I saw some discussion of java on X, and someone claimed that it ships with java 1.3. If you do "java -version" on the command line it says it's 1.3, according to him.
You'd think that the work of porting java from Solaris and/or Linux would be pretty minimal, compared to doing it for MacOS 9.
I'm hoping I can get a MacOS X box for my new java programming job that starts in a few months. The dual 1GHz should be out by then...
Really, you do want to upgrade. When I first got my Tivo, I loved it. But after a while, you notice that some things are pretty awkward, some obvious features are missing and some things are just wrong.
2.01 fixes 60% of my pet peeves, and introduces some new features I didn't even know I needed:)
I heard people complain about the autocorrection change, but I haven't even noticed it.
Here's the dirty little secret behind XP and most other Wonderful Methodologies.
They require a set of passionate and skilled programmers, and a smart and charismatic team leader. Given that, XP will produce excellent results. And so will pretty much any other method.
The inventors of these things are invariably those types of exceptional leaders needed, and they gather a team of highly skilled engineers, so the results from their projects trying out their new ideas will be exceptional.
Meanwhile, many real projects are plagued by incompetent, combative engineers and managers, who jump ship at the most inopportune moments. Figuring out how to get good results in that environment is much harder and messier.
I don't want to be smug, but...
on
OS X
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· Score: 2
Yeah, compared to Windoze or Solaris, the interface is perfectly OK. Compared to the pinnacle of usability and productivity OS UI, it is painfully inadequate. If you've not really used Mac OS 9, X will seem quite decent.
It's like the remote control, if you're old enough to remeber life before it. We were perfectly happy getting up from the counch to switch channels of adjusting the sound. Had we been given a 10 foot stick custom designed to click the tv buttons from the sofa with, we would have loved it. Once you get used to the convenience of a real remote though, the stick is unbearably inconvenient.
Let me also point out that usability is NOT a matter of taste about what's pretty etc. It is a hard science where you measure how fast people accomplish tasks using different UIs, and while I haven't done the tests myself, I have no doubt that many of the problems in the X Finder are very real and measurable.
Comparing no-brand cheap-as-dirt components to a preassembled name brand computer is an eternal part of the Mac vs PC discussions, and I won't do more than point it out here.
But it seems to me that you will spend thousands of hours in front of whatever machine you aquire. If, as you say, the apple product is superior, even if you only value that advantage to only $0.01 per hour, the Mac looks pretty attractive.
These days I make well into 6 figures, but I still have some vague memories of being a very poor student, and the equation may well be different for someone in that situation.
I don't think "sheetsda" is confining himself to only considering computer women, he is just saying that if there were more of them he would meet more women.
More women in the field would most definitely make a difference. Spending most of your young years in an environment where there are 5 men for every woman sets it mark.
The confidence part is a pretty vicious catch 22. But I ramble.
Personally, i've always seen true user friendliness as a sacrifice to power. I would rather have a high learning curve but more power than an OS that's easy to use, but offers me less power.
If done right, user friendly design increases the power of a system. You can spend less effort remembering, learning and figuring out how to do things, and more on actually doing them.
And there is no need at all to take away features to get there. You just have to do them right.
I can't really blame you for your observation though. Most of what's done in the name of user friendliness is pathetically misguided.
If things can be made so much better and more useful on a closed hardware system, as you claim, that seems to be a pretty strong argument in favour of closed hardware systems.
LinuxPPC supports the exact same machines as MacOS X, and I haven't heard it's anywhere near MacOS X in these aspects.
Of course Linux can be made that easy to install and configure. The point of the article is that it hasn't. That's the promise vs deliver thing.
1. Those who listen to the sound.
2. Those who listen to the music.
Group 1 can tell the difference, and are bothered by it. Group 2 can probably tell the difference as well (I haven't tried), but don't really care that much as long as the musical ideas come through fine.
Unless you don't object to someone having a phone conversation in the seat behind you in a theatre? Or a regular conversation for that matter. It's all communication.
And if cell phones stop annoying people, the jammers will not be used anymore.
Rusting iron and steel is not the best thing to have in your drinking water, but it's a perfectly normal component of ocean water.
As you know, sea water is about 3% "salt". That does not only mean regular table salt, NaCl, but pretty much any element or compound that exists on the planet and is soluble in water. I haven't checked the iron content of the ocean, but I'd be surprised if it's not in the megazillions of tonnes.
insufferable preaching section:
Iron is a perfectly natural element in nature, and to put it back in nature is not in general a bad thing.
More controversially, the same can be said of, among many other things, uranium, which is quite common in ocean water.
end of preaching. phew!
PS. Could the bug actually be seen from Marina Blvd? It was reported to be a very foggy day.
From the tone of disbelief from the crowd, it seems that Macs are the only computers that do this. Aren't PCs crippled this way? Is seems a bit futile to plug the 3% hole and leave the rest open.
By saying that the non digital part of the world is "the real world", you're implying that the digital part of the world is not real. That expresses the view that digital and more traditional medias are completely different. Which is the view you say you want to fight!
Free your mind!
Re:Sys admins can terminate your education??
on
Carl Kadie Responds
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· Score: 2
I don't have any problem with a policy that says "if you are shown to deliberately shut down the campus network, you may be expelled from the school", if the student also gets to defend himself in front of some impartial decisionmaker. That's a bit more work, but how many real cases like this do you have in a year?
What it sounded like was that the Director of Network Operations can act like judge, jury and executioner on any trumped up charge against someone he's taken a dislike to. Maybe the student did try to destroy the campus. Or maybe the Director doesn't like how he looks at his girlfriend. We'll never know.
The original post pointed out, probably correctly, that the current crop of admins are using their powers in a sensible and decent way. But those people will get replaced or may change their behaviour, drunk by the power over students lives vested in them.
Sys admins can terminate your education??
on
Carl Kadie Responds
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· Score: 2
As an aside, I've never seen them use it, but the Network Operations (NetOps) group has received permission to directly punish students found trying to crack into the campus routers. The punishment, in this case, is immediate expulsion from WPI, with all of your transcripts withheld. Yes, NetOps can do this directly...
I know there are plenty of smart and morally upstanding citizens who work as sysadmins, but I have also seen a scary percentage of assholes and morons in that profession.
That these people can terminate peoples education at will is truly scary. That the WPI students posting here choose to do so as Anonymous Cowards in not surprising at all.
Any post pointing out the irrelevancy of a post is itself even more irrelevant and will generate even more uninteresting traffic than the one that originally offended you did.
So, just don't read what you're not interested in.
I'd like to take this opportunity to tell the world that the first thing Swedes and Swiss talk about when they meet in the US, is the Americans annoying incapability of telling our countries apart. It's good for a few laughs.
Not that Swedes are any better at telling Idaho and Iowa apart.
It is not "illegal to engage in private spacefaring." There's a large launch-services industry (SeaLaunch being one notable one.)
You seem to be right. I couldn't find any reference to that ban. I know I heard space activists complain loudly about things like that 10 years ago, but if there ever was such a ban, it must be gone now.
I'm dissapointed in how the system is currently structured, yes. NASA has always been in a quandry due to it's untenable status. It's funding is completely at the whim of each administration and subject to a great deal of external manipulation & "adjustment". [...] Rather I see changing the status of NASA or some successor agency to a more stable one with a more reliable budget as being an answer.
But every government agency is subject to those whims. It's inherent in the governmental system. I think the difference is that most agencies delivier tangible benefits to large groups of voters, so they're harder to mess with. And you can't restructure that away.
NASA was created with the mission to win the space race part of the cold war. That mission is accomplished, so it's current purpose is pretty vague.
On the other hand as I noted I don't see any supposed "privitization" being preferable. Already many STS services are privately managed yet there seems little cost savings.
Is this odd? No - I don't think going to an extreme, particularly an extreme I consider an innapropriate response to be the optimal solution.
This rhetorical trick of pretending there is only my alternative and a very extreme and scary one is called "false choice". In reality there are of course many different options.
I found this article on a libertarian space policy. It makes a lot of sense to me. An interesting fact it mentions is that around 60% of space spending is already done by private industry.
http://www.lp.org/lpnews/0005/libsolutions.html
Favorite quote: "no government agency that runs with the efficiency of the Pentagon and the U.S. Postal Service will ever realize the dream of commercially viable orbiting stations or moon bases."
Tell me, do you find it odd that you assert falsehoods, competely disregard the point of much of my posting then misrepresent my position ?
I don't entirely believe the folks that claim privatization is the solution-to-all-problems (Ride British railways lately? Electricity in California?)
I don't know about BR, but the California deregulation is for one thing not in any way a privatization, it is a stupid attempt at partial deregulation.
If commercial space flight truly *is* viable then why aren't more companies investing their own dollars into it and not trying to pry open the public purse?
Last I heard this debate (which is over 5 years ago) it was because it was illegal to engage in private spacefaring. The government protects the NASA monpoly.
These cuts show one major disadvantage of government controlled space industry. It is totally dependent on temporary and fickle power and mood changes in one single, and not very rational organization.
You seem to be pretty disappointed in how the current system works, yet you think it's the best possible. Isn't that a bit odd when you think about it?
If you speak to people who work in marketing (you may never have met any, but they're nice friendly people in general), they'll tell you that the easiest thing to market is a good product. Given the choice, they'd always work with marketing a good product than a bad, since it's a much easier and more rewarding job.
I hear many of my fellow libertarians saying that M$ hasn't done anything wrong, and this is just the government grabbing even more power. And in some parts I agree. There's nothing wrong with giving away your products for free. I don't buy the assumptions behind anti trust legislation at all. And selling several products as a package is perfectly fine.
But there are one or two things M$ does that I think should be criminal in a libertarian society. Ironically, they don't seem to be in this one.
The big one is that they, by controlling the OS, can and do make any competitors sowtware stop working at any time. I can't see why that should be any more legal than to burn down your competitors factories. But our legal notions of what's right and wrong in the world of software are still too confused to really get this. I think this is the big reason behind their success. everyone knows that it is impossible to compete with them, so they own all the interesting SW markets, where they make their real money.
Also their repeted and blatant theft of both ideas and source code is something I'd like to see them punished for. Rumor is that for many years Apple was referred to as the "M$ southern researh campus" within the company. I know, there are some thorny issues around intellectual property and what's really right and wrong there. But I want them dead for it.
None of this changes that the government is doing this to grab more power to itself, of course.
Slashdot Mirror
I can only speak for Sweden, but yes, there is routinely nudity and occasionally even sex on prime time TV.
Society shows no signs of falling apart for it.
I saw some discussion of java on X, and someone claimed that it ships with java 1.3. If you do "java -version" on the command line it says it's 1.3, according to him.
You'd think that the work of porting java from Solaris and/or Linux would be pretty minimal, compared to doing it for MacOS 9.
I'm hoping I can get a MacOS X box for my new java programming job that starts in a few months. The dual 1GHz should be out by then...
Really, you do want to upgrade. When I first got my Tivo, I loved it. But after a while, you notice that some things are pretty awkward, some obvious features are missing and some things are just wrong.
:)
2.01 fixes 60% of my pet peeves, and introduces some new features I didn't even know I needed
I heard people complain about the autocorrection change, but I haven't even noticed it.
Here's the dirty little secret behind XP and most other Wonderful Methodologies.
They require a set of passionate and skilled programmers, and a smart and charismatic team leader. Given that, XP will produce excellent results. And so will pretty much any other method.
The inventors of these things are invariably those types of exceptional leaders needed, and they gather a team of highly skilled engineers, so the results from their projects trying out their new ideas will be exceptional.
Meanwhile, many real projects are plagued by incompetent, combative engineers and managers, who jump ship at the most inopportune moments. Figuring out how to get good results in that environment is much harder and messier.
Yeah, compared to Windoze or Solaris, the interface is perfectly OK. Compared to the pinnacle of usability and productivity OS UI, it is painfully inadequate. If you've not really used Mac OS 9, X will seem quite decent.
It's like the remote control, if you're old enough to remeber life before it. We were perfectly happy getting up from the counch to switch channels of adjusting the sound. Had we been given a 10 foot stick custom designed to click the tv buttons from the sofa with, we would have loved it. Once you get used to the convenience of a real remote though, the stick is unbearably inconvenient.
Let me also point out that usability is NOT a matter of taste about what's pretty etc. It is a hard science where you measure how fast people accomplish tasks using different UIs, and while I haven't done the tests myself, I have no doubt that many of the problems in the X Finder are very real and measurable.
Comparing no-brand cheap-as-dirt components to a preassembled name brand computer is an eternal part of the Mac vs PC discussions, and I won't do more than point it out here.
But it seems to me that you will spend thousands of hours in front of whatever machine you aquire. If, as you say, the apple product is superior, even if you only value that advantage to only $0.01 per hour, the Mac looks pretty attractive.
These days I make well into 6 figures, but I still have some vague memories of being a very poor student, and the equation may well be different for someone in that situation.
I don't think "sheetsda" is confining himself to only considering computer women, he is just saying that if there were more of them he would meet more women.
More women in the field would most definitely make a difference. Spending most of your young years in an environment where there are 5 men for every woman sets it mark.
The confidence part is a pretty vicious catch 22. But I ramble.
To me, these statements seem to clash:
"the program's idea of what letters match may be different than the file systems"
"there is no reason that user-level programs cannot do their own case-insensitive search for a matching file".
Personally, i've always seen true user friendliness as a sacrifice to power. I would rather have a high learning curve but more power than an OS that's easy to use, but offers me less power.
If done right, user friendly design increases the power of a system. You can spend less effort remembering, learning and figuring out how to do things, and more on actually doing them.
And there is no need at all to take away features to get there. You just have to do them right.
I can't really blame you for your observation though. Most of what's done in the name of user friendliness is pathetically misguided.
If things can be made so much better and more useful on a closed hardware system, as you claim, that seems to be a pretty strong argument in favour of closed hardware systems.
LinuxPPC supports the exact same machines as MacOS X, and I haven't heard it's anywhere near MacOS X in these aspects.
Of course Linux can be made that easy to install and configure. The point of the article is that it hasn't. That's the promise vs deliver thing.
1. Those who listen to the sound.
2. Those who listen to the music.
Group 1 can tell the difference, and are bothered by it. Group 2 can probably tell the difference as well (I haven't tried), but don't really care that much as long as the musical ideas come through fine.
..., isn't the US, or anyone else, free to do whatever they want out there, without the need for any jurisdiction?
Unless you don't object to someone having a phone conversation in the seat behind you in a theatre? Or a regular conversation for that matter. It's all communication.
And if cell phones stop annoying people, the jammers will not be used anymore.
Rusting iron and steel is not the best thing to have in your drinking water, but it's a perfectly normal component of ocean water.
As you know, sea water is about 3% "salt". That does not only mean regular table salt, NaCl, but pretty much any element or compound that exists on the planet and is soluble in water. I haven't checked the iron content of the ocean, but I'd be surprised if it's not in the megazillions of tonnes.
insufferable preaching section:
Iron is a perfectly natural element in nature, and to put it back in nature is not in general a bad thing.
More controversially, the same can be said of, among many other things, uranium, which is quite common in ocean water.
end of preaching. phew!
PS. Could the bug actually be seen from Marina Blvd? It was reported to be a very foggy day.
From the tone of disbelief from the crowd, it seems that Macs are the only computers that do this. Aren't PCs crippled this way? Is seems a bit futile to plug the 3% hole and leave the rest open.
By saying that the non digital part of the world is "the real world", you're implying that the digital part of the world is not real. That expresses the view that digital and more traditional medias are completely different. Which is the view you say you want to fight!
Free your mind!
I don't have any problem with a policy that says "if you are shown to deliberately shut down the campus network, you may be expelled from the school", if the student also gets to defend himself in front of some impartial decisionmaker. That's a bit more work, but how many real cases like this do you have in a year?
What it sounded like was that the Director of Network Operations can act like judge, jury and executioner on any trumped up charge against someone he's taken a dislike to. Maybe the student did try to destroy the campus. Or maybe the Director doesn't like how he looks at his girlfriend. We'll never know.
The original post pointed out, probably correctly, that the current crop of admins are using their powers in a sensible and decent way. But those people will get replaced or may change their behaviour, drunk by the power over students lives vested in them.
As an aside, I've never seen them use it, but the Network Operations (NetOps) group has received permission to directly punish students found trying to crack into the campus routers. The punishment, in this case, is immediate expulsion from WPI, with all of your transcripts withheld. Yes, NetOps can do this directly...
I know there are plenty of smart and morally upstanding citizens who work as sysadmins, but I have also seen a scary percentage of assholes and morons in that profession.
That these people can terminate peoples education at will is truly scary. That the WPI students posting here choose to do so as Anonymous Cowards in not surprising at all.
Remember rule 1 (*) of online discussions:
Any post pointing out the irrelevancy of a post is itself even more irrelevant and will generate even more uninteresting traffic than the one that originally offended you did.
So, just don't read what you're not interested in.
(*) Or is it rule 4? Nevermind.
I'd like to take this opportunity to tell the world that the first thing Swedes and Swiss talk about when they meet in the US, is the Americans annoying incapability of telling our countries apart. It's good for a few laughs.
Not that Swedes are any better at telling Idaho and Iowa apart.
It is not "illegal to engage in private spacefaring." There's a large launch-services industry (SeaLaunch being one notable one.)
You seem to be right. I couldn't find any reference to that ban. I know I heard space activists complain loudly about things like that 10 years ago, but if there ever was such a ban, it must be gone now.
I'm dissapointed in how the system is currently structured, yes. NASA has always been in a quandry due to it's untenable status. It's funding is completely at the whim of each administration and subject to a great deal of external manipulation & "adjustment". [...] Rather I see changing the status of NASA or some successor agency to a more stable one with a more reliable budget as being an answer.
But every government agency is subject to those whims. It's inherent in the governmental system. I think the difference is that most agencies delivier tangible benefits to large groups of voters, so they're harder to mess with. And you can't restructure that away.
NASA was created with the mission to win the space race part of the cold war. That mission is accomplished, so it's current purpose is pretty vague.
On the other hand as I noted I don't see any supposed "privitization" being preferable. Already many STS services are privately managed yet there seems little cost savings.
Is this odd? No - I don't think going to an extreme, particularly an extreme I consider an innapropriate response to be the optimal solution.
This rhetorical trick of pretending there is only my alternative and a very extreme and scary one is called "false choice". In reality there are of course many different options.
I found this article on a libertarian space policy. It makes a lot of sense to me. An interesting fact it mentions is that around 60% of space spending is already done by private industry.
http://www.lp.org/lpnews/0005/libsolutions.html
Favorite quote: "no government agency that runs with the efficiency of the Pentagon and the U.S. Postal Service will ever realize the dream of commercially viable orbiting stations or moon bases."
Tell me, do you find it odd that you assert falsehoods, competely disregard the point of much of my posting then misrepresent my position ?
Oh please. Don't be childish.
I don't entirely believe the folks that claim privatization is the solution-to-all-problems (Ride British railways lately? Electricity in California?)
I don't know about BR, but the California deregulation is for one thing not in any way a privatization, it is a stupid attempt at partial deregulation.
If commercial space flight truly *is* viable then why aren't more companies investing their own dollars into it and not trying to pry open the public purse?
Last I heard this debate (which is over 5 years ago) it was because it was illegal to engage in private spacefaring. The government protects the NASA monpoly.
These cuts show one major disadvantage of government controlled space industry. It is totally dependent on temporary and fickle power and mood changes in one single, and not very rational organization.
You seem to be pretty disappointed in how the current system works, yet you think it's the best possible. Isn't that a bit odd when you think about it?
The obvious antimeasure is a slightly parabolic mirror you can hide behind and at the same time refry your attacker.
The hard part is how to aim it. Perhaps you'll need a small slit to see through.
I don't know which materals act as mirrors at these frequencies, but there has to be plenty. Metals usually work.
If you speak to people who work in marketing (you may never have met any, but they're nice friendly people in general), they'll tell you that the easiest thing to market is a good product. Given the choice, they'd always work with marketing a good product than a bad, since it's a much easier and more rewarding job.
But there are one or two things M$ does that I think should be criminal in a libertarian society. Ironically, they don't seem to be in this one.
The big one is that they, by controlling the OS, can and do make any competitors sowtware stop working at any time. I can't see why that should be any more legal than to burn down your competitors factories. But our legal notions of what's right and wrong in the world of software are still too confused to really get this. I think this is the big reason behind their success. everyone knows that it is impossible to compete with them, so they own all the interesting SW markets, where they make their real money.
Also their repeted and blatant theft of both ideas and source code is something I'd like to see them punished for. Rumor is that for many years Apple was referred to as the "M$ southern researh campus" within the company. I know, there are some thorny issues around intellectual property and what's really right and wrong there. But I want them dead for it.
None of this changes that the government is doing this to grab more power to itself, of course.