Well, Mac OS X took 52 seconds on my PowerBook G4 from power button press to fully responsive (when set to auto-login). Almost half of that was diagnostics.
sqlite is vary resistant to corruption. In fact, the only way you're likely to see it is if Firefox for some reason tries to touch the databases with its own code rather than sqlite. Further, a simple command line query will dump everything.
Even the phrase "launching a SQL database" indicates you're thinking of SQLite the wrong way.
A better way of thinking of it is this: Mozilla developers are removing thousands of lines of code with an unknown number of bugs for a simple data storage mechanism used in thousands of software products, including embedded systems. SQLite works. In fact, it works astonishingly well. We're gradually using it to replace most data storage in our own products.
Bottom line: Those are two insipid, uninsightful, mediocre fluff stories. In addition to being hard on the eyes, they were also poorly researched and wrong. Both stories should have been killed for that reason. PC missed a chance to hire someone with integrity AND taste.
I'm sure there's some correlation between market share and share of web browsers, but it certainly isn't 1.0. For instance, let's say I installed Vista. Maybe I need to download an update several pieces of utility software. Maybe I want to find some desktop gadgets. Hey, look, a cool new Vista-ready application with gorgeous eye candy! Oops, it looks like I need to download Flash again. etc, etc. New OSes will always have a disproportionately large market share until the users settle into a pattern (whether through boredom, angry parents, angry spouse, whatever).
What's confusing you is that Apple actually has enough confidence in the iPod as a MP3 player to feel that lock-ins are bad for them.
Apple may be wrong about it, but they "know" they have the best MP3 player out there for the vast majority of people... and if they slip in some area that's important to people, they'll fix it. Thus, to Apple every restriction in moving music between players is really a restriction from moving to the iPod. Even if the customer is moving away from the iPod, Apple figures they'll move their music over there, realize how badly the new player sucks for managing it (but buy a few tracks from time to time), and move back on their next player purchase.
Let's say Apple's iPod has 60% market share. I'm not sure what it really is. Apple wants open formats across the board because they're looking at the other 40%. They "know" the 60% is safe.
Indeed. The primary requirement of SMTP is that it remain compatibile with SMTP, whereas one of the things current applications depend on is this inability to authenticate.
SMTP mail is inherently insecure in that it is feasible for even
fairly casual users to negotiate directly with receiving and relaying
SMTP servers and create messages that will trick a naive recipient
into believing that they came from somewhere else. Constructing such
a message so that the "spoofed" behavior cannot be detected by an
expert is somewhat more difficult, but not sufficiently so as to be a
deterrent to someone who is determined and knowledgeable.
Consequently, as knowledge of Internet mail increases, so does the
knowledge that SMTP mail inherently cannot be authenticated, or
integrity checks provided, at the transport level. Real mail
security lies only in end-to-end methods involving the message
bodies, such as those which use digital signatures (see [14] and,
e.g., PGP [4] or S/MIME [31]).
Princeton University, Random House Unabridged Dictionary and American Heritage Dictionary disagree with you. But hey, I'll believe some slahdot anonymous coward instead, howzat?
PS: I am well aware "howzat," is not a word, either. The aforementioned dictionaries even agree on that point. Big gold star for you!
I'm not sure even calling it blackballed is fair. When I think of blackballing, I think of someone deliberately trying to destroy the "blackballee" in an industry, not simply disconnecting them from a single "blackballing" company.
In other words, I'm totally justified in not letting you play with my ball. It's only when I try to stop you from using any balls, or play in any game I'm related to, that it becomes blackballing.
It's definitely debatable. I suspect Apple couldn't give two shakes about "vendor lock in," and it probably annoys them more than anything else.
See, Apple has confidence they have the best music player. That means that if everyone removed DRM, Apple would have a larger share of a much bigger pie. Even if some users moved away from the iPod, after their new device breaks (or gets sufficienty annoying), Apple's confident they'll come back to the iPod. At that point, the lack of "lock in" helps Apple.
"Lock in" is only useful when you don't know you're the best. Apple knows its the best (even though there's some possibility they're wrong).
With Mac OS X, Apple has a unique form of copyright protection: One that gets in the way of absolutely no legitimate users. And no, it doesn't use the TPM. The TPM isn't even on recent models.
I can't speak for Office v. X, but I can assure you that Tiger broke one of the ways to rebuild a table of contents in Office 2004. Microsoft Word would pop up a modal dialog box, but it would be under a progress bar. There was no way to switch from the progress bar to the dialog box. I don't remember much detail other than that; there was another way to rebuild the table of contents, but it wasn't exactly obvious, and a later update (to Office 2004) fixed it.
I don't understand why Apple is being held to this standard. I can't remember the last time Microsoft Office didn't require an update to move from "sorta works" to "supported" following a major Mac OS X update.
Likewise, I'm not blaming Microsoft here. The product I worked on until a few months ago isn't supported on Vista yet (something that's entirely unrelated to me being on something else).
The point of pre-release software is to test that software. We use pre-releases to prepare for major changes, to report unintentional changes back to the vendor, and to build a list of issues to re-check and possibly fix in the final. Sometimes if we're doing something wrong that's being exposed, it'll get fixed right away, but we don't try to work around ever pre-release OS issue.
If you live on the razor's edge, expect a bit of blood from time to time.
I've been zapped by my 500 Mhz PowerBook G4 many times. However, that was not really its fault - it was coming from a cheap USB printer that didn't have a ground cable, and I was running the PowerBook without the ground cable. Me and my PowerBook made the only path from the printer to ground. (When I figured this out, it was a definite Duh! moment.) Did you have anything else plugged in at the time the Dell got you? (Not that I'm doubting you, I'm just curious.)
I thought he played with some code, made a mess out of it, bought someone else's code, then licensed yet another third party to replace his original attempt at coding? But he did pick the box color.
Slashdot Mirror
Subversion does do all of that, however.
Well, Mac OS X took 52 seconds on my PowerBook G4 from power button press to fully responsive (when set to auto-login). Almost half of that was diagnostics.
sqlite is vary resistant to corruption. In fact, the only way you're likely to see it is if Firefox for some reason tries to touch the databases with its own code rather than sqlite. Further, a simple command line query will dump everything.
Even the phrase "launching a SQL database" indicates you're thinking of SQLite the wrong way.
A better way of thinking of it is this: Mozilla developers are removing thousands of lines of code with an unknown number of bugs for a simple data storage mechanism used in thousands of software products, including embedded systems. SQLite works. In fact, it works astonishingly well. We're gradually using it to replace most data storage in our own products.
Bottom line: Those are two insipid, uninsightful, mediocre fluff stories. In addition to being hard on the eyes, they were also poorly researched and wrong. Both stories should have been killed for that reason. PC missed a chance to hire someone with integrity AND taste.
All hard drives are disposable, 2.5" drives doubly so.
I'm sure there's some correlation between market share and share of web browsers, but it certainly isn't 1.0. For instance, let's say I installed Vista. Maybe I need to download an update several pieces of utility software. Maybe I want to find some desktop gadgets. Hey, look, a cool new Vista-ready application with gorgeous eye candy! Oops, it looks like I need to download Flash again. etc, etc. New OSes will always have a disproportionately large market share until the users settle into a pattern (whether through boredom, angry parents, angry spouse, whatever).
What's confusing you is that Apple actually has enough confidence in the iPod as a MP3 player to feel that lock-ins are bad for them.
Apple may be wrong about it, but they "know" they have the best MP3 player out there for the vast majority of people... and if they slip in some area that's important to people, they'll fix it. Thus, to Apple every restriction in moving music between players is really a restriction from moving to the iPod. Even if the customer is moving away from the iPod, Apple figures they'll move their music over there, realize how badly the new player sucks for managing it (but buy a few tracks from time to time), and move back on their next player purchase.
Let's say Apple's iPod has 60% market share. I'm not sure what it really is. Apple wants open formats across the board because they're looking at the other 40%. They "know" the 60% is safe.
Indeed. The primary requirement of SMTP is that it remain compatibile with SMTP, whereas one of the things current applications depend on is this inability to authenticate.
From the RFC #2821 (which defiens modern SMTP):
SMTP mail is inherently insecure in that it is feasible for even fairly casual users to negotiate directly with receiving and relaying SMTP servers and create messages that will trick a naive recipient into believing that they came from somewhere else. Constructing such a message so that the "spoofed" behavior cannot be detected by an expert is somewhat more difficult, but not sufficiently so as to be a deterrent to someone who is determined and knowledgeable. Consequently, as knowledge of Internet mail increases, so does the knowledge that SMTP mail inherently cannot be authenticated, or integrity checks provided, at the transport level. Real mail security lies only in end-to-end methods involving the message bodies, such as those which use digital signatures (see [14] and, e.g., PGP [4] or S/MIME [31]).
And under budget, too! :)
(Thanks for the great laugh.)
SMTP is not only defective by design, but defective by requirement.
No, the first day would be devoted into a hazing ritual: mainly, making him pass out in the low oxygen room just for laughs.
I might have believed you if you'd said "...Windows requires you to activate it again."
D'oh! You're right.
I don't know if it could handle slashdot or a digg, but one of the major pushes recently has been SQL query optimization. It's made a big difference.
Princeton University, Random House Unabridged Dictionary and American Heritage Dictionary disagree with you. But hey, I'll believe some slahdot anonymous coward instead, howzat?
PS: I am well aware "howzat," is not a word, either. The aforementioned dictionaries even agree on that point. Big gold star for you!
I'm not sure even calling it blackballed is fair. When I think of blackballing, I think of someone deliberately trying to destroy the "blackballee" in an industry, not simply disconnecting them from a single "blackballing" company.
In other words, I'm totally justified in not letting you play with my ball. It's only when I try to stop you from using any balls, or play in any game I'm related to, that it becomes blackballing.
As someone who slept in today, I agree with you, though I do think you mixed a few too many analogies in there. :)
It's definitely debatable. I suspect Apple couldn't give two shakes about "vendor lock in," and it probably annoys them more than anything else.
See, Apple has confidence they have the best music player. That means that if everyone removed DRM, Apple would have a larger share of a much bigger pie. Even if some users moved away from the iPod, after their new device breaks (or gets sufficienty annoying), Apple's confident they'll come back to the iPod. At that point, the lack of "lock in" helps Apple.
"Lock in" is only useful when you don't know you're the best. Apple knows its the best (even though there's some possibility they're wrong).
With Mac OS X, Apple has a unique form of copyright protection: One that gets in the way of absolutely no legitimate users. And no, it doesn't use the TPM. The TPM isn't even on recent models.
Yes.
Oh, I suppose you want to know which.
Darned if I know.
I can't speak for Office v. X, but I can assure you that Tiger broke one of the ways to rebuild a table of contents in Office 2004. Microsoft Word would pop up a modal dialog box, but it would be under a progress bar. There was no way to switch from the progress bar to the dialog box. I don't remember much detail other than that; there was another way to rebuild the table of contents, but it wasn't exactly obvious, and a later update (to Office 2004) fixed it.
I don't understand why Apple is being held to this standard. I can't remember the last time Microsoft Office didn't require an update to move from "sorta works" to "supported" following a major Mac OS X update.
Likewise, I'm not blaming Microsoft here. The product I worked on until a few months ago isn't supported on Vista yet (something that's entirely unrelated to me being on something else).
The point of pre-release software is to test that software. We use pre-releases to prepare for major changes, to report unintentional changes back to the vendor, and to build a list of issues to re-check and possibly fix in the final. Sometimes if we're doing something wrong that's being exposed, it'll get fixed right away, but we don't try to work around ever pre-release OS issue.
If you live on the razor's edge, expect a bit of blood from time to time.
I've been zapped by my 500 Mhz PowerBook G4 many times. However, that was not really its fault - it was coming from a cheap USB printer that didn't have a ground cable, and I was running the PowerBook without the ground cable. Me and my PowerBook made the only path from the printer to ground. (When I figured this out, it was a definite Duh! moment.) Did you have anything else plugged in at the time the Dell got you? (Not that I'm doubting you, I'm just curious.)