Take a look around and see how many American newspapers and other news outlets reported the fact that Colin Powell's presentation to the U.N.S.C. prior to "Operation Iraqi Freedom" was plagiarized from a 12-year-old thesis paper. You'd think this salacious bit of news would have been splattered all over every front page. Instead it appeared in only a few local independent newspapers. It was published almost immediately in the U.K., feeding the groundswell of opposition to the US position. In the US very few people even know about it now! Whenever I hear Monday morning quarterbacks talking about the reasons why the intelligence was bad or why we shouldn't have jumped in without planning, etc., they never bring this glaring bit of bad intelligence up. Either they don't know about it, or they believe it would be blasphemy to disparage the character of Colin Powell. At least Gen. Powell, to his credit, was very much against taking the case he did to the U.N., but in the end he did what a good soldier does.
There are plenty of other things the US has done - and is doing - that continues to be completely assinine. That includes overthrowing Democratically elected governments, continuing to allow the ban on land mines to go unratified, failing to pay billions in dues to the UN, failing to adhere to UN mandates, failing to insist that its allies (notably Israel) fulfill their obligations under UN mandates, locking up Japanese US citizens during WWII, hunting down Communists for thoughtcrimes against capitalism during the McCarthy era, presenting knwon-to-be-faulty-and-old intelligence about Iraq to the UNSC (as Powell did before the war), baldfacedly lying about the situation in Iraq to the American people in order to gain support, using 9/11 as an excuse to expand the war machine and transfer billions in tax revenue to administration cronies....
The people in charge of our country are immoral and megalomaniacal. Plain and simple.
I just opened a NIB package, and opened all the files in it - including "objects.xib" in BBEdit. Every single one is XML. Have you ever looked at a NIB file? Where are you getting your information?
I own 5 Macs, one of which is a 7 year old 8500 upgraded to a G3/400. It still works beautifully, and I've even had Mac OS X on it occasionally, though the 50MHz bus makes it a bit slow for that. It has also had Linux installed on it a few times. Can you tell I use it for tinkering? Currently I keep it around to run Painter on Mac OS 9 so that I can use my old graphics tablet that Wacom doesn't support on the new machines (it's a serial model).
Anyhow, it's a matter of choice to throw away a perfectly useful machine only to buy another one. I'm not one of those people you're describing.
I also happen to be quite a computer afficionado, not one of those that hates computers so gets a Mac. I've been programming computers for 25 years, and have never taken to PCs mainly for aesthetic reasons. The Intel chip architecture was kludgy and hackish back in the days when it was either Intel or 680x0, so I stuck with 680x0 assembler. Of course nowadays the chip architectures have matured somewhat, but then you're still stuck with Microsoft's horrendous APIs and development tools. Thank goodness for CodeWarrior. (Admittedly the APIs for Mac OS 7/8/9 were pretty godawful too, but CodeWarrior always rocked there.)
I own a PC that runs Windows 2000 and Linux, and I don't mind rolling my chair over to it to test my builds (currently working on a cross-platform game with SDL). I have found Windows 2000 a pleasant surprise compared to Windows 98, though I still consider Windows an organizational and aesthetic disaster.
Your posts are pretty strident, so I hardly expect to make a dent in your attitude. But you should be aware that there are some serious and experienced developers working on the Mac by choice.
You're right that the Cube had QA issues. They were resolved, and the Cube got its just desserts in the end. I had the Airport Base Station capacitor problem recently with one of the original ABS models that I got from a computer recycling center here in Portland, OR. I got replacement capacitors and soldered them in myself. It works as good as new - probably better since it has the appropriately rated capacitors now!
I can't say definitively that Apple uses superior components in their motherboards, but they have made that claim, and they do tend to last. And they *did* change battery suppliers for the iPod when it turned out the batteries weren't up to their standards. It would seem that this is the case. Many PC manufacturers use decent components too. Those PCs tend to cost a little more.
I can't say definitively that Apple would tell you to fuck off. I can see why someone who might meet you in person would do so, but my experience with Apple Support has always been very positive. But I've always had an expectation of a good resolution, which tends to sway the outcome towards a positive one. Perhaps if I had a negative expectation I'd get screwed. Who knows? Karma is a mysterious thing.
Having said that, I must admit that none of my computers have ever had problems requiring service from Apple. Nor my iPod neither. Since all my Apple products are currently out of warrantee I'd tend to try fixing things myself before going to a service center anyhow.
One last thing. I think the term "asshat" must have gone out of style recently. Haven't you noticed that it seems kind of silly nowadays, or is it just me who finds it worn?
why do some people find bad arguments so persuasive?
Because they are uninformed, uneducated, or simply prefer the wrong path due to overriding prejudices and fears.
Since stupidity makes you more susceptible to all of the above, and Conservatives benefit from a stupid populace, the best thing for Conservatives to do is gut the educational system.
In the US anything which might undermine or unduly burden the State Religion (capitalism) tends to be swept under. So although our friend should certainly sue for slander and libel he should not hold his breath for a just resolution. Of the people, by the people, and for the people are just cheap words here in Americorp.
Then I can smoke really good inexpensive pot and fileshare all I want. Moreover I wouldn't have to live in this nutso country (USA) as it dumbs-down its populus and careens into a fear-drive death-spiral. Woohoo!
Actually, when you enable distributed compile it causes distccd to load at startup. That means, in case you didn't know, that you don't need to keep XCode running on machines that you use for remote compiling.
Well, ICC compiled with ICC ought to run pretty fast given its optimizations. Now, has anyone considered compiling gcc using ICC to see how much of a performance boost it gets?
...It's likely that a visual interface builder tool will write the XML on your behalf. As with most such interface builders it will provide snapping and layout hints to make sure things are well-spaced according to UI guidelines. There should almost never be any need to hand-code an XML description of the GUI. Many coders already build UIs with visual tools, and the use of XML behind the scenes isn't going to make a difference to bad design.
I base my outlook on the fact that Interface Builder (NeXT, Mac OS X) has long used XML for its GUI description files, and there are unlikely to be a dozen coders in the world who ever hand-edit the suckers. And I personally like both the abstraction of the GUI from my application and the use of XML behind the scenes.
XML is well-suited to the kind of data pertinent to a GUI, and it's infinitely open-ended, which is good for any evolving framework. It doesn't hurt that it's human-readable either.
Since NextStep there has been an interface builder tool, and it has evolved with the Mac OS X developer tools into the modern Interface Builder we use today. Interface Builder lets you build GUIs which are encapsulated into NIB files (stands for NeXT Interface Builder). Well, cool, NIB files are XML files. The GUIs you build in IB can be used to front-end applications written in C, C++, Objective-C, AppleScript, - and I believe perl and python as well using bridge modules.
Now, of course, on Mac OS X as in other Unix-like OS's, the GUI you build and script can invoke any of the facilities of the OS, command-line, libraries, frameworks, shell scripts, daemons, processes, and doodads. This is of course the kind of power X-Windows coders have enjoyed perhaps longer than anyone else. But a lot of this capability existed in NeXT as well.
Recently a very interesting and cool desktop widget engine called Konfabulator was released for Mac OS X. And of course, its interfaces are built in XML. The code that primarily interacts with the GUI is written in Javascript (aka ECMAScript). From JavaScript you can invoke any of the facilities of the OS. The possibilities are staggeringly neat. People have programmed everything from "top" front-ends to action games. PNG is the preferred graphics format for building GUIs due to its powers of translucency. But of course you can independently set the translucency and layering behavior of any widget.
The thing that appeals most to me as a programmer is the systematic reinforcement of the MVC design paradigm at the operating system level. Abstracting the GUI from the code is a good idea and it's good to see MS catching on at last. Earlier attempts at RAD solutions on Windows have always had a kludgy feel, or tied you to a particular framework. Making a modern GUI engine a part of the OS foundation will not only simplify development it ought to eventually lead to a more compact and clean OS in general.
larger church and social groups now refuse to sing them at campfires.
...for fear that there lurks among them a copyright snitch.
"Before we sing this song, Betty, please assure us the ASCAP fees are paid up."
"Are you now, or have you ever been a copyright violator?"
"Good morning kids, instead of US History today we're going to watch a video called 'RIAA Duck and Cover' that will help you understand why you must obey the behavioral rules set forth by our wise capitalist overlords or be hunted down as a criminal."
Tonight's headline: The IP structure is breaking down! The once-powerful barons of IP can be seen running for the hills. Only last week former media magnate Rupert Murdoch wrote a frantic email to Ted Turner in which he asks "What if we're not needed anymore? The very idea of IP has begun to piss people off in a world where drug companies must weigh the value of their secrets over a cost of millions of lives each year. There's no bottom line any more, Ted. Men like us were extinct long ago."
This Christmas give the gift of Book Burning. Copyrighted works from all over the country are being gathered in the Nevada desert for a massive burning in protest of the international intellectual keepaway game. The self-appointed "Wise Council" convened last night to give details. "Having lived too long in a world ruled by Power and trampled on by the wars of Power against Power, we have come together to form an alternative power. We make no claims to history, offer no revolutionary means to topple the capitalists. We only suggest there may be another way to live which accomplishes our great aims yet feeds no alienating system. We represent a direct and simple means. You've seen the armies of lawyers beginning to convene. You know what they claim to protect. But the true coin of their realm is something much more precious: It is the will of mankind."
Using non-open-source software for voting machines is just plain irresponsible. Hard to believe a continent entirely peopled by convicts is so far ahead of our blind and backward political culture.
Hey, I'm a fan of the capitalist ethos as much as the next guy, but when it comes to the interests of the populous it's clearly more responsible to choose open source and open standards. Should we really trust Our Data to invisible source code written by anonymous programmers ensconced in a proprietary bubble?
I guess we shouldn't be so surprised that the elite don't have the interests of the populous at heart. Hmm, maybe there's a worm in the Capitalist apple.... It's time the Open Source Community made it clear that we are an essential element of the free market ecosystem and not some fringe element to be vilified and marginalized.
Slashdot Mirror
Take a look around and see how many American newspapers and other news outlets reported the fact that Colin Powell's presentation to the U.N.S.C. prior to "Operation Iraqi Freedom" was plagiarized from a 12-year-old thesis paper. You'd think this salacious bit of news would have been splattered all over every front page. Instead it appeared in only a few local independent newspapers. It was published almost immediately in the U.K., feeding the groundswell of opposition to the US position. In the US very few people even know about it now! Whenever I hear Monday morning quarterbacks talking about the reasons why the intelligence was bad or why we shouldn't have jumped in without planning, etc., they never bring this glaring bit of bad intelligence up. Either they don't know about it, or they believe it would be blasphemy to disparage the character of Colin Powell. At least Gen. Powell, to his credit, was very much against taking the case he did to the U.N., but in the end he did what a good soldier does.
There are plenty of other things the US has done - and is doing - that continues to be completely assinine. That includes overthrowing Democratically elected governments, continuing to allow the ban on land mines to go unratified, failing to pay billions in dues to the UN, failing to adhere to UN mandates, failing to insist that its allies (notably Israel) fulfill their obligations under UN mandates, locking up Japanese US citizens during WWII, hunting down Communists for thoughtcrimes against capitalism during the McCarthy era, presenting knwon-to-be-faulty-and-old intelligence about Iraq to the UNSC (as Powell did before the war), baldfacedly lying about the situation in Iraq to the American people in order to gain support, using 9/11 as an excuse to expand the war machine and transfer billions in tax revenue to administration cronies....
The people in charge of our country are immoral and megalomaniacal. Plain and simple.
Then the planet gets destroyed and everyone dies - problem solved. You didn't think it was going to last forever did you? ;-)
For as we all know, every time the government has raised the alert level it was quickly followed by a terrorist attack on US soil.
D'oh! Well, shows how much I know at this stage in my Mac programming career! Okay, then. You're officially truthful and informed.
Well, damn, now I want to find out more about these mysterious Cocoa NIBs and see where they have analogs to Carbon NIBs....
Indeed! Someone should use that idea to create a news web site for nerds.
Right. There's just Conservatives and Liberals. Big world you live in, AC.
You're either lying or uninformed.
I just opened a NIB package, and opened all the files in it - including "objects.xib" in BBEdit. Every single one is XML. Have you ever looked at a NIB file? Where are you getting your information?
Limbaugh? Limbaugh? Is that you?
I own 5 Macs, one of which is a 7 year old 8500 upgraded to a G3/400. It still works beautifully, and I've even had Mac OS X on it occasionally, though the 50MHz bus makes it a bit slow for that. It has also had Linux installed on it a few times. Can you tell I use it for tinkering? Currently I keep it around to run Painter on Mac OS 9 so that I can use my old graphics tablet that Wacom doesn't support on the new machines (it's a serial model).
Anyhow, it's a matter of choice to throw away a perfectly useful machine only to buy another one. I'm not one of those people you're describing.
I also happen to be quite a computer afficionado, not one of those that hates computers so gets a Mac. I've been programming computers for 25 years, and have never taken to PCs mainly for aesthetic reasons. The Intel chip architecture was kludgy and hackish back in the days when it was either Intel or 680x0, so I stuck with 680x0 assembler. Of course nowadays the chip architectures have matured somewhat, but then you're still stuck with Microsoft's horrendous APIs and development tools. Thank goodness for CodeWarrior. (Admittedly the APIs for Mac OS 7/8/9 were pretty godawful too, but CodeWarrior always rocked there.)
I own a PC that runs Windows 2000 and Linux, and I don't mind rolling my chair over to it to test my builds (currently working on a cross-platform game with SDL). I have found Windows 2000 a pleasant surprise compared to Windows 98, though I still consider Windows an organizational and aesthetic disaster.
Your posts are pretty strident, so I hardly expect to make a dent in your attitude. But you should be aware that there are some serious and experienced developers working on the Mac by choice.
You're right that the Cube had QA issues. They were resolved, and the Cube got its just desserts in the end. I had the Airport Base Station capacitor problem recently with one of the original ABS models that I got from a computer recycling center here in Portland, OR. I got replacement capacitors and soldered them in myself. It works as good as new - probably better since it has the appropriately rated capacitors now!
I can't say definitively that Apple uses superior components in their motherboards, but they have made that claim, and they do tend to last. And they *did* change battery suppliers for the iPod when it turned out the batteries weren't up to their standards. It would seem that this is the case. Many PC manufacturers use decent components too. Those PCs tend to cost a little more.
I can't say definitively that Apple would tell you to fuck off. I can see why someone who might meet you in person would do so, but my experience with Apple Support has always been very positive. But I've always had an expectation of a good resolution, which tends to sway the outcome towards a positive one. Perhaps if I had a negative expectation I'd get screwed. Who knows? Karma is a mysterious thing.
Having said that, I must admit that none of my computers have ever had problems requiring service from Apple. Nor my iPod neither. Since all my Apple products are currently out of warrantee I'd tend to try fixing things myself before going to a service center anyhow.
One last thing. I think the term "asshat" must have gone out of style recently. Haven't you noticed that it seems kind of silly nowadays, or is it just me who finds it worn?
Well, take it easy.
Because they are uninformed, uneducated, or simply prefer the wrong path due to overriding prejudices and fears.
Since stupidity makes you more susceptible to all of the above, and Conservatives benefit from a stupid populace, the best thing for Conservatives to do is gut the educational system.
Damn that liberal media for pushing its agenda by misrepresenting Al Gore! Damn them!
In the US anything which might undermine or unduly burden the State Religion (capitalism) tends to be swept under. So although our friend should certainly sue for slander and libel he should not hold his breath for a just resolution. Of the people, by the people, and for the people are just cheap words here in Americorp.
Then I can smoke really good inexpensive pot and fileshare all I want. Moreover I wouldn't have to live in this nutso country (USA) as it dumbs-down its populus and careens into a fear-drive death-spiral. Woohoo!
Actually, when you enable distributed compile it causes distccd to load at startup. That means, in case you didn't know, that you don't need to keep XCode running on machines that you use for remote compiling.
Well, ICC compiled with ICC ought to run pretty fast given its optimizations. Now, has anyone considered compiling gcc using ICC to see how much of a performance boost it gets?
But didn't Coppertone standardized SPF over 20 years ago?!
I must agree. I do it all the time.
...It's likely that a visual interface builder tool will write the XML on your behalf. As with most such interface builders it will provide snapping and layout hints to make sure things are well-spaced according to UI guidelines. There should almost never be any need to hand-code an XML description of the GUI. Many coders already build UIs with visual tools, and the use of XML behind the scenes isn't going to make a difference to bad design.
I base my outlook on the fact that Interface Builder (NeXT, Mac OS X) has long used XML for its GUI description files, and there are unlikely to be a dozen coders in the world who ever hand-edit the suckers. And I personally like both the abstraction of the GUI from my application and the use of XML behind the scenes.
XML is well-suited to the kind of data pertinent to a GUI, and it's infinitely open-ended, which is good for any evolving framework. It doesn't hurt that it's human-readable either.
Since NextStep there has been an interface builder tool, and it has evolved with the Mac OS X developer tools into the modern Interface Builder we use today. Interface Builder lets you build GUIs which are encapsulated into NIB files (stands for NeXT Interface Builder). Well, cool, NIB files are XML files. The GUIs you build in IB can be used to front-end applications written in C, C++, Objective-C, AppleScript, - and I believe perl and python as well using bridge modules.
Now, of course, on Mac OS X as in other Unix-like OS's, the GUI you build and script can invoke any of the facilities of the OS, command-line, libraries, frameworks, shell scripts, daemons, processes, and doodads. This is of course the kind of power X-Windows coders have enjoyed perhaps longer than anyone else. But a lot of this capability existed in NeXT as well.
Recently a very interesting and cool desktop widget engine called Konfabulator was released for Mac OS X. And of course, its interfaces are built in XML. The code that primarily interacts with the GUI is written in Javascript (aka ECMAScript). From JavaScript you can invoke any of the facilities of the OS. The possibilities are staggeringly neat. People have programmed everything from "top" front-ends to action games. PNG is the preferred graphics format for building GUIs due to its powers of translucency. But of course you can independently set the translucency and layering behavior of any widget.
The thing that appeals most to me as a programmer is the systematic reinforcement of the MVC design paradigm at the operating system level. Abstracting the GUI from the code is a good idea and it's good to see MS catching on at last. Earlier attempts at RAD solutions on Windows have always had a kludgy feel, or tied you to a particular framework. Making a modern GUI engine a part of the OS foundation will not only simplify development it ought to eventually lead to a more compact and clean OS in general.
...for fear that there lurks among them a copyright snitch.
"Before we sing this song, Betty, please assure us the ASCAP fees are paid up."
"Are you now, or have you ever been a copyright violator?"
"Good morning kids, instead of US History today we're going to watch a video called 'RIAA Duck and Cover' that will help you understand why you must obey the behavioral rules set forth by our wise capitalist overlords or be hunted down as a criminal."
Tonight's headline: The IP structure is breaking down! The once-powerful barons of IP can be seen running for the hills. Only last week former media magnate Rupert Murdoch wrote a frantic email to Ted Turner in which he asks "What if we're not needed anymore? The very idea of IP has begun to piss people off in a world where drug companies must weigh the value of their secrets over a cost of millions of lives each year. There's no bottom line any more, Ted. Men like us were extinct long ago."
This Christmas give the gift of Book Burning. Copyrighted works from all over the country are being gathered in the Nevada desert for a massive burning in protest of the international intellectual keepaway game. The self-appointed "Wise Council" convened last night to give details. "Having lived too long in a world ruled by Power and trampled on by the wars of Power against Power, we have come together to form an alternative power. We make no claims to history, offer no revolutionary means to topple the capitalists. We only suggest there may be another way to live which accomplishes our great aims yet feeds no alienating system. We represent a direct and simple means. You've seen the armies of lawyers beginning to convene. You know what they claim to protect. But the true coin of their realm is something much more precious: It is the will of mankind."
I'll grant you that, if you'll grant me your ignorance of oblique Princess Bride references.
Oops, here's a more poignant link to those convicts I mentioned.
Hey, I'm a fan of the capitalist ethos as much as the next guy, but when it comes to the interests of the populous it's clearly more responsible to choose open source and open standards. Should we really trust Our Data to invisible source code written by anonymous programmers ensconced in a proprietary bubble?
I guess we shouldn't be so surprised that the elite don't have the interests of the populous at heart. Hmm, maybe there's a worm in the Capitalist apple.... It's time the Open Source Community made it clear that we are an essential element of the free market ecosystem and not some fringe element to be vilified and marginalized.
...does Ontogeny Recapitulate Phylogeny in window managers?