That's clearly a nonsense. There's no way to use antibiotics "properly" without a previous correct diagnosis, which obviously is not the case. He is NOT using antibiotics properly. Full stop.
Inaccurate. If it is impossible to make a good diagnosis of a clearly bacterial problem, for whatever reason, then throwing random antibiotics at it until it goes away is absolutely a superior treatment than one frequent alternative (dying of it) and is almost always superior to another alternative (major invasive biopsy surgery). That said, fine-needle biopsy and/or non-invasive methods of gathering a sample to culture are almost always superior to the random antibiotic scattershot approach. However, they are also more expensive, and frequently, in countries with no socialized medicine (such as the US), that is frequently the most pressing factor in the equation.
And, as has been said, INproper use of antibiotics (as in *here now*) can be even disastrous (aka mortal) in extrem cases: antibiotics crushes compentency with both standard flora and the very pathogenic agent, specifically selecting the most dangerous among the bacterial individuals that then, due to the antibiotic itself, are free to grow beyond control.
Absolutely. And ignoring the problem until it goes away can also be disastrous (aka mortal) in extreme circumstances, and if you don't have the money for a really good diagnostic effort, then you will frequently end up having spent a lot of money on diagnostics that come up with nothing substantive, and then spending a lot more on some spanking new drug to see if it works. This is what happened with me, and the result was that we couldn't figure out what I had, and the doctor kept telling me (as I was coughing up green mucous) that it must be viral, it must be viral, until it had been going on for three months and I had a constant fever of 102 and above.
After that, he gave me amoxicillin (because it was cheap and I was a student.) Slight improvement, then relapse. Doxicycline. No go. Erythromicin. Slight improvement, then relapse. Sulfa. Allergic. Cithromax. No go. And, finally, Clindamycin, which, after five months of this, had me on my feet in less than 24 hours. Clindmycin is well-known for killing people by colitis upon occasion, but given that I was getting steadily worse at that point, I would say it was definitely worth the risk.
It was some sort of anaerobe which was apparently very hard to get a culture of, but which was delighted to live in various portions of my anatomy.
No, I am not a physicist, but I am a biologist with knowledge enough about micropathology to back up what I am saying: abusing antibiotics can really be a very nasty bussiness.
Erm. I can only assume that English is your second language. I wouldn't presume to correct any of your other mistakes, but I think the word you wanted was 'physician' and not 'physicist'.
Abusing antibiotics can be somewhat nasty. Not being given them can be just as nasty.
I used to be prone to sinus infections. Each time I moved and got a new doctor, I would go through the cycle: go in, tell the doctor I had a sinus infection. Doctor would say, 'Oh, it's just a virus.' I would tell him he was wrong, and then be sent home. I'd come back in a week, he'd take a culture, and three or four days later I'd go back in for a followup and get my antibiotic. It usually only took a couple of repetitions of this with each new doctor to convince them that I knew what a sinus infection looked like for me. But for the first couple of times, I would be incapacitated for a week and a half or so, and the infection would have spread to my chest and that would linger for another week afterward.
And that's just in a non-life-threatening situation. If something is getting really nasty and rapidly worsening, you throw what you can at it in the hopes that something will stick, because if you don't, then your patient ends up dead, and that doesn't help anyone any.
I don't buy iTunes Music Store tunes, by and large (though I do download the free ones once in a while, when I see something that interests me). But when I encode stuff, it's typically into AAC, because I find it superior to MP3 and I don't have enough hard drive space to do everything in the lossless formats.
Or are you another person paying so little attention that he doesn't know the difference between AAC and FairPlay, Apple's DRM?
That was what I meant by biased samples. You go sample where people have died to survey. Oops, forgot the rest of the country. It's like trying to measure global warming, but only measuring temperature inside urban heat islands.
No, actually, they sampled random places. Intentionally. And then when one of them turned out to be in a really heavy-mortality area, they discounted it as an outlier.
Oh, and this gem on the speed of light was just amazing.
Yes... that's lovely. I mean, it's one thing to present your views in opposition to someone else's, it's an entire separate ball game to do so when you don't even know what the views you're refuting are.
Really. Expanding universe. Expanding. If you ignore that, of course nothing makes sense.
I have also been told by some of the best-trained and most vociferous global warming alarmists that event they cannot submit global warming as anything other than a theory -- the earth as a whole is an incredibly complex variable to be studying.
Really? You've talked to some of the most vociferous global warming 'alarmists'? Well, we'll let that go.
Evolution is only a 'theory'. Gravity is only a 'theory'. It is not my intention to imply that global warming is experimentally on the same level as gravity, but calling something a theory is not an implication that it can't be relied upon to be correct. If you want to disparage good science, use some other word because saying that something is 'just a theory' makes you sound like you don't know the meaning of the word.
As for asking the media to make these decisions: the news media has to make decisions every time it broadcasts. Whenever it does a story on a Jew who lived through the holocaust, should they come up with a holocaust denier who claims that the Jew is lying? Whether or not they do, that's a decision right there. It is literally no different with 'bad science'... there is always a whacko out there who will tell you that the common cold is caused by fluoride in our drinking water, and can prove it. Do you put him on the show about cold vaccines?
No, of course you don't. The only time you should have a far-out pseudoscientist on your show is when a large corporation or the government stands to benefit from his or her views.
Geneva Conventions. You mean the Geneva Conventions, not the Geneva Accords. And yes, they were all signed by the US president and ratified by Congress except for the two of 1977, as seen here: http://ask.yahoo.com/ask/20020212.html
The ABM treaty did not allow us to withdraw if notice was served, it allowed the treaty to be changed if both sides agreed to it, or under certain circumstances where other parties weren't following the treaty.
He has also pulled out of an agreement to regulate biological weapons and warfare, which the US was one of the prime movers behind (in the Clinton years, of course). We basically lined up all these nations, saying, 'we should have some good verifiable way of keeping nations from developing biological weapons.' Everyone else said 'Yes, good idea!' and then Bush said, 'Okay, you do it, but we won't.'
He destroyed an international treaty set up by the UN to regulate arms traffic to developing nations because the US wants to sell lots of weapons to them. We weren't actually a signer of this, but we basically kept the treaty from being signed by ANYONE.
And that's not even to mention the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which we never signed but which we really thought was a very good idea right up until Newt Gingrich took over Congress, and which is still supported by over 70% of the US population. (I forget what the exact number is, but it was over 80% at one point last decade.)
I'm sure there are more, those are just the ones that made really big headlines.
Actually, files on X are a single file. Bundles (which most but not all applications actually are) are a bundle of files. Very few things besides apps and frameworks are bundles.
Personally, were I a liberal I'd be a little pissed off that my candidates insist on catering to the marginalia of politics instead of moderating their platform and ending up having SOME control of the process.
Heh. That's so funny to hear.
First: Clinton was to the right of every Republican to run for public office before Goldwater. Kerry was, in fact, slightly to the left of Clinton, but he was a lot closer to what would normally have been considered the mainstream of American politics than GWB has been. The amazing trick GWB has pulled off is to make everyone believe that he is actually right down the middle.
I mean, wow... more than half of Bush voters (51%) believe he's promised to sign the Kyoto treaty! 72% think he favors the land mine treaty. 69% think he favors the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty! And, AFTER Bush said that the International Criminal Court was the worst thing that could happen to this country in a televised debate, 53% of people who supported him thought it was a good idea and thought he supported it.
So, really, the problem isn't that Kerry isn't mainstream enough.
It's that Americans are stupid.
-fred (Citations: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1022-01.ht m)
Two, Americans are becoming less and less enamoured of labor unions. They basically seem to think that any benefits created by the unions are seen only by some of the union personnel. This is, of course, not only short-sighted but absolutely amnesiac in its fallacy, but nobody has ever lost an election or gone bankrupt by underestimating the intelligence of the American people... and I sure don't see them starting now.
In San Francisco... San Francisco, mind you, there are hotel workers who have been locked out. They're not on strike, they're locked out. They can't go back to work. I've hung around the picket lines for a while, just to see what was up. Most of the people who had any reaction at all to the picket used the opportunity to make fun of them.
The hotels want to freeze their wages for five years and make them pay for health care for their children, out of pocket. If they have two kids, they pay an extra $200-300 a month. And right now it looks like the hotels are prepared to keep them locked out for another six months if necessary. They can afford to. The union can't.
Unless somehow Americans can start mobilizing effective boycotts, and persuade people to respect picket lines, and do so very soon, I suspect labor unions are going to cease to be a power in the USA within 20 to 30 years.
These days, if the primary care doctor takes care of it all himself, and the outcome is less than perfect, he'll get sued, and he'll lose because he didn't refer the patient.
The statistics say you're wrong, but that's okay; you're being deluded by masters. Two weeks ago there was a good article on this in the Philadelphia Inquirer, if I recall correctly. The number of people suing for malpractice (by PERCENTAGE) hasn't markedly increased in the last 50 years, nor have the awards. Perception is all.
And, to give you a little counterexample: I dislocated my big toe several years ago, playing soccer. That hurt a lot by the way, enough that by the time I got to the hospital I was vomiting from the pain. The hospital didn't have an orthopedic specialist on call (well, they did, but he wasn't answering his beeper) but the doctor on call said, after she took the x-rays, not to worry: it was a simple dislocation. She gave me a very large shot of some local anaesthetic, and a smaller one of a muscle relaxant, and then grabbed my toe and pulled. (BTW, this is generally the right way to handle a dislocated toe, it turns out.)
Only problem was, there was a fracture that she hadn't noticed.
It hadn't been broken all the way through -- quite -- but now it was. So the toe went back into its socket, but the fractured bones were separated and offset. And then she had more x-rays taken and looked at it for a while and told me I was fine. Couldn't bend my toe, but, well, what did I know? It's not like I was trying hard.
Upshot? Well, for most people this wouldn't have mattered. For me, I couldn't waltz for a year, and I still can't bend the toe much. If someone had noticed the fracture, they could have gotten my toe back in its socket without breaking it completely. But no -- no specialist, no experience, no problem, we'll just do what comes naturally.
Needless to say, I didn't sue. Telling a jury of my blank-faced peers that waltzing is important to me is more than I want to attempt, and anyway, I wouldn't set a dollar value on it. But it really pissed me off, and still does. And I often imagine what it would have been like if it had been my right thumb instead of my right big toe. 'Oh, gee, can't bend your thumb any more, what a pity...'
This is just one more reason why socialized medicine is a bad idea. The absolute last thing the US needs is another layer of insulation between patients and the real cost of health care.
One more? No, the socialized medicine would replace the insurance companies, see. That would mean it would be the same number of layers.
The sad thing is, Canada has a good but not great health care system and pays less than half for it what the US does, per capita. Canada's health care system is better for everyone in Canada than the US's is for somewhere between 40 and 60% of the US population (depending on whether you ask a conservative think tank, a moderate one, or a liberal one, I guess).
But, well, that's the theme of absolute capitalism, right? Those with the gold make the rules.
In the meantime, you'll do Mac users (civilians, not./ers) a favor by getting them to down-privilege their account if they're using an Admin account. Otherwise, as mentioned throughout, all kinds of mayhem can ensue.
Er. So then they can't run the disk repair tool if they have a problem, they can't install system updates, and so forth? Or perhaps you think that system updates should be installable by non-admin users?
Or perhaps you think that someone should get a message that they need a system update, and then should log out, then log back in as the admin user they use twice a month, run the update, then log out when it's done? (So, of course, one hopes that the 'your system needs an update' dialog couldn't be spoofed, then, right?)
Look, it's not a bad idea. Come back when you've thought it out more thoroughly. And bear in mind that not every naive user has an IT expert who lives with them. (Although it might be useful if they did, huh?)
Another thing that kills me is that Linux users are becoming more and more like Mac users every day. They expect everything to be done for them from 1 little click of a button.
Some of us would say that that's what computers are for: doing repetitive and irritating tasks for us, so we don't have to bother. If it can be done in one click of the mouse, so much the better.
Like, for example, I wish I had a little button that replied to people like you with one click of the mouse. Hmm. Actually, that sounds like a pretty useful macro.
Of course, most of your stuff is just bollocks served up by someone who is apparently extremely bored and has nothing better to do, but I wanted to mention one thing:
What would we have in OSX/ADC without the GNU tools? LOL.
Actually, what we would have is an unarguably superior product. Apple's own optimizing C compiler, MrC, at the time of release of Mac OS X 10.0, produced code that was between 20% and 40% more efficient than gcc did, quite reliably. (And sometimes significantly better than that, depending on the code in question. And the tools that Mac OS 8 & 9 final builds were made on, which were the IBM XLC compilers, did a couple percent better than MrC on average.)
Many of us inside Apple were stunned that Apple went with an all-gcc lineup for the Mac OS X releases, because frankly gcc sucked raw rotten eggs when it came to PowerPC optimization. The QuickTime team in particular were crying tears of blood trying to make up for the huge drop in performance that happened when they started having to compile with gcc.
Now, of course, it has improved a fair bit since then, almost entirely due to the contributions Apple has made to the PPC code generation part of the gcc code base. But if a third the resources were put into MrC that Apple put into gcc, then it would probably *still* be 20-40% ahead of gcc. Apple couldn't give MrC away free, because it has a lot of patented code in it, and that's why they chose to stick with gcc. I personally think it was a dumb decision: gcc for the masses and MrC for the people willing to pay for it sounds like a good plan to me. But I'm not running Apple.
(And don't get me started on gdb. For the first two releases of X, debugging with it worked on the order of 50% of the time. The other 50% it would get confused and crash your program (when you were debugging a non-crashing problem), or itself, or the entire machine if you were debugging a kernel extension. Or it would change the heap sufficiently that your program would stop failing as soon as you started trying to use the debugger. I got into the habit, which I am still trying to break, of just using log output to debug instead of actually using the debugger.)
The open-source tools that Apple distributes are probably great on Intel machines, but running them on the PPC, especially early on, made them look like they were written over the summer by a bored high school student.
It's really nice that you're so plugged into the open source community that you missed, for example:
- All the optimization stuff they've folded into gcc
- All the fixes they've folded back into the BSD code tree
I'm sure there's more, those are just the two categories that I've actually used and found helpful.
And, of course, the 'overly restrictive license' is considered to be a 'Free Software' license by the FSF. It's not gnu-compatible (for which I am awfully glad) and it (oh horrors!) allows linking to proprietary non-free software. Since I am not a gnu zealot, I find those things to be positive benefits, not drawbacks.
But, of course, the facts never stopped an Anonymous Coward before, so why should they now, eh?
Fair is fair. Both groups need their names and addresses published, or none at all.
Fair is absolutely fair. If you can dredge up a list of protesters at the RNC, I'll fight for your right to post it if you want to. (Although I may also support lawsuits against you, if you encourage people to go around killing protesters and someone actually does so. As I would if anyone had done that sort of thing with the RNC list.)
And, hey, I'll also fight for either of the major parties' rights to not post their delegates' names themselves if they don't want to, and for the rights of anyone who went to the protests to do so without any kind of permit and without being required to give their names to anyone at all.
And if you don't actually see how these two statements are compatible, you need to spend some thought on this one.
Slashdot Mirror
After that, he gave me amoxicillin (because it was cheap and I was a student.) Slight improvement, then relapse. Doxicycline. No go. Erythromicin. Slight improvement, then relapse. Sulfa. Allergic. Cithromax. No go. And, finally, Clindamycin, which, after five months of this, had me on my feet in less than 24 hours. Clindmycin is well-known for killing people by colitis upon occasion, but given that I was getting steadily worse at that point, I would say it was definitely worth the risk.
It was some sort of anaerobe which was apparently very hard to get a culture of, but which was delighted to live in various portions of my anatomy.Erm. I can only assume that English is your second language. I wouldn't presume to correct any of your other mistakes, but I think the word you wanted was 'physician' and not 'physicist'.
Abusing antibiotics can be somewhat nasty. Not being given them can be just as nasty.
I used to be prone to sinus infections. Each time I moved and got a new doctor, I would go through the cycle: go in, tell the doctor I had a sinus infection. Doctor would say, 'Oh, it's just a virus.' I would tell him he was wrong, and then be sent home. I'd come back in a week, he'd take a culture, and three or four days later I'd go back in for a followup and get my antibiotic. It usually only took a couple of repetitions of this with each new doctor to convince them that I knew what a sinus infection looked like for me. But for the first couple of times, I would be incapacitated for a week and a half or so, and the infection would have spread to my chest and that would linger for another week afterward.
And that's just in a non-life-threatening situation. If something is getting really nasty and rapidly worsening, you throw what you can at it in the hopes that something will stick, because if you don't, then your patient ends up dead, and that doesn't help anyone any.
-fred
-fred
Really? That's a pity. What format do you use?
I don't buy iTunes Music Store tunes, by and large (though I do download the free ones once in a while, when I see something that interests me). But when I encode stuff, it's typically into AAC, because I find it superior to MP3 and I don't have enough hard drive space to do everything in the lossless formats.
Or are you another person paying so little attention that he doesn't know the difference between AAC and FairPlay, Apple's DRM?
-fred
-fred
It's a funny old world.
-fred
Really. Expanding universe. Expanding. If you ignore that, of course nothing makes sense.
-fred
Evolution is only a 'theory'. Gravity is only a 'theory'. It is not my intention to imply that global warming is experimentally on the same level as gravity, but calling something a theory is not an implication that it can't be relied upon to be correct. If you want to disparage good science, use some other word because saying that something is 'just a theory' makes you sound like you don't know the meaning of the word.
As for asking the media to make these decisions: the news media has to make decisions every time it broadcasts. Whenever it does a story on a Jew who lived through the holocaust, should they come up with a holocaust denier who claims that the Jew is lying? Whether or not they do, that's a decision right there. It is literally no different with 'bad science'... there is always a whacko out there who will tell you that the common cold is caused by fluoride in our drinking water, and can prove it. Do you put him on the show about cold vaccines?
No, of course you don't. The only time you should have a far-out pseudoscientist on your show is when a large corporation or the government stands to benefit from his or her views.
-fred
Oh, wait. Do I have that quote wrong?
-fred
Geneva Conventions. You mean the Geneva Conventions, not the Geneva Accords. And yes, they were all signed by the US president and ratified by Congress except for the two of 1977, as seen here:
http://ask.yahoo.com/ask/20020212.html
The ABM treaty did not allow us to withdraw if notice was served, it allowed the treaty to be changed if both sides agreed to it, or under certain circumstances where other parties weren't following the treaty.
He has also pulled out of an agreement to regulate biological weapons and warfare, which the US was one of the prime movers behind (in the Clinton years, of course). We basically lined up all these nations, saying, 'we should have some good verifiable way of keeping nations from developing biological weapons.' Everyone else said 'Yes, good idea!' and then Bush said, 'Okay, you do it, but we won't.'
He destroyed an international treaty set up by the UN to regulate arms traffic to developing nations because the US wants to sell lots of weapons to them. We weren't actually a signer of this, but we basically kept the treaty from being signed by ANYONE.
And that's not even to mention the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which we never signed but which we really thought was a very good idea right up until Newt Gingrich took over Congress, and which is still supported by over 70% of the US population. (I forget what the exact number is, but it was over 80% at one point last decade.)
I'm sure there are more, those are just the ones that made really big headlines.
-fred
Actually, files on X are a single file. Bundles (which most but not all applications actually are) are a bundle of files. Very few things besides apps and frameworks are bundles.
Sorry to burst your bundle.
-fred
I read recently that more than half of American schoolchildren think that the US is the largest country in the world.
-fred
Split infinitives are really pretty much becoming acceptable these days, and they were never really frowned upon that heavily.
Except by high school english teachers.
-fred
First: Clinton was to the right of every Republican to run for public office before Goldwater. Kerry was, in fact, slightly to the left of Clinton, but he was a lot closer to what would normally have been considered the mainstream of American politics than GWB has been. The amazing trick GWB has pulled off is to make everyone believe that he is actually right down the middle.
I mean, wow... more than half of Bush voters (51%) believe he's promised to sign the Kyoto treaty! 72% think he favors the land mine treaty. 69% think he favors the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty! And, AFTER Bush said that the International Criminal Court was the worst thing that could happen to this country in a televised debate, 53% of people who supported him thought it was a good idea and thought he supported it.
So, really, the problem isn't that Kerry isn't mainstream enough.
It's that Americans are stupid.
-fred
(Citations: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1022-01.h
One, type slower, will you? Damn.
Two, Americans are becoming less and less enamoured of labor unions. They basically seem to think that any benefits created by the unions are seen only by some of the union personnel. This is, of course, not only short-sighted but absolutely amnesiac in its fallacy, but nobody has ever lost an election or gone bankrupt by underestimating the intelligence of the American people... and I sure don't see them starting now.
In San Francisco... San Francisco, mind you, there are hotel workers who have been locked out. They're not on strike, they're locked out. They can't go back to work. I've hung around the picket lines for a while, just to see what was up. Most of the people who had any reaction at all to the picket used the opportunity to make fun of them.
The hotels want to freeze their wages for five years and make them pay for health care for their children, out of pocket. If they have two kids, they pay an extra $200-300 a month. And right now it looks like the hotels are prepared to keep them locked out for another six months if necessary. They can afford to. The union can't.
Unless somehow Americans can start mobilizing effective boycotts, and persuade people to respect picket lines, and do so very soon, I suspect labor unions are going to cease to be a power in the USA within 20 to 30 years.
-fred
He did it for the drug companies.
-fred
Intriguingly, China actually has a better record in the last five years on following their treaties than the US does.
-fred
And, to give you a little counterexample: I dislocated my big toe several years ago, playing soccer. That hurt a lot by the way, enough that by the time I got to the hospital I was vomiting from the pain. The hospital didn't have an orthopedic specialist on call (well, they did, but he wasn't answering his beeper) but the doctor on call said, after she took the x-rays, not to worry: it was a simple dislocation. She gave me a very large shot of some local anaesthetic, and a smaller one of a muscle relaxant, and then grabbed my toe and pulled. (BTW, this is generally the right way to handle a dislocated toe, it turns out.)
Only problem was, there was a fracture that she hadn't noticed.
It hadn't been broken all the way through -- quite -- but now it was. So the toe went back into its socket, but the fractured bones were separated and offset. And then she had more x-rays taken and looked at it for a while and told me I was fine. Couldn't bend my toe, but, well, what did I know? It's not like I was trying hard.
Upshot? Well, for most people this wouldn't have mattered. For me, I couldn't waltz for a year, and I still can't bend the toe much. If someone had noticed the fracture, they could have gotten my toe back in its socket without breaking it completely. But no -- no specialist, no experience, no problem, we'll just do what comes naturally.
Needless to say, I didn't sue. Telling a jury of my blank-faced peers that waltzing is important to me is more than I want to attempt, and anyway, I wouldn't set a dollar value on it. But it really pissed me off, and still does. And I often imagine what it would have been like if it had been my right thumb instead of my right big toe. 'Oh, gee, can't bend your thumb any more, what a pity...'One more? No, the socialized medicine would replace the insurance companies, see. That would mean it would be the same number of layers.
The sad thing is, Canada has a good but not great health care system and pays less than half for it what the US does, per capita. Canada's health care system is better for everyone in Canada than the US's is for somewhere between 40 and 60% of the US population (depending on whether you ask a conservative think tank, a moderate one, or a liberal one, I guess).
But, well, that's the theme of absolute capitalism, right? Those with the gold make the rules.
-fred
Or perhaps you think that someone should get a message that they need a system update, and then should log out, then log back in as the admin user they use twice a month, run the update, then log out when it's done? (So, of course, one hopes that the 'your system needs an update' dialog couldn't be spoofed, then, right?)
Look, it's not a bad idea. Come back when you've thought it out more thoroughly. And bear in mind that not every naive user has an IT expert who lives with them. (Although it might be useful if they did, huh?)
-fred
Like, for example, I wish I had a little button that replied to people like you with one click of the mouse. Hmm. Actually, that sounds like a pretty useful macro.
-fred
-fred
Many of us inside Apple were stunned that Apple went with an all-gcc lineup for the Mac OS X releases, because frankly gcc sucked raw rotten eggs when it came to PowerPC optimization. The QuickTime team in particular were crying tears of blood trying to make up for the huge drop in performance that happened when they started having to compile with gcc.
Now, of course, it has improved a fair bit since then, almost entirely due to the contributions Apple has made to the PPC code generation part of the gcc code base. But if a third the resources were put into MrC that Apple put into gcc, then it would probably *still* be 20-40% ahead of gcc. Apple couldn't give MrC away free, because it has a lot of patented code in it, and that's why they chose to stick with gcc. I personally think it was a dumb decision: gcc for the masses and MrC for the people willing to pay for it sounds like a good plan to me. But I'm not running Apple.
(And don't get me started on gdb. For the first two releases of X, debugging with it worked on the order of 50% of the time. The other 50% it would get confused and crash your program (when you were debugging a non-crashing problem), or itself, or the entire machine if you were debugging a kernel extension. Or it would change the heap sufficiently that your program would stop failing as soon as you started trying to use the debugger. I got into the habit, which I am still trying to break, of just using log output to debug instead of actually using the debugger.)
The open-source tools that Apple distributes are probably great on Intel machines, but running them on the PPC, especially early on, made them look like they were written over the summer by a bored high school student.
-fred
Hate (hah!) to be a pedant, but the only guarantee about the length of a short is that it is equal to or less than a long.
So your long could be 16 bits (on a 16-bit processor) and your short 8 bits. And then half of it would, indeed, be just a nybble.
On a 64-bit machine, in theory, a short could be 32 bits, and each of you could've gotten a pair of ascii characters plus two bits in change.
-fred
It's really nice that you're so plugged into the open source community that you missed, for example:
- All the optimization stuff they've folded into gcc
- All the fixes they've folded back into the BSD code tree
I'm sure there's more, those are just the two categories that I've actually used and found helpful.
And, of course, the 'overly restrictive license' is considered to be a 'Free Software' license by the FSF. It's not gnu-compatible (for which I am awfully glad) and it (oh horrors!) allows linking to proprietary non-free software. Since I am not a gnu zealot, I find those things to be positive benefits, not drawbacks.
But, of course, the facts never stopped an Anonymous Coward before, so why should they now, eh?
-fred
...the grandparent post was sarcasm.
-fred
And, hey, I'll also fight for either of the major parties' rights to not post their delegates' names themselves if they don't want to, and for the rights of anyone who went to the protests to do so without any kind of permit and without being required to give their names to anyone at all.
And if you don't actually see how these two statements are compatible, you need to spend some thought on this one.
-fred