> Panther Fast User Switching was borrowed from Microsoft (Jobs even said it at WWDC).
Truth.
> Also, guess where Panther's Finder got Image previews from?
Falsehood. QuickTime for Copeland had image previews built into the finder years before Windows did. However, it'd be tough to prove that MS stole it from Apple, either, since Apple wasn't exactly giving out free tech demos right and left. However, a couple of the books about Copeland that were published did mention it, so maybe it was stolen at that.
Apple eventually issued an official statement on the fellow selling his iTune online. It was something along the lines of, 'We believe he has the right to do this; however, it may not be terribly practical.'
> iTunes' pricing scheme is $1 for a track or $10 for an album. That is cheap. That's what CDs should be priced at. I > praise the prices of iTunes because it offers a reasonable price.
Cheap? Hey, I'm as happy with iTunes as the next guy, but I know that they could easily be selling CDs for $10 each, with all the distribution costs and everything else as well. Easily. And still be making plenty of profit.
$10 per album, downloaded, is not cheap. It's marginally acceptable... that's all.
Help the English language become less precise. Ooh, I love that one. That's one of the funniest things I've heard in ages. AND I SAID IT FIRST.
Dammit, you stole my idea!
Oh... wait... even though people have been saying that for a lot longer than there has been any kind of an audio duplication effort, it looks like they were using it in the same way the person you're so pissed off at was using it. Unless, perhaps, you think that they meant that people were actually breaking open their heads and scooping out some grey matter.
You are trying to artificially narrow the vernacular definition of theft. In fact, in 18th and 19th century literature, a rapist was indeed someone who 'stole your virtue'. Common turn of phrase.
Get OVER it. It may not be 'material theft' but it is, in the broad, vernacular sense of the English word, theft. If you want to redefine the word, you're going to have to go a lot further than Slashdot to do so.
And by the way, I find it amusing and telling that you don't see any difference between illegally copying music and rape. An especially interesting problem, given that you're clearly in favor of being able to copy music freely. Makes me wonder what else you're in favor of.
The people running these groups have never in fact tried to drive heavy-duty trucks in snow. They don't *care* about skill levels. The trucks are owned by the operators, driven by the operators, and insured by the operators. People constantly complain about plowing no matter how well it is done, so complaints (except perhaps by people in authority) aren't worth noting.
It doesn't matter if a job requires skill, if the people who are hiring don't KNOW (or care) that it does.
You're partway right about this, and perhaps the unions do deserve some amount of blame. However, the lion's share has to go to the companies and union-busting consultants, who spend enormous amounts of time and money trying to make unions look as bad as possible so that nobody will unionize.
The book Confessions of a Union Buster is a worthwhile read. You may or may not take what he says as gospel, but there is good documentation to suggest that what he says is goig on, actually is, constantly and with a great deal of malice aforethought.
Robert Reich also has some things to say about this, in various of his books. Some interesting discussion of it in Locked in the Cabinet.
The $300 is almost certainly a 'snow emergency' rate. It's when they want to get every single driver out there. It happens once or twice a year, and generally not for very long... just long enough to get the major roads plowed. Couple of days, maybe?
The rest of the year, the wages are almost certainly between $40 and $60. At least, that's how things worked where I lived, when I was back east.
So, maybe you think that $600 for a 30 minute drive to work, two hours' work, and a 30 minute drive back sounds *wonderful*... but does it sound so nice when it's $100?
Or maybe you just haven't bothered to read all the people saying 'this review is written wrong' and 'all he does is say that it sucks' and 'what does Honor Harrington have to do with a TOTALLY DIFFERENT SERIES OF BOOKS' (as if comparison were an untested, unknown, and suspect form of evaluation).
Or maybe all of those have been modded down so you didn't see them, but the original poster did?
Don't get a hair up your tushie, there were plenty of people bashing the review.
I read the series. I enjoyed parts: the flawed hero thing was fine, and the characters in general were pretty good. But the world was strange and implausible enough, and frankly irritating enough in the way it worked, that I didn't enjoy it much. And the end seemed like gratuitous weirdness. Somewhere it crossed the line between 'I give a shit how this series turns out' and 'pass the beer nuts' (thank you, Cliff). That's a very difficult line to walk when your hero isn't supposed to be terribly sympathetic in the first place, even if your *world* is. But the world was just a little too weird and felt contrived enough that I didn't care about it either.
I put down the last book with a feeling of relief, and some sadness, because I felt it was something that could have been so much more than it had.
Mind you, this is based on having read it 15 years ago or so. (And no, that doesn't mean I was 10 at the time. Not everyone on slashdot is under 30, or even under 50.)
A good bookstore? One which is unable to remove me from its customer lists and has sold my (spiked) email address to dozens of places without my consent? One which charges different amounts to different people based on who they are?
"One of the questions that comes up all the time is: How enthusiastic is our support for UNIX?
Unix was written on our machines and for our machines many years ago. Today, much of UNIX being done is done on our machines. Ten percent of our VAXs are going for UNIX use. UNIX is a simple language, easy to understand, easy to get started with. It's great for students, great for somewhat casual users, and it's great for interchanging programs between different machines. And so, because of its popularity in these markets, we support it. We have good UNIX on VAX and good UNIX on PDP-11s.
It is our belief, however, that serious professional users will run out of things they can do with UNIX. They'll want a real system and will end up doing VMS when they get to be serious about programming.
With UNIX, if you're looking for something, you can easily and quickly check that small manual and find out that it's not there. With VMS, no matter what you look for -- it's literally a five-foot shelf of documentation -- if you look long enough it's there. That's the difference -- the beauty of UNIX is it's simple; and the beauty of VMS is that it's all there."
The question was 'What have you accomplished in congress?' or something similar. So now let's look at his response in that *CONTEXT*.
Did Al Gore take the initiative IN CONGRESS in creating the internet? You bet he did! In fact, Newt Gingrich said that if there had been no Al Gore, there would be no internet as we know it today. (Of course, that was a few years ago. But still.) He was the prime mover behind getting funding for it. And without government funding, the internet would never have grown like it did, and may well still be some strange, escoteric thing that connects a few universities together... and AOL (or *shudder* MSN) could be the 'Information Superhighway'.
So, you can still say that since he didn't explicitly SAY 'in Congress' in response to the question about what he did in congress, he was actually claiming to have invented the entire internet from scratch. But at that point, anyone with an ounce of intellectual honesty would have to admit that this was a 'lie' that was created entirely by the press and was perpetrated on an American public that is instantly ready to believe anything they hear, as long as it's bad.
> However, this (in addition to a weakening dollar) will eventually lead to equilibrium and a return of jobs as > manufacturing is able to afford more workers locally....as Americans become more and more willing to work for less and less money, and more and more people end up below the poverty line, as 'working poor'.
That's the answer, all right. As long as you aren't one of the 'more and more people'.
> And MIT students get a lesson in economics as well.
Indeedy.
> If we were faultless we should not be so much annoyed by the defects of those with whom we associate. -- Shakespear
> When the first generations came out, they were $399 for a 5 gig iPod. Now you can get a 10 gig for $299. Hmm, > twice as much space, better design, and 50 bucks cheaper. That seems like a price drop to me.
> Since I prefer not to pay for biased pseudoscientific drivel, I won't be purchasing the book.
I.e. 'since this says something I disagree with, it must be biased psedoscientific drivel'. If the imbalance had been in the other direction, since it played to your sympathies, you would have bought it.
By all means, don't buy anything that could upset your carefully-crafted ideas about The Way Things Are. It's amazing how far some people can travel without ever leaving the confines of their own heads.
Most security holes aren't newsworthy. Remote root exploits, if they can actually be used, are, no matter what platform you're on. Thankfully, they're also rare, on most platforms.
If someone can screw up your machine if they're sitting at it, or have an account on it, or are on the same (unswitched) subnet, that's annoying. If they can crash your machine remotely, or bring down its network stack, or DOS it to death with just one remote machine, that's really annoying. But when they can take it over, that's when it steps beyond annoying and becomes newsworthy.
1) The program is perfected, so that you end up with a simple, easy-to-use way to remove DRM.
The people are happy, and basically everything from iTunes shows up on the free music channels almost instantly.
2) Apple is forced to sue him under this, and use the much-hated DMCA to do so, because otherwise the record labels will simply shut down the iTMS.
Everyone starts on a huge 'I hate Apple' rampage, blind to the fact that the only other course is for Apple to just close the iTMS.
3) Apple changes the DRM in the iTMS to something more secure. The jury is still quite out on whether it would be more obnoxiously intrusive or not, but if it wasn't, it would almost certainly end up being hacked very quickly as well. (If it was, it would probably just take a little longer.)
Everyone gets really mad at Apple for this, too, no matter where on the spectrum of intrusiveness it actually is.
It's great... Apple has absolutely no choice in the matter, so we can beat up on them *in advance*! Let the hate-fest begin!
...that you're perfect, and have never done anything ill-informed, spiteful, purely accidental, or just plain stupid. Therefore, you can tell people not to fuck up in the first place, because clearly the rest of us just aren't trying hard enough.
The rest of us, sadly, aren't interested in trying hard enough, especially if it results in as much difficulty as you seem to have in extracting your cranium from the depths of your large intestine.
That said, I do agree that two weeks isn't an irrational amount of time for this. If it had been two months, though, I would say that they were, in fact, being irresponsible, because they said they were doing something, and then they didn't actually do it, and in fact damaged someone's personal life and potentially their business for making one simple, easy-to-make mistake.
At some point, if you volunteer to undertake a project, and then in the course of doing so you dick someone over in an easily-prevented manner, you are acting unethically. Doesn't matter that you volunteered: if your actions can screw up someone else's life, you have the obligation to be careful of them.
I try to avoid killing pets in the road, if I can do so safely. It's certainly not illegal to run over a cat, but it's certainly not nice. The argument that 'they shouldn't have let fluffy escape out the window that their nine-year-old accidentally left open' does not, somehow, cause me to decide not to (gently) step on the brake.
I know, I know, I'm the anti-libertarian, right? Saying that we actually have some sort of obligations not to actively screw over our fellow man? God, I'm a pinko commie symp! Shoot me now! Or something.
At least Oracle has real, decent, non-brain-dead installers for Windows.
They have a Solaris programming team, who writes the Solaris installers when they find time, and then ports everything to linux.
They have a dedicated Windows porting team for the database, and another (small) one for the installer.
That's why you can install Oracle on basically any version of windows with very little fuss, and on one or two versions of Linux by beating yourself about the head with a hammer. Metaphorically, of course.
I shudder to think of what the MacOS X version is going to look like... because it's almost certainly going to be a straight port of the Linux one, written when the Solaris developers have a few free minutes...
Slashdot Mirror
> Panther Fast User Switching was borrowed from Microsoft (Jobs even said it at WWDC).
Truth.
> Also, guess where Panther's Finder got Image previews from?
Falsehood. QuickTime for Copeland had image previews built into the finder years before Windows did. However, it'd be tough to prove that MS stole it from Apple, either, since Apple wasn't exactly giving out free tech demos right and left. However, a couple of the books about Copeland that were published did mention it, so maybe it was stolen at that.
-fred
Apple eventually issued an official statement on the fellow selling his iTune online. It was something along the lines of, 'We believe he has the right to do this; however, it may not be terribly practical.'
-fred
> iTunes' pricing scheme is $1 for a track or $10 for an album. That is cheap. That's what CDs should be priced at. I
> praise the prices of iTunes because it offers a reasonable price.
Cheap? Hey, I'm as happy with iTunes as the next guy, but I know that they could easily be selling CDs for $10 each, with all the distribution costs and everything else as well. Easily. And still be making plenty of profit.
$10 per album, downloaded, is not cheap. It's marginally acceptable... that's all.
-fred
...where do you think Kool-Aid is made these days?
-fred
Help the English language become less precise. Ooh, I love that one. That's one of the funniest things I've heard in ages. AND I SAID IT FIRST.
Dammit, you stole my idea!
Oh... wait... even though people have been saying that for a lot longer than there has been any kind of an audio duplication effort, it looks like they were using it in the same way the person you're so pissed off at was using it. Unless, perhaps, you think that they meant that people were actually breaking open their heads and scooping out some grey matter.
You are trying to artificially narrow the vernacular definition of theft. In fact, in 18th and 19th century literature, a rapist was indeed someone who 'stole your virtue'. Common turn of phrase.
Get OVER it. It may not be 'material theft' but it is, in the broad, vernacular sense of the English word, theft. If you want to redefine the word, you're going to have to go a lot further than Slashdot to do so.
And by the way, I find it amusing and telling that you don't see any difference between illegally copying music and rape. An especially interesting problem, given that you're clearly in favor of being able to copy music freely. Makes me wonder what else you're in favor of.
-fred
The people running these groups have never in fact tried to drive heavy-duty trucks in snow. They don't *care* about skill levels. The trucks are owned by the operators, driven by the operators, and insured by the operators. People constantly complain about plowing no matter how well it is done, so complaints (except perhaps by people in authority) aren't worth noting.
It doesn't matter if a job requires skill, if the people who are hiring don't KNOW (or care) that it does.
-fred
You're partway right about this, and perhaps the unions do deserve some amount of blame. However, the lion's share has to go to the companies and union-busting consultants, who spend enormous amounts of time and money trying to make unions look as bad as possible so that nobody will unionize.
The book Confessions of a Union Buster is a worthwhile read. You may or may not take what he says as gospel, but there is good documentation to suggest that what he says is goig on, actually is, constantly and with a great deal of malice aforethought.
Robert Reich also has some things to say about this, in various of his books. Some interesting discussion of it in Locked in the Cabinet.
-fred
The $300 is almost certainly a 'snow emergency' rate. It's when they want to get every single driver out there. It happens once or twice a year, and generally not for very long... just long enough to get the major roads plowed. Couple of days, maybe?
The rest of the year, the wages are almost certainly between $40 and $60. At least, that's how things worked where I lived, when I was back east.
So, maybe you think that $600 for a 30 minute drive to work, two hours' work, and a 30 minute drive back sounds *wonderful*... but does it sound so nice when it's $100?
-fred
Or maybe you just haven't bothered to read all the people saying 'this review is written wrong' and 'all he does is say that it sucks' and 'what does Honor Harrington have to do with a TOTALLY DIFFERENT SERIES OF BOOKS' (as if comparison were an untested, unknown, and suspect form of evaluation).
Or maybe all of those have been modded down so you didn't see them, but the original poster did?
Don't get a hair up your tushie, there were plenty of people bashing the review.
-fred
I read the series. I enjoyed parts: the flawed hero thing was fine, and the characters in general were pretty good. But the world was strange and implausible enough, and frankly irritating enough in the way it worked, that I didn't enjoy it much. And the end seemed like gratuitous weirdness. Somewhere it crossed the line between 'I give a shit how this series turns out' and 'pass the beer nuts' (thank you, Cliff). That's a very difficult line to walk when your hero isn't supposed to be terribly sympathetic in the first place, even if your *world* is. But the world was just a little too weird and felt contrived enough that I didn't care about it either.
I put down the last book with a feeling of relief, and some sadness, because I felt it was something that could have been so much more than it had.
Mind you, this is based on having read it 15 years ago or so. (And no, that doesn't mean I was 10 at the time. Not everyone on slashdot is under 30, or even under 50.)
-fred
A good bookstore? One which is unable to remove me from its customer lists and has sold my (spiked) email address to dozens of places without my consent? One which charges different amounts to different people based on who they are?
Good old Amazon.
Try Powell's Books: www.powells.com
-fred
UNIX versus VMS
"One of the questions that comes up all the time is: How enthusiastic is our support for UNIX?
Unix was written on our machines and for our machines many years ago. Today, much of UNIX being done is done on our machines. Ten percent of our VAXs are going for UNIX use. UNIX is a simple language, easy to understand, easy to get started with. It's great for students, great for somewhat casual users, and it's great for interchanging programs between different machines. And so, because of its popularity in these markets, we support it. We have good UNIX on VAX and good UNIX on PDP-11s.
It is our belief, however, that serious professional users will run out of things they can do with UNIX. They'll want a real system and will end up doing VMS when they get to be serious about programming.
With UNIX, if you're looking for something, you can easily and quickly check that small manual and find out that it's not there. With VMS, no matter what you look for -- it's literally a five-foot shelf of documentation -- if you look long enough it's there. That's the difference -- the beauty of UNIX is it's simple; and the beauty of VMS is that it's all there."
-- Ken Olsen, President of DEC, 1984
You got a good ways. Now you just have to think.
The question was 'What have you accomplished in congress?' or something similar. So now let's look at his response in that *CONTEXT*.
Did Al Gore take the initiative IN CONGRESS in creating the internet? You bet he did! In fact, Newt Gingrich said that if there had been no Al Gore, there would be no internet as we know it today. (Of course, that was a few years ago. But still.) He was the prime mover behind getting funding for it. And without government funding, the internet would never have grown like it did, and may well still be some strange, escoteric thing that connects a few universities together... and AOL (or *shudder* MSN) could be the 'Information Superhighway'.
So, you can still say that since he didn't explicitly SAY 'in Congress' in response to the question about what he did in congress, he was actually claiming to have invented the entire internet from scratch. But at that point, anyone with an ounce of intellectual honesty would have to admit that this was a 'lie' that was created entirely by the press and was perpetrated on an American public that is instantly ready to believe anything they hear, as long as it's bad.
-fred
> However, this (in addition to a weakening dollar) will eventually lead to equilibrium and a return of jobs as ...as Americans become more and more willing to work for less and less money, and more and more people end up below the poverty line, as 'working poor'.
> manufacturing is able to afford more workers locally.
That's the answer, all right. As long as you aren't one of the 'more and more people'.
> And MIT students get a lesson in economics as well.
Indeedy.
> If we were faultless we should not be so much annoyed by the defects of those with whom we associate. -- Shakespear
Shakespeare. Shakespeare. Shakespeare.
-fred
> When the first generations came out, they were $399 for a 5 gig iPod. Now you can get a 10 gig for $299. Hmm,
> twice as much space, better design, and 50 bucks cheaper. That seems like a price drop to me.
$399 - $299 = $50?
-fred
> Since I prefer not to pay for biased pseudoscientific drivel, I won't be purchasing the book.
I.e. 'since this says something I disagree with, it must be biased psedoscientific drivel'. If the imbalance had been in the other direction, since it played to your sympathies, you would have bought it.
By all means, don't buy anything that could upset your carefully-crafted ideas about The Way Things Are. It's amazing how far some people can travel without ever leaving the confines of their own heads.
-fred
It's another word for 'condom-using', silly.
Those wacky Republicans have got to make perfectly normal things sound bad. 'That cock-smocking bastard! Doesn't he know that every sperm is sacred?'
-fred
Most security holes aren't newsworthy. Remote root exploits, if they can actually be used, are, no matter what platform you're on. Thankfully, they're also rare, on most platforms.
If someone can screw up your machine if they're sitting at it, or have an account on it, or are on the same (unswitched) subnet, that's annoying. If they can crash your machine remotely, or bring down its network stack, or DOS it to death with just one remote machine, that's really annoying. But when they can take it over, that's when it steps beyond annoying and becomes newsworthy.
-fred
You were complaining that 'xxxx.exe' was being used by porn sites. Get it?
-fred
Ayn Rand is like the Nazis.
The Nazis breathed air. Ayn Rand breathed air.
The Nazis wrote books. Ayn Rand wrote books.
The Nazis were quite successful at promoting their agenda. Ayn Rand was quite successful at promoting her agenda.
The Nazis were batfuck crazy. Ayn Rand... well, you get the idea.
-fred
1) The program is perfected, so that you end up with a simple, easy-to-use way to remove DRM.
The people are happy, and basically everything from iTunes shows up on the free music channels almost instantly.
2) Apple is forced to sue him under this, and use the much-hated DMCA to do so, because otherwise the record labels will simply shut down the iTMS.
Everyone starts on a huge 'I hate Apple' rampage, blind to the fact that the only other course is for Apple to just close the iTMS.
3) Apple changes the DRM in the iTMS to something more secure. The jury is still quite out on whether it would be more obnoxiously intrusive or not, but if it wasn't, it would almost certainly end up being hacked very quickly as well. (If it was, it would probably just take a little longer.)
Everyone gets really mad at Apple for this, too, no matter where on the spectrum of intrusiveness it actually is.
It's great... Apple has absolutely no choice in the matter, so we can beat up on them *in advance*! Let the hate-fest begin!
-fred
> And since when is 50% cheaper "not a whole lot less"?
Since shipping and tax makes it $70, and then you add in the hassle of having to install it yourself?
(The Apple offer includes shipping, I'm not sure if 'repairs' are taxable.)
-fred
Quote: We haven't talked to a single user who has said they're using [open source] because it's better.
And thus, by extension, if YOU say open source software is better, we won't talk to you either.
-fred
...that you're perfect, and have never done anything ill-informed, spiteful, purely accidental, or just plain stupid. Therefore, you can tell people not to fuck up in the first place, because clearly the rest of us just aren't trying hard enough.
The rest of us, sadly, aren't interested in trying hard enough, especially if it results in as much difficulty as you seem to have in extracting your cranium from the depths of your large intestine.
That said, I do agree that two weeks isn't an irrational amount of time for this. If it had been two months, though, I would say that they were, in fact, being irresponsible, because they said they were doing something, and then they didn't actually do it, and in fact damaged someone's personal life and potentially their business for making one simple, easy-to-make mistake.
At some point, if you volunteer to undertake a project, and then in the course of doing so you dick someone over in an easily-prevented manner, you are acting unethically. Doesn't matter that you volunteered: if your actions can screw up someone else's life, you have the obligation to be careful of them.
I try to avoid killing pets in the road, if I can do so safely. It's certainly not illegal to run over a cat, but it's certainly not nice. The argument that 'they shouldn't have let fluffy escape out the window that their nine-year-old accidentally left open' does not, somehow, cause me to decide not to (gently) step on the brake.
I know, I know, I'm the anti-libertarian, right? Saying that we actually have some sort of obligations not to actively screw over our fellow man? God, I'm a pinko commie symp! Shoot me now! Or something.
Sheesh.
-fred
At least Oracle has real, decent, non-brain-dead installers for Windows.
They have a Solaris programming team, who writes the Solaris installers when they find time, and then ports everything to linux.
They have a dedicated Windows porting team for the database, and another (small) one for the installer.
That's why you can install Oracle on basically any version of windows with very little fuss, and on one or two versions of Linux by beating yourself about the head with a hammer. Metaphorically, of course.
I shudder to think of what the MacOS X version is going to look like... because it's almost certainly going to be a straight port of the Linux one, written when the Solaris developers have a few free minutes...
-fred