These days, sarcasm is both insightful and informative;-) Sorry, but you have to deal with it. I expected a funny mod, but, ok... You never know which way the public will mod you.
And no, nuclear fission is not my favorite power source. It's just that saying the ISS is "going solar" implies it went in another direction before.
Something it, obviously and conspicuously (its solar panels already made it visible from the surface), didn't.
"there's a 1:100,000,000 chance that it might cause contamination"
So, there is a pretty good chance we will never again see those nasty radioactive pollutants...
Treehuggers everywhere should be happy for this!
But, again, if we are talking manned spaceflight reliability, I would say between a 1:100 (shuttle) and a 1:200 (soyuz) chance it goes _very_ wrong. And we know unmanned has a higher tolerance to catastrophic failure.
Wouldn't it be possible that these unidentified sequences have still unidentified promoters for yet unidentified (perhaps rarer or slower) transcription factors?
Resistance to "corruption" would also decrease both the likeliness and the extension of each mutation. While it may provide the individual with a longer lifespan, by preventing some forms of cellular aging, on the long run it would hurt the species by reducing the rate at which it can evolve and adapt, as evolution relies on mutations as one tool to introduce diversity in the population.
I mean... Tree-huggers everywhere would have been screaming for years if it did run on nuclear (and, quite probably, we don't have the required technology anyway).
I can't say anything about your experience, but, along with the Mac users with deep psychological issues we have observed, there are also those Mac users who bought a Mac simply because it is prettier, more reliable and gets the job done.
You know... There _are_ people around who really don't want to know much about computers and don't particularly enjoy playing with them - they just need them to work properly. Most of them end-up using Windows because they don't care what an OS is, because their corporate masters want it that way, because their fear there will be no software available or they just fear change and struggle with it because they don't know their e-life doesn't have to be miserable. Still, among those, there are people who think Windows is unbearably ugly (I certainly do), want no business with it and chose to have a Macintosh instead.
For those, a Mac is a pretty smart choice - much better than going with either Linux or Windows.
That said, I run Linux as my main OS, on an HP notebook that came with Vista installed, but that's because I run several Linux servers for clients and also develop software to run, mostly, under Linux. I love my Macs (I have a collection of them, along several other interesting computers and workstations, including a couple Apple IIs, an Amiga and an MSX), but I tend not to spend as much time with them as I did before. I used PCs and Macs in the late 80s and early 90s, spent some time with Windows, Solaris, AIX and IRIX (during the early web boom), experimented with MkLinux (on a 9500), switched back to Macs briefly because of OSX, and decided I would be better served by a package-managed Unix-like OS like Debian (Ubuntu, currently) than with the BSD-ish OSX.
Happily, in my experience, Mac users like the one who started this thread are a minority. Most are well educated, well resolved and don't feel the need to justify their choices.
You must have met those who bought Macs because they felt themselves in disadvantage in other aspects of their lives. Those are fairly common, sadly.
The Mac users who have "earned their apples" (and thus can call themselves "real Mac users") knew MacOS from the time it was called System and have a consciously, but never gratuitious, rebellious attitude inherited from those who preferred Apple IIs to CP/M and, later, IBM PC-lookalikes. Those usually have a good sense of humour. They are also in their late 30s and 40s.
A Real Mac User would never, ever, post such thing because we really see no point in doing that.
Nobody is allowed to use a monopoly (desktop OS market, in this case) to gain another one (desktop search products market). These laws exist, in some shape or form, mostly everywhere. In Europe, for instance, Microsoft is in trouble because of this behaviour.
You have to be very, very careful with what you wish for. Wishing for a monopoly is not frequently the most clever thing to want as it brings a whole lot of regulation with it. Just ask anyone who was at AT&T from before 1956 until after 1982.
You know... This troll was not particularly funny the first time. I know you must find it funny, but real Mac users usually have a good sense of humor and, since you don't, I suppose you got your first Mac to match your first iPod, in a time they were no longer beige. You felt immediately superior, something you clearly did not when you used commodity PCs. I warn you this feeling of superiority is only skin deep and having a Mac will not increase your chances of getting laid. Nothing will.
It's not something you buy at a store, child. It's something you are.
"So Google is demanding that Microsoft remove Vista's desktop search feature, a feature that other OSes already ship? If other OSes can ship it then so can Microsoft. Hell, if I'd been in charge of Microsoft, I would've been bundling Windows Desktop Search with XP for years now."
Since Microsoft has an effective monopoly on operating systems for commodity hardware, they have to play under different, more restrictive, rules. If Apple locks down Safari search it affects about 10 percent of users, 50% of which use Firefox, anyway. When Microsoft introduces new features into Windows, if affects 90+% of the market.
It's also illegal for Microsoft to leverage its monopoly on desktop OSs to gain a monopoly on other existing markets (like web browsers, office suites, corporate e-mail, file and print servers, anti-virus and, yes, desktop search). And, mind you, since being judged guilty of extending their monopoly in the anti-trust lawsuit, they _have_ such restrictions in place and the DoJ _should_ be doing something about it.
While it may look obvious they should be able to extend their products at will, it should be noted that by doing so in an unrestrained way, they can harm the market in very severe ways.
Of course, if all things continue the way they do, Google's time under the microscope is coming, but that doesn't mean Microsoft can do whatever it wants.
Actually setting up Apache in a modern Linux environment is quite easy - it amounts to open the package manager, select the apache package and the modules you will use, let it select any dependencies you may need (languages, libraries) and let the package manager do its job.
That said, I like the way Debian-derived distros install their apache servers and find them very easy and even pleasant to configure.
And, as a bonus, they seem to be quite secure by default, requiring, at most, some very simple tweaks.
And, best of all, your package manager will keep everything up-to-date and consistent.
The poster was obviously not talking about Mac-specific applications, as the Foleo is, most definitely, not a Mac.
The fact remains, indeed, that since it is a general purpose computer running Linux, it can do _almost_ anything a MacBook can do as long as there is functionally equivalent software.
And Xcode is a particularly bad example as there are plenty of development tools available for Linux that are equivalent or surpass what Xcode can do, creating MacOS applications excepted. I must admit that it's not as easy to create MacOSX applications on Eclipse/Netbeans/Sun Studio/Monodevelop/Eric/whatever as it is on Xcode, but, since I don't use MacOSX (except for my second, now third, computer) and I don't wish to develop anything for it except, maybe, a widget, I couldn't care less.
The fact that it may use a very low power CPU with somewhat limited storage means that it may do everything a MacBook (or any other computer, BTW) but says nothing about how fast it can do it.
I run NetBeans on my laptop that has a very fast Intel Core 2 Duo, gobs of memory, a fast-enough hard-disk and a gigabit ethernet and, still, it is slower that what I would like it to be.
I can imagine the Foleo running NetBeans (given enough memory and storage), but I can't imagine it doing that fast enough to be bearable.
Don't assume you know what people do with their computers.
I would like to remind people that if Microsoft ever tries to enforce any patents Linux violates, they will have to deal with a huge, somewhat concerted effort to invalidate as many Microsoft patents as possible. Imagine what a couple hundred dedicated and knowledgeable geeks can dig in terms of prior art. While the geeks may not be a significant nuisance for Microsoft, anyone who has cross-licensing agreements will consider those patents they paid for that are now invalid as a reason to re-negotiate the deal with MS. In this scenario, while Microsoft may not bleed to death from the patent invalidation suits, they will find themselves in a much weaker position regarding their patent licensing partners than they find themselves now.
BTW, how much does it cost to fight a patent invalidation suit when you have some clear prior art? Is it possible to ask the USPTO (we are almost always talking US software-related patents) to re-examine a patent in light of some newly found prior art?
I can only offer you a personal definition - one that works for me. A good product (specially a good computer, as we are talking about Apple) would have to:
- be trustworthy - not easily hackable, sturdy and reliable - pretty - light and have a long battery life - have a good screen - be inexpensive (expendable if needed)
Of course, not many people will want all these and Apple products usually offer more than most of the others but, still, these requirements are not what I would expect to show up in a poll made at Circuit City or Wal Mart.
Well... I like to define myself as a communist, while fully acknowledging I also am a libertarian and I am happy the totalitarian regimes of the past century failed. Many people fail to see a totalitarian regime is not required for communism but communism was and is still used as an excuse to create totalitarian regimes in miserable countries.
In order to be able to seriously propose communism, we need to be able to feed, educate, keep healthy and give rich existences to every human being with a lot to spare, without sacrificing any rights, freedoms and other things we need to keep governments honest, and this is quite impossible now. In the future, it may be within the realm of possibility and, as I see, it is well worth it.
I too find his position incomprehensible. He is taking a stand defending his right to make Microsoft products more usable, thus making people develop more software for Windows so Windows is more attractive for users which then increases Microsoft's revenue.
"You don't award engineering ingenuity, and then turn around and let the marketing and lawyering dweebs come in and take it away"
Who told you they award engineering ingenuity?
They award people who work hard to increase their revenue, by making their revenue-driving products somewhat better than the most visible competitors. This guy improved a freebie, which does not increase revenue directly (but may indirectly, in the end) and this improvement is seen as a competitor because you would have to buy the extra-cash version to get similar functionality.
The title "Most Valueble Professional" really means "Most Valuable for Us"
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These days, sarcasm is both insightful and informative ;-) Sorry, but you have to deal with it. I expected a funny mod, but, ok... You never know which way the public will mod you.
And no, nuclear fission is not my favorite power source. It's just that saying the ISS is "going solar" implies it went in another direction before.
Something it, obviously and conspicuously (its solar panels already made it visible from the surface), didn't.
"there's a 1:100,000,000 chance that it might cause contamination"
So, there is a pretty good chance we will never again see those nasty radioactive pollutants...
Treehuggers everywhere should be happy for this!
But, again, if we are talking manned spaceflight reliability, I would say between a 1:100 (shuttle) and a 1:200 (soyuz) chance it goes _very_ wrong. And we know unmanned has a higher tolerance to catastrophic failure.
Wouldn't it be possible that these unidentified sequences have still unidentified promoters for yet unidentified (perhaps rarer or slower) transcription factors?
"We will have patents on a machine not being stupid."
Yes, but would an intelligent machine have the right to violate patents in order to preserve itself?
Resistance to "corruption" would also decrease both the likeliness and the extension of each mutation. While it may provide the individual with a longer lifespan, by preventing some forms of cellular aging, on the long run it would hurt the species by reducing the rate at which it can evolve and adapt, as evolution relies on mutations as one tool to introduce diversity in the population.
Didn't the ISS already run on solar power?
I mean... Tree-huggers everywhere would have been screaming for years if it did run on nuclear (and, quite probably, we don't have the required technology anyway).
Sorry. I wasn't looking. Won't happen next time.
I can't say anything about your experience, but, along with the Mac users with deep psychological issues we have observed, there are also those Mac users who bought a Mac simply because it is prettier, more reliable and gets the job done.
You know... There _are_ people around who really don't want to know much about computers and don't particularly enjoy playing with them - they just need them to work properly. Most of them end-up using Windows because they don't care what an OS is, because their corporate masters want it that way, because their fear there will be no software available or they just fear change and struggle with it because they don't know their e-life doesn't have to be miserable. Still, among those, there are people who think Windows is unbearably ugly (I certainly do), want no business with it and chose to have a Macintosh instead.
For those, a Mac is a pretty smart choice - much better than going with either Linux or Windows.
That said, I run Linux as my main OS, on an HP notebook that came with Vista installed, but that's because I run several Linux servers for clients and also develop software to run, mostly, under Linux. I love my Macs (I have a collection of them, along several other interesting computers and workstations, including a couple Apple IIs, an Amiga and an MSX), but I tend not to spend as much time with them as I did before. I used PCs and Macs in the late 80s and early 90s, spent some time with Windows, Solaris, AIX and IRIX (during the early web boom), experimented with MkLinux (on a 9500), switched back to Macs briefly because of OSX, and decided I would be better served by a package-managed Unix-like OS like Debian (Ubuntu, currently) than with the BSD-ish OSX.
Happily, in my experience, Mac users like the one who started this thread are a minority. Most are well educated, well resolved and don't feel the need to justify their choices.
You must have met those who bought Macs because they felt themselves in disadvantage in other aspects of their lives. Those are fairly common, sadly.
The Mac users who have "earned their apples" (and thus can call themselves "real Mac users") knew MacOS from the time it was called System and have a consciously, but never gratuitious, rebellious attitude inherited from those who preferred Apple IIs to CP/M and, later, IBM PC-lookalikes. Those usually have a good sense of humour. They are also in their late 30s and 40s.
A Real Mac User would never, ever, post such thing because we really see no point in doing that.
I see.
That's why you are posting here.
Nobody is allowed to use a monopoly (desktop OS market, in this case) to gain another one (desktop search products market). These laws exist, in some shape or form, mostly everywhere. In Europe, for instance, Microsoft is in trouble because of this behaviour.
You have to be very, very careful with what you wish for. Wishing for a monopoly is not frequently the most clever thing to want as it brings a whole lot of regulation with it. Just ask anyone who was at AT&T from before 1956 until after 1982.
You know... This troll was not particularly funny the first time. I know you must find it funny, but real Mac users usually have a good sense of humor and, since you don't, I suppose you got your first Mac to match your first iPod, in a time they were no longer beige. You felt immediately superior, something you clearly did not when you used commodity PCs. I warn you this feeling of superiority is only skin deep and having a Mac will not increase your chances of getting laid. Nothing will.
It's not something you buy at a store, child. It's something you are.
And you, obviously, are not.
"So Google is demanding that Microsoft remove Vista's desktop search feature, a feature that other OSes already ship? If other OSes can ship it then so can Microsoft. Hell, if I'd been in charge of Microsoft, I would've been bundling Windows Desktop Search with XP for years now."
Since Microsoft has an effective monopoly on operating systems for commodity hardware, they have to play under different, more restrictive, rules. If Apple locks down Safari search it affects about 10 percent of users, 50% of which use Firefox, anyway. When Microsoft introduces new features into Windows, if affects 90+% of the market.
It's also illegal for Microsoft to leverage its monopoly on desktop OSs to gain a monopoly on other existing markets (like web browsers, office suites, corporate e-mail, file and print servers, anti-virus and, yes, desktop search). And, mind you, since being judged guilty of extending their monopoly in the anti-trust lawsuit, they _have_ such restrictions in place and the DoJ _should_ be doing something about it.
While it may look obvious they should be able to extend their products at will, it should be noted that by doing so in an unrestrained way, they can harm the market in very severe ways.
Of course, if all things continue the way they do, Google's time under the microscope is coming, but that doesn't mean Microsoft can do whatever it wants.
Actually setting up Apache in a modern Linux environment is quite easy - it amounts to open the package manager, select the apache package and the modules you will use, let it select any dependencies you may need (languages, libraries) and let the package manager do its job.
That said, I like the way Debian-derived distros install their apache servers and find them very easy and even pleasant to configure.
And, as a bonus, they seem to be quite secure by default, requiring, at most, some very simple tweaks.
And, best of all, your package manager will keep everything up-to-date and consistent.
"bad analogy time, with no cars involved!"
Actually, it was a good one.
Well... At least if was not incorrect. And... It was amusing.
What else can you ask for?
"Start with a blank codebase if you're going to do something like that."
;-)
Actually, he can still use BSD code. Microsoft did (and still does, AFAIK)
It points out IIS admins are twice as lazy or half as clever as other sysadmins.
;-)
Since they go for less money, that's hardly surprising
I find it extremely funny to think that the old lady's dogs were eaten by radioactive wolves...
Not to speak of how many radioactive spiders are there.
The poster was obviously not talking about Mac-specific applications, as the Foleo is, most definitely, not a Mac.
The fact remains, indeed, that since it is a general purpose computer running Linux, it can do _almost_ anything a MacBook can do as long as there is functionally equivalent software.
And Xcode is a particularly bad example as there are plenty of development tools available for Linux that are equivalent or surpass what Xcode can do, creating MacOS applications excepted. I must admit that it's not as easy to create MacOSX applications on Eclipse/Netbeans/Sun Studio/Monodevelop/Eric/whatever as it is on Xcode, but, since I don't use MacOSX (except for my second, now third, computer) and I don't wish to develop anything for it except, maybe, a widget, I couldn't care less.
The fact that it may use a very low power CPU with somewhat limited storage means that it may do everything a MacBook (or any other computer, BTW) but says nothing about how fast it can do it.
I run NetBeans on my laptop that has a very fast Intel Core 2 Duo, gobs of memory, a fast-enough hard-disk and a gigabit ethernet and, still, it is slower that what I would like it to be.
I can imagine the Foleo running NetBeans (given enough memory and storage), but I can't imagine it doing that fast enough to be bearable.
Don't assume you know what people do with their computers.
I would like to remind people that if Microsoft ever tries to enforce any patents Linux violates, they will have to deal with a huge, somewhat concerted effort to invalidate as many Microsoft patents as possible. Imagine what a couple hundred dedicated and knowledgeable geeks can dig in terms of prior art. While the geeks may not be a significant nuisance for Microsoft, anyone who has cross-licensing agreements will consider those patents they paid for that are now invalid as a reason to re-negotiate the deal with MS. In this scenario, while Microsoft may not bleed to death from the patent invalidation suits, they will find themselves in a much weaker position regarding their patent licensing partners than they find themselves now.
BTW, how much does it cost to fight a patent invalidation suit when you have some clear prior art? Is it possible to ask the USPTO (we are almost always talking US software-related patents) to re-examine a patent in light of some newly found prior art?
I can only offer you a personal definition - one that works for me. A good product (specially a good computer, as we are talking about Apple) would have to:
- be trustworthy - not easily hackable, sturdy and reliable
- pretty
- light and have a long battery life
- have a good screen
- be inexpensive (expendable if needed)
Of course, not many people will want all these and Apple products usually offer more than most of the others but, still, these requirements are not what I would expect to show up in a poll made at Circuit City or Wal Mart.
Well... I like to define myself as a communist, while fully acknowledging I also am a libertarian and I am happy the totalitarian regimes of the past century failed. Many people fail to see a totalitarian regime is not required for communism but communism was and is still used as an excuse to create totalitarian regimes in miserable countries.
In order to be able to seriously propose communism, we need to be able to feed, educate, keep healthy and give rich existences to every human being with a lot to spare, without sacrificing any rights, freedoms and other things we need to keep governments honest, and this is quite impossible now. In the future, it may be within the realm of possibility and, as I see, it is well worth it.
I too find his position incomprehensible. He is taking a stand defending his right to make Microsoft products more usable, thus making people develop more software for Windows so Windows is more attractive for users which then increases Microsoft's revenue.
There must be something better for him to do.
"You don't award engineering ingenuity, and then turn around and let the marketing and lawyering dweebs come in and take it away"
Who told you they award engineering ingenuity?
They award people who work hard to increase their revenue, by making their revenue-driving products somewhat better than the most visible competitors. This guy improved a freebie, which does not increase revenue directly (but may indirectly, in the end) and this improvement is seen as a competitor because you would have to buy the extra-cash version to get similar functionality.
The title "Most Valueble Professional" really means "Most Valuable for Us"