Which is like saying "fluids all flow". Yup. It's just that some, such as ice (which acts as a fluid under certain circumstances) flow a LOT less easily than others. Basically, most fluids compress down until, at a certain pressure (for a given temperature), they become solids. Water doesn't: water is less dense as a solid than it is as a liquid. As compared to most other fluids, water compresses orders of magnitude less easily.
even zero compressibility does not mean fixed pressure.
Clearly not. But just as clearly, this has literally nothing to do with the subject at hand, because the fact that an uncompressable liquid transmits pressure means literally nothing when you're asking if it makes a decent refrigerant.
Which it doesn't. Water is basically the worst there is. Putting pressure on something doesn't raise its temperature. (Except for that amount caused by friction-- exactly the OPPOSITE effect that you want since you don't want to add energy (heat) to the system.) Compressing it (thus causing it to have more energy per unit volume) does. Cooling it while compressed and then decompressing it makes it colder than the air around it.
And water is very close to the worst possible material to do that with.
If you're not in California, you may have never heard of Fry's. It's a huge retail store, designed by scions of a prominent supermarket family, that works basically like a supermarket for computer gear. If it exists, and it has to do with computers or salty snacks, it's probably hiding somewhere in Fry's, waiting patiently for you to discover it.
And, much like a supermarket, the people working there know literally nothing about what they're selling, because they hire at less than $10/hour in Sunnyvale, which doesn't pay RENT in the Silicon Valley.
And, much like a supermarket, the prices aren't actually any better than they are anywhere else except on weekly specials.
And, unlike a supermarket, returning things often requires an hour of standing in line.
And, unlike a supermarket, when you return things (whether you returned it because it was the wrong color or because it set your console stereo system on fire) they re-shrink-wrap it, slap a sticker on it that says 'this was previously bought returned, and has been tested and found to be operational', and put it back on the shelf. Never mind that they don't have any of the equipment to test anything. And they don't even discount it. And sometimes they 'accidentally forget' to put on the sticker.
And, unlike a supermarket, they search you when you leave. And have in one case actually had a security guard prevent someone from leaving until they were searched even though that is illegal. (They were sued, and settled for an undisclosed amount.)
And, unlike most supermarkets, the company has been investigated for illegal union-busting activities several times. Fortunately for the Fry family, they have friends in high places, because firing people for trying to form a union is illegal for *most* companies, even in this day and age.
No insults. No 'you're WRONG (because you got this little nitpicky fact wrong even though everything else was fine.)' No condescending attitude. And you even seem to know what you're talking about!
What's wrong with you? This is slashdot, for pity's sake.
So why post the fact that they are fixed on the front page? By your logic this information is purely of use to Mac owners, and would not be interesting to non-Mac owners, yet it gets on the front page.
Oh yes... yes... agree with me *harder*!
From my original post:
Besides, I frankly think that none of those deserved to be on the main page, including this last one. Basically, they're of interest if you're a Mac user, a Mac admirer, or a Mac basher, and all three of those types already read the apple.slashdot.org section.
That is to say, 'I think posting this on the front page was a mistake because it's not that important.'
Saying they're trying to hide things about the Mac by posting them in the Mac section is silly. Saying that they're trying to hide bad things about the Mac by posting the fixes to those problems on the front page (which automatically lets people know that the problem existed, even if they didn't know before) is logic I am used to from my glue-sniffing comrades of yore. Easy on the recreational substances and the paranoia will fade after a while.
I went this one better (well, maybe... you decide) and set up a PowerMac G4 Cube as my file server. I got one at a reasonable price ($500), installed Mac OS X Server on it (I get it free because I'm an ADC member) and set it up with a 200 gig hard drive. It does web service for my company, file service for the apartment, mail service, DNS, runs a custom chat server, runs backups on all my machines (to an external DVD-RW drive; fortunately the differential backups are small enough that I don't have to replace the disk often)... basically, it does everything. Plus it's small, cute, and literally makes less noise than the external DVD-RW drive I plugged into it, when there ISN'T a disk in it.
I'm currently trying to make it act as a wireless base station: it has a perfectly good Airport card in it, so I might as well. But the damn thing won't play ball! The simple sharing thing that Mac OS X lets you do is absent in X Server, and there's no way to control the card, and thus no way that I can find to establish a network. I can get tantalizingly close: it knows the card is there and will let you tell it to serve PAT and DHCP to it, but it won't set up an actual network. And I can set up a computer-to-computer network, but that automatically forces the IP addresses into the 'self-selected' range, and ignores the settings in the server setup utilities.
> If there can only be one transmitter at a time how in the world do multiple > computers talk to the same base station? All wi-fi cards are transmitters and receivers.
Know anything about Ethernet? Ever heard of a packet collision? Similar thing. That is to say, two computers are broadcasting on the same channel at the same time. They both send packets at the same time, and detect each others' packets. That means there was a collision. So they each wait a random amount of time (measured in milliseconds) and then resend. The chances that the second packets from each will overlap are entirely dependent on how much of the bandwidth is currently being taken up, but on an underutilized network the odds are tiny.
I'm fairly sure that's how wireless networks work as well.
AAC is decoded into a regular digital audio stream and sent to the audio out device. If it's a digital audio out, that sends the digital signal on to the next step. It only gets turned into analog when it hits the sound chip.
You're crediting Slashdot with far, far, FAR too much organizational ability.
Trust me. If Slashdot was trying to hide something, they would post it on the front page, in foot-high green letters. Using the 'flash' tag. By accident.
Besides, I frankly think that none of those deserved to be on the main page, including this last one. Basically, they're of interest if you're a Mac user, a Mac admirer, or a Mac basher, and all three of those types already read the apple.slashdot.org section.
And likewise, if they were trying to keep these things hushed up, why would they have posted them at all? Anyone who has any interest in Apple, pro or con, already reads the Apple section, so it's not like they're being very effectively hidden. And nobody else who saw them on the main page would remember that they saw them fifteen minutes later.
There are plenty of conspiracies out there. Go pick a real one to pick on. For example, if you find out what happened to all my damn missing socks, I'll give you a medal.
> test 2 - "idisk" mounts, but it brings up the new dialog.
That's the fixed part.
> test 4 - terminal launches, and attempts to connect to a remote site - > appears that if it were a malicious site, it would have worked.
A malicious... telnet... site? Er, whee, lookit the pretty birdies.
The telnet: URL handler is *supposed* to open a telnet connection. It doesn't install any code, it doesn't download anything, it doesn't even execute any commands. It just opens a telnet connection.
The issue that is fixed here is having a disk image mount and create a new URI handler, and then a redirect on your web browser launching the application using the new handler.
This doesn't affect telnet handlers, which are already registered and don't run anything on random mounted disk images.
It doesn't affect helpviewer, which has already been patched and fixed. That is, helpviewer can no longer run arbitrary scripts, so the fact that the disk image mounted doesn't make a damn bit of difference.
Basically, don't post warnings about things you have no clue about.
[Fnord:/Users] fred% ls -Fal (snippity) drwxr-xr-x 4 fred fred 136 5 Nov 2003.fred/ drwx------ 69 fred fred 2346 2 Jun 17:02 fred/ (snippity) [Fnord:/Users] fred% ls -Fal.fred (snippity) -rwxr--r-- 1 fred fred 7476502528 3 Jun 16:17 fred.sparseimage*
So, basically, in your/Users directory, for every person with FileVault turned on, there are two things. - A link of some kind to/Volumes/.com.apple.FileVault/username - A directory called.username
In the directory called.username is an encrypted sparse disk image called 'username.sparseimage'. If you copy it before it is mounted (say during boot) or as another user, you are guaranteed to get a good snapshot of your home directory. If you copy it while it's mounted, you may or may not get something usable.
> Lots of "code that you didn't write" runs in your application's process space. I don't see how Apple or the DivX guys or anyone > else are any better or more trustworthy than Unsanity in this regard.
Do you really not see how Apple is better in this regard? It seems unlikely that anyone could be that thick, but I'll give it a go:
Apple uses talented programmers, has a QA department, doesn't allow commits without thorough code reviews (or at least, didn't in my department when I worked there), and tests in a multitude of different environments. Plus they have guidelines for acceptable programming.
People who write 'haxies', by and large, have none of these advantages. Some of them are actively incompetent, but not very many.
> Lots of "code that you didn't write" runs in your application's process space. I don't see how Apple or the DivX guys or anyone > else are any better or more trustworthy than Unsanity in this regard. If a QuickTime plugin causes a crash, disable it.
I can address this one. At Apple, they have a fellow (poor fellow) whose job it is, almost entirely, to sit there taking the bug reports that they get for QuickTime from external testers, developers, and users (via Feedback), and figure out which ones are known bugs, which ones are new bugs, and which ones are bugs caused by third-party products.
Most shareware developers don't have this luxury. (I except groups like Ambrosia, who can at least spread the work around a little.) They have to poke around at every trouble report that they get until they figure out what happened with it, or risk being panned as 'unresponsive'. If the problem is caused by, say, a new version of the MacOS which breaks an API you were depending on (which has happened to me several times), you will typically see the same problem over and over and be able to classify them pretty easily. With 'haxies', it's a guessing game, and not one that I would particularly enjoy.
There's a simple answer, of course. APE adds a thread to every application that it infects. It's trivial to detect this thread and put up a dialog box that says, 'Sorry, this program is not compatible with 'haxies'. Please uninstall APE or disable it for this program.' And then exit. And some people will uninstall APE. And some people will disable it for my application. And some people will decide not to use my software. And some people, people with an attitude like yours, will find some way around my safeguards, and then will still send me crash logs with APE in them and expect me to fix them. And it is they, and only they, whom I will tell to blow me.
If I ever release any of the Cocoa apps that I whipped up for my own use to the general public, that's probably what I'll do. I don't see any compelling reason to release them right now... it would take dozens of hours of polishing, and then some sort of a volunteer beta program, all so that 0.1% of my users can send me $10 and 80% of my users can expect me to fix my bugs for them even though they haven't paid me. (I'm not a big fan of cripple-ware.) Add haxies (which I've run afoul of before, when I was doing contract work) and their ilk to that mix, requiring me to fix OTHER PEOPLE'S BUGS for free, and you'll probably never see my apps out there. They work for me, and that's all I need.
> Yes, being a developer is hard. Sometimes you have to debug problems caused by other people's code. Sometimes new > versions of the OS break your app. How dare those users upgrade their OS! How dare they install software that runs in > your process space! Sorry, but that's the right of the user.
It is the right of the user to do whatever he damn well pleases with an app he bought, aside from giving away copies or reselling them for profit. (Well, it isn't, in the US, but I agree that broadly speaking it probably should be.) It is the right of the developer not to have to support it if the user uses it in a way that makes such support impossible.
> Otherwise, it's still chugging along, like a double decker bus packed into a sports car body....that big six-wheeler scarlet-painted London transport diesel-engined 97-horsepower omnibus?
I got an AlBook with the white-spots-on-screen problem. (I got it because they had it for $300 off at the Apple store, because of the screen... they told me I could send it in for repair but not bring it back for the money-back guarantee, which suited me fine.)
I called Apple up a couple months later and told them I had to send them my laptop to fix the screen, and it had also (a few times, maybe one time in ten) turned itself off when I unplugged the DVI cable. The next day I got the box. Two weeks later I got a call saying, 'Uh, we don't have your computer yet, are you sure you sent it?' Well, er, actually, I hadn't been able to live without it for long enough to send it in. But it was nice of them to call.
I eventually took a friday and a monday off. On thursday evening at 5:30 I dropped the box off at an Airborne Express location and went home. On monday at 10 AM I got a call from one of my coworkers asking if I wanted to come in and pick up my laptop. So they got it on Friday around noon (according to the tracking number) and sent it back out on Friday sometime later in the day. And not only was the screen flawless, but it has never turned itself off when disconnecting the DVI connector since.
Got to admit, as hard as I am to impress, that impressed me.
> I would LOVE to see the prices hiked on all the Big-Five tracks, while the indie tracks > stay at a nice, cheap 99 cents. Then let the free market do its job. Let the Big-Five > loose MORE sales, and cry foul again.
Because, as we all know, everything is a commodity, including music, because all music is really the same and therefore people should only buy the cheapest music.
And it's 'lose'. 'Lose'. God, what is it with people these days? 'Loose,' as in 'your head has a loose screw' and 'lose' as in 'don't lose that screw'. I can understand the confusion between 'its' and 'it's', that is an irrationality of English speech anyway, but I'm totally at a loss to explain people tossing in the extra 'o' there. Does it look prettier that way?
Sorry. Grammar nazis are universally abhorred, and I haven't been getting my RDA of abhorrance lately.
>...and as I've stated over and over again now, Apple does not pull a profit > from iTunes so they are not profitting $0.10 a song.
Sadly, your stating it over and over again now doesn't make it any more correct. (And it is probably substantially less correct than it was the first time you said it, actually.)
At least, according to Mr. Jobs, the iTunes Music Store made a small profit last quarter. C.f.: http://www.macobserver.com/article/2004/04/ 29.9.sh tml
Or perhaps you'd like to argue with him about what constitutes a profit?
Okay, here we go. There are two important facts about apple genetics. The first is, apple trees do not 'breed true' to their subspecies. That is to say, take an apple seed from a green granny smith apple tree. Pollenate it with pollen from another green granny smith apple tree. Plant it, water it, take care of it (for several years) until it matures enough to bear fruit. What are the chances that it produces green granny smith apples?
Answer: roughly the same chances that you have of winning the lottery with one ticket. I don't remember the exact number but it is in the range of one in a million or worse.
What are the chances that the apples are any more edible than your average crab-apple tree's apples? I don't remember this number either, but I believe it was between one in a thousand and one in ten thousand. Which, incidentally, are pretty much the same odds as you have for any of the seeds from the crab apple tree in your back yard producing a tree that yields desirable fruit.
So where do all these green granny smiths actually come from? They're basically clones (grown from cuttings) of the One Original Green Granny Smith tree.
So how does a person make new apple variants? Simple... he plants a WHOLE LOT of seeds, grows them to fruit-bearing, and checks each one to see if the apples taste good. If he gets something really good, then he stands to make a boodle. If he's not very lucky, every single one of the trees produces crab apples or otherwise inedible variants and he ends up with several acres of cordwood. And he tries again.
Now, to say that patents aren't the way to reward someone that plants ten thousand apple trees is a perfectly valid argument. But it's hard to protect your intellectual property with just a contract... if you license someone to grow the 'big boy' apple, which you invented, and he sells it to seventy people, thus breaking his contract, you can sue him, but the seventy people not only can grow the apples legally but can resell the cuttings and you can't do anything about it. Unless, of course, you have a patent.
Basically, it requires a lot of work, a lot of money, and a lot of luck to make a new apple variety, and without a patent it is hard to protect it when you're done. It differs from other patentable endeavors not a lot in this way.
> Interesting. I was not aware that Apple had done that (are you sure it was QuickTime > proper, and not merely quicktime streaming server, which doesn't need Carbon?).
Quite sure. In fact, this was in the days before Carbon, and the entire QuickTime MetaLayer (which contains the vast majority of the old Classic (and now Carbon) APIs in it) got ported to UNIX.
And, well, if you want to trace the provenance of Carbon, and how it got ported to UNIX (Mac OS X) so quickly when people decided they didn't want to rewrite all their programs in Cocoa for Rhapsody... look no further than the UNIX port of QTML.
You know, I would honestly have tried to defend my position here, but it's clearly not worth it. When 10% of the language is, ah, 'idiomatic English', it doesn't really make me want to respond. Except maybe to agree that you are, in fact, a 'goddam' idiot.
As for it running on WINE, I'm surprised. Not to hear that it does, but that you say it runs 'just fine' when I've never heard a single other person who didn't complain about QuickTime on WINE.
Basically, you come off like a sophomore in college who has four programming courses under his belt and is eager to show off. Be civil and maybe I'll explain things to you.
Umm... you said it was a G3. You said it was 900 mHz. And you said it was a Powerbook, not an iBook.
That indicates one of three things to me: 1) This is a processor-upgraded Frankenmac. In which case, well, you pays your money, you takes your chance. 2) You don't know what kind of machine you have. 3) This is a troll.
Because, as anyone with even a nodding familiarity with recent Mac models knows, the Powerbooks have been G4 since machine speeds were hovering around the 400-500 mHz mark. Apple never released an 800 mHz Powerbook.
Slashdot Mirror
Which it doesn't. Water is basically the worst there is. Putting pressure on something doesn't raise its temperature. (Except for that amount caused by friction-- exactly the OPPOSITE effect that you want since you don't want to add energy (heat) to the system.) Compressing it (thus causing it to have more energy per unit volume) does. Cooling it while compressed and then decompressing it makes it colder than the air around it.
And water is very close to the worst possible material to do that with.
-fred
And, much like a supermarket, the prices aren't actually any better than they are anywhere else except on weekly specials.
And, unlike a supermarket, returning things often requires an hour of standing in line.
And, unlike a supermarket, when you return things (whether you returned it because it was the wrong color or because it set your console stereo system on fire) they re-shrink-wrap it, slap a sticker on it that says 'this was previously bought returned, and has been tested and found to be operational', and put it back on the shelf. Never mind that they don't have any of the equipment to test anything. And they don't even discount it. And sometimes they 'accidentally forget' to put on the sticker.
And, unlike a supermarket, they search you when you leave. And have in one case actually had a security guard prevent someone from leaving until they were searched even though that is illegal. (They were sued, and settled for an undisclosed amount.)
And, unlike most supermarkets, the company has been investigated for illegal union-busting activities several times. Fortunately for the Fry family, they have friends in high places, because firing people for trying to form a union is illegal for *most* companies, even in this day and age.
-fred
No insults. No 'you're WRONG (because you got this little nitpicky fact wrong even though everything else was fine.)' No condescending attitude. And you even seem to know what you're talking about!
What's wrong with you? This is slashdot, for pity's sake.
-fred
No, that's a 'kick me' sign.
Keep looking.
-fred
From my original post:That is to say, 'I think posting this on the front page was a mistake because it's not that important.'
Saying they're trying to hide things about the Mac by posting them in the Mac section is silly. Saying that they're trying to hide bad things about the Mac by posting the fixes to those problems on the front page (which automatically lets people know that the problem existed, even if they didn't know before) is logic I am used to from my glue-sniffing comrades of yore. Easy on the recreational substances and the paranoia will fade after a while.
-fred
But that exploit has already been fixed.
-fred
I went this one better (well, maybe... you decide) and set up a PowerMac G4 Cube as my file server. I got one at a reasonable price ($500), installed Mac OS X Server on it (I get it free because I'm an ADC member) and set it up with a 200 gig hard drive. It does web service for my company, file service for the apartment, mail service, DNS, runs a custom chat server, runs backups on all my machines (to an external DVD-RW drive; fortunately the differential backups are small enough that I don't have to replace the disk often)... basically, it does everything. Plus it's small, cute, and literally makes less noise than the external DVD-RW drive I plugged into it, when there ISN'T a disk in it.
I'm currently trying to make it act as a wireless base station: it has a perfectly good Airport card in it, so I might as well. But the damn thing won't play ball! The simple sharing thing that Mac OS X lets you do is absent in X Server, and there's no way to control the card, and thus no way that I can find to establish a network. I can get tantalizingly close: it knows the card is there and will let you tell it to serve PAT and DHCP to it, but it won't set up an actual network. And I can set up a computer-to-computer network, but that automatically forces the IP addresses into the 'self-selected' range, and ignores the settings in the server setup utilities.
Grr. Frustrating.
-fred
> If there can only be one transmitter at a time how in the world do multiple
> computers talk to the same base station? All wi-fi cards are transmitters and receivers.
Know anything about Ethernet? Ever heard of a packet collision? Similar thing. That is to say, two computers are broadcasting on the same channel at the same time. They both send packets at the same time, and detect each others' packets. That means there was a collision. So they each wait a random amount of time (measured in milliseconds) and then resend. The chances that the second packets from each will overlap are entirely dependent on how much of the bandwidth is currently being taken up, but on an underutilized network the odds are tiny.
I'm fairly sure that's how wireless networks work as well.
-fred
You're missing something.
AAC is decoded into a regular digital audio stream and sent to the audio out device. If it's a digital audio out, that sends the digital signal on to the next step. It only gets turned into analog when it hits the sound chip.
-fred
You're crediting Slashdot with far, far, FAR too much organizational ability.
Trust me. If Slashdot was trying to hide something, they would post it on the front page, in foot-high green letters. Using the 'flash' tag. By accident.
Besides, I frankly think that none of those deserved to be on the main page, including this last one. Basically, they're of interest if you're a Mac user, a Mac admirer, or a Mac basher, and all three of those types already read the apple.slashdot.org section.
And likewise, if they were trying to keep these things hushed up, why would they have posted them at all? Anyone who has any interest in Apple, pro or con, already reads the Apple section, so it's not like they're being very effectively hidden. And nobody else who saw them on the main page would remember that they saw them fifteen minutes later.
There are plenty of conspiracies out there. Go pick a real one to pick on. For example, if you find out what happened to all my damn missing socks, I'll give you a medal.
-fred
> test 2 - "idisk" mounts, but it brings up the new dialog.
That's the fixed part.
> test 4 - terminal launches, and attempts to connect to a remote site -
> appears that if it were a malicious site, it would have worked.
A malicious... telnet... site? Er, whee, lookit the pretty birdies.
The telnet: URL handler is *supposed* to open a telnet connection. It doesn't install any code, it doesn't download anything, it doesn't even execute any commands. It just opens a telnet connection.
The issue that is fixed here is having a disk image mount and create a new URI handler, and then a redirect on your web browser launching the application using the new handler.
This doesn't affect telnet handlers, which are already registered and don't run anything on random mounted disk images.
It doesn't affect helpviewer, which has already been patched and fixed. That is, helpviewer can no longer run arbitrary scripts, so the fact that the disk image mounted doesn't make a damn bit of difference.
Basically, don't post warnings about things you have no clue about.
-fred
Take a look in your /Users directory:
.fred/ .fred
/Users directory, for every person with FileVault turned on, there are two things. /Volumes/.com.apple.FileVault/username .username
.username is an encrypted sparse disk image called 'username.sparseimage'. If you copy it before it is mounted (say during boot) or as another user, you are guaranteed to get a good snapshot of your home directory. If you copy it while it's mounted, you may or may not get something usable.
[Fnord:/Users] fred% ls -Fal
(snippity)
drwxr-xr-x 4 fred fred 136 5 Nov 2003
drwx------ 69 fred fred 2346 2 Jun 17:02 fred/
(snippity)
[Fnord:/Users] fred% ls -Fal
(snippity)
-rwxr--r-- 1 fred fred 7476502528 3 Jun 16:17 fred.sparseimage*
So, basically, in your
- A link of some kind to
- A directory called
In the directory called
Have fun.
-fred
Tried to delete the first bit of this but apparently I missed. So I end up responding to the same part of a post twice. Teach me not to proofread.
Well, what I wish it would teach me is to get a sufficient amount of sleep. But that doesn't seem likely right at the moment.
-fred
> Lots of "code that you didn't write" runs in your application's process space. I don't see how Apple or the DivX guys or anyone
> else are any better or more trustworthy than Unsanity in this regard.
Do you really not see how Apple is better in this regard? It seems unlikely that anyone could be that thick, but I'll give it a go:
Apple uses talented programmers, has a QA department, doesn't allow commits without thorough code reviews (or at least, didn't in my department when I worked there), and tests in a multitude of different environments. Plus they have guidelines for acceptable programming.
People who write 'haxies', by and large, have none of these advantages. Some of them are actively incompetent, but not very many.
> Lots of "code that you didn't write" runs in your application's process space. I don't see how Apple or the DivX guys or anyone
> else are any better or more trustworthy than Unsanity in this regard. If a QuickTime plugin causes a crash, disable it.
I can address this one. At Apple, they have a fellow (poor fellow) whose job it is, almost entirely, to sit there taking the bug reports that they get for QuickTime from external testers, developers, and users (via Feedback), and figure out which ones are known bugs, which ones are new bugs, and which ones are bugs caused by third-party products.
Most shareware developers don't have this luxury. (I except groups like Ambrosia, who can at least spread the work around a little.) They have to poke around at every trouble report that they get until they figure out what happened with it, or risk being panned as 'unresponsive'. If the problem is caused by, say, a new version of the MacOS which breaks an API you were depending on (which has happened to me several times), you will typically see the same problem over and over and be able to classify them pretty easily. With 'haxies', it's a guessing game, and not one that I would particularly enjoy.
There's a simple answer, of course. APE adds a thread to every application that it infects. It's trivial to detect this thread and put up a dialog box that says, 'Sorry, this program is not compatible with 'haxies'. Please uninstall APE or disable it for this program.' And then exit. And some people will uninstall APE. And some people will disable it for my application. And some people will decide not to use my software. And some people, people with an attitude like yours, will find some way around my safeguards, and then will still send me crash logs with APE in them and expect me to fix them. And it is they, and only they, whom I will tell to blow me.
If I ever release any of the Cocoa apps that I whipped up for my own use to the general public, that's probably what I'll do. I don't see any compelling reason to release them right now... it would take dozens of hours of polishing, and then some sort of a volunteer beta program, all so that 0.1% of my users can send me $10 and 80% of my users can expect me to fix my bugs for them even though they haven't paid me. (I'm not a big fan of cripple-ware.) Add haxies (which I've run afoul of before, when I was doing contract work) and their ilk to that mix, requiring me to fix OTHER PEOPLE'S BUGS for free, and you'll probably never see my apps out there. They work for me, and that's all I need.
> Yes, being a developer is hard. Sometimes you have to debug problems caused by other people's code. Sometimes new
> versions of the OS break your app. How dare those users upgrade their OS! How dare they install software that runs in
> your process space! Sorry, but that's the right of the user.
It is the right of the user to do whatever he damn well pleases with an app he bought, aside from giving away copies or reselling them for profit. (Well, it isn't, in the US, but I agree that broadly speaking it probably should be.) It is the right of the developer not to have to support it if the user uses it in a way that makes such support impossible.
> Otherwise, it's still chugging along, like a double decker bus packed into a sports car body. ...that big six-wheeler scarlet-painted London transport diesel-engined 97-horsepower omnibus?
p po/transp.h tml )
(Hold very tight, ting-ting!)
(From Flanders & Swann's 'Transport of Delight')
http://www.iankitching.me.uk/humour/hi
-fred
I've got a set I'm not using.
I guarantee that they'll cost you a lot less than the Apple official part.
-fred
I got an AlBook with the white-spots-on-screen problem. (I got it because they had it for $300 off at the Apple store, because of the screen... they told me I could send it in for repair but not bring it back for the money-back guarantee, which suited me fine.)
I called Apple up a couple months later and told them I had to send them my laptop to fix the screen, and it had also (a few times, maybe one time in ten) turned itself off when I unplugged the DVI cable. The next day I got the box. Two weeks later I got a call saying, 'Uh, we don't have your computer yet, are you sure you sent it?' Well, er, actually, I hadn't been able to live without it for long enough to send it in. But it was nice of them to call.
I eventually took a friday and a monday off. On thursday evening at 5:30 I dropped the box off at an Airborne Express location and went home. On monday at 10 AM I got a call from one of my coworkers asking if I wanted to come in and pick up my laptop. So they got it on Friday around noon (according to the tracking number) and sent it back out on Friday sometime later in the day. And not only was the screen flawless, but it has never turned itself off when disconnecting the DVI connector since.
Got to admit, as hard as I am to impress, that impressed me.
-fred
Speak for yourself!
Personally, I quite like the sex toys once in a while.
-fred
> I would LOVE to see the prices hiked on all the Big-Five tracks, while the indie tracks
> stay at a nice, cheap 99 cents. Then let the free market do its job. Let the Big-Five
> loose MORE sales, and cry foul again.
Because, as we all know, everything is a commodity, including music, because all music is really the same and therefore people should only buy the cheapest music.
And it's 'lose'. 'Lose'. God, what is it with people these days? 'Loose,' as in 'your head has a loose screw' and 'lose' as in 'don't lose that screw'. I can understand the confusion between 'its' and 'it's', that is an irrationality of English speech anyway, but I'm totally at a loss to explain people tossing in the extra 'o' there. Does it look prettier that way?
Sorry. Grammar nazis are universally abhorred, and I haven't been getting my RDA of abhorrance lately.
Cheers.
-fred
> ...and as I've stated over and over again now, Apple does not pull a profit
/ 29.9.sh tml
> from iTunes so they are not profitting $0.10 a song.
Sadly, your stating it over and over again now doesn't make it any more correct. (And it is probably substantially less correct than it was the first time you said it, actually.)
At least, according to Mr. Jobs, the iTunes Music Store made a small profit last quarter. C.f.:
http://www.macobserver.com/article/2004/04
Or perhaps you'd like to argue with him about what constitutes a profit?
-fred
Do I have to be the expert on EVERYTHING?
Okay, here we go. There are two important facts about apple genetics. The first is, apple trees do not 'breed true' to their subspecies. That is to say, take an apple seed from a green granny smith apple tree. Pollenate it with pollen from another green granny smith apple tree. Plant it, water it, take care of it (for several years) until it matures enough to bear fruit. What are the chances that it produces green granny smith apples?
Answer: roughly the same chances that you have of winning the lottery with one ticket. I don't remember the exact number but it is in the range of one in a million or worse.
What are the chances that the apples are any more edible than your average crab-apple tree's apples? I don't remember this number either, but I believe it was between one in a thousand and one in ten thousand. Which, incidentally, are pretty much the same odds as you have for any of the seeds from the crab apple tree in your back yard producing a tree that yields desirable fruit.
So where do all these green granny smiths actually come from? They're basically clones (grown from cuttings) of the One Original Green Granny Smith tree.
So how does a person make new apple variants? Simple... he plants a WHOLE LOT of seeds, grows them to fruit-bearing, and checks each one to see if the apples taste good. If he gets something really good, then he stands to make a boodle. If he's not very lucky, every single one of the trees produces crab apples or otherwise inedible variants and he ends up with several acres of cordwood. And he tries again.
Now, to say that patents aren't the way to reward someone that plants ten thousand apple trees is a perfectly valid argument. But it's hard to protect your intellectual property with just a contract... if you license someone to grow the 'big boy' apple, which you invented, and he sells it to seventy people, thus breaking his contract, you can sue him, but the seventy people not only can grow the apples legally but can resell the cuttings and you can't do anything about it. Unless, of course, you have a patent.
Basically, it requires a lot of work, a lot of money, and a lot of luck to make a new apple variety, and without a patent it is hard to protect it when you're done. It differs from other patentable endeavors not a lot in this way.
-fred
> Interesting. I was not aware that Apple had done that (are you sure it was QuickTime
> proper, and not merely quicktime streaming server, which doesn't need Carbon?).
Quite sure. In fact, this was in the days before Carbon, and the entire QuickTime MetaLayer (which contains the vast majority of the old Classic (and now Carbon) APIs in it) got ported to UNIX.
And, well, if you want to trace the provenance of Carbon, and how it got ported to UNIX (Mac OS X) so quickly when people decided they didn't want to rewrite all their programs in Cocoa for Rhapsody... look no further than the UNIX port of QTML.
-fred
You know, I would honestly have tried to defend my position here, but it's clearly not worth it. When 10% of the language is, ah, 'idiomatic English', it doesn't really make me want to respond. Except maybe to agree that you are, in fact, a 'goddam' idiot.
As for it running on WINE, I'm surprised. Not to hear that it does, but that you say it runs 'just fine' when I've never heard a single other person who didn't complain about QuickTime on WINE.
Basically, you come off like a sophomore in college who has four programming courses under his belt and is eager to show off. Be civil and maybe I'll explain things to you.
-fred
Er. Pays to proofread.
-fred
Umm... you said it was a G3. You said it was 900 mHz. And you said it was a Powerbook, not an iBook.
That indicates one of three things to me:
1) This is a processor-upgraded Frankenmac. In which case, well, you pays your money, you takes your chance.
2) You don't know what kind of machine you have.
3) This is a troll.
Because, as anyone with even a nodding familiarity with recent Mac models knows, the Powerbooks have been G4 since machine speeds were hovering around the 400-500 mHz mark. Apple never released an 800 mHz Powerbook.
Keep trying, though!
-fred