The other thing that struck me (coming from a household that made over 200k a year) was how poor the people working there were. I remember one girl bragging abuot how well she was doing -- she had a dvd player and a ps2.
Which makes her richer than 95% of the world's population. Poverty is relative; as long as there are any differences in wealth, there will be people near the bottom. But the bottom in the US and other developed nations is far higher than the rest of the world, and far higher than it was anywhere 100 years ago. You can thank capitalism for that.
Wow. I really wish basic economics were a required subject in school.
Buying $8 American means helping the defeceit, not having to pay $6 social secuity to the American who got layed off because of China. Buying $8 American means the government gets back a certain amount in Taxes from the American workers.
Yet another broken window fallacy, because you've now paid $8 for $2 worth of stuff, reducing your wealth by $6. You are effectively advocating charity for US businesses that can't compete in the global market. It's equivalent to buying the Chinese product for $2 and then just paying $6 for the US worker to do nothing. Better idea: encourage the US company and workers to either become more efficient, or find another business. Neither wealth nor jobs is a fixed quantity, and the economy is not a zero-sum game.
People here with this "buy from China" attitude are blissfully unaware that for every $ going overseas it costs us another 10 here to keep america going.
Not remotely true. Free trade benefits both parties; there is a mountain of theoretical and historical evidence to support this. You want to see what happens when a nation cuts itself off from world trade, go take a look at North Korea. There's a plausible case that the US shouldn't buy Chinese goods because the Chinese government is hostile. There's not a plausible case that it's bad for our economy.
And now we know Obi Wan & Yoda spent 20 years talking to Qui-Gon in the beyond and figuring out how to become that ghost-person. And all of a sudden Vader knew how?
Well, Palpatine was researching psuedo-immortality too, so it's entirely possible he and Vader could have learned the same thing. Recall in episode IV Vader wasn't terribly surprised when Obi-wan vanished. (This also implies that Palpatine can still be around to cause problems in theoretical episodes VII-IX).
We all know that you can't trust anything the government has to say about a draft.
Just like talking to creationists, no amount of evidence or logic can convince you guys. You know what, go ahead and assume they're a bunch of lying warmongering fascists. It makes no difference because they want to stay in power, and attempting to reinstate the draft would eliminate any chance of that.
The only ones talking about a draft are those who want to scare people and thereby make them oppose the war. Everyone at the Pentagon has repeatedly said that they neither need nor want a draft.
By massive corporate fraud do you mean enron, MCI, adelphia et al?
Precisely. You know, the guys who were lying their asses off during the Clinton administration and who were caught during the Bush administration. (And no, I'm not blaming Clinton, although that would be slightly more plausible than blaming Bush). The economy that you thought was so wonderful under Clinton was a mirage and was already dematerializing well before Bush took office.
No, they planned long time ago.
Yes. Many years ago, in fact. Many years during which action could have been taken, and was not. Considering Bush was president for less than one of those years, your assignment of 90% of the responsibility to him is specious and transparently partisan.
Perhaps if you could control your hatred of Bush, you could criticize him effectively where he actually does deserve it, such as his irresponsible deficit spending and luddite bioethics council.
I'd take the clinton years back in a heartbeat and I bet so would most Americans.
Dot-coms with impossible business models and massive corporate fraud? Well ok, but I'm curious how you'd go about sustaining those conditions.
I'd rather have a president got blown in the white house but kept the country at peace and prosperity then to fall asleep at the wheel and let the terrorists kill 3000 people.
Yes, it's a little known fact that Al Qaeda began planning their reign of terror on January 21, 2001.
Outsourcing takes money out of the middle/working class (in the form of good jobs) and redistributes it to the upper class (in the form of increased profits in lieu of decreased labor costs).
By this reasoning, any increase in productivity or efficiency is bad.
No limit on the number of framebuffers, beyond the limits of available memory and address space. Alice, Bob, Carol, and Dave can all use the system at the same time.
Sweet. Multiple graphical logins was the one thing on my wishlist for Tiger that I didn't think was in there, and you guys snuck it in anyway. Great work, I'll be playing with that tonight.
In Tiger, Mac OS X 10.4, fast user switching gets a related feature. When a user session is switched off-screen, if a screen watching program such as OSXvnc-server is running, the off-screen session will get a virtual framebuffer so that it can be remote-operated while another user session or a login window is on the hardware console.
That's fantastic. Is there any limit to the number of framebuffers? i.e. can Alice, Bob, and Carol simultaneously have their own VNC sessions while Dave is actually at the Mac running his own session?
Forced ads would require control of the playback medium; it would need to be streamed, with no ability to fastforward or rewind
Not to mention hooks into the OS to disable grabbing the video and audio, otherwise you could save a copy of the stream and strip the ads. Goodbye Linux.
I'm really amazed by how many people have said here that they think downloading stuff off the Internet is okay, that it's just like setting the VCR, that it's not stealing.
Well, it's not stealing at all, but I really don't want to get into the copyright infringment vs theft debate for the 623rd time. It *can* be wrong, but it really depends on the circumstances. Say I set my PVR (which BTW is a Mac mini) to record 24, but my power gets knocked out and I miss it. What conceivable harm is done to anyone if I grab that episode off Bittorrent? (The answer isn't commercials, because I wouldn't be watching them anyway. Unless you want to argue that "skipping commercials is stealing", and we've been there before). It's different in the case of premium channels. I don't subscribe to HBO, so I acknowlege that it would be wrong for me to download Deadwood episodes. If I *did* subscribe to HBO, I wouldn't have any moral problem doing so.
Every time you say something like that, you push the date of our opening back by a month. If you won't buy a moral argument, will you at least buy that one?
Not really; I don't see how it follows. If the studios are so threatened by Internet piracy, I'd expect them to move even faster to get a legal alternative in place.
It's not that I don't understand, it's that I don't care.
As usual, a bald animated alcoholic has shown us the way.
Just like I don't care that when I buy only the specials at the supermarket I'm causing them to lose money, I don't really care how the shows I watch make money. That's their problem, not mine.
Absolutely right. Ultimately, funding TV via commercial breaks is doomed. What will replace it? I don't know, and as you said, it's not my problem.
Re:Its only the bad things we head about?
on
Safari vs. KHTML
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· Score: 2, Insightful
everybody has access to KDE source code repositories and they can be analized checkin by checkin.
That sounds painful.
The offense comes from Apple not giving (read)access to their source code repositories so you only gain access to a bunch of incompatible inextricable code while it would cost NOTHING to them to allow read access to the repo
There's almost certainly lots of information in the logs referring to unannounced products and features. Apple would either have to sanitize the logs (costing time) or grant NDAs to "trusted" individuals (still costs time, and increases the risk of exposure of sensitive information).
Not at all, I find your honesty refreshing. (Again, assuming you are in some way speaking for Apple).
Neither Apple's management nor Apple's shareholders give a shit about what the "alpha geeks" think.
Unfortunate and shortsighted. BTW at least one shareholder does.
Geeks are not rational. They base their purchasing decisions on things that, from a rational point of view, just don't make any sense. Things like politics, lack "openness," like "customizability." Things that just don't add up in the cost-benefit analysis.
For what geeks want to do, those criteria are perfectly rational. They want to build cool stuff, and aren't going to tolerate their systems imposing artificial limitations. Personally, I'm a software geek. I don't care about being able to buy random components and assemble them into a semi-working system; that's been done already. I care about being able to create new and original programs, and Macs are great for that with Cocoa, free developer tools, and Unix compatibility. Start telling me that I have to sign my applications, or that I'm not allowed to grab screenshots or audio output because that might conceivably let me pirate stuff, and I'll be off to Linux and working on GNUstep. Yes, I'm one guy, but I've directly influenced the purchase of tens of thousands of dollars of Apple products.
We love the fact that some prominent hard-core geeks use Macs. But we're not going to abandon our business plan to woo them. We're not going to turn our backs on the vast and untapped market for next-generation content delivery services, a market which we basically created, in order to please some Internet message board guys.
And I'm not suggesting that you should. I'm just suggesting that you respect the rights of your customers, as you've mostly done a decent job of with iTunes.
Assuming you actually do work for Apple, I'm impressed that you haven't been fired yet. Unless you're working under direction from Steve and Phil, which would actually not be a bad idea, but it's not in keeping with Steve's desire for absolute secrecy. Moving on:
What's a much bigger thing is the gradual shift, over the past two years, in the way we as a company do business. We are very serious about IP. We've made a name for ourselves as being the one company in the industry that, better than anybody else, understands the need to zealously protect intellectual property.
Be careful here. The alpha geeks that have embraced OS X will drop it instantly if Apple starts pulling Palladium-style crap that removes control of our machines from us and hands it to Hollywood. iTunes DRM is just barely acceptable, mainly because it's easily circumvented and it doesn't interfere with the rest of the system.
But a trojan, a social engineering exploit that requires explicit and deliberate user action, is completely uninteresting. That will always be possible on all OSes and all platforms.
That's the thing; a good OS *should* be able to prevent those. The OS should be able to recognize that what claimed to be a screensaver is attempting to access your Quicken files and open a connection to somewhere in Russia, and it would probably be a good idea to deny that and let you know what's going on.
User education is a lost cause. An OS needs to be able to defend against trojans without relying on the user to be particularly intelligent. Unfortunately I have no idea how to actually implement that in a usable manner.
Apple charges a hundred bucks a year for a shitload of essential functionality that ought to be shipped uncrippled
There's nothing in.mac that's essential. Some of it might be convenient, but it's not worth anywhere near $100/year, at least to me. If you want to rant about pointless crippling, Quicktime Player disabling full screen mode unless you fork over an extra $30 is *really* stupid.
Insane is perhaps too strong a word, but my problem with them is their inability to put forward ideas that have a snowball's chance in hell of being accepted in today's environment. Wholesale drug legalization isn't going to happen anytime soon. Decriminalization of marijuana and ending abuses like civil asset forfeiture might. Cutting government spending by 90% can't happen, 20% can. Groups like the Cato Institute do a much better job than the LP of actually proposing workable solutions
Yeah same here. The neo-republican party is about as republican as new coke is coke. Maybe it's time America went to a 3 party system of Democrats, Republicans and Ex-Republicans...
I'm in. A party that *actually* stands for limited government and individual freedom and is less insane than the LP could do quite well.
So you can bet the MPAA is on the horn right about now to every senator and representative they've ever donated money to trying to call in a favor. And you can bet they'll get that favor, probably sooner rather than later.
I'm not so sure about that. Certainly we should continue to be vigilant, but FCC commissioners don't have to explain to voters why they made it illegal to record Survivor.
Yes, I had never heard any opposition to the Iraq war until reading your post. Thank you for opening my eyes and saving me from this oppressive American censorship.
Slashdot Mirror
The other thing that struck me (coming from a household that made over 200k a year) was how poor the people working there were. I remember one girl bragging abuot how well she was doing -- she had a dvd player and a ps2.
Which makes her richer than 95% of the world's population. Poverty is relative; as long as there are any differences in wealth, there will be people near the bottom. But the bottom in the US and other developed nations is far higher than the rest of the world, and far higher than it was anywhere 100 years ago. You can thank capitalism for that.
Wow. I really wish basic economics were a required subject in school.
Buying $8 American means helping the defeceit, not having to pay $6 social secuity to the American who got layed off because of China. Buying $8 American means the government gets back a certain amount in Taxes from the American workers.
Yet another broken window fallacy, because you've now paid $8 for $2 worth of stuff, reducing your wealth by $6. You are effectively advocating charity for US businesses that can't compete in the global market. It's equivalent to buying the Chinese product for $2 and then just paying $6 for the US worker to do nothing. Better idea: encourage the US company and workers to either become more efficient, or find another business. Neither wealth nor jobs is a fixed quantity, and the economy is not a zero-sum game.
People here with this "buy from China" attitude are blissfully unaware that for every $ going overseas it costs us another 10 here to keep america going.
Not remotely true. Free trade benefits both parties; there is a mountain of theoretical and historical evidence to support this. You want to see what happens when a nation cuts itself off from world trade, go take a look at North Korea. There's a plausible case that the US shouldn't buy Chinese goods because the Chinese government is hostile. There's not a plausible case that it's bad for our economy.
And now we know Obi Wan & Yoda spent 20 years talking to Qui-Gon in the beyond and figuring out how to become that ghost-person. And all of a sudden Vader knew how?
Well, Palpatine was researching psuedo-immortality too, so it's entirely possible he and Vader could have learned the same thing. Recall in episode IV Vader wasn't terribly surprised when Obi-wan vanished. (This also implies that Palpatine can still be around to cause problems in theoretical episodes VII-IX).
the youngling padawans will attack Anakin first, so he doesn't seem so "evil".
+5 Morbidly Hilarious
We all know that you can't trust anything the government has to say about a draft.
Just like talking to creationists, no amount of evidence or logic can convince you guys. You know what, go ahead and assume they're a bunch of lying warmongering fascists. It makes no difference because they want to stay in power, and attempting to reinstate the draft would eliminate any chance of that.
No wonder they're talking about a draft
The only ones talking about a draft are those who want to scare people and thereby make them oppose the war. Everyone at the Pentagon has repeatedly said that they neither need nor want a draft.
By massive corporate fraud do you mean enron, MCI, adelphia et al?
Precisely. You know, the guys who were lying their asses off during the Clinton administration and who were caught during the Bush administration. (And no, I'm not blaming Clinton, although that would be slightly more plausible than blaming Bush). The economy that you thought was so wonderful under Clinton was a mirage and was already dematerializing well before Bush took office.
No, they planned long time ago.
Yes. Many years ago, in fact. Many years during which action could have been taken, and was not. Considering Bush was president for less than one of those years, your assignment of 90% of the responsibility to him is specious and transparently partisan.
Perhaps if you could control your hatred of Bush, you could criticize him effectively where he actually does deserve it, such as his irresponsible deficit spending and luddite bioethics council.
I'd take the clinton years back in a heartbeat and I bet so would most Americans.
Dot-coms with impossible business models and massive corporate fraud? Well ok, but I'm curious how you'd go about sustaining those conditions.
I'd rather have a president got blown in the white house but kept the country at peace and prosperity then to fall asleep at the wheel and let the terrorists kill 3000 people.
Yes, it's a little known fact that Al Qaeda began planning their reign of terror on January 21, 2001.
Outsourcing takes money out of the middle/working class (in the form of good jobs) and redistributes it to the upper class (in the form of increased profits in lieu of decreased labor costs).
By this reasoning, any increase in productivity or efficiency is bad.
No limit on the number of framebuffers, beyond the limits of available memory and address space. Alice, Bob, Carol, and Dave can all use the system at the same time.
Sweet. Multiple graphical logins was the one thing on my wishlist for Tiger that I didn't think was in there, and you guys snuck it in anyway. Great work, I'll be playing with that tonight.
In Tiger, Mac OS X 10.4, fast user switching gets a related feature. When a user session is switched off-screen, if a screen watching program such as OSXvnc-server is running, the off-screen session will get a virtual framebuffer so that it can be remote-operated while another user session or a login window is on the hardware console.
That's fantastic. Is there any limit to the number of framebuffers? i.e. can Alice, Bob, and Carol simultaneously have their own VNC sessions while Dave is actually at the Mac running his own session?
One other note on the G5, if Microsoft can take a tri-core G5 based CPU and put it a Video Game Console (Xbox360) at 3+GHz
Um, they haven't yet. All the Xbox360 demos were running on Power Mac G5s.
Forced ads would require control of the playback medium; it would need to be streamed, with no ability to fastforward or rewind
Not to mention hooks into the OS to disable grabbing the video and audio, otherwise you could save a copy of the stream and strip the ads. Goodbye Linux.
I'm really amazed by how many people have said here that they think downloading stuff off the Internet is okay, that it's just like setting the VCR, that it's not stealing.
Well, it's not stealing at all, but I really don't want to get into the copyright infringment vs theft debate for the 623rd time. It *can* be wrong, but it really depends on the circumstances. Say I set my PVR (which BTW is a Mac mini) to record 24, but my power gets knocked out and I miss it. What conceivable harm is done to anyone if I grab that episode off Bittorrent? (The answer isn't commercials, because I wouldn't be watching them anyway. Unless you want to argue that "skipping commercials is stealing", and we've been there before). It's different in the case of premium channels. I don't subscribe to HBO, so I acknowlege that it would be wrong for me to download Deadwood episodes. If I *did* subscribe to HBO, I wouldn't have any moral problem doing so.
Every time you say something like that, you push the date of our opening back by a month. If you won't buy a moral argument, will you at least buy that one?
Not really; I don't see how it follows. If the studios are so threatened by Internet piracy, I'd expect them to move even faster to get a legal alternative in place.
It's not that I don't understand, it's that I don't care.
As usual, a bald animated alcoholic has shown us the way.
Just like I don't care that when I buy only the specials at the supermarket I'm causing them to lose money, I don't really care how the shows I watch make money. That's their problem, not mine.
Absolutely right. Ultimately, funding TV via commercial breaks is doomed. What will replace it? I don't know, and as you said, it's not my problem.
everybody has access to KDE source code repositories and they can be analized checkin by checkin.
That sounds painful.
The offense comes from Apple not giving (read)access to their source code repositories so you only gain access to a bunch of incompatible inextricable code while it would cost NOTHING to them to allow read access to the repo
There's almost certainly lots of information in the logs referring to unannounced products and features. Apple would either have to sanitize the logs (costing time) or grant NDAs to "trusted" individuals (still costs time, and increases the risk of exposure of sensitive information).
I know you're going to say I'm being a dick here
Not at all, I find your honesty refreshing. (Again, assuming you are in some way speaking for Apple).
Neither Apple's management nor Apple's shareholders give a shit about what the "alpha geeks" think.
Unfortunate and shortsighted. BTW at least one shareholder does.
Geeks are not rational. They base their purchasing decisions on things that, from a rational point of view, just don't make any sense. Things like politics, lack "openness," like "customizability." Things that just don't add up in the cost-benefit analysis.
For what geeks want to do, those criteria are perfectly rational. They want to build cool stuff, and aren't going to tolerate their systems imposing artificial limitations. Personally, I'm a software geek. I don't care about being able to buy random components and assemble them into a semi-working system; that's been done already. I care about being able to create new and original programs, and Macs are great for that with Cocoa, free developer tools, and Unix compatibility. Start telling me that I have to sign my applications, or that I'm not allowed to grab screenshots or audio output because that might conceivably let me pirate stuff, and I'll be off to Linux and working on GNUstep. Yes, I'm one guy, but I've directly influenced the purchase of tens of thousands of dollars of Apple products.
We love the fact that some prominent hard-core geeks use Macs. But we're not going to abandon our business plan to woo them. We're not going to turn our backs on the vast and untapped market for next-generation content delivery services, a market which we basically created, in order to please some Internet message board guys.
And I'm not suggesting that you should. I'm just suggesting that you respect the rights of your customers, as you've mostly done a decent job of with iTunes.
Assuming you actually do work for Apple, I'm impressed that you haven't been fired yet. Unless you're working under direction from Steve and Phil, which would actually not be a bad idea, but it's not in keeping with Steve's desire for absolute secrecy. Moving on:
What's a much bigger thing is the gradual shift, over the past two years, in the way we as a company do business. We are very serious about IP. We've made a name for ourselves as being the one company in the industry that, better than anybody else, understands the need to zealously protect intellectual property.
Be careful here. The alpha geeks that have embraced OS X will drop it instantly if Apple starts pulling Palladium-style crap that removes control of our machines from us and hands it to Hollywood. iTunes DRM is just barely acceptable, mainly because it's easily circumvented and it doesn't interfere with the rest of the system.
The lawsuits. That's where you'll find the clues.
Hmm, that really doesn't give me warm fuzzies.
But a trojan, a social engineering exploit that requires explicit and deliberate user action, is completely uninteresting. That will always be possible on all OSes and all platforms.
That's the thing; a good OS *should* be able to prevent those. The OS should be able to recognize that what claimed to be a screensaver is attempting to access your Quicken files and open a connection to somewhere in Russia, and it would probably be a good idea to deny that and let you know what's going on.
User education is a lost cause. An OS needs to be able to defend against trojans without relying on the user to be particularly intelligent. Unfortunately I have no idea how to actually implement that in a usable manner.
Apple charges a hundred bucks a year for a shitload of essential functionality that ought to be shipped uncrippled
.mac that's essential. Some of it might be convenient, but it's not worth anywhere near $100/year, at least to me. If you want to rant about pointless crippling, Quicktime Player disabling full screen mode unless you fork over an extra $30 is *really* stupid.
There's nothing in
why do you consider the LP 'insane'?
Insane is perhaps too strong a word, but my problem with them is their inability to put forward ideas that have a snowball's chance in hell of being accepted in today's environment. Wholesale drug legalization isn't going to happen anytime soon. Decriminalization of marijuana and ending abuses like civil asset forfeiture might. Cutting government spending by 90% can't happen, 20% can. Groups like the Cato Institute do a much better job than the LP of actually proposing workable solutions
Yeah same here. The neo-republican party is about as republican as new coke is coke. Maybe it's time America went to a 3 party system of Democrats, Republicans and Ex-Republicans...
I'm in. A party that *actually* stands for limited government and individual freedom and is less insane than the LP could do quite well.
So you can bet the MPAA is on the horn right about now to every senator and representative they've ever donated money to trying to call in a favor. And you can bet they'll get that favor, probably sooner rather than later.
I'm not so sure about that. Certainly we should continue to be vigilant, but FCC commissioners don't have to explain to voters why they made it illegal to record Survivor.
So if you see 5.5% you should probably move the decimal place to the right one: 55%.
Wow. And you guys are supposed to be the "reality based community"?
The illegal Iraq war is a clear case of this.
Yes, I had never heard any opposition to the Iraq war until reading your post. Thank you for opening my eyes and saving me from this oppressive American censorship.