You say 30% like it's a crazy number. I'll happily give Apple a 30% cut in exchange for not having to run my own shopping cart, manage my own DRM scheme, manage my own update architecture, manage my own review and rating architecture, and for free placement in their own widely distributed app store that has trained users to pay for good software rather than expect it for free.
I can understand why a developer would avoid the app store, because it has its flaws--sometimes capricious curating, and a poor design for sorting through the volume of apps they have--but it's not crazy at all to pay 30% to be in there. By comparison, Steam takes 40%.
After awhile, you really gotta wonder what people like you really do with their machines (if anything).
What do you think I do with my machine?
SSD's are TINY by modern standard.
Okay. Still not seeing why that's an issue. Your anecdotal evidence with a Mac Mini does not trump my experience with my Macbook where I've never come close to filling it up. Nor does it present a compelling argument that people who will buy an Air for non-heavy computing should care that its Flash memory instead of a platter.
Clearly you don't use your Mac for anything remotely interesting.
Not sure how you got there from my question, since you don't know what I do with my Mac.
Just "casual" use of a Mac can easily cause a much larger drive to be completely consumed.
I've never had that problem, and my Mac is one of my main work computers.
Flash is still an overpriced technology for what it's being used here. It's also woefully insufficient for any number of likely casual use cases.
Yeah, well, this is what I'm trying to ask about, a little detail in the criticism. Why is it woefully insufficient? Is it slower than SSDs? Does Apple's volume of Flash memory consumption bring the price down sufficiently?
It's not that I mind a discussion full of shit-flinging monkeys, but it gets a little unsatisfying after a while.
If I find it too restrictive, I just won't buy it. If I don't find it too restrictive, I'll happily use it for the benefits it offers. Why this should cause so many tears of nerd-rage is beyond me.
This is one of the bizarre things about/.: rivers of nerd rage when a company does something they don't like, and cries of "you didn't stop it from happening!" But anything we might do to stop it from happening would have others rivers of nerd rage uncorked because we're getting in the way of our Galtian overlords making boatloads of money.
The existing Airs are sluggish compared to the rest of the Macbook line, and this model refresh isn't going after that because the people who buy Airs don't run CPU intensive apps like Xcode. The typical use case for the air is 1) college students with rich parents in humanities programs, 2) executives who travel a lot, and 3) gadget mavens who want to show off. In other words, browser, email, and maybe iLife. Coders typically jump straight to the 15" Pro models just for the bigger screen.
It's always been a prestige model and, secondarily, a testbed for miniaturization of components. I'm kind of impressed at the all-Flash storage, actually.
And for a huge number of consumers, they'll be quite happy with the locked down device with Apple as gatekeeper. They'll have everything they need or want, will pay a bit extra for that, and won't even notice the/. crowd wailing and gnashing its collective teeth over Jobs' "war on openness".
When will/. readers acknowledge that they're not the entire fucking market for computing devices?
Apparently there's a steady rain of nutrition from above, basically. Feces, skin cells, plant material, cast off crap... they live in a constant of surface particles wending their way down, much of which is edible to them.
How did their species evolve to make sure they were born with the same internal pressure?
You don't decide to be born at the same internal pressure as your parents, any that you, the poster, decided to be born as an oxygen breathing mammal. Fish at that pressure necessarily breed more fish at the same pressure--any who leave the safe pressure zone die rather than breed. How did you decide not to be born underwater? Your parents avoiding death by drowning in order to give birth to you.
C++, perhaps more than most other languages, but like C, requires that much of the discipline reside in the programmer. I think if you read the responses here from C++ defenders, you'll note a common theme, which is that they are productive and not masochistic largely because they internalize the discipline to use it well. This includes learning idioms and best practices like RAII, but generally it involves acting like a highly professional programmer.
One of my hobbies is watercolor painting. More than oil or acrylics, watercolor is a delicate medium that's unforgiving of mistakes, but mastering the material is very rewarding, allowing one to achieve certain visual effects that are unavailable in other mediums. This is how I feel about C++. Like golf, it takes a long time to learn to do well, and there's always some way to improve; but doing it well is tremendously fulfilling, both in terms of results and the feeling that discipline and commitment paid off.
That's awesome how I wrote an indignant post defending both C++ as an expert language, and myself as at least a competent and serious programmer, and then blew closing the em tag.
No, you're calling anyone who enjoys it wrongheaded. You state categorically that anyone who likes it is a member of the sets described by points 1 to 5, none of which are complimentary or admit of any sincere and technically knowledgeable appreciation for the language. You basically say that a good programmer couldn't possibly like C++.
I haven't done much C++, but what I've done I've enjoyed a lot. It's a language that both demands and rewards precision in thought in a way that no scripting language or garbage collected language ever can. It's an expert tool with no beginner's mode, and is that much more rewarding when you do something right.
To deal with your points:
1. I've programmed non-trivially in Perl, C, Java, C#, and Python. 2. Not sure what this means. 3. All of my C++ was for personal projects that never saw the light of day. They were pursued entirely for my own experience. 4. I enjoyed C++ while I was working with it, not afterwards. 5. See point 4.
A flat tax is conceptually egalitarian, but I don't think so in practice. It's nice and neat to say "everyone pays the same proportion of taxes", but I wouldn't call it egalitarian for someone earning $10,000/year to pay the same proportion as someone earning $10,000,000/year. It's the same basic issue as with a national sales tax: When you're poor you pretty much have to spend your entire income, but when you're rich you have plenty of extra to invest or save or whatever. Limiting the egalitarian-ness of the tax to their income figure ignores the lack of egalitarian standing in how their income is spent and affects their life.
Most flat tax advocates recognize this and provide a set of basic exemptions to poor people, but then you're essentially back to a progressive tax where the rich pay a larger proportion of their income than many of those with less money.
The basic problem with taxation schemes is that they unavoidably implement social policy. There's no such thing as a value-neutral tax--someone is always paying more and someone else is always paying less, and the person paying less is either being protected from an onerous burden or encouraged to use their money elsewhere somehow.
So, I think a progressive tax is most egalitarian when it's set up well to minimize the tax burden on everyone and provide for the greatest class mobility.
Or you and your heirs will do the smart thing and let the principle sit there untouched, living off the interest and paying only a fraction of the national sales tax that would be paid if an amount equivalent to the principle were spent by those living at the poverty line.
Okay, here's a non-FUD based criticism: sales taxes are heavily regressive. The less money you have, the more of your income is spent on taxable goods. The rich, the people who are most able to afford to pay taxes, pay an even smaller portion of their income in taxes than they would under a flat tax scheme. Contrary to the bill's stated intention of increasing class mobility, a national sales tax responsible for bearing the entire cost of the federal government would just dig the poverty trench deeper. The worse off you are now, you'll be even more worse off under a national sales tax plan. This plan would do more to obliterate the middle class and widen the gap between rich and poor than any other taxation plan available.
you'd still be making a "hasty generalization" fallacy. It's asinine to say that because a government, which has existed for several hundred years and is composed of millions of individuals, once had a group within it which did X, therefore Y was most likely carried out by similar individuals in a similar organization of the same government.
If you'd started with this, I would have agreed that my statement was logically unsupportable hyperbole. Instead, you wanted to be an e-peen waving prick, which is why it took us this long to get here. Next time, try starting here.
Yes it is, to this extent: The FBI had, prior to the Kent State shootings, a history of routinely violating the civil rights of Americans, up to and including the use of informants as instigators to illegal activities. This is settled history; there's nothing conspiracy minded about it. In the particular case of the Kent State shootings, an FBI informer was present, and there's some pretty good evidence that he did things that contributed to the shooting.
You're right that this doesn't prove that the FBI instigated the Kent State shootings. But put the argument in a general form:
1. X is a sufficient cause for Y 2. F has a history of X 3. Y happened. Therefore, it's reasonable to ask if F Xed.
Where's the fallacy in that? You're arguing that, when someone has a history of something, and that something occurs again, it's completely illogical to ask that someone if they did it. If I have a history of smashing up my car while drunk, and my car gets smashed up again, you wouldn't ask me if I was drunk again?
Are you just a stubborn fool with nothing better to do, or are you unable to maintain a consistent line of thought for more than 2 minutes?... says the guy who keeps responding.
Yes, if the government decided that it didn't need any tax revenue at all, and just decided to fold up shop and go away, then sure, getting the IRS running again would be a low priority.
Slashdot Mirror
You forgot "and lose more American soldiers than civilians were killed in the initial attack." 3,000 dead from 9/11, 4,400+ combat deaths in Iraq.
"See here: For every American you kill, we'll waste 1.3 American lives attacking that guy over there! You've been warned!"
I'm smarter than Cindy Osborne because I know how to use paragraph breaks to increase legibility.
You say 30% like it's a crazy number. I'll happily give Apple a 30% cut in exchange for not having to run my own shopping cart, manage my own DRM scheme, manage my own update architecture, manage my own review and rating architecture, and for free placement in their own widely distributed app store that has trained users to pay for good software rather than expect it for free.
I can understand why a developer would avoid the app store, because it has its flaws--sometimes capricious curating, and a poor design for sorting through the volume of apps they have--but it's not crazy at all to pay 30% to be in there. By comparison, Steam takes 40%.
How has Apple screwed developers before?
After awhile, you really gotta wonder what people like you really do with their machines (if anything).
What do you think I do with my machine?
SSD's are TINY by modern standard.
Okay. Still not seeing why that's an issue. Your anecdotal evidence with a Mac Mini does not trump my experience with my Macbook where I've never come close to filling it up. Nor does it present a compelling argument that people who will buy an Air for non-heavy computing should care that its Flash memory instead of a platter.
Clearly you don't use your Mac for anything remotely interesting.
Not sure how you got there from my question, since you don't know what I do with my Mac.
Just "casual" use of a Mac can easily cause a much larger drive to be completely consumed.
I've never had that problem, and my Mac is one of my main work computers.
Flash is still an overpriced technology for what it's being used here. It's also woefully insufficient for any number of likely casual use cases.
Yeah, well, this is what I'm trying to ask about, a little detail in the criticism. Why is it woefully insufficient? Is it slower than SSDs? Does Apple's volume of Flash memory consumption bring the price down sufficiently?
It's not that I mind a discussion full of shit-flinging monkeys, but it gets a little unsatisfying after a while.
Probably. So what?
If I find it too restrictive, I just won't buy it. If I don't find it too restrictive, I'll happily use it for the benefits it offers. Why this should cause so many tears of nerd-rage is beyond me.
How were we supposed to stop it from happening?
This is one of the bizarre things about /.: rivers of nerd rage when a company does something they don't like, and cries of "you didn't stop it from happening!" But anything we might do to stop it from happening would have others rivers of nerd rage uncorked because we're getting in the way of our Galtian overlords making boatloads of money.
What's wrong with all-Flash storage?
The existing Airs are sluggish compared to the rest of the Macbook line, and this model refresh isn't going after that because the people who buy Airs don't run CPU intensive apps like Xcode. The typical use case for the air is 1) college students with rich parents in humanities programs, 2) executives who travel a lot, and 3) gadget mavens who want to show off. In other words, browser, email, and maybe iLife. Coders typically jump straight to the 15" Pro models just for the bigger screen.
It's always been a prestige model and, secondarily, a testbed for miniaturization of components. I'm kind of impressed at the all-Flash storage, actually.
And for a huge number of consumers, they'll be quite happy with the locked down device with Apple as gatekeeper. They'll have everything they need or want, will pay a bit extra for that, and won't even notice the /. crowd wailing and gnashing its collective teeth over Jobs' "war on openness".
When will /. readers acknowledge that they're not the entire fucking market for computing devices?
An empty threat, since you've allowed extensive exposure to Celine Dion for decades now.
What is their food source?
Apparently there's a steady rain of nutrition from above, basically. Feces, skin cells, plant material, cast off crap... they live in a constant of surface particles wending their way down, much of which is edible to them.
How did their species evolve to make sure they were born with the same internal pressure?
You don't decide to be born at the same internal pressure as your parents, any that you, the poster, decided to be born as an oxygen breathing mammal. Fish at that pressure necessarily breed more fish at the same pressure--any who leave the safe pressure zone die rather than breed. How did you decide not to be born underwater? Your parents avoiding death by drowning in order to give birth to you.
C++, perhaps more than most other languages, but like C, requires that much of the discipline reside in the programmer. I think if you read the responses here from C++ defenders, you'll note a common theme, which is that they are productive and not masochistic largely because they internalize the discipline to use it well. This includes learning idioms and best practices like RAII, but generally it involves acting like a highly professional programmer.
One of my hobbies is watercolor painting. More than oil or acrylics, watercolor is a delicate medium that's unforgiving of mistakes, but mastering the material is very rewarding, allowing one to achieve certain visual effects that are unavailable in other mediums. This is how I feel about C++. Like golf, it takes a long time to learn to do well, and there's always some way to improve; but doing it well is tremendously fulfilling, both in terms of results and the feeling that discipline and commitment paid off.
That's not machismo.
That's awesome how I wrote an indignant post defending both C++ as an expert language, and myself as at least a competent and serious programmer, and then blew closing the em tag.
I guess that's my refutation of point 2.
No, you're calling anyone who enjoys it wrongheaded. You state categorically that anyone who likes it is a member of the sets described by points 1 to 5, none of which are complimentary or admit of any sincere and technically knowledgeable appreciation for the language. You basically say that a good programmer couldn't possibly like C++.
I haven't done much C++, but what I've done I've enjoyed a lot. It's a language that both demands and rewards precision in thought in a way that no scripting language or garbage collected language ever can. It's an expert tool with no beginner's mode, and is that much more rewarding when you do something right.
To deal with your points:
1. I've programmed non-trivially in Perl, C, Java, C#, and Python.
2. Not sure what this means.
3. All of my C++ was for personal projects that never saw the light of day. They were pursued entirely for my own experience.
4. I enjoyed C++ while I was working with it, not afterwards.
5. See point 4.
I am only a few weeks in on C++.
Then you're overqualified for public pronouncements about C++ on /. Perhaps you have some trenchant thoughts on f#.
2001 called, it wants its market prediction back.
A flat tax is conceptually egalitarian, but I don't think so in practice. It's nice and neat to say "everyone pays the same proportion of taxes", but I wouldn't call it egalitarian for someone earning $10,000/year to pay the same proportion as someone earning $10,000,000/year. It's the same basic issue as with a national sales tax: When you're poor you pretty much have to spend your entire income, but when you're rich you have plenty of extra to invest or save or whatever. Limiting the egalitarian-ness of the tax to their income figure ignores the lack of egalitarian standing in how their income is spent and affects their life.
Most flat tax advocates recognize this and provide a set of basic exemptions to poor people, but then you're essentially back to a progressive tax where the rich pay a larger proportion of their income than many of those with less money.
The basic problem with taxation schemes is that they unavoidably implement social policy. There's no such thing as a value-neutral tax--someone is always paying more and someone else is always paying less, and the person paying less is either being protected from an onerous burden or encouraged to use their money elsewhere somehow.
So, I think a progressive tax is most egalitarian when it's set up well to minimize the tax burden on everyone and provide for the greatest class mobility.
Or you and your heirs will do the smart thing and let the principle sit there untouched, living off the interest and paying only a fraction of the national sales tax that would be paid if an amount equivalent to the principle were spent by those living at the poverty line.
Okay, here's a non-FUD based criticism: sales taxes are heavily regressive. The less money you have, the more of your income is spent on taxable goods. The rich, the people who are most able to afford to pay taxes, pay an even smaller portion of their income in taxes than they would under a flat tax scheme. Contrary to the bill's stated intention of increasing class mobility, a national sales tax responsible for bearing the entire cost of the federal government would just dig the poverty trench deeper. The worse off you are now, you'll be even more worse off under a national sales tax plan. This plan would do more to obliterate the middle class and widen the gap between rich and poor than any other taxation plan available.
you'd still be making a "hasty generalization" fallacy. It's asinine to say that because a government, which has existed for several hundred years and is composed of millions of individuals, once had a group within it which did X, therefore Y was most likely carried out by similar individuals in a similar organization of the same government.
If you'd started with this, I would have agreed that my statement was logically unsupportable hyperbole. Instead, you wanted to be an e-peen waving prick, which is why it took us this long to get here. Next time, try starting here.
the basis for your argument is past precedent
Yes it is, to this extent: The FBI had, prior to the Kent State shootings, a history of routinely violating the civil rights of Americans, up to and including the use of informants as instigators to illegal activities. This is settled history; there's nothing conspiracy minded about it. In the particular case of the Kent State shootings, an FBI informer was present, and there's some pretty good evidence that he did things that contributed to the shooting.
You're right that this doesn't prove that the FBI instigated the Kent State shootings. But put the argument in a general form:
1. X is a sufficient cause for Y
2. F has a history of X
3. Y happened.
Therefore, it's reasonable to ask if F Xed.
Where's the fallacy in that? You're arguing that, when someone has a history of something, and that something occurs again, it's completely illogical to ask that someone if they did it. If I have a history of smashing up my car while drunk, and my car gets smashed up again, you wouldn't ask me if I was drunk again?
Are you just a stubborn fool with nothing better to do, or are you unable to maintain a consistent line of thought for more than 2 minutes? ... says the guy who keeps responding.
Ah, the bill purports to replace all sources of tax revenue with a national sales tax. Good luck with that.
Yes, if the government decided that it didn't need any tax revenue at all, and just decided to fold up shop and go away, then sure, getting the IRS running again would be a low priority.