I suspect the reason for your dislike of the Wii is simply your approach to gaming. I imagine you sit down and play a game for 2+ hours with some frequency (daily, every other day). I will readily admit that the Wii is not particularly well suited to that type of gameplay. It is, however, very well suited to less "serious" gameplay - an hour at a time, a couple of times a week, and "party" style gameplay, where your primary purpose is not actually playing the game, but interacting with a group of people.
I don't wholly agree with the GP, but just like there are fanboys for a particular platform (irrational support of and expenditure on a particular company's products) there are anti-fanboys (irrational distaste and malaise expressed towards a particular company's products) - call it the law of conservation of market preference. I think it's reasonable to say, also, that the size and vocality of a given anti-fanclub is as good (or perhaps even better) an indicator of the success of a product as that of its fanclub.
It shouldn't - and yet the patterns of drug enforcement and sentencing are such that it very much does. The system for drug control in this country is completely out of whack, and desperately needs to be corrected. I, personally, think a good first step is legalizing the least harmful intoxicant anyone in the country consumes.
Damn straight - caps lock is a worthless key anyway. I map caps lock to control, handy given how addicted I am to emacs key bindings - when you fix a transposition typo by typing ^t, rather than a double backspace - retype, you know you've got a problem...(for those who don't know, most of the basic emacs navigational shortcuts work in all Cocoa applications on OS X)
Absolutely. And really - Javascript based animations on a browser with a fast javascript engine (safari, chrome, firefox 3.5 (? haven't tested it yet myself)) is getting much smoother (see the chrome experiments as an example). As to the GGPs claim that tables are necessary. Good lord he needs to get out of the dark ages - CSS is better for layout than a table based model on *all* modern browsers - and I'm including IE6 in my definition of modern. There are admittedly some quirks - but they are reasonably few, and in spite of them, a css based design is far, far, far more maintainable (and accessible) than a table based design.
Really? I knew cars could 'ping', but 'fsck'? That's impressive. Now GM just needs to make some forking cars and some rming cars and we'll have a POSIX compliant highway system.
I'm guessing it won't take long for these phones to be outlawed in the EU though.
Yeah, legal prohibition is an excellent way to prevent people from using something. It works so fantastically well for drugs, guns and pirated music/movies.
I let that be as Gamepark is a European company - and different dialects of English take different approaches. The Brits (IIRC) treat companies as a plural entity, whereas us 'muricans treat them as singular entities.
Hey now - the HD remasterings of TOS are excellent. The new special effects and backdrop enhancements put the remastering of Star Wars IV, V and VI to shame (they are actually faithful to the original); and it looks pretty damn good in HD.
In both cases, the first result is the wikipedia entry for Data from Star Trek - but in google's case - the company's website (www.ericspecht.com) does not even appear on the first page - on yahoo - it's the second result.
First of all, many things that live in a plist can be edited with the 'defaults' command - no file editing required.
For those things that can't be editted with the defaults command - and can't be edited with your favorite text editor, 'plutil' is your friend - you can convert plists between binary and xml very easily. Spotlight indexing for a specific volume can be turned on or off using the mdutil command, and indexing of specific subdirectories of a given volume is (i believe) controlled by metadata on the directory in question.
You can list all the plist domains controllable by defaults by doing 'defaults domains' that'll give you a (huge) list of plists controllable by the defaults command. In there, com.apple.desktop has all the desktop background picture settings.
Disabling automatic login is an ldap property, i believe, and you can disable it by using dscl (at least in leopard, in tiger and earlier that property lived in the now dead netinfo database).
Admittedly, there's one item on your list that I can't, off the top of my head, figure out - FileVault. If I didn't have work to do - I'd spend some time figuring it out - but, alas, I do.
Apple does not give app developers any way to perform refunds.
App developers are not in charge of Apple's store. App developers cannot initiate refunds. Users, however, can complain to Apple to initiate a refund, which Apple will then allow or deny. So Inner Fence was not wrong - they don't run the App Store, so they don't initiate refunds.
They told all of the developers that they were responsible to rewrite every thing in OSX and Apple was not going to help provide transition information.
Not to pick nits, but what? The Classic environment stuck around for ~7 (!) years, the Carbon API for longer. Apple provided plenty of transition, and transition information.
The decided to stop doing newbusiness in the early 90's with the small retailer
Bold text mine, they did not terminate their existing agreements with small retailers (many of whom are still around). Yes, they changed their business strategy, and that sucks if you're interested in getting into the small mac shop business.
On the subject of Mac clones, yes - that sucks for the clone makers, although from Apple's perspective whoever decided it was a good idea to allow clones should have realized that it would have done the damage it did to Apple's business. Even back then Apple was still a hardware company, that made the vast majority of their money on hardware. Clones cut directly into their primary revenue stream. Economically good for the end user, I suppose, but in the long run it would have driven a stake into the heart of the entity providing the software that actually set the platform apart from the herd.
And as to this particular article - it has been demonstrated in other comments and on other sites that this claim is categorically false. Apple refunds their commission to the person requesting a refund, and the developer refunds their 70% - so guess who actually loses money in a refund situation? Apple. They eat the credit card processing fees.
I don't have a credit card (or any other means of payment for the iTunes store), and I have an iTunes account (I have an iphone too, and I've downloaded many free games from iTunes).
You are absolutely right in that drug addiction is bad. Addiction of any sort is bad, sex, gambling, video games. The definition of addiction is the persistence at an activity to the point where it has a negative impact on other portions of your life. The problem - as I see things, anyway, is that the prohibition, and the legal penalties for the possession and distribution of illegal drugs makes the problem worse, and reinforces and worsens the downward direction an addiction assumes, and makes it harder for legal, job-related and other reasons to recover from an addiction.
Prohibition is, furthermore, completely ineffective. It is easier for an underage person to purchase marijuana, cocaine, or crystal meth than it is for them to purchase alcohol.
You mentioned that four teenagers in your town died after smoking salvia - now, can you affirmatively attribute the cause of the accident to salvia? Had they consumed said salvia within 30 minutes (the effective length of time salvia affects the brain) of operating the vehicle? Or were they, in fact, teenagers - a demographic, that even when they are completely sober have the highest rate of automobile fatalities of all the demographics.
The problem is some presumption that prohibition is actually helping - legalization would give the government more control over the distribution of these substances, not less - because it would obliterate the black market, lowering significantly the profit margins of those interested in distributing it (currently Al Qaeda, the Taliban, various other large criminal organizations). It's simple economics that the prohibition of something creates a very profitable market for whatever is being prohibited, and it is simply sociology that shows that the legal prohibition of something does not eliminate the market for that which is being prohibited.
I was including ACLs under the umbrella of POSIX permissions - not technically correct as ACLs as I understand things are not actually part of the POSIX standard and are merely a recommendation, but whatever.
You are quite correct - however, the immutable flag is a different part of the posix standard - and really has nothing at all to do with permissions. With root privileges - I can override the immutable flag and still delete the file - and so can the Finder (but only the user immutable flag - the system immutable flag must be unset in order for the file to be removed). The behavior is different from what the GGP is talking about as when you try to change/delete a file with the immutable flag set (be it user or system) in the Finder it will tell you that the file is "locked", *not* that you "don't have permission" to delete the file, which is the behavior that the GGP was describing.
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect the reason for your dislike of the Wii is simply your approach to gaming. I imagine you sit down and play a game for 2+ hours with some frequency (daily, every other day). I will readily admit that the Wii is not particularly well suited to that type of gameplay. It is, however, very well suited to less "serious" gameplay - an hour at a time, a couple of times a week, and "party" style gameplay, where your primary purpose is not actually playing the game, but interacting with a group of people.
I don't wholly agree with the GP, but just like there are fanboys for a particular platform (irrational support of and expenditure on a particular company's products) there are anti-fanboys (irrational distaste and malaise expressed towards a particular company's products) - call it the law of conservation of market preference. I think it's reasonable to say, also, that the size and vocality of a given anti-fanclub is as good (or perhaps even better) an indicator of the success of a product as that of its fanclub.
It shouldn't - and yet the patterns of drug enforcement and sentencing are such that it very much does. The system for drug control in this country is completely out of whack, and desperately needs to be corrected. I, personally, think a good first step is legalizing the least harmful intoxicant anyone in the country consumes.
Damn straight - caps lock is a worthless key anyway. I map caps lock to control, handy given how addicted I am to emacs key bindings - when you fix a transposition typo by typing ^t, rather than a double backspace - retype, you know you've got a problem...(for those who don't know, most of the basic emacs navigational shortcuts work in all Cocoa applications on OS X)
Brings new meaning to the term "bone conducting microphone"...
I'm fairly certain that everyone who uses the Gregorian calendar has May 25th on it...
Absolutely. And really - Javascript based animations on a browser with a fast javascript engine (safari, chrome, firefox 3.5 (? haven't tested it yet myself)) is getting much smoother (see the chrome experiments as an example). As to the GGPs claim that tables are necessary. Good lord he needs to get out of the dark ages - CSS is better for layout than a table based model on *all* modern browsers - and I'm including IE6 in my definition of modern. There are admittedly some quirks - but they are reasonably few, and in spite of them, a css based design is far, far, far more maintainable (and accessible) than a table based design.
... they sell fscking cars.
Really? I knew cars could 'ping', but 'fsck'? That's impressive. Now GM just needs to make some forking cars and some rming cars and we'll have a POSIX compliant highway system.
I'm guessing it won't take long for these phones to be outlawed in the EU though.
Yeah, legal prohibition is an excellent way to prevent people from using something. It works so fantastically well for drugs, guns and pirated music/movies.
I let that be as Gamepark is a European company - and different dialects of English take different approaches. The Brits (IIRC) treat companies as a plural entity, whereas us 'muricans treat them as singular entities.
Hey now - the HD remasterings of TOS are excellent. The new special effects and backdrop enhancements put the remastering of Star Wars IV, V and VI to shame (they are actually faithful to the original); and it looks pretty damn good in HD.
Qué?
Oops - the android data site is erichspecht.com
A very good point - check this out:
Google Search for "android data -google"
Yahoo Search for "android data -google"
In both cases, the first result is the wikipedia entry for Data from Star Trek - but in google's case - the company's website (www.ericspecht.com) does not even appear on the first page - on yahoo - it's the second result.
It's just too problematic to have to code separate DOM funtionality for every browser on the market.
These days, most of the forking is done in the library you're using - I rarely need to fork my code based on specific browsers anymore.
some way of securely identifying the correct bank and retrieving that key
The destination bank prints the cards - can't they put their public key on the magnetic stripe?
First of all, many things that live in a plist can be edited with the 'defaults' command - no file editing required.
For those things that can't be editted with the defaults command - and can't be edited with your favorite text editor, 'plutil' is your friend - you can convert plists between binary and xml very easily. Spotlight indexing for a specific volume can be turned on or off using the mdutil command, and indexing of specific subdirectories of a given volume is (i believe) controlled by metadata on the directory in question.
You can list all the plist domains controllable by defaults by doing 'defaults domains' that'll give you a (huge) list of plists controllable by the defaults command. In there, com.apple.desktop has all the desktop background picture settings.
Disabling automatic login is an ldap property, i believe, and you can disable it by using dscl (at least in leopard, in tiger and earlier that property lived in the now dead netinfo database).
Admittedly, there's one item on your list that I can't, off the top of my head, figure out - FileVault. If I didn't have work to do - I'd spend some time figuring it out - but, alas, I do.
Any OS requiring >90% of configuration changes to be made in a GUI does not count as UNIX
100% of configuration changes in OS X can be made from the console. There is not a single setting that *requires* a GUI.
Apple does not give app developers any way to perform refunds.
App developers are not in charge of Apple's store. App developers cannot initiate refunds. Users, however, can complain to Apple to initiate a refund, which Apple will then allow or deny. So Inner Fence was not wrong - they don't run the App Store, so they don't initiate refunds.
They told all of the developers that they were responsible to rewrite every thing in OSX and Apple was not going to help provide transition information.
Not to pick nits, but what? The Classic environment stuck around for ~7 (!) years, the Carbon API for longer. Apple provided plenty of transition, and transition information.
The decided to stop doing newbusiness in the early 90's with the small retailer
Bold text mine, they did not terminate their existing agreements with small retailers (many of whom are still around). Yes, they changed their business strategy, and that sucks if you're interested in getting into the small mac shop business.
On the subject of Mac clones, yes - that sucks for the clone makers, although from Apple's perspective whoever decided it was a good idea to allow clones should have realized that it would have done the damage it did to Apple's business. Even back then Apple was still a hardware company, that made the vast majority of their money on hardware. Clones cut directly into their primary revenue stream. Economically good for the end user, I suppose, but in the long run it would have driven a stake into the heart of the entity providing the software that actually set the platform apart from the herd.
And as to this particular article - it has been demonstrated in other comments and on other sites that this claim is categorically false. Apple refunds their commission to the person requesting a refund, and the developer refunds their 70% - so guess who actually loses money in a refund situation? Apple. They eat the credit card processing fees.
How can you kill that which does not live?
By using sudo: ...
sudo kill -9
I don't have a credit card (or any other means of payment for the iTunes store), and I have an iTunes account (I have an iphone too, and I've downloaded many free games from iTunes).
The submitter was thinking in hex - he meant 10.
You are absolutely right in that drug addiction is bad. Addiction of any sort is bad, sex, gambling, video games. The definition of addiction is the persistence at an activity to the point where it has a negative impact on other portions of your life. The problem - as I see things, anyway, is that the prohibition, and the legal penalties for the possession and distribution of illegal drugs makes the problem worse, and reinforces and worsens the downward direction an addiction assumes, and makes it harder for legal, job-related and other reasons to recover from an addiction.
Prohibition is, furthermore, completely ineffective. It is easier for an underage person to purchase marijuana, cocaine, or crystal meth than it is for them to purchase alcohol.
You mentioned that four teenagers in your town died after smoking salvia - now, can you affirmatively attribute the cause of the accident to salvia? Had they consumed said salvia within 30 minutes (the effective length of time salvia affects the brain) of operating the vehicle? Or were they, in fact, teenagers - a demographic, that even when they are completely sober have the highest rate of automobile fatalities of all the demographics.
The problem is some presumption that prohibition is actually helping - legalization would give the government more control over the distribution of these substances, not less - because it would obliterate the black market, lowering significantly the profit margins of those interested in distributing it (currently Al Qaeda, the Taliban, various other large criminal organizations). It's simple economics that the prohibition of something creates a very profitable market for whatever is being prohibited, and it is simply sociology that shows that the legal prohibition of something does not eliminate the market for that which is being prohibited.
I was including ACLs under the umbrella of POSIX permissions - not technically correct as ACLs as I understand things are not actually part of the POSIX standard and are merely a recommendation, but whatever.
You are quite correct - however, the immutable flag is a different part of the posix standard - and really has nothing at all to do with permissions. With root privileges - I can override the immutable flag and still delete the file - and so can the Finder (but only the user immutable flag - the system immutable flag must be unset in order for the file to be removed). The behavior is different from what the GGP is talking about as when you try to change/delete a file with the immutable flag set (be it user or system) in the Finder it will tell you that the file is "locked", *not* that you "don't have permission" to delete the file, which is the behavior that the GGP was describing.