Which can be CHANGED, NOT NOMINATED (ie: no "faith") and even IGNORED by the student in question.
Capiche ?
You forgot "In my opinion ...".
No, I didn't, because it isn't opinion, it's fact. The State is neither carrying out the education, nor requiring participation. They _are_ providing a venue, but they are doing so indiscriminately and as a reasonable part of the educational process.
My opinion is that it is a breach, however this can only be tested in a court of law, something no Australian would be willing to do (myself included, I don't have the time or the resources).
That's because "no Australian" gives a shit when there's nothing to give a shit about. There is no coercion, there is no requirement, there is the ability to opt out.
Yes, the Americans are a little crazy, but at least they will defend their constitution against even perceived infringements.
They'll defend certain parts of the constituion. A few others seem to have fallen by the wayside without too much opposition.
Aussies just don't care.
Aussies care when it's important to care. Ie: when bad things are actually happening and problems actually exist.
I know where its going. I have 35GB of iTunes content. I don't trust Vista enough to store it there.
Your current machine suffers near daily crashes but you "dont trust Vista" enough to store some MP3s ?
O.o
Slashdot trolls, rejoice ! Your FUD has claimed another victim.
Though it lacks the sudoers concept.
Well, I'd say the concept is about as close to identical as it can be, given NT's lack of SUID capabilities (a GOOD thing from a security perspective). Although, obviously, the execution is much more primitive there's nothing that would stop it being extended to the equivalent of 'MakeMeAdmin [blah]' to launch [blah] instead of the command prompt.
They're different security models, essentially. In Windows, you are granted the permissions necessary to do something. In UNIX, you temporarily "assume the identity" of a user (typically root) that already has the permissions to do something.
That is a trade off where MS chose to make easier design decisions, rather than expensive but correct design decisions.
These are configuration, not design, decisions. *Very* different things. And I doubt they were any easier (there was a large amount of agonising about making the default user in XP an Administrator, for example).
There are very few "incorrect" design decisions in Windows. Certainly no more than any of its contemporaries.
In any case, MS does respond to the demands of customers to some degree, just not usually to end users. You'll note their customers are purchasing agents for OEMs and enterprise businesses, not users.
This separation is artificial and unrealistic.
Do you truly and honestly believe that if there were two manufacturers of Windows in competition with one another, both would not be working a hell of a lot harder on bringing security to users in a usable way?
I believe that an unmanaged, general purpose computer is - practically speaking - an unsecurable device, with our current levels of technology and knowledge. Add in the actual requirements for legacy software and hardware support, acessibility by non-professional/small-shop developers and it is _unquestionably_ an insecurable device.
There is very little technically wrong with Windows. There are parts of the UI that could have been improved (and have been in Vista - eg: privilege escalation with UAC), but the vast, vast majority of "problems" in Windows, both past and present, are the direct result of poorly-written applications and the subsequent workarounds that have been instituted to make them function transparently *so end users don't have to worry about it*.
If ever you needed evidence that Microsoft listen to their customers, then you need look no further than the (often ridiculous) lengths they go to so that existing, typically badly written software continues to run on newer versions of Windows where, by all rights, it should break horribly (and for external verification of how the rest of the industry perceives this level of support, look no further than the "outrage" when XP SP2 (quick justifiably) broke 0.0001% of the software out there). Microsoft are *acutely* aware that to most users, the OS is little more than a vehicle for the application(s) and, therefore, they need to keep the applications working.
The one we live in, of course. Anyone can use such software; because the uses begin with people who have an image they are interested in changing somehow such as removing redeye, cropping, or resizing, and they extend all the way to Hollywood setting someone's hair on fire in HD as they run down a hall, or shooting lightning from someone's fingertips. In between are a massive number of potential users and uses. So to describe our image manipulation software as "niche or specialized" is quite naive.
You obviously travel in very, very different circles to me if you find there are more than a handful of people lining up to buy software that offers more "image manipulation" capabilities than iPhoto, or the tools that come with pretty much every digital camera sold.
I've answered it twice.
No, you haven't. In fact, you're *still* trying to dodge the question with semantics.
You're just ignoring, or misunderstanding, the answer: I identify them when, and because, they pay me. You give me money for my product, you become my customer. Prior to that, at best, you were only a potential customer, and probably not even that. All of my customers are treated the same. Get it now?
When someone calls up your support line, how do you identify if they are a "paying customer" ?
It's not just the US either. France loved its African colonies; the early African emigrants were all talented and beautiful. When the desperate refugees started showing up however, France decided it hated dark skinned people and needed emigration control. The UK, Germany, and pretty much any other country with a functional economy similarly has a love (cheap labor) / hate (benefits for foreigners) relationship with émigrés.
Fantastic logic you have there:
They like them when they're "talented and beautiful".
They don't like them when they're "desparate refugees".
*Obviously* it's all because of the colour of their skin. Clearly the massively different capabilities the two types of people described above to both support themselves and contribute to the country as a whole has no bearing on the decision whether or not to let them into the country.
Firstly the problem is that the feedback is largely anonymous. You have to ask would these students walk up to the school principal and make these complaints in person? In a lot of cases they would not. Any derogatory comment made anonymously is a comment made by a coward.
Anonymity is a cornerstone of free speech. Without it, criticism without fear of reprisal cannot be made.
Is the Iranian blogger who prefers to remain anonymous so he doesn't get dragged off in the middle of the night and shot a coward ?
Not that the two situations are more than superficially comparable, but if you think certain teachers won't single out certain students for attention, you're very naive.
With that said, I agree with everything else you have said. I, too, have friends and family who are - or were - teachers.
But not separation of church and State.
Hard to see how:
Is all that much different from:
Further, in actual reality, the presence of religion in Australian society, and especially in Government, is *far* less prominent than it is in the US.
The presence of religious education in publicly-funded schools is in no way a breach of the separation between Church and State, so long as no specific religion must be taught and opting-out is allowed.
First of all, I did elect for my child not to attend the scripture session, and my child attended anyway, at least until she spouted off some offensive catholic dogma and I rang the school and put in a 'special order' to ensure she no longer attended that.
Indeed. Perish the thought your little darling make her own decisions instead of following your anti-religion dogma.
Not in a public school it doesn't. The public school is an instrument of the State, engaged in State activities, paid for by the State (i.e. my taxes). It is NOT, I repeat NOT, an institution for the teaching of religion. That is the role of private religious institutions such as religious schools and churchs (mosques, temples, synagogues etc).
The "State" isn't teaching religion. The various faiths have to provide a representative.
Further, a system that allows children to sample the teachings of numerous faiths - or none - at their discretion, is an excellent form of exposure to the various belief systems. Making it part of the typical educational process is a perfectly reasonable path to take.
There is no breach of the separation between Church and State in this system.
Maybe it's the result of having a constant work environment where the principle relationship with people is one of authority and, perhaps, a lack of firm grounding in that authority, that results in such hypersensitivity to criticism. Whatever the reason, they should get a bleedin' grip.
Probably has more to do with the constant public criticism they face from idiots who don't realise how valuable a service they provide.
Heck, look no further than Slashdot. The typical article involving teachers usually has the obligatory "those who can, do - those who can't, teach" quote before the number of posts even hits double figures.
It doesn't take a genious to see that a major pieces in the puzzle that is our long-term survival is population control, and we need to enact it now.
We've been doing it since the dawn of time. It's called war.
For example, many Americans would be outraged to learn that scripture is being taught in Australian Public Schools.
Which ones ? Maybe things have changed in the last 15 years, but back when I was at school, "Religious Education" offered a choice of faiths *and* allowed for those wanted to opt-out and use it as free time.
I personally find this highly offensive, and it makes me long for a US style constitution that guarantees separation of church (blech) and State.
We do (in this context). The Australian Constitution guarantees freedom of religion.