Specifically, I work at a small software house that writes exclusively in java. Our product is a piece of server software, quite large, runs on multiple machines, etc. Now, I won't say that GC isn't nice, but I will say this: it took us over three months to find settings that kept java from seizing up for over three minutes once every half hour or so for full GC, when it's under heavy load. When Java 1.5 came out, all those settings failed and we had to try again. (They're still failed; one of the hidden settings we depended upon has been taken out of 1.5, or at least appears to have no effect when used.) When that happens, our servers get out of sync and we had to write an entire new section of code to handle the fact that the servers regularly go away for minutes at a time. One solution, it turns out, is to load up the machine with 4 gigs of RAM, but we're hesitant to suggest this because even Oracle doesn't require 4 gigs of RAM to run. Another solution could be requiring multiple servers and failover setups... that would be awfully popular.
I agree that situations like this are rare, but they aren't unknown. If we had a choice, it's possible we would, in fact, redo this whole mess in Java Minus GC, despite the headaches. (Unlikely, but possible. I sure know a lot of our customers would like us to.)
These have been definitively explained about six times, each time exactly the same way. And then everyone apparently forgets what the explanation was last time, and/or a bunch of people say 'nooo, it COULDN'T be headlights, because that's not a cool enough explanation!' and we go back into the same roll-around again. My science writing prof in college, lo these many years ago, was part of the first or second team to go and sniff it out with an actual PhD in optics and all sorts of funky equipment, and he wrote up an article for Science News and a big brassy Popular Science article on it. (If I could remember his name I'd include it here, but it's, ah, been a while.)
I wish people would just give it up. They're not mysterious any more.
From the buyer's perspective, however, Apple's 99-cents-for-everything model isn't perfect. Isn't 99 cents too much to pay for music that appeals to just a few people?
Erm? Last I heard, typically, things that are mass-produced in enormous quantity tend to be less expensive than 'boutique' items, not more. If you have a half-assed boy band that you have to pay a million dollars to, and recording and PR fees are another couple million, and thirty million people want to buy a copy of their smash hit album, 'We're Boys And We Are A Band So Pay Us Money', you only have to charge ten cents per person to break even. If you have to pay the Cambridge Singers plus the Berlin Philharmonic $3 million to make an album, and only 300,000 copies are sold, then you have to charge $10 per album to break even.
I like folk music. I typically pay much more per album than someone who can buy their CDs at WalMart (oops, I mean CostCo) because I have to buy them at full SRP at specialty stores.
And now suddenly the popular stuff should be more expensive?
I do study history. Many geniuses do indeed have asshole sides to them (e.g. Gandhi) but it's an exaggeration to say that most are assholes.
Would you say? I'm not so sure. Yes, you can come up with counterexamples, and yes, there are plenty. But of the ones that I've read about, I'd have to say that the majority, i.e. more than 50%, were. Maybe we're studying mostly-non-overlapping sets?
What you say is more true than you than you think it is. We would be better served by intelligent, cooperative, conscientious and thoughtful politicians. Political genius is a dangerous thing, because it covers a multitude of policy sins.
Of course, we have to define our terms here. I'd argue that we could absolutely use a genius in politics, but perhaps not a political genius. Sadly, by and large that seems to be the only type who would be attracted to, well, politics.
> Dell is more interested in gaining market-share than in maximizing price.
Which is to say, 'Dell is more interested in driving all of its competitors out of the business of making computers at all, so that they can then jack up their prices as high as they like, than in actually making money.':-)
> Apple makes money by doing everything that is supposed to be suicidally stupid.
Which is to say, 'doing everything in a way different than Microsoft/IBM/Whoever did.' If you assume that there is only ever one way to do anything, you'll never find a new one. And in particular, business orthodoxy should be questioned at every opportunity, because it is often self-fulfilling, and ONLY self-fulfilling.
> I detest Steve Jobs' personality. I think he's a self-centered, manipulative bully.
Ye gods. Have you ever met the man? Detesting someone without ever even meeting them is pretty sad, especially when half of the things you read about him are from people who are desperate to sell books about him or were, at one time or another, fired by him.
And yes, I've met him a few times, very briefly, but hardly enough to tell what I think about his personality. He varied between charming and brusque.
> Bastards who [...] are geniuses, [...] those are rare.
Um, actually, if you study your history, the majority of the people you could actually call geniuses tended to be, in a word, assholes. I mean, yes, they're rare, because any kind of real genius is rare, but the personable genius, who actually has the patience to wait for the rest of humanity to keep up with him, he's the exception rather than the rule. (Or she, of course.)
> I'm just grateful he's not in politics.
Because lord knows the last thing we need in politics is a genius.
I'm actually surprised. I mean, I'm not a big Dell fan, and our failure rate on their laptops at my company approaches 100% per year. (60 laptops, nearly 60 failures per year, though of course not every single one fails... some fail several times.) But as for my (14) rack-mount servers, mostly Dells, I have had only two problems in the last two years: one was on a Dell which had one drive, which I bought myself, fail (fortunately it was in a RAID), and one was on an xServe that had its memory (which I had also bought, from Crucial) die spectacularly. Aside from that, everything has been rock-solid, and I've never even had to use that 8-hour-response-time service contract I got from Dell.
What do you see failing? What are the worst models?
What I was complaining about was their representative's tired use of the old "viral" FUD that has been debunked all over the Net, including right here on/.
Translation: I read an argument here (and perhaps somewhere else) that said that the GPL wasn't viral, and I agree with it. Therefore, this tired old myth has been debunked and everyone who claims otherwise is wrong.
Refutation: You (presumably) understand the GPL, and don't think it's viral. Other people, who also understand it, do. Since 'viral' as it applies to the GPL is a not-well-defined term (as you have so amply demonstrated with your attempts to define it yourself), there is no 'correct' answer to the question 'Is the GPL viral?' It is an opinion question, and you just make yourself sound like an asshole (which I presume, for the sake of charity, that you're actually not) when you try to dress it up like an argument of fact.
I see the GPL as viral because if I had ever released any of my software (or some part thereof) as GPL source and as commercial software as well, and anyone had contributed to my GPL source, I wouldn't have been able to use their contribution without negotiating a separate license (which is certainly not a guaranteed outcome). His code has 'infected' my source tree, and now I have to either cut it out (and then, when I fix the same bug he just did, be accused of stealing his code) or maintain two different versions of my software, one for commercial sales and one for GPL.
The GPL counter-argument is, 'well, yeah, he's letting you use HIS code, so you should do it under HIS rules. He doesn't have to let you use his code, after all, and why should YOU make money off of HIS code when he doesn't?' And, of course, one counter-argument is, 'I'm letting him use my code for free, so why SHOULDN'T I make money off of his code in return?' But of course my real counter-argument is, 'okay, I won't release my source code at all because this is all too much of a pain in the butt, and GPL zealots make my head hurt.'
NOTHING IS HIDDEN IN RIGHT CLICK MENUs ONLY...period
Oo. It's good to know that someone who has used every single piece of software on the face of the earth is here to reassure us that everything's fine.
When, in fact, I know of a couple pieces of MICROSOFT software -- let alon non-MS stuff -- where right-clicking is absolutely necessary. MSSQL 2k, for example. How do I know this? Because I often access a server running MSSQL from a Mac with VNC, and I haven't been able to get the right-mouse-button-alternate to work properly with the VNC client, and thus there are a couple of things I simply can't do. I'm SUPPOSED to be able to do them, but the operative menu has them greyed out when the contextual menu works. Why? Because nobody tests that part of the software because everybody uses the contextual menu.
Another example would be our CRM software, Goldmine, but that's such a stinking pile of crap (making all the MS software we run look good by comparison) that there are a bunch of things you can't do on it no matter how many mouse buttons you have. However, it is also a piece of software that extremely inexperienced computer users (sales guys) often have to use.
And then there are the computer games that do something specific when you right-click. Inexperienced people do play computer games, and on the PC there are quite a lot of them that can't be played without a right mouse button, and I'm not talking about the computer-game-junkies kind. I know of a bridge game that you can't play without the right mouse button. Your grandma might be using that game right now, except she can't figure out how to click.
On the Mac? Not a problem.
But no, you don't care about facts. Since you're too narrowly experienced to have ever seen this problem, you assume it can't exist.
It's nice to know Slashdot hasn't changed during my little break.
I'd have to guess it would be people who got theirs shot off in the war.
-fred
Re:Corporations are not *evil*. They are a busines
on
HP Fires Father of OOP
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The purpose of a corporation is to make money for the shareholders (owners, etc..) within the Law. Period. The purpose of the government is to make Law.
Actually, that would be a 'no.' The purpose of a corporation is to make money for its stakeholders. No 'law' about it. In fact, the joke is that if a corporation can make more money by flouting the law, or outright breaking it, than it can by working within the law, it only has two choices: break the law, or face shareholder lawsuits.
Heck, cigarette companies liked to hundreds of thousands of people about their products, and as a direct result, killed untold numbers of people. Legal? Well, actually, no. Accepted practice? Well, they're being sued now, but you rarely hear the argument that they shouldn't have done it to begin with. Why? Because they've made orders of magnitude more money off of those dead people than they will ever be fined. The shareholders are happy, the executives (who aren't fined themselves, and who have made zillions) are happy... pretty much the only people who aren't happy are the dead and dying people.
Or how about the case where Ford decided that it would be cheaper to be sued successfully by a few hundred families whose loved ones their defective products killed than to issue a recall of their products so those people wouldn't die in the first place. Legal? Well, no. Profitable? Absolutely. Shareholders happy? Well... not once it came out.
No, corporations are not evil. They are absolutely amoral and anethical. They have no business except making money, and no reason to ever obey a law that they can make more money by breaking, assuming you take into account probable consequences of breaking the law. And sometimes even if you don't, since corporations these days aren't very good at taking the long view...
I'm in a similar situation, and I'm less worried about the company going public and then having layoffs than I am about the company being bought by some other, larger company for its intellectual property, and shut down. (Or simply being destroyed by Microsoft, for that matter.)
I believe that's what the owners and the management are aiming for. (The former, not the latter, natch.) The executives will get enough to retire on; I will get enough to tide me over for six months and then I'll be back to eating shoe leather again, until someone decides to hire me for exactly what I was making five years ago, in unadjusted dollars.
Does it sound like I've been there before? You bet!
Well, since HP just basically nuked their retirement benefits package -- they're not going to be putting new hires into it, and current employees will have it frozen at its current level -- he is going to be getting the exact same retirement benefits as he would if he stayed on there another 20 years.
It won't be long before there are no companies left in the US that have actual pension plans. Oddly, when people are talking about how the income of the people in the US is doing, they always discuss 'wage' as if it were god, but if your wages stayed flat (adjusted for inflation) over the last 10 years but you lost all your retirement benefits, you are six kinds of screwed. And I know a LOT of people in that position, and NOBODY in the opposite position.
4. Why on earth do you need to see only the relevant file types? Sometimes OS X will grey out the ones that aren't relevant or not selectable, but what good is it going to do? Afraid of accidentally naming your file a name that already exists?!
Oh, come ON. Most of his points are silly, but at least this one... if I'm opening a file, I don't want to have to scroll through the 300 word documents in there looking for the single mp3, it's just dumb.
I will look at my needs, just as I do every time I buy a computer. I will look at the computer world. If there is something that is significantly cheaper than the Mac which is just as easy to use, set up, and maintain, I'll buy that. (It would have to be significantly cheaper because I do still have quite a bit of software that will run plenty fast with rosetta.)
I suspect that I will find that there is nothing that is as easy to use, maintain, and set up, and I will buy another Mac. Although as always there could be a breakthrough in Linux usability over the next two years.
Speaking personally, I'd have to say that the new Macs will be even better for me, because I have needed to use Virtual PC/VMWare for a couple years now to do testing with. (I have to test some of our stuff on ten different flavors of Windows.) I eventually bought an x86 box for home, just so I could run VMWare FAST. I use it once a month for a day or so. (When I ran VPC on the Mac it was often as much as two days.) Now I won't need to have a separate machine to do that. That makes the new Macs even more of a bargain, for me.
I was driving down the highway, and saw, up ahead, something very strange looking. I slowed down and discovered a very large winnebago... except brownish-black, not white. And with huge flames inside and black smoke pouring out of the roof.
I stopped and stared. Nobody around. Nobody apparent inside, although, well, there wouldn't be, would there? I got out my cell phone and dialed 911.
I got, 'We're sorry, all 911 circuits are busy. Please try your call again later.'
Never mind the fact that PacBell, even before SBC bought them out, closed all of their customer service centers in the entire state of California, so that you have to deal with them over the phone. Two reasons they did this: it is expensive having to actually give people customer service, and much less expensive to make them wait on hold. And if everything is done over the phone, then they can charge $10 for you to pay your bills over the phone if you want to pay them immediately, whereas when they had customer service centers, you could hand them a check.
Of course, you can still do that, at some dubious $20 check cashing place that caters to the 'I found this check on the ground outside a bar' crowd, but I've always been a little leery of doing that. Plus, of course, since the people who work there don't actually work for SBC, they can't answer any questions or anything.
I also use a third-party DSL provider. (dslextreme.com) My experience with them has been quite good, except for the occasions where SBC disconnects their entire northern California network for between 12 and 30 hours (2), disconnects me from DSL by adding some sort of filter and then lies and says that it is my DSL provider's fault (1), or disconnects my DSL because if I want to have a DSL line I need to either buy it through SBC or buy an extra phone line for it, even though that's not only false but illegal (1).
And that's not even touching the fact that they closed up port 135 for their DSL customers. I called them and received the following valuable insights:
Me: Yes, I understand there have been some virus problems, but my client uses port 135 to contact his mail server.
Rep: That can't be true. Port 135 isn't for mail, it's a Microsoft Windows communication port.
Me: Er. Right. Well, look, he needs to use it.
Rep: We recommend using a VPN.
Me: Yes, that's another thing. I tried to set him up with a PPTP VPN.
Rep: PPP isn't a VPN, it's a way of contacting the internet.
Me: Yes, thank you. I tried setting him up with a VPN, and it appears that that port is blocked as well.
...comments by people who don't know what they're talking about.
Do you even know what a content management system is? Did you bother to look at what the Xythos software actually does before commenting on something else's ability to replace it?
Certainly not. If you had, this wouldn't be Slashdot, would it?
I'd say that was one place they've easily sacrified ergonomics for aesthestics
You could say that, but you'd be absolutely 100% ass-backwards.
It may well have been not to your taste, but the mouse had a very definite ergonomic theory behind one, and one that a lot of people liked once they actually wrapped their brains around it. The mouse was designed so that you could do anything you wanted with it with just your fingertips, without putting your entire hand on it. You were supposed to rest your hand on the desk and use your fingertips to move the mouse and click and so forth. Required a lot less wrist movement, which significantly improved the ergonomics for the people who both figured this out and found it comfortable.
A very large subset of the people who bought them didn't figure it out, and of the people who did, not all found it comfortable. And then there were the people who thought it looked dumb, which, frankly, it diiiiid, oh my yes. And then there were those of us who never gave it a fair shake because we liked three-button mice.
All in all, it was a bomb, but absolutely not because of ergonomics; it was designed to be a breakthrough as far as ergonomics were concerned, and tests showed it was. It didn't catch on because of aesthetics, and old habits.
The 2006 Apple machines will likely use an Intel chipset and a regular BIOS.
Apple machines highly unlikely to use a 'regular bios'. If you look around a little you'll see both why, and what they're likely to use instead. (Hint: not Open Firmware.)
In any case, Apple didn't develop their own chipsets (by themselves anyway) on the PPC platform (they used an AIM-developed chipset)
Actually, Apple developed that almost entirely in-house, if I recall correctly, and then farmed it out to manufacture. Just like they basically made up the Altivec extensions themselves, because nobody could be bothered at I or M.
As for the firmware, while EFI is still possible, its unlikely. Apple's current developer documentation all refers to a regular BIOS. If Apple changes things again before the platform is even rolled out, third-party manufacturers are going to be pissed.
Um... actually, I guess I haven't seen that part of the developer documentation, because I haven't seen a reference to bios in it at all, in the quick look I took.
Here's a quote from Dean Reece (Apple Engineering Manager).
Correct. We realize there are lots of folks that need to know what is going to be in the ROMs on these new machines, and what partition scheme will be used. Unfortunately, we are not yet in a position to make that information available, but we will communicate it as soon as we reasonably can. Don't assume that what you see in the transition boxes represents what will be present in the final product.
and
The general consensus I've heard from other developers is: 1) They don't want us to use BIOS 2) If they haven't heard of EFI, they want us to use OF 3) If they have heard of EFI, they want us to use EFI
This is not a statement about what Apple will use, just what I've heard from developers that have an opinion on the subject.
So frankly, given that Apple doesn't typically adopt really rotten, useless, outdated technologies when they switch from one to another, with the exception of course of the x86 (ugh) instruction set, I'm inclined to believe him rather than you.
You take slashdot way too seriously. I have never, ever, LOLed at anything I've read on this damn addictive/useless website.
It seems to me that if he's laughing at something, he's probably not taking it too seriously. You, on the other hand, are chiding someone for laughing at something. Which would mean, ordinarily, that you were taking it too seriously.
The Pentium M kinda makes sense, but I don't think that Apple is going to back out of the 64-bit apps (unless they do it really quietly).
They don't have to: their laptops aren't 64-bit yet. This just means it'll be another year or two (until the Pentium-M line gets bumped up to 64-bit) before they are. And, in fact, it was going to mean that anyway, since IBM basically told Apple to go to hell as soon as they found a bigger buyer for Power chips.
I mean, imagine: you make a chip, and someone actually keeps buying it for years instead of rudely demanding faster ones all the time. Even if the game platforms market were only the same size as Apple's, IBM would choose them every time.
Ok, I'd better stop smoking that Longbottom leaf...
Is that another one o' them 'goatse.cx' references? Naw, or it would be 'Widebottom', I guess.
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree.
Specifically, I work at a small software house that writes exclusively in java. Our product is a piece of server software, quite large, runs on multiple machines, etc. Now, I won't say that GC isn't nice, but I will say this: it took us over three months to find settings that kept java from seizing up for over three minutes once every half hour or so for full GC, when it's under heavy load. When Java 1.5 came out, all those settings failed and we had to try again. (They're still failed; one of the hidden settings we depended upon has been taken out of 1.5, or at least appears to have no effect when used.) When that happens, our servers get out of sync and we had to write an entire new section of code to handle the fact that the servers regularly go away for minutes at a time. One solution, it turns out, is to load up the machine with 4 gigs of RAM, but we're hesitant to suggest this because even Oracle doesn't require 4 gigs of RAM to run. Another solution could be requiring multiple servers and failover setups... that would be awfully popular.
I agree that situations like this are rare, but they aren't unknown. If we had a choice, it's possible we would, in fact, redo this whole mess in Java Minus GC, despite the headaches. (Unlikely, but possible. I sure know a lot of our customers would like us to.)
-fred
These have been definitively explained about six times, each time exactly the same way. And then everyone apparently forgets what the explanation was last time, and/or a bunch of people say 'nooo, it COULDN'T be headlights, because that's not a cool enough explanation!' and we go back into the same roll-around again. My science writing prof in college, lo these many years ago, was part of the first or second team to go and sniff it out with an actual PhD in optics and all sorts of funky equipment, and he wrote up an article for Science News and a big brassy Popular Science article on it. (If I could remember his name I'd include it here, but it's, ah, been a while.)
I wish people would just give it up. They're not mysterious any more.
-fred
Erm? Last I heard, typically, things that are mass-produced in enormous quantity tend to be less expensive than 'boutique' items, not more. If you have a half-assed boy band that you have to pay a million dollars to, and recording and PR fees are another couple million, and thirty million people want to buy a copy of their smash hit album, 'We're Boys And We Are A Band So Pay Us Money', you only have to charge ten cents per person to break even. If you have to pay the Cambridge Singers plus the Berlin Philharmonic $3 million to make an album, and only 300,000 copies are sold, then you have to charge $10 per album to break even.
I like folk music. I typically pay much more per album than someone who can buy their CDs at WalMart (oops, I mean CostCo) because I have to buy them at full SRP at specialty stores.
And now suddenly the popular stuff should be more expensive?
Weird.
-fred
I do study history. Many geniuses do indeed have asshole sides to them (e.g. Gandhi) but it's an exaggeration to say that most are assholes.
Would you say? I'm not so sure. Yes, you can come up with counterexamples, and yes, there are plenty. But of the ones that I've read about, I'd have to say that the majority, i.e. more than 50%, were. Maybe we're studying mostly-non-overlapping sets?
What you say is more true than you than you think it is. We would be better served by intelligent, cooperative, conscientious and thoughtful politicians. Political genius is a dangerous thing, because it covers a multitude of policy sins.
Of course, we have to define our terms here. I'd argue that we could absolutely use a genius in politics, but perhaps not a political genius. Sadly, by and large that seems to be the only type who would be attracted to, well, politics.
-fred
> Dell is more interested in gaining market-share than in maximizing price.
:-)
Which is to say, 'Dell is more interested in driving all of its competitors out of the business of making computers at all, so that they can then jack up their prices as high as they like, than in actually making money.'
-fred
> Apple makes money by doing everything that is supposed to be suicidally stupid.
Which is to say, 'doing everything in a way different than Microsoft/IBM/Whoever did.' If you assume that there is only ever one way to do anything, you'll never find a new one. And in particular, business orthodoxy should be questioned at every opportunity, because it is often self-fulfilling, and ONLY self-fulfilling.
> I detest Steve Jobs' personality. I think he's a self-centered, manipulative bully.
Ye gods. Have you ever met the man? Detesting someone without ever even meeting them is pretty sad, especially when half of the things you read about him are from people who are desperate to sell books about him or were, at one time or another, fired by him.
And yes, I've met him a few times, very briefly, but hardly enough to tell what I think about his personality. He varied between charming and brusque.
> Bastards who [...] are geniuses, [...] those are rare.
Um, actually, if you study your history, the majority of the people you could actually call geniuses tended to be, in a word, assholes. I mean, yes, they're rare, because any kind of real genius is rare, but the personable genius, who actually has the patience to wait for the rest of humanity to keep up with him, he's the exception rather than the rule. (Or she, of course.)
> I'm just grateful he's not in politics.
Because lord knows the last thing we need in politics is a genius.
-fred
I'm actually surprised. I mean, I'm not a big Dell fan, and our failure rate on their laptops at my company approaches 100% per year. (60 laptops, nearly 60 failures per year, though of course not every single one fails... some fail several times.) But as for my (14) rack-mount servers, mostly Dells, I have had only two problems in the last two years: one was on a Dell which had one drive, which I bought myself, fail (fortunately it was in a RAID), and one was on an xServe that had its memory (which I had also bought, from Crucial) die spectacularly. Aside from that, everything has been rock-solid, and I've never even had to use that 8-hour-response-time service contract I got from Dell.
What do you see failing? What are the worst models?
-fred
Is THAT why IBM puts a little red nipple in the middle of their keyboards?
-fred
Translation: I read an argument here (and perhaps somewhere else) that said that the GPL wasn't viral, and I agree with it. Therefore, this tired old myth has been debunked and everyone who claims otherwise is wrong.
Refutation: You (presumably) understand the GPL, and don't think it's viral. Other people, who also understand it, do. Since 'viral' as it applies to the GPL is a not-well-defined term (as you have so amply demonstrated with your attempts to define it yourself), there is no 'correct' answer to the question 'Is the GPL viral?' It is an opinion question, and you just make yourself sound like an asshole (which I presume, for the sake of charity, that you're actually not) when you try to dress it up like an argument of fact.
I see the GPL as viral because if I had ever released any of my software (or some part thereof) as GPL source and as commercial software as well, and anyone had contributed to my GPL source, I wouldn't have been able to use their contribution without negotiating a separate license (which is certainly not a guaranteed outcome). His code has 'infected' my source tree, and now I have to either cut it out (and then, when I fix the same bug he just did, be accused of stealing his code) or maintain two different versions of my software, one for commercial sales and one for GPL.
The GPL counter-argument is, 'well, yeah, he's letting you use HIS code, so you should do it under HIS rules. He doesn't have to let you use his code, after all, and why should YOU make money off of HIS code when he doesn't?' And, of course, one counter-argument is, 'I'm letting him use my code for free, so why SHOULDN'T I make money off of his code in return?' But of course my real counter-argument is, 'okay, I won't release my source code at all because this is all too much of a pain in the butt, and GPL zealots make my head hurt.'
-fred
Oo. It's good to know that someone who has used every single piece of software on the face of the earth is here to reassure us that everything's fine.
When, in fact, I know of a couple pieces of MICROSOFT software -- let alon non-MS stuff -- where right-clicking is absolutely necessary. MSSQL 2k, for example. How do I know this? Because I often access a server running MSSQL from a Mac with VNC, and I haven't been able to get the right-mouse-button-alternate to work properly with the VNC client, and thus there are a couple of things I simply can't do. I'm SUPPOSED to be able to do them, but the operative menu has them greyed out when the contextual menu works. Why? Because nobody tests that part of the software because everybody uses the contextual menu.
Another example would be our CRM software, Goldmine, but that's such a stinking pile of crap (making all the MS software we run look good by comparison) that there are a bunch of things you can't do on it no matter how many mouse buttons you have. However, it is also a piece of software that extremely inexperienced computer users (sales guys) often have to use.
And then there are the computer games that do something specific when you right-click. Inexperienced people do play computer games, and on the PC there are quite a lot of them that can't be played without a right mouse button, and I'm not talking about the computer-game-junkies kind. I know of a bridge game that you can't play without the right mouse button. Your grandma might be using that game right now, except she can't figure out how to click.
On the Mac? Not a problem.
But no, you don't care about facts. Since you're too narrowly experienced to have ever seen this problem, you assume it can't exist.
It's nice to know Slashdot hasn't changed during my little break.
-fred
I'd have to guess it would be people who got theirs shot off in the war.
-fred
Actually, that would be a 'no.' The purpose of a corporation is to make money for its stakeholders. No 'law' about it. In fact, the joke is that if a corporation can make more money by flouting the law, or outright breaking it, than it can by working within the law, it only has two choices: break the law, or face shareholder lawsuits.
Heck, cigarette companies liked to hundreds of thousands of people about their products, and as a direct result, killed untold numbers of people. Legal? Well, actually, no. Accepted practice? Well, they're being sued now, but you rarely hear the argument that they shouldn't have done it to begin with. Why? Because they've made orders of magnitude more money off of those dead people than they will ever be fined. The shareholders are happy, the executives (who aren't fined themselves, and who have made zillions) are happy... pretty much the only people who aren't happy are the dead and dying people.
Or how about the case where Ford decided that it would be cheaper to be sued successfully by a few hundred families whose loved ones their defective products killed than to issue a recall of their products so those people wouldn't die in the first place. Legal? Well, no. Profitable? Absolutely. Shareholders happy? Well... not once it came out.
No, corporations are not evil. They are absolutely amoral and anethical. They have no business except making money, and no reason to ever obey a law that they can make more money by breaking, assuming you take into account probable consequences of breaking the law. And sometimes even if you don't, since corporations these days aren't very good at taking the long view...
-fred
I'm in a similar situation, and I'm less worried about the company going public and then having layoffs than I am about the company being bought by some other, larger company for its intellectual property, and shut down. (Or simply being destroyed by Microsoft, for that matter.)
I believe that's what the owners and the management are aiming for. (The former, not the latter, natch.) The executives will get enough to retire on; I will get enough to tide me over for six months and then I'll be back to eating shoe leather again, until someone decides to hire me for exactly what I was making five years ago, in unadjusted dollars.
Does it sound like I've been there before? You bet!
-fred
Well, since HP just basically nuked their retirement benefits package -- they're not going to be putting new hires into it, and current employees will have it frozen at its current level -- he is going to be getting the exact same retirement benefits as he would if he stayed on there another 20 years.
It won't be long before there are no companies left in the US that have actual pension plans. Oddly, when people are talking about how the income of the people in the US is doing, they always discuss 'wage' as if it were god, but if your wages stayed flat (adjusted for inflation) over the last 10 years but you lost all your retirement benefits, you are six kinds of screwed. And I know a LOT of people in that position, and NOBODY in the opposite position.
-fred
Oh, come ON. Most of his points are silly, but at least this one... if I'm opening a file, I don't want to have to scroll through the 300 word documents in there looking for the single mp3, it's just dumb.
-fred
I will look at my needs, just as I do every time I buy a computer. I will look at the computer world. If there is something that is significantly cheaper than the Mac which is just as easy to use, set up, and maintain, I'll buy that. (It would have to be significantly cheaper because I do still have quite a bit of software that will run plenty fast with rosetta.)
I suspect that I will find that there is nothing that is as easy to use, maintain, and set up, and I will buy another Mac. Although as always there could be a breakthrough in Linux usability over the next two years.
Speaking personally, I'd have to say that the new Macs will be even better for me, because I have needed to use Virtual PC/VMWare for a couple years now to do testing with. (I have to test some of our stuff on ten different flavors of Windows.) I eventually bought an x86 box for home, just so I could run VMWare FAST. I use it once a month for a day or so. (When I ran VPC on the Mac it was often as much as two days.) Now I won't need to have a separate machine to do that. That makes the new Macs even more of a bargain, for me.
-fred
I've called 911 on my cell phone. Once.
I was driving down the highway, and saw, up ahead, something very strange looking. I slowed down and discovered a very large winnebago... except brownish-black, not white. And with huge flames inside and black smoke pouring out of the roof.
I stopped and stared. Nobody around. Nobody apparent inside, although, well, there wouldn't be, would there? I got out my cell phone and dialed 911.
I got, 'We're sorry, all 911 circuits are busy. Please try your call again later.'
-fred
Never mind the fact that PacBell, even before SBC bought them out, closed all of their customer service centers in the entire state of California, so that you have to deal with them over the phone. Two reasons they did this: it is expensive having to actually give people customer service, and much less expensive to make them wait on hold. And if everything is done over the phone, then they can charge $10 for you to pay your bills over the phone if you want to pay them immediately, whereas when they had customer service centers, you could hand them a check.
Of course, you can still do that, at some dubious $20 check cashing place that caters to the 'I found this check on the ground outside a bar' crowd, but I've always been a little leery of doing that. Plus, of course, since the people who work there don't actually work for SBC, they can't answer any questions or anything.
I also use a third-party DSL provider. (dslextreme.com) My experience with them has been quite good, except for the occasions where SBC disconnects their entire northern California network for between 12 and 30 hours (2), disconnects me from DSL by adding some sort of filter and then lies and says that it is my DSL provider's fault (1), or disconnects my DSL because if I want to have a DSL line I need to either buy it through SBC or buy an extra phone line for it, even though that's not only false but illegal (1).
And that's not even touching the fact that they closed up port 135 for their DSL customers. I called them and received the following valuable insights:
Me: Yes, I understand there have been some virus problems, but my client uses port 135 to contact his mail server.
Rep: That can't be true. Port 135 isn't for mail, it's a Microsoft Windows communication port.
Me: Er. Right. Well, look, he needs to use it.
Rep: We recommend using a VPN.
Me: Yes, that's another thing. I tried to set him up with a PPTP VPN.
Rep: PPP isn't a VPN, it's a way of contacting the internet.
Me: Yes, thank you. I tried setting him up with a VPN, and it appears that that port is blocked as well.
Rep: We don't support VPNs.
-fred
-fred
...comments by people who don't know what they're talking about.
Do you even know what a content management system is? Did you bother to look at what the Xythos software actually does before commenting on something else's ability to replace it?
Certainly not. If you had, this wouldn't be Slashdot, would it?
-fred
It may well have been not to your taste, but the mouse had a very definite ergonomic theory behind one, and one that a lot of people liked once they actually wrapped their brains around it. The mouse was designed so that you could do anything you wanted with it with just your fingertips, without putting your entire hand on it. You were supposed to rest your hand on the desk and use your fingertips to move the mouse and click and so forth. Required a lot less wrist movement, which significantly improved the ergonomics for the people who both figured this out and found it comfortable.
A very large subset of the people who bought them didn't figure it out, and of the people who did, not all found it comfortable. And then there were the people who thought it looked dumb, which, frankly, it diiiiid, oh my yes. And then there were those of us who never gave it a fair shake because we liked three-button mice.
All in all, it was a bomb, but absolutely not because of ergonomics; it was designed to be a breakthrough as far as ergonomics were concerned, and tests showed it was. It didn't catch on because of aesthetics, and old habits.
-fred
Here's a quote from Dean Reece (Apple Engineering Manager).andSo frankly, given that Apple doesn't typically adopt really rotten, useless, outdated technologies when they switch from one to another, with the exception of course of the x86 (ugh) instruction set, I'm inclined to believe him rather than you.
-fred
-fred
I mean, imagine: you make a chip, and someone actually keeps buying it for years instead of rudely demanding faster ones all the time. Even if the game platforms market were only the same size as Apple's, IBM would choose them every time.Is that another one o' them 'goatse.cx' references? Naw, or it would be 'Widebottom', I guess.
-fred
...that I don't know about you, but I generally don't use images of stretched assholes to hold my lunch down...
-fred