One of evolution's central stipulations is that there is no "goal state" or ideal form for life. We're not all evolving toward something. Evolution is a reactive process driven by environmental change, copy errors and mutations. The "few caveats" espoused by the Catholic Church basically say that there is a goal state (since humans are "created in God's image") and that the driver is a supernatural being. That is not evolutionary theory. It's a useless theory that can basically be made to retroactively predict anything. "Humans evolved a digestive system to accommodate high-calorie diets without becoming grossly overweight? That was God's plan all along!"
I'm kind of a proponent of having a student's evolution mirror the industry's, to an extent. Start them with C and then gradually introduce problems that were more and more difficult to solve in C. That way, when you show them C++ or Java, they can appreciate why these languages were needed and what classes of problems they're appropriate for and more importantly, what they're not appropriate for. But to really appreciate these things, you have to have students implement their own little OO runtime in C or whatever other procedural language. You can bet that after that, by the time you show them a true OO language, they'll know plenty about OOP, and things will just come more naturally.
These students are being trained as engineers. They shouldn't be afraid of a little grease.
These insane laws are almost always championed by swine from both sides of the aisle, and lately, it's been the Republicans that have been getting on the "Big Government" bandwagon these days anyway. Or did you forget that Republicans were the ones so outraged when Texas sodomy laws were ruled unconstitutional? I can't think of a bigger government than the one which tells people what sexual positions are okay.
That's an interesting paradox. The court prosecutes on behalf of her older self, whose life has been ruined because her younger self posted nude pictures of herself, causing the court to prosecute her on behalf of her older self and ruin her life by putting her on the sex offenders' registry.
Let's leave aside that, by that rationale, the victim of the crime does not exist, and therefore that was no complaining witness and therefore no crime could have possibly been committed. Honestly, would that really stand up under appeal? Are you sure that's what the rationale was?
As is the case with most well-implemented dongles, it's hard to describe the extent and functionality of the dongle. In the case of Apple it's deeply embedded in the system. It prevents MacOS from running on any system that doesn't contain the dongle.
I know what a hardware dongle is. I'm asking how you know that there is one on every Apple motherboard. You seem to think that this would be impossible to implement in software.
Of course, we can never know for certain. But the fact that they're stooping to the level of introducing intentionally-flawed technology seems to indicate that they don't possess the computing power to break the encryption available to the average person these days.
The Feds aren't omnipotent. They have to live under the same computing constraints the rest of us do. That's probably why the NSA created an encryption standard with a built-in backdoor. People have access to 2048-bit encryption technologies these days, and you just can't brute-force that encryption in a reasonable timeframe. Doesn't matter if you're from the NSA, FBI or another TLA. That's why the Feds want to start mandating technology that they've specifically designed to be broken.
Likewise, I'd like to think that if you pay your debt to soceity (i.e: you aren't on parole or in prison) then soceity shouldn't judge you for your past actions.
Well, yes and no. Businesses dealing with information security have every right not to hire someone with a criminal background. There are certain things that just stick with you, and there are legitimate reasons to inquire as to whether or not someone has been convicted of a crime.
Now, that being said, yes I agree that denying felons the right to vote is unreasonable. We can't release them back into society and expect them to be productive members if we remove their ability to effect change. That goes double for these insane sex offender databases. They are, in the truest sense, the government getting citizens to do its dirty work. Lawmakers can't get the death penalty for child molestation because, in a legal sense, it's far beyond the scope of the crime. So they put offenders in a big, public database and force them to live as hermits outside of society, lest they be arrested for being within a mile of some place children might be at sometime.
Once you're in a sex offender registry, your hope of leading a normal life drops to zero. (And the criteria for even being in the registry are so broad in some states that an 18 year-old who has sex with his 17 year-old girlfriend is the same as a child rapist.) There's no point to releasing sex offenders from prison if they have the shadow of this omnipresent database looming over them. Better to just keep them locked up indefinitely. (Oh but of course, that would leave less room for kids caught with a couple ounces of marijuana, the people who really belong in prison.)
The attitude toward sex crimes in this country is getting really out of hand. Ohio, if I remember correctly, actually wanted to maintain a public registry of people who had been accused of sex crimes and then acquitted, which is about as flagrant a violation of due process as I can think of. This is a real problem, and public databases designed to incite vigilantism are not the solution.
This is contradictory. If devloping for the platform is easier, the developer should in theory have more time left at his or her disposal to polish the GUI and stomp bugs.
You're assuming a competent developer. The lower the barrier to entry of developing for your platform is, the less competent a developer has to be to write for it. Less competent developers will write lower quality code and not be terribly good at bug stomping.
Hey, man, I hate Microsoft, and I love my Mac. I even like Objective-C, but the CLI is an evolution in compiler chains. Imagine the computing world as a whole failed a course when Java was developed, and CLI is the result of really fucking paying attention in class this time. Ignoring this advancement could really give those bastards an edge, so for the sake of those that come after us, let's keep focused. Microsoft: evil. CLI: an ECMA/ISO-flavoured pacifier for redmond's rabid backwards-compatibility-status-quo crowd.
I never made any comments about whether.Net was evil. From what I hear, it's a fine framework. What I questioned was whether.Net was worth bringing into Cocoa.
sides The worlds colleges are churning out neither Java nor C# programmers, they are simply churning out programmers. Most of which can learn a new language in no time.
I don't necessarily agree. If a student who only learned Java in school has to learn Objective-C, he has to learn to deal with more or less manual memory management. This is simply not a concept a lot of people can grasp, and it takes a lot of experience to get decent at debugging memory errors and keeping track of what's going on under the hood. And everything in Objective-C is a pointer, which is not a concept that's exposed at all in Java, and is only exposed in C# in a very "don't ever use this" kind of way, from my understanding. Sure, you could argue that everyone would just treat the pointer as an object, but things like dangling pointers and reference-passing are still problems.
Objective-C would take a Java or C# developer a week to learn, a month to master.
I definitely disagree here. Objective-C is fairly easy language to pick up, but master? No way. Maybe it's because I went from C++ to Objective-C and had to rid my mind of all the C++ OO kludges to really get a feel for Objective-C's OOP capabilities, but I've been writing it for years, and I still don't know if I could say I've mastered it.
And, honestly, after using both Java and Objective-C, it's clear that Objective-C is object oriented programming done right. The only thing Java or C# really have going for them is mindshare in management.
Right now, the world's colleges and universities are churning out Java & C# programmers. Those are the popular languages, the ones for which you can almost literally open up a can of programmers for.
Having the "dime a dozen" crowd develop for your platform isn't without its drawbacks. I hear a lot of comments from Windows converts saying that the Mac indy developer scene is smaller than Windows, but the software is almost always of much higher quality and polish. When you make it easy to develop for your platform, you attract lots of developers (good), but the signal-to-noise ratio drops significantly (bad).
Microsoft's seen the proverbial storm coming, and has been working on an alternative for their aging and clunky Win32 API. Remember a few years back, when the Redmontians announced that Vista (then called Longhorn) would only support.NET programs natively? Back then the world evidently wasn't ready for it. But it's slowly becoming ready, because it's getting harder and harder to find competent C++ programmers.
Based on what I've heard from Windows developers, Microsoft needed a good Win32 replacement because Win32 sucked. I've seen some Win32 code; it's not pretty, and the way the UI code connects to what's happening on the screen is a complete mystery to me. When I learned Cocoa and Objective-C, the connections were intuitive and obvious.
Meanwhile, Apple is tied to Objective C. A language few people are willing to learn (remember "Objectionable C"?).
I'm sure that'll change in February of 2008. Then lots of people will probably be interested in learning Objective-C.
So, enter.NET. It's reasonably fast (getting faster), it has plenty of mindshare, and most importantly: there isn't much in the way of a legacy code base for it. Supporting.NET doesn't mean hurting your own APIs, its simply an additional one.
Apple tried that kind of thing before with the Java/Cocoa bridge. It's now been deprecated because it was a pain in the ass to maintain, and no one was using it. A.Net bridge would require that Apple map all the.Net standard classes to their own. They might be able to do toll-free bridging to underlying CoreFoundation types (like dictionaries, strings, etc...), but I don't know if C# supports the kind of dynamic typing that makes it possible through the C/Objective-C combination. I suspect it does. But it'd still be a lot of work.
Instead, Apple is offering Python and Ruby Objective-C bridges, and that makes a lot more sense. They've got bridging support for arbitrary scripting languages into the Objective-C runtime, enabling web developers to write native Mac OS X applications using native APIs. Whatever Apple does with respect to additional language support in the future, you can bet Objective-C will be a part of it. The language allows for a lot of dynamism and flexibility, and on top of that, it's a strict C superset, which means that there are no special wrappers required to call down to the POSIX layer. So it's just easy to bridge other languages with it.
At the end of the day, Objective-C just doesn't get the credit it deserves. It's a very well thought-out language with lots of power. Most people just don't see it because they think Objective-C is Apple's "proprietary" language or some such nonsense.
I'm not sure why this post was rated +5 insightful. It seemed about as ill-informed as the one it complains about. First of all, there is no indication that the US is less prepared for a natural disaster because of the war. These claims were made in regards to California wild-fires but were immediately refuted by the California National Guard, and by Democrats as well.
Tell that to all the people in Louisiana who got fucked over in the hurricane.
Second, its not cute to mangle words like administration with maladministration. It makes the poster sound like a 14 year old trying to sound smart.
And pontificating to an Internet peanut gallery as though you're some professor talking about an experiment makes you seem like a dork with delusions of grandeur.
Throwing in a lot of swear words makes the poster seem closer to an internet tough guy than someone who I would take seriously.
If someone is willing to dismiss an argument because it contains swear words, then I'm not inclined to care whether he takes me seriously.
Its really easy to claim everything is a conspiracy.
I made no conspiracy claims. I accused this administration of being incompetent and deceptive.
But could it be possible that the Bush administration recognized an actual threat to global and US security?
No, they simply made one up. Hussein was barely a threat to his neighbors. Honestly, their military surrendered in droves when we invaded, and that's something we counted on. How in hell was this a military that was any threat to us?
Militant Islam (or terrorism) seems like a threat to our way of life to me.
Only as long as we maintain a massive military presence in that region and fund Israel. Suicide bombers don't give two shits about whether our women where short skirts. They want to rule their little part of the world as a theocracy, and frankly, if that's what they want, great. The people will rise up and overthrow them when they get sick of it.
Now how the Bush administration proceeded in dealing with that threat is a place where people can disagree, but I would be interested to know if the poster feels Militant Islam (or terrorism) is an actual threat or a tool for this conspiracy theory I see so many people going on about.
What conspiracy theory? That Bush and his cabinet wanted to expand executive power? It's hardly a conspiracy theory; they've made several statements exactly to that effect. Cheney in particular thinks that the presidency should be unquestionable in matters of national security. Hell, the White House legal team got a memo the day after Bush took office instructing them to look for ways to expand executive power, claiming that it had been significantly restricted. (What they really meant is that the growth rate of executive power slowed. The presidency has done nothing but accumulate power for the past 30 years.) And constantly saying that, since we're in a time of war, we need to sacrifice our liberties, makes it pretty clear that they think illegitimate wars are enough to expand government power.
Also I feel the poster shortchanges the intelligence of the average person in the military. Most of them I have talked with agree the Bush administration has made errors in the execution of the war.
And I feel that your conversations with military personnel do not constitute a representative sample of the entire military. My feelings are backed up by math textbooks. How about yours?
When it comes to that, the US has always made errors in its execution of war throughout history. If the servicemen and women will vote for Republicans, could it be that they feel Democrat policies would be even worse? Is the only conclusion really that they are all being tricked and used and taken advantage of?
One might argue that the insurgents are not terrorists and are thus not our enemy. A reasonable argument, save for one missing piece of logic. If the insurgents would wait we'd already be out of Iraq and they could be dealing with the local, underpowered government. Instead, they decide to take on the most powerful military in the world. Even on our bad days, that's not such a good idea.
Insurgents are hardly the only problem in Iraq. There are gaping ethnic and tribal divisions that have existed for centuries. "Sunni" and "Shiite" aren't just media buzzwords. They mean something. They're two groups that simply don't get along, and the only reason they were relatively passive during Hussein's rule was because he kept them inline through violence and fear of force. The idea that we could just walk in and wave our magic democracy wand was completely idiotic and obviously came about from people who haven't taken so much as a 100-level college course in Middle Eastern history. If the insurgents decided to wait it out, you can damn sure bet that the ethnic cleansing death squads wouldn't. These people have violent disagreements. Yes, they're disagreements about superstitious bullshit (much like how the Catholics and Protestants can't agree on whether the cardboard-flavored wafer is actually Zombie-Jesus or just a symbol of Zombie-Jesus), but they're disagreements these lunatics are willing to kill each other over.
As for your ridiculous bravado about our military, wake up. It's being stretched so thin that we can't even take care of our own citizens in case of a natural disaster because all the National Guard units are gone. If the Iraqi insurgents were World War II Germany, then yeah, we'd be suited to fighting them. But our military is simply not geared toward urban warfare. Our troops simply don't have that kind of training. They went in without knowing dick about local customs, and we fired Arabic translators because they were gay and that's icky. We'd be better off dropping the NYPD or LAPD in there. Cops are trained to get to know neighborhoods, learn who to make friends with and whose arms to twist. Soldiers, in the classical sense, aren't.
It's amazing to me how this maladministration constantly crows about how this is a "different kind of war", but they want to fight it like it's World War II, only not, but kind of. They declare "war" on the tactic of terror (without any Congressional votes), and then they refuse to provide a list of goals that we have to achieve. (And no, "eliminating terrorism" isn't a goal; it's a pipe dream.) So we declare war on terror, and then the president says, "We're at war! I need to expand the executive branch's power and make government waaaaaaaay the fuck bigger!" So what city do we have to capture for the war on terror to be over and for the executive branch to return to its proper size and scope in the government? Who has to surrender? Funny, there are no answers to either of those questions. It's a perpetual war, meant to expand the powers of the presidency beyond any sane interpretations of the Constitution.
Meanwhile, while all this bullshit is going on, you sit there are cheerlead this insane, utterly incomprehensible state of affairs. Yeah yeah, you love the troops, whatever. Someone who supports the troops wouldn't send them to die for nothing in that fucked up sandpit. This administration is a disgrace to the military. They love to talk about how much they support them and what a great job they're doing, but at the end of the day, the army is an instrument which they use to further their own political ends. And the saddest part is that the military laps it up because they get lip-service. Servicemen and women will still vote for these assholes time and time again, and they die for nothing for their trouble. It's a god damn tragedy.
The best of these schemes, IMHO, is an advisory reference counting algorithm in which you make a habit of incrementing an object's ref counter whenever you add a reference to it and decrementing it when you remove a reference. Combined with manual alloc/free, this gives you the ease of tracking down where those references are, while still giving you the ability to test for references on free and generate a warning that "Object 0x46b32158 is still referenced in three places when freed at utilities.c:866."
Objective-C has a similar scheme, but the object is automatically freed when the reference count reaches 0. You simply increment and decrement the reference count as you work with the object. To me, that's the best compromise between automatic garbage collectors and purely manual memory management.
Except that iSuppli doesn't attach error bars to their estimates. They just state them as-is. Without error bars, estimates that have error are useless.
Really? I haven't used Office on Windows in a while, but I remember it having that weird minimizing behavior when I last used it. (It was probably Office 2003 or 2000.)
I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft was trying to move away from the old MDI in Vista. They're probably getting tired of that kludge, since they wind up having to use it in their own Office suite. It creates inconsistent behavior within the main window in that, if you minimize a window, it doesn't go down to the task bar. It goes down to a little area at the bottom of the window. And it's not really "minimized" in the Windows task bar sense; it's sized as small as it can possibly be, which compresses the title bar horizontally, so you don't really have any idea which documents are where, since there is no indication as to their title (beyond a couple characters' worth) or their contents.
I would disagree that the MDI of Photoshop sucks. In fact, I prefer working in Photoshop on a PC rather than a mac, for the mere simple fact that Photoshop hides all the desktop clutter while allowing me to resize the images I'm working on, whereas on a mac, the desktop is always there as a distraction.
Ask any artist who deals with multiple monitors how much he likes working with Photoshop's interface on Windows. It's a nightmare. You can't just drag a document over to the other monitor. You have to expand the main window over to it to use it, and then you can only use a certain subset of the pixels. To utilize the entire second monitor, you actually have to sacrifice its utility in other programs. MDI is basically a very poor emulation of Mac OS X's single menu bar.
Also, I'd buy your argument if both the Dock and Expose came out at the same time. In the first releases of the OS, there was no Expose, and hence the Dock was designed to do what the taskbar is supposed to do in Windows. Clearly that wasn't the best solution, so Expose came later as an attempt to solve the problem.
How does that change anything I said? Even if the Dock was originally intended to be a window manager, it clearly wasn't filling that role, so along came Exposé. The end result is the same.
The issue is that the Dock isn't there to be a window manager. That's what Exposé is for. The Dock is an application manager and a temporary holding place for windows. But it's not a window manager because it just doesn't do well as one in the UI sense. The Dock is very visual: big icons that immediately communicate what they're supposed to represent. The compass is a browser, the CD is iTunes, etc... But windows are defined by their contents, and that's not something that the Dock can easily display. The tiles are just too small. That's why there's Exposé. You can view your windows' contents much more easily.
The task bar attempts to handle both application and window switching because on Windows, applications and windows are very closely related. If an application is open, it has at least one window associated with it. This is not true of Mac OS X, and generally on Windows, there is a one-to-one relationship between application instances and documents. So if you want to edit another document, open another instance of the application. (That is, unless you use the MDI that Photoshop and Office use, which I think we can all agree sucks.)
So as I said, it's a design decision, and it's not as simple as many people seem to think. It's not just a matter of "Oh do it like Windows does". Mac OS X is not Windows. The Dock and Exposé represent a sort of re-factored task bar from a higher-level standpoint. Obviously, their implementations are different.
That's a design choice, and there are valid arguments either way as to whether one should make the Dock or task bar have a reference to every window that's open or just applications. The problem with giving every window a reference is that it can very easily clutter up your task bar, and when that happens, those references get collapsed into per-application groupings, so you just wind up with the Dock's basic behavior anyway.
And the Finder does have view options. Press Command-J on the window you're in and set the options for "All Windows" to keep items sorted by Kind. Oh yeah, and download Adium.
Slashdot Mirror
One of evolution's central stipulations is that there is no "goal state" or ideal form for life. We're not all evolving toward something. Evolution is a reactive process driven by environmental change, copy errors and mutations. The "few caveats" espoused by the Catholic Church basically say that there is a goal state (since humans are "created in God's image") and that the driver is a supernatural being. That is not evolutionary theory. It's a useless theory that can basically be made to retroactively predict anything. "Humans evolved a digestive system to accommodate high-calorie diets without becoming grossly overweight? That was God's plan all along!"
I'm kind of a proponent of having a student's evolution mirror the industry's, to an extent. Start them with C and then gradually introduce problems that were more and more difficult to solve in C. That way, when you show them C++ or Java, they can appreciate why these languages were needed and what classes of problems they're appropriate for and more importantly, what they're not appropriate for. But to really appreciate these things, you have to have students implement their own little OO runtime in C or whatever other procedural language. You can bet that after that, by the time you show them a true OO language, they'll know plenty about OOP, and things will just come more naturally.
These students are being trained as engineers. They shouldn't be afraid of a little grease.
These insane laws are almost always championed by swine from both sides of the aisle, and lately, it's been the Republicans that have been getting on the "Big Government" bandwagon these days anyway. Or did you forget that Republicans were the ones so outraged when Texas sodomy laws were ruled unconstitutional? I can't think of a bigger government than the one which tells people what sexual positions are okay.
That's an interesting paradox. The court prosecutes on behalf of her older self, whose life has been ruined because her younger self posted nude pictures of herself, causing the court to prosecute her on behalf of her older self and ruin her life by putting her on the sex offenders' registry.
Let's leave aside that, by that rationale, the victim of the crime does not exist, and therefore that was no complaining witness and therefore no crime could have possibly been committed. Honestly, would that really stand up under appeal? Are you sure that's what the rationale was?
Please enlighten us all. What specific dongle does Apple use in their hardware?
Could Slashdot please change the inflammatory title of the post to reflect that it's actually a hoax?
Of course, we can never know for certain. But the fact that they're stooping to the level of introducing intentionally-flawed technology seems to indicate that they don't possess the computing power to break the encryption available to the average person these days.
The Feds aren't omnipotent. They have to live under the same computing constraints the rest of us do. That's probably why the NSA created an encryption standard with a built-in backdoor. People have access to 2048-bit encryption technologies these days, and you just can't brute-force that encryption in a reasonable timeframe. Doesn't matter if you're from the NSA, FBI or another TLA. That's why the Feds want to start mandating technology that they've specifically designed to be broken.
Now, that being said, yes I agree that denying felons the right to vote is unreasonable. We can't release them back into society and expect them to be productive members if we remove their ability to effect change. That goes double for these insane sex offender databases. They are, in the truest sense, the government getting citizens to do its dirty work. Lawmakers can't get the death penalty for child molestation because, in a legal sense, it's far beyond the scope of the crime. So they put offenders in a big, public database and force them to live as hermits outside of society, lest they be arrested for being within a mile of some place children might be at sometime.
Once you're in a sex offender registry, your hope of leading a normal life drops to zero. (And the criteria for even being in the registry are so broad in some states that an 18 year-old who has sex with his 17 year-old girlfriend is the same as a child rapist.) There's no point to releasing sex offenders from prison if they have the shadow of this omnipresent database looming over them. Better to just keep them locked up indefinitely. (Oh but of course, that would leave less room for kids caught with a couple ounces of marijuana, the people who really belong in prison.)
The attitude toward sex crimes in this country is getting really out of hand. Ohio, if I remember correctly, actually wanted to maintain a public registry of people who had been accused of sex crimes and then acquitted, which is about as flagrant a violation of due process as I can think of. This is a real problem, and public databases designed to incite vigilantism are not the solution.
No offense, but what people? The impact of breaking NeoOffice is probably negligible at best.
Instead, Apple is offering Python and Ruby Objective-C bridges, and that makes a lot more sense. They've got bridging support for arbitrary scripting languages into the Objective-C runtime, enabling web developers to write native Mac OS X applications using native APIs. Whatever Apple does with respect to additional language support in the future, you can bet Objective-C will be a part of it. The language allows for a lot of dynamism and flexibility, and on top of that, it's a strict C superset, which means that there are no special wrappers required to call down to the POSIX layer. So it's just easy to bridge other languages with it.
At the end of the day, Objective-C just doesn't get the credit it deserves. It's a very well thought-out language with lots of power. Most people just don't see it because they think Objective-C is Apple's "proprietary" language or some such nonsense.
Not only that, but the date on the blog post was 19 November. Just a bit late, guys.
Tell that to all the people in Louisiana who got fucked over in the hurricane.
And pontificating to an Internet peanut gallery as though you're some professor talking about an experiment makes you seem like a dork with delusions of grandeur.
If someone is willing to dismiss an argument because it contains swear words, then I'm not inclined to care whether he takes me seriously.
I made no conspiracy claims. I accused this administration of being incompetent and deceptive.
No, they simply made one up. Hussein was barely a threat to his neighbors. Honestly, their military surrendered in droves when we invaded, and that's something we counted on. How in hell was this a military that was any threat to us?
Only as long as we maintain a massive military presence in that region and fund Israel. Suicide bombers don't give two shits about whether our women where short skirts. They want to rule their little part of the world as a theocracy, and frankly, if that's what they want, great. The people will rise up and overthrow them when they get sick of it.
What conspiracy theory? That Bush and his cabinet wanted to expand executive power? It's hardly a conspiracy theory; they've made several statements exactly to that effect. Cheney in particular thinks that the presidency should be unquestionable in matters of national security. Hell, the White House legal team got a memo the day after Bush took office instructing them to look for ways to expand executive power, claiming that it had been significantly restricted. (What they really meant is that the growth rate of executive power slowed. The presidency has done nothing but accumulate power for the past 30 years.) And constantly saying that, since we're in a time of war, we need to sacrifice our liberties, makes it pretty clear that they think illegitimate wars are enough to expand government power.
And I feel that your conversations with military personnel do not constitute a representative sample of the entire military. My feelings are backed up by math textbooks. How about yours?
As for your ridiculous bravado about our military, wake up. It's being stretched so thin that we can't even take care of our own citizens in case of a natural disaster because all the National Guard units are gone. If the Iraqi insurgents were World War II Germany, then yeah, we'd be suited to fighting them. But our military is simply not geared toward urban warfare. Our troops simply don't have that kind of training. They went in without knowing dick about local customs, and we fired Arabic translators because they were gay and that's icky. We'd be better off dropping the NYPD or LAPD in there. Cops are trained to get to know neighborhoods, learn who to make friends with and whose arms to twist. Soldiers, in the classical sense, aren't.
It's amazing to me how this maladministration constantly crows about how this is a "different kind of war", but they want to fight it like it's World War II, only not, but kind of. They declare "war" on the tactic of terror (without any Congressional votes), and then they refuse to provide a list of goals that we have to achieve. (And no, "eliminating terrorism" isn't a goal; it's a pipe dream.) So we declare war on terror, and then the president says, "We're at war! I need to expand the executive branch's power and make government waaaaaaaay the fuck bigger!" So what city do we have to capture for the war on terror to be over and for the executive branch to return to its proper size and scope in the government? Who has to surrender? Funny, there are no answers to either of those questions. It's a perpetual war, meant to expand the powers of the presidency beyond any sane interpretations of the Constitution.
Meanwhile, while all this bullshit is going on, you sit there are cheerlead this insane, utterly incomprehensible state of affairs. Yeah yeah, you love the troops, whatever. Someone who supports the troops wouldn't send them to die for nothing in that fucked up sandpit. This administration is a disgrace to the military. They love to talk about how much they support them and what a great job they're doing, but at the end of the day, the army is an instrument which they use to further their own political ends. And the saddest part is that the military laps it up because they get lip-service. Servicemen and women will still vote for these assholes time and time again, and they die for nothing for their trouble. It's a god damn tragedy.
Okay, rant over.
Except that iSuppli doesn't attach error bars to their estimates. They just state them as-is. Without error bars, estimates that have error are useless.
Really? I haven't used Office on Windows in a while, but I remember it having that weird minimizing behavior when I last used it. (It was probably Office 2003 or 2000.)
I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft was trying to move away from the old MDI in Vista. They're probably getting tired of that kludge, since they wind up having to use it in their own Office suite. It creates inconsistent behavior within the main window in that, if you minimize a window, it doesn't go down to the task bar. It goes down to a little area at the bottom of the window. And it's not really "minimized" in the Windows task bar sense; it's sized as small as it can possibly be, which compresses the title bar horizontally, so you don't really have any idea which documents are where, since there is no indication as to their title (beyond a couple characters' worth) or their contents.
The issue is that the Dock isn't there to be a window manager. That's what Exposé is for. The Dock is an application manager and a temporary holding place for windows. But it's not a window manager because it just doesn't do well as one in the UI sense. The Dock is very visual: big icons that immediately communicate what they're supposed to represent. The compass is a browser, the CD is iTunes, etc ... But windows are defined by their contents, and that's not something that the Dock can easily display. The tiles are just too small. That's why there's Exposé. You can view your windows' contents much more easily.
The task bar attempts to handle both application and window switching because on Windows, applications and windows are very closely related. If an application is open, it has at least one window associated with it. This is not true of Mac OS X, and generally on Windows, there is a one-to-one relationship between application instances and documents. So if you want to edit another document, open another instance of the application. (That is, unless you use the MDI that Photoshop and Office use, which I think we can all agree sucks.)
So as I said, it's a design decision, and it's not as simple as many people seem to think. It's not just a matter of "Oh do it like Windows does". Mac OS X is not Windows. The Dock and Exposé represent a sort of re-factored task bar from a higher-level standpoint. Obviously, their implementations are different.
That's a design choice, and there are valid arguments either way as to whether one should make the Dock or task bar have a reference to every window that's open or just applications. The problem with giving every window a reference is that it can very easily clutter up your task bar, and when that happens, those references get collapsed into per-application groupings, so you just wind up with the Dock's basic behavior anyway.
And the Finder does have view options. Press Command-J on the window you're in and set the options for "All Windows" to keep items sorted by Kind. Oh yeah, and download Adium.