Whilst public moaning in completely unrelated forums may appear to be the best way to expedite delivery, talking to to RS or Farnell will probably yield better results. If you've been waiting months, and you really have paid, then something has gone wrong. I wasn't charged until despatch, and I received the board within eight weeks of first reserving it (not purchasing, reserving). Registered with Farnell/RS 2012-05-08, pre-ordered from Farnell 2012-06-13, despatched and invoiced 2012-07-17, arrived 2012-07-20.
Of course if you've already talked to the supplier, please disregard my missive. It's merely that every story about the Pi includes at least a couple of people complaining that they've been waiting months. In the early days supply was a problem, now less so.
Note I don't deny that language is mutating. But using that truism to justify why someone yet again has used the unnecessary and nonsensical neologism "virii" is tired and lazy.
Your: I am dependent on evolution to cull the vulnerable so that future generations are immune to each disease naturally, matches pretty well with Wikipedia's: advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population, from where I'm standing.
Anyhow, I see you're a brand-new user who's previously never posted. Others have already moderated you down to 0 (harsh, but fair, on a site with a scientific approach to life) and I'm just giving you the oxygen of attention. Good luck with making "anti-dysgenicsm" anything other than, in reality, eugenics.
One final definition: "irreverent": showing a lack of respect for people or things that are generally taken seriously (my emboldening). You throw around words and phrases like "poison", "cull the vulnerable", "cocktails of poison", "crap", "toxic", "natural lottery", "destined to die", "medical industrial complex" and then expect to be taken seriously. No, I don't think I was being irreverent.
From Wikipedia: Eugenics is the "applied science or the bio-social movement which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population", usually a human population.
No need for artificial-selection - your practice of non-vaccination is a practice aimed at blah blah blah.
From the Oxford English dictionary: the science of improving a population by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics.
Again, you would like the breeding population to drop vaccination, with the hope that some gene for resistance to diseases is inherited (notwithstanding the fact we tried that for a few thousand years before vaccines came along).
How's evolution working out for you? As an individual, living here today, for let's say 80 years? Or maybe you really think on a thousand-year or 10 thousand-year timescale?
As a family person, do you play the lottery game with your children? Or as someone with friends, are you prepared to play that game with other people? When they've chosen not to play, but rather do the best they can for themselves and their families?
The polite description for you would be "eugenicist". Selfish, misguided, conspiracy theorist, anti-science would also fit.
Useless, eh? My 2560x1440 (16:9) and 1920x1200 (16:10) monitors covered in 80x48 character vim and log windows beg leave to differ. Your "actual work" differs from mine, so let's keep the generalisations down, okay?
Incidentally, a 364x106 character terminal window has also occasionally been useful for long-lined log analysis.
Good point on the retailer vs manufacturer. Agree entirely that this lock manufacturer is negligent/naive.
but having a maintenance contract is likley to make them sweing the benefit of doubt in your favour
If the vendor is sensible, they'll have used the maintenance contract fees to pay for appropriate insurance against future claims, so they'll be happier to deal with the issue swiftly. It seems that the lock manufacturer didn't do that...
IANAL. But I've been corrected on this issue by someone who is, and who happened to be my boss at the time.
If you're talking about the UK (my version of "over here") most of the stuff to do with refunds and longer-term fitness for purpose only apply to individual consumers. As long as the Cisco device is supplied in a fit state at purchase time then a purchasing company has no come-back if bugs are revealed later and require a paid fix. And in general, a Cisco router, for example, will route packets as advertised. It may have edge cases and rarely-exercised bugs that are only revealed in the field, but Cisco sold it as a router, in good faith.
An individual consumer could expend some effort talking to Cisco about "reasonable" fitness for purpose for up to six years after purchase, but the probable end result would be that Cisco suggest you accept a refund for returning the item.
Have a look (if you've got a lot of time) at the Sale of Goods Act 1979 (and later modifications, etc.) for the basis of all this. There may be European law overlaid on this as well, but so far as I know, no-one's ever tried to use "the law" to resist paying for ongoing maintenance fees on computer hardware, or at least nobody's succeeded in such a venture. And again - IANAL.
Fair enough, although can one buy a Vista OEM licence at the moment anyway? Will you be able to buy a Windows 7 OEM licence once 8 is released? If not, the point about sealed/unsealed is moot.
The rMBP along with all other sealed or unsealed computers will be able to use the PULSB licence, which is supposedly going to cost about the same as the OEM licence. So where's the problem?
And if you want to do one of the things on your list and you can work quickly, then developers can even download a free 90-day eval version of Windows 8 .
But again - why the special mention of the Retina? It has no relevance to the discussion at hand - ie the new licensing that Microsoft offers.
You've got the world waiting to hear about how "OSX screws up just too much" and the first thing that you choose to share is that you can't have the same wallpaper spread between two monitors. I don't normally like snarkiness but it must really be tough being you, what with the massive annoyances you have to deal with. Sheesh.
Still, it's your choice to jettison the reliability, consistency, elegance, support and put Linux on the machine because you can't spread wallpaper across monitors. Meanwhile some of the rest of us have applications or content on screen and tend not to bother with wallpaper.
Like I say, I'm not normally a fan of snarkiness, but today's been a real doozy of a day for idiotic comments, from people accepting the "UK threatens to storm the Ecuador embassy" line from Ecuador, through to people complaining about a change of connector (in a story from the frikking Daily Mail of all places), through to a piece about how Linux doesn't run well on a machine specifically designed to run a different OS.
As a European (from the UK), who regularly travels on business and pleasure to France, Germany and Switzerland, I don't have enough data to make any statements such as you make in your original comment. Hence the request for citations. I can't speak for "people like me", just me, but I can say that what I "won't understand" is rampant generalisation, backed up only by anecdote, but stated as fact.
So, help me out, show me the data that describes your reality and we can avoid the silly name calling.
If this kind of comment from an AC is going to get moderated "Interesting" I think the writer really should provide some citations so we can determine whether there's an axe being ground.
For a start, please quantify your "staff... mostly uneducated..." and "whenever you read..." and "most violence..." comments.
Sadly you're absolutely right on that point. From my point of view, I pre-filter the stuff on the BBC news site that isn't on the main news page since most of it (the non-hard news) is no better than the Idle section of Slashdot.
In the absence of Ben Goldacre from his Guardian column (come back Ben), there's very little consistently good science reporting in mainstream UK media.
To be fair to our beloved Beeb, none of those links point to "hard news" pages. They're either from the magazine section (a bit like the op-ed section of a paper) or a "balanced" current affairs program where one uninformed talking head berates another one for 30 minutes and noone emerges from the program any the wiser.
In the UK, Farnell and RS both emailed me in the last fortnight to say that my turn for ordering had come up and that I might receive it in August (I only ordered from Farnell). I only registered in April.
Woz left a while ago. Maybe hacker culture has moved on to other niches, as you suggest. If it has (and I don't believe it has), what's left behind is a large group of programmers using their Macs (of any stripe, in my experience) to code for any platform, including Mac OS and iOS. The idea that Apple would reduce demand for any of its computers by removing a basic tool like Terminal is borderline insane.
One appeal of the Mac environment is that I can move from my MBA to my MacPro or vice versa, pull my code and work seamlessly. Take away the power of the lesser machine and you reduce the value of the MacPro. Apple might lose two sales, rather than increase the value of a single sale. To what end? Terminal has always been tucked away in Utilities, which is pretty close to invisible to "normal users". Why bother upsetting a small but useful group of people by chopping out this kind of thing?
Any citation for the claim that access to the Terminal will be restricted in the future? Or that the putative restrictions will only apply to expensive "workstations"? Or is it just something you've been saying?
Anyone can write software for the Mac. If it's for your own use, that's the end of the story. In the future, anyone can request a certificate that will permit distribution of their software (either through the App store or independently). XCode runs on all Macs from Mini to MacPro (I know, I run it on everything other than an Xserve [the other users would be annoyed] and an iMac [I don't have one of them]). The open-source unbundled compilers also run on all of them.
Slashdot Mirror
Start with big pharma. They kill more people every year than illegal drugs.
1. Citation required.
2. Per user, or in absolute terms?
Not that I disagree with your general point about commercials - I live in a country where this sort of advertising is forbidden.
Whilst public moaning in completely unrelated forums may appear to be the best way to expedite delivery, talking to to RS or Farnell will probably yield better results. If you've been waiting months, and you really have paid, then something has gone wrong. I wasn't charged until despatch, and I received the board within eight weeks of first reserving it (not purchasing, reserving). Registered with Farnell/RS 2012-05-08, pre-ordered from Farnell 2012-06-13, despatched and invoiced 2012-07-17, arrived 2012-07-20.
Of course if you've already talked to the supplier, please disregard my missive. It's merely that every story about the Pi includes at least a couple of people complaining that they've been waiting months. In the early days supply was a problem, now less so.
Note I don't deny that language is mutating. But using that truism to justify why someone yet again has used the unnecessary and nonsensical neologism "virii" is tired and lazy.
One of the hackneyed excuses for spelling or grammar mistakes is to say that language is mutating.
Your: I am dependent on evolution to cull the vulnerable so that future generations are immune to each disease naturally, matches pretty well with Wikipedia's: advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population, from where I'm standing.
Anyhow, I see you're a brand-new user who's previously never posted. Others have already moderated you down to 0 (harsh, but fair, on a site with a scientific approach to life) and I'm just giving you the oxygen of attention. Good luck with making "anti-dysgenicsm" anything other than, in reality, eugenics.
One final definition: "irreverent": showing a lack of respect for people or things that are generally taken seriously (my emboldening). You throw around words and phrases like "poison", "cull the vulnerable", "cocktails of poison", "crap", "toxic", "natural lottery", "destined to die", "medical industrial complex" and then expect to be taken seriously. No, I don't think I was being irreverent.
Dropping into the third-person eh?
From Wikipedia: Eugenics is the "applied science or the bio-social movement which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population", usually a human population.
No need for artificial-selection - your practice of non-vaccination is a practice aimed at blah blah blah.
From the Oxford English dictionary: the science of improving a population by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics.
Again, you would like the breeding population to drop vaccination, with the hope that some gene for resistance to diseases is inherited (notwithstanding the fact we tried that for a few thousand years before vaccines came along).
You quack like a duck.
How's evolution working out for you? As an individual, living here today, for let's say 80 years? Or maybe you really think on a thousand-year or 10 thousand-year timescale?
As a family person, do you play the lottery game with your children? Or as someone with friends, are you prepared to play that game with other people? When they've chosen not to play, but rather do the best they can for themselves and their families?
The polite description for you would be "eugenicist". Selfish, misguided, conspiracy theorist, anti-science would also fit.
Useless, eh? My 2560x1440 (16:9) and 1920x1200 (16:10) monitors covered in 80x48 character vim and log windows beg leave to differ. Your "actual work" differs from mine, so let's keep the generalisations down, okay?
Incidentally, a 364x106 character terminal window has also occasionally been useful for long-lined log analysis.
It's new, it's washable, but it's already been done at least twice by other companies. So it ain't news, it's an advert. Grrr.
Good point on the retailer vs manufacturer. Agree entirely that this lock manufacturer is negligent/naive.
If the vendor is sensible, they'll have used the maintenance contract fees to pay for appropriate insurance against future claims, so they'll be happier to deal with the issue swiftly. It seems that the lock manufacturer didn't do that...
IANAL. But I've been corrected on this issue by someone who is, and who happened to be my boss at the time.
If you're talking about the UK (my version of "over here") most of the stuff to do with refunds and longer-term fitness for purpose only apply to individual consumers. As long as the Cisco device is supplied in a fit state at purchase time then a purchasing company has no come-back if bugs are revealed later and require a paid fix. And in general, a Cisco router, for example, will route packets as advertised. It may have edge cases and rarely-exercised bugs that are only revealed in the field, but Cisco sold it as a router, in good faith.
An individual consumer could expend some effort talking to Cisco about "reasonable" fitness for purpose for up to six years after purchase, but the probable end result would be that Cisco suggest you accept a refund for returning the item.
Have a look (if you've got a lot of time) at the Sale of Goods Act 1979 (and later modifications, etc.) for the basis of all this. There may be European law overlaid on this as well, but so far as I know, no-one's ever tried to use "the law" to resist paying for ongoing maintenance fees on computer hardware, or at least nobody's succeeded in such a venture. And again - IANAL.
Fair enough, although can one buy a Vista OEM licence at the moment anyway? Will you be able to buy a Windows 7 OEM licence once 8 is released? If not, the point about sealed/unsealed is moot.
Nice bit of shoe-horning there.
The rMBP along with all other sealed or unsealed computers will be able to use the PULSB licence, which is supposedly going to cost about the same as the OEM licence. So where's the problem?
And if you want to do one of the things on your list and you can work quickly, then developers can even download a free 90-day eval version of Windows 8 .
But again - why the special mention of the Retina? It has no relevance to the discussion at hand - ie the new licensing that Microsoft offers.
I'm sure not going to argue that people use KDE under OSX, but for general OSS needs try homebrew - http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/
I develop for Linux, Windows and MacOS on my Macs. I abandoned MacPorts and Fink a year ago and haven't looked back. My current list of brews is:
You've got the world waiting to hear about how "OSX screws up just too much" and the first thing that you choose to share is that you can't have the same wallpaper spread between two monitors. I don't normally like snarkiness but it must really be tough being you, what with the massive annoyances you have to deal with. Sheesh.
Still, it's your choice to jettison the reliability, consistency, elegance, support and put Linux on the machine because you can't spread wallpaper across monitors. Meanwhile some of the rest of us have applications or content on screen and tend not to bother with wallpaper.
Like I say, I'm not normally a fan of snarkiness, but today's been a real doozy of a day for idiotic comments, from people accepting the "UK threatens to storm the Ecuador embassy" line from Ecuador, through to people complaining about a change of connector (in a story from the frikking Daily Mail of all places), through to a piece about how Linux doesn't run well on a machine specifically designed to run a different OS.
As a European (from the UK), who regularly travels on business and pleasure to France, Germany and Switzerland, I don't have enough data to make any statements such as you make in your original comment. Hence the request for citations. I can't speak for "people like me", just me, but I can say that what I "won't understand" is rampant generalisation, backed up only by anecdote, but stated as fact.
So, help me out, show me the data that describes your reality and we can avoid the silly name calling.
If this kind of comment from an AC is going to get moderated "Interesting" I think the writer really should provide some citations so we can determine whether there's an axe being ground.
For a start, please quantify your "staff ... mostly uneducated..." and "whenever you read..." and "most violence..." comments.
Also "natives" - seriously?
Replying to my own post because I can.
Here's a pretty picture of a German keyboard showing some of the other differences that my anglo-centric non-umlaut-needing mind had blanked out.
When I'm in the data-centre at Frankfurt, the Y and the Z key suggest that you're wrong about Germans using QWERTY.
Sadly you're absolutely right on that point. From my point of view, I pre-filter the stuff on the BBC news site that isn't on the main news page since most of it (the non-hard news) is no better than the Idle section of Slashdot.
In the absence of Ben Goldacre from his Guardian column (come back Ben), there's very little consistently good science reporting in mainstream UK media.
To be fair to our beloved Beeb, none of those links point to "hard news" pages. They're either from the magazine section (a bit like the op-ed section of a paper) or a "balanced" current affairs program where one uninformed talking head berates another one for 30 minutes and noone emerges from the program any the wiser.
Before you visit the source code page, switch your "90's web page design mistakes" filter to maximum.
In the UK, Farnell and RS both emailed me in the last fortnight to say that my turn for ordering had come up and that I might receive it in August (I only ordered from Farnell). I only registered in April.
Woz left a while ago. Maybe hacker culture has moved on to other niches, as you suggest. If it has (and I don't believe it has), what's left behind is a large group of programmers using their Macs (of any stripe, in my experience) to code for any platform, including Mac OS and iOS. The idea that Apple would reduce demand for any of its computers by removing a basic tool like Terminal is borderline insane.
One appeal of the Mac environment is that I can move from my MBA to my MacPro or vice versa, pull my code and work seamlessly. Take away the power of the lesser machine and you reduce the value of the MacPro. Apple might lose two sales, rather than increase the value of a single sale. To what end? Terminal has always been tucked away in Utilities, which is pretty close to invisible to "normal users". Why bother upsetting a small but useful group of people by chopping out this kind of thing?
Any citation for the claim that access to the Terminal will be restricted in the future? Or that the putative restrictions will only apply to expensive "workstations"? Or is it just something you've been saying?
Anyone can write software for the Mac. If it's for your own use, that's the end of the story. In the future, anyone can request a certificate that will permit distribution of their software (either through the App store or independently). XCode runs on all Macs from Mini to MacPro (I know, I run it on everything other than an Xserve [the other users would be annoyed] and an iMac [I don't have one of them]). The open-source unbundled compilers also run on all of them.