You're also constructing a straw man argument: you're equating an advocacy position ("I don't think you should use proprietary software for the following reasons") with a call for coercion, which isn't the same thing at all. (That you used the word "imposition" rather than "coercision" doesn't change matters; I think everyone should use my favorite text editor, but I can only impose that view upon you by coercing you to use my favorite editor. Otherwise, I'm just sharing my opinion with you, even if I'm doing it boorishly.) If I tell you that you should never use closed source software because it's immoral, I am stating a strong position--you may feel it's too strong, but unless I'm actually somehow preventing you from using closed source software, it's hardly fascist.
This is an exasperating argumentative move I've seen libertarian friends of mine make on occasion: stating an opinion about a change you'd personally like to see in a given area is taken as a call for regulation, which is taken as a call for government regulation (as opposed to voluntary), and suddenly the libertarian is passionately denouncing the feds arresting small business owners at gunpoint, when all you'd said was that you'd like it if restaurants stopped using partially hydrogenated vegetable oils. Your friend has, even if he's done it with the best of intentions, made several unsupported logical leaps to get from Wesson to Waco.
One of the "less prominent commercial systems" Apple has been borrowing a lot of features from was called NextStep, I believe. Earlier than that, it's fairly well-documented that the original Apple Lisa team visited Xerox PARC and took concepts from Smalltalk-80 (they didn't actually get to see the Star until its public release), but by the time they appeared in the Macintosh, there were a lot of changes based on work by Jef Raskin, Bill Atkinson, Bruce Tognazzini and other Apple engineers. (If you think these folks only knew about "eye candy," you might want to take a look at their resumes.)
There are certainly Apple zealots out there, but there's a surprising number of people out there who are just reflexively anti-Apple. They're the ones who dismiss any positive comment about Apple's work as obviously having come from a zealot. Apple's R&D group is not and never was a match for PARC or Bellcore in their heydays, but the implication that they do nothing but pillage other people's ideas and slap brightly colored fruit logos on them is just as wrong-headed as the implication that Apple invented the GUI.
Massive profit gain, with the only downside being a slight loss in public love when people blame them for their DOA Dell boxen.
Um, no. The downside to selling PC-compatible OS X that people seem to keep forgetting is a company based in Redmond.
Without getting too much into the Linux for the desktop argument, I think its hard to deny that a PC-compatible OS X would be the biggest challenge to Windows thats ever been mounted. Unlike Linux, or BeOS, or even OS/2, Apple has an incredible combination of worldwide brand recognition, reputation for user friendliness, and a broad software base. Right now, Apple and Microsoft can manage to stay in coopetition in the OS market; Apple can take as many pot shots at Microsoft as they want, because as long as OS X only (officially) runs on Apple hardware, Apple is not in direct competition with them. The moment an OS X box appears on shelves at your local Best Buy that Apple intends for you to install on your Dell, HP or Lenovo, that wall is down.
The reason you arent going to see OS X for PCs any time soon has little to do with profit, and a lot to do with the fact that doing so means a fight to the death with Microsoftand no, I dont think Im engaging in hyperbole. In that circumstance, Microsoft would do everything they could to kill OS X dead. No Microsoft Office for Mac. No Microsoft anything for Mac. License changes to make running Windows on Mac hardware illegal. (And this is without suggesting any dirty trick like Microsoft was accused of in their fight with DR-DOS and BeOS, both of which were arguably far less threatening than OS X would be.)
I'd submit that while it'd be great if CSS supported some advanced typography controls, web typography would be improved by an order of magnitude by making the browsers smarter about it. Hyphenation and justification algorithms that have been around for decades and basic ligature support could be added to any browser right now without changing anything on any web page anywhere. Browsers could actually start, y'know, correctly implementing the ­ soft-hyphen entity, while they're at it. (Ironically, only IE gets this right, if I'm remembering correctly!)
When browser developers start getting serious about what's already there and those brain-dead typography problems are solved, then we can start thinking about what needs to be added to CSS to fine-tune the output.
Re:Then you should try PHP
on
Ruby For Rails
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· Score: 1
In a Rails form, I might type
<% form_for:user do |form| %>
<%= form.text_field:name,:size => 40 %>
And then access that returned variable with
@user.name
I suppose I'm not seeing the dramatic productivity loss in doing it that way compared to PHP's approach of
if (!empty ($_POST)) extract($_POST);
...which isn't necessarily safe, anyway, from a good coding practice standpoint. (I tend to use the EXTR_PREFIX_ALL option for extract, which isn't necessary with Rails--the returned form variables exist as accessors in a class variable named after the form, so there's no possibility of a namespace collision.)
At any rate, the argument "you can do anything in C++ if you have the proper libraries" is true, but it's not an argument about language design except in a very peripheral sense--it's an argument for ignoring language design. The sentence works just as well if we change C++ to Fortran, Perl, or for that matter, Ruby.
I can't help but be reminded of Java enthusiasts who were dismissing the observation that Ruby on Rails often accomplishes the same thing as Java and various libraries in much fewer lines of code; "why," said the Java advocates, "lines of code is a silly measure, because we're using Eclipse and it's virtually typing all that extra library and framework setup in there for us!" This may well be the case, but it's hard not respond with, "Perhaps one of Ruby's virtues is that we can do as much as we can in it without all that extra library and framework setup."
If you want to use the full power of the language, Ruby's syntax isn't so simple at all.
That's an extremely subjective measure, isn't it? I find Ruby considerably cleaner and simpler than Perl, and I know I'm not alone.
Re:Then you should try PHP
on
Ruby For Rails
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· Score: 1
Funny, but I've coded for a living off and on for over a decade, including in PHP, and don't consider the inclusion of an "end" statement instead of a closing brace to be a damning indictment of a language. You're essentially arguing that not using C-like syntax shows a language isn't very well thought out.
Suppose you had an array of hashes -- in PHP, something akin to:
You need to know what the highest 'id' value is within that array. In Ruby, you'd write:
i = mood_list.max { |a,b| a['id'] <=> b['id'] }
There are other languages you could do this as easily in, but PHP is not one of them. And there are many, many things you find in a language like Ruby or Python like that.
Writing off a language as powerful as Ruby (or Python, or several others) with very useful features--mixins, blocks of code as parameters, iterators (PHP5's library implementation is comparatively anemic), closures--that have no equivalent in PHP because you can't see past that ol' icky end statement--or can't press a button in your editor to select the current block of code--says more about your biases than it does about faults in the programming language. It's great you're making a living coding, but with all due respect, that doesn't make you very well-informed about programming languages you clearly haven't taken the time to understand.
You mean it's been a whole seven months since the release of Rails 1.0 and Bank of America hasn't redone their entire website in it yet? My god, it's all been a sham! How could we have been so blind!
LOL, indeed. Nobody has a frickin' clue how Rails 2.x, let alone Rails 3.x, is (or is not) going to change anything, whether we're talking about scalability or speed or new ORM approaches. Hell, we don't even know anything about the relative performance of Ruby 2.0's VM, presuming it chugs out of the gate in the next couple of years.
All the Web 2.0 buzzwords being thrown about notwithstanding, d'ya think maybe we could, oh, wait a few goddamn years before writing Rails off as a failure?
They wouldn't be dictated for you anymore than where you live is dictated for you. Many apartment complexes strike deals to only offer a single cable provider; there's no reasons communities can't do the same thing.
I suggested that's exactly what would happen. My point was simply that in such a scenario (your town, subdivision, apartment complex, etc. contracting with a telecom provider), the "consumer" the telecom companies are competing for is not actually the end user, and this is a somewhat less rosy scenario than actually being able to choose your provider for yourself, which is what most proponents of deregulation (seem to) envision.
Further, what's stopping the companies from striking deals allowing access on some of their last miles for access on some of the other companies last miles?
If I have access into 10,000 homes and they're all my customers at retail rates, and you say, "Share your access and I'll pay you wholesale rates for every customer on your network that goes with my retail service, and I'll give you access to 10,000 homes on my network with the same deal," that means both of us will lose customers to one another. So neither of us has an incentive to let the other guy sell his service on our network for less than we could sell it on our network ourselves--if you could sell on my network for less than I did, I'd have to lower my price to stay competitive, and the net effect would be less revenue for me from the deal. Obviously, neither of us would want to sell on the other guy's network for more than the other guy, which means a zero-sum game is the most likely alternative.
There's no reason that a company couldn't do that, but if we're going to propose letting the market do that, the market needs to provide a better incentive for the producers than "consumer choice will be improved." Arguments for consumer well-being seem to very rarely be persuasive to accountants.
The way it was explained to me when I was in telephony was that the 99.999% applied only to getting a dialtone. That is, you didn't actually have to be able to call anyone, just that your line would produce that pleasing tone in your ear.
While that may have been true in telephony if we take that as "land-based voice telephone service over the last century as a whole," in telecom that surely wasn't true a decade ago, and I doubt that's changed since. The industry was already moving toward a packet-based, "data-centric" model when I was working in it in the mid-to-late '90s, and the six nine reliability we were shooting for had nothing to do with dial tones at all -- it had to do with how many packets were being delivered successfully.
Even before "VoIP" became a buzzword, data was surpassing voice traffic; from a delivery standpoint, nearly all telecom traffic now is packetized data at some point in its life. (AFAIK, it's mostly IP, in fact, since frame is fading and ATM never got a lot of traction.)
The page you point to isn't incorrect, per se, but there's a distinction between carrier equipment and "customer premise equipment" (CPE), and a lot of what that article is talking about is CPE concerns like PBXes. What the carriers are using generally does strive for five nines reliability (or better), but even if they're successful at delivering on that, it doesn't mean your office communications lines will have the same reliability.
To bring this back to the original topic, "Carrier Grade Linux" is a drive to have a Linux build that, well, pretty much doesn't go down. The OS in your office PBX failing doesn't mean JoeBob Communications' five-nines guarantee has been violated, no. However, if your PBX can't connect because JBC's Fooblitzky 3000 Gigabit "Carrier-Class" has failed due to its OS, it has been. And, so has their SLA with hundreds of their customers. Then Very Bad Things happen.
The problem is that 'ending telco entitlements' is easier said than done. It's easy to dwell on all the problems caused by the government-created telco monopolies in various municipalities, but I haven't seen anyone really think about what the alternative would have been in a completely unregulated market.
Suppose your town had four telephone companies. How do you get service from one of them to your house? Somebody has to pay for the physical lines between their CO and your home to start with. If there's just one phone company for that "territory," that company can estimate the revenue they'll make by running out trunk lines to a neighborhood; with four companies, none of them can make nearly as good an estimation. Do you pay for the actual last mile between the nearest junction box and your house? And who owns that last mile, the phone company you're buying from? What if you want to switch services? Does the new company have to run out *their* trunk line to your neighborhood to get to you, and do they have to put in their own connection to your house? Their competitors not only aren't compelled to give them access, after all, they now have a vested interest in making that access *difficult.*
As counter-intuitive as it may seem, I suspect your choice of local phone company, cable service, etc. would still be dictated for you in a "purely free market" scenario, because the economies of scale involved would drive the phone companies to negotiate exclusive contracts with subdivision planners, builders, property managers and, yes, municipalities. (The only solution to that I could come up with would, ironically, be *more* government involvement, not less: make the "last mile" an actual public utility; the four theoretical phone companies could connect at the municipal COs, all at the same rates.)
Sure, Red Hat may have good room for growth. But that's not a good argument.
Well, that depends on which argument you're making. It's a perfectly splendid argument for which company you'd rather be a shareholder of, which is what the OP specifically mentioned. Obviously, an investment in a company whose share price goes from, say, $5 to $10 in a year is a much better return than the same amount invested in a company whose share price goes from $50 to $60, even if the latter company has an order of magnitude more cash on hand and market share.
If the argument is more specifically "which platform do you want to hitch your business to," it's less clear, but the case could still be made for the underdog platform. Your potential rate of return is limited by the much smaller market, but you're also more likely to be able to attract attention and less likely to have incredibly entrenched market leaders. Comparing Mac OS X to Windows is illustrative here; there are market categories for Macs which are all but dead on the Windows side (outliners, alternative commercial word processors), or have allowed for competition even with big names--such as upstart text editor TextMate compared to the "big dog" of BBEdit. On the Windows side, how many of you are using Gobe Productive, the alternative commercial office suite originally for BeOS that got fairly solid reviews from the five people who saw it before the company vanished? If Gobe's ex-Claris staff hadn't been stubbornly anti-Mac, and had ported Productive to OS X as "the AppleWorks descendant that doesn't suck," I suspect they'd still be around. (Ironically, I gather several of their programmers ended up back at Apple!)
I don't think Linux is actually a good market for commercial programs; there's simply too much resistance to products that aren't free (as in beer, not speech), save for "heavy iron" server apps like Oracle. But for a service or consulting company, Linux would be at least as good a choice to focus on as Windows.
AFAIK, the security guard usually isn't the one making the call on who gets searched -- the computer flags you at check-in, whether by random function or TSA criteria. The guard doesn't really have to care what your race is.
My point was that having two different restaurant chains/brands in the same building tends to degrade/worsen both brands-- Like combining two seperate companies with different objectives.
That does frequently seem to be the case, yes. I'm not entirely sure it has to be the case, but the practice seems to bear the assertion out. (I certainly can't think of any case where the consolidation made any involved brand better. Has anyone ever said, "Wow, Dunkin' Donuts sure makes much better coffee now that so many of them are co-located with Togo's sandwich shops?")
Apple and Nintendo:: professional computers and gaming
Well, to play devil's advocate for a moment: it really has seemed to me for a while now that if you look at Apple as a whole -- computers, music players, content distribution, and a strong focus on lifestyle branding -- the company that Apple is really gunning for long-term is neither Microsoft nor Dell. If you think of Apple as trying to build itself into "The American Sony," a lot of their strategies fit together, and it suggests a few signposts up ahead, like moving from entertainment distribution to entertainment production, possibly via acquisition.
Now look back at your comparison, and try putting the word "Sony" in place of both Apple and Nintendo.:)
I think they've effectively *always* been owned by Yum, just under different names. They owned those three restaurants since the late '70s, IIRC, first as a division of PepsiCo, then as a spinoff company, Tricon. Tricon changed to Yum after they also bought A&W and Long John Silver's.
In my dim recollection, Pizza Hut wasn't a bad pizza joint -- not great, but decent -- back when they real restaurants, with table service and full menus. They went downhill pretty rapidly when Tricon refashioned them as a fast food place.
(Wow, this is off-topic, isn't it? Hell, maybe Apple will buy Yum, and rename all the brands: iPizza, iChicken, iBell, iFloat, and iYARRR. It doesn't make that much less sense than them buying Nintendo...)
As opposed to, "If private corporations say it, it must be true?" Because I'm thinkin' their track record hasn't been that great, either, when push comes to shove.
How many non-DRM alternatives are there anyway? To the best of my knowledge there is only one,
Off the top of my head there's
Magnatune
eMusic
MP3tunes.com
...and, you know, ripping from (most) CDs
and it's based in russia because that's apparently the only country whose laws don't enable the record company cartel found in the west. And even that DRM-free alternative is under constant fire from the cartel.
It's under constant fire from the cartel because it's of extremely dubious legality. Russia is a signatory to the Berne Convention. Allofmp3.com is essentially making the claim that (a) they're licensed for Russian distribution rights of music, and (b) an exemption in Russian copyright law allowing for recordings to be played without permission of the copyright owner for broadcasting and cable transmission covers the internet. But foreign rights holders under Berne only control the copyright within their own country, which means that even if Allofmp3 has legal Russian distribution rights to the music they're selling, they can't sell it to someone outside of Russia. (And there's dispute as to whether they even paid for the in-country distribution rights.)
If you're looking for a champion of non-DRMed music, okay. But please, consider championing a company that actually cares about both consumers and artists--even in the best possible light, there's not a single penny from Allofmp3's sales going to anyone's bank account but theirs. Allofmp3 may be convenient and cheap for you, but they are not fair use crusaders. They're grey marketeers making money off other people's works without compensation.
For instance, around the time LOTR:FOTR came out his magazine ran an article that attempted to claim that LOTR was Christian allegory.
While I agree Dobson's generally an incoherent idiot, Lord of the Rings very definitely isn't allegory--but it's very definitely Christian. As Tolkien himself wrote, "The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first but consciously in the revision." There's a great deal of scholarly work out there on the Christian themes in the work. (It's something I wrote a term paper on, many years ago.)
I think you and some of the other people are arguing at cross-purposes.
You're right in that Office doesn't require any server support to be a functional office suite for individuals. To be a good tool for collaboration in an actual office, however, the more Microsoft Server technology you have behind it the better off you are. Outlook may be a perfectly serviceable mail client when it's not talking to Exchange, but the resource scheduling and its tight integration with calendar and mail functions is lost. Sharepoint Server certainly isn't required, but there's a range of functionality relating to web publishing/sharing that's lost.
This is all entirely by design, and I have absolutely no doubt that there's even more of this in Office 2007 than there is in the current Office 2003 iteration. No matter how neato keen the new ribbon interface may be in practice, that alone is not going to get a company with 1000 (let alone 10,000 or more) desktop licenses to rush out and upgrade. "Look at all the neat stuff Office's integration with our server technologies gives you" is a more compelling case.
Sure, you're right, nobody has to buy those server technologies to use Office 2007: but if they don't, they may decide they don't have to buy Office 2007 at all. And I think that's mostly what people are saying here. We're all aware that a guy off the company LAN is still likely to be able to use Office without any issues -- it's just that he may decide it's not worth bothering, and for Microsoft, that's a big issue.
I suppose I'd question whether "middle click on the word Put" actually "indicates how to interface with that object or feature," as the Wikipedia article puts it, any more than a menu that says "Save... ^S" on it. There's nothing about either of those that really implies what to do with the text no the screen -- the user has to have information that can't be derived from the UI appearance: in the latter CUA-ish case, that you can click on menu titles and release the mouse button on a command, and that commands will show you the keyboard shortcuts in the menus; in the former Acme-ish case, that middle-clicking on any word will try to interpret that as an action, and that "Put" is the name of the action for storing whatever you're working on.
Also, I suspect once one learns the mnemonics, the keyboard interface becomes faster. No matter how good the mouse control may be--and I say this as a Mac user who bitches about how Windows and most Unixes woefully underuse the mouse by comparison--a well-thought-out keyboard interface will nearly always trump it.
Actually, that is one aspect that has changed since the paper - sam-style editing commands are now built in to the editor.
Good! I'll be downloading it and giving it a look when I can. I'm aware that to some degree I'm doing the equivalent of reviewing a movie based on watching its trailer.:)
I did RTFM, or at least RTFP -- the paper on Acme's design. And when TFP cheerfully described how Acme doesn't have an internal concept of global search and replace but rather relegates those to tool commands that one pipes together, I was certainly impressed. Just, you know, not in a positive way.
Okay, that's not quite fair. From a design standpoint I think Acme is brilliant and I'll probably look at it again in more detail (I used it a few years ago, but briefly). From a practical standpoint, nothing I've read or seen so far about Acme's design convinces me it's a better way of doing text editing, though--just a different way of doing it. It's hard to see a serious advantage given us by replacing our ^S (or ^XS or Command-S or even:w) with a middle-click on the word "Put"; even some of the more elaborate functionality Acme's approach provides has close analogues in modern text editors--in TextMate, for instance, I can select text with the left mouse button and then right-click the selected text to perform functions on it, including executing it as a shell command. Of course, I can also select it with the keyboard and press ^R, and I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that just may be faster.
There are some theoretical advantages Acme still has, I suspect, that just naturally flow from its command-search-select approach, but for the majority of users would they really outweigh the advantages of a syntax-sensitive text editor? Is Acme superior to Emacs' PSGML mode for SGML/XML editing, or TextMate's Rails-specific modes for Ruby on Rails?
Acme and Plan 9 in general are really fascinating, no question. Yet, they still remind me of a friend's comment on Smalltalk a few years back: "Smalltalk is the language of the future... and always will be."
The original poster referred to "the liberal montra" [sic] as, apparently, spouting off uninformed opinions, as if there are no conservatives who ever spout off uninformed opinions.
"Now, you realize that six weeks from now we're expecting to introduce a replacement for the system you're looking at, so you might want to hold off just a bit longer. And for that matter, we're thinking about introducing a laptop six months from now with the following features--does that work for you? Should we add a Firewire port? Should the screen be anti-reflective? What do you think about the haptic feel of this new keyboard we're considering--let us send you a few samples."
It'd sure be nice if Apple was one of the computer manufacturers who took such a proactive approach, I agree.
Um, just who are the computer manufacturers who do that?
I'm being facetious, yes, but my point is that some of the criticisms Apple gets, and I honestly think yours is one of them, are based on holding Apple to a different standard than other hardware and software makers. Yes, when you buy something from Apple, you don't know what they're going to introduce next week, and you may not agree with the design and implementation choices they made. The same is true for Dell or IBM or any other computer maker.
The Windows-centric world has the advantage of having many, many compatible machines, so you may be able to find one that does match your criteria; in the Apple world you're stuck with Apple's choices. That's a more valid criticism, but it's not something Apple can reasonably be blamed for or even expected to address. (The issue of "Mac clones" is a very big and very contentious topic which has been addressed ad infinitum elsewhere.)
how hard would it be for them to put in a couple, in the bus path, or the network communications path, or any number of other places that kick back and listen for X. when X happens, open a link on an unsuspecting port encrypted and give full access to the box, or log keys and wait for something to happen or some set time and dump the data somewhere.
The first scenario is not a matter of "a few transistors"; to give "full access to the box," you need to be able to communicate with the box at an operating system level. The question you're really asking is, "How hard would it be to put the equivalent of VNC in hardware and have it transparently work with the OS on a laptop," and the answer is "very." The second scenario is more plausible, but exactly where is the "somewhere" the data is being dumped to? The laptop may not be on a network all the time, and most corporate networks are running firewalls these days, despite what the cynics will tell you. (I haven't been able to open a non-standard port out at any company I've worked at in the last four years, and when I've opened a standard SSH connection to my home machine I've gotten questioned more than once.) Do you propose that at midnight the computer is going to automatically FedEx a flash card to China?
Go talk to a company that actually deals with classified technologies and export controls sometime. Business computers manufactured by a company that has a home office in China are not very high on the list of things they worry about. And you are aware that many laptops sold by non-Chinese companies are made in China anyway, right? If it were truly so easy to be hiding nefarious things on motherboards, they could be just as easily "bugged" by a subcontractor. The fact that we're worried about Lenovo and not about Dell shows this is more about making a political point than making the State Department safer.
Why do clueless people bother to voice their uninformed opionions on something? The standard liberal montra.
If only more Americans gave the careful, deliberate consideration to important matters that Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly do.
Because if Apple sells OS X in a fashion that is intended to run on non-Mac hardware, they move into direct competition with Windows.
Despite the "ha ha only serious" kind of rivalry Microsoft and Apple have with one another currently, there's a clear difference: users have to invest in entirely new hardware to run Apple's operating system, hardware you can't just throw together for a couple hundred bucks at No-Name Computers. Basically, you have to step outside of the Windows-compatible hardware market. Even if they're all technically personal computers, Macs are not "PCs" in the way the term's come to be used. You have to make a conscious choice to buy a Mac, not a PC.
If, however, OS X was available for your Dell or your IBM or your No-Name Computer, with Apple's knowledge and support, that is no longer quasi-friendly rivalry with Microsoft. That is throwing down the gauntlet. Apple may not have a great market share but they have a high mind share, and would be coming to the table with things OS/2 and even Linux never had: a reputation for high usability, thousands of well-known commercial programs. OS X on "generic" Intel hardware would be a full frontal assault the likes of which has never been mounted.
There's a lot of good technical arguments against OS X on generic hardware ("driver support nightmare" covers most of them), but the best reason for Apple to do their best to tie their OS to their hardware is that they're not interested in having a battle to the death with Microsoft. Because that's exactly how Microsoft would see it, and things would get very, very ugly.
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You're also constructing a straw man argument: you're equating an advocacy position ("I don't think you should use proprietary software for the following reasons") with a call for coercion, which isn't the same thing at all. (That you used the word "imposition" rather than "coercision" doesn't change matters; I think everyone should use my favorite text editor, but I can only impose that view upon you by coercing you to use my favorite editor. Otherwise, I'm just sharing my opinion with you, even if I'm doing it boorishly.) If I tell you that you should never use closed source software because it's immoral, I am stating a strong position--you may feel it's too strong, but unless I'm actually somehow preventing you from using closed source software, it's hardly fascist.
This is an exasperating argumentative move I've seen libertarian friends of mine make on occasion: stating an opinion about a change you'd personally like to see in a given area is taken as a call for regulation, which is taken as a call for government regulation (as opposed to voluntary), and suddenly the libertarian is passionately denouncing the feds arresting small business owners at gunpoint, when all you'd said was that you'd like it if restaurants stopped using partially hydrogenated vegetable oils. Your friend has, even if he's done it with the best of intentions, made several unsupported logical leaps to get from Wesson to Waco.
One of the "less prominent commercial systems" Apple has been borrowing a lot of features from was called NextStep, I believe. Earlier than that, it's fairly well-documented that the original Apple Lisa team visited Xerox PARC and took concepts from Smalltalk-80 (they didn't actually get to see the Star until its public release), but by the time they appeared in the Macintosh, there were a lot of changes based on work by Jef Raskin, Bill Atkinson, Bruce Tognazzini and other Apple engineers. (If you think these folks only knew about "eye candy," you might want to take a look at their resumes.)
There are certainly Apple zealots out there, but there's a surprising number of people out there who are just reflexively anti-Apple. They're the ones who dismiss any positive comment about Apple's work as obviously having come from a zealot. Apple's R&D group is not and never was a match for PARC or Bellcore in their heydays, but the implication that they do nothing but pillage other people's ideas and slap brightly colored fruit logos on them is just as wrong-headed as the implication that Apple invented the GUI.
Um, no. The downside to selling PC-compatible OS X that people seem to keep forgetting is a company based in Redmond.
Without getting too much into the Linux for the desktop argument, I think its hard to deny that a PC-compatible OS X would be the biggest challenge to Windows thats ever been mounted. Unlike Linux, or BeOS, or even OS/2, Apple has an incredible combination of worldwide brand recognition, reputation for user friendliness, and a broad software base. Right now, Apple and Microsoft can manage to stay in coopetition in the OS market; Apple can take as many pot shots at Microsoft as they want, because as long as OS X only (officially) runs on Apple hardware, Apple is not in direct competition with them. The moment an OS X box appears on shelves at your local Best Buy that Apple intends for you to install on your Dell, HP or Lenovo, that wall is down.
The reason you arent going to see OS X for PCs any time soon has little to do with profit, and a lot to do with the fact that doing so means a fight to the death with Microsoftand no, I dont think Im engaging in hyperbole. In that circumstance, Microsoft would do everything they could to kill OS X dead. No Microsoft Office for Mac. No Microsoft anything for Mac. License changes to make running Windows on Mac hardware illegal. (And this is without suggesting any dirty trick like Microsoft was accused of in their fight with DR-DOS and BeOS, both of which were arguably far less threatening than OS X would be.)
I'd submit that while it'd be great if CSS supported some advanced typography controls, web typography would be improved by an order of magnitude by making the browsers smarter about it. Hyphenation and justification algorithms that have been around for decades and basic ligature support could be added to any browser right now without changing anything on any web page anywhere. Browsers could actually start, y'know, correctly implementing the ­ soft-hyphen entity, while they're at it. (Ironically, only IE gets this right, if I'm remembering correctly!)
When browser developers start getting serious about what's already there and those brain-dead typography problems are solved, then we can start thinking about what needs to be added to CSS to fine-tune the output.
In a Rails form, I might type
<% form_forAnd then access that returned variable with
@user.nameI suppose I'm not seeing the dramatic productivity loss in doing it that way compared to PHP's approach of
if (!empty ($_POST)) extract($_POST);...which isn't necessarily safe, anyway, from a good coding practice standpoint. (I tend to use the EXTR_PREFIX_ALL option for extract, which isn't necessary with Rails--the returned form variables exist as accessors in a class variable named after the form, so there's no possibility of a namespace collision.)
At any rate, the argument "you can do anything in C++ if you have the proper libraries" is true, but it's not an argument about language design except in a very peripheral sense--it's an argument for ignoring language design. The sentence works just as well if we change C++ to Fortran, Perl, or for that matter, Ruby.
I can't help but be reminded of Java enthusiasts who were dismissing the observation that Ruby on Rails often accomplishes the same thing as Java and various libraries in much fewer lines of code; "why," said the Java advocates, "lines of code is a silly measure, because we're using Eclipse and it's virtually typing all that extra library and framework setup in there for us!" This may well be the case, but it's hard not respond with, "Perhaps one of Ruby's virtues is that we can do as much as we can in it without all that extra library and framework setup."
If you want to use the full power of the language, Ruby's syntax isn't so simple at all.
That's an extremely subjective measure, isn't it? I find Ruby considerably cleaner and simpler than Perl, and I know I'm not alone.
Funny, but I've coded for a living off and on for over a decade, including in PHP, and don't consider the inclusion of an "end" statement instead of a closing brace to be a damning indictment of a language. You're essentially arguing that not using C-like syntax shows a language isn't very well thought out.
...)
Suppose you had an array of hashes -- in PHP, something akin to:
$mood_list = array( array( "id" => 0, "mood" => "happy"), array("id" => 1, "mood" => "grumpy"),
You need to know what the highest 'id' value is within that array. In Ruby, you'd write:
i = mood_list.max { |a,b| a['id'] <=> b['id'] }
There are other languages you could do this as easily in, but PHP is not one of them. And there are many, many things you find in a language like Ruby or Python like that.
Writing off a language as powerful as Ruby (or Python, or several others) with very useful features--mixins, blocks of code as parameters, iterators (PHP5's library implementation is comparatively anemic), closures--that have no equivalent in PHP because you can't see past that ol' icky end statement--or can't press a button in your editor to select the current block of code--says more about your biases than it does about faults in the programming language. It's great you're making a living coding, but with all due respect, that doesn't make you very well-informed about programming languages you clearly haven't taken the time to understand.
You mean it's been a whole seven months since the release of Rails 1.0 and Bank of America hasn't redone their entire website in it yet? My god, it's all been a sham! How could we have been so blind!
LOL, indeed. Nobody has a frickin' clue how Rails 2.x, let alone Rails 3.x, is (or is not) going to change anything, whether we're talking about scalability or speed or new ORM approaches. Hell, we don't even know anything about the relative performance of Ruby 2.0's VM, presuming it chugs out of the gate in the next couple of years.
All the Web 2.0 buzzwords being thrown about notwithstanding, d'ya think maybe we could, oh, wait a few goddamn years before writing Rails off as a failure?
I suggested that's exactly what would happen. My point was simply that in such a scenario (your town, subdivision, apartment complex, etc. contracting with a telecom provider), the "consumer" the telecom companies are competing for is not actually the end user, and this is a somewhat less rosy scenario than actually being able to choose your provider for yourself, which is what most proponents of deregulation (seem to) envision.
If I have access into 10,000 homes and they're all my customers at retail rates, and you say, "Share your access and I'll pay you wholesale rates for every customer on your network that goes with my retail service, and I'll give you access to 10,000 homes on my network with the same deal," that means both of us will lose customers to one another. So neither of us has an incentive to let the other guy sell his service on our network for less than we could sell it on our network ourselves--if you could sell on my network for less than I did, I'd have to lower my price to stay competitive, and the net effect would be less revenue for me from the deal. Obviously, neither of us would want to sell on the other guy's network for more than the other guy, which means a zero-sum game is the most likely alternative.
There's no reason that a company couldn't do that, but if we're going to propose letting the market do that, the market needs to provide a better incentive for the producers than "consumer choice will be improved." Arguments for consumer well-being seem to very rarely be persuasive to accountants.
While that may have been true in telephony if we take that as "land-based voice telephone service over the last century as a whole," in telecom that surely wasn't true a decade ago, and I doubt that's changed since. The industry was already moving toward a packet-based, "data-centric" model when I was working in it in the mid-to-late '90s, and the six nine reliability we were shooting for had nothing to do with dial tones at all -- it had to do with how many packets were being delivered successfully.
Even before "VoIP" became a buzzword, data was surpassing voice traffic; from a delivery standpoint, nearly all telecom traffic now is packetized data at some point in its life. (AFAIK, it's mostly IP, in fact, since frame is fading and ATM never got a lot of traction.)
The page you point to isn't incorrect, per se, but there's a distinction between carrier equipment and "customer premise equipment" (CPE), and a lot of what that article is talking about is CPE concerns like PBXes. What the carriers are using generally does strive for five nines reliability (or better), but even if they're successful at delivering on that, it doesn't mean your office communications lines will have the same reliability.
To bring this back to the original topic, "Carrier Grade Linux" is a drive to have a Linux build that, well, pretty much doesn't go down. The OS in your office PBX failing doesn't mean JoeBob Communications' five-nines guarantee has been violated, no. However, if your PBX can't connect because JBC's Fooblitzky 3000 Gigabit "Carrier-Class" has failed due to its OS, it has been. And, so has their SLA with hundreds of their customers. Then Very Bad Things happen.
The problem is that 'ending telco entitlements' is easier said than done. It's easy to dwell on all the problems caused by the government-created telco monopolies in various municipalities, but I haven't seen anyone really think about what the alternative would have been in a completely unregulated market.
Suppose your town had four telephone companies. How do you get service from one of them to your house? Somebody has to pay for the physical lines between their CO and your home to start with. If there's just one phone company for that "territory," that company can estimate the revenue they'll make by running out trunk lines to a neighborhood; with four companies, none of them can make nearly as good an estimation. Do you pay for the actual last mile between the nearest junction box and your house? And who owns that last mile, the phone company you're buying from? What if you want to switch services? Does the new company have to run out *their* trunk line to your neighborhood to get to you, and do they have to put in their own connection to your house? Their competitors not only aren't compelled to give them access, after all, they now have a vested interest in making that access *difficult.*
As counter-intuitive as it may seem, I suspect your choice of local phone company, cable service, etc. would still be dictated for you in a "purely free market" scenario, because the economies of scale involved would drive the phone companies to negotiate exclusive contracts with subdivision planners, builders, property managers and, yes, municipalities. (The only solution to that I could come up with would, ironically, be *more* government involvement, not less: make the "last mile" an actual public utility; the four theoretical phone companies could connect at the municipal COs, all at the same rates.)
Well, that depends on which argument you're making. It's a perfectly splendid argument for which company you'd rather be a shareholder of, which is what the OP specifically mentioned. Obviously, an investment in a company whose share price goes from, say, $5 to $10 in a year is a much better return than the same amount invested in a company whose share price goes from $50 to $60, even if the latter company has an order of magnitude more cash on hand and market share.
If the argument is more specifically "which platform do you want to hitch your business to," it's less clear, but the case could still be made for the underdog platform. Your potential rate of return is limited by the much smaller market, but you're also more likely to be able to attract attention and less likely to have incredibly entrenched market leaders. Comparing Mac OS X to Windows is illustrative here; there are market categories for Macs which are all but dead on the Windows side (outliners, alternative commercial word processors), or have allowed for competition even with big names--such as upstart text editor TextMate compared to the "big dog" of BBEdit. On the Windows side, how many of you are using Gobe Productive, the alternative commercial office suite originally for BeOS that got fairly solid reviews from the five people who saw it before the company vanished? If Gobe's ex-Claris staff hadn't been stubbornly anti-Mac, and had ported Productive to OS X as "the AppleWorks descendant that doesn't suck," I suspect they'd still be around. (Ironically, I gather several of their programmers ended up back at Apple!)
I don't think Linux is actually a good market for commercial programs; there's simply too much resistance to products that aren't free (as in beer, not speech), save for "heavy iron" server apps like Oracle. But for a service or consulting company, Linux would be at least as good a choice to focus on as Windows.
AFAIK, the security guard usually isn't the one making the call on who gets searched -- the computer flags you at check-in, whether by random function or TSA criteria. The guard doesn't really have to care what your race is.
That does frequently seem to be the case, yes. I'm not entirely sure it has to be the case, but the practice seems to bear the assertion out. (I certainly can't think of any case where the consolidation made any involved brand better. Has anyone ever said, "Wow, Dunkin' Donuts sure makes much better coffee now that so many of them are co-located with Togo's sandwich shops?")
Well, to play devil's advocate for a moment: it really has seemed to me for a while now that if you look at Apple as a whole -- computers, music players, content distribution, and a strong focus on lifestyle branding -- the company that Apple is really gunning for long-term is neither Microsoft nor Dell. If you think of Apple as trying to build itself into "The American Sony," a lot of their strategies fit together, and it suggests a few signposts up ahead, like moving from entertainment distribution to entertainment production, possibly via acquisition.
Now look back at your comparison, and try putting the word "Sony" in place of both Apple and Nintendo. :)
I think they've effectively *always* been owned by Yum, just under different names. They owned those three restaurants since the late '70s, IIRC, first as a division of PepsiCo, then as a spinoff company, Tricon. Tricon changed to Yum after they also bought A&W and Long John Silver's.
In my dim recollection, Pizza Hut wasn't a bad pizza joint -- not great, but decent -- back when they real restaurants, with table service and full menus. They went downhill pretty rapidly when Tricon refashioned them as a fast food place.
(Wow, this is off-topic, isn't it? Hell, maybe Apple will buy Yum, and rename all the brands: iPizza, iChicken, iBell, iFloat, and iYARRR. It doesn't make that much less sense than them buying Nintendo...)
Low Slashdot IDs are worth money? Dude!
As opposed to, "If private corporations say it, it must be true?" Because I'm thinkin' their track record hasn't been that great, either, when push comes to shove.
Off the top of my head there's
It's under constant fire from the cartel because it's of extremely dubious legality. Russia is a signatory to the Berne Convention. Allofmp3.com is essentially making the claim that (a) they're licensed for Russian distribution rights of music, and (b) an exemption in Russian copyright law allowing for recordings to be played without permission of the copyright owner for broadcasting and cable transmission covers the internet. But foreign rights holders under Berne only control the copyright within their own country, which means that even if Allofmp3 has legal Russian distribution rights to the music they're selling, they can't sell it to someone outside of Russia. (And there's dispute as to whether they even paid for the in-country distribution rights.)
If you're looking for a champion of non-DRMed music, okay. But please, consider championing a company that actually cares about both consumers and artists--even in the best possible light, there's not a single penny from Allofmp3's sales going to anyone's bank account but theirs. Allofmp3 may be convenient and cheap for you, but they are not fair use crusaders. They're grey marketeers making money off other people's works without compensation.
For instance, around the time LOTR:FOTR came out his magazine ran an article that attempted to claim that LOTR was Christian allegory.
While I agree Dobson's generally an incoherent idiot, Lord of the Rings very definitely isn't allegory--but it's very definitely Christian. As Tolkien himself wrote, "The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first but consciously in the revision." There's a great deal of scholarly work out there on the Christian themes in the work. (It's something I wrote a term paper on, many years ago.)
I think you and some of the other people are arguing at cross-purposes.
You're right in that Office doesn't require any server support to be a functional office suite for individuals. To be a good tool for collaboration in an actual office, however, the more Microsoft Server technology you have behind it the better off you are. Outlook may be a perfectly serviceable mail client when it's not talking to Exchange, but the resource scheduling and its tight integration with calendar and mail functions is lost. Sharepoint Server certainly isn't required, but there's a range of functionality relating to web publishing/sharing that's lost.
This is all entirely by design, and I have absolutely no doubt that there's even more of this in Office 2007 than there is in the current Office 2003 iteration. No matter how neato keen the new ribbon interface may be in practice, that alone is not going to get a company with 1000 (let alone 10,000 or more) desktop licenses to rush out and upgrade. "Look at all the neat stuff Office's integration with our server technologies gives you" is a more compelling case.
Sure, you're right, nobody has to buy those server technologies to use Office 2007: but if they don't, they may decide they don't have to buy Office 2007 at all. And I think that's mostly what people are saying here. We're all aware that a guy off the company LAN is still likely to be able to use Office without any issues -- it's just that he may decide it's not worth bothering, and for Microsoft, that's a big issue.
I suppose I'd question whether "middle click on the word Put" actually "indicates how to interface with that object or feature," as the Wikipedia article puts it, any more than a menu that says "Save... ^S" on it. There's nothing about either of those that really implies what to do with the text no the screen -- the user has to have information that can't be derived from the UI appearance: in the latter CUA-ish case, that you can click on menu titles and release the mouse button on a command, and that commands will show you the keyboard shortcuts in the menus; in the former Acme-ish case, that middle-clicking on any word will try to interpret that as an action, and that "Put" is the name of the action for storing whatever you're working on.
:)
Also, I suspect once one learns the mnemonics, the keyboard interface becomes faster. No matter how good the mouse control may be--and I say this as a Mac user who bitches about how Windows and most Unixes woefully underuse the mouse by comparison--a well-thought-out keyboard interface will nearly always trump it.
Actually, that is one aspect that has changed since the paper - sam-style editing commands are now built in to the editor.
Good! I'll be downloading it and giving it a look when I can. I'm aware that to some degree I'm doing the equivalent of reviewing a movie based on watching its trailer.
I did RTFM, or at least RTFP -- the paper on Acme's design. And when TFP cheerfully described how Acme doesn't have an internal concept of global search and replace but rather relegates those to tool commands that one pipes together, I was certainly impressed. Just, you know, not in a positive way.
:w) with a middle-click on the word "Put"; even some of the more elaborate functionality Acme's approach provides has close analogues in modern text editors--in TextMate, for instance, I can select text with the left mouse button and then right-click the selected text to perform functions on it, including executing it as a shell command. Of course, I can also select it with the keyboard and press ^R, and I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that just may be faster.
Okay, that's not quite fair. From a design standpoint I think Acme is brilliant and I'll probably look at it again in more detail (I used it a few years ago, but briefly). From a practical standpoint, nothing I've read or seen so far about Acme's design convinces me it's a better way of doing text editing, though--just a different way of doing it. It's hard to see a serious advantage given us by replacing our ^S (or ^XS or Command-S or even
There are some theoretical advantages Acme still has, I suspect, that just naturally flow from its command-search-select approach, but for the majority of users would they really outweigh the advantages of a syntax-sensitive text editor? Is Acme superior to Emacs' PSGML mode for SGML/XML editing, or TextMate's Rails-specific modes for Ruby on Rails?
Acme and Plan 9 in general are really fascinating, no question. Yet, they still remind me of a friend's comment on Smalltalk a few years back: "Smalltalk is the language of the future... and always will be."
The original poster referred to "the liberal montra" [sic] as, apparently, spouting off uninformed opinions, as if there are no conservatives who ever spout off uninformed opinions.
They don't have sarcasm on your planet, do they?
"Now, you realize that six weeks from now we're expecting to introduce a replacement for the system you're looking at, so you might want to hold off just a bit longer. And for that matter, we're thinking about introducing a laptop six months from now with the following features--does that work for you? Should we add a Firewire port? Should the screen be anti-reflective? What do you think about the haptic feel of this new keyboard we're considering--let us send you a few samples."
It'd sure be nice if Apple was one of the computer manufacturers who took such a proactive approach, I agree.
Um, just who are the computer manufacturers who do that?
I'm being facetious, yes, but my point is that some of the criticisms Apple gets, and I honestly think yours is one of them, are based on holding Apple to a different standard than other hardware and software makers. Yes, when you buy something from Apple, you don't know what they're going to introduce next week, and you may not agree with the design and implementation choices they made. The same is true for Dell or IBM or any other computer maker.
The Windows-centric world has the advantage of having many, many compatible machines, so you may be able to find one that does match your criteria; in the Apple world you're stuck with Apple's choices. That's a more valid criticism, but it's not something Apple can reasonably be blamed for or even expected to address. (The issue of "Mac clones" is a very big and very contentious topic which has been addressed ad infinitum elsewhere.)
how hard would it be for them to put in a couple, in the bus path, or the network communications path, or any number of other places that kick back and listen for X. when X happens, open a link on an unsuspecting port encrypted and give full access to the box, or log keys and wait for something to happen or some set time and dump the data somewhere.
The first scenario is not a matter of "a few transistors"; to give "full access to the box," you need to be able to communicate with the box at an operating system level. The question you're really asking is, "How hard would it be to put the equivalent of VNC in hardware and have it transparently work with the OS on a laptop," and the answer is "very." The second scenario is more plausible, but exactly where is the "somewhere" the data is being dumped to? The laptop may not be on a network all the time, and most corporate networks are running firewalls these days, despite what the cynics will tell you. (I haven't been able to open a non-standard port out at any company I've worked at in the last four years, and when I've opened a standard SSH connection to my home machine I've gotten questioned more than once.) Do you propose that at midnight the computer is going to automatically FedEx a flash card to China?
Go talk to a company that actually deals with classified technologies and export controls sometime. Business computers manufactured by a company that has a home office in China are not very high on the list of things they worry about. And you are aware that many laptops sold by non-Chinese companies are made in China anyway, right? If it were truly so easy to be hiding nefarious things on motherboards, they could be just as easily "bugged" by a subcontractor. The fact that we're worried about Lenovo and not about Dell shows this is more about making a political point than making the State Department safer.
Why do clueless people bother to voice their uninformed opionions on something? The standard liberal montra.
If only more Americans gave the careful, deliberate consideration to important matters that Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly do.
Because if Apple sells OS X in a fashion that is intended to run on non-Mac hardware, they move into direct competition with Windows.
Despite the "ha ha only serious" kind of rivalry Microsoft and Apple have with one another currently, there's a clear difference: users have to invest in entirely new hardware to run Apple's operating system, hardware you can't just throw together for a couple hundred bucks at No-Name Computers. Basically, you have to step outside of the Windows-compatible hardware market. Even if they're all technically personal computers, Macs are not "PCs" in the way the term's come to be used. You have to make a conscious choice to buy a Mac, not a PC.
If, however, OS X was available for your Dell or your IBM or your No-Name Computer, with Apple's knowledge and support, that is no longer quasi-friendly rivalry with Microsoft. That is throwing down the gauntlet. Apple may not have a great market share but they have a high mind share, and would be coming to the table with things OS/2 and even Linux never had: a reputation for high usability, thousands of well-known commercial programs. OS X on "generic" Intel hardware would be a full frontal assault the likes of which has never been mounted.
There's a lot of good technical arguments against OS X on generic hardware ("driver support nightmare" covers most of them), but the best reason for Apple to do their best to tie their OS to their hardware is that they're not interested in having a battle to the death with Microsoft. Because that's exactly how Microsoft would see it, and things would get very, very ugly.