There are multiple spellings; ever consider how many spellings of european names got mangled at ellis island?
So, what you're saying is that because my father spells it the way he does, you don't believe me? Wow. I hope you function in society, because lots of people do things in different and unique ways outside of your parents' basement too.
Well, soon enough it will get your name too, somehow.
As a bearded unix programmer who happens to be muslim, complete with a muslim name ( first name == first name of an at large chechen terrorist; last name == name of a 911 hijacker ) this kind of stuff makes my hackles stand up.
I happen to be white (not arab), and american born; but nonetheless I was raised with a love for this country and its freedoms by a father who also is bearded and muslim ( and happens to have the *most* common muslim name, Mohamad ).
I know many arabs who love this country and live here. We ( and by we I mean people with "funny" names, beards, etc ) are always put in the random search line in airports, given extra scrutiny at border crossings, etc. Etc. Etc. Etc.
Frankly, I don't really care about the camera in the USPS box. I live in DC, I can't walk a block without being seen by probably half a dozen cameras.
But this is yet another straw. People like me feel it earlier, but we're all losing our freedom here.
Perhaps it's time to take off; but where else is any better? I get the impression these days that the only place you can actually be *free* is in a 3rd world country that doesn't have its shit together well enough to properly monitor its citizens. But do you really want to live in such a place?
I guess the answer is "Anywhere in Europe". Sure you won't be any more free, but at least you'll have healthcare and good mass transit. In america we're getting the shaft six ways to sunday, and we don't even have a good society as an excuse.
If only, two years ago, I had had a viable Ogg option. I finally had the throwaway money to buy a harddisk mp3 player ( to replace my increasingly unreliable MD player ) and literally everything I examined was either a complete piece of crap ( in terms of build quality ) or a complete piece of crap ( in terms of usability ) or a complete piece of crap ( in terms of design ). The sole machine that was any good was the iPod, and it excelled in every way, except for its lack of Ogg support.
So I bought an iPod, and re-ripped all my CDs ( thank god, not too many ) to high quality MP3 and discarded my oggs.
Seems like Apple has lit the fire under the feet of competitors who are *now* making increasingly appealing machines.
Newsflash: Insane, opinionated crank on the internet. News at 11.
This is not news. It's funny, his wikipediasucks site is distressing, for making fun of the guy's daughter, but this is not news.
Nothing to see here, move along. My guess is that if this hadn't involved wikipedia, but instead one of the many, many other wikkis out there, this would never have been "news".
My understanding is that SGI had some hairy X11 extensions -- obviously tailored for their hardware -- which made for video performance that nobody could touch.
This is the trouble with "generic" computers/OSs such as Mac and the PC -- they're aiming at doing everything, and accordingly, they cannot excel at any one thing like a specifically designed machine/OS can.
That said, Macs still spank PCs at video and typography, and PCs still spank Macs at games and.. I guess.. office. There's some specialization in the Mac and PC world, just not as balls-to-the-wall as SGI.
On a side note, I used to do texture mapping for the early incarnation of the Alice project ( www.alice3d.org, but back in '96 when it was still at UVa ). We used an SGI Reality Engine, and it made my hairs stand up it was so powerful. I remember once I crashed it -- by accidently pressing the middle button on the haxored broken mouse which was taped and labeled "Don't press me" -- and we had to go to the server room to reboot it. This was my first exposure to a *real* computer, and seeing that it was rebooted by turning a key blew my mind.
I have to say, though, that crashing a server by clicking the (admittedly broken) middle mouse button on a terminal is pretty appalling. Something was clearly Very Wrong in the setup.
For what it's worth, my grandmother was hit with a ruler in gradeschool whenever she wrote with her left hand.
I was discouraged by my teachers from using my left hand until about 3rd grade when my teacher complained about my deplorable handwriting. I told her my handwriting was so bad because I was forced to use my right hand. Grudgingly, she "allowed" me to use my left. Not that my left-hand writing is much better.
That said, I'm excited to here that evolution has "allowed" people like me. I'd be SOL otherwise.
Not to mention that janitors -- being blue collar and generally lower on the social totem pole -- *know* they're the first to be suspected/fired when something goes missing.
Generally speaking the theives are coworkers, with sticky fingers. But usually it's people -- dressed nicely -- who just walk in off the street, looking like they belong, and picking something up and quietly taking off.
I'm probably not the only person *hoping* that this refers to the Upright Citizens Brigade's super secret underground laboratory.
Better not read the article, then.
It's true. I've been bitten by the surprisingly bad performance of std::vector in tight inner loops ( opengl code, doing hairy stuff at runtime ).
While I try to stick with the STL, there are times when you need to just eat it and use traditional arrays. And all sorts of other nasty things like making local copies of simple objects to avoid repetitive dereferencing and so on and so forth.
The important part is to explain in your documentation and source comments *why* you've done these things, so that other programmers -- or you in the future -- won't think "what the hell is this crap" and then undo some hairy code in the name of "elegance" and lose a 500% speedup.
Actually, Apple use it for nearly all their apps don't they?
True -- but Apple's apps are in many cases frontends to system frameworks. E.g, safari is just a frontend to WebKit.framework. AddressBook is a frontend to AddressBook.framework, and so on. You can't install or update one of these without installing new frameworks; thereby eliminating the feasibility of a drag and drop install.
Not that that's cool or anything. But the situation is more complicated than is the case for a 3rd party app like SubEthaEdit or -- amazingly enough -- MS Office which is also a drag-n-drop install on OS X.
I agree about the mindset change -- see my other post on this same topic: Here
This may constitute a fundamental dosconnect between OS X users and Linux users.
Allow me to explain is I can -- as a user and developer who's been on both platforms for a long time.
Linux users see software as... and don't flame me here... a capital-R Right. it's a global commodity; it just exists, you pick it from a list and there it is. This is a Good Thing as regards Open Source, since it's generally not one person who invented it, wrote it, designed the icons, debugged it, wrote the documentation,etc etc. It's a group effort. It's installed by sucking down a package from sourceforge CVS or some other anonymous distribution method. If there is a homepage, it's more likely to be a doc or FAQ than a serious production. And, to top it all off, it's free.
OS X users tend to be willing to pay for software ( the HORROR! ). They are aware of Open Source software and have things like Fink and the portage port to install that stuff -- from lists just like you like.
But the GUI stuff, like text editors, music players, etc are downloaded from the product pages of the developers who wrote it. These pieces of software are sometimes open source, but more often are inexpensive shareware -- with excellent support from the developer ( often just one person ) himself -- because he's trying to make a living this way.
Since it's generally shareware, the developer has to make it appealing, and make it personal. Good graphic design, good packaging, good documentation, etc etc. They probably wouldn't like their software to be just Yet Another Item in a List because why would you pick product X when there are 10 others that do similar things -- with no real information to separate them. Would you buy a stereo or a car just by looking at a list ( assuming no previous knowledge of manufacturer or model )?
it's a different world from Linux. Both are GOOD. Both are very good in fact -- but they are different. Deal with it.
Speaking as an OS X developer, another thing this style of packaging tends to result in is devs who *want* the app to be easily installed.
Apple provides an "Installer" app for apps which *need* installation, and look how many people use it. Almost nobody.
The whole design guidelines of OS X and the general mindset that comes with living in and working on OS X is that an app should be one thing, an object, which can run anywhere and shouldn't require a billion libs to run.
And for those who gripe about not re-using libs, well, OS X apps *do* link against libs in/usr/lib and frameworks in/Library. So when OS X gets an update, everybody gets it.
Frankly, I don't miss running configure scripts and then manually installing a half dozen obscure libs to run a single app. If I -- a developer mind you on a well maintained system -- didn't have those libs already, how many people would? Just link it statically and deal with it. Criminy.
Well, it worked for me at least, using KDE. It didn't help me manage a bajillion dot files, but it made certain I kept things in order. Nothing like having chaos stare you in the face to instill a natural desire to tidy up.
Sad thing is I'm on OS X now and I don't know any way to do that in Aqua. I hate having shortcuts on my desktop to folders in ~
I just want to say that while I'm by no means a professional programmer, I do know my stuff, more or less. I do hobby robotics with my own runtime and electronics, I've written device drivers in deeply low level c and assembler for embedded systems. Right now I'm taking a break by writing a game that does emergent intelligence in hoards. And so on and so forth.
I do most of it in C and C++ just because that's what I feel best in.
Anyway, I'm on a Mac, and I decided that Applescript looked interesting from a functional standpoint -- you know, dynamic scripting of app and system and so on. Keen! I used to muck around with DCOP under KDE and I was thinking how cool it is that apple has taken the idea of COM and so on and made it a *language*.
Anyway, it turns out I can't write Applescript to save my life. I write a line and the sheer *ambiguity* makes my tender gonads retract into my abdomen. I can't take such *uncertainty*. The grammar seems dependent on context and function, and even then, there's six ways to express it.
I'll stick to C and C++, and languages like io or lisp when I need greater dynamism; and as for applescript, I'm hoping this ( http://www.cocoadev.com/index.pl?DOScriptingArchit ecture ) pans out.
I wish I had been there. I could have showed him my stuff, which is something like 45kloc, separated into 3 frameworks ( each at least 5kloc ) and a main app which is 27kloc.
What bothers me about this is that it gives me the impression that Apple is surprised if people use Xcode for non trivial apps. Yes, I know, Xcode has bugs and so does Apple. But it's better than make, and for me it's great, until I start refactoring and renaming files...
Maybe they're trying to get people to move from Codewarrior?
Anyway, if you think C++ is portable, well, it is so long as you don't go outside of the standard libraries. As soon as you touch something GUI related you're out of luck.
My aforementioned project is, intentionally, about 85% completely 100% portable C++, using only the standard libraries, STL, and OpenGL. The remaining 15% is Objective-C++, binding my logic against a sweet Cocoa GUI.
yeah, perhaps god put the puzzle there as a test to see if we could develop enough free will and free thinking to derive a theory of our own development that is counter to what He gave us?
perhaps He'd be proud of his clever children.
I just don't get the evangelical idea that a wise or compassionate god would want us to dwell and wallow in willful ignorance. Why give us these big calorically hungry brains if we're only to use them to worship Him? What a jerk!
True. But those people are very loud about their credo. Plus, they tend to try make PUBLIC schools teach children their RELIGIOUS credo as if it were legitimate science, with legitimate science being sidelined as merely one of many opinions.
I think many people here would have less problems with creationists if they weren't so damn evil about it.
yes, you heard me: evil. I think it's evil to trick children into believing this stuff. If you want your kids to learn creationism, fine -- teach them: yourself. But it's not the public school system's business to do so. Schools should teach things outside of religion -- e.g. math, history, language, science.
I'm not going to try to forcibly teach your kids and everybody's kids that the earth is flat, or that vampires are real, or that visual basic is the One True Language, just because I happen to believe it is the case. I will make my own children ignorant and incapable of critical thought, not yours.
Not to mention other flaws such as our esophagus, which shares an entry point with the windpipe, allowing for easy choking.
Or our appendix, which is unused and causes all sorts of problems in modern man.
Or our wisdom teeth, which don't fit anymore and need to be removed surgically in many people.
Or our knees which fail way too easily.
Or our backs which are too fragile and don't self repair well enough ( e.g., spinal cords ).
All these things SCREAM to me of an evolutionary process which selected for beings which could get around in an energetically cheaply fashion, well enough to have a few children before the parts fail. This is good for evolution and population. This is terrible for the individual who suffers for it.
This tells me that "god" is more interested in overpopulation than the success and happiness of the individual.
Re:Except Animals are more likely to be right.
on
Good Bad Attitude
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· Score: 1
our rights being eroded/Patriot act (Sedition Act, McCarthyism during Red Scare), and a general distrust of politicians (even our founding fathers distrusted politicians!)
Well said. Whenever I get the willies about the future of freedom in America, I think of how many times we've come close before. We always seem to make it back out. It's a bit of a razor's edge, but we always seem to make it.
Doesn't mean, however, that I will blindly trust politicians to cool down and allow us to be free citizens again, once we've "solved" terrorism.
I always saw them in the math department, and a friend of mine who worked at NIST was always raving about them. I wish I could have used them, as I would have spent less time wishing something beautiful existed, as it already did. My work in college kept me on macs and irix.
Objective-C is great, and I write in it every day, but sadly, for my work I find C++ better suited. So be it, I can at least write my GUIs in Objective-C.
And, as you mention ruby, there's an article on Oreillynet today about RubyCocoa. I've printed it to read on the train home tonight.
Pretty much yes; but the thing is Cocoa programming isn't something you pick up by reading API docs. Cocoa programming is *different*, and until something makes you grok it, it will be baffling.
I'd written Win32, BeOS, GTK, Qt and Java AWT/Swing apps, so I figured Cocoa would be just a matter of adaptation, since the above systems were all ( with the exception of Win32 ) basically the same, just with slightly different semantics.
I was shocked to realize that Cocoa is its own thing, and is completely and utterly different ( albeit, it shares some basic ideas like "views" and "events" ).
But I bought a few books, did the tutorials, and then whammo it all made sense. My eyes were opened, and I understood.
Yes -- Mac OS did suck, from the standpoint of anybody not involved in graphic design.
As a graphic designer by day, I can attest to having used macs exclusively from 1992 on and while yes they did suck for things like programming, they were not merely better, but fundamentally CORRECT for graphic work. For a million and one reasons that fall best into the "intangible" category. Little things. But they add up. And Mac OS X has inherited *most* of them.
As a programmer by night, I didn't want to use Macs for hacking until OS X came out. Previosly I had used linux & BeOS for those tasks.
Regarding mouse buttons, well, that's a different bag of snakes. It's easy to get accustomed to either usage paradigm. I, personally, like the right mouse button but using ctrl-click on the Mac simply fits better with its general usage. So, on linux I use a three buttoned mouse, on the mac I use a one-button mouse. When in Rome...
My ex-roomate, was a VERY capable Novell/Linux/Windows admin. When I let him use my powerbook one day he said to me...
"What's this about usability? I thought Macs were supposed to be so usable? I can't even find a start menu. How are you supposed to run anything"
Not to mention he thought my 12" aluminum PB, the most robust and well made computer I've ever owned, looked "cheesy", compared to his 100% black plastic Dell -- complete with its ill fittings and cracks.
I'm serious. The reality is that these people have had it shoved into their heads, for YEARS, that Macs are toys. Playthings for "ghey" graphic designers.
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There are multiple spellings; ever consider how many spellings of european names got mangled at ellis island?
So, what you're saying is that because my father spells it the way he does, you don't believe me? Wow. I hope you function in society, because lots of people do things in different and unique ways outside of your parents' basement too.
Well, soon enough it will get your name too, somehow.
As a bearded unix programmer who happens to be muslim, complete with a muslim name ( first name == first name of an at large chechen terrorist; last name == name of a 911 hijacker ) this kind of stuff makes my hackles stand up.
I happen to be white (not arab), and american born; but nonetheless I was raised with a love for this country and its freedoms by a father who also is bearded and muslim ( and happens to have the *most* common muslim name, Mohamad ).
I know many arabs who love this country and live here. We ( and by we I mean people with "funny" names, beards, etc ) are always put in the random search line in airports, given extra scrutiny at border crossings, etc. Etc. Etc. Etc.
Frankly, I don't really care about the camera in the USPS box. I live in DC, I can't walk a block without being seen by probably half a dozen cameras.
But this is yet another straw. People like me feel it earlier, but we're all losing our freedom here.
Perhaps it's time to take off; but where else is any better? I get the impression these days that the only place you can actually be *free* is in a 3rd world country that doesn't have its shit together well enough to properly monitor its citizens. But do you really want to live in such a place?
I guess the answer is "Anywhere in Europe". Sure you won't be any more free, but at least you'll have healthcare and good mass transit. In america we're getting the shaft six ways to sunday, and we don't even have a good society as an excuse.
Forgive my rambling, but this stuff grates on me.
If only, two years ago, I had had a viable Ogg option. I finally had the throwaway money to buy a harddisk mp3 player ( to replace my increasingly unreliable MD player ) and literally everything I examined was either a complete piece of crap ( in terms of build quality ) or a complete piece of crap ( in terms of usability ) or a complete piece of crap ( in terms of design ). The sole machine that was any good was the iPod, and it excelled in every way, except for its lack of Ogg support.
So I bought an iPod, and re-ripped all my CDs ( thank god, not too many ) to high quality MP3 and discarded my oggs.
Seems like Apple has lit the fire under the feet of competitors who are *now* making increasingly appealing machines.
I'm sticking with my iPod, but go competition!
Newsflash: Insane, opinionated crank on the internet. News at 11.
This is not news. It's funny, his wikipediasucks site is distressing, for making fun of the guy's daughter, but this is not news.
Nothing to see here, move along. My guess is that if this hadn't involved wikipedia, but instead one of the many, many other wikkis out there, this would never have been "news".
My understanding is that SGI had some hairy X11 extensions -- obviously tailored for their hardware -- which made for video performance that nobody could touch.
This is the trouble with "generic" computers/OSs such as Mac and the PC -- they're aiming at doing everything, and accordingly, they cannot excel at any one thing like a specifically designed machine/OS can.
That said, Macs still spank PCs at video and typography, and PCs still spank Macs at games and.. I guess.. office. There's some specialization in the Mac and PC world, just not as balls-to-the-wall as SGI.
On a side note, I used to do texture mapping for the early incarnation of the Alice project ( www.alice3d.org, but back in '96 when it was still at UVa ). We used an SGI Reality Engine, and it made my hairs stand up it was so powerful. I remember once I crashed it -- by accidently pressing the middle button on the haxored broken mouse which was taped and labeled "Don't press me" -- and we had to go to the server room to reboot it. This was my first exposure to a *real* computer, and seeing that it was rebooted by turning a key blew my mind.
I have to say, though, that crashing a server by clicking the (admittedly broken) middle mouse button on a terminal is pretty appalling. Something was clearly Very Wrong in the setup.
For what it's worth, my grandmother was hit with a ruler in gradeschool whenever she wrote with her left hand.
I was discouraged by my teachers from using my left hand until about 3rd grade when my teacher complained about my deplorable handwriting. I told her my handwriting was so bad because I was forced to use my right hand. Grudgingly, she "allowed" me to use my left. Not that my left-hand writing is much better.
That said, I'm excited to here that evolution has "allowed" people like me. I'd be SOL otherwise.
Not to mention that janitors -- being blue collar and generally lower on the social totem pole -- *know* they're the first to be suspected/fired when something goes missing.
Generally speaking the theives are coworkers, with sticky fingers. But usually it's people -- dressed nicely -- who just walk in off the street, looking like they belong, and picking something up and quietly taking off.
We've had a fair bit of the latter where I work.
I'm probably not the only person *hoping* that this refers to the Upright Citizens Brigade's super secret underground laboratory. Better not read the article, then.
It's true. I've been bitten by the surprisingly bad performance of std::vector in tight inner loops ( opengl code, doing hairy stuff at runtime ).
While I try to stick with the STL, there are times when you need to just eat it and use traditional arrays. And all sorts of other nasty things like making local copies of simple objects to avoid repetitive dereferencing and so on and so forth.
The important part is to explain in your documentation and source comments *why* you've done these things, so that other programmers -- or you in the future -- won't think "what the hell is this crap" and then undo some hairy code in the name of "elegance" and lose a 500% speedup.
True -- but Apple's apps are in many cases frontends to system frameworks. E.g, safari is just a frontend to WebKit.framework. AddressBook is a frontend to AddressBook.framework, and so on. You can't install or update one of these without installing new frameworks; thereby eliminating the feasibility of a drag and drop install.
Not that that's cool or anything. But the situation is more complicated than is the case for a 3rd party app like SubEthaEdit or -- amazingly enough -- MS Office which is also a drag-n-drop install on OS X. I agree about the mindset change -- see my other post on this same topic: Here
This may constitute a fundamental dosconnect between OS X users and Linux users.
,etc etc. It's a group effort. It's installed by sucking down a package from sourceforge CVS or some other anonymous distribution method. If there is a homepage, it's more likely to be a doc or FAQ than a serious production. And, to top it all off, it's free.
Allow me to explain is I can -- as a user and developer who's been on both platforms for a long time.
Linux users see software as... and don't flame me here... a capital-R Right. it's a global commodity; it just exists, you pick it from a list and there it is. This is a Good Thing as regards Open Source, since it's generally not one person who invented it, wrote it, designed the icons, debugged it, wrote the documentation
OS X users tend to be willing to pay for software ( the HORROR! ). They are aware of Open Source software and have things like Fink and the portage port to install that stuff -- from lists just like you like.
But the GUI stuff, like text editors, music players, etc are downloaded from the product pages of the developers who wrote it. These pieces of software are sometimes open source, but more often are inexpensive shareware -- with excellent support from the developer ( often just one person ) himself -- because he's trying to make a living this way.
Since it's generally shareware, the developer has to make it appealing, and make it personal. Good graphic design, good packaging, good documentation, etc etc. They probably wouldn't like their software to be just Yet Another Item in a List because why would you pick product X when there are 10 others that do similar things -- with no real information to separate them. Would you buy a stereo or a car just by looking at a list ( assuming no previous knowledge of manufacturer or model )?
it's a different world from Linux. Both are GOOD. Both are very good in fact -- but they are different. Deal with it.
Speaking as an OS X developer, another thing this style of packaging tends to result in is devs who *want* the app to be easily installed.
/usr/lib and frameworks in /Library. So when OS X gets an update, everybody gets it.
Apple provides an "Installer" app for apps which *need* installation, and look how many people use it. Almost nobody.
The whole design guidelines of OS X and the general mindset that comes with living in and working on OS X is that an app should be one thing, an object, which can run anywhere and shouldn't require a billion libs to run.
And for those who gripe about not re-using libs, well, OS X apps *do* link against libs in
Frankly, I don't miss running configure scripts and then manually installing a half dozen obscure libs to run a single app. If I -- a developer mind you on a well maintained system -- didn't have those libs already, how many people would? Just link it statically and deal with it. Criminy.
Well, it worked for me at least, using KDE. It didn't help me manage a bajillion dot files, but it made certain I kept things in order. Nothing like having chaos stare you in the face to instill a natural desire to tidy up.
Sad thing is I'm on OS X now and I don't know any way to do that in Aqua. I hate having shortcuts on my desktop to folders in ~
I just want to say that while I'm by no means a professional programmer, I do know my stuff, more or less. I do hobby robotics with my own runtime and electronics, I've written device drivers in deeply low level c and assembler for embedded systems. Right now I'm taking a break by writing a game that does emergent intelligence in hoards. And so on and so forth.
t ecture ) pans out.
I do most of it in C and C++ just because that's what I feel best in.
Anyway, I'm on a Mac, and I decided that Applescript looked interesting from a functional standpoint -- you know, dynamic scripting of app and system and so on. Keen! I used to muck around with DCOP under KDE and I was thinking how cool it is that apple has taken the idea of COM and so on and made it a *language*.
Anyway, it turns out I can't write Applescript to save my life. I write a line and the sheer *ambiguity* makes my tender gonads retract into my abdomen. I can't take such *uncertainty*. The grammar seems dependent on context and function, and even then, there's six ways to express it.
I'll stick to C and C++, and languages like io or lisp when I need greater dynamism; and as for applescript, I'm hoping this ( http://www.cocoadev.com/index.pl?DOScriptingArchi
I still want to be an astronaut. Probably not going to happen, though.
I wish I had been there. I could have showed him my stuff, which is something like 45kloc, separated into 3 frameworks ( each at least 5kloc ) and a main app which is 27kloc.
What bothers me about this is that it gives me the impression that Apple is surprised if people use Xcode for non trivial apps. Yes, I know, Xcode has bugs and so does Apple. But it's better than make, and for me it's great, until I start refactoring and renaming files...
Maybe they're trying to get people to move from Codewarrior?
Anyway, if you think C++ is portable, well, it is so long as you don't go outside of the standard libraries. As soon as you touch something GUI related you're out of luck.
My aforementioned project is, intentionally, about 85% completely 100% portable C++, using only the standard libraries, STL, and OpenGL. The remaining 15% is Objective-C++, binding my logic against a sweet Cocoa GUI.
yeah, perhaps god put the puzzle there as a test to see if we could develop enough free will and free thinking to derive a theory of our own development that is counter to what He gave us?
perhaps He'd be proud of his clever children.
I just don't get the evangelical idea that a wise or compassionate god would want us to dwell and wallow in willful ignorance. Why give us these big calorically hungry brains if we're only to use them to worship Him? What a jerk!
True. But those people are very loud about their credo. Plus, they tend to try make PUBLIC schools teach children their RELIGIOUS credo as if it were legitimate science, with legitimate science being sidelined as merely one of many opinions.
I think many people here would have less problems with creationists if they weren't so damn evil about it.
yes, you heard me: evil. I think it's evil to trick children into believing this stuff. If you want your kids to learn creationism, fine -- teach them: yourself. But it's not the public school system's business to do so. Schools should teach things outside of religion -- e.g. math, history, language, science.
I'm not going to try to forcibly teach your kids and everybody's kids that the earth is flat, or that vampires are real, or that visual basic is the One True Language, just because I happen to believe it is the case. I will make my own children ignorant and incapable of critical thought, not yours.
YES.
Not to mention other flaws such as our esophagus, which shares an entry point with the windpipe, allowing for easy choking.
Or our appendix, which is unused and causes all sorts of problems in modern man.
Or our wisdom teeth, which don't fit anymore and need to be removed surgically in many people.
Or our knees which fail way too easily.
Or our backs which are too fragile and don't self repair well enough ( e.g., spinal cords ).
All these things SCREAM to me of an evolutionary process which selected for beings which could get around in an energetically cheaply fashion, well enough to have a few children before the parts fail. This is good for evolution and population. This is terrible for the individual who suffers for it.
This tells me that "god" is more interested in overpopulation than the success and happiness of the individual.
Well said. Whenever I get the willies about the future of freedom in America, I think of how many times we've come close before. We always seem to make it back out. It's a bit of a razor's edge, but we always seem to make it.
Doesn't mean, however, that I will blindly trust politicians to cool down and allow us to be free citizens again, once we've "solved" terrorism.
Give this a try iPodbackup
It's the best thing, ever.
I was using my iPod as a manual backup, now it's a mirror of my home folder, synced every time I plug in.
I always saw them in the math department, and a friend of mine who worked at NIST was always raving about them. I wish I could have used them, as I would have spent less time wishing something beautiful existed, as it already did. My work in college kept me on macs and irix.
Objective-C is great, and I write in it every day, but sadly, for my work I find C++ better suited. So be it, I can at least write my GUIs in Objective-C.
And, as you mention ruby, there's an article on Oreillynet today about RubyCocoa. I've printed it to read on the train home tonight.
Pretty much yes; but the thing is Cocoa programming isn't something you pick up by reading API docs. Cocoa programming is *different*, and until something makes you grok it, it will be baffling.
I'd written Win32, BeOS, GTK, Qt and Java AWT/Swing apps, so I figured Cocoa would be just a matter of adaptation, since the above systems were all ( with the exception of Win32 ) basically the same, just with slightly different semantics.
I was shocked to realize that Cocoa is its own thing, and is completely and utterly different ( albeit, it shares some basic ideas like "views" and "events" ).
But I bought a few books, did the tutorials, and then whammo it all made sense. My eyes were opened, and I understood.
Yes -- Mac OS did suck, from the standpoint of anybody not involved in graphic design.
As a graphic designer by day, I can attest to having used macs exclusively from 1992 on and while yes they did suck for things like programming, they were not merely better, but fundamentally CORRECT for graphic work. For a million and one reasons that fall best into the "intangible" category. Little things. But they add up. And Mac OS X has inherited *most* of them.
As a programmer by night, I didn't want to use Macs for hacking until OS X came out. Previosly I had used linux & BeOS for those tasks.
Regarding mouse buttons, well, that's a different bag of snakes. It's easy to get accustomed to either usage paradigm. I, personally, like the right mouse button but using ctrl-click on the Mac simply fits better with its general usage. So, on linux I use a three buttoned mouse, on the mac I use a one-button mouse. When in Rome...
My ex-roomate, was a VERY capable Novell/Linux/Windows admin. When I let him use my powerbook one day he said to me...
"What's this about usability? I thought Macs were supposed to be so usable? I can't even find a start menu. How are you supposed to run anything"
Not to mention he thought my 12" aluminum PB, the most robust and well made computer I've ever owned, looked "cheesy", compared to his 100% black plastic Dell -- complete with its ill fittings and cracks.
I'm serious. The reality is that these people have had it shoved into their heads, for YEARS, that Macs are toys. Playthings for "ghey" graphic designers.