You're overstating matters a bit. Russia had extremely good intelligence on the Germans via Lucy and Ultra intelligence stolen from the Brits, and they successfully used this information in some key battles on the eastern front, so it's wrong to imply that they exhibited no tactical planning.
You're right that Russia was not known for their brilliant generals or technological superiority, but having an excellent spy network plus sheer numbers did make them a force to be reckoned with. (And Hitler being suicidally stubborn about the whole thing certainly didn't help.)
Oh you silly Americans and your revisionist history. The Soviets beat the Nazi menace, not you.
Russia was quite important in ending the war so soon, but this is obviously overstating matters to a comical degree.
We could have beaten the Nazis alone, with Russia not in the picture. It would have been much longer and messier, but there is no way Germany could have prevailed (they were short on supplies, had highly compromised intelligence and counter-intelligence capabilities and couldn't match the production capabilities of America. They may have had some nice tanks and some interesting jet/rocketry programs, but overall they were obviously lagging in technology, not just in nuclear capability but also in critical radar and shell fuse technology. The only surprise trump card they had was tabun, but it would've ended pretty badly for them if they tried to use it. )
But if Germany had little need to worry much about the Western or African fronts? Well, I suspect they could have simply taken their time with Russia, instead of trying to blitzkrieg the un-blitzkrieg-able. Russia was obviously not in nearly as powerful a position as America was in, during the 1940s.
As I explain elsewhere, this is highly selective credit-giving. Virtually everything that makes the web what it is today (and what it was in the 1990s, for that matter) was conceived of and popularized in America including but not limited to: Internet-like networks, markup languages, and client-side scripting.
Yeah, um, markup languages were invented and popularized by several Americans, not Europeans. So you have the network itself invented and popularized by Americans, the computers largely designed and built by Americans, the markup language conceived up and popularized by Americans, pre-Internet networks (including BBSes) popularized in America... But no, some European who drafts a few standards based entirely on existing and deployed American ideas deserves the lion's share of the credit for inventing the modern Internet.
Oh yeah, and then the American company Netscape invented Javascript which (for better or worse) completely redefined how developers viewed the web.
But to the extent it fucks up the other people attempting to fuck up the world, it's clearly a net improvement.
All reasonable, mature people who understand how the world works have adopted a moral philosophy that defines goodness in a way that parallels how Karl Popper defined truth, but a simpler and cruder step philosophy that is nonetheless a step in the right direction is of course the lesser of two evils.
The world would be a much worse place if America's influence simply diminished, but that's exactly what a lot of leftists appear to desire because they can't see past all of the harm (very real and unacknowledged by most of the right wing) America does.
Just a brief addendum: there are probably some interesting corner cases here where it does make sense to take a file's permissions at face value (regardless of whether or not it's a system file), and/or where some system files would indeed reside on external disc. However, if you designed a new DAC system (as opposed to hackery that selectively elevates privileges on demand), this would hopefully be flexible enough to accommodate that, and the new DAC could be made to be backwards-compatible... I think.
I'm still chewing this one over. The issue at hand that I've so far intentionally left underspecified is how to best differentiate system vs. non-system files.... one idea that is intriguing me at the moment would be to randomly generate an N-bit identifier during install that root identifies itself with and attach that to all files that claim to be owned by root. Seems simultaneously clever and moronic... or at the very least, somehow tacky. Hm.
I'm primarily using these posts to think 'out loud', if that isn't obvious by now.
I did actually have a permission issue issue with a FAT drive a couple months ago using Debian 8 on Qubes, but I've forgotten the details... I was in a hurry to do something, couldn't be bothered to spare more than a few moments on it (during which I did little other than fly some flabbergast-tinged obscenities.) The hypervisor is probably crucial to the explanation; either Qubes did something strange or I did something strange in Qubes.
That said, there's still something broken in the core of most distros; as I've said, there needs to be a "single user" configuration or perhaps I'm looking at this wrong and what's really needed is a "super-super user". Regardless, this option should be available (and the default for most general purpose Desktop distros) and should automatically renders moot most of these issues without compromising security. There's nothing secure whatsoever about refusing to let me look at removable device I've just mounted that has a *nix file system on it. Yes, I do use them on some of my flash drives. And it also comes up whenever you need to examine a system drive taken from another machine.
Actually, come to think of it the overriding issue is this: security of system files (the system you're currently on), security regarding files (other than system files) that are considered executable, and security of non-system & non-executable files are three very different things, but *nix permissions treats them the same. That last one shouldn't be respected on a single-user system (or anyone logged in as super-super user.)
I mean think about it: "Oh, this directory on this hard drive you've just attached says root owns it! Go away." is the same response the distro is giving for its actual system directories. That's ridiculously dumb. I understand that this is a natural consequence of the highly modular nature of *nix, so it's not dumb in the sense of having a flawed foundation, but it seems clear that in the spirit of this modularity a simple flag to distinguish these two states ("these are my system files and they are CRITICAL!" vs. "this is someone else's system files, supposedly. I dunno, I've never seen this disk before in my life. The files claim to be owned by "root", but it's obviously not a system disk.") can and should be added. It should've been added a very long time ago.
Linux DAC helps in two ways on a typical single-user modern desktop: protection from executable files and protecting system files. Protecting *a foreign file on a non-system disk* from me just because it claims to be owned by 'root' serves no purpose whatsoever. This behavior is (on a single user system) clearly pointless and is presumably a relic from the days of multi-user UNIX.
I was quite annoyed with myself last night, thought I got fucked up and wasted too much time writing a bunch of stuff no one would ever see... thanks mods! I guess I'm not alone.
I do apologize for all the typos and nonsensically phrased sentences that must be up there.
Unfortunately for capacitive screens, they do shatter (or at least crack in the corners)....I still hate capacitive screens, particularly for soft-keyboards.
Capacitive doesn't have to be glass. I've seen two low-end devices that appeared to have plastic capacitive screens (they were multitouch and certainly didn't feel like resistive.)
The friction sucks, but if you don't do a lot of swiping (just pecking or viewing), it's fantastic. It's lighter and incredibly durable. Although, you do need to toss a screen protector on it to protect against scratches.
The glass thing is so weird... I'm positive they could figure out a formula of plastic (perhaps with a coating of something special sprayed on) that had decent frictional properties. I think it must be a legit conspiracy. That's the only explanation. They know that there are WAY too many used phones available due to carrier subsidization, so they had to find a way to plausibly make them more fragile.
I agree that resistive is a bit underrated (I had the chance to use an N800 for a period of time), especially for precision, but *some* multitouch gestures, like zooming, is just way, way too damn convenient to give up. I've also had a couple resistive screens die on me (progressive discoloration) whereas the aforementioned plastic-capacitive phone eventually had to be sold on Craigslist for $10, all scratched to hell and back, but with a completely functional and uncracked display.
Apple also used to make clicky alps-based keyboards.
Alps doesn't really do it for me, be it Matias or vintage. I always thought the point of mechanical keyboards is to not be bottoming out most of your strokes, allowing you to go faster (once you get used to it) and have less finger fatigue. The higher actuation point is nice, but useless without a good followup. Besides, Cherry has finally made a higher actuation switch (Speed Silver MX) and hopefully the Chinese MX-clone companies won't be far behind (maybe even with tactility/clicks?).
I get to deal with all their gear when it inevitably stops working.
Oh, well maybe this is trickier in some cases, but I nipped that in the bud by saying "I will customize and fix any Windows, Linux or Android device you have. If you buy Apple, you're on your own. I'm not learning OS X or iOS." This worked for me pretty effectively, but if one's family has been caught early on in the Apple RDF then I can fully understand and empathize about the difficulties of saying no.
Although, truth be told, I still ended up learning tidbits I wish I didn't know due to friends and coworkers. So infectious.
Ok, that's enough smoking of the earthly remains of Steve Jobs for you. Objective-C is the least elegant language I've ever seen, and that includes assembly language for two different chip architectures.
1. And this differs from C++ how?
2. I really despise Steve Jobs worship, but this was one of the few things he was more or less right on.
3. That welding together of two different languages isn't necessarily a bad thing. Certainly, it is much, much more desirable than Java's "You WILL USE OBJECTS IN EVERYTHING YOU DO WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT!!" approach (more on this in a moment.)
In the hands of someone capable (I've already admitted Java is much more idiotproof), it can make optimization much easier as you can easily when C stuff is happening and when Objective-C stuff is happening even if those things are heavily mixed.
4. I'm more concerned with elegance from a properties-of-constructs point of view, not elegance of syntax. Syntax can be (but for some reason generally isn't) abstracted and changed. I have no patience whatsoever for the "But Python uses whitespace for scope delimiting! I want *brackets*, waaaaaah!" arguments. No, I don't especially love objective-c syntax but that shouldn't be the main issue.
5. Ok, you want to insist that syntax matters anyway? Fine, message passing at least is a coherent paradigm. Mixing () function syntax with.method syntax the way C++ and Java do is a fucking abomination. Not only is it often a symptom of a crippled OO system (a lack of multiple dispatch), but it's a very ugly relict of C++'s insane decision to foist noun-centric syntax on everyone whether they like it or not. The sane thing to do would be have the dot be exactly equivalent to a function call with parentheses except the object (or primitive) to the left of the dot is passed in as the first argument. "Well that makes no sense!", I can hear you say. "The dot is obviously meant to convey whether or not the object *has* the method defined for that class, mirroring its dual syntax usage to address specific fields within the object"... and this is a symptom of the massive brain rot that C++ syntax has spread everywhere.
Objects/classes don't own methods. That's extremely stupid and limiting and badly corrupts the function-centered way of doing things. (Now, an object can have a first-class function present within it but that's something quite different from a class defining a function.)
This is a treatise best left for another day, I think. Bottom line is that no, I'm not completely in love with objective-c syntax but its semantics are reasonably beautiful and the damage C++/Java's syntax has wrought is (in the eyes of anyone whose brain hasn't been thorough corrupted with "design pattern" dreck) nothing short of catastrophic.
I wouldn't drop it, but I'd instantly become a lot more suspicious (to the point that I'd be vocal in mentioning the potential issue if any particular quotes of hers were being passed around.) This is particularly true if she could provide any specifics about what has supposedly been modified or fabricated.
Mentioning that their private keys were compromised (if indeed that is the case) would be good, too. Well... 'good' in one particularly limited sense of the word.
I would gladly do that (and I'm serious here--I would take the time to learn the language used, if need be, and learn the codebase enough to actually submit patches) if it appeared that anyone was headed in the right direction. But they aren't. Some of the things I mentioned are hard to implement, but some are extremely easy (better prompt dialogs and better behavior for stuff like file collisions) and yet almost no one has done it, despite having 10+ years to. I don't want to waste my life on a project that has head devs that obviously do not really care about regular, day to day power user stuff.
Right now the only person who has that "holy shit, you are reading my mind!" effect on me (with UI) is Joanna Rutkowska, but her endeavors are limited to only those UI issues that concern hypervisors.
Fork it myself? Sure. Some day. If/when I win the lottery, yes I will almost certainly end up at least forking something like a file browser, if not actually endeavoring to start my own DE.
Yeah, I guess a key detail I forget to examine here is the fact that they're predominantly judge trials in Russia. It all more or less makes sense now, but is no less disheartening.
His definition of "inappropriate" language includes the word "jackass" and any post that points out his lies involving Andrew Wakefield, or his profound ignorance involving how placebos work, how smallpox was eradicated, etc. He has refused to respond to any of this issues raised.
You're on my whitelist. The "inappropriate language" was the word "jackass". He posted these messages immediately after I demonstrated his lies and profound ignorance regarding placebos, Andrew Wakefeld, smallpox and other topics.
For posterity: The "inappropriate language" was the word "jackass". He posted these messages immediately after I demonstrated his lies and profound ignorance regarding placebos, Andrew Wakefeld, smallpox and other topics.
The "inappropriate language" was the word "jackass". He posted these messages immediately after I demonstrated his lies and profound ignorance regarding placebos, Andrew Wakefeld, smallpox and other topics.
It's well past time for UI to have different modes. Have one that's for ease of use. Have another for power and expert users.
"Power users" are the ones that have really got the shaft over the past 10+ years. It's distinct from (but broadly overlaps with) expert: the basic idea of a power user is someone who is fully taking advantage of the functionality that is built-into the app (including options in the config files or "advanced" tabs in a GUI), but doesn't want to built it him/herself (which includes but isn't limited to writing CLI scripts.) Some stuff I am probably an "expert" on, but most of the time I'm just a power user. I don't want to use a CLI to sort my photos. That's horrendous and clearly less functional. I'm sure emacs-dired or some old midnight commander clone would be functional enough, but I've never had the patience to sit down to get over that learning curve and configure it how I need it just to enable a few missing features.
But WHY THE HELL SHOULD I NEED TO MANUALLY ENABLE THOSE FEATURES TO BEGIN WITH? Linux has had like 20 years to make a good GUI file browser and they've failed utterly. Why the hell are permission issues with removable drives still a thing? Having to open a terminal window to launch "sudo nautilus/thunar/dolphin" in a separate window, without any of my customizations (so everything is invariably some big icon, enabling me to see like 7 files at a time) to fix some ridiculous a permission issue that should've never existed in the first place... are you fucking kidding me?[1] No, I am NOT going to open up a CLI as a workaround for bugs (yes, bugs) in your 15 year old actively-developed file browser, and fuck you very much for suggesting such a thing.
Why can't I tell at a glance where this folder is being mounted from? Why can't I tell at a glance what the filesystem is? Wait, what? You can't even tell these things even with rightclick-properties?? What is the POINT of having a "properties" or "details" if you're not going to even give me a hint about where the directory is physically located? When this sort of thing comes up I generally just give up and launch gparted, just to figure out what the hell I'm looking at. I'm sure there's an easier way, but the easiest way was obviously for my file browser to actually give me a few scraps of information about the goddamn files.
Why does this "places" view vs. "tree" view dichotomy still exist? It's senselessly crippled almost every single Linux file browser I've ever seen, to one extent or another. It renders pcmanfm unusable. It used to render thunar unusable, but they've fixed it now. Sort of. Still completely impossible to tell apart a lot of the entries in the left pane: 32GB removable drive, 32GB removable drive, 32GB removable drive, god fucking forbid you show me anything like a vendor name or a graphic representing used space or the file system or something. Dolphin is a bit better at it, as I recall, but I've never gotten around to getting Qt dark theming to work properly.
Why is there no "undo"?[2] Why the fuck can't I simply control-z to undo a partial file file move after I realize there's not enough space... wait just a goddamned second, WHY DID YOU EVEN BEGIN THE MOVE OPERATION WITHOUT FIRST CHECKING TO SEE IF I HAD ENOUGH SPACE?
Oh look, now there's a filename collision during my 2 TB copy, which you helpfully paused about 30 seconds into it (and I've been gone for an hour eating lunch, thinking you were busy finishing said goddamn copy operation.) Couldn't you have just keep going and ask me about duplicate filenames after you've copied all the other thousands of files that weren't duplicates?
Oh look, in addition to the file name being the same, the file size is also the same. Hmm. It says "resume_latest.odt". Well, is it the same file or isn't it? Why the hell aren't you telling me the goddamned modified date on the file? And why didn't you run a hash? Y
* Magnetic cables are freakin' awesome but are one of the few things that haven't been widely copied (I'm assuming due to patent or something.)
* I think the iPad was sort of innovative... was there really no Android version in the works beforehand? I know e-ink readers were pretty widespread before then. Regardless, the "just make a big phone, but without the phone" approach was a very wise choice (even if it was obvious in retrospect) and they certainly deserve kudos they were the first ones to do it. I dearly wish removable keyboards and docks were more widespread and many, many things could be said about the walled gardens and tragic demise of the netbook but on the whole, it's hard not to give them this one.
* Capacitive screens, while sometimes leading to annoying UIs, never became widespread until after the iPhone[1]. This is a slightly double-edged sword, as it ushered in an era of glass screens, but the net UI win and normal wear and tear durability improvements (i.e. if it doesn't shatter, it can last a lot longer than resistive) can't be ignored. (I did actually own a plastic capacitive touchscreen and it was pretty awesome from a durability standpoint but the friction sucked.)
* Objective-C is a much better, more optimizable and more elegant language than Java (and Cocoa was a powerful platform long before JVM began to get interesting.) Java would be a pretty horrible language if not for the massive amount of work that's gone into optimizing it and the fact so it does make it a bit harder for mediocre coders to crank out catastrophically bad code.
* OS X is considerably better than Windows or OS 9. From what I hear. [2]
* Building on what I allude to in footnote 1, if we're just talking about "changes" here (and not actual industry innovations), anytime Apple has copied an Android feature it's turned out pretty well for them...especially since they always manage to convince people that they were the ones that invented it. They went from " Independent app devs? AhahahahaGo FUCK yourselves. We don't want you crapping up our walled garden!" to millions of dorky freshmen making "there's an app for that!" jokes in just a couple years, and from my understanding you have Google to thank for that.
* I guess chiclet keyboards aren't that bad... they do tend to be more durable than other laptop keyboards, and they're only slightly more cumbersome to use once you get over the learning curve. But oh, to live in an alternate universe where they stuck a Cherry MX style mechanical keyboard in there and everyone else rushed to copy that instead...
1. And honestly, the capacitive screen was the only thing they really got right with the iPhone (which was nice, because they were relatively rare/expensive prior to the first iPhone.) Other than that it was pretty goddamn inferior to the G1 and the N800, and they had to play catchup with really basic shit like MMS, 3G speeds (seriously! Who the hell builds an uber-expensive smartphone with a mandatory data plan but only EDGE speeds?) , customizable ringtones and an app marketplace that wasn't a locked-down nightmare. Of course, mainstream culture/media firmly asserts that it was the other way around and Android has supposedly been some crappy knockoff trying to play catchup with Apple.
2. The sales pitch always sounds pretty weak to me though, when comparing it to any laptop that's known to run your favorite BSD or Linux distro well out of the box: "All of the benefits of *nix except it costs money to upgrade and it's much less configurable and there's a 30% Apple Tax, and there's no low end option at all if you just need a basic workhorse and even older machines on Craigslist sell for twice as much as they should! Yes, you heard that correctly... all of the benefits of *nix!!!!"
Apple is one of those things you wish you could simply pass on and not have an opinion about (different strokes for different folks), but mainstream culture's rampant and unreasonable obsession forces you to know stuff and develop an opinion whether you want to or not. Detailed, cranky opinions.
That's an interesting statistic of course, but it's a little less shocking or worrying than one might initially assume. For instance, I read that one of the reasons is that Japanese prosecutors will very rarely take something all the way to trial unless they are nearly positive they'll win--it's therefore as much a symbol of Japanese perfectionism / aversion to failure as anything else. Also, there's a lot of soft power in Japanese culture, so presumably they have other ways to pressure suspected criminals to stay in line in non-slam dunk cases... or maybe they have a lot of plea bargains, not sure. I never looked that far into it.
The statistic that over 99% of people in modern Russia are convicted is more bluntly worrying to me. One might've hoped that, given their history, a distrust of authority would have taken root at some point, but this does not seem to be the case (or if it is, it's exceeded by the distrust of the accused.) And there's no use appealing to an overall lower trial rate or crime rate to explain that one.
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You're overstating matters a bit. Russia had extremely good intelligence on the Germans via Lucy and Ultra intelligence stolen from the Brits, and they successfully used this information in some key battles on the eastern front, so it's wrong to imply that they exhibited no tactical planning.
You're right that Russia was not known for their brilliant generals or technological superiority, but having an excellent spy network plus sheer numbers did make them a force to be reckoned with. (And Hitler being suicidally stubborn about the whole thing certainly didn't help.)
Oh you silly Americans and your revisionist history. The Soviets beat the Nazi menace, not you.
Russia was quite important in ending the war so soon, but this is obviously overstating matters to a comical degree.
We could have beaten the Nazis alone, with Russia not in the picture. It would have been much longer and messier, but there is no way Germany could have prevailed (they were short on supplies, had highly compromised intelligence and counter-intelligence capabilities and couldn't match the production capabilities of America. They may have had some nice tanks and some interesting jet/rocketry programs, but overall they were obviously lagging in technology, not just in nuclear capability but also in critical radar and shell fuse technology. The only surprise trump card they had was tabun, but it would've ended pretty badly for them if they tried to use it. )
But if Germany had little need to worry much about the Western or African fronts? Well, I suspect they could have simply taken their time with Russia, instead of trying to blitzkrieg the un-blitzkrieg-able. Russia was obviously not in nearly as powerful a position as America was in, during the 1940s.
As I explain elsewhere, this is highly selective credit-giving. Virtually everything that makes the web what it is today (and what it was in the 1990s, for that matter) was conceived of and popularized in America including but not limited to: Internet-like networks, markup languages, and client-side scripting.
Yeah, um, markup languages were invented and popularized by several Americans, not Europeans. So you have the network itself invented and popularized by Americans, the computers largely designed and built by Americans, the markup language conceived up and popularized by Americans, pre-Internet networks (including BBSes) popularized in America... But no, some European who drafts a few standards based entirely on existing and deployed American ideas deserves the lion's share of the credit for inventing the modern Internet.
Oh yeah, and then the American company Netscape invented Javascript which (for better or worse) completely redefined how developers viewed the web.
But to the extent it fucks up the other people attempting to fuck up the world, it's clearly a net improvement.
All reasonable, mature people who understand how the world works have adopted a moral philosophy that defines goodness in a way that parallels how Karl Popper defined truth, but a simpler and cruder step philosophy that is nonetheless a step in the right direction is of course the lesser of two evils.
The world would be a much worse place if America's influence simply diminished, but that's exactly what a lot of leftists appear to desire because they can't see past all of the harm (very real and unacknowledged by most of the right wing) America does.
Just a brief addendum: there are probably some interesting corner cases here where it does make sense to take a file's permissions at face value (regardless of whether or not it's a system file), and/or where some system files would indeed reside on external disc. However, if you designed a new DAC system (as opposed to hackery that selectively elevates privileges on demand), this would hopefully be flexible enough to accommodate that, and the new DAC could be made to be backwards-compatible... I think.
I'm still chewing this one over. The issue at hand that I've so far intentionally left underspecified is how to best differentiate system vs. non-system files.... one idea that is intriguing me at the moment would be to randomly generate an N-bit identifier during install that root identifies itself with and attach that to all files that claim to be owned by root. Seems simultaneously clever and moronic... or at the very least, somehow tacky. Hm.
I'm primarily using these posts to think 'out loud', if that isn't obvious by now.
I did actually have a permission issue issue with a FAT drive a couple months ago using Debian 8 on Qubes, but I've forgotten the details... I was in a hurry to do something, couldn't be bothered to spare more than a few moments on it (during which I did little other than fly some flabbergast-tinged obscenities.) The hypervisor is probably crucial to the explanation; either Qubes did something strange or I did something strange in Qubes.
That said, there's still something broken in the core of most distros; as I've said, there needs to be a "single user" configuration or perhaps I'm looking at this wrong and what's really needed is a "super-super user". Regardless, this option should be available (and the default for most general purpose Desktop distros) and should automatically renders moot most of these issues without compromising security. There's nothing secure whatsoever about refusing to let me look at removable device I've just mounted that has a *nix file system on it. Yes, I do use them on some of my flash drives. And it also comes up whenever you need to examine a system drive taken from another machine.
Actually, come to think of it the overriding issue is this: security of system files (the system you're currently on), security regarding files (other than system files) that are considered executable, and security of non-system & non-executable files are three very different things, but *nix permissions treats them the same. That last one shouldn't be respected on a single-user system (or anyone logged in as super-super user.)
I mean think about it: "Oh, this directory on this hard drive you've just attached says root owns it! Go away." is the same response the distro is giving for its actual system directories. That's ridiculously dumb. I understand that this is a natural consequence of the highly modular nature of *nix, so it's not dumb in the sense of having a flawed foundation, but it seems clear that in the spirit of this modularity a simple flag to distinguish these two states ("these are my system files and they are CRITICAL!" vs. "this is someone else's system files, supposedly. I dunno, I've never seen this disk before in my life. The files claim to be owned by "root", but it's obviously not a system disk.") can and should be added. It should've been added a very long time ago.
Linux DAC helps in two ways on a typical single-user modern desktop: protection from executable files and protecting system files. Protecting *a foreign file on a non-system disk* from me just because it claims to be owned by 'root' serves no purpose whatsoever. This behavior is (on a single user system) clearly pointless and is presumably a relic from the days of multi-user UNIX.
I was quite annoyed with myself last night, thought I got fucked up and wasted too much time writing a bunch of stuff no one would ever see... thanks mods! I guess I'm not alone.
I do apologize for all the typos and nonsensically phrased sentences that must be up there.
Unfortunately for capacitive screens, they do shatter (or at least crack in the corners). ...I still hate capacitive screens, particularly for soft-keyboards.
Capacitive doesn't have to be glass. I've seen two low-end devices that appeared to have plastic capacitive screens (they were multitouch and certainly didn't feel like resistive.)
The friction sucks, but if you don't do a lot of swiping (just pecking or viewing), it's fantastic. It's lighter and incredibly durable. Although, you do need to toss a screen protector on it to protect against scratches.
The glass thing is so weird... I'm positive they could figure out a formula of plastic (perhaps with a coating of something special sprayed on) that had decent frictional properties. I think it must be a legit conspiracy. That's the only explanation. They know that there are WAY too many used phones available due to carrier subsidization, so they had to find a way to plausibly make them more fragile.
I agree that resistive is a bit underrated (I had the chance to use an N800 for a period of time), especially for precision, but *some* multitouch gestures, like zooming, is just way, way too damn convenient to give up. I've also had a couple resistive screens die on me (progressive discoloration) whereas the aforementioned plastic-capacitive phone eventually had to be sold on Craigslist for $10, all scratched to hell and back, but with a completely functional and uncracked display.
Apple also used to make clicky alps-based keyboards.
Alps doesn't really do it for me, be it Matias or vintage. I always thought the point of mechanical keyboards is to not be bottoming out most of your strokes, allowing you to go faster (once you get used to it) and have less finger fatigue. The higher actuation point is nice, but useless without a good followup. Besides, Cherry has finally made a higher actuation switch (Speed Silver MX) and hopefully the Chinese MX-clone companies won't be far behind (maybe even with tactility/clicks?).
I get to deal with all their gear when it inevitably stops working.
Oh, well maybe this is trickier in some cases, but I nipped that in the bud by saying "I will customize and fix any Windows, Linux or Android device you have. If you buy Apple, you're on your own. I'm not learning OS X or iOS." This worked for me pretty effectively, but if one's family has been caught early on in the Apple RDF then I can fully understand and empathize about the difficulties of saying no.
Although, truth be told, I still ended up learning tidbits I wish I didn't know due to friends and coworkers. So infectious.
Ok, that's enough smoking of the earthly remains of Steve Jobs for you. Objective-C is the least elegant language I've ever seen, and that includes assembly language for two different chip architectures.
1. And this differs from C++ how?
.method syntax the way C++ and Java do is a fucking abomination. Not only is it often a symptom of a crippled OO system (a lack of multiple dispatch), but it's a very ugly relict of C++'s insane decision to foist noun-centric syntax on everyone whether they like it or not. The sane thing to do would be have the dot be exactly equivalent to a function call with parentheses except the object (or primitive) to the left of the dot is passed in as the first argument. "Well that makes no sense!", I can hear you say. "The dot is obviously meant to convey whether or not the object *has* the method defined for that class, mirroring its dual syntax usage to address specific fields within the object"... and this is a symptom of the massive brain rot that C++ syntax has spread everywhere.
2. I really despise Steve Jobs worship, but this was one of the few things he was more or less right on.
3. That welding together of two different languages isn't necessarily a bad thing. Certainly, it is much, much more desirable than Java's "You WILL USE OBJECTS IN EVERYTHING YOU DO WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT!!" approach (more on this in a moment.)
In the hands of someone capable (I've already admitted Java is much more idiotproof), it can make optimization much easier as you can easily when C stuff is happening and when Objective-C stuff is happening even if those things are heavily mixed.
4. I'm more concerned with elegance from a properties-of-constructs point of view, not elegance of syntax. Syntax can be (but for some reason generally isn't) abstracted and changed. I have no patience whatsoever for the "But Python uses whitespace for scope delimiting! I want *brackets*, waaaaaah!" arguments. No, I don't especially love objective-c syntax but that shouldn't be the main issue.
5. Ok, you want to insist that syntax matters anyway? Fine, message passing at least is a coherent paradigm. Mixing () function syntax with
Objects/classes don't own methods. That's extremely stupid and limiting and badly corrupts the function-centered way of doing things. (Now, an object can have a first-class function present within it but that's something quite different from a class defining a function.)
This is a treatise best left for another day, I think. Bottom line is that no, I'm not completely in love with objective-c syntax but its semantics are reasonably beautiful and the damage C++/Java's syntax has wrought is (in the eyes of anyone whose brain hasn't been thorough corrupted with "design pattern" dreck) nothing short of catastrophic.
I wouldn't drop it, but I'd instantly become a lot more suspicious (to the point that I'd be vocal in mentioning the potential issue if any particular quotes of hers were being passed around.) This is particularly true if she could provide any specifics about what has supposedly been modified or fabricated.
Mentioning that their private keys were compromised (if indeed that is the case) would be good, too. Well... 'good' in one particularly limited sense of the word.
I would gladly do that (and I'm serious here--I would take the time to learn the language used, if need be, and learn the codebase enough to actually submit patches) if it appeared that anyone was headed in the right direction. But they aren't. Some of the things I mentioned are hard to implement, but some are extremely easy (better prompt dialogs and better behavior for stuff like file collisions) and yet almost no one has done it, despite having 10+ years to. I don't want to waste my life on a project that has head devs that obviously do not really care about regular, day to day power user stuff.
Right now the only person who has that "holy shit, you are reading my mind!" effect on me (with UI) is Joanna Rutkowska, but her endeavors are limited to only those UI issues that concern hypervisors.
Fork it myself? Sure. Some day. If/when I win the lottery, yes I will almost certainly end up at least forking something like a file browser, if not actually endeavoring to start my own DE.
Yeah, I guess a key detail I forget to examine here is the fact that they're predominantly judge trials in Russia. It all more or less makes sense now, but is no less disheartening.
Your continued insistence that there is no proof of safety demonstrates a profound tendency towards lies and self-delusion. Your ignorance alone is quite forgivable; your decision to ignore facts that have been gift-wrapped and delivered to your doorstep and repost the same lies is not.
Yup, it's very clear that you are not interested in traveling down any facts-laden paths.
If you post lies and then refuse to respond when people call you out... you can expect a response.
His definition of "inappropriate" language includes the word "jackass" and any post that points out his lies involving Andrew Wakefield, or his profound ignorance involving how placebos work, how smallpox was eradicated, etc. He has refused to respond to any of this issues raised.
You're on my whitelist. The "inappropriate language" was the word "jackass". He posted these messages immediately after I demonstrated his lies and profound ignorance regarding placebos, Andrew Wakefeld, smallpox and other topics.
For posterity: The "inappropriate language" was the word "jackass". He posted these messages immediately after I demonstrated his lies and profound ignorance regarding placebos, Andrew Wakefeld, smallpox and other topics.
The "inappropriate language" was the word "jackass". He posted these messages immediately after I demonstrated his lies and profound ignorance regarding placebos, Andrew Wakefeld, smallpox and other topics.
You are knowingly spreading lies that lead to the death of children. No word is too strong to describe you.
For else out there who is reading this: the 'abusive' word is he referring to appears to be "jackass."
It's well past time for UI to have different modes. Have one that's for ease of use. Have another for power and expert users.
"Power users" are the ones that have really got the shaft over the past 10+ years. It's distinct from (but broadly overlaps with) expert: the basic idea of a power user is someone who is fully taking advantage of the functionality that is built-into the app (including options in the config files or "advanced" tabs in a GUI), but doesn't want to built it him/herself (which includes but isn't limited to writing CLI scripts.) Some stuff I am probably an "expert" on, but most of the time I'm just a power user. I don't want to use a CLI to sort my photos. That's horrendous and clearly less functional. I'm sure emacs-dired or some old midnight commander clone would be functional enough, but I've never had the patience to sit down to get over that learning curve and configure it how I need it just to enable a few missing features.
But WHY THE HELL SHOULD I NEED TO MANUALLY ENABLE THOSE FEATURES TO BEGIN WITH? Linux has had like 20 years to make a good GUI file browser and they've failed utterly. Why the hell are permission issues with removable drives still a thing? Having to open a terminal window to launch "sudo nautilus/thunar/dolphin" in a separate window, without any of my customizations (so everything is invariably some big icon, enabling me to see like 7 files at a time) to fix some ridiculous a permission issue that should've never existed in the first place... are you fucking kidding me?[1] No, I am NOT going to open up a CLI as a workaround for bugs (yes, bugs) in your 15 year old actively-developed file browser, and fuck you very much for suggesting such a thing.
Why can't I tell at a glance where this folder is being mounted from? Why can't I tell at a glance what the filesystem is? Wait, what? You can't even tell these things even with rightclick-properties?? What is the POINT of having a "properties" or "details" if you're not going to even give me a hint about where the directory is physically located? When this sort of thing comes up I generally just give up and launch gparted, just to figure out what the hell I'm looking at. I'm sure there's an easier way, but the easiest way was obviously for my file browser to actually give me a few scraps of information about the goddamn files .
Why does this "places" view vs. "tree" view dichotomy still exist? It's senselessly crippled almost every single Linux file browser I've ever seen, to one extent or another. It renders pcmanfm unusable. It used to render thunar unusable, but they've fixed it now. Sort of. Still completely impossible to tell apart a lot of the entries in the left pane: 32GB removable drive, 32GB removable drive, 32GB removable drive, god fucking forbid you show me anything like a vendor name or a graphic representing used space or the file system or something. Dolphin is a bit better at it, as I recall, but I've never gotten around to getting Qt dark theming to work properly.
Why is there no "undo"?[2] Why the fuck can't I simply control-z to undo a partial file file move after I realize there's not enough space... wait just a goddamned second, WHY DID YOU EVEN BEGIN THE MOVE OPERATION WITHOUT FIRST CHECKING TO SEE IF I HAD ENOUGH SPACE?
Oh look, now there's a filename collision during my 2 TB copy, which you helpfully paused about 30 seconds into it (and I've been gone for an hour eating lunch, thinking you were busy finishing said goddamn copy operation.) Couldn't you have just keep going and ask me about duplicate filenames after you've copied all the other thousands of files that weren't duplicates?
Oh look, in addition to the file name being the same, the file size is also the same. Hmm. It says "resume_latest.odt". Well, is it the same file or isn't it? Why the hell aren't you telling me the goddamned modified date on the file? And why didn't you run a hash? Y
Devil's Advocate:
* Magnetic cables are freakin' awesome but are one of the few things that haven't been widely copied (I'm assuming due to patent or something.)
* I think the iPad was sort of innovative... was there really no Android version in the works beforehand? I know e-ink readers were pretty widespread before then. Regardless, the "just make a big phone, but without the phone" approach was a very wise choice (even if it was obvious in retrospect) and they certainly deserve kudos they were the first ones to do it. I dearly wish removable keyboards and docks were more widespread and many, many things could be said about the walled gardens and tragic demise of the netbook but on the whole, it's hard not to give them this one.
* Capacitive screens, while sometimes leading to annoying UIs, never became widespread until after the iPhone[1]. This is a slightly double-edged sword, as it ushered in an era of glass screens, but the net UI win and normal wear and tear durability improvements (i.e. if it doesn't shatter, it can last a lot longer than resistive) can't be ignored. (I did actually own a plastic capacitive touchscreen and it was pretty awesome from a durability standpoint but the friction sucked.)
* Objective-C is a much better, more optimizable and more elegant language than Java (and Cocoa was a powerful platform long before JVM began to get interesting.) Java would be a pretty horrible language if not for the massive amount of work that's gone into optimizing it and the fact so it does make it a bit harder for mediocre coders to crank out catastrophically bad code.
* OS X is considerably better than Windows or OS 9. From what I hear. [2]
* Building on what I allude to in footnote 1, if we're just talking about "changes" here (and not actual industry innovations), anytime Apple has copied an Android feature it's turned out pretty well for them...especially since they always manage to convince people that they were the ones that invented it. They went from " Independent app devs? AhahahahaGo FUCK yourselves. We don't want you crapping up our walled garden!" to millions of dorky freshmen making "there's an app for that!" jokes in just a couple years, and from my understanding you have Google to thank for that.
* I guess chiclet keyboards aren't that bad... they do tend to be more durable than other laptop keyboards, and they're only slightly more cumbersome to use once you get over the learning curve. But oh, to live in an alternate universe where they stuck a Cherry MX style mechanical keyboard in there and everyone else rushed to copy that instead...
1. And honestly, the capacitive screen was the only thing they really got right with the iPhone (which was nice, because they were relatively rare/expensive prior to the first iPhone.) Other than that it was pretty goddamn inferior to the G1 and the N800, and they had to play catchup with really basic shit like MMS, 3G speeds (seriously! Who the hell builds an uber-expensive smartphone with a mandatory data plan but only EDGE speeds?) , customizable ringtones and an app marketplace that wasn't a locked-down nightmare. Of course, mainstream culture/media firmly asserts that it was the other way around and Android has supposedly been some crappy knockoff trying to play catchup with Apple.
2. The sales pitch always sounds pretty weak to me though, when comparing it to any laptop that's known to run your favorite BSD or Linux distro well out of the box: "All of the benefits of *nix except it costs money to upgrade and it's much less configurable and there's a 30% Apple Tax, and there's no low end option at all if you just need a basic workhorse and even older machines on Craigslist sell for twice as much as they should! Yes, you heard that correctly... all of the benefits of *nix!!!!"
Apple is one of those things you wish you could simply pass on and not have an opinion about (different strokes for different folks), but mainstream culture's rampant and unreasonable obsession forces you to know stuff and develop an opinion whether you want to or not. Detailed, cranky opinions.
err, over 99% of defendants*
That's an interesting statistic of course, but it's a little less shocking or worrying than one might initially assume. For instance, I read that one of the reasons is that Japanese prosecutors will very rarely take something all the way to trial unless they are nearly positive they'll win--it's therefore as much a symbol of Japanese perfectionism / aversion to failure as anything else. Also, there's a lot of soft power in Japanese culture, so presumably they have other ways to pressure suspected criminals to stay in line in non-slam dunk cases... or maybe they have a lot of plea bargains, not sure. I never looked that far into it.
The statistic that over 99% of people in modern Russia are convicted is more bluntly worrying to me. One might've hoped that, given their history, a distrust of authority would have taken root at some point, but this does not seem to be the case (or if it is, it's exceeded by the distrust of the accused.) And there's no use appealing to an overall lower trial rate or crime rate to explain that one.