I love Safari, and I wouldn't be caught dead without my Leatherman.
I look at it this way: I have a computer. It has lots and lots of useful little tools in it. When I'm sitting in front of it, I can afford to use the right tool for the job. I have a toolbox. It has lots and lots of useful little tools in it. When I have my toolbox with me, I can afford to use the right tool for the job.
When I'm in the dance hall helping the gentleman set up his sound system and a Very Important Screw falls out, and I don't have my toolbox, I get out my Leatherman.
Sadly, what this means is the only time I'd be interested in Opera is when I don't have my computer in front of me. And I don't think they've ported it to my brain yet.
> Apple has a habit of using other peoples code (either GPL stuff or by purchasing the company that > wrote the code) and re-skinning it as a "revolutionary new program by Apple."
God, it's fun reading this stuff.
I do have to wonder if these are the same people saying this who castigated Apple for its terrible 'Not Invented Here' attitude ten years ago.
There are two forces at play here: first, if you take a spectrum of people and have them review an item, and have a 5 star rating system, three stars will always be the least frequently given rating. Why? Because everyone always leans one way or the other, and if they don't lean far, then they just narrow their spectrum.
Second, if you don't care much one way or the other about an item, how likely are you to spend the time to review it.
So don't look at the scores! Read the reviews instead. I frequently do find them useful.
So here is what I would say is the definitive statement on Sosumi:
http://www.spies.com/~greg/resume.html
Do a search for the word, it's near the bottom of the page.
Plus, I believe Apple Records was eventually paid $30 million (not sure about the exact figure) by Apple Computers, in return for allowing Apple Computers free reign in the music business.
Believe me, I was there for one or two of those meetings.
There are legitimate needs for DRM. Protecting music may or not be one of them, but making documents that are Very Hard for anyone who is not authorized to read and copy would be an extremely useful thing in a lot of industries... in fact, any industry where industrial espionage is a problem.
The meetings actually went more like this.
DRM SALES GUY
Hey, we have an unbreakable digital rights amangement system! It's 100% effective. You need to protect your... why are you looking at me like that?
APPLE GUY 100% effective, huh? Then why won't you tell us how it works? We ARE under a nondisclosure agreement. Also, incidentally, we cracked the protection on those two files you sent us last week, so I hope whatever you're plugging now is better.
The answer is, most contracts are in some way transferrable. If your aunt dies and leaves you a computer, its warrantee is transferred to you... in most states it's actually illegal to have it not transfer. If you sign up for three years' prepaid DSL in a house of six college students, and then transfer after the first year, you can (I have) transfer the service over to somone else's name, as long as they're at the same address. If your car comes with 60,000 mile power train protection, it doesn't matter if your car was sold eleven times, you're still entitled to it. (Unless your car has been sold as a salvage vehicle.)
There are non-transferrable contracts, but those have to be scrutinized carefully. For example, the idea a non-transferrable *END-USER* software license has been invalidated by the courts a number of times. Right of first purchase comes with the right to transfer your license to anyone else. (Do you honestly think there would be any way of transferring licenses for MS software if this weren't the case? There is, as long as it wasn't an OEM copy of Windows... and even then you can transfer it as long as you sell the hardware in tandem.)
Here we have a software purchase agreement which is nontransferrable. It's just that this one is for a big company, and so MS can, perhaps, get away with it.
Specifically, if a landlord requires the full rent to be paid for a broken lease, many states have laws requiring him to allow you to sublet the apartment for the remainder of your lease period. If the landlord doesn't want to allow this, there is usually a way to go into binding arbitration or court to have someone settle who pays what to whom.
Even if your state doesn't, you can continue paying the lease and use the space as a second home, for storage, or for whatever you like (as long as you don't trash the place). Microsoft is saying, "You are no longer living there, therefore you cannot use the space but still must pay for the balance of the lease."
Of course, that's a lousy analogy too. But at least it's refutable.
As for the 'it's just business' argument, it's always completely irrefutable if your belief is that business is the highest purpose of human endeavor. If you believe in anything else, it is a useless argument, because all it does is say 'this is legal and therefore it is moral and ethical'.
Microsoft has also been experimenting with licenses that are agreed to when you purchase the computer, stating that you will never run any software other than Windows on it. These fall into a grey area where enforcibility is concerned, but they do raise some interesting questions...
> They never, ever comment about upcoming hardware, so if you for example bought a gen. 2 iMac (the multi-flavor > ones) the day before they released the iMac DV at the same price, you were screwed.
Okay. First, I must admit, I can see how this sort of thing would be annoying.
That said, even if I'm NOT playing devil's advocate, I can't see how the word 'screwed' applies. You paid X amount of money for a computer. Apparently you thought it would be worth it. Is the computer less than you hoped it would be? Does it not do what you wanted it to?
Basically, you're arguing that you're 'screwed' because if you'd waited a week you could have gotten something better for the same amount of money. Well, surprise, that's always true, albeit not usually in such a short-term way. You buy a computer and you use it. And then another computer comes out that's faster for the same amount of money.
Are you 'screwed' when you buy something and then six months later something faster comes out for the same amount of money? How about three months? One month? Is there a magical screwing cut-off date? If so, where? Why?
I submit that you might be annoyed, or even disgruntled, but you're not 'screwed' in any way that really matters. 'Screwed' is what happens when a computer company *does* pre-announce their next big thing. See, for example, Osbourne.
If you want to be certain that this doesn't happen to you, always do one of two things: 1) buy a computer (or piece of software) the week after comes out. Even the ill-fated Mac IIvx lasted more than two months. 2) buy a computer (or piece of software) the week after ITS SUCCESSOR comes out. You're a step behind the technology curve, true, but you're also spending half the money (or less), and you're still not surprised by the announcement.
'Do some homework' is the cry of those who cannot document their own assertions. Basically, you say 'go look at the evidence for yourself.' If the person you're arguing doesn't find any, you have plenty of recourse: you can tell them they didn't look hard enough, or in the right places, without actually telling them where to look. Or you can say that they're lying, or that they're stupid, because they didn't find what is so obviously there. Or you can, after they spend a bunch of time looking, steer them in the direction of a biased source.
And if they find data that seems to refute what you're saying, you can always claim that it's biased. Not actually giving out your own sources keeps you safe from claims of bias, even if your source does happen to be the 'People in favor of whatever it is you're arguing in favor of.'
Saying something is common knowledge, and that it has been documented to death, may or may not be true. Even if it is true, it's not helpful, because it depends entirely on who documented it. Give me your sources.
But you can't or won't, so you accuse me of having my head in my arse. Because it's easier than backing up your assertions.
The global cooling thing was a brief footnote in history, which is currently being blown up to insanely huge proportions by a bunch of people who are determined to discredit the global warming theory for their own, usually economic, purposes. And people like you have bought into it hook, line, and sinker, because it dovetails neatly into your own preconceptions... and so it must be true.
See? I can make unsupported assertions, too. And they're no more useful than yours.
> You honestly believe we could eliminate every single bacteria in the world?
Clearly you didn't actually read my post, or you wouldn't have bothered to ask this. I said we could destroy all life larger than one cell in size. I still believe this to be true.
And an asteroid impact bears absolutely no resemblance to what would happen if you impregnated the atmosphere of the world with extremely radioactive compounds with a very long half-life. Dramatic climate change is a bear, but it's nothing compared to an environment that takes self-organizing life forms and corrupts the information that they need to pass on to their progeny. I think it conceivable, though not obvious, that we could in fact wipe out the vast majority of unicellular life as well.
> Within a few million years, you'd never know humans existed.
We could fix this, too. Take a radioactive substance with a really long half-life... on the order of 20 or 30 million years. Spread it far and wide through the atmosphere.
Here are some good candidates: http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/cr eation/isotop e_list.html
> Could we fuck it up to the point that humans could survive in it?
Um... I'm pretty sure it's fucked up to that extent already.:-)
> But nature doesn't revolve around man
Yes, but at some point you have to decide what IS important. If you don't think that life is important, then that's fine, because nothing we're going to do is going to have much effect on *geology* in the short term. If you think that us destroying everything except for unicellular life is a negligable change, then that's clearly true from the universe's perspective and clearly not true from the earth's perspecitve. The biosphere is thin, but it has had an extremely large impact on the composition of the surface of the earth.
You clearly don't even believe we could have that much of an effect. But I submit to you that, given the even distribution of a few million tons of highly radioactive materials with a really long half-life over the surface of the world (and, of course, in the oceans as well), we could probably prevent any even modestly complex self-replicating organisms from existing for an extremely long time. If you don't know enough biology to understand why this is, the conversation stops here, I'm afraid, because I'm not going to take the time to explain it to you.
Suffice it to say that the human capacity for destruction is nearly as great as the human capacity to ignore facts that we don't want to acknowledge.
If we were (in some bizarre, science-fiction way) to produce a hundred kilograms of antimatter, would you still claim that anything we could possibly do would have any real impact on the earth? E = 200 * c^2 = 1.8 * 10^19 kg * meters^2 / seconds^2 = 1.8 * 10^19 joules.
This would be enough (by a couple of orders of magnitude, in fact) to bring the moon down onto the earth. Would you consider that 'serious'?
I've called up Apple when something like this happened to me. If you talk to the right people and have a serious issue, they'll frequently do something about your problem.
Now, I'm not sure that 'I bought this software that will work fine for me just before it was upgraded and I want the new version for free' is a serious issue. After all, what exactly is it about the new versions that you *have* to have, and why did you buy the old versions if they wouldn't do what you needed them to?
> Old versions of QT for Windows contain a partial implementation of the Macintosh Toolbox
Replace 'old' with 'new' and you're right. Everything from QT3 onwards on Windows is basically built on top of QTML, the QuickTime Meta Layer, which is a close-to-complete version of the Classic Mac Toolbox.
It was actually complete enough that you could get code to run by changing less than 5%. (For example, (Mac call) InvalRect doesn't work, so you had to translate your coordinates into Windows coordinates and use (Windows call) InvalidateRect instead.)
Plus, Carbon is the bastard child of an implementation of QTML for Linux, Solaris, and Irix. So he's not as far off as you might think he is.
This kind of thing is frequently due to people not having a clue how to exercise and driving their hearts way too hard. Pick up a heart rate monitor for less than $100... Polar is a good brand. Set it for your optimum heart rate speed (the watches come with some relatively good guidelines) and stay in them. Wham, suddenly you're only a tiny bit more likely to die of a heart attack while exercising than you are while getting up from the sofa to get some chips.
> or if the gasoline engines in the buses were replaced with propane-burning engines (I don't know if this would really > work, but you get the idea)
I visited State College, Pennsylvania recently for a seminar. This is an insanely conservative, whacko-Republican place in the geographic center of Pennsylvania, far, far away from anywhere rational. The students are just as whacko-conservative as the locals are, from what I could see.
All of the busses there are natural-gas-only. Quiet, too.
> Dude, don't expect him to do all your homework for you
On the contrary, if someone makes an accusation, I want it to be backed up by credible and complete evidence. If it isn't, that is a sign that there is something wrong with the assumption.
>...Fact is fairly undisputed...
Undisputed by those people who deny that global warming exists.
Believe it or not, I lived through the 70s. I heard very little to nothing about global cooling and predicted ice ages. Now there is a large general consensus that there is a global warming trend and that it is at least partly caused by human activity. Funny, I have heard of this one.
The point being, if you want to win a public debate with someone, it's a lot easier to do if you can just find something embarrassing they did in the past and wave it in the air, rather than actually trying to refute what they're saying. Because after all, you might actually be wrong, but that doesn't matter if you can destroy your opponent without recourse to the actual facts.
Slashdot Mirror
> * company notices clients asking for something
> * company adds it to their product
> * clients start asking for something else
Those ungrateful bastards!
(Well, it was either that or add 4- PROFIT!)
-fred
I love Safari, and I wouldn't be caught dead without my Leatherman.
I look at it this way: I have a computer. It has lots and lots of useful little tools in it. When I'm sitting in front of it, I can afford to use the right tool for the job. I have a toolbox. It has lots and lots of useful little tools in it. When I have my toolbox with me, I can afford to use the right tool for the job.
When I'm in the dance hall helping the gentleman set up his sound system and a Very Important Screw falls out, and I don't have my toolbox, I get out my Leatherman.
Sadly, what this means is the only time I'd be interested in Opera is when I don't have my computer in front of me. And I don't think they've ported it to my brain yet.
-fred
> Apple has a habit of using other peoples code (either GPL stuff or by purchasing the company that
> wrote the code) and re-skinning it as a "revolutionary new program by Apple."
God, it's fun reading this stuff.
I do have to wonder if these are the same people saying this who castigated Apple for its terrible 'Not Invented Here' attitude ten years ago.
How dare they? How dare they WHICH?
-fred
I can "voila" anytime I want, and you can't stop me.
Voila voila voilavoilavoila voila voila!
I can viola too, but that's more strictly regulated.
-fred
Ooh! I like this idea. Not sure how I'd even BEGIN to write it, though.
-fred
You are no longer allowed to use the hardware if you install another OS onto the machine.
People should read more carefully before they post.
-fred
Gametab detects what browser you're using and doesn't allow you to view their site if it isn't IE, Netscape, or Opera.
Just blanks it out. I tried it with Safari and a couple of others.
Loverly.
-fred
Then you deserve what you get.
There are two forces at play here: first, if you take a spectrum of people and have them review an item, and have a 5 star rating system, three stars will always be the least frequently given rating. Why? Because everyone always leans one way or the other, and if they don't lean far, then they just narrow their spectrum.
Second, if you don't care much one way or the other about an item, how likely are you to spend the time to review it.
So don't look at the scores! Read the reviews instead. I frequently do find them useful.
-fred
So here is what I would say is the definitive statement on Sosumi:
http://www.spies.com/~greg/resume.html
Do a search for the word, it's near the bottom of the page.
Plus, I believe Apple Records was eventually paid $30 million (not sure about the exact figure) by Apple Computers, in return for allowing Apple Computers free reign in the music business.
-fred
Believe me, I was there for one or two of those meetings.
There are legitimate needs for DRM. Protecting music may or not be one of them, but making documents that are Very Hard for anyone who is not authorized to read and copy would be an extremely useful thing in a lot of industries... in fact, any industry where industrial espionage is a problem.
The meetings actually went more like this.
DRM SALES GUY
Hey, we have an unbreakable digital rights amangement system! It's 100% effective. You need to protect your... why are you looking at me like that?
APPLE GUY
100% effective, huh? Then why won't you tell us how it works? We ARE under a nondisclosure agreement. Also, incidentally, we cracked the protection on those two files you sent us last week, so I hope whatever you're plugging now is better.
The answer is, most contracts are in some way transferrable. If your aunt dies and leaves you a computer, its warrantee is transferred to you... in most states it's actually illegal to have it not transfer. If you sign up for three years' prepaid DSL in a house of six college students, and then transfer after the first year, you can (I have) transfer the service over to somone else's name, as long as they're at the same address. If your car comes with 60,000 mile power train protection, it doesn't matter if your car was sold eleven times, you're still entitled to it. (Unless your car has been sold as a salvage vehicle.)
There are non-transferrable contracts, but those have to be scrutinized carefully. For example, the idea a non-transferrable *END-USER* software license has been invalidated by the courts a number of times. Right of first purchase comes with the right to transfer your license to anyone else. (Do you honestly think there would be any way of transferring licenses for MS software if this weren't the case? There is, as long as it wasn't an OEM copy of Windows... and even then you can transfer it as long as you sell the hardware in tandem.)
Here we have a software purchase agreement which is nontransferrable. It's just that this one is for a big company, and so MS can, perhaps, get away with it.
-fred
Specifically, if a landlord requires the full rent to be paid for a broken lease, many states have laws requiring him to allow you to sublet the apartment for the remainder of your lease period. If the landlord doesn't want to allow this, there is usually a way to go into binding arbitration or court to have someone settle who pays what to whom.
Even if your state doesn't, you can continue paying the lease and use the space as a second home, for storage, or for whatever you like (as long as you don't trash the place). Microsoft is saying, "You are no longer living there, therefore you cannot use the space but still must pay for the balance of the lease."
Of course, that's a lousy analogy too. But at least it's refutable.
As for the 'it's just business' argument, it's always completely irrefutable if your belief is that business is the highest purpose of human endeavor. If you believe in anything else, it is a useless argument, because all it does is say 'this is legal and therefore it is moral and ethical'.
-fred
Microsoft has also been experimenting with licenses that are agreed to when you purchase the computer, stating that you will never run any software other than Windows on it. These fall into a grey area where enforcibility is concerned, but they do raise some interesting questions...
-fred
A SWIM chip is a floppy controller, which is hardly crucial to running MacOS X.
-fred
> Seems we have the answer for Microsoft, don't we?
So your suggestion would be for MS to keep their source closed (they're going to anyway) and then give out the software, but sell the support?
And this would encourage good, easy-to-use, easy-to-configure, bug-free software with a consistent interface, I bet, right?
-fred
> They never, ever comment about upcoming hardware, so if you for example bought a gen. 2 iMac (the multi-flavor
> ones) the day before they released the iMac DV at the same price, you were screwed.
Okay. First, I must admit, I can see how this sort of thing would be annoying.
That said, even if I'm NOT playing devil's advocate, I can't see how the word 'screwed' applies. You paid X amount of money for a computer. Apparently you thought it would be worth it. Is the computer less than you hoped it would be? Does it not do what you wanted it to?
Basically, you're arguing that you're 'screwed' because if you'd waited a week you could have gotten something better for the same amount of money. Well, surprise, that's always true, albeit not usually in such a short-term way. You buy a computer and you use it. And then another computer comes out that's faster for the same amount of money.
Are you 'screwed' when you buy something and then six months later something faster comes out for the same amount of money? How about three months? One month? Is there a magical screwing cut-off date? If so, where? Why?
I submit that you might be annoyed, or even disgruntled, but you're not 'screwed' in any way that really matters. 'Screwed' is what happens when a computer company *does* pre-announce their next big thing. See, for example, Osbourne.
If you want to be certain that this doesn't happen to you, always do one of two things:
1) buy a computer (or piece of software) the week after comes out. Even the ill-fated Mac IIvx lasted more than two months.
2) buy a computer (or piece of software) the week after ITS SUCCESSOR comes out. You're a step behind the technology curve, true, but you're also spending half the money (or less), and you're still not surprised by the announcement.
-fred
'Do some homework' is the cry of those who cannot document their own assertions. Basically, you say 'go look at the evidence for yourself.' If the person you're arguing doesn't find any, you have plenty of recourse: you can tell them they didn't look hard enough, or in the right places, without actually telling them where to look. Or you can say that they're lying, or that they're stupid, because they didn't find what is so obviously there. Or you can, after they spend a bunch of time looking, steer them in the direction of a biased source.
And if they find data that seems to refute what you're saying, you can always claim that it's biased. Not actually giving out your own sources keeps you safe from claims of bias, even if your source does happen to be the 'People in favor of whatever it is you're arguing in favor of.'
Saying something is common knowledge, and that it has been documented to death, may or may not be true. Even if it is true, it's not helpful, because it depends entirely on who documented it. Give me your sources.
But you can't or won't, so you accuse me of having my head in my arse. Because it's easier than backing up your assertions.
The global cooling thing was a brief footnote in history, which is currently being blown up to insanely huge proportions by a bunch of people who are determined to discredit the global warming theory for their own, usually economic, purposes. And people like you have bought into it hook, line, and sinker, because it dovetails neatly into your own preconceptions... and so it must be true.
See? I can make unsupported assertions, too. And they're no more useful than yours.
-fred
> You honestly believe we could eliminate every single bacteria in the world?
r eation/isotop e_list.html
:-)
Clearly you didn't actually read my post, or you wouldn't have bothered to ask this. I said we could destroy all life larger than one cell in size. I still believe this to be true.
And an asteroid impact bears absolutely no resemblance to what would happen if you impregnated the atmosphere of the world with extremely radioactive compounds with a very long half-life. Dramatic climate change is a bear, but it's nothing compared to an environment that takes self-organizing life forms and corrupts the information that they need to pass on to their progeny. I think it conceivable, though not obvious, that we could in fact wipe out the vast majority of unicellular life as well.
> Within a few million years, you'd never know humans existed.
We could fix this, too. Take a radioactive substance with a really long half-life... on the order of 20 or 30 million years. Spread it far and wide through the atmosphere.
Here are some good candidates:
http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/c
> Could we fuck it up to the point that humans could survive in it?
Um... I'm pretty sure it's fucked up to that extent already.
> But nature doesn't revolve around man
Yes, but at some point you have to decide what IS important. If you don't think that life is important, then that's fine, because nothing we're going to do is going to have much effect on *geology* in the short term. If you think that us destroying everything except for unicellular life is a negligable change, then that's clearly true from the universe's perspective and clearly not true from the earth's perspecitve. The biosphere is thin, but it has had an extremely large impact on the composition of the surface of the earth.
You clearly don't even believe we could have that much of an effect. But I submit to you that, given the even distribution of a few million tons of highly radioactive materials with a really long half-life over the surface of the world (and, of course, in the oceans as well), we could probably prevent any even modestly complex self-replicating organisms from existing for an extremely long time. If you don't know enough biology to understand why this is, the conversation stops here, I'm afraid, because I'm not going to take the time to explain it to you.
Suffice it to say that the human capacity for destruction is nearly as great as the human capacity to ignore facts that we don't want to acknowledge.
If we were (in some bizarre, science-fiction way) to produce a hundred kilograms of antimatter, would you still claim that anything we could possibly do would have any real impact on the earth? E = 200 * c^2 = 1.8 * 10^19 kg * meters^2 / seconds^2 = 1.8 * 10^19 joules.
This would be enough (by a couple of orders of magnitude, in fact) to bring the moon down onto the earth. Would you consider that 'serious'?
-fred
I've called up Apple when something like this happened to me. If you talk to the right people and have a serious issue, they'll frequently do something about your problem.
Now, I'm not sure that 'I bought this software that will work fine for me just before it was upgraded and I want the new version for free' is a serious issue. After all, what exactly is it about the new versions that you *have* to have, and why did you buy the old versions if they wouldn't do what you needed them to?
-fred
> Old versions of QT for Windows contain a partial implementation of the Macintosh Toolbox
Replace 'old' with 'new' and you're right. Everything from QT3 onwards on Windows is basically built on top of QTML, the QuickTime Meta Layer, which is a close-to-complete version of the Classic Mac Toolbox.
It was actually complete enough that you could get code to run by changing less than 5%. (For example, (Mac call) InvalRect doesn't work, so you had to translate your coordinates into Windows coordinates and use (Windows call) InvalidateRect instead.)
Plus, Carbon is the bastard child of an implementation of QTML for Linux, Solaris, and Irix. So he's not as far off as you might think he is.
-fred
1) Toke
2) Post
3) Profit
-fred
This kind of thing is frequently due to people not having a clue how to exercise and driving their hearts way too hard. Pick up a heart rate monitor for less than $100... Polar is a good brand. Set it for your optimum heart rate speed (the watches come with some relatively good guidelines) and stay in them. Wham, suddenly you're only a tiny bit more likely to die of a heart attack while exercising than you are while getting up from the sofa to get some chips.
-fred
Informative? Oh, come ON.
:-)
Plus, I've never heard anyone say that the end was neigh, except possibly a horse.
-fred
> or if the gasoline engines in the buses were replaced with propane-burning engines (I don't know if this would really
> work, but you get the idea)
I visited State College, Pennsylvania recently for a seminar. This is an insanely conservative, whacko-Republican place in the geographic center of Pennsylvania, far, far away from anywhere rational. The students are just as whacko-conservative as the locals are, from what I could see.
All of the busses there are natural-gas-only. Quiet, too.
Go fig.
-fred
> Dude, don't expect him to do all your homework for you
...Fact is fairly undisputed...
On the contrary, if someone makes an accusation, I want it to be backed up by credible and complete evidence. If it isn't, that is a sign that there is something wrong with the assumption.
>
Undisputed by those people who deny that global warming exists.
Believe it or not, I lived through the 70s. I heard very little to nothing about global cooling and predicted ice ages. Now there is a large general consensus that there is a global warming trend and that it is at least partly caused by human activity. Funny, I have heard of this one.
The point being, if you want to win a public debate with someone, it's a lot easier to do if you can just find something embarrassing they did in the past and wave it in the air, rather than actually trying to refute what they're saying. Because after all, you might actually be wrong, but that doesn't matter if you can destroy your opponent without recourse to the actual facts.
-fred