There's still the little problem of software. I know there's a lot of Mac software out there, but it's nothing like the PC market. The average user doesn't really get that, but a lot of salesmen do. Salesmen don't want to be the guys who sold a useless computer, so they'll push PCs to be safe.
Switching to Intel causes a minor problem in the short term (legacy PPC apps run slowly or not at all on new Intel-based Macs), but helps greatly in the long term (developers can stick to writing for x86 without worrying about supporting PPC). This is a particularly big deal for game developers.
Also, in addition to much better performance from apps like VirtualPC, compatibility environments like WINE are now possible on Mac OS X, which should allow Mac users to run Windows software.
Porting NeXTStep to Intel didn't hurt NeXT. Remember, NeXT also decided to stop making their own hardware, and just sell their OS independently. Apple isn't doing that.
I would not be surprised if the Mac hardware using Intel chips is nothing more than a way for Apple to ease out of the computer hardware market over the next couple of years.
I believe you're mistaken. Switching to Intel hardware allows Apple to gain hardware marketshare, by being able to produce more powerful Macs for less money, and by being able to meet demand instead of having major shortages every time they announce a new product. Raw CPU speed for a reasonable price has been a major problem for Apple; their high-end $3000 machines perform nicely but the low-end consumer stuff (that people like me can actually afford) crawls, and once they've fixed this problem, I think Mac sales will really take off.
Having worked for Earthlink in DSL support (before they closed all their callcenters and outsourced everything), I can say that rain is a legitimate excuse - we used to get a lot of customers who would have intermittent connectivity and slow speeds after it had been raining. Phone lines are funny things. You can have a small break in the wire, or a short across the wires, without noticing any problem in your voice service, but DSL performance goes to hell. After 30+ years of expanding in hot weather and contracting in cold weather, this sort of thing happens.
Working with BellSouth DSG (their DSL tech support people), I've noticed that the company actively discourages their employees from being helpful. Techs aren't allowed to tell you useful information (BellSouth claims it's "proprietary"). Sometimes a helpful tech will break the rules in order to try to solve your problem, but there aren't many and they don't last long (either they get caught and fired, or annoyed and leave).
The Mozilla project didn't have the resources to maintain separate ports for Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X. They switched from CFM to Mach-O in order to get much better performance on Mac OS X, but since Mach-O binaries can't run on Mac OS 9, support for that OS had to go.
If you think you can back-port Firefox to Mac OS 9, go ahead. Don't expect anyone else to help you, though.
Funny, I've just switched from Safari to Firefox because Safari is too damn slow, especially on certain sites. Browsing newegg.com with Safari was driving me nuts; Firefox has no problem.
I tried Camino, maybe a year ago or so. I found it unusable, and went back to Safari. I have now switched to Firefox, and for the most part it's working fine.
When a developer calls a bug minor, it doesn't necessarily mean the end user impact is minor, it often means the bug itself is minor, i.e. relatively simple to fix.
The lack of Inkwell support is an issue, but I more importantly question the screen. As far as I know, there's no way to switch between Portrait and Landscape mode. TFA certainly doesn't mention this capablity, and after playing around with my PowerBook for a few minutes, OSX doesn't seem to naitively support that kind of orientation change. That's a big issue as it removes one of the cornerstones of Tablet fuctionality.
OSX 10.4 does support rotating an external display, but it won't let me rotate the internal display on my iBook. Also, performance is severely impacted when you rotate a display.
Um, you're aware that a Mac mini is also likely to have a keyboard attached? The 6-btn remote is offered only as a convenience; of course you could use the keyboard instead (just like you could with your Linux box) but a 6-button remote is much easier.
Nowdays, when I have to go through an automated phone system, it starts with a spanish message.
The message says to push a button to get to a Spanish menu. The only good alternative I can think of is to have it say "for English press 1, para español oprima el 2" which would require me to press an extra button. Do you have any less-annoying suggestions that would work for a bilingual menu?
Sorry...but reading this just hit a hot spot with me of late. I mean...when you travel to another country outside of the US, with the exception of tourist areas...they don't have every sign in 5 different languages, they expect you to pick up on the native language of the country.
My mom lives in Guatemala City and only has to speak Spanish when calling a taxi. She teaches in an English-speaking school, attends an English-speaking church, has English-speaking friends, and menus in restaurants are usually at least bilingual.
I noticed when I went through Barcelona about 10 years ago that all the signs were in two languages, Catelan and Spanish. In Valencia they have a Valencian-language TV channel.
Others have rightly pointed out that Apple's legal department will run this into the ground, but they've missed the most important reason why:
When you purchase a song from the iTunes Music Store, the AAC file is downloaded without FairPlay DRM encryption. The iTunes software adds the FairPlay DRM while downloading, encrypting the file with your iTMS account ID. An open-source client wouldn't do this (or at least wouldn't have to, if it could). Apple would be in a heap of trouble with the record labels if they allowed this software to exist.
The only way to make it work is to move the encryption process from the client to the server, which would significantly increase Apple's costs (in addition to the huge CPU requirements of encrypting every song they sell, they probably wouldn't be able to use Akami's distribution network anymore).
If Noah brought along the dinosaurs, then where did he stick all of the ammonites, trilobites, crinoids, brachiopods and other common Cretaceous Era fossils?
All four examples you've given were marine animals that would not have been brought on the Ark.
Christians believe that God directly inspired the men who wrote the Bible, ensuring the accuracy of the original Scriptures. You're right: without divine inspiration, stories passed down orally through that many generations wouldn't end up being particularly accurate.
As for copies and translations, those are the works of man and are therefore fallible, which is why there are minor disagreements between manuscripts and between translations. However, since the text of the manuscripts we have available are quite similar, it can be reasonably assumed that the original text wasn't much different.
The canonization of the New Testament is a valid issue that I don't feel qualified to address.
If the earth has been realitively unchanged in the last six thousand years as they claim where did it go?
Ah, there's your problem - Creationists claim quite the opposite, that the earth has changed a lot in the last six thousand years. The earth as originally created had one super-continent and one super-ocean.
From Creation to the Flood the earth remained relatively unchanged, but during the flood, the earth's crust broke apart, continents formed roughly where they are today, and immediately following the Flood was an ice age which probably killed the dinosaurs (Noah would have brought some on the boat, though presumably not adults).
According to the bible even the highest mountains were covered. Everest is nearly 30,000 feet above sea level.
Everest would probably have been formed during the Flood; if the "highest mountains" before the Flood weren't very high, it's not that much of a problem.
The difference between Intellegent Design and Evolution is whatever holes there are in Evolution they are slowly being filled. They same holes will still be there in a thousand years that there are now in Intellegent Design.
Holes are being filled as new research is done and scientific discoveries are made. It's a slow process (because so few scientists are working on it), and there are still a lot of holes.
That's exactly my point (which you've obviously missed)- the bible cannot be taken literally.
No, you're misunderstanding: this isn't a debate over whether the entire Bible is literal or not. Use some common sense. The Bible is full of stories, analogies, metaphors, poetry, andliteral truth. Most of the time it should be pretty clear to an intelligent person which is which.
The problem with the latter is that then *insert favourite diety* must have deliberately placed dinasaur bones everywhere, put mountains there that have clearly been eroded over a much longer time and to top it off put it in a galaxy that has been there for, er, slightly longer than 6000 years.
I'm not suggesting that dinosaur bones were "placed" everywhere, nor that already-eroded mountains were created; rather that dinosaurs were still alive as recently as 2,000 B.C. and those mountains eroded a lot faster than you think. I don't expect you to agree, I just want to make sure you understand what we disagree on.;-)
Being able to see stars over 6,000 light years away is a much bigger problem for the Creation theory, and although I've heard several explanations, none of them are particularly satisfactory. The Bible does say that God created light before God created the stars, but that's still kinda weird.
I just remember seeing the minister reading it out of a book at a funeral and assumed it was the bible. However I will assume you are correct.
Have you ever considered reading the Bible for yourself, to find out what it actually says?
(Hint: "If you try to be a good person, you'll get into Heaven" is a common misconception that the Bible is quite clear about.)
Re:This doesn't mean they want to "control" Python
on
Guido Goes Google
·
· Score: 1
The problem (to me) is that while a multitude of operators is concise, it does not convey the meaning of code quickly to a second programmer.
It's not a problem when the second programmer is thoroughly familiar with the language. Anything that isn't clear should be commented, or perhaps extracted into a clearly-named function. The problem is that many Perl programmers are not thoroughly familiar with the language. Perl doesn't require you to learn the whole language before you can start using it; beginners can learn and use a small subset and still be productive. However, since everybody learns a slightly different subset, it's very difficult for non-experts to understand someone else's code (because they used parts of the language you haven't learned yet). This is less of a problem for languages that rely more on functions, because functions can always be looked up in a reference, but Perl has a complex syntax, and references are much less helpful there (how can you look up the meaning of ($ref->{$key})[0]=~/^(\d+)$/?$1:0 in a reference?).
By the way, assuming $ref is a hash reference, $key is one of the hash keys, and each element of the hash is an array reference, this will check to see whether the first element of the array corresponding to this key looks like a positive integer (i.e. contains only numbers, no other characters), and if so, return that number, or if not, return 0. I don't deny that this is overly complicated; perhaps this will clear it up a bit:
sub validateNumber {
my($num)=@_;
return $num=~/^\d+$/?$num:0; }
print validateNumber(($ref->{$key})[0]);
Both examples assume the value to not be undef; it would probably be better to explicitly trap for that (otherwise you'll get a non-fatal warning at run-time if an undef value is encountered while strict and warnings are enabled, which they should be).
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There's still the little problem of software. I know there's a lot of Mac software out there, but it's nothing like the PC market. The average user doesn't really get that, but a lot of salesmen do. Salesmen don't want to be the guys who sold a useless computer, so they'll push PCs to be safe.
Switching to Intel causes a minor problem in the short term (legacy PPC apps run slowly or not at all on new Intel-based Macs), but helps greatly in the long term (developers can stick to writing for x86 without worrying about supporting PPC). This is a particularly big deal for game developers.
Also, in addition to much better performance from apps like VirtualPC, compatibility environments like WINE are now possible on Mac OS X, which should allow Mac users to run Windows software.
Porting NeXTStep to Intel didn't hurt NeXT. Remember, NeXT also decided to stop making their own hardware, and just sell their OS independently. Apple isn't doing that.
I would not be surprised if the Mac hardware using Intel chips is nothing more than a way for Apple to ease out of the computer hardware market over the next couple of years.
I believe you're mistaken. Switching to Intel hardware allows Apple to gain hardware marketshare, by being able to produce more powerful Macs for less money, and by being able to meet demand instead of having major shortages every time they announce a new product. Raw CPU speed for a reasonable price has been a major problem for Apple; their high-end $3000 machines perform nicely but the low-end consumer stuff (that people like me can actually afford) crawls, and once they've fixed this problem, I think Mac sales will really take off.
Linux 2.0.40 was released a few days after the release of Linux 2.6.2.
Having worked for Earthlink in DSL support (before they closed all their callcenters and outsourced everything), I can say that rain is a legitimate excuse - we used to get a lot of customers who would have intermittent connectivity and slow speeds after it had been raining. Phone lines are funny things. You can have a small break in the wire, or a short across the wires, without noticing any problem in your voice service, but DSL performance goes to hell. After 30+ years of expanding in hot weather and contracting in cold weather, this sort of thing happens.
Working with BellSouth DSG (their DSL tech support people), I've noticed that the company actively discourages their employees from being helpful. Techs aren't allowed to tell you useful information (BellSouth claims it's "proprietary"). Sometimes a helpful tech will break the rules in order to try to solve your problem, but there aren't many and they don't last long (either they get caught and fired, or annoyed and leave).
The Mozilla project didn't have the resources to maintain separate ports for Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X. They switched from CFM to Mach-O in order to get much better performance on Mac OS X, but since Mach-O binaries can't run on Mac OS 9, support for that OS had to go.
If you think you can back-port Firefox to Mac OS 9, go ahead. Don't expect anyone else to help you, though.
Funny, that's the same reason I've just switched from Safari to Firefox.
Funny, I've just switched from Safari to Firefox because Safari is too damn slow, especially on certain sites. Browsing newegg.com with Safari was driving me nuts; Firefox has no problem.
I tried Camino, maybe a year ago or so. I found it unusable, and went back to Safari. I have now switched to Firefox, and for the most part it's working fine.
Flash and Java support are NOT minor bugs.
When a developer calls a bug minor, it doesn't necessarily mean the end user impact is minor, it often means the bug itself is minor, i.e. relatively simple to fix.
The lack of Inkwell support is an issue, but I more importantly question the screen. As far as I know, there's no way to switch between Portrait and Landscape mode. TFA certainly doesn't mention this capablity, and after playing around with my PowerBook for a few minutes, OSX doesn't seem to naitively support that kind of orientation change. That's a big issue as it removes one of the cornerstones of Tablet fuctionality.
OSX 10.4 does support rotating an external display, but it won't let me rotate the internal display on my iBook. Also, performance is severely impacted when you rotate a display.
According to the article, this is an optical mouse; it does not have a roller ball. However, it does not use a laser.
Most of the whackjobs deny the idea of a trinity. That's Catholic Dogma.
I think you're mistaken. JWs don't believe in the Trinity, but as far as I'm aware, most other Christian-ish religions/denominations do.
Is racial insensitivity so DEAD in your country...
I dunno about you, but I'm pretty happy to let racism die quietly.
Um, you're aware that a Mac mini is also likely to have a keyboard attached? The 6-btn remote is offered only as a convenience; of course you could use the keyboard instead (just like you could with your Linux box) but a 6-button remote is much easier.
Nowdays, when I have to go through an automated phone system, it starts with a spanish message.
The message says to push a button to get to a Spanish menu. The only good alternative I can think of is to have it say "for English press 1, para español oprima el 2" which would require me to press an extra button. Do you have any less-annoying suggestions that would work for a bilingual menu?
Sorry...but reading this just hit a hot spot with me of late. I mean...when you travel to another country outside of the US, with the exception of tourist areas...they don't have every sign in 5 different languages, they expect you to pick up on the native language of the country.
My mom lives in Guatemala City and only has to speak Spanish when calling a taxi. She teaches in an English-speaking school, attends an English-speaking church, has English-speaking friends, and menus in restaurants are usually at least bilingual.
I noticed when I went through Barcelona about 10 years ago that all the signs were in two languages, Catelan and Spanish. In Valencia they have a Valencian-language TV channel.
Could this possibly be the result of Apple pressuring? I can't imagine they wanted that sticker all over their future machines...
Apple doesn't like ANY stickers all over their machines; whether Intel changes their logo or not, Apple won't be putting stickers on the box.
Surely a blatant attempt by the media companies to get back at Apple for refusing to allowing to gouge the consumer even more by the 99c/song price.
Perhaps you meant AU$1.69?
Others have rightly pointed out that Apple's legal department will run this into the ground, but they've missed the most important reason why:
When you purchase a song from the iTunes Music Store, the AAC file is downloaded without FairPlay DRM encryption. The iTunes software adds the FairPlay DRM while downloading, encrypting the file with your iTMS account ID. An open-source client wouldn't do this (or at least wouldn't have to, if it could). Apple would be in a heap of trouble with the record labels if they allowed this software to exist.
The only way to make it work is to move the encryption process from the client to the server, which would significantly increase Apple's costs (in addition to the huge CPU requirements of encrypting every song they sell, they probably wouldn't be able to use Akami's distribution network anymore).
All four examples you've given were marine animals that would not have been brought on the Ark.
Christians believe that God directly inspired the men who wrote the Bible, ensuring the accuracy of the original Scriptures. You're right: without divine inspiration, stories passed down orally through that many generations wouldn't end up being particularly accurate.
As for copies and translations, those are the works of man and are therefore fallible, which is why there are minor disagreements between manuscripts and between translations. However, since the text of the manuscripts we have available are quite similar, it can be reasonably assumed that the original text wasn't much different.
The canonization of the New Testament is a valid issue that I don't feel qualified to address.
Yes, definitely.
If the earth has been realitively unchanged in the last six thousand years as they claim where did it go?
Ah, there's your problem - Creationists claim quite the opposite, that the earth has changed a lot in the last six thousand years. The earth as originally created had one super-continent and one super-ocean.
From Creation to the Flood the earth remained relatively unchanged, but during the flood, the earth's crust broke apart, continents formed roughly where they are today, and immediately following the Flood was an ice age which probably killed the dinosaurs (Noah would have brought some on the boat, though presumably not adults).
According to the bible even the highest mountains were covered. Everest is nearly 30,000 feet above sea level.
Everest would probably have been formed during the Flood; if the "highest mountains" before the Flood weren't very high, it's not that much of a problem.
The difference between Intellegent Design and Evolution is whatever holes there are in Evolution they are slowly being filled. They same holes will still be there in a thousand years that there are now in Intellegent Design.
Holes are being filled as new research is done and scientific discoveries are made. It's a slow process (because so few scientists are working on it), and there are still a lot of holes.
That's exactly my point (which you've obviously missed)- the bible cannot be taken literally.
No, you're misunderstanding: this isn't a debate over whether the entire Bible is literal or not. Use some common sense. The Bible is full of stories, analogies, metaphors, poetry, and literal truth. Most of the time it should be pretty clear to an intelligent person which is which.
The problem with the latter is that then *insert favourite diety* must have deliberately placed dinasaur bones everywhere, put mountains there that have clearly been eroded over a much longer time and to top it off put it in a galaxy that has been there for, er, slightly longer than 6000 years.
;-)
I'm not suggesting that dinosaur bones were "placed" everywhere, nor that already-eroded mountains were created; rather that dinosaurs were still alive as recently as 2,000 B.C. and those mountains eroded a lot faster than you think. I don't expect you to agree, I just want to make sure you understand what we disagree on.
Being able to see stars over 6,000 light years away is a much bigger problem for the Creation theory, and although I've heard several explanations, none of them are particularly satisfactory. The Bible does say that God created light before God created the stars, but that's still kinda weird.
I just remember seeing the minister reading it out of a book at a funeral and assumed it was the bible. However I will assume you are correct.
Have you ever considered reading the Bible for yourself, to find out what it actually says?
(Hint: "If you try to be a good person, you'll get into Heaven" is a common misconception that the Bible is quite clear about.)
The problem (to me) is that while a multitude of operators is concise, it does not convey the meaning of code quickly to a second programmer.
It's not a problem when the second programmer is thoroughly familiar with the language. Anything that isn't clear should be commented, or perhaps extracted into a clearly-named function. The problem is that many Perl programmers are not thoroughly familiar with the language. Perl doesn't require you to learn the whole language before you can start using it; beginners can learn and use a small subset and still be productive. However, since everybody learns a slightly different subset, it's very difficult for non-experts to understand someone else's code (because they used parts of the language you haven't learned yet). This is less of a problem for languages that rely more on functions, because functions can always be looked up in a reference, but Perl has a complex syntax, and references are much less helpful there (how can you look up the meaning of ($ref->{$key})[0]=~/^(\d+)$/?$1:0 in a reference?).
By the way, assuming $ref is a hash reference, $key is one of the hash keys, and each element of the hash is an array reference, this will check to see whether the first element of the array corresponding to this key looks like a positive integer (i.e. contains only numbers, no other characters), and if so, return that number, or if not, return 0. I don't deny that this is overly complicated; perhaps this will clear it up a bit:
sub validateNumber {
my($num)=@_;
return $num=~/^\d+$/?$num:0;
}
print validateNumber(($ref->{$key})[0]);
Both examples assume the value to not be undef; it would probably be better to explicitly trap for that (otherwise you'll get a non-fatal warning at run-time if an undef value is encountered while strict and warnings are enabled, which they should be).