If you've spent more than 15 minutes doing that, it should sneak up on you and put your finger in 37C warm water, at which point every human naturally wets themselves.
I thought Stacks were Piles too, I even wrote up a sentence with a link about Piles, but this seems to be more of a Smart Folder thing. Aren't Piles more like regular folders where you'd drag files towards each other and they'd "pile up"? That's what I've always thought.
Good points. I guess that what I was after was that Longhorn wouldn't be as BAD as ME - the constant crashes and general instability and lack of new features.
Speaking of less evil, when is the last time Microsoft sued someone for installing their copy of windows on more than one machine? They even support pirated copies with service packs.
They don't sue because he installed a copy of OS X on more than one machine - they sue because he leaked a *pre-release* copy of OS X. Precedents have been set before with regards on how to deal with "installing [one's] copy of windows on more than one machine" - they haven't for leaking pre-release OSes. And indeed the people leading widespread piracy ARE the ones that the companies are hunting.
From what I've heard and read, the guy in question sounds honest and it seems that the leak was made in good faith; he didn't intend to spread it like that, he thought it was no big deal to give it to one or two friends. I can certainly see why people may think so. I have nothing against the guy, in fact a ruling like this might help people like him to not fall into the same trap later on if more people decide to sue for stuff like this.
I don't know wether Apple have identified the people who seeded the torrent in the first place, and I agree that they are as guilty as the guy who leaked. The final point is that I'm not happy about Apple taking people to court. I'm happy about Apple resolving this in a civil manner - without basically beating the crap out of the guy, but still saying that "kids, you can't do this", which is the message they want to get across.
Windows ME isn't "everything else they ever did" (it's significantly worse), but the guy I responded to thought that it'd be a new ME. I'm not claiming it'll be the best things since sliced bread, but I think they'll have to get something fundamentally wrong if it'd fail as badly as ME.
Not one existing API is being switched to managed.
No, because - again, according to what I've heard - the existing APIs are being run under a compatibility layer. Bringing that down would reasonably only crash the compatibility layer, much like crashing Classic on OS X or the Windows 9x compatibility layer on XP. Am I way off on this?
I'd be sticking up for Microsoft, the RIAA and SCO too if they were this non-evil in court. But they aren't, so I won't.
It's up to everyone to decide if they want copy proof software (of course, there's no such thing, just relatively hard or weak measures against it). But if they *had* had copy protection in place - such as a serial key - all that would have happened would be that they would have distributed or cracked that too.
Apple aren't pioneers of DRM, they're pioneers of a relatively successful online music store - IIRC they only added in DRM into QuickTime (and thus iTunes) when the iTMS came around, and only then because it was the only way to start something up with the big five labels in over the deal.
You say "you'd think apple would know better than to trust people on the internet like that" as something you think the guy could have said, but I'd like to note that in no case were they "trusting people on the internet like that". These people had signed NDA contracts, and they're bound by the law. Break the law and suffer the consequences. Disagree with the law? Don't sign any NDAs and protest against it. Many things about the law may be hard to grok, but this isn't one of them.
I'd also like to know how you'd propose a flourishing worldwide developer community without "trusting people on the internet". Your ideas are intriguing, and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
My basis on thinking that it'll be more stable and secure is that - if I've gotten this right - major parts of the actual architecture will run as managed code and it will therefore be easier to 'throttle' any bugs or exploits.
I love Linux as much as anyone here, but seriously, saying that "3D stuff on the desktop isn't anything new and we have it already running on linux." is just meaningless. Lots of technologies already exist. However, the vast majority don't use them. Are you willing to bet that even 5% of Linux *desktop* users use "3D stuff on the desktop"?
WinFS may not be coming, but there's certainly plenty of stuff available. Paul Thurrott has a nice article about some of the new stuff, and I like the look of things like Stacks. (Advocates, take note; Paul Thurrott is a semi-Microsoft advocate.;)) Syncing and searching are always nice, as is competent permissions - Windows will actually put up a dialog asking for temporary administrator permissions when doing stuff like installing programs; the way it's done in OS X, BSD and *nix, and about damn time, too. (The link above had a screenshot of this earlier and I think it's been removed.)
Microsoft might have had to tighten a lot of security screws all over the place, and might have had to restructure a lot of the internals as well, but I don't think the "Applications" team have been noodling since the release of XP.
Otherwise we'll have to wait until it's released to say anything good or bad about Longhorn. In the meantime there are anough things to say about XP. Both good points. But all I'm saying is that for something that will have been in development for over five years (at the time of release) by one of the largest companies in the world should not reasonably be assumed to be as crappy (or even half as crappy) as a rushed Windows version that too at most two years to finish and mainly served as a good reason to upgrade to XP**. I don't want to glorify Microsoft - they've done enough to warrant my outright hatred and very little to make up for it - but I'm just saying that it's not very logical to underestimate them either.
(In the interest of full disclosure, I'm writing this on a Mac, and my other two computers run XP and Fedora Core respectively. I try not to be biased but judge everything on its merits rather than on its supporters or its history. I've also never tried out Longhorn myself.)
(** The Douglas Adams in me wants to add "where of course new exploits await your pleasure" here, but I opted against it because this comment is long enough already... what's that? Oh. Crap.;))
I've heard the Windows ME point to death. Do you know why they made Windows ME? Because 98, even with 98SE, wasn't up to snuff for the people that weren't ready to jump to the NT platform yet (which was where they were going with Whistler - which is what XP was known as back then). I think they just rushed it and it was a good base of half-baked ideas, but it was certainly a lot buggier than any other Windows release in recent history.
Contrast this to Longhorn - for once, Microsoft has bet the lion's part of their resources on one project to overhaul the system. If I understand this correctly, this includes making the kernel run as managed code - a huge undertaking in itself - but also revamping or replacing vast parts of what's under the GUI but above the kernel.
It's been big on promises both under the GUI (ie system features) and other, more advanced features that you actually use directly as applications. They realized that it'd take freaking forever, cut a big chunk of the touted advanced features and are now focusing on what's left. It's not going to be rushed and it will bring a big deal of new stuff, including vastly improved stability. So yes, if you're expecting Windows ME, you'll be pleasantly surprised, because this time, what's new in there isn't half-baked, isn't unstable and actually changes the core of the system to be more secure. They were very big on promises, and this seems like a major mistake now, but I think you're going to get your money's worth.
I know about - and daily use! - VLC and mplayer. They're impressive and I love using them but they're not major players in the way that they could be attractive to Apple to ship as an alternative player - RealPlayer and WMP are the only ones I think they'd even consider and sadly they both kind of suck in their OS X versions.
I don't think Apple's doing anything wrong by shipping QuickTime with OS X - what got Microsoft into trouble with the XP WMP is the fact that it's very similar looking to the IE situation a few years back.
I could be totally wrong here, but it seems like Apple's a lot more open than the other competitors. The fact that iTunes itself applies the DRM means that they're willing (and probably eager) to sell music *without* DRM in the first place. Steve Jobs also made a big show of how they really tried to nail as many privileges as they could when they negotiated the terms, and has been known for taking jabs at DRM tactics and copyright issues himself.
Call me a fool, but I think this is good. Yes, clearly DRM is never going to allow as much as fair use, but with the biggest player (pun unintended) on the market being rather negative towards DRM and only using it because it's the only way they're going to get the labels on board I think we're in a good position. Apple could pressure the labels into changing their minds or at least reevaluate the situation further down the road.
On a different note, Napster and other players in the market that offer subscriptions depend too much on DRM to be able to contest it to the extent that Apple could. It's in the interest of the market players with at least partly subscription-based services to keep DRM alive - without DRM the songs wouldn't deactivate and it'd just be a solution equivalent to opening the doors to the record store, telling people to grab everything they can for five minutes and then letting them keep it forever.
How are web pages supposed to evolve if we keep having to make a dumb-downed version?
If you evolved your web pages properly, you wouldn't need to dumb it down. CSS kinda does that. Are you still using mostly table soup? Table soup with CSS added is putting lipstick on a pig, and a pig with lipstick is still a goddamned pig.
I'm not saying I apply that equality to them. (I don't.) I'm just saying that's how it is inherently *before* any filter - human mind or machine - plays in. The whole signal and noise terminology deals with filtering value out of communication. Machine filters are going to have to get better to resolve this, because people sure as hell aren't going to stop talking about their lunches.
Good point. I've never seen something like http://www.perversiontracker.com/ for Windows. (Then again, I haven't looked either, but I didn't look for Perversiontracker to start with.)
The discussion was about people playing games at work when they're supposed to be working, and the people they work for taking action to prevent that. This article in particular refers to that of an american state.
Even though my particular comment may have had nothing to do with people playing games at work, it's indeed a wide enough subject to warrant people who are not from, or living in, the US to discuss it. It's an american site alright, but that doesn't warrant totally dismissing people not familiar with April 15 in general (original poster, not me) on the grounds that they're stupid because they're not american, which seems to be what's happened, but on the grounds that they're off-topic.
Not many people realize that this is the way the cookie crumbles for a lot of us. I've been using Windows, Linux *and* Mac OS X for 2 years now, and I grew up in a household where I spent my first ten years using Macs AND Windows/DOS PCs. I don't do this because I *have to*, I do it because *I enjoy it*. It's an incredible resource and I rather enjoy having the big three at my disposal without emulators anytime. I just wish more people would drop the axiom that you must only run one OS at a time and you must worship it like mad, be on the verge of switching to another one or just hate everything about computers.
Development? Xcode (IDE) and Cocoa (Objective-C plus frameworks) are both on par with Visual Studio - I know from experience.
World domination? The Mac market has fewer apps and Mac owners are generally regarded to be *more* likely to buy shareware. You'll have a better chance of making it with a well engineered shareware app on OS X.
Price? Buy a Mac mini for $599 every 6 months and hook them up to Xcode's distributed building. You won't *need* to sell off your old computers and you'll get a way bigger speed boost when it comes to building.
I won't even comment on devices because you've crossed your cords here. We're talking the merits of OS X, right? You did say "switched back to Windows", right? But if it's all about the functionality, and you *do* use your voice recorder, radio tuner and WMA DRM, then by all means, stay with your "Windows mp3 player".
No, "a single person (or couple) reporting or, in the case of Flickr, showing daily mundane things from their lives" is called a journal or a diary. A web log is not a "blog", seeming as how "blog" is nowadays just a buzzword for easy personal publication in chronological order. The original web log concept includes commentary and linking to relevant information or current events. Slashdot is much closer to this than the vast majority of sites calling themselves "blogs".
Yup, everyone lives in the US or otherwise must be assumed to know about tax day, and it's impossible that people might only recognize the date from the pretty recent rumors about the Tiger release.
Flickr isn't a "blog" company, they're indeed a photo management company.
"Blogs" are being adopted at lots of places because they mean *communication*. The proverbial angst-ridden teen talking about his/her lunch and how life sucks is communication as much as team members inside a company making decisions is communication. "Blog" is just a buzzword for communication, and it's good in that it has gotten people to adopt it; the form itself may or may not be a fad depending on if some greater way of communication shapes up.
(Personally I think calling this a fad is arrogant - people kept captain's logs and personal diaries centuries ago. But it all hinges on the definition of "blog" and "fad" respectively, I guess; If you mean that people will not start as many "blogs" and that they won't be as hyped in a few years, you may be right.)
Re:Ah. You tried to get into mensa....
on
MSN Sponsors Mensa
·
· Score: 1
My point was that if he hadn't brought the numerous grades up specifically, he would have gotten a lot of flak for thinking he's "special" - a lot of people can excel at every academic test they'll take, provided they'll take only one that they really know their stuff on.
MSN is a portal..NET Messenger is an IM network service, to which there are several clients, including the Microsoft-branded and official Windows Messenger and MSN Messenger, and others such as GAIM, Trillian, Miranda and Adium.
http://www.msn.com/ - I couldn't even find "MSN Messenger" at first - turns out it's a small link in the MSN Services box.
Way to completely mistake the wheel for the wagon.
Slashdot Mirror
If you've spent more than 15 minutes doing that, it should sneak up on you and put your finger in 37C warm water, at which point every human naturally wets themselves.
That'll teach them.
I thought Stacks were Piles too, I even wrote up a sentence with a link about Piles, but this seems to be more of a Smart Folder thing. Aren't Piles more like regular folders where you'd drag files towards each other and they'd "pile up"? That's what I've always thought.
Good points. I guess that what I was after was that Longhorn wouldn't be as BAD as ME - the constant crashes and general instability and lack of new features.
Speaking of less evil, when is the last time Microsoft sued someone for installing their copy of windows on more than one machine? They even support pirated copies with service packs.
They don't sue because he installed a copy of OS X on more than one machine - they sue because he leaked a *pre-release* copy of OS X. Precedents have been set before with regards on how to deal with "installing [one's] copy of windows on more than one machine" - they haven't for leaking pre-release OSes. And indeed the people leading widespread piracy ARE the ones that the companies are hunting.
From what I've heard and read, the guy in question sounds honest and it seems that the leak was made in good faith; he didn't intend to spread it like that, he thought it was no big deal to give it to one or two friends. I can certainly see why people may think so. I have nothing against the guy, in fact a ruling like this might help people like him to not fall into the same trap later on if more people decide to sue for stuff like this.
I don't know wether Apple have identified the people who seeded the torrent in the first place, and I agree that they are as guilty as the guy who leaked. The final point is that I'm not happy about Apple taking people to court. I'm happy about Apple resolving this in a civil manner - without basically beating the crap out of the guy, but still saying that "kids, you can't do this", which is the message they want to get across.
Windows ME isn't "everything else they ever did" (it's significantly worse), but the guy I responded to thought that it'd be a new ME. I'm not claiming it'll be the best things since sliced bread, but I think they'll have to get something fundamentally wrong if it'd fail as badly as ME.
Not one existing API is being switched to managed.
No, because - again, according to what I've heard - the existing APIs are being run under a compatibility layer. Bringing that down would reasonably only crash the compatibility layer, much like crashing Classic on OS X or the Windows 9x compatibility layer on XP. Am I way off on this?
I'd be sticking up for Microsoft, the RIAA and SCO too if they were this non-evil in court. But they aren't, so I won't.
It's up to everyone to decide if they want copy proof software (of course, there's no such thing, just relatively hard or weak measures against it). But if they *had* had copy protection in place - such as a serial key - all that would have happened would be that they would have distributed or cracked that too.
Apple aren't pioneers of DRM, they're pioneers of a relatively successful online music store - IIRC they only added in DRM into QuickTime (and thus iTunes) when the iTMS came around, and only then because it was the only way to start something up with the big five labels in over the deal.
You say "you'd think apple would know better than to trust people on the internet like that" as something you think the guy could have said, but I'd like to note that in no case were they "trusting people on the internet like that". These people had signed NDA contracts, and they're bound by the law. Break the law and suffer the consequences. Disagree with the law? Don't sign any NDAs and protest against it. Many things about the law may be hard to grok, but this isn't one of them.
I'd also like to know how you'd propose a flourishing worldwide developer community without "trusting people on the internet". Your ideas are intriguing, and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
My basis on thinking that it'll be more stable and secure is that - if I've gotten this right - major parts of the actual architecture will run as managed code and it will therefore be easier to 'throttle' any bugs or exploits.
;)) Syncing and searching are always nice, as is competent permissions - Windows will actually put up a dialog asking for temporary administrator permissions when doing stuff like installing programs; the way it's done in OS X, BSD and *nix, and about damn time, too. (The link above had a screenshot of this earlier and I think it's been removed.)
;))
I love Linux as much as anyone here, but seriously, saying that "3D stuff on the desktop isn't anything new and we have it already running on linux." is just meaningless. Lots of technologies already exist. However, the vast majority don't use them. Are you willing to bet that even 5% of Linux *desktop* users use "3D stuff on the desktop"?
WinFS may not be coming, but there's certainly plenty of stuff available. Paul Thurrott has a nice article about some of the new stuff, and I like the look of things like Stacks. (Advocates, take note; Paul Thurrott is a semi-Microsoft advocate.
Microsoft might have had to tighten a lot of security screws all over the place, and might have had to restructure a lot of the internals as well, but I don't think the "Applications" team have been noodling since the release of XP.
Otherwise we'll have to wait until it's released to say anything good or bad about Longhorn. In the meantime there are anough things to say about XP. Both good points. But all I'm saying is that for something that will have been in development for over five years (at the time of release) by one of the largest companies in the world should not reasonably be assumed to be as crappy (or even half as crappy) as a rushed Windows version that too at most two years to finish and mainly served as a good reason to upgrade to XP**. I don't want to glorify Microsoft - they've done enough to warrant my outright hatred and very little to make up for it - but I'm just saying that it's not very logical to underestimate them either.
(In the interest of full disclosure, I'm writing this on a Mac, and my other two computers run XP and Fedora Core respectively. I try not to be biased but judge everything on its merits rather than on its supporters or its history. I've also never tried out Longhorn myself.)
(** The Douglas Adams in me wants to add "where of course new exploits await your pleasure" here, but I opted against it because this comment is long enough already... what's that? Oh. Crap.
I've heard the Windows ME point to death. Do you know why they made Windows ME? Because 98, even with 98SE, wasn't up to snuff for the people that weren't ready to jump to the NT platform yet (which was where they were going with Whistler - which is what XP was known as back then). I think they just rushed it and it was a good base of half-baked ideas, but it was certainly a lot buggier than any other Windows release in recent history.
Contrast this to Longhorn - for once, Microsoft has bet the lion's part of their resources on one project to overhaul the system. If I understand this correctly, this includes making the kernel run as managed code - a huge undertaking in itself - but also revamping or replacing vast parts of what's under the GUI but above the kernel.
It's been big on promises both under the GUI (ie system features) and other, more advanced features that you actually use directly as applications. They realized that it'd take freaking forever, cut a big chunk of the touted advanced features and are now focusing on what's left. It's not going to be rushed and it will bring a big deal of new stuff, including vastly improved stability. So yes, if you're expecting Windows ME, you'll be pleasantly surprised, because this time, what's new in there isn't half-baked, isn't unstable and actually changes the core of the system to be more secure. They were very big on promises, and this seems like a major mistake now, but I think you're going to get your money's worth.
Setting a precedent and standing up for their rights while not mauling the guy to death. Nice.
I know about - and daily use! - VLC and mplayer. They're impressive and I love using them but they're not major players in the way that they could be attractive to Apple to ship as an alternative player - RealPlayer and WMP are the only ones I think they'd even consider and sadly they both kind of suck in their OS X versions.
I don't think Apple's doing anything wrong by shipping QuickTime with OS X - what got Microsoft into trouble with the XP WMP is the fact that it's very similar looking to the IE situation a few years back.
Which is sensible, considering the other major players *suck*.
I could be totally wrong here, but it seems like Apple's a lot more open than the other competitors. The fact that iTunes itself applies the DRM means that they're willing (and probably eager) to sell music *without* DRM in the first place. Steve Jobs also made a big show of how they really tried to nail as many privileges as they could when they negotiated the terms, and has been known for taking jabs at DRM tactics and copyright issues himself.
Call me a fool, but I think this is good. Yes, clearly DRM is never going to allow as much as fair use, but with the biggest player (pun unintended) on the market being rather negative towards DRM and only using it because it's the only way they're going to get the labels on board I think we're in a good position. Apple could pressure the labels into changing their minds or at least reevaluate the situation further down the road.
On a different note, Napster and other players in the market that offer subscriptions depend too much on DRM to be able to contest it to the extent that Apple could. It's in the interest of the market players with at least partly subscription-based services to keep DRM alive - without DRM the songs wouldn't deactivate and it'd just be a solution equivalent to opening the doors to the record store, telling people to grab everything they can for five minutes and then letting them keep it forever.
How are web pages supposed to evolve if we keep having to make a dumb-downed version?
If you evolved your web pages properly, you wouldn't need to dumb it down. CSS kinda does that. Are you still using mostly table soup? Table soup with CSS added is putting lipstick on a pig, and a pig with lipstick is still a goddamned pig.
I'm not saying I apply that equality to them. (I don't.) I'm just saying that's how it is inherently *before* any filter - human mind or machine - plays in. The whole signal and noise terminology deals with filtering value out of communication. Machine filters are going to have to get better to resolve this, because people sure as hell aren't going to stop talking about their lunches.
Good point. I've never seen something like http://www.perversiontracker.com/ for Windows. (Then again, I haven't looked either, but I didn't look for Perversiontracker to start with.)
The discussion was about people playing games at work when they're supposed to be working, and the people they work for taking action to prevent that. This article in particular refers to that of an american state.
Even though my particular comment may have had nothing to do with people playing games at work, it's indeed a wide enough subject to warrant people who are not from, or living in, the US to discuss it. It's an american site alright, but that doesn't warrant totally dismissing people not familiar with April 15 in general (original poster, not me) on the grounds that they're stupid because they're not american, which seems to be what's happened, but on the grounds that they're off-topic.
Mac OS X is dying; rabid Windows gamers worldwide confirm it!
Not many people realize that this is the way the cookie crumbles for a lot of us. I've been using Windows, Linux *and* Mac OS X for 2 years now, and I grew up in a household where I spent my first ten years using Macs AND Windows/DOS PCs. I don't do this because I *have to*, I do it because *I enjoy it*. It's an incredible resource and I rather enjoy having the big three at my disposal without emulators anytime. I just wish more people would drop the axiom that you must only run one OS at a time and you must worship it like mad, be on the verge of switching to another one or just hate everything about computers.
Development? Xcode (IDE) and Cocoa (Objective-C plus frameworks) are both on par with Visual Studio - I know from experience.
World domination? The Mac market has fewer apps and Mac owners are generally regarded to be *more* likely to buy shareware. You'll have a better chance of making it with a well engineered shareware app on OS X.
Price? Buy a Mac mini for $599 every 6 months and hook them up to Xcode's distributed building. You won't *need* to sell off your old computers and you'll get a way bigger speed boost when it comes to building.
I won't even comment on devices because you've crossed your cords here. We're talking the merits of OS X, right? You did say "switched back to Windows", right? But if it's all about the functionality, and you *do* use your voice recorder, radio tuner and WMA DRM, then by all means, stay with your "Windows mp3 player".
No, "a single person (or couple) reporting or, in the case of Flickr, showing daily mundane things from their lives" is called a journal or a diary. A web log is not a "blog", seeming as how "blog" is nowadays just a buzzword for easy personal publication in chronological order. The original web log concept includes commentary and linking to relevant information or current events. Slashdot is much closer to this than the vast majority of sites calling themselves "blogs".
Yup, everyone lives in the US or otherwise must be assumed to know about tax day, and it's impossible that people might only recognize the date from the pretty recent rumors about the Tiger release.
Flickr isn't a "blog" company, they're indeed a photo management company.
"Blogs" are being adopted at lots of places because they mean *communication*. The proverbial angst-ridden teen talking about his/her lunch and how life sucks is communication as much as team members inside a company making decisions is communication. "Blog" is just a buzzword for communication, and it's good in that it has gotten people to adopt it; the form itself may or may not be a fad depending on if some greater way of communication shapes up.
(Personally I think calling this a fad is arrogant - people kept captain's logs and personal diaries centuries ago. But it all hinges on the definition of "blog" and "fad" respectively, I guess; If you mean that people will not start as many "blogs" and that they won't be as hyped in a few years, you may be right.)
My point was that if he hadn't brought the numerous grades up specifically, he would have gotten a lot of flak for thinking he's "special" - a lot of people can excel at every academic test they'll take, provided they'll take only one that they really know their stuff on.
MSN is a portal. .NET Messenger is an IM network service, to which there are several clients, including the Microsoft-branded and official Windows Messenger and MSN Messenger, and others such as GAIM, Trillian, Miranda and Adium.
http://www.msn.com/ - I couldn't even find "MSN Messenger" at first - turns out it's a small link in the MSN Services box.
Way to completely mistake the wheel for the wagon.