Speaking of which, Apple's security fixes are really apauling. It's apauling long it takes them to even acknowledge there is a issue, nevermind doing the actual fix (which they like to try to delay till the next big OS update).
Well maybe once someone starts exploiting them Apple will get its shit together.
Since then, though, I've realized that the job at Maxis would have been high-hours and low-pay in a location that would have been way too expensive to live in.
I'm no security expert, but I don't see how this inherently indicates any particular vulnerability:
Cyberattackers can take over a computer by appropriating that safeguard to make the machine interrupt operations and enter System Management Mode, Duflot said. Attackers then enter the System Management RAM and replace the default emergency-response software with custom software that, when run, will give them full administrative privileges.
How do they 'enter System Management RAM'? Presumably this is a local attack where you plug in some hardware to do this while the computer is asleep. How could this possibly work over a network? You also have to make the machine overheat...
Any more knowledgeable speculation on the real threat posed by this?
Okay, so I guess I don't really expect Boot Camp to generate a huge number of switchers. And, as a Mac user, I really am more interested in virtualization (no thanks Parallels though). But you can tell the author is completely clueless right at the end:
I don't see any valid reason why Apple isn't doing this, as it would dramatically increase its revenue and market penetration.
If he can't see that they would simultaneously reduce the stability and permanently cannibalize their own hardware sales then he doesn't know the first thing about Apple. This is typical of the Windows-centric or Wall Street-centric reporter who just doesn't get Macs. Macs are a niche market. Macs have a loyal following. Business types want to look at Apple and compare 3% marketshare to Dell's 25% (or whatever it is) and say Apple is losing. But look at Apple's profit margins. Not to mention that Apple has a monopoly on its own market, and the ability to move into new markets at will. Dell has got what? Some third-rate case designers and a few factories? They can only grow their business by shaving profits a little more and grabbing another obscenely large chunk of commodity PC sales.
Then there's this juicy tidbit:
Does OS X really offer any applications that would entice me to purchase a new Mac and put up with the tedium of Boot Camp? I doubt it.
So, hmm, he never used a Mac, and just assumes it's a more expensive PC (that can now boot Windows). Back in 1999 this was more or less true. Windows had pretty much caught up and surpassed OS 9. Nowadays the comparison is laughable. Why does he think that the Mac is still so popular among designers, photographers, musicians and programmers? Certainly not just religious fervor...
I'd wager that 9 times out of 10, IM is deployed in situations where it actually brings negative returns to the work performed. I don't think "most people" are moving to IM. If they are, I think most people will be moving away from it shortly when they people start to understand its impact better.
I have to agree there. I keep IM up so I can communicate with my colleagues when I'm working from home. I also made the mistake of letting clients get ahold of my username. Now I get interrupted ten times a day by an ADHD client who thinks the best way to do a web startup is to hack together some piss poor mockups in Photoshop, send them to a web agency to be 'programmed' with no specs, then change and add features daily. It's bad enough working with someone like this over email or telephone, but IM really makes him think he's getting work done as he sends me randomly timed stream of consciousness rambling about the latest slew of nonsensical requests and changes.
IE doesn't even have a 90% marketshare on the Microsoft campus so I don't know how you can possibly say that; I actually worked as a web developer with Microsoft (as an external vendor) and internally, 8-11% of users run a Mozilla based browser. THIS IS IN MICROSOFT ITSELF! When I left over a year ago, it was around 11%.
Microsoft employees are geeks. They should have a significantly higher usage of Firefox than the general public.
Now before anyone goes jumping down my throat, I'm only saying that most people don't seem to understand that buying the biggest, most expensive laptop isn't always the right choice. I don't expect a lot of those people to be reading this article right now, and I do think that laptops can be used effictively and efficiently by people who know what they are doing. I just think that 90% of the time, this is not the case.
I once read a study that found that people who just buy the first thing that appears to meet their needs are usually happier than those who spend days or weeks researching before making a purchase. It's very rare that a product exist that has the exact mix of features that one would need, and even rarer that you would know what that mix was before making a purchase. So if you're obsessed with getting the perfect solution you're bound to be disappointed.
Now enter the world of computers. It's rare for people to know enough about them to even process all the available information. Even among geeks, it's impossible to keep up with all options, especially with software thrown into the mix. The decision to buy a desktop or a laptop is one of the few that has obvious pros and cons even for the layman. The question is, do I want a more powerful machine that sits in one place and is a pain to set up and move, or a less powerful machine that I can take with me and requires no setup.
My girlfriend's parents replaced their desktop with a laptop a couple years ago. They never even take the thing out of the house, but they use it about 100 times more than they did the desktop! I think they made the perfect decision.
As for myself, I used to have 4 different desktops that I used at various locations. Without one central machine that I could use as an rsync server, it took a lot of mental gymnastics just to keep my files straight. When it was time to buy a new computer, I could have gotten a fast powerful desktop that would have met my computing needs to a tee. Instead I opted for a top-of-the-line laptop, consolidated all my files, and now I can work from a coffee shop, or an airplane, or the in-laws house. The desktop would have given more processing bang for the buck, but the laptop had a much bigger impact on my productivity.
I'm sure a number of people buy a laptop for the wrong reasons as you suggest, but I think portability is one of the few easily-understood factors in buying a computer, and I think most people know what they are doing when they choose it.
I was skiing this week with a friend of mine who manages a half-billion dollar investment fund. His skepticism about the US was withering. It will not be very long before the world economy interprets America, with its spaghetti of ludicrous, paranoiac IT legislation, DMCA bullshit and general hostility towards 'the other', as damage, and routes around it.
That's just the symptom. The real problem is one that all great civilizations face: abundance decreases motivation and creates a false sense of entitlement. Just look at companies like Enron who fabricate business models out of thin air. There's so much money floating around the United States, that monetary success has very little to do with creating any kind of value. Meanwhile, developing countries like China are plowing full steam ahead. Right now the United States is basically just riding a wave of lucky historical opportunity. Given the concentration of wealth and power, that wave can carry the US by intertia for quite some time, but maybe not as long as most Americans think.
lease somebody point me to a comprehensive step by step tutorial that details the creation of an administrative side of a web application.
The book's tutorial was pretty comprehensive wasn't it? I got about one third of the way through before I just flipped to the back and read the meaty sections. After that the API docs were mostly good enough. If you're new to web development then it may help to spend a few years writing web applications in PHP or Perl without a framework to understand why things go where they do in Rails. You'll also do well not to shortchange Ruby itself, but learn the language in depth so you understand where Rails is coming from and how stuff really works.
Why use the migration? I prefer to create my tables with good ol' SQL saved to a text file.
So that you can automatically update your application without overwriting your data or some brittle dump/reimport script. Also gives you the ability to rollback changes automatically with switchtower in case something breaks on your production server.
Right now they are a little weak with non-MySQL dbs, and you have to learn a little syntax, but if you want to be able to do things like release a new version of your web app every week then migrations are invaluable.
Software doesn't 'crash' hard disks you fucking numbnut! A hard disk crash is a *mechanical* failure. Your drive probably crashed because it was a cheap piece of Maxtore shit or something.
Okay, my hard drive didn't crash, the boot blocks were scrambled. I reformatted the hard drive and reinstalled Win98, tried to install again and the same thing happened. Sure it was because of cheap hardware, but so what? This is the same inbred pedantry that led to my response in the first place. I'm guessing you didn't do too good on the reading comprehension portion of the ACT...
I got my BS in CSCI taking all graduate level courses for my upper division classes. I've built a ray tracer and a radiosity renderer, a compiler for a subset of Java, ethernet emulation in software, among other things. I work on the web because that's where the demand is these days, and allows for some creativity.
What are you, a fucking sysadmin? Do you even write code?
I find it incredibly hypocritical the way Mac zealots crow about the "technical superiority" of OS X while conveniently ignoring the "technical superiority" of most PC OSes for nearly a decade preceding its release.
Thanks for picking out one sentence of my post and overemphasizing it The whole reason I said that was to get through the thick skull of a true Apple Fanboy who wouldn't listen to anything else.
I don't give a shit about technical superiority. I've been using Mac OS X since 2000 because it's far better suited to my profession (web design and development) and because of general maintenance nightmares I experienced on my last PC (installing IE6 caused a hard drive crash). I don't give a shit about the eye candy or Quartz Extreme. I'm not loyal to Apple, they've just got the best thing going for what I do, and I don't see that changing any time soon.
They might give back some here and there, but from what I've heard a lot of Apple's patches for KHTML haven't really been useful given the structure of their code.
Besides, the value of Apple is the integration of everything in a tidy, uniform package. The problem with KDE isn't lack of features, it's lack of unified vision.
apple zealots are even worse than windows ones. they think the ass-reaming they get is for their benefit. windows dumbies at least curse bill each time something goes wrong (or even when not).
Not that I'm an Apple zealot, but I do primarily use Macs. I pay the premium with a smile because:
1) My time is worth money. Time spent fucking around configuring a free OS and commodity hardware is not billable. With a Mac sure I pay $100 a year for my OS, but if I have to spend 2 hours getting something working on Linux before I've lost any financial incentive.
&
2) I like Apple's software from a usability and software availability perspective. Paying them money seems like a reasonable thing to do if I want them to continue developing it.
That said, I do agree with your general premise that its stupid to make extra effort to lock the software. I do think they have a right to only support it on approved hardware though.
Contrary to popular opinion, Windows/PC users aren't all thieves. I'd be happy to be able to purchase an x86 version of OSX.
Yes, but Apple makes their money off hardware. Plus, if they sold a generic PC version then they'd have to support about 10,000 times more hardware then they currently support. The cost of tech support alone seems like it would blow away any profitability, not to mention the lost sales of Mac hardware.
Then it's not a good OS. It is the job of the operating system to abstract the hardware so applications can run on it hardware-agnostic.
That's assuming hardware manufacturer's are all writing perfect drivers for your OS. I don't see that Windows has a real problem here... you can't expect every shitty hardware manufacturer to write decent drivers, especially when they're just trying to scrape a little profit off the bottom of the OS bucket.
OS X is BY FAR technically and usably superior to Microsoft Windows in every aspect. A hardware driver is a hardware driver. If a company, such as ATI, can make a stable hardware driver for Windows they can make a stable hardware driver for OS X. The simple fact that until OS X Apple has had a small hardware market does not imply that Apple's are only stable because they only have to run on a small market of hardware.
Whoah, tone down the zealotry. Of course Mac OS X is technically superior to Windows, Apple chooses to actually push the technology envelope instead of repeatedly patching the old piece of shit for 25 years in order to maintain compatibility (which coincidentally is one reason some people choose Windows).
The fact of the matter is that, amazing though Windows driver support might be, it's still not perfect. Sure most work on 99% of Windows boxes, but on that last 1% it doesn't, or it jacks your hard drive, or something else horrible happens. You need to come out of your fantasy world and realize that the reason this doesn't happen on Macs is because the hardware is strictly controlled and well-tested. And just to offer some legitimate proof... I had one of those Motorola Mac clones back in the day, a StarMax 3000. That bastard wouldn't even install a Mac OS upgrade that I needed to run a program. The installer just crashed out every time.
When I pay the premium for Apple computers (they're all I've bought in the last 8 years), I do so with a full awareness of the benefits that I'm getting and why. Instead of running around like a chicken with your head cut off spouting unfounded hyperbole, you should get your facts straight. There are plenty of reasons Macs are awesome, divine intervention isn't one of them.
As more F/OSS Operating Systems arise (F/OSSOS's?) the value of software will fade. It's a matter of time realistically.
This is far from a foregone conclusion. The kind of vision that is required to create a reasonable consumer-oriented operating system is so far only seen in private companies.
KDE and Gnome won't cut it, there's too much demand for features that dilute the usability of the system for novices. Only a company has the kind of structure where a central authority maintains the vision by delegating carefully, and controlling the developers with paychecks.
But assuming that the conditions somehow fall into place within the next 50 years, you still have to assume the quality won't quite reach Apple's standard.
If your wrist is so frail that this makes a difference to your gaming performance then you really need to leave the dungeon and go see a physical therapist.
Ruby as a language look pretty nice but I have the same problem with RoR as I do with PHP. It tries to do too much for you. Its probably great for specific things but a mess when someone needs finer control.
If you're referring to register_globals and magic_quotes_gpc then I must say that those are the least annoying of PHP's issues when you are developing for a single environment. PHP is an adequate language, but it's filled with questionable design decisions and legacy functionality that just adds up to a lot of unpleasant edge cases and quirky behaviour.
RoR on the other hand is just a framework, most of the things it does are entirely optional. If you don't need an MVC design pattern then of course RoR is pointless, but I don't see it cramming things down your throat like PHP does. You can use it as a pretty minimalistic MVC template with all your own Ruby functionality.
That said, having been developing web applications fulltime for 6 years in PHP and Perl, I gotta say that RoR makes a lot of sense out of the box. The things it does are by and large the things that I'm sick of doing after writing the 100th web application. Unlike other frameworks I've seen, it has a strong eye towards standards and clean HTML, and you just can't beat Ruby as a templating language.
(and I hope beyond hope the next big thing isn't Ruby on Rails)
That's the kind of statement that needs to be qualified. Ruby is arguably the best interpretted language out there. Rails is the MVC design pattern plus some nice tools. What's not to like?
You're right, I did read the article. How is that elitist?
Because you go insulting one person when the entire forum is at fault (not to mention the press) for missing the point. The ad-hominem attack discredits you, and the results are your post which contains the most truth of anything posted here today remains at score 1 while people continue to argue a non-issue above.
To understand the point you have to go back to the previous article. The new article (or any of the other stories on this issue for that matter) is just as ignorant as the discussion here. Just because people do not to do their research does not make them 'dense'. It must make you feel superior to think that though, hence 'elitist'.
And what about you, do you have anything worthwhile to contribute to the discussion?
Sigh. I guess you're either sarcastic or dense. I'll proceed as if you're dense.
You're an elitist shithead, you realize that right?
It's too bad that, you, the only person in this entire conversation that actually read the original article has to come on here, post a flippant AC post confusing 'dense' with 'equally ignorant to the rest of the herd' thus ensuring that the truth remains obscured indefinitely.
The original article was on Google's potential use as a tool for ferreting out "private" information. Hence, Mr. Schmidt's "private" information would seem to be relevant as a compelling example of the problem.
Actually one thing that every single person here seems to be missing is that the original article was mostly about Google's profiling and data retention, not the search engine.
Of course, when you open up an article with a paragraph of links of personal information you found by searching Google, you'd think that was the subject of the article. Can't fault people for thinking that, but I'm surprised no one read even more than the first paragraph!
Bottom line is C|Net screwed up because they pissed off Google and didn't even make their point. If they had just left off that whole introduction the story would communicate it's point better, and they wouldn't be blacklisted.
That's not to say that Google is not overreacting... I think it's pretty immature what they are doing considering the nature of the information that was posted.
But these aren't new programming models. We use the same old programming models to build new kinds of apps.
I think your view of a programming model is a lot more easy to swallow than the author's nebulous usage. He even says:
When should one create a new programming model as opposed to go with a framework and/or tool leverage? What is a programming model anyway?
At the end he implies that Ruby on Rails is a new programming model, but to me it just looks like a framework. Ultimately though I don't find any conceptual value in the term programming model.
He cites the page-based languages like ColdFusion and later PHP and mod_perl as a new programming model. But come on, the concept of parsing code in a data file, however clever, is nothing more than a template. You could do this any number of ways. When you make it an Apache module it looks like a 'programming model', but if you were to set up some mod_rewrite scripts and perl that would parse the source page then it looks more like a 'framework'.
Even your list of programming models is a bit nebulous because individual languages can share elements of all of those ideas.
The author uses the analogy of floors for models and walls for frameworks, which I think is a good analogy for programming, but his terminology is just bad. Rather I'd use the term platform and framework. You want your platform to be well-suited to your framework. Such is the case with Ruby on Rails, which makes an incredible templating language in addition to providing the object-orientedness necessary to implement a Model-View-Controller pattern well.
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Speaking of which, Apple's security fixes are really apauling. It's apauling long it takes them to even acknowledge there is a issue, nevermind doing the actual fix (which they like to try to delay till the next big OS update).
Well maybe once someone starts exploiting them Apple will get its shit together.
Since then, though, I've realized that the job at Maxis would have been high-hours and low-pay in a location that would have been way too expensive to live in.
You save money on rent by sleeping at the office.
This is not a case of discrimination, it is a fact of life. Young people are generally more naive and easier to exploit.
Or maybe also because it's harder to get a job without a lot experience?
I'm no security expert, but I don't see how this inherently indicates any particular vulnerability:
Cyberattackers can take over a computer by appropriating that safeguard to make the machine interrupt operations and enter System Management Mode, Duflot said. Attackers then enter the System Management RAM and replace the default emergency-response software with custom software that, when run, will give them full administrative privileges.
How do they 'enter System Management RAM'? Presumably this is a local attack where you plug in some hardware to do this while the computer is asleep. How could this possibly work over a network? You also have to make the machine overheat...
Any more knowledgeable speculation on the real threat posed by this?
Okay, so I guess I don't really expect Boot Camp to generate a huge number of switchers. And, as a Mac user, I really am more interested in virtualization (no thanks Parallels though). But you can tell the author is completely clueless right at the end:
I don't see any valid reason why Apple isn't doing this, as it would dramatically increase its revenue and market penetration.
If he can't see that they would simultaneously reduce the stability and permanently cannibalize their own hardware sales then he doesn't know the first thing about Apple. This is typical of the Windows-centric or Wall Street-centric reporter who just doesn't get Macs. Macs are a niche market. Macs have a loyal following. Business types want to look at Apple and compare 3% marketshare to Dell's 25% (or whatever it is) and say Apple is losing. But look at Apple's profit margins. Not to mention that Apple has a monopoly on its own market, and the ability to move into new markets at will. Dell has got what? Some third-rate case designers and a few factories? They can only grow their business by shaving profits a little more and grabbing another obscenely large chunk of commodity PC sales.
Then there's this juicy tidbit:
Does OS X really offer any applications that would entice me to purchase a new Mac and put up with the tedium of Boot Camp? I doubt it.
So, hmm, he never used a Mac, and just assumes it's a more expensive PC (that can now boot Windows). Back in 1999 this was more or less true. Windows had pretty much caught up and surpassed OS 9. Nowadays the comparison is laughable. Why does he think that the Mac is still so popular among designers, photographers, musicians and programmers? Certainly not just religious fervor...
I'd wager that 9 times out of 10, IM is deployed in situations where it actually brings negative returns to the work performed. I don't think "most people" are moving to IM. If they are, I think most people will be moving away from it shortly when they people start to understand its impact better.
I have to agree there. I keep IM up so I can communicate with my colleagues when I'm working from home. I also made the mistake of letting clients get ahold of my username. Now I get interrupted ten times a day by an ADHD client who thinks the best way to do a web startup is to hack together some piss poor mockups in Photoshop, send them to a web agency to be 'programmed' with no specs, then change and add features daily. It's bad enough working with someone like this over email or telephone, but IM really makes him think he's getting work done as he sends me randomly timed stream of consciousness rambling about the latest slew of nonsensical requests and changes.
IE doesn't even have a 90% marketshare on the Microsoft campus so I don't know how you can possibly say that; I actually worked as a web developer with Microsoft (as an external vendor) and internally, 8-11% of users run a Mozilla based browser. THIS IS IN MICROSOFT ITSELF! When I left over a year ago, it was around 11%.
Microsoft employees are geeks. They should have a significantly higher usage of Firefox than the general public.
Now before anyone goes jumping down my throat, I'm only saying that most people don't seem to understand that buying the biggest, most expensive laptop isn't always the right choice. I don't expect a lot of those people to be reading this article right now, and I do think that laptops can be used effictively and efficiently by people who know what they are doing. I just think that 90% of the time, this is not the case.
I once read a study that found that people who just buy the first thing that appears to meet their needs are usually happier than those who spend days or weeks researching before making a purchase. It's very rare that a product exist that has the exact mix of features that one would need, and even rarer that you would know what that mix was before making a purchase. So if you're obsessed with getting the perfect solution you're bound to be disappointed.
Now enter the world of computers. It's rare for people to know enough about them to even process all the available information. Even among geeks, it's impossible to keep up with all options, especially with software thrown into the mix. The decision to buy a desktop or a laptop is one of the few that has obvious pros and cons even for the layman. The question is, do I want a more powerful machine that sits in one place and is a pain to set up and move, or a less powerful machine that I can take with me and requires no setup.
My girlfriend's parents replaced their desktop with a laptop a couple years ago. They never even take the thing out of the house, but they use it about 100 times more than they did the desktop! I think they made the perfect decision.
As for myself, I used to have 4 different desktops that I used at various locations. Without one central machine that I could use as an rsync server, it took a lot of mental gymnastics just to keep my files straight. When it was time to buy a new computer, I could have gotten a fast powerful desktop that would have met my computing needs to a tee. Instead I opted for a top-of-the-line laptop, consolidated all my files, and now I can work from a coffee shop, or an airplane, or the in-laws house. The desktop would have given more processing bang for the buck, but the laptop had a much bigger impact on my productivity.
I'm sure a number of people buy a laptop for the wrong reasons as you suggest, but I think portability is one of the few easily-understood factors in buying a computer, and I think most people know what they are doing when they choose it.
I was skiing this week with a friend of mine who manages a half-billion dollar investment fund. His skepticism about the US was withering. It will not be very long before the world economy interprets America, with its spaghetti of ludicrous, paranoiac IT legislation, DMCA bullshit and general hostility towards 'the other', as damage, and routes around it.
That's just the symptom. The real problem is one that all great civilizations face: abundance decreases motivation and creates a false sense of entitlement. Just look at companies like Enron who fabricate business models out of thin air. There's so much money floating around the United States, that monetary success has very little to do with creating any kind of value. Meanwhile, developing countries like China are plowing full steam ahead. Right now the United States is basically just riding a wave of lucky historical opportunity. Given the concentration of wealth and power, that wave can carry the US by intertia for quite some time, but maybe not as long as most Americans think.
lease somebody point me to a comprehensive step by step tutorial that details the creation of an administrative side of a web application.
The book's tutorial was pretty comprehensive wasn't it? I got about one third of the way through before I just flipped to the back and read the meaty sections. After that the API docs were mostly good enough. If you're new to web development then it may help to spend a few years writing web applications in PHP or Perl without a framework to understand why things go where they do in Rails. You'll also do well not to shortchange Ruby itself, but learn the language in depth so you understand where Rails is coming from and how stuff really works.
Why use the migration? I prefer to create my tables with good ol' SQL saved to a text file.
So that you can automatically update your application without overwriting your data or some brittle dump/reimport script. Also gives you the ability to rollback changes automatically with switchtower in case something breaks on your production server.
Right now they are a little weak with non-MySQL dbs, and you have to learn a little syntax, but if you want to be able to do things like release a new version of your web app every week then migrations are invaluable.
Software doesn't 'crash' hard disks you fucking numbnut! A hard disk crash is a *mechanical* failure. Your drive probably crashed because it was a cheap piece of Maxtore shit or something.
Okay, my hard drive didn't crash, the boot blocks were scrambled. I reformatted the hard drive and reinstalled Win98, tried to install again and the same thing happened. Sure it was because of cheap hardware, but so what? This is the same inbred pedantry that led to my response in the first place. I'm guessing you didn't do too good on the reading comprehension portion of the ACT...
I got my BS in CSCI taking all graduate level courses for my upper division classes. I've built a ray tracer and a radiosity renderer, a compiler for a subset of Java, ethernet emulation in software, among other things. I work on the web because that's where the demand is these days, and allows for some creativity.
What are you, a fucking sysadmin? Do you even write code?
I find it incredibly hypocritical the way Mac zealots crow about the "technical superiority" of OS X while conveniently ignoring the "technical superiority" of most PC OSes for nearly a decade preceding its release.
Thanks for picking out one sentence of my post and overemphasizing it The whole reason I said that was to get through the thick skull of a true Apple Fanboy who wouldn't listen to anything else.
I don't give a shit about technical superiority. I've been using Mac OS X since 2000 because it's far better suited to my profession (web design and development) and because of general maintenance nightmares I experienced on my last PC (installing IE6 caused a hard drive crash). I don't give a shit about the eye candy or Quartz Extreme. I'm not loyal to Apple, they've just got the best thing going for what I do, and I don't see that changing any time soon.
They might give back some here and there, but from what I've heard a lot of Apple's patches for KHTML haven't really been useful given the structure of their code.
Besides, the value of Apple is the integration of everything in a tidy, uniform package. The problem with KDE isn't lack of features, it's lack of unified vision.
apple zealots are even worse than windows ones. they think the ass-reaming they get is for their benefit. windows dumbies at least curse bill each time something goes wrong (or even when not).
Not that I'm an Apple zealot, but I do primarily use Macs. I pay the premium with a smile because:
1) My time is worth money. Time spent fucking around configuring a free OS and commodity hardware is not billable. With a Mac sure I pay $100 a year for my OS, but if I have to spend 2 hours getting something working on Linux before I've lost any financial incentive.
&
2) I like Apple's software from a usability and software availability perspective. Paying them money seems like a reasonable thing to do if I want them to continue developing it.
That said, I do agree with your general premise that its stupid to make extra effort to lock the software. I do think they have a right to only support it on approved hardware though.
Contrary to popular opinion, Windows/PC users aren't all thieves. I'd be happy to be able to purchase an x86 version of OSX.
Yes, but Apple makes their money off hardware. Plus, if they sold a generic PC version then they'd have to support about 10,000 times more hardware then they currently support. The cost of tech support alone seems like it would blow away any profitability, not to mention the lost sales of Mac hardware.
Then it's not a good OS. It is the job of the operating system to abstract the hardware so applications can run on it hardware-agnostic.
That's assuming hardware manufacturer's are all writing perfect drivers for your OS. I don't see that Windows has a real problem here... you can't expect every shitty hardware manufacturer to write decent drivers, especially when they're just trying to scrape a little profit off the bottom of the OS bucket.
OS X is BY FAR technically and usably superior to Microsoft Windows in every aspect. A hardware driver is a hardware driver. If a company, such as ATI, can make a stable hardware driver for Windows they can make a stable hardware driver for OS X. The simple fact that until OS X Apple has had a small hardware market does not imply that Apple's are only stable because they only have to run on a small market of hardware.
Whoah, tone down the zealotry. Of course Mac OS X is technically superior to Windows, Apple chooses to actually push the technology envelope instead of repeatedly patching the old piece of shit for 25 years in order to maintain compatibility (which coincidentally is one reason some people choose Windows).
The fact of the matter is that, amazing though Windows driver support might be, it's still not perfect. Sure most work on 99% of Windows boxes, but on that last 1% it doesn't, or it jacks your hard drive, or something else horrible happens. You need to come out of your fantasy world and realize that the reason this doesn't happen on Macs is because the hardware is strictly controlled and well-tested. And just to offer some legitimate proof... I had one of those Motorola Mac clones back in the day, a StarMax 3000. That bastard wouldn't even install a Mac OS upgrade that I needed to run a program. The installer just crashed out every time.
When I pay the premium for Apple computers (they're all I've bought in the last 8 years), I do so with a full awareness of the benefits that I'm getting and why. Instead of running around like a chicken with your head cut off spouting unfounded hyperbole, you should get your facts straight. There are plenty of reasons Macs are awesome, divine intervention isn't one of them.
As more F/OSS Operating Systems arise (F/OSSOS's?) the value of software will fade. It's a matter of time realistically.
This is far from a foregone conclusion. The kind of vision that is required to create a reasonable consumer-oriented operating system is so far only seen in private companies.
KDE and Gnome won't cut it, there's too much demand for features that dilute the usability of the system for novices. Only a company has the kind of structure where a central authority maintains the vision by delegating carefully, and controlling the developers with paychecks.
But assuming that the conditions somehow fall into place within the next 50 years, you still have to assume the quality won't quite reach Apple's standard.
If your wrist is so frail that this makes a difference to your gaming performance then you really need to leave the dungeon and go see a physical therapist.
Ruby as a language look pretty nice but I have the same problem with RoR as I do with PHP. It tries to do too much for you. Its probably great for specific things but a mess when someone needs finer control.
If you're referring to register_globals and magic_quotes_gpc then I must say that those are the least annoying of PHP's issues when you are developing for a single environment. PHP is an adequate language, but it's filled with questionable design decisions and legacy functionality that just adds up to a lot of unpleasant edge cases and quirky behaviour.
RoR on the other hand is just a framework, most of the things it does are entirely optional. If you don't need an MVC design pattern then of course RoR is pointless, but I don't see it cramming things down your throat like PHP does. You can use it as a pretty minimalistic MVC template with all your own Ruby functionality.
That said, having been developing web applications fulltime for 6 years in PHP and Perl, I gotta say that RoR makes a lot of sense out of the box. The things it does are by and large the things that I'm sick of doing after writing the 100th web application. Unlike other frameworks I've seen, it has a strong eye towards standards and clean HTML, and you just can't beat Ruby as a templating language.
(and I hope beyond hope the next big thing isn't Ruby on Rails)
That's the kind of statement that needs to be qualified. Ruby is arguably the best interpretted language out there. Rails is the MVC design pattern plus some nice tools. What's not to like?
You're right, I did read the article. How is that elitist?
Because you go insulting one person when the entire forum is at fault (not to mention the press) for missing the point. The ad-hominem attack discredits you, and the results are your post which contains the most truth of anything posted here today remains at score 1 while people continue to argue a non-issue above.
To understand the point you have to go back to the previous article. The new article (or any of the other stories on this issue for that matter) is just as ignorant as the discussion here. Just because people do not to do their research does not make them 'dense'. It must make you feel superior to think that though, hence 'elitist'.
And what about you, do you have anything worthwhile to contribute to the discussion?
How about my name.
Sigh. I guess you're either sarcastic or dense. I'll proceed as if you're dense.
You're an elitist shithead, you realize that right?
It's too bad that, you, the only person in this entire conversation that actually read the original article has to come on here, post a flippant AC post confusing 'dense' with 'equally ignorant to the rest of the herd' thus ensuring that the truth remains obscured indefinitely.
The original article was on Google's potential use as a tool for ferreting out "private" information. Hence, Mr. Schmidt's "private" information would seem to be relevant as a compelling example of the problem.
Actually one thing that every single person here seems to be missing is that the original article was mostly about Google's profiling and data retention, not the search engine.
Of course, when you open up an article with a paragraph of links of personal information you found by searching Google, you'd think that was the subject of the article. Can't fault people for thinking that, but I'm surprised no one read even more than the first paragraph!
Bottom line is C|Net screwed up because they pissed off Google and didn't even make their point. If they had just left off that whole introduction the story would communicate it's point better, and they wouldn't be blacklisted.
That's not to say that Google is not overreacting... I think it's pretty immature what they are doing considering the nature of the information that was posted.
Bah, the whole thing is just silly.
I think your view of a programming model is a lot more easy to swallow than the author's nebulous usage. He even says:
At the end he implies that Ruby on Rails is a new programming model, but to me it just looks like a framework. Ultimately though I don't find any conceptual value in the term programming model.
He cites the page-based languages like ColdFusion and later PHP and mod_perl as a new programming model. But come on, the concept of parsing code in a data file, however clever, is nothing more than a template. You could do this any number of ways. When you make it an Apache module it looks like a 'programming model', but if you were to set up some mod_rewrite scripts and perl that would parse the source page then it looks more like a 'framework'.
Even your list of programming models is a bit nebulous because individual languages can share elements of all of those ideas.
The author uses the analogy of floors for models and walls for frameworks, which I think is a good analogy for programming, but his terminology is just bad. Rather I'd use the term platform and framework. You want your platform to be well-suited to your framework. Such is the case with Ruby on Rails, which makes an incredible templating language in addition to providing the object-orientedness necessary to implement a Model-View-Controller pattern well.