Exactly. That governments everywhere are ready to gut civil rights in order to sustain business models coming apart at the seams speaks very negatively to the state of common sense. A century ago, people began to buy freezers and wiped out an entire ice delivery business; this wasn't odd, it's just part of life in a free market.
Since Apple employs Noel Dellofano, hosts Mac OS Forge, has incorporated the stable read-only bits in the latest Mac OS X Server and makes a slightly older build of the same code as the Mac OS Forge read/write version available on their developer web site, I think they approve.
If it was about not being able to download movies, your reaction would be correct. In reality, it's about (some, but "any at all" is a bad enough answer) private interests and the state being allowed by law to monitor all network traffic supposedly to be able to catch any copyright infringements. Once that's actually allowed, you can imagine what people can do with that kind of power.
A break-out group of seven politicians from the dominant party in the current administration wrote an op-ed piece last Monday which outlines some of the consequences in the near future (link's to the English version). If you won't believe the rag-tag newcomer party, would you believe the largest party in the administration - the people who already *have* power?
Believe me, of all the problems this might bring, having to spend money to see "Hollywood claptrap" is not what we're worried about.
Does anyone know of any music player that plays more than "a single protected digital format"? This is solely about the wrong "protected digital format" - read: not theirs - winning. Even Microsoft has abandoned and scaled down their own licensable DRM in favor of a new one.
Yes, perhaps Apple could have left the WMA support in. For this to have any bearing of the "more than one protected digital format", though, the support for DRMed WMA would also have to be available in iTunes, which runs on Windows and on Mac OS X. DRMed WMA isn't ported to Mac OS X, and I'm not sure what to tell you if you think Microsoft would have let Apple port it there for them or would have ported it to Mac OS X so that Apple could use it.
If there's going to be a substantive antitrust suit, the best argument would be the coupling of iTunes and iPod. It's perfectly possible to continue to deliver the "seamless experience" while allowing other ways to put songs on the iPod, for example.
Beyond being rumored to make a phone, they also got a few of the industry players together and have announced a new entirely open source mobile platform (of which a preview is available). I'm not a big fan of designing platforms by committee, nor do I think that the next breakthrough in mobile usability is likely to come from a group that includes Motorola, but Google's participation is interesting and stretches beyond auction participation and steadily-denied "Google phone" rumors.
Microsoft offers a *memory* profiler with source provided ("CLR Profiler"). The only CPU profiler tuned to.NET work Microsoft offers that I've been able to find is bundled with Visual Studio Team System, which starts at $2300, *if* you have an MSDN subscription that you'd like to renew at the same time.
The problem with the shelf Dock is that the Dock has always been mostly transparent. Now it's anything but - it's got that S curve, and it reflects windows from just above it. The icons also get extra shadows applied to them for no reason whatsover - if you look at the Transmit icon, it looks like it's doing a pirouette on the wheel at the bottom. The shelf Dock would be great if it just shucked these elements and easily allowed non-stack folders (perhaps dragging in an alias to a folder will do that, I haven't tried) because I like the basic look - it's the unnecessary effects that make it look like they may just as well have glued on spray-painted macaroni.
The menu bar isn't a big worry. The transparency at the cost of legibility is far down since earlier, and if you want it white you can just draw a white 22 pixel line on the top of your wallpaper.
From what I hear, the idea of the new major breaks-backward-compatibility Python version was conceived in 1999, so the release was codenamed Python 3000 to mock Windows 2000 especially. It will actually be named Python 3.0.
I see where you're coming from. I also guess your problem with OS X doesn't end with these specific problems. I'm not here to make or break anyone's opinion on OS X vs Gentoo based on a few specific problems (nor, actually, to cast it into a 'vs' scenario in the first place).
But I must ask: did you try to research the "OS X" way to do it before you tried the Linux way to do it? If you didn't, why not? Because a quick search for NFS in Mac Help brought up four topics about mounting network shares; Go -> Connect to Server in Finder and entering "nfs://servername/pathname". You're now going to say that "well, then it won't connect on startup", at which point I will ask you to go into System Preferences, Accounts, select your account, go to the Login Items tab, click the + button and choose the mount.
The reason I asked the first question was because it wasn't much harder in OS X than in UNIX variants that use fstab - if you're used to fstab, it's a minor inconvenience to push a bunch of buttons, and if you're sitting down in front of any sort of UNIX for the first time (or the second time), editing a text file to do so simply isn't going to occur to you. This doesn't make your experience with OS X any less annoying in hindsight, of course, and it doesn't mean that you had a worse time with it than with Gentoo. And it certainly doesn't mean that OS X is now on equal footing with Gentoo as a capable OS for you personally. Your investment in how Linux traditionally works and where you go to edit, install, configure and fix things is only partially applicable on OS X, for example. But it's something to think about.
Additionally, not to cast any blame, and just to clarify, if you happened upon a Firefox extension that didn't work with your applications on Gentoo, but that worked with applications on Windows or OS X, you wouldn't blame Gentoo, you'd think that the Firefox extension was written with another platform in mind, and find an alternative. Naturally.
The only good thing about Macs is the look of the case, and even THAT is a matter of taste.
Bullshit. First of all: This is not about Linux not being all you make it out to be. Your depiction seems accurate, and desktop Linux distributions are continuously improving. This is about Macs being put down. I've used a Mac for a number of years now, sliding over to using it full time (in the place of Windows + Linux where I used Linux mostly for server stuff) and I can testament that it's not just about the look of the case.
The number one reason I use a Mac is not to get to act all "look at me, I'm special" or to pay more for my computers. It is because of the applications and the operating system. Some of the third party Mac applications are, in my opinion, unsurpassed in their genre on any platform. Like the app I'm writing this in - NetNewsWire, a feed reader (full disclosure: I'm a beta tester, but I'm not saying nice things because I'm a beta tester, I'm a beta tester because I like the app so much). Generalization is dangerous, but paying more attention to detail, especially in the user interface, seems more pervasive on Mac OS X than on any other OS.
I am a developer. I'll admit it: my bread-and-butter today is (and has been for the last year or so).NET. I love Perl and Ruby and PHP, and I can use them as good on OS X as on any other OS (and significantly easier than on Windows). But I also really like Cocoa and Objective-C, and I believe it's a good example of what.NET could have become had they actively tried to keep the class count down. You can't really claim "marketing" or "RDF" on developer APIs - you start to notice as soon as you use it, and while Cocoa might seem eclectic at the start, it works really well.
There's also a level of chutzpah in the frequent OS updates that I appreciate, even if I have to shell out $129 before rebates every two years or so. When was the last time your OS added automatic backups with one-button setup (and easy full-disk restoration), a layer animation engine and resolution independence in an update? They're also following existing standards (like CalDAV, Open Directory and soon ZFS) - or creating extensions or new standards and publishing them and open source implementations (like HFS+ and launchd) - almost across the board (yes, except for anything possibly involving DRM where they have to deal with the **AAs; I don't like that any more than anyone else). I think the best thing I can say about the operating system and software is that I'd rather use Mac OS X in a regular PC than I would use Ubuntu or Vista in a MacBook.
There's tons of valid points of criticism for Apple, for their computers and for Mac OS X. None of this passes me by unnoticed. QuickTime Pro and.Mac upsell offers are persistent and horrible, for one thing. They're not perfect. But putting off Macs and Mac OS X by the blanket statement "The only good thing about Macs is the look of the case" is simply unfair.
I thought of J. J. Abrams because his name is mentioned in the summary (and while the summaries frequently omits useful information, what's in them is usually fairly solid) as having to do with that film, and because I'm impressed with the treatment that's given to his new movie. (Not the alternate reality web games, I mean the trailer.) Having read his Wikipedia article I haven't knowingly ever watched his stuff aside from the trailer.
I admit I don't like Star Trek or the whole community around it, but he seems like he has the ability to give the whole thing a swift kick in the nads, and it sorely needs it, in my opinion. But, then again, I haven't read the Superman treatment you mentioned either.
You may want to check out what other J. J. Abrams movies are coming up within, say, the next 6 months before you deride the man as not being able to create his own thing from scratch.
First, it's Australian dollars, so it's "only" above 69 (ha!) million US dollars.
Second: A big government is looking for some "industrial strength" filter. They find three alternatives, $40,000, $10 million and $84 million. A filter for $40,000 can't be that good, can it? In fact, $40,000 might be approaching a third of what the salary is of the government committee that's surveying the choices. So if they buy something that cheap, they don't get to prove that they're worth their salary, and the administration might be attacked as just getting the cheapest option on the table and trying to avoid the issue. If the other two cost in the two-digit millions, the first alternative is probably bullshit, the government decides. They can afford the $84 million filter, so they buy it, thinking that even if it's not 8.4 times better, it cost a lot more to make, so it's probably involved more people, or as many but higher-paid people, so it must be better.
So that'd be how they inflate it up to these numbers. Even with margins, management wallet padding, sustained support and upkeep, I, like you, can't see the fair price of the whole deal being above, say, $10 million.
According to the article he used another site, shady-sounding itself, to mass submit to a bunch of sites, and a fair deal of them did reject the "program". There's still hope for humanity in that there's a number of reputable sites doing the right thing, but like everything else aside from download sites, Sturgeon's law applies. It remains to be seen how many sites accepted his submission through malice and cluelessness, respectively.
So, in other words, it's not the case that he didn't "put his worthless program into the darkest trenches of the internet"; he just didn't put it there *exclusively*.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. That governments everywhere are ready to gut civil rights in order to sustain business models coming apart at the seams speaks very negatively to the state of common sense. A century ago, people began to buy freezers and wiped out an entire ice delivery business; this wasn't odd, it's just part of life in a free market.
Since Apple employs Noel Dellofano, hosts Mac OS Forge, has incorporated the stable read-only bits in the latest Mac OS X Server and makes a slightly older build of the same code as the Mac OS Forge read/write version available on their developer web site, I think they approve.
If it was about not being able to download movies, your reaction would be correct. In reality, it's about (some, but "any at all" is a bad enough answer) private interests and the state being allowed by law to monitor all network traffic supposedly to be able to catch any copyright infringements. Once that's actually allowed, you can imagine what people can do with that kind of power.
A break-out group of seven politicians from the dominant party in the current administration wrote an op-ed piece last Monday which outlines some of the consequences in the near future (link's to the English version). If you won't believe the rag-tag newcomer party, would you believe the largest party in the administration - the people who already *have* power?
Believe me, of all the problems this might bring, having to spend money to see "Hollywood claptrap" is not what we're worried about.
Does anyone know of any music player that plays more than "a single protected digital format"? This is solely about the wrong "protected digital format" - read: not theirs - winning. Even Microsoft has abandoned and scaled down their own licensable DRM in favor of a new one. Yes, perhaps Apple could have left the WMA support in. For this to have any bearing of the "more than one protected digital format", though, the support for DRMed WMA would also have to be available in iTunes, which runs on Windows and on Mac OS X. DRMed WMA isn't ported to Mac OS X, and I'm not sure what to tell you if you think Microsoft would have let Apple port it there for them or would have ported it to Mac OS X so that Apple could use it. If there's going to be a substantive antitrust suit, the best argument would be the coupling of iTunes and iPod. It's perfectly possible to continue to deliver the "seamless experience" while allowing other ways to put songs on the iPod, for example.
Beyond being rumored to make a phone, they also got a few of the industry players together and have announced a new entirely open source mobile platform (of which a preview is available). I'm not a big fan of designing platforms by committee, nor do I think that the next breakthrough in mobile usability is likely to come from a group that includes Motorola, but Google's participation is interesting and stretches beyond auction participation and steadily-denied "Google phone" rumors.
Unless they're listening to music in white headphones, in which case H.264 is mandated.
Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Q1 -08 in Japan and North America. No European or Australian date yet.
Microsoft offers a *memory* profiler with source provided ("CLR Profiler"). The only CPU profiler tuned to .NET work Microsoft offers that I've been able to find is bundled with Visual Studio Team System, which starts at $2300, *if* you have an MSDN subscription that you'd like to renew at the same time.
Or "PETR".
The problem with the shelf Dock is that the Dock has always been mostly transparent. Now it's anything but - it's got that S curve, and it reflects windows from just above it. The icons also get extra shadows applied to them for no reason whatsover - if you look at the Transmit icon, it looks like it's doing a pirouette on the wheel at the bottom. The shelf Dock would be great if it just shucked these elements and easily allowed non-stack folders (perhaps dragging in an alias to a folder will do that, I haven't tried) because I like the basic look - it's the unnecessary effects that make it look like they may just as well have glued on spray-painted macaroni.
The menu bar isn't a big worry. The transparency at the cost of legibility is far down since earlier, and if you want it white you can just draw a white 22 pixel line on the top of your wallpaper.
horrific adjective see Windows Me
That was about Linux as a server OS, not as a desktop OS.
Smileys.
Good point. Well put.
Sometimes some of it is, sometimes some of it isn't. Maybe.
From what I hear, the idea of the new major breaks-backward-compatibility Python version was conceived in 1999, so the release was codenamed Python 3000 to mock Windows 2000 especially. It will actually be named Python 3.0.
If it helps, I'll add that I hate LISP. :)
I see where you're coming from. I also guess your problem with OS X doesn't end with these specific problems. I'm not here to make or break anyone's opinion on OS X vs Gentoo based on a few specific problems (nor, actually, to cast it into a 'vs' scenario in the first place).
But I must ask: did you try to research the "OS X" way to do it before you tried the Linux way to do it? If you didn't, why not? Because a quick search for NFS in Mac Help brought up four topics about mounting network shares; Go -> Connect to Server in Finder and entering "nfs://servername/pathname". You're now going to say that "well, then it won't connect on startup", at which point I will ask you to go into System Preferences, Accounts, select your account, go to the Login Items tab, click the + button and choose the mount.
The reason I asked the first question was because it wasn't much harder in OS X than in UNIX variants that use fstab - if you're used to fstab, it's a minor inconvenience to push a bunch of buttons, and if you're sitting down in front of any sort of UNIX for the first time (or the second time), editing a text file to do so simply isn't going to occur to you. This doesn't make your experience with OS X any less annoying in hindsight, of course, and it doesn't mean that you had a worse time with it than with Gentoo. And it certainly doesn't mean that OS X is now on equal footing with Gentoo as a capable OS for you personally. Your investment in how Linux traditionally works and where you go to edit, install, configure and fix things is only partially applicable on OS X, for example. But it's something to think about.
Additionally, not to cast any blame, and just to clarify, if you happened upon a Firefox extension that didn't work with your applications on Gentoo, but that worked with applications on Windows or OS X, you wouldn't blame Gentoo, you'd think that the Firefox extension was written with another platform in mind, and find an alternative. Naturally.
Bullshit. First of all: This is not about Linux not being all you make it out to be. Your depiction seems accurate, and desktop Linux distributions are continuously improving. This is about Macs being put down. I've used a Mac for a number of years now, sliding over to using it full time (in the place of Windows + Linux where I used Linux mostly for server stuff) and I can testament that it's not just about the look of the case.
The number one reason I use a Mac is not to get to act all "look at me, I'm special" or to pay more for my computers. It is because of the applications and the operating system. Some of the third party Mac applications are, in my opinion, unsurpassed in their genre on any platform. Like the app I'm writing this in - NetNewsWire, a feed reader (full disclosure: I'm a beta tester, but I'm not saying nice things because I'm a beta tester, I'm a beta tester because I like the app so much). Generalization is dangerous, but paying more attention to detail, especially in the user interface, seems more pervasive on Mac OS X than on any other OS.
I am a developer. I'll admit it: my bread-and-butter today is (and has been for the last year or so) .NET. I love Perl and Ruby and PHP, and I can use them as good on OS X as on any other OS (and significantly easier than on Windows). But I also really like Cocoa and Objective-C, and I believe it's a good example of what .NET could have become had they actively tried to keep the class count down. You can't really claim "marketing" or "RDF" on developer APIs - you start to notice as soon as you use it, and while Cocoa might seem eclectic at the start, it works really well.
There's also a level of chutzpah in the frequent OS updates that I appreciate, even if I have to shell out $129 before rebates every two years or so. When was the last time your OS added automatic backups with one-button setup (and easy full-disk restoration), a layer animation engine and resolution independence in an update? They're also following existing standards (like CalDAV, Open Directory and soon ZFS) - or creating extensions or new standards and publishing them and open source implementations (like HFS+ and launchd) - almost across the board (yes, except for anything possibly involving DRM where they have to deal with the **AAs; I don't like that any more than anyone else). I think the best thing I can say about the operating system and software is that I'd rather use Mac OS X in a regular PC than I would use Ubuntu or Vista in a MacBook.
There's tons of valid points of criticism for Apple, for their computers and for Mac OS X. None of this passes me by unnoticed. QuickTime Pro and .Mac upsell offers are persistent and horrible, for one thing. They're not perfect. But putting off Macs and Mac OS X by the blanket statement "The only good thing about Macs is the look of the case" is simply unfair.
I thought of J. J. Abrams because his name is mentioned in the summary (and while the summaries frequently omits useful information, what's in them is usually fairly solid) as having to do with that film, and because I'm impressed with the treatment that's given to his new movie. (Not the alternate reality web games, I mean the trailer.) Having read his Wikipedia article I haven't knowingly ever watched his stuff aside from the trailer.
I admit I don't like Star Trek or the whole community around it, but he seems like he has the ability to give the whole thing a swift kick in the nads, and it sorely needs it, in my opinion. But, then again, I haven't read the Superman treatment you mentioned either.
You may want to check out what other J. J. Abrams movies are coming up within, say, the next 6 months before you deride the man as not being able to create his own thing from scratch.
Aren't you with Apple?
First, it's Australian dollars, so it's "only" above 69 (ha!) million US dollars.
Second: A big government is looking for some "industrial strength" filter. They find three alternatives, $40,000, $10 million and $84 million. A filter for $40,000 can't be that good, can it? In fact, $40,000 might be approaching a third of what the salary is of the government committee that's surveying the choices. So if they buy something that cheap, they don't get to prove that they're worth their salary, and the administration might be attacked as just getting the cheapest option on the table and trying to avoid the issue. If the other two cost in the two-digit millions, the first alternative is probably bullshit, the government decides. They can afford the $84 million filter, so they buy it, thinking that even if it's not 8.4 times better, it cost a lot more to make, so it's probably involved more people, or as many but higher-paid people, so it must be better.
So that'd be how they inflate it up to these numbers. Even with margins, management wallet padding, sustained support and upkeep, I, like you, can't see the fair price of the whole deal being above, say, $10 million.
No, but I hear your employer has.
According to the article he used another site, shady-sounding itself, to mass submit to a bunch of sites, and a fair deal of them did reject the "program". There's still hope for humanity in that there's a number of reputable sites doing the right thing, but like everything else aside from download sites, Sturgeon's law applies. It remains to be seen how many sites accepted his submission through malice and cluelessness, respectively.
So, in other words, it's not the case that he didn't "put his worthless program into the darkest trenches of the internet"; he just didn't put it there *exclusively*.