Sounds remotely plausible, yet is completely unconfirmable since the G5s have not yet shipped. You have the beginning of a fine troll here. However, a few problems.
How are YOU getting word from Apple? You must really be in the loop to know about this. Boy, they sure screwed up bigtime with this goof. Thanks for letting us know. Still, whether you are in the know is completely unconfirmable, so it is not a big deal.
The real issue with this troll is that you are not going into enough detail. A truly excellent troll would have a list of bullet points detailing the problem Apple was having, and all the workarounds they were developing. The expose thing is a start, but just not enough.
Still, the post is shocking enough to merit a 7/10 score. I think it is a shame you didn't develop your idea further. With some work this could be the next BSD is dying troll. Like this classic troll, it might even have versatility, depending on when Apple or other companies release hardware and software.
I doubt the original troll will last long, though.
I have read other statistics that peg American worker's productivity per hour as only slightly higher (%3) than Europeans, but that also noted that Americans work more hours. I'm fairly sure this was in the edition of The Economist from Feb 8th, 2003, but I cannot readily access the online content anymore. Maybe that was biased, since it is a British magazine, but there are other opinions as to why Americans produce more overall. The Economist seemed to indicate Americans simply work more.
Slashdot renders much better in 1.0 than in previous versions of Safari. The background colors under the story titles are solid, and the fonts are crisper. Only slightly faster if at all, but looks so much better. Ah...
If I only had a nickel for every time this exchange has taken place during a tech support call I have taken from a Windows user: 'story about user not understanding difference between buttons'
Man, if only I had a nickel every time this exchange was posted to Slashdot! Every single time any discussion, criticism, mention of Apple's one button mouse occurs, somebody posts this thing. Is it possible the same person is posting this? Either one person or a group of people really thinks it is important to prove both that Windows users are dumb and that Apple's mouse design is superior. This story does it in one fell swoop right?
Nah, all this proves is that most of the interface aspects of computers depend on your perspective. People have been having this argument for years, whether a tool is better if it is easy to use but hard to learn, or easy to learn but only somewhat effective to use. Guess what, there is no right answer here. Everything depends on the user.
I also wish I had a nickel every time somebody jumped up in defense of some other relatively arbitrary detail of an UI's implementation, inventing all kinds of fanciful explanations as to why it was more 'logical,' when in reality it is just a matter of opinion, probably all the way to the level of the people who designed it. Coming up with the right metaphor is important, but so many computing tasks defy direct, simple comparisons to other things people do, and therefore the metaphors designers attach to these tasks are at best indirect comparisons.
For instance, I never use any other device that remotely resembles a computer mouse to perform tasks in the same fashion as on a computer. When the mouse was invented, it was to support the newly invented way of 'pointing' at things on a computer screen, and selecting them or activating them by 'clicking' on them. Most people have pointed at something before with their fingers, and understand how to push a button, so this makes sense. But most of the specific things the mouse is used to do, like run programs, have no direct analog outside of a computer. Admittedly, many GUI tasks are in themselves metaphors. In being so, there is actually less restriction on how they should be implemented as compared to the extremely specific tasks performed by microprocessors, operating systems, etc.
Since the mouse is essentially being used in a unique way as part of the interface of the computer, there is no reason not to adapt it to suit the tasks performed with the computer. GUI tasks performed with the mouse are only metaphors for lower level tasks, and as such could be implemented and mapped to the mouse in a variety of potential ways. Therefore there is no logical arbitrary limit on the number of buttons a mouse should have. Reducing the number of buttons does not make the tasks one performs with a computer inherently less complex. It does impose restrictions on how the mouse may be used however, because of the way the GUI metaphor must be implemented to suit the mouse.
Maybe when Apple did their usability tests, they found that a single button mouse was easier to use simply because they had designed the rest of their interface around this concept. They have continued to do so, and a single button mouse remains an efficient way to interact with Apple systems. The important thing is not how many buttons the mouse has, it is whether they do anything useful in the GUI that is not implemented some other immediately accessible way.
Please reread this post before you respond to it advocating one arbitrary user interface metaphor over another.
C:\>ls autoexec.bat command.com gnu bin dosemu kernel.sys C:\>
Lemme see here, with a drive letter, DOS system files, but ls working. Must be an emulated version of DOS with some basic GNU tools installed, running under Linux. But if ls is here, I know what I'm doing!
C:\>emacs emacs: file not found C:\>vi vi: file not found C:\>pico pico: file not found C:\>nano nano: file not found C:\>gcc gcc: file not found C:\>
Huh, what I'm doing is not gonna be much... At least I have my favorite good-time old Unix environment to do it in!
C:\>ls autoexec.bat command.com gnu bin dosemu kernel.sys C:\>
Oh great, GLTerm was not in the discussion because it was in the article. I guess I should be prepared for more Ask Slashdot's where the author asks a question, and then proceeds to answer it themselves. Whoops.
Nobody has mentioned GLTerm. This program does not look as nice as Terminal.app (especially if you like the transparency feature, which it does not have), but it is much faster. Much faster. It renders the entire contents of your terminal using OpenGL, bypassing Quartz entirely. I used it frequently on my old iBook (no Quartz Extreme support was possible on this machine, and the Terminal.app really lagged). It really fits the bill if you are frustrated with Terminal.app's slowness.
Oh sure, just smack down the Ogg guy, like always happens when the format is mentioned here. As if a free and open audio codec were such a terrible idea... Incidentally it sounds pretty good too.
Yeah, they are totally status symbols. Remember the ad where the boss says to the techie, "All I know about computers is that I want a better one than everybody else!"
Well, they discontinued that particular model in January 2001. It seems they were testing the waters with that one, and had not yet fully made the transition (all models shipping at that time did not have it). Fast forward to the present - All currently shipping PowerMac G4s have built-in gigabit ethernet. I doubt it will ever go away now. Curiously, the Apple Store does not mention this as a prominent selling point, placing more emphasis on the modem and airport extreme.
Good point. Anyone who believes Linus is much of an inspirational ideological figure should read Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary. This book, which he co-authored, essentially outlines a very bland philosophical outlook, in my opinion. To sum up, Linus believes there are three levels of human social activity, survival, social order, and entertainment.
Building on this, Linus says he made the Linux kernel to entertain himself. That's it. Nowhere does he mention saving the world, or how important free software is for free society, or anything. After reading the book, I doubt he thought about these kind of issues at all before making or releasing his software.
That's nice. Why won't the GNU binutils build on OS X? Why do they use an unusual executable format (Mach-O) instead of ELF that was the standard on FreeBSD (and still is, on most other systems as well) before they came along? Although OS X claims credibly to be a Unix variant, I recently discovered it is apparently impossible to cross-compile for it.
The way Apple sees it, people who want to develop for their platform can buy it first, and to hell with anyone who wants to take apart the binaries they release for the system (or even to hell with me taking apart the binaries I made myself for the system, for that matter!).
The parent poster is exactly right, OS X is open to a point, but when you really want to get your hands dirty working with it, it is still closed in a lot of ways. Just because the source is open does not mean the system is open. I think they are suspicious of allowing people too much freedom with their system. This is evident in more obvious ways, too, like the closedness of Aqua.
"microsoft or not a company should not have that much power"
Microsoft does have the power to do whatever they want with their operating system. Yet, for some reason that does not matter to me. I am not forced to use it, see? As long as there are some alternatives (and there are right now if you are willing to learn), I will be fine. More people need to be made aware of the alternatives, is all.
And to everyone who says, but what if Microsoft and some media companies get together to make some kind of system that ensures that content distributed in this system could only be used in extravagantly restrictive ways?
Well, darn, I guess I will not buy that content. I suppose I will just continue consuming media in all the other ways it is available to me that are easier and cheaper.
Some guy asked a better 'what if' recently in another discussion on Palladium. What if systems using this technology are required to access the Internet?
Oh, Microsoft controls the Internet now?
This is just another silly copy protection scheme, nothing more. As are any alternative silly copy protection schemes. Take the tinfoil hats off, folks.
I am not entirely certain that we are forcing people to eat low-protein foods, or consume certain kinds of entertainment. I think you are misplacing cause and effect here. People do those things because they already are stupid, not because there is some conspiracy to produce more stupid people. My understanding is that the core of the problem is that the uneducated tend to have more children.
As for your criticisms of slang and dialect, it is obvious you have never studied linguistics. The differences in speech people develop are because of differences in their thoughts. Grammatical rules of dialects are frequently as complicated and consistent as the 'proper' ones of prescriptive grammer. Now, if you are saying people who grow up learning one language or another are encouraged to think in certain structures that the language is well suited to express, that seems more plausible. But dialects only develop after you have a learned a language.
Do you think I only work on one project at a time? Moreover, the examples you give are not projects at all, they are just tasks that would take about fifteen minutes once. If my goal was to live a clean and organized life, and one day I cleaned my bathroom, the next my desk, the next my kitchen, etc, then the sum total would be a real accomplishment. But every day it does not take that much time.
You sound to me like a person who cannot get started on projects, because you always frame things in giant self-defeating terms, making tasks look so huge that beginning work on such a thing takes immense effort. I see even the largest tasks in terms of smaller incremental pieces, that can be done immediately.
I think I am a useful member of the human race (though I seldom think in such broad terms, since such an honor is too vague and commonplace to be really satisfying for me), but winning the Nobel Prize is not a realistic goal for me. I think a problem with American society at least is that people are workaholic, encouraged to push themselves to the absolute limits in search of career goals and nothing else. You did not mention what you spend 80 hours a week on, but I hope it is something that allows for your development as a person. There are many definitions of success.
Why do you ask? What will my answer prove? Or are you proposing to me? If so, this isn't quite as cool as when CmdrTaco did it, but I am still touched. Unfortunately, after reading some of your recent posts, I have decided against the proposition. While you appear to have the ability to be charming every now and then, you appear to mostly be a hardcore web development nerd. Not exactly the type of person I am looking for to make a long term commitment. Sorry.
Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. Thing is, people moderate depending on whether or not they agree with what you said. The tone with which you say it merely makes moderation more likely. Therefore it is usually worth it to go out on a limb and be assertive, even abrasive, unless you are voicing an opinion that you know is going to be unpopular on slashdot. Like one of my more recent posts, stating that all the concern over palladium is paranoia, especially since it is pure vaporware. My tone was fairly vicious, and I was rewarded with a flamebait mod, and one of the two replies to me stated essentially that 'we are all slaves, you are just blind to that fact.' Whatever. That may be the majority opinion here, but it is still just an opinion and there are arguments against it. The idea of moderation is to smack down real trolls, while allowing the best expressed positions in the discussion to rise to the top. Moderation is not supposed to be a vehicle to express agreement or disagreement with posts. We have posting for that! But there are still a lot of people who would rather click a button than risk entering a discussion, even when they have an opinion to express.
But never fear, eventually your karma gets high enough and your user account gets old enough that you can meta-moderate all the unfair moderation. I have been doing that quite a bit recently, and you would be surprised how often I come across a post that is a nothing more than an assertive, valid opinion relating to the discussion at hand, that has been modded into oblivion. Obviously some moderator had an axe to grind. All I can do is rate that unfair, and hope my karma stays high enough that I am still allowed to do this in the future.
P.S. is my post that I referred to really completely and utter flamebait? You decide!
Xserves are definitely at some point in the receiving chain for me, but not the final resting place of the mail as you have pointed out. My mistake.
Received: from smtpin06-en2.mac.com ([10.13.10.151]) by ms05.mac.com (Netscape Messaging Server 4.15) with ESMTP id XXXXXXXXX for X; Tue, 3 Jun 2003 13:18:29 -0700
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Apple's.Mac mail servers are XServes, too, running OS X Server. Apple is eating their own dogfood. Or forging the headers to make themselves look good... I don't even care as long as the mail gets through.
"I just dug a very deep hole, and filled it in again, neatly. I worked very hard. I deserve to be compensated."
Your assertions bring to mind a very old engineering principle (I forgot who came up with it, I dimly recall a sixteenth century Dutchman), that no work has been performed by a process if the starting point and ending point of all of the pieces involved is the same. Therefore, though you may have expended considerable effort with your hole digging and filling, you have unfortunately done no work at all. Do you deserve compensation? Of course not.
Maybe this was your point. But at best all we can conclude from this is that people have widely varying opinions of the value of the work of creators of intellectual property. I suspect the creators may tend to overvalue their efforts somewhat, while consumers of intellectual property may tend to undervalue them.
If you are arguing that intelluctual property creation is worthless activity, I disagree that all content creators are merely expending effort without producing anything of value for others. They deserve some compensation for their activities.
That you can accomplish anything you want if you devote an average of fifteen minutes a day to it. That might take a while for bigger undertakings (do you suppose these guys averaged 15 minutes a day working on this for six years? I bet it might even be a little less than that). But fifteen minutes a day is such a small commitment that if you want to accomplish anything at all faster, just devote an hour a day to it over a period of time.
The only trick is knowing what you consider worth making an extended effort for. That takes vision. All the implementation takes is dedication.
I'm not sure if this is related, but I just discovered how easy it is to do X-forwarding with Apple's X11 Beta, running all the graphical applications I wanted from my linux system, but using OS X as my desktop. I honestly feel that this is the best of both worlds. I understand that this is not a new technology, but I am so amazingly primitive that I still think it is a pretty neat idea.
That way I can have an officially supported IM client, iChat. This is the real reason using Gaim was so frustrating for you. You were forced to update if you wanted to stay compliant with any changes AOL made to their proprietary protocol. Well, generally Apple has taken care of dealing with issues like this for me, so Microsoft software and AOL instant messenging is possible. But I can also use any free software applications that I want, especially in cases where I cannot afford commercial software to do something. Also, unless you insist on having the latest version of everything, or are forced by outside circumstances like the Gaim case (which is a pretty unusual one, honestly), Linux software generally does not become outdated nearly as fast as you imply. I'm perfectly happy using Debian 3.0 (stable), and that is hardly known for being super up to date. However, the package management system is nice, and the software works. I don't have to keep updating it all the time, and when I do, apt-get takes care of the real work for me.
I generally find that I like individual applications, and certain utility functions of linux like the ability to use it as a router/gateway with highly configurable settings, a print server, etc. The desktop environments for it, while not terrible, are uninteresting since I already have that taken care of with OS X. X-forwarding has set me free to do the things I like with linux on OS X.
The only drawback is that you need two machines to be able to do this. But I do so it is fine.;)
Slashdot Mirror
"10.3 Panther will not run on G5's"
Sounds remotely plausible, yet is completely unconfirmable since the G5s have not yet shipped. You have the beginning of a fine troll here. However, a few problems.
How are YOU getting word from Apple? You must really be in the loop to know about this. Boy, they sure screwed up bigtime with this goof. Thanks for letting us know. Still, whether you are in the know is completely unconfirmable, so it is not a big deal.
The real issue with this troll is that you are not going into enough detail. A truly excellent troll would have a list of bullet points detailing the problem Apple was having, and all the workarounds they were developing. The expose thing is a start, but just not enough.
Still, the post is shocking enough to merit a 7/10 score. I think it is a shame you didn't develop your idea further. With some work this could be the next BSD is dying troll. Like this classic troll, it might even have versatility, depending on when Apple or other companies release hardware and software.
I doubt the original troll will last long, though.
I have read other statistics that peg American worker's productivity per hour as only slightly higher (%3) than Europeans, but that also noted that Americans work more hours. I'm fairly sure this was in the edition of The Economist from Feb 8th, 2003, but I cannot readily access the online content anymore. Maybe that was biased, since it is a British magazine, but there are other opinions as to why Americans produce more overall. The Economist seemed to indicate Americans simply work more.
That is the most dyslexic joke I have ever heard.
A debian style packaging system for OS X? Who makes this?
Slashdot renders much better in 1.0 than in previous versions of Safari. The background colors under the story titles are solid, and the fonts are crisper. Only slightly faster if at all, but looks so much better. Ah...
If I only had a nickel for every time this exchange has taken place during a tech support call I have taken from a Windows user: 'story about user not understanding difference between buttons'
Man, if only I had a nickel every time this exchange was posted to Slashdot! Every single time any discussion, criticism, mention of Apple's one button mouse occurs, somebody posts this thing. Is it possible the same person is posting this? Either one person or a group of people really thinks it is important to prove both that Windows users are dumb and that Apple's mouse design is superior. This story does it in one fell swoop right?
Nah, all this proves is that most of the interface aspects of computers depend on your perspective. People have been having this argument for years, whether a tool is better if it is easy to use but hard to learn, or easy to learn but only somewhat effective to use. Guess what, there is no right answer here. Everything depends on the user.
I also wish I had a nickel every time somebody jumped up in defense of some other relatively arbitrary detail of an UI's implementation, inventing all kinds of fanciful explanations as to why it was more 'logical,' when in reality it is just a matter of opinion, probably all the way to the level of the people who designed it. Coming up with the right metaphor is important, but so many computing tasks defy direct, simple comparisons to other things people do, and therefore the metaphors designers attach to these tasks are at best indirect comparisons.
For instance, I never use any other device that remotely resembles a computer mouse to perform tasks in the same fashion as on a computer. When the mouse was invented, it was to support the newly invented way of 'pointing' at things on a computer screen, and selecting them or activating them by 'clicking' on them. Most people have pointed at something before with their fingers, and understand how to push a button, so this makes sense. But most of the specific things the mouse is used to do, like run programs, have no direct analog outside of a computer. Admittedly, many GUI tasks are in themselves metaphors. In being so, there is actually less restriction on how they should be implemented as compared to the extremely specific tasks performed by microprocessors, operating systems, etc.
Since the mouse is essentially being used in a unique way as part of the interface of the computer, there is no reason not to adapt it to suit the tasks performed with the computer. GUI tasks performed with the mouse are only metaphors for lower level tasks, and as such could be implemented and mapped to the mouse in a variety of potential ways. Therefore there is no logical arbitrary limit on the number of buttons a mouse should have. Reducing the number of buttons does not make the tasks one performs with a computer inherently less complex. It does impose restrictions on how the mouse may be used however, because of the way the GUI metaphor must be implemented to suit the mouse.
Maybe when Apple did their usability tests, they found that a single button mouse was easier to use simply because they had designed the rest of their interface around this concept. They have continued to do so, and a single button mouse remains an efficient way to interact with Apple systems. The important thing is not how many buttons the mouse has, it is whether they do anything useful in the GUI that is not implemented some other immediately accessible way.
Please reread this post before you respond to it advocating one arbitrary user interface metaphor over another.
Hey, that's a good idea! Trying it now...
C:\>ls
autoexec.bat command.com gnu
bin dosemu kernel.sys
C:\>
Lemme see here, with a drive letter, DOS system files, but ls working. Must be an emulated version of DOS with some basic GNU tools installed, running under Linux. But if ls is here, I know what I'm doing!
C:\>emacs
emacs: file not found
C:\>vi
vi: file not found
C:\>pico
pico: file not found
C:\>nano
nano: file not found
C:\>gcc
gcc: file not found
C:\>
Huh, what I'm doing is not gonna be much... At least I have my favorite good-time old Unix environment to do it in!
C:\>ls
autoexec.bat command.com gnu
bin dosemu kernel.sys
C:\>
Ahhh....
Oh great, GLTerm was not in the discussion because it was in the article. I guess I should be prepared for more Ask Slashdot's where the author asks a question, and then proceeds to answer it themselves. Whoops.
Nobody has mentioned GLTerm. This program does not look as nice as Terminal.app (especially if you like the transparency feature, which it does not have), but it is much faster. Much faster. It renders the entire contents of your terminal using OpenGL, bypassing Quartz entirely. I used it frequently on my old iBook (no Quartz Extreme support was possible on this machine, and the Terminal.app really lagged). It really fits the bill if you are frustrated with Terminal.app's slowness.
More information is available here.
Oh sure, just smack down the Ogg guy, like always happens when the format is mentioned here. As if a free and open audio codec were such a terrible idea... Incidentally it sounds pretty good too.
Yeah, they are totally status symbols. Remember the ad where the boss says to the techie, "All I know about computers is that I want a better one than everybody else!"
Well, they discontinued that particular model in January 2001. It seems they were testing the waters with that one, and had not yet fully made the transition (all models shipping at that time did not have it). Fast forward to the present - All currently shipping PowerMac G4s have built-in gigabit ethernet. I doubt it will ever go away now. Curiously, the Apple Store does not mention this as a prominent selling point, placing more emphasis on the modem and airport extreme.
Good point. Anyone who believes Linus is much of an inspirational ideological figure should read Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary. This book, which he co-authored, essentially outlines a very bland philosophical outlook, in my opinion. To sum up, Linus believes there are three levels of human social activity, survival, social order, and entertainment.
Building on this, Linus says he made the Linux kernel to entertain himself. That's it. Nowhere does he mention saving the world, or how important free software is for free society, or anything. After reading the book, I doubt he thought about these kind of issues at all before making or releasing his software.
That's nice. Why won't the GNU binutils build on OS X? Why do they use an unusual executable format (Mach-O) instead of ELF that was the standard on FreeBSD (and still is, on most other systems as well) before they came along? Although OS X claims credibly to be a Unix variant, I recently discovered it is apparently impossible to cross-compile for it.
The way Apple sees it, people who want to develop for their platform can buy it first, and to hell with anyone who wants to take apart the binaries they release for the system (or even to hell with me taking apart the binaries I made myself for the system, for that matter!).
The parent poster is exactly right, OS X is open to a point, but when you really want to get your hands dirty working with it, it is still closed in a lot of ways. Just because the source is open does not mean the system is open. I think they are suspicious of allowing people too much freedom with their system. This is evident in more obvious ways, too, like the closedness of Aqua.
"One is proposed by some folks in Stanford, the other is proposed by Microsoft and Intel.
Guess which one is going to matter?"
Neither.
"microsoft or not a company should not have that much power"
Microsoft does have the power to do whatever they want with their operating system. Yet, for some reason that does not matter to me. I am not forced to use it, see? As long as there are some alternatives (and there are right now if you are willing to learn), I will be fine. More people need to be made aware of the alternatives, is all.
And to everyone who says, but what if Microsoft and some media companies get together to make some kind of system that ensures that content distributed in this system could only be used in extravagantly restrictive ways?
Well, darn, I guess I will not buy that content. I suppose I will just continue consuming media in all the other ways it is available to me that are easier and cheaper.
Some guy asked a better 'what if' recently in another discussion on Palladium. What if systems using this technology are required to access the Internet?
Oh, Microsoft controls the Internet now?
This is just another silly copy protection scheme, nothing more. As are any alternative silly copy protection schemes. Take the tinfoil hats off, folks.
I am not entirely certain that we are forcing people to eat low-protein foods, or consume certain kinds of entertainment. I think you are misplacing cause and effect here. People do those things because they already are stupid, not because there is some conspiracy to produce more stupid people. My understanding is that the core of the problem is that the uneducated tend to have more children.
As for your criticisms of slang and dialect, it is obvious you have never studied linguistics. The differences in speech people develop are because of differences in their thoughts. Grammatical rules of dialects are frequently as complicated and consistent as the 'proper' ones of prescriptive grammer. Now, if you are saying people who grow up learning one language or another are encouraged to think in certain structures that the language is well suited to express, that seems more plausible. But dialects only develop after you have a learned a language.
Do you think I only work on one project at a time? Moreover, the examples you give are not projects at all, they are just tasks that would take about fifteen minutes once. If my goal was to live a clean and organized life, and one day I cleaned my bathroom, the next my desk, the next my kitchen, etc, then the sum total would be a real accomplishment. But every day it does not take that much time.
You sound to me like a person who cannot get started on projects, because you always frame things in giant self-defeating terms, making tasks look so huge that beginning work on such a thing takes immense effort. I see even the largest tasks in terms of smaller incremental pieces, that can be done immediately.
I think I am a useful member of the human race (though I seldom think in such broad terms, since such an honor is too vague and commonplace to be really satisfying for me), but winning the Nobel Prize is not a realistic goal for me. I think a problem with American society at least is that people are workaholic, encouraged to push themselves to the absolute limits in search of career goals and nothing else. You did not mention what you spend 80 hours a week on, but I hope it is something that allows for your development as a person. There are many definitions of success.
Why do you ask? What will my answer prove? Or are you proposing to me? If so, this isn't quite as cool as when CmdrTaco did it, but I am still touched. Unfortunately, after reading some of your recent posts, I have decided against the proposition. While you appear to have the ability to be charming every now and then, you appear to mostly be a hardcore web development nerd. Not exactly the type of person I am looking for to make a long term commitment. Sorry.
Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. Thing is, people moderate depending on whether or not they agree with what you said. The tone with which you say it merely makes moderation more likely. Therefore it is usually worth it to go out on a limb and be assertive, even abrasive, unless you are voicing an opinion that you know is going to be unpopular on slashdot. Like one of my more recent posts, stating that all the concern over palladium is paranoia, especially since it is pure vaporware. My tone was fairly vicious, and I was rewarded with a flamebait mod, and one of the two replies to me stated essentially that 'we are all slaves, you are just blind to that fact.' Whatever. That may be the majority opinion here, but it is still just an opinion and there are arguments against it. The idea of moderation is to smack down real trolls, while allowing the best expressed positions in the discussion to rise to the top. Moderation is not supposed to be a vehicle to express agreement or disagreement with posts. We have posting for that! But there are still a lot of people who would rather click a button than risk entering a discussion, even when they have an opinion to express.
But never fear, eventually your karma gets high enough and your user account gets old enough that you can meta-moderate all the unfair moderation. I have been doing that quite a bit recently, and you would be surprised how often I come across a post that is a nothing more than an assertive, valid opinion relating to the discussion at hand, that has been modded into oblivion. Obviously some moderator had an axe to grind. All I can do is rate that unfair, and hope my karma stays high enough that I am still allowed to do this in the future.
P.S. is my post that I referred to really completely and utter flamebait? You decide!
Xserves are definitely at some point in the receiving chain for me, but not the final resting place of the mail as you have pointed out. My mistake.
Received: from smtpin06-en2.mac.com ([10.13.10.151]) by ms05.mac.com (Netscape Messaging Server 4.15) with ESMTP id XXXXXXXXX for X; Tue, 3 Jun 2003 13:18:29 -0700
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Apple's .Mac mail servers are XServes, too, running OS X Server. Apple is eating their own dogfood. Or forging the headers to make themselves look good... I don't even care as long as the mail gets through.
"I just dug a very deep hole, and filled it in again, neatly. I worked very hard. I deserve to be compensated."
Your assertions bring to mind a very old engineering principle (I forgot who came up with it, I dimly recall a sixteenth century Dutchman), that no work has been performed by a process if the starting point and ending point of all of the pieces involved is the same. Therefore, though you may have expended considerable effort with your hole digging and filling, you have unfortunately done no work at all. Do you deserve compensation? Of course not.
Maybe this was your point. But at best all we can conclude from this is that people have widely varying opinions of the value of the work of creators of intellectual property. I suspect the creators may tend to overvalue their efforts somewhat, while consumers of intellectual property may tend to undervalue them.
If you are arguing that intelluctual property creation is worthless activity, I disagree that all content creators are merely expending effort without producing anything of value for others. They deserve some compensation for their activities.
That you can accomplish anything you want if you devote an average of fifteen minutes a day to it. That might take a while for bigger undertakings (do you suppose these guys averaged 15 minutes a day working on this for six years? I bet it might even be a little less than that). But fifteen minutes a day is such a small commitment that if you want to accomplish anything at all faster, just devote an hour a day to it over a period of time.
The only trick is knowing what you consider worth making an extended effort for. That takes vision. All the implementation takes is dedication.
I'm not sure if this is related, but I just discovered how easy it is to do X-forwarding with Apple's X11 Beta, running all the graphical applications I wanted from my linux system, but using OS X as my desktop. I honestly feel that this is the best of both worlds. I understand that this is not a new technology, but I am so amazingly primitive that I still think it is a pretty neat idea.
That way I can have an officially supported IM client, iChat. This is the real reason using Gaim was so frustrating for you. You were forced to update if you wanted to stay compliant with any changes AOL made to their proprietary protocol. Well, generally Apple has taken care of dealing with issues like this for me, so Microsoft software and AOL instant messenging is possible. But I can also use any free software applications that I want, especially in cases where I cannot afford commercial software to do something. Also, unless you insist on having the latest version of everything, or are forced by outside circumstances like the Gaim case (which is a pretty unusual one, honestly), Linux software generally does not become outdated nearly as fast as you imply. I'm perfectly happy using Debian 3.0 (stable), and that is hardly known for being super up to date. However, the package management system is nice, and the software works. I don't have to keep updating it all the time, and when I do, apt-get takes care of the real work for me.
I generally find that I like individual applications, and certain utility functions of linux like the ability to use it as a router/gateway with highly configurable settings, a print server, etc. The desktop environments for it, while not terrible, are uninteresting since I already have that taken care of with OS X. X-forwarding has set me free to do the things I like with linux on OS X.
The only drawback is that you need two machines to be able to do this. But I do so it is fine. ;)