I have nothing against Apple, in fact I love the Macbook Pro...
Right, but the MacBook Pro and the iPad ultimately appeal to very different kinds of people. The MacBook Pro has a uniquely broad appeal these days, because it combines a pretty decent UNIX (with all the familiar tools that we know and love) with a beautiful and easy-to-use UI. The former appeals to those that peruse Slashdot; the latter, to Apple's stereotyped traditional customer (though, these days, plenty of UNIX geeks appreciate a pretty UI too).
The iPad is very different. Despite its UNIX underpinnings, Apple is not interested in exposing them this time round. In the eyes of us geeks, this seems outrageous - how dare they restrict what we can do with the hardware!? But these simplifications make the product more appealing to - I would wager - >95% of the people out there, so, if only to appease its shareholders, Apple is pretty much duty-bound to deliver the most appealing product it can. If that means disposing of the concept of disks and drives and replacing it with ubiquitous in-the-cloud storage that syncs magically between related devices, most people will thank them for it.
Ultimately, it comes down to how you want to use a tablet. Apple's view seems to be that tablets are good at some things (web browsing, book- and magazine-reading, watching videos, etc.), passable at some things (they've made a laudable effort at porting their productivity suite to the iPad and the iPhone, but it probably needs a little more work to be truly brilliant on a tablet) and terrible at others. For the things a tablet is not suitable for (e.g. development), you use a more traditional laptop or desktop. The Android approach seems to be rather less radical - the stance on Flash is a good example (what use is Flash on a device without a permanent keyboard and, more crucially, a mouse?). That said, the Android stance is infinitely more radical than Microsoft's - Windows 8 is promising to provide an innovative and attractive touch interface (good), but will still run all the existing Windows apps (oh fuck), thus removing any incentive developers might have to create tailored apps for it.
...we schedule our Linux boxen to reboot weekly. Without fail.
I work in an investment bank. There, they don't have time for this uptime-dick-size-contest shit. The longer a box is up, the greater the likelihood that some hardware failure is going to fuck it up and it won't boot again. A reboot is a great way to tease weird issues out into the open so that they don't screw you over at the critical moment. Of course we have redundant servers, but that's not the point.
Ultimately, the 3 year uptime on that web server you brag about is a disaster waiting to happen. I can give a pretty much cast iron guarantee that when it does go down, whether by choice or unexpectedly, it won't come back up again smoothly. And then you're fucked.
Not sure if you can use a string for a switch statement
This is just syntactic sugar in.NET actually. If you look at the IL it compiles to, for short switch blocks, it's a set of if statements; for longer ones, it creates a Dictionary and then does TryGetValue.
...though. I was sceptical at first, but it is a genuinely useful way of indicating the absence of a value when dealing with, for example, stuff that has come out of a database.
What, you mean, MONTH/DAY/YEAR bothers you? It's just a convention.
Yes, and a fucking stupid one, which causes no end of pain. What does 3/12/2009 mean in a bit of text? To most of the world, it means 3rd December 2009. But, for some bizarre reason, it means 12th March 2009 in America. The result? It is impossible to determine whether a given date is in sane or bizarre format for values of dd < 13. The only meaningful date format now is the Asian format (yyyy-mm-dd), which is the ISO standard.
Some will argue that this is because you say "March 12th", but I'm sure you also say "ten past nine", and you don't write that 10:9. Why? Oh yes, because that would be stupid.
Or was interpreted differently. 1,000,000,000-as-billion is pretty much standard here now, at least in this limey's experience. Ordinarily I would lament such a happening, but the world is better served by a consistent definition of "billion".
Now if only you guys could sort your stupid date format out, we'd be set...
Not sure what CacheViewer is, but on Safari, there is ClickToFlash to block Flash, which is wonderful (and, IIRC, very similar to FlashBlock). And one can turn off JavaScript in the preferences, if one is suitably paranoid...
Not sure about on Windows, but on the Mac, it doesn't install the VoiceOver Kit unless you have one of the new Shuffles. I was a bit disappointed by this, as I would quite like my Mac to be able to speak something other than English.
Interestingly, Japanese Mac keyboards still use that very layout. Though the addition of a couple of extra buttons either side of the space bar for switching between English and Japanese might put you off a bit...
Actually, that's a terrible example. Adobe consistently produces (some of) the worst applications on the Mac. Even Microsoft now produce more Mac-like applications than Adobe do (e.g. use of Installer packages). If you're trying to prove OS X is teh fail, you'll have to try harder.
the opposition in M'sia is a coalition that includes the radical Islamic right
True, but that's because the opposition in Malaysia is still a rather nascent phenomenon. Yes, there have been opposition parties for years, but they are all very small, and so this odd alliance of non-Muslim Chinese Malaysians and the radical Islamic parties is what you get. It's the only way to face off the UMNO (ruling party) juggernaut.
Incidentally, the blame for the Internal Security Act (both in Malaysia and Singapore) can be laid squarely with the British. As someone else has pointed out, it was introduced when there was a very real fear that Malaya would fall to the commies; the British were successful in preventing that. But afterwards, these new "democracies" felt that the ISA might be useful, and so it has remained. The other British-imposed legislative gem is that criminalising sodomy (though Muslim Malaysia might have had something to say about that anyway): the one-time darling of the UMNO party and now leader of the opposition Anwar Ibrahim has twice been accused of sodomy, though pretty much everyone knows the charges were politically motivated. The first time round though, he spent quite a few years in jail for it.
The good thing is that sites like this "blog" are demonstrating that the power of the Internet is starting to act as a force for change (and why it is relevant to Slashdot, I might add). That the government feels the need to lock people up on trumped-up charges of anti-Islamic conduct is, ultimately, a sign that they are making waves. And that can only be a good thing.
At $400, considering that the cost of other consumer-level software has NOT gone up by a factor of 10, I expect a bloody PERFECT OS with absolutely NO glitches.
Indeed - your point about inflation is spot on, and is something that is often overlooked. People complain about the ridiculous number of versions of Vista and complain about the price, but I think they forget just how ridiculous the price now actually is.
I think that if one were to pay a sum more commensurate with the perceived value of the software (and commensurate with the apparent level of effort that went into its production), $40 sounds like quite a nice sum. Hell, I might even buy a copy of Windows for $40.
And the argument about being 5 years late is a little misleading. Yes, it's true, but Vista is not the same OS they were working on for most of that time. They were a bit ambitious, and effectively killed off the real "longhorn" in late 2005. Then they started over and the Vista today is really only about 2 years or work. Maybe in irrelevant point, but the "they had 5 years to get it right" argument is equally irrelelvant.
But it's not irrelevant. Just because they fucked it up three years in doesn't mean it doesn't count. It's true that because of the fuck-up, Vista does indeed represent only about two years of (lackadaisical) work, but at the end of the day, it was still the first consumer OS to come out of Redmond after XP, some five-six years later.
And in any case, it's a pretty poor show that a company with the resources that Microsoft has couldn't deliver "the real Longhorn", as you put it. I can't help but look at the elegant solutions that, for example, Apple has engineered and wonder why Microsoft, with all the talent it can and does recruit, can't do the same.
Honestly, that's just the way software is these days. Open Source is the same way, except they just call stuff beta for 5,10 or more years.
Yes, but the difference with Windows is that you pay a small fortune for it. And if it's broke, you can't just poke at the code to fix it.
With Vista, all of this has become even more pronounced. Not only was it terribly late anyway, but it was shipped in this really rather broken state. Given that it took them five years to deliver it, waiting another 6 months to deliver something that actually works would have gone a long way to giving Microsoft some credibility. Instead, now they have next to none, with the result that everyone - from the student off to university right up to massive multinational enterprises - is avoiding Vista like the plague.
I think the root of the problem is that Microsoft has lost its way. Completely. Back when they had someone to compete with, the releases came thick and fast, as with Internet Explorer when they were out to crush Netscape. But now, for whatever reason, the company has ground to a halt. Apologists are talking about Windows 7, about eschewing backwards compatibility, a break from the past, a leaner, more modular system - in short, everything Windows Vista was supposed to be. But it won't happen.
Face it, Microsoft is dying.
:|
(Yes, I admit, that last line is a little dramatic. But these days it has an eerie ring of truth to it...)
For fuck's sake. It's never good enough, is it? Like the binary drivers thing or countless other trifling irrelevancies before it, this is a classic example of why open source has as many detractors as it does supporters â" the polarising ideology of its most ardent supporters. To these types, if you are not with them, you are against them, an open source hater and betrayer of the cause.
But seriously â" let's look at Ubuntu for a moment. It's one of the freest and most principled distributions of Linux out there, building off the same dogmatic (some would say excessively so) tradition as Debian. A default install of Ubuntu does not contain any non-free software (in that most pedantic sense), but a lot of distributions make no such distinction. So to try to paint it as the product of some evil conglomerate is disingenuous at the very least.
This is misguided, because in the real world, even free is not free. As we are well aware, many open source contributors are paid to work on open source projects by their employers - IBM, Novell, Apple, Sun. And indeed, every open source contributor that is not still living with their parents has to work to live. Money buys food and shelter; money buys the free time to devote oneself to contributing to open source. And it buys things like the thousands of Ubuntu CDs that get pressed and distributed for free. Yes, someone had to pay for those.
Ideology is our enemy. The wars of the 20th century were wars rooted in ideology; in the 21st century, religious ideology seems to have once again reared its ugly head. If we were to try to think a little more pragmatically and a little less ideologically; in terms of shades of grey rather than black and white, then the world would genuinely be a better place.
Slashdot Mirror
I've had two die on me over the years. I always wondered why. I had no idea it could have just been me running nmap on them...
I have nothing against Apple, in fact I love the Macbook Pro...
Right, but the MacBook Pro and the iPad ultimately appeal to very different kinds of people. The MacBook Pro has a uniquely broad appeal these days, because it combines a pretty decent UNIX (with all the familiar tools that we know and love) with a beautiful and easy-to-use UI. The former appeals to those that peruse Slashdot; the latter, to Apple's stereotyped traditional customer (though, these days, plenty of UNIX geeks appreciate a pretty UI too).
The iPad is very different. Despite its UNIX underpinnings, Apple is not interested in exposing them this time round. In the eyes of us geeks, this seems outrageous - how dare they restrict what we can do with the hardware!? But these simplifications make the product more appealing to - I would wager - >95% of the people out there, so, if only to appease its shareholders, Apple is pretty much duty-bound to deliver the most appealing product it can. If that means disposing of the concept of disks and drives and replacing it with ubiquitous in-the-cloud storage that syncs magically between related devices, most people will thank them for it.
Ultimately, it comes down to how you want to use a tablet. Apple's view seems to be that tablets are good at some things (web browsing, book- and magazine-reading, watching videos, etc.), passable at some things (they've made a laudable effort at porting their productivity suite to the iPad and the iPhone, but it probably needs a little more work to be truly brilliant on a tablet) and terrible at others. For the things a tablet is not suitable for (e.g. development), you use a more traditional laptop or desktop. The Android approach seems to be rather less radical - the stance on Flash is a good example (what use is Flash on a device without a permanent keyboard and, more crucially, a mouse?). That said, the Android stance is infinitely more radical than Microsoft's - Windows 8 is promising to provide an innovative and attractive touch interface (good), but will still run all the existing Windows apps (oh fuck), thus removing any incentive developers might have to create tailored apps for it.
Sent from my iPad
And likewise Paintbrush (pbrush.exe), which became Paint (mspaint.exe).
To this day, I still type 'pbrush' into Run to start Paint.
...we schedule our Linux boxen to reboot weekly. Without fail.
I work in an investment bank. There, they don't have time for this uptime-dick-size-contest shit. The longer a box is up, the greater the likelihood that some hardware failure is going to fuck it up and it won't boot again. A reboot is a great way to tease weird issues out into the open so that they don't screw you over at the critical moment. Of course we have redundant servers, but that's not the point.
Ultimately, the 3 year uptime on that web server you brag about is a disaster waiting to happen. I can give a pretty much cast iron guarantee that when it does go down, whether by choice or unexpectedly, it won't come back up again smoothly. And then you're fucked.
No, those figures are from their tests. The iPad is that good. (Basically because it's a battery with a screen and a small PCB attached.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Warrant
...or something along those lines.
By appointment to HRH Queen Elizabeth II
Facebook UK Limited
Social Networking Services
This is just syntactic sugar in .NET actually. If you look at the IL it compiles to, for short switch blocks, it's a set of if statements; for longer ones, it creates a Dictionary and then does TryGetValue.
You can't do:
...in C# either. You can do:
...though. I was sceptical at first, but it is a genuinely useful way of indicating the absence of a value when dealing with, for example, stuff that has come out of a database.
int i = null;
int? i = null;
What, you mean, MONTH/DAY/YEAR bothers you? It's just a convention.
:|
Yes, and a fucking stupid one, which causes no end of pain. What does 3/12/2009 mean in a bit of text? To most of the world, it means 3rd December 2009. But, for some bizarre reason, it means 12th March 2009 in America. The result? It is impossible to determine whether a given date is in sane or bizarre format for values of dd < 13. The only meaningful date format now is the Asian format (yyyy-mm-dd), which is the ISO standard.
Some will argue that this is because you say "March 12th", but I'm sure you also say "ten past nine", and you don't write that 10:9. Why? Oh yes, because that would be stupid.
It is now, but it wasn't. A British billion used to be 1,000,000,000,000.
Or was interpreted differently. 1,000,000,000-as-billion is pretty much standard here now, at least in this limey's experience. Ordinarily I would lament such a happening, but the world is better served by a consistent definition of "billion".
Now if only you guys could sort your stupid date format out, we'd be set...
Not sure what CacheViewer is, but on Safari, there is ClickToFlash to block Flash, which is wonderful (and, IIRC, very similar to FlashBlock). And one can turn off JavaScript in the preferences, if one is suitably paranoid...
Heck, my old (circa-1991) Latitude did 1680x1050...
Bullshit. Pure bullshit. You're off by about a fucking decade...
In that fragment you undermine everything else you have say.
Not sure about on Windows, but on the Mac, it doesn't install the VoiceOver Kit unless you have one of the new Shuffles. I was a bit disappointed by this, as I would quite like my Mac to be able to speak something other than English.
Interestingly, Japanese Mac keyboards still use that very layout. Though the addition of a couple of extra buttons either side of the space bar for switching between English and Japanese might put you off a bit...
:)
A good example is Adobe Reader.
:|
Actually, that's a terrible example. Adobe consistently produces (some of) the worst applications on the Mac. Even Microsoft now produce more Mac-like applications than Adobe do (e.g. use of Installer packages). If you're trying to prove OS X is teh fail, you'll have to try harder.
the opposition in M'sia is a coalition that includes the radical Islamic right
:|
True, but that's because the opposition in Malaysia is still a rather nascent phenomenon. Yes, there have been opposition parties for years, but they are all very small, and so this odd alliance of non-Muslim Chinese Malaysians and the radical Islamic parties is what you get. It's the only way to face off the UMNO (ruling party) juggernaut.
Incidentally, the blame for the Internal Security Act (both in Malaysia and Singapore) can be laid squarely with the British. As someone else has pointed out, it was introduced when there was a very real fear that Malaya would fall to the commies; the British were successful in preventing that. But afterwards, these new "democracies" felt that the ISA might be useful, and so it has remained. The other British-imposed legislative gem is that criminalising sodomy (though Muslim Malaysia might have had something to say about that anyway): the one-time darling of the UMNO party and now leader of the opposition Anwar Ibrahim has twice been accused of sodomy, though pretty much everyone knows the charges were politically motivated. The first time round though, he spent quite a few years in jail for it.
The good thing is that sites like this "blog" are demonstrating that the power of the Internet is starting to act as a force for change (and why it is relevant to Slashdot, I might add). That the government feels the need to lock people up on trumped-up charges of anti-Islamic conduct is, ultimately, a sign that they are making waves. And that can only be a good thing.
Last I heard he was more interested in chairs than developers...
...that I don't know what almost all these words mean? What is a "webinar" for example? I guess I'm just not cool anymore... :|
Well, not quite. It might effect greater sales of Macs, which in turn would effect greater Mac OS X usage...
:P
Couldn't resist. Learn to spell next time...?
At $400, considering that the cost of other consumer-level software has NOT gone up by a factor of 10, I expect a bloody PERFECT OS with absolutely NO glitches.
:|
Indeed - your point about inflation is spot on, and is something that is often overlooked. People complain about the ridiculous number of versions of Vista and complain about the price, but I think they forget just how ridiculous the price now actually is.
I think that if one were to pay a sum more commensurate with the perceived value of the software (and commensurate with the apparent level of effort that went into its production), $40 sounds like quite a nice sum. Hell, I might even buy a copy of Windows for $40.
And the argument about being 5 years late is a little misleading. Yes, it's true, but Vista is not the same OS they were working on for most of that time. They were a bit ambitious, and effectively killed off the real "longhorn" in late 2005. Then they started over and the Vista today is really only about 2 years or work. Maybe in irrelevant point, but the "they had 5 years to get it right" argument is equally irrelelvant.
:|
But it's not irrelevant. Just because they fucked it up three years in doesn't mean it doesn't count. It's true that because of the fuck-up, Vista does indeed represent only about two years of (lackadaisical) work, but at the end of the day, it was still the first consumer OS to come out of Redmond after XP, some five-six years later.
And in any case, it's a pretty poor show that a company with the resources that Microsoft has couldn't deliver "the real Longhorn", as you put it. I can't help but look at the elegant solutions that, for example, Apple has engineered and wonder why Microsoft, with all the talent it can and does recruit, can't do the same.
Honestly, that's just the way software is these days. Open Source is the same way, except they just call stuff beta for 5,10 or more years.
:|
Yes, but the difference with Windows is that you pay a small fortune for it. And if it's broke, you can't just poke at the code to fix it.
With Vista, all of this has become even more pronounced. Not only was it terribly late anyway, but it was shipped in this really rather broken state. Given that it took them five years to deliver it, waiting another 6 months to deliver something that actually works would have gone a long way to giving Microsoft some credibility. Instead, now they have next to none, with the result that everyone - from the student off to university right up to massive multinational enterprises - is avoiding Vista like the plague.
I think the root of the problem is that Microsoft has lost its way. Completely. Back when they had someone to compete with, the releases came thick and fast, as with Internet Explorer when they were out to crush Netscape. But now, for whatever reason, the company has ground to a halt. Apologists are talking about Windows 7, about eschewing backwards compatibility, a break from the past, a leaner, more modular system - in short, everything Windows Vista was supposed to be. But it won't happen.
Face it, Microsoft is dying.
(Yes, I admit, that last line is a little dramatic. But these days it has an eerie ring of truth to it...)
For fuck's sake. It's never good enough, is it? Like the binary drivers thing or countless other trifling irrelevancies before it, this is a classic example of why open source has as many detractors as it does supporters â" the polarising ideology of its most ardent supporters. To these types, if you are not with them, you are against them, an open source hater and betrayer of the cause.
:|
But seriously â" let's look at Ubuntu for a moment. It's one of the freest and most principled distributions of Linux out there, building off the same dogmatic (some would say excessively so) tradition as Debian. A default install of Ubuntu does not contain any non-free software (in that most pedantic sense), but a lot of distributions make no such distinction. So to try to paint it as the product of some evil conglomerate is disingenuous at the very least.
The fundamental issue here is in their dogmatism, open source's most ardent supporters become like the architects of a communist régime, where all enemies are members of a bourgeoisie that only ever gets bigger. At first it is just the most blatant offenders â" wholly proprietary companies like Microsoft. Then it is companies like Apple, whose commitment to open source is, shall we say, pragmatic. Finally they come for the most well-intentioned - companies like Canonical, who are behind Ubuntu. Why? One can only assume that it stems from some frankly communistic hatred of money.
This is misguided, because in the real world, even free is not free. As we are well aware, many open source contributors are paid to work on open source projects by their employers - IBM, Novell, Apple, Sun. And indeed, every open source contributor that is not still living with their parents has to work to live. Money buys food and shelter; money buys the free time to devote oneself to contributing to open source. And it buys things like the thousands of Ubuntu CDs that get pressed and distributed for free. Yes, someone had to pay for those.
Ideology is our enemy. The wars of the 20th century were wars rooted in ideology; in the 21st century, religious ideology seems to have once again reared its ugly head. If we were to try to think a little more pragmatically and a little less ideologically; in terms of shades of grey rather than black and white, then the world would genuinely be a better place.
I think you're right. We need a new meme.
...but does it run Mac OS X?
:P