Indeed, we should scour the universe for more exploitive possibilities
Yes. We should look for resources that we can use efficiently that will cause less harm. Apparently you won't be satisfied with anything that doesn't involve radical changes to our evil lifestyles of decadence and greed. This is the psuedo-religious component of environmentalism that I just don't get.
The only reason there are food and water and oil and etc shortages is because people ARE shortsighted.
Actually there are no shortages. Food and oil are cheaper than they were 20, 50, or 100 years ago. Famines are not due to lack of available food production, they are due to wars and tyrannical governments that use starvation as a weapon.
If I recall correctly, about 40% of code writing time is spent on mapping your object's member variables to tables
Wow. I'm glad I use WebObjects. It works with traditional RDBMS systems but presents an OO view. You define your entities and relationships, and it generates Java classes for them. You fetch, create, and modify instance of those classes and it handles all the SQL generation. It does intelligent caching of the rows/objects that you work with, so it provides a lot of the benefits of in-memory OO databases without the drawbacks (you can still do SQL by hand if you need to).
WebObjects has been around for many years now, unfortunately it suffers from Apple's stealth marketing. I'm amazed that people are still manually embedding SQL in their code these days.
however its main flaw as an API is that it just hasn't had the widespread use and testing that Carbon has.
Cocoa has had over a decade of use and testing in its various *Step incarnations. Sure it's changed since then, but as you point out so has Carbon.
these are APIs designed for the future, with opaque accessors, reference counting, and a very OOish flavour.
Or you could use Cocoa and have real OO, not "flavored".
arguably in a more stable position than Cocoa (99% of the developers who generate money for the platform are using Carbon).
I'd like to see your source for that figure. All of Apple's new applications are Cocoa. They've said repeatedly that Cocoa is the best path for new application development. What do you know that they don't?
Right, I can't see that as anything other than the writers realizing "whoops, we need Willow to be able to do *some* magic, so let's ignore most of what we said last season." I'm glad they did that, but it's a flaw in the show's usually excellent internal consistency.
Just because someone's been stabbed nastily on these shows does not necessarily mean they are dead (as a human) yet.
And just because someone's dead doesn't mean they stay that way. I wouldn't be surprised if sufficiently high-ranking Wolfram & Hart employees get special "life insurance" benefits.
Cordelia could eventually become good or come back and restore Wess's toy
when certain things happened, such as her first lesbian experience, and her "addiction" to witchcraft, fans of the show were not surprised, because they were always logical places for her character to go. I, for one, would love to see what path Willow takes for the next few years.
Absolutely. It's fascinating to watch her in season 1 and 2 episodes and realize she'll be destroying the world 5 years later, and yet it's a mostly reasonable progression. My only complaint is that the "magic=drugs" metaphor was very heavy-handed and clumsy. They could have done something along the lines of her using so much power that she was tapping into a demon dimension which gradually affected her mind. Instead we got something that looked like an ad from the DEA with burned-out "druggies" and scummy "dealers" and peer pressure from irresponsible friends. Just silly.
Agreed on all counts, except that IMO this season of Buffy is significantly better than the last. Some of the stuff with the potential slayers is a bit silly, but I like the arc of a final confrontation between the Scoobies and the First.
I would also be remiss if I didn't mention that Stephanie Romanov is right up there with Charisma. (Okay, so she's evil and wants to enslave the world to her demon masters, but who's perfect?)
We have Republicans in charge now. If there is one thing Republicans pride themselves on it is about getting criminals, getting them fast, and respecting "rights" later.
Right, that would be why Democrats opposed the Patriot Act, DMCA, export restrictions, and Clipper chip. Come on. Republicans aren't great on civil liberties, but Democrats have been just as bad or worse in recent years.
I doubt that 64-bit is significantly faster when doing 4096-bit math.
Really? I would think that you'd operate on 4096-bit numbers by breaking them into pieces whose lengths are the word size of the processor, so a 64-bit processor should be able to process them in half the passes. Not that I necessarily know what I'm talking about.
But with this, and MS buying Connectix, they will die.
Nope. If Apple has any clue at all they've been preparing for this, and indications are that they have. Look at Keynote: it's a thinly veiled message to Microsoft that Mac Office is not indispensible. Ditto for Safari vs IE. And a recent rumor was that OS X for x86 would ship right after MS released the Palladium-crippled Windows, which could make things very interesting.
DRM has very little to do with encryption or privacy. If you want your plans for world domination to stay secret, you can encrypt them today. The problem with DRM is not with the functionality it allows, but with the architecture that's required to support it. Say you want to use DRM to show me your secret document but disallow me from printing it or sending it to anyone else. How is this going to work? Obviously the print and copy functions are going to be disabled, but what will stop me from firing up a debugger and twiddling the bit that says "this document is protected", or simply reading the unencrypted data out of memory? Either I can do this and your DRM is useless for its intended purpose, or the Palladium-style DRM will stop me. In the latter case I have lost control over what runs on "my" computer, which is unacceptable to me.
Effective DRM is fundamentally incompatible with general-purpose computing. I don't have a problem with *ineffective* DRM (i.e. that doesn't attempt to restrict tools that could be used to defeat it), but that's obviously of limited use. That might actually be good enough for some cases where you want to make it inconvenient for people to print sensitive documents, recognizing that it's not foolproof.
but we should be able to at least say, "hey, what they're trying to achieve is valid"
Except it's not. "Trusted computing" as defined by Microsoft is not a valid goal because it necessarily means that users must be prohibited from performing a great number of entirely legitimate activities. The DeCSS fiasco is just a small example of what's to come if they continue down this path.
You may want it to be free, but it doesn't want to be free, and you have no right or expectation to see that type of information that is produced in Office.
That has nothing to do with DRM. You can encrypt your diary today, or better yet just don't keep it in a publicly accessible place. The problem with DRM is not the functionality it claims to offer, but with the removal of the user's ability to control his own computer.
Right, but you can't expect me to do anything to help you that I don't want.
Agreed. I don't believe MS is under any legal or moral obligation to help these guys. I also don't believe they should have any authority to prevent Xbox owners from modifying their hardware.
I saw a few beaten for being condescending. They all deserved it.
No, they didn't. At best they may have deserved to be called assholes, but in the 21st century engaging in physical violence because you don't like someone's personality is not acceptable.
"The goal, Microsoft officials say, is to make servers and desktop PC's that people can trust." (ha-ha)
Yeah, that's an impressive bit of doublespeak. Technically it's not even a lie, it's just that the "people" MS speaks of are not the owners of the machines.
Exactly. The GPL is a "license" in the true sense of the word; it's a grant of permission to do something that you otherwise couldn't. No consideration is required because there is nothing taken from the user of GPL software. The consideration argument *should* apply to the typical commercial EULA which attempts to remove your rights in exchange for nothing, and thus those should be struck down.
It seems to me that zero configuration automatic sharing of resources is exactly what I don't want
It's not automatic sharing, it's automatic discovery. Rendezvous will tell you that there's a machine providing a particular service on your LAN, but that doesn't necessarily mean you'll be able to gain access to it.
the low end of the income distribution--people likely to spend the extra money
As opposed to "rich" taxpayers who will put it under their mattresses?
Instead, the administration gives huge tax breaks to the wealthy
The income tax reductions actually make the system more progressive. The evil rich will get a larger reduction in absolute dollars only because they pay so much more in the first place. But you knew that.
and introduces new sales taxes
This is an agreement made with state governments. The Bush administration has nothing to do with it. But you probably knew that too.
I was wondering how long it would be from the time Bush took office (and left the Clinton/Gore approach of "fund the Internet to build it up, but keep it hands off as much as possible") to the time big companies (brick-and-mortar types) started getting their way legally.
Good grief. I know people here love to blame Bush and Republicans for all the evils in the world, but at least try to make some amount of sense when you do. This is an agreement between retailers and *states*, neither the federal government nor Bush has anything to do with it. (And I'm relieved to know Clinton kept his hands off the Internet, otherwise we might have gotten bad laws like the CDA, DMCA, and crypto restrictions. Oh wait.)
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Yes. We should look for resources that we can use efficiently that will cause less harm. Apparently you won't be satisfied with anything that doesn't involve radical changes to our evil lifestyles of decadence and greed. This is the psuedo-religious component of environmentalism that I just don't get.
The only reason there are food and water and oil and etc shortages is because people ARE shortsighted.
Actually there are no shortages. Food and oil are cheaper than they were 20, 50, or 100 years ago. Famines are not due to lack of available food production, they are due to wars and tyrannical governments that use starvation as a weapon.
Wow. I'm glad I use WebObjects. It works with traditional RDBMS systems but presents an OO view. You define your entities and relationships, and it generates Java classes for them. You fetch, create, and modify instance of those classes and it handles all the SQL generation. It does intelligent caching of the rows/objects that you work with, so it provides a lot of the benefits of in-memory OO databases without the drawbacks (you can still do SQL by hand if you need to).
WebObjects has been around for many years now, unfortunately it suffers from Apple's stealth marketing. I'm amazed that people are still manually embedding SQL in their code these days.
Cocoa has had over a decade of use and testing in its various *Step incarnations. Sure it's changed since then, but as you point out so has Carbon.
these are APIs designed for the future, with opaque accessors, reference counting, and a very OOish flavour.
Or you could use Cocoa and have real OO, not "flavored".
arguably in a more stable position than Cocoa (99% of the developers who generate money for the platform are using Carbon).
I'd like to see your source for that figure. All of Apple's new applications are Cocoa. They've said repeatedly that Cocoa is the best path for new application development. What do you know that they don't?
Right, I can't see that as anything other than the writers realizing "whoops, we need Willow to be able to do *some* magic, so let's ignore most of what we said last season." I'm glad they did that, but it's a flaw in the show's usually excellent internal consistency.
And just because someone's dead doesn't mean they stay that way. I wouldn't be surprised if sufficiently high-ranking Wolfram & Hart employees get special "life insurance" benefits.
Cordelia could eventually become good or come back and restore Wess's toy
Heh, I always thought he was her toy.
Absolutely. It's fascinating to watch her in season 1 and 2 episodes and realize she'll be destroying the world 5 years later, and yet it's a mostly reasonable progression. My only complaint is that the "magic=drugs" metaphor was very heavy-handed and clumsy. They could have done something along the lines of her using so much power that she was tapping into a demon dimension which gradually affected her mind. Instead we got something that looked like an ad from the DEA with burned-out "druggies" and scummy "dealers" and peer pressure from irresponsible friends. Just silly.
Yes and yes. She's easily the best character, it's close between Giles and Anya for second (you just can't beat the Dance of Capitalist Superiority).
I would also be remiss if I didn't mention that Stephanie Romanov is right up there with Charisma. (Okay, so she's evil and wants to enslave the world to her demon masters, but who's perfect?)
Right, that would be why Democrats opposed the Patriot Act, DMCA, export restrictions, and Clipper chip. Come on. Republicans aren't great on civil liberties, but Democrats have been just as bad or worse in recent years.
Yes, that's true. I was specifically talking about processing large numbers like the 1024 or more bits that are used in public key algorithms.
Really? I would think that you'd operate on 4096-bit numbers by breaking them into pieces whose lengths are the word size of the processor, so a 64-bit processor should be able to process them in half the passes. Not that I necessarily know what I'm talking about.
Nope. If Apple has any clue at all they've been preparing for this, and indications are that they have. Look at Keynote: it's a thinly veiled message to Microsoft that Mac Office is not indispensible. Ditto for Safari vs IE. And a recent rumor was that OS X for x86 would ship right after MS released the Palladium-crippled Windows, which could make things very interesting.
Effective DRM is fundamentally incompatible with general-purpose computing. I don't have a problem with *ineffective* DRM (i.e. that doesn't attempt to restrict tools that could be used to defeat it), but that's obviously of limited use. That might actually be good enough for some cases where you want to make it inconvenient for people to print sensitive documents, recognizing that it's not foolproof.
Except it's not. "Trusted computing" as defined by Microsoft is not a valid goal because it necessarily means that users must be prohibited from performing a great number of entirely legitimate activities. The DeCSS fiasco is just a small example of what's to come if they continue down this path.
That has nothing to do with DRM. You can encrypt your diary today, or better yet just don't keep it in a publicly accessible place. The problem with DRM is not the functionality it claims to offer, but with the removal of the user's ability to control his own computer.
Google for "broken window fallacy". When a formerly scarce good becomes abundant, the economy benefits.
Agreed. I don't believe MS is under any legal or moral obligation to help these guys. I also don't believe they should have any authority to prevent Xbox owners from modifying their hardware.
True, but once you've sold it to me you have no right to dictate how I use it (or at least you shouldn't).
No, they didn't. At best they may have deserved to be called assholes, but in the 21st century engaging in physical violence because you don't like someone's personality is not acceptable.
Yeah, that's an impressive bit of doublespeak. Technically it's not even a lie, it's just that the "people" MS speaks of are not the owners of the machines.
Exactly. The GPL is a "license" in the true sense of the word; it's a grant of permission to do something that you otherwise couldn't. No consideration is required because there is nothing taken from the user of GPL software. The consideration argument *should* apply to the typical commercial EULA which attempts to remove your rights in exchange for nothing, and thus those should be struck down.
It's not automatic sharing, it's automatic discovery. Rendezvous will tell you that there's a machine providing a particular service on your LAN, but that doesn't necessarily mean you'll be able to gain access to it.
As opposed to "rich" taxpayers who will put it under their mattresses?
Instead, the administration gives huge tax breaks to the wealthy
The income tax reductions actually make the system more progressive. The evil rich will get a larger reduction in absolute dollars only because they pay so much more in the first place. But you knew that.
and introduces new sales taxes
This is an agreement made with state governments. The Bush administration has nothing to do with it. But you probably knew that too.
Good grief. I know people here love to blame Bush and Republicans for all the evils in the world, but at least try to make some amount of sense when you do. This is an agreement between retailers and *states*, neither the federal government nor Bush has anything to do with it. (And I'm relieved to know Clinton kept his hands off the Internet, otherwise we might have gotten bad laws like the CDA, DMCA, and crypto restrictions. Oh wait.)
Sounds very similar to EyeTV, except at double the price.