you need to inspect the compiler and other tools as well
So use an open source toolchain, and have it audited thoroughly and then frozen before use. Each change has again to be carefully audited. The federal govt is supposed to have expertise on tap about such things.
You do not control the hardware,
You do if you (the government) bought it and mandated standard, easily verifiable hardware. This is a non-issue with the proper controls, so long as you don't hire cowboys interested in delivering the lowest quality for the highest price to do your work. Start from a known standard base and each change has to be audited. If your machines aren't running the latest, cheapest hardware, so what?
How do you trust that the version you reviewed is the one used?
This is a logistical issue, and is eminently fixable - no last minute patches, all-party oversight, and all changes audited well in advance and then the release frozen.
Paper ballots can be stuffed too, very easily if you corrupt or coerce the officials (how do you think Musharraf got 98% of the vote in the last 'free' election in pakistan?). Indeed you saw this in the last election in the states in Florida with so-called hanging chads being discounted. The issue with electronic voting is not with electronic voting per se (as your objections illustrate), but with the disorganised, slipshod, negligent manner in which it's been carried out in the US at present. It's perfectly possible to design a system that works well and is audited, verifiable, and very difficult to influence, but that's not really in the interest of any parties involved except the voters, is it?
Quick: the current time is 00:30 -- is it morning, midday, or night where I live? I live in the states, but the time is 00:30 UTC everywhere right now. If I call my grandma in Australia, is she going to say, "ugh! Why did you call me at 00:30?" or is she going to say, "oh, you picked a perfect time to call." (My grandma does, in fact, talk like that, by the way.)
Let's look at the present situation - before you call your grandma, you need to know 3 things : What time (local time) does she get up/go to bed What is the local time offset from where she lives to where you live What is the daylight savings offset where she lives? Then you do a calculation based on your local time (unless you have a clock on your wall set to grandma time)
If everyone uses the same time you need to know one thing What time UTC she gets up/goes to bed
No calculation involved, and less things to know. Now maybe for your grandma you've already memorised this information, but if you deal with a lot of people in different time zones, it becomes a pain quite fast.
The reason for daylight savings is to have more daylight in the hours we are up doing stuff - a far better system would be to have a universal time and properly local decisions (taken by your place of work or institution) on when to go to work and when to vary those hours in winter. If you lived someplace slightly out of the way you'd know that the current daylight savings system is a farce for many people anyway, because it's chosen to fit a whole country/state, some of which it doesn't suit at all.
The point of time zones and "local time" is that it provides *context*. Wednesday is going to turn into Thursday (or already has) in the middle of the night -- for everybody.
Just because you change the times to UTC doesn't mean you have to make days change at absurd times. Days and concepts like noon etc could stay attached to the solar calendar, since that's what they describe, and switch over at an arbitrary hour in different regions. For most places in the world you'll still be on the same day, just offset a bit, and people care far more about the time than the day in other places. If I want to talk to someone, I don't really care if it's Wednesday or Thursday where you live, but I do care if you're available. If you did what you're suggesting (divorced days from the solar clock), you'd be better off getting rid of days, months and years altogether and working with kiloseconds, gigaseconds etc. At some point we may do this, particularly if we don't all live on the same rock. The current calendar is a bit of a mess anyway, and doesn't even fit the solar year very well.
Daylight savings (and indeed local time itself) is confusing and anachronistic, and it's time it was replaced with something which was more useful and locally flexible. Getting rid of it would help a lot of people who at present have hours imposed by a central authority rather than just deciding on them themselves, and also people who live far apart and want to plan meetings etc.
Samba is the only networking file system I can think of that has reasonable cross-platform support.
System Preferences > Sharing > Windows Sharing (on 10.4 at least)
Hardware availability is also difficult...rant about support for old hardware...Again, my philosophy of "upgrade" seems to be in conflict with Apple's philosophy of "buy a new one!".
So the moral of the story is - if you're looking to tinker and upgrade a very old machine piecemeal, don't try to run OS X on it, as you will inevitably run into snags, and the support isn't there for very old hardware. That's one of the disadvantages of close source, and of course running an operating system that wasn't even out in beta when that G3 was first produced.
If I can't use the OSX-style features, what's the point of paying extra for OSX? In general I prefer F/OSS software to commercial software (though I will use free versions sometimes).
If you don't want to use the OSX style programs which are available, why try to use OS X? What's the point in downloading ports made for another system and then complaining they don't look right - I think it's pretty cool that they exist at all. You won't find any ports of large OS X programs on linux. To limit your choice to only open source applications will (at present) leave you using inferior programs in some cases. There are much better closed source programs than the Gimp for example.
The strength of OS X is really in the consistency of the GUI (which has been eroded somewhat lately), and the effort made to apply polish to every little facet. As one example, the consistency in menu items between applications makes life a lot easier, error dialogs are generally short, and security messages only pop up when required, not every five minutes. I'm not sure I'd really compare it to XP's GUI, which is more than a little rough at the edges. Sounds like that doesn't appeal to you enough to outweigh the disadvantages of not having an all open-source ecosystem, so you'd be better off on Linux as you say. However most of your bad impressions of OS X are caused by the old hardware you're trying to run it on, and the mismatch between Apple's aims and yours.
a. the users and more importantly b. the usage pattern of these users
While google has been picking up little things here and there, essentially this is google's first real "social networking" site that they have purchased. I say it in quotes because youtube isn't really a social networking site, but there are certainly aspects of it that cannot be denied.
I say youtube lucked out and google really made a stupid purchase, it appears to me like it was an attrition attempt against the competition in internet space (yahoo? microsoft? myspace? - whoever they think their competition is atm, because I can't tell). I don't know.. I'm curious to see where this goes. Google definately wants to go into the multimedia distribution area, that's for sure. How they go about doing it, we'll have to see..
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Are you a script? If so you should be changed to reply coherently to replies in your thread, that would be more entertaining. Simply copying posts is a bit dull don't you think?
Did they fake the 9/11 "attack" in order to start the war on terror so they could use it as an excuse to start this spying?
Maybe you should re-examine your constant recourse to silly crazyliberalbelievesanythinghereadsontheinternet straw men and consider the real problem here. The US Administration wants unfettered power to tap phones - can you not see how this *could* be very very dangerous, if not in the hands of Bush, in the hands of a future president?
If Apple really was interested in running an online music venture and making their money there -- as in, really having that be their core business -- they would have tried to license out FairPlay as widely as possible and make it a de facto standard. (Which it already practically is, without licensing; given that the iPod is the de facto standard MP3 player.)
Actually, I disagree - they didn't license out to protect the market as it was growing, if they had attempted to license early it could easily have meant the death of their format. Licensing out to the likes of Microsoft and their hardware partners would leave them forced to play along with multiple implementations of their DRM, possibly even dealing with outright sabotage (see Java in MS Windows) to undermine their position. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. By building a strong monolithic market first, they're in a perfect position to open up licensing and make a killing, and no-one can challenge their position at this point as the one who sets the standards.
In fact there's going to be far more money in online media when it takes off than there will ever be in gadgets - once people don't bother buying physical media the market will be huge; owning the most widely licensed DRM will be very profitable. For now though the money is in the gadgets.
Loaning out "modern" paper money (instead of real money like gold)
The value of Gold is no more real than that of a promissory note. The important thing is scarcity, and paper money, if managed properly, can be just as scarce as any valuable commodity.
Sure, it looks cool but once it's outdated you throw it away.
Do you really throw away your old computers? ? ? I sell them or give them away. I always thought most people did that. And an AIO design doesn't make doing those things any harder. All of the AIO computers I've ever owned are still chugging away on someone else's desk, several years later.
There are advantages to the AIO format (takes up less space, easy to install, easy to move) as well. Just because those aren't important to you doesn't mean they wouldn't be to others. Personally, I don't know why people put up with ugly noisy boxes under their desks and a mess of wires when they could have a fanless computer hidden away behind the LCD.
This has nothing to do with sour grapes. The point of these moves was to protect consumers from monopolies. I think it's time Apple opened up their DRM for use on other devices. If I want to buy music online I don't want to be locked in to using one device from one company for the rest of my life, do you? Currently (despite owning an iPod) I won't touch Apple's online store because of this issue, but I expect many governments to take action, not to dismantle, punish, or disable Apple, but to stop them using their near monopoly in one space (iPod) to extend that monopoly into another space (online media). They should be compelled to license (for a reasonable fee) their DRM to other widget makers, thus allowing the consumer to win and the market to blossom. In the end this would in fact be a huge bonus to Apple, because their revenue from the license fees would outweigh any potential loss on the widget sales (which won't crater if they continue to make the best ones), and they won't have to worry about MS steamrollering them with DRM included in Windows.
I like to think that Apple will eventually do the right thing on their own, because it is in their interest to do so now that they dominate the market but if they don't, they should be compelled to. Contrary to your beliefs, individual consumers (or even consumers en masse) do not have the power to compel them, they can only buy or not buy - often Hobson's choice in a 'free' market.
The big problem in Europe is that they are socialist and want to destroy the advantage that anyone over here has. You think if it was Nokia who was the first to market with the iPod/iTunes combination that the Scandanavian judicial system would be trying to break it open? I think not. It is really a case of sour grapes. If you can't compete, just drag them down.
Europe has (currently) 25 nation states - to characterise them all as 'socialist' is laughable, most aren't even aiming for something remotely socialist and definitions of socialist vary the world over. Try stepping around your stale stereotype and find out what's on the other side. If it was Nokia it's possible Finnish MPs could be persuaded to look the other way (1 country of 24 in Europe), however Finland technically isn't part of Scandinavia, which isn't a country and doesn't have a judicial system.
He never tried to get the technical illiterals of the mac community or the slashdot trolls involved,
Oh really?
What was the video, presented in layman's terms and using a macbook (albeit in an unusual config), for then? The newspaper interview which hinted at more and claimed Apple was 'leaning on him' without giving details? The snide asides like makes you want to stab one of those (mac) users in the eye with a lit cigarette or something?
If he didn't want to troll or be trolled, those are a few things he could have avoided doing. If he had quietly posted this to a security list and not made unsubstantiated claims of legal interference, I'd understand your position. As it is he's provoking a lot of people and fanning the flames by refusing to substantiate claims of legal pressure (where are the letters, why would Apple lie if they know it will all come out?) and hinting at more serious and widespread vulnerabilities without revealing them.
I feel sorry for him now, because it's very difficult for him to do anything without provoking more uninformed debate, which must be frustrating.
PS This has nothing to do with any US policy on science.
Personally, I find OS X to be inelegant and inconsistent.
Well, they did say 'in comparison' : ) There are some things which could be a lot better in OS X - including some of those you mentioned, though I'd disagree about dragging off the dock - those are links to files, not files themselves, and the user wouldn't want to drag them to the desktop. The same principle is used for toolbar icons and icons in the favourites list in the finder - it's not used only in the Dock.
Re separating the functions in the Dock, this would definitely be an improvement - it'd be nice if it had an area for running applications, and an area for documents, and if the trash can where still on the desktop so that it stayed still. As you say, there's plenty of things to improve (perhaps just less than Windows : ) )
Like the crazy file selector dialogs that force you to laboriously click your way through the folder hierarchy, because Apple has decided you shouldn't want to save time by just typing the path in.
If you want to type the path in while in a system dialog, you can press cmd-shift-G; presumably it's not in there because it would confuse users who don't know what a path is. Alternatively you can just drag in the folder you want to go to.
Like iTunes, with its "streamlined" interface that just leaves average users upset because they can't understand why there isn't a "stop" button.
I see, and what would this missing stop button do; exactly the same thing as the pause button? The stop button is a hangover from VCRs where there was actually a mechanical difference between stopping (and moving the head away from the tape) and pausing, it has no place on a non-VCR device.
And the confusing interface that makes no distinction between the fundamental system menus and an individual application's menus.
The only 'fundamental system menu' is the Apple menu on the left, which stays in the same place. Each application has its own menubar which appears when that application is active, seems sensible to me. I prefer this to the approach of replicating the same application menus in each window, but each to their own. There's no need to close applications after use, so why should the system encourage it? I'd prefer them to go the other way and leave all apps running unless you explicitly choose quit.
delightful self-delusion that Windows sucks in every way imaginable... Neither actually has a major advantage in terms of "elegance" or "consistency".
Having struggled through various Windows 'assistants' trying to get a basic thing like an external USB disk to work the other day (worked flawlessly on OS X, and other disks worked with XP), I beg to differ. This was using the built in XP mass storage device drivers, which usually work, but when they don't the Add Hardware dialogs are just a mess of confusing options and properties that the user hardly ever wants to see. Windows isn't so different from OS X, but there are still differences, and they way it handles problems and presents them to the user is one of the most obvious.
Flamebait oblivion, here I come!
On the contrary, on this site your point of view is the received wisdom, the silent majority are still using Windows.
So frankly, your analysis is nothing more than window dressing of conservative, narrow-minded, thinking that is in desperate need of some fresh ideas... Ignoring the question to satisfy your threats of ridicule (which you have so eloquently made clear) is hardly science.
Your original post was full of woolly thinking, and was a rehash of an idea which has already been proposed and rejected, without adding anything original to it. If you're going to say something so contentious in public you need to back it up and show that you're aware of previous versions of this idea. You're now trying to turn a debate about that particular comment into a debate on the workings of science. It's easy to rail about The System which is keeping good scientists down, and far harder to come up with original, rigourous thought.
You might find this book interesting if you haven't read it; not all progress in science is obtained by creative genius, much of it is just hard slog, with little questioning and lots of experimentation. While sometimes critical of this approach, I do believe Kuhn has it right as he doesn't (as you are doing here) romanticise scientific endeavour and portray the only good scientist as a paradigm-smashing iconclast.
Ignoring the question to satisfy your threats of ridicule (which you have so eloquently made clear) is hardly science.
Posts on slashdot are unlikely to be 'science' or have pretensions to be, and the parent post didn't ignore your proposition, it addressed it directly - you're wrestling with straw men.
Frankly the Chinese would be the type to land on the moon and start mining for resources and say: "Screw the moon treaty, what are you going to do about it?"
Most of the rest of the world would say this of the current United States attitude. A better attitude would be to launch a cooperative project with other space agencies, as NASA has been doing in the past.
If NASA went totally robotic, yes they may learn things, but public interest and their budget to do such missions would shrink as a few nerdy folks in the bowls of mission control would actually care.
If NASA went totally robotic, instead of this hair-brained scheme they can't afford, they'd have more robotic probes on the way to Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and out of the solar system, and they'd be investigating self-assembling factories which could use endemic materials to boot-strap unmanned science stations which eventually could be manned. That would set us up to really colonise the rest of the planets instead of going for very expensive weekend trips, which is what we're going to get if this goes ahead at the expense of all the real science missions.
You're right to say pretty pictures matter, but the missions which have caused the most stir in the last few decades have all been robotic - Cassini, Mars Rovers, Mars Global Surveyor, Deep Impact, Voyager, SOHO etc etc. That's where the best return on investment currently is, no matter whether we're impatient to see humans up there too. Compare that to the ISS, which no one really cares about, and is manned.
Cassini, which brought back (and continues to) a huge amount of data, cost $3.26b total This project is slated to cost $100b (before over-runs) - that's over 30 Cassini-type missions
If they want a sustainable human presence on the moon, they should be sending robots first. They could send a hundred lunar robot missions for the price of this manned launcher.
Or perhaps, along with all the other posters on this thread, they have experienced problems with suspend/hibernate in Windows and now avoid it. Several people I know have also had this issue, also with desktops - I've never seen *or* heard of it on OS X, so I think the comparison is fair. It probably depends on a lot of things, and given all the variety of PC hardware out there I'm not surprised they're having a tough time making it a reliable feature.
Just because it works in your experience doesn't make that experience universal, so there's no need to stoop to insulting other posters because they have problems you haven't seen.
Well, unless your current prototype doesn't, you know, really provide free power. It will only do _that_ after you've built the $10M version, of course.
Yeah, so they should also trust two jokers on the internet who want to create a buzz around their presentation, and frame their demo so that it is bound to do so...? It cuts both ways.
Although we'll see nothing but speculation in this article and its comments, eventually the truth will be known, and we'll have an exploit which is documented and proven to work, or not. If Apple have a flaw, and won't admit it, that would light a fire under them wouldn't it?
Given the hackers comments :
Although an Apple MacBook was used as the demo platform, it was exploited through a third-party wireless device driver - not the original wireless device driver that ships with the MacBook.
It sounds like they were bullshitting to try to make a splash, which they did. Till I see proof, I'm not inclined to trust either side.
no IT manager in his right mind will go with an office suite that doesn't support scripting.
No IT manager in his right mind will rely on some bastardised macro language built on top of a binary, continually changing 3rd party application for important parts of the company workflow.
If you've built a load of 'apps' on VBA, you're now a hostage to whatever MS decide to do with Office, Windows and VBA. As it happens, it's going to be replaced by something called VSTO soon, so your 'enterprise ready' solution is probably doomed in the medium term. There are many replacements for VBA (perl, ruby, python) which you could use to munge data just as easily, and more importantly you'd be able to continue to use them whatever projects are cancelled by MS/Apple for political reasons.
What I don't like is the complexity and security involved with all this wireless... Therefore, you'd need security. Likely culprit would be wpa or some variation of said protocol...I would still run the risk of overloading the "channel" with my multiple keyboards and mouses, oh and pritners and monitors. So while it sounds good on paper, the practicality of wireless is still missing from the equation.
It's interesting that the system I'm running at home is exactly the one you suggest is not yet possible. WPA wifi network, pixma wifi wireless printer, bluetooth keyboard and mouse with encryption (apple ones), bluetooth drawing tablet with a rechargeable battery. The batteries last about a month for a mouse (I use rechargable ones) and much longer for the keyboard. None of them interfere with each other. Given I've never had any problems with any of the gear, I'd say it's eminently practical today to use wireless peripherals.
I was really hoping they were going to introduce proper system-wide versioning. Almost every app uses the system save dialog, and they could have put a one line entry in there so that users could add comments whenever they saved (optional of course). Then they could have proper versioning under the covers, and even integrate with version control servers (svn or whatever) to allow remote backups/syncing.
I'd love to use svn with clients to check in and out changed versions of documents which they are editing too, but I can't recommend it to someone who's not prepared to muck around on the command line - integration with the finder could smooth out problems which occur when folders are copied or renamed, make adding comments a snap, and leave the whole process transparent to end users. The GUI clients can't deal with this, because it needs to be built into the finder so that you can't rename a folder without telling the vc system about it. They could actually add some value to dotmac by providing proper synchronising and secure backup/retreival.
Instead this just sounds like Backup.app divorced from dotmac, better than nothing, but a shame nonetheless; maybe for 10.6 : ) At the moment version control is stuck in the programming ghetto and looks set to remain that way in the near future.
Slashdot Mirror
you need to inspect the compiler and other tools as well
So use an open source toolchain, and have it audited thoroughly and then frozen before use. Each change has again to be carefully audited. The federal govt is supposed to have expertise on tap about such things.
You do not control the hardware,
You do if you (the government) bought it and mandated standard, easily verifiable hardware. This is a non-issue with the proper controls, so long as you don't hire cowboys interested in delivering the lowest quality for the highest price to do your work. Start from a known standard base and each change has to be audited. If your machines aren't running the latest, cheapest hardware, so what?
How do you trust that the version you reviewed is the one used?
This is a logistical issue, and is eminently fixable - no last minute patches, all-party oversight, and all changes audited well in advance and then the release frozen.
Paper ballots can be stuffed too, very easily if you corrupt or coerce the officials (how do you think Musharraf got 98% of the vote in the last 'free' election in pakistan?). Indeed you saw this in the last election in the states in Florida with so-called hanging chads being discounted. The issue with electronic voting is not with electronic voting per se (as your objections illustrate), but with the disorganised, slipshod, negligent manner in which it's been carried out in the US at present. It's perfectly possible to design a system that works well and is audited, verifiable, and very difficult to influence, but that's not really in the interest of any parties involved except the voters, is it?
Quick: the current time is 00:30 -- is it morning, midday, or night where I live?
I live in the states, but the time is 00:30 UTC everywhere right now. If I call my grandma in Australia, is she going to say, "ugh! Why did you call me at 00:30?" or is she going to say, "oh, you picked a perfect time to call." (My grandma does, in fact, talk like that, by the way.)
Let's look at the present situation - before you call your grandma, you need to know 3 things :
What time (local time) does she get up/go to bed
What is the local time offset from where she lives to where you live
What is the daylight savings offset where she lives?
Then you do a calculation based on your local time (unless you have a clock on your wall set to grandma time)
If everyone uses the same time you need to know one thing
What time UTC she gets up/goes to bed
No calculation involved, and less things to know. Now maybe for your grandma you've already memorised this information, but if you deal with a lot of people in different time zones, it becomes a pain quite fast.
The reason for daylight savings is to have more daylight in the hours we are up doing stuff - a far better system would be to have a universal time and properly local decisions (taken by your place of work or institution) on when to go to work and when to vary those hours in winter. If you lived someplace slightly out of the way you'd know that the current daylight savings system is a farce for many people anyway, because it's chosen to fit a whole country/state, some of which it doesn't suit at all.
The point of time zones and "local time" is that it provides *context*. Wednesday is going to turn into Thursday (or already has) in the middle of the night -- for everybody.
Just because you change the times to UTC doesn't mean you have to make days change at absurd times. Days and concepts like noon etc could stay attached to the solar calendar, since that's what they describe, and switch over at an arbitrary hour in different regions. For most places in the world you'll still be on the same day, just offset a bit, and people care far more about the time than the day in other places. If I want to talk to someone, I don't really care if it's Wednesday or Thursday where you live, but I do care if you're available. If you did what you're suggesting (divorced days from the solar clock), you'd be better off getting rid of days, months and years altogether and working with kiloseconds, gigaseconds etc. At some point we may do this, particularly if we don't all live on the same rock. The current calendar is a bit of a mess anyway, and doesn't even fit the solar year very well.
Daylight savings (and indeed local time itself) is confusing and anachronistic, and it's time it was replaced with something which was more useful and locally flexible. Getting rid of it would help a lot of people who at present have hours imposed by a central authority rather than just deciding on them themselves, and also people who live far apart and want to plan meetings etc.
Samba is the only networking file system I can think of that has reasonable cross-platform support.
System Preferences > Sharing > Windows Sharing (on 10.4 at least)
Hardware availability is also difficult...rant about support for old hardware...Again, my philosophy of "upgrade" seems to be in conflict with Apple's philosophy of "buy a new one!".
So the moral of the story is - if you're looking to tinker and upgrade a very old machine piecemeal, don't try to run OS X on it, as you will inevitably run into snags, and the support isn't there for very old hardware. That's one of the disadvantages of close source, and of course running an operating system that wasn't even out in beta when that G3 was first produced.
If I can't use the OSX-style features, what's the point of paying extra for OSX? In general I prefer F/OSS software to commercial software (though I will use free versions sometimes).
If you don't want to use the OSX style programs which are available, why try to use OS X? What's the point in downloading ports made for another system and then complaining they don't look right - I think it's pretty cool that they exist at all. You won't find any ports of large OS X programs on linux. To limit your choice to only open source applications will (at present) leave you using inferior programs in some cases. There are much better closed source programs than the Gimp for example.
The strength of OS X is really in the consistency of the GUI (which has been eroded somewhat lately), and the effort made to apply polish to every little facet. As one example, the consistency in menu items between applications makes life a lot easier, error dialogs are generally short, and security messages only pop up when required, not every five minutes. I'm not sure I'd really compare it to XP's GUI, which is more than a little rough at the edges. Sounds like that doesn't appeal to you enough to outweigh the disadvantages of not having an all open-source ecosystem, so you'd be better off on Linux as you say. However most of your bad impressions of OS X are caused by the old hardware you're trying to run it on, and the mismatch between Apple's aims and yours.
Perhaps he's in the gin mill (a cross between the moulin rouge and a gin den?) too.
"Zuned" will be a verb all right. Just like "Osborned" or "Borked".
e _id=219
It's already a verb, meaning 'Caught out by non-portable DRM' :
http://www.michaelrobertson.com/archive.php?minut
Tell me, why do you go through all this hassle, when you could just steal the music in one step, without paying a middle-man?
Do you actually believe that some of this money gets back to the bands/producers?
That's funny, I had a quick discussion with my co-workers too, and they were of the mind TEN MINUTES AGO that Google needs the following:
c id=16357565c id=16357445
a. the users and more importantly
b. the usage pattern of these users
While google has been picking up little things here and there, essentially this is google's first real "social networking" site that they have purchased. I say it in quotes because youtube isn't really a social networking site, but there are certainly aspects of it that cannot be denied.
I say youtube lucked out and google really made a stupid purchase, it appears to me like it was an attrition attempt against the competition in internet space (yahoo? microsoft? myspace? - whoever they think their competition is atm, because I can't tell). I don't know.. I'm curious to see where this goes. Google definately wants to go into the multimedia distribution area, that's for sure. How they go about doing it, we'll have to see..
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Are you a script? If so you should be changed to reply coherently to replies in your thread, that would be more entertaining. Simply copying posts is a bit dull don't you think?
http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=199747&
http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=199747&
Did they fake the 9/11 "attack" in order to start the war on terror so they could use it as an excuse to start this spying?
Maybe you should re-examine your constant recourse to silly crazyliberalbelievesanythinghereadsontheinternet straw men and consider the real problem here. The US Administration wants unfettered power to tap phones - can you not see how this *could* be very very dangerous, if not in the hands of Bush, in the hands of a future president?
If Apple really was interested in running an online music venture and making their money there -- as in, really having that be their core business -- they would have tried to license out FairPlay as widely as possible and make it a de facto standard. (Which it already practically is, without licensing; given that the iPod is the de facto standard MP3 player.)
Actually, I disagree - they didn't license out to protect the market as it was growing, if they had attempted to license early it could easily have meant the death of their format. Licensing out to the likes of Microsoft and their hardware partners would leave them forced to play along with multiple implementations of their DRM, possibly even dealing with outright sabotage (see Java in MS Windows) to undermine their position. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. By building a strong monolithic market first, they're in a perfect position to open up licensing and make a killing, and no-one can challenge their position at this point as the one who sets the standards.
In fact there's going to be far more money in online media when it takes off than there will ever be in gadgets - once people don't bother buying physical media the market will be huge; owning the most widely licensed DRM will be very profitable. For now though the money is in the gadgets.
Loaning out "modern" paper money (instead of real money like gold)
The value of Gold is no more real than that of a promissory note. The important thing is scarcity, and paper money, if managed properly, can be just as scarce as any valuable commodity.
Sure, it looks cool but once it's outdated you throw it away.
Do you really throw away your old computers? ? ? I sell them or give them away. I always thought most people did that. And an AIO design doesn't make doing those things any harder. All of the AIO computers I've ever owned are still chugging away on someone else's desk, several years later.
There are advantages to the AIO format (takes up less space, easy to install, easy to move) as well. Just because those aren't important to you doesn't mean they wouldn't be to others. Personally, I don't know why people put up with ugly noisy boxes under their desks and a mess of wires when they could have a fanless computer hidden away behind the LCD.
This has nothing to do with sour grapes. The point of these moves was to protect consumers from monopolies. I think it's time Apple opened up their DRM for use on other devices. If I want to buy music online I don't want to be locked in to using one device from one company for the rest of my life, do you? Currently (despite owning an iPod) I won't touch Apple's online store because of this issue, but I expect many governments to take action, not to dismantle, punish, or disable Apple, but to stop them using their near monopoly in one space (iPod) to extend that monopoly into another space (online media). They should be compelled to license (for a reasonable fee) their DRM to other widget makers, thus allowing the consumer to win and the market to blossom. In the end this would in fact be a huge bonus to Apple, because their revenue from the license fees would outweigh any potential loss on the widget sales (which won't crater if they continue to make the best ones), and they won't have to worry about MS steamrollering them with DRM included in Windows.
I like to think that Apple will eventually do the right thing on their own, because it is in their interest to do so now that they dominate the market but if they don't, they should be compelled to. Contrary to your beliefs, individual consumers (or even consumers en masse) do not have the power to compel them, they can only buy or not buy - often Hobson's choice in a 'free' market.
The big problem in Europe is that they are socialist and want to destroy the advantage that anyone over here has. You think if it was Nokia who was the first to market with the iPod/iTunes combination that the Scandanavian judicial system would be trying to break it open? I think not. It is really a case of sour grapes. If you can't compete, just drag them down.
Europe has (currently) 25 nation states - to characterise them all as 'socialist' is laughable, most aren't even aiming for something remotely socialist and definitions of socialist vary the world over. Try stepping around your stale stereotype and find out what's on the other side. If it was Nokia it's possible Finnish MPs could be persuaded to look the other way (1 country of 24 in Europe), however Finland technically isn't part of Scandinavia, which isn't a country and doesn't have a judicial system.
Stop - Ceases playback and returns to the start of the file.
Why would you want to do that?
He never tried to get the technical illiterals of the mac community or the slashdot trolls involved,
Oh really?
What was the video, presented in layman's terms and using a macbook (albeit in an unusual config), for then?
The newspaper interview which hinted at more and claimed Apple was 'leaning on him' without giving details?
The snide asides like makes you want to stab one of those (mac) users in the eye with a lit cigarette or something?
If he didn't want to troll or be trolled, those are a few things he could have avoided doing. If he had quietly posted this to a security list and not made unsubstantiated claims of legal interference, I'd understand your position. As it is he's provoking a lot of people and fanning the flames by refusing to substantiate claims of legal pressure (where are the letters, why would Apple lie if they know it will all come out?) and hinting at more serious and widespread vulnerabilities without revealing them.
I feel sorry for him now, because it's very difficult for him to do anything without provoking more uninformed debate, which must be frustrating.
PS This has nothing to do with any US policy on science.
Personally, I find OS X to be inelegant and inconsistent.
Well, they did say 'in comparison' : ) There are some things which could be a lot better in OS X - including some of those you mentioned, though I'd disagree about dragging off the dock - those are links to files, not files themselves, and the user wouldn't want to drag them to the desktop. The same principle is used for toolbar icons and icons in the favourites list in the finder - it's not used only in the Dock.
Re separating the functions in the Dock, this would definitely be an improvement - it'd be nice if it had an area for running applications, and an area for documents, and if the trash can where still on the desktop so that it stayed still. As you say, there's plenty of things to improve (perhaps just less than Windows : ) )
Like the crazy file selector dialogs that force you to laboriously click your way through the folder hierarchy, because Apple has decided you shouldn't want to save time by just typing the path in.
If you want to type the path in while in a system dialog, you can press cmd-shift-G; presumably it's not in there because it would confuse users who don't know what a path is. Alternatively you can just drag in the folder you want to go to.
Like iTunes, with its "streamlined" interface that just leaves average users upset because they can't understand why there isn't a "stop" button.
I see, and what would this missing stop button do; exactly the same thing as the pause button? The stop button is a hangover from VCRs where there was actually a mechanical difference between stopping (and moving the head away from the tape) and pausing, it has no place on a non-VCR device.
And the confusing interface that makes no distinction between the fundamental system menus and an individual application's menus.
The only 'fundamental system menu' is the Apple menu on the left, which stays in the same place. Each application has its own menubar which appears when that application is active, seems sensible to me. I prefer this to the approach of replicating the same application menus in each window, but each to their own. There's no need to close applications after use, so why should the system encourage it? I'd prefer them to go the other way and leave all apps running unless you explicitly choose quit.
delightful self-delusion that Windows sucks in every way imaginable... Neither actually has a major advantage in terms of "elegance" or "consistency".
Having struggled through various Windows 'assistants' trying to get a basic thing like an external USB disk to work the other day (worked flawlessly on OS X, and other disks worked with XP), I beg to differ. This was using the built in XP mass storage device drivers, which usually work, but when they don't the Add Hardware dialogs are just a mess of confusing options and properties that the user hardly ever wants to see. Windows isn't so different from OS X, but there are still differences, and they way it handles problems and presents them to the user is one of the most obvious.
Flamebait oblivion, here I come!
On the contrary, on this site your point of view is the received wisdom, the silent majority are still using Windows.
So frankly, your analysis is nothing more than window dressing of conservative, narrow-minded, thinking that is in desperate need of some fresh ideas... Ignoring the question to satisfy your threats of ridicule (which you have so eloquently made clear) is hardly science.
Your original post was full of woolly thinking, and was a rehash of an idea which has already been proposed and rejected, without adding anything original to it. If you're going to say something so contentious in public you need to back it up and show that you're aware of previous versions of this idea. You're now trying to turn a debate about that particular comment into a debate on the workings of science. It's easy to rail about The System which is keeping good scientists down, and far harder to come up with original, rigourous thought.
You might find this book interesting if you haven't read it; not all progress in science is obtained by creative genius, much of it is just hard slog, with little questioning and lots of experimentation. While sometimes critical of this approach, I do believe Kuhn has it right as he doesn't (as you are doing here) romanticise scientific endeavour and portray the only good scientist as a paradigm-smashing iconclast.
Ignoring the question to satisfy your threats of ridicule (which you have so eloquently made clear) is hardly science.
Posts on slashdot are unlikely to be 'science' or have pretensions to be, and the parent post didn't ignore your proposition, it addressed it directly - you're wrestling with straw men.
Frankly the Chinese would be the type to land on the moon and start mining for resources and say: "Screw the moon treaty, what are you going to do about it?"
Most of the rest of the world would say this of the current United States attitude. A better attitude would be to launch a cooperative project with other space agencies, as NASA has been doing in the past.
If NASA went totally robotic, yes they may learn things, but public interest and their budget to do such missions would shrink as a few nerdy folks in the bowls of mission control would actually care.
If NASA went totally robotic, instead of this hair-brained scheme they can't afford, they'd have more robotic probes on the way to Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and out of the solar system, and they'd be investigating self-assembling factories which could use endemic materials to boot-strap unmanned science stations which eventually could be manned. That would set us up to really colonise the rest of the planets instead of going for very expensive weekend trips, which is what we're going to get if this goes ahead at the expense of all the real science missions.
You're right to say pretty pictures matter, but the missions which have caused the most stir in the last few decades have all been robotic - Cassini, Mars Rovers, Mars Global Surveyor, Deep Impact, Voyager, SOHO etc etc. That's where the best return on investment currently is, no matter whether we're impatient to see humans up there too. Compare that to the ISS, which no one really cares about, and is manned.
Cassini, which brought back (and continues to) a huge amount of data, cost $3.26b total
This project is slated to cost $100b (before over-runs) - that's over 30 Cassini-type missions
If they want a sustainable human presence on the moon, they should be sending robots first. They could send a hundred lunar robot missions for the price of this manned launcher.
Or perhaps, along with all the other posters on this thread, they have experienced problems with suspend/hibernate in Windows and now avoid it. Several people I know have also had this issue, also with desktops - I've never seen *or* heard of it on OS X, so I think the comparison is fair. It probably depends on a lot of things, and given all the variety of PC hardware out there I'm not surprised they're having a tough time making it a reliable feature.
Just because it works in your experience doesn't make that experience universal, so there's no need to stoop to insulting other posters because they have problems you haven't seen.
What if on some level, our cells construct egg/sperm cells based on macroscopic-level environmental conditions?
Don't give up the day job.
Well, unless your current prototype doesn't, you know, really provide free power. It will only do _that_ after you've built the $10M version, of course.
Sounds a lot like ITER : )
Being able to not have to buy filler,
Good albums don't contain filler material.
Yeah, so they should also trust two jokers on the internet who want to create a buzz around their presentation, and frame their demo so that it is bound to do so...? It cuts both ways.
Although we'll see nothing but speculation in this article and its comments, eventually the truth will be known, and we'll have an exploit which is documented and proven to work, or not. If Apple have a flaw, and won't admit it, that would light a fire under them wouldn't it?
Given the hackers comments :
Although an Apple MacBook was used as the demo platform, it was exploited through a third-party wireless device driver - not the original wireless device driver that ships with the MacBook.
It sounds like they were bullshitting to try to make a splash, which they did. Till I see proof, I'm not inclined to trust either side.
no IT manager in his right mind will go with an office suite that doesn't support scripting.
No IT manager in his right mind will rely on some bastardised macro language built on top of a binary, continually changing 3rd party application for important parts of the company workflow.
If you've built a load of 'apps' on VBA, you're now a hostage to whatever MS decide to do with Office, Windows and VBA. As it happens, it's going to be replaced by something called VSTO soon, so your 'enterprise ready' solution is probably doomed in the medium term. There are many replacements for VBA (perl, ruby, python) which you could use to munge data just as easily, and more importantly you'd be able to continue to use them whatever projects are cancelled by MS/Apple for political reasons.
What I don't like is the complexity and security involved with all this wireless... Therefore, you'd need security. Likely culprit would be wpa or some variation of said protocol...I would still run the risk of overloading the "channel" with my multiple keyboards and mouses, oh and pritners and monitors.
So while it sounds good on paper, the practicality of wireless is still missing from the equation.
It's interesting that the system I'm running at home is exactly the one you suggest is not yet possible. WPA wifi network, pixma wifi wireless printer, bluetooth keyboard and mouse with encryption (apple ones), bluetooth drawing tablet with a rechargeable battery. The batteries last about a month for a mouse (I use rechargable ones) and much longer for the keyboard. None of them interfere with each other. Given I've never had any problems with any of the gear, I'd say it's eminently practical today to use wireless peripherals.
ah, what a shame.
I was really hoping they were going to introduce proper system-wide versioning. Almost every app uses the system save dialog, and they could have put a one line entry in there so that users could add comments whenever they saved (optional of course). Then they could have proper versioning under the covers, and even integrate with version control servers (svn or whatever) to allow remote backups/syncing.
I'd love to use svn with clients to check in and out changed versions of documents which they are editing too, but I can't recommend it to someone who's not prepared to muck around on the command line - integration with the finder could smooth out problems which occur when folders are copied or renamed, make adding comments a snap, and leave the whole process transparent to end users. The GUI clients can't deal with this, because it needs to be built into the finder so that you can't rename a folder without telling the vc system about it. They could actually add some value to dotmac by providing proper synchronising and secure backup/retreival.
Instead this just sounds like Backup.app divorced from dotmac, better than nothing, but a shame nonetheless; maybe for 10.6 : ) At the moment version control is stuck in the programming ghetto and looks set to remain that way in the near future.