The hardware isn't _that_ much better than what you can buy in the Windows world.
Depending on the market you're looking at it's not that much better but that much cheaper/easier. Try finding a decent entry-level notebook guaranteed to run a unixoid OS. You have the Thinkpad, but IBM/Lenovo charges even more for the name tag than Apple does. Then you have... various laptops that might or might not work (and usually won't completely). And you have the iBook, a notebook known for it's robustness and for an OS actually worth paying a premium for, which also happens to weigh less than the usual notebook. And come with a usable 3D card. Not to mention the decent price. And the fact that you can choose the size of your mainboard/RAM/etc. when buying from Apple's online store. With no shipping costs. And did I mention the fact that students get a price cut?
If you want a cheap notebook that runs something besides Windows Apple makes a _very_ good offer. I hope that the iBook stays the same with the switch to Intel (cheap, light and silent with decent battery life that is).
Note that I mentioned design flaws, not design errors. A design flaw can be a working part of a design that just isn't that good. For example the C compatibility is part of C++s basic design decisions and it works. But it introduces (sometimes unnecessary) redundance into the language (malloc/free vs. new/delete, char* vs. std::string, printf vs. cout etc.) and leads to C++ coders using C practices for which C++ has better alternatives (like many instances of pointer arithmetic).
Maybe it's just because I don't trust the programmer (seriously, after seeing the modern software world who would?) and because I don't believe in mixing code from two different languages (C and C++), but I think that C++ could have been a less annoying language. (Another thing that gets me: Definitions like char foo, *bar, barf;. If char and *char are different types why can they be declared in the same line?)
Between PHP, Python, Ruby, Java, various Basic flavors, UnrealScript, C++ and even Haskell C++ is by far the most annoying language. Most off the annoyingness comes from the fact that to me C++ feels like a hack to make C object-oriented and not an attempt at a new language. I know that C++ is powerful and I know that some people much smarter than me spend a lot of time working it out, but still it feels badly designed.
In case you want to make an argument á la "You hate C++ because it isn't an easy scripting language like PHP": I worked with C++ before I worked with scripting languages. It feels weird on its own right.
Why didn't the STL developers simply add a function that returns a copy (like string.str() as opposed to the static std.c_str())? Sure, it's just a matter of convenience, but still it would have been easy for them to implement and it would have made the language a bit less verbose.
Not quite. What annoys me to no end are some of the consequences of C compatibility, the lack of checks (for example when handling out-of-bounds pointers into arrays) and the fact that STL-related errors tend to be ridiculously long. And of course: Why the $EXPLETIVE can std::strings covert themselves to const char* but not char* when most functions dealing with strings expect a char* as a parameter?
Sure, C++s design flaws are not exactly showstoppers, but whenever I code in C++ I regularly end up cursing Bjarne Stroustrup, even though he probably doesn't have anything to do with the quirk I'm yelling about.
...woould be a hack to make Intel OS X run on my G4 iBook. With the processor behaving exactly like an x86 processor. Without performance loss.
Okay, so I want an Intel iBook. But seriously, I've been thinking about trying to run OSx86 on my beige box, simply because OS X is great and I can't afford thir current Intel offerings. Then again, I value OS X as a great notebook OS (as things like WLAN have to Just Work) and I like it enough to feel bad about pirating it. Also, I'd like it to actually work.
If Apple would just release the Intel iBook already this would be a non-issue for me. Damn them for hooking me on their stuff, I need another fix before I lose all dignity and become a hip iPod owner!
Its soo nice to everything and everyone...
While their web-based services are of good quality I have heard people bitch and moan over Google Ads (people who signed up to put them on their site). Google is nice to many, but not to everyone.
It works everywhere...
Google Search works pretty much everywhere. Google Mail does now, too, but it didn't always. All client-side Google apps are Win-only (okay, except for Picasa, which is coming to linux as a half-baked winelib port). Googe Talk couldn't even talk to the rest of the Jabber network until recently. Google Earth should be called "Google USA and UK", as pretty much everything else is only available at rather low resolutions,
Uless you're talking web stuff Google works only in a very specific environment.
Its Free... ...as in beer, but only because there are ads everywhere. It's their right to show me ads, but it doesn't mean that Google is the big selfless benefactor that gives away everything for free.
It offers soo many features...
And here I thought that Google was the master of the simplistic interface. Seriously, Google Sarch desperately needs more options (most of them called "search for what I typed exactly as I typed it, without ignoring all non-alphanumeric characters"). Google Mail offers not much more than most other free webmail providers. Google Earth is a nice toy but not exactly useful. Google Talk is nothing more than a proprietary Jabber client. Google Maps - well, it's just that, a map. Not much in the way of features there.
Its a globaly know company...
The same applies to Microsoft, SCO, IBM (remember when Big Blue used to be Big Evil?), ExxonMobil, DaimlerChrysler (known for good cars in the first world and for landmines in the third world)... The fact that a corporation is globally known is an indicator for it being evil, if anything.
I think the catch to Google is that a) they're not that great, they just have exceptional marketing skills and b) they are turning into Yet Another Corporation, willing to do everything for the shareholder value.
Seeing that wine 0.9.3 runs just fine on my AMD64 Gentoo (and yes, it's compiled in 64 bit mode) I'd say that either your distribution's package repository sucks or you haven't even tried installing wine.
If you'll excuse me, I have just noticed that the 0.9.5 ebuild is out. *goes off to emerge -uDavN world*
The basic networking stuff is handled by Winsock, but everything involving HTML goes through Trident (aka MSHTML), which is IE's HTML rendering engine. Most HTML-enabled non-browser Win apps use Trident. HTTP is probably handled by another library.
Are you kidding? Vista has much higher requirements and DRM that has generated a lot of bad press - enough for even normal people to notice it. It has a confusing mess of versions and the people who actually take a look at the different versions are appalled by the ridiculous "Starter Edition". Most people don't see any reason to upgrade besides "new stuff won't be released for XP". And every half-educated user who looks at Vista's feature list eagerly awaiting all the exciting new stuff becomes more and more disillusioned as the deadline gets pushed further back and feature after feature disappears from the release while Mac are discussing with the Linux crowd about who has the better implementation two years before Vista ships.
Windows Vista is one of the best arguments to switch to Linux or OS X. At least a half dozen people I know are in the process of getting a Mac or making ther system dualboot-ready in order to emancipate themselves from Microsoft before Vista beceomes a necessity. I love it, really.
I meant: "Why have they been ordering people to specifically look at distant things?" Probably because it was already known that spending hours focusing on small letters twenty centimeters from your face is unhealthy.
But it sounds like this theory of myopia is the same; muscles get conditioned by too much near-focussing, to be in cronic spasm. Maybe excercises, like alternate focussing on near/far objects for some time could forstall the process that causes the eyeball elongation?
Why do you think video game manuals have been recommending exactly that for the last ten years? (At least they recommend to make a pause every half to full hour, giving the eyes some rest by focusing on distant objects.)
And to cool off your hot (in legal sense) American heads, I have to remind that European legal system is NOT precedent-based. IOW, one case over here means nothing. Judge decides the case after looking into the circumstances of the case before him, not by searching prehistoric records of how Gutenberg/etc were judged.
However, precedent is not entirely meaningless - a judge might factor it in when (s)he makes a decision. In some cases a widely known decision might even influence the legislative. So precedent still has some importance over here, even though it's not like in the USA where according to Redneckville vs. Sixpack it's allowed for a person to compare backwater towns with less than ten inhabitants with Podunk, VA. (Watch out for hyperbole. Might cause diarrhea when consumed in large quantities. Celebrity voices impersonated.)
The King Of All Cosmos is not evil. I man, after he accidentally destroyed all stars he sent his son to replace them... with balls of... random stuff... involving houses...
Well...
Opery, Konqueror et al. are nice, but what makes Firefox so great is the extensibility. What do you think made Winamp big? The skin support (i.e. absence of standard widgets and window decorations)? It was the fact that you could make it do pretty much everything if you had the right plugin. What I love about Firefox is not the fact that it's from Mozilla, it's things like Greasemonkey, Web Devloper, DownThemAll, Translation Panel, DictionarySearch, the Download Statusbar... The extensions are what makes Firefox stand out. And the fact that Konqueror tends to be unstable.
If you could give me a lightweight browser that hat the extensibility of Firefox I might consider a switch, Until then I guess I'll stick with Mozilla's offer - even if it's not the most efficient bowser out there.
- How the hell do we find out whether a mail is legit?
By looking at the address? Great, now joe-jobs cause even more damage! By looking at the sender's IP address? Can comeone say "spoofing"? By scanning the contents, for example for a certain header? It'll take the spammers about two weeks to forge it.
There is pretty much nothing in an e-mail that can't be spoofed - so how do they intend to find out which mails are legit? The only way I'd see would be by checksumming the whole thing and comparing the result to a list of allowed checksums, but that would be impractical as it'd put a much higher load on the mail servers.
From my personal experience you're lucky if they only crash. I can distinctly remember haveing to replace half of a Windows installation when NAV 2001 ate the sys tray, completely blocked access to the NIC and became unkillable.
This all-in-one-super-mighty-oh-my-god-I-just-wet-mysel f software would be something to investigate if it didn't come from a company that has worked up a reputation of releasing software more dangerous to Windows installs than the malware it's supposed to protect against...
PNG is lossless, JPG is lossy.
Deriving from that, JPEG usually produces the smaller images, especially with photos.
PNG allows for binary transparency and transparency via alpha channel, JPEG doesn't support transparency.
PNG supports color correction, JPEG doesn't.
PNG has many ways of compressing an image, JPEG has one. (This makes the use of PNG optimizers like OptiPNG a good idea - some programs tend to use dumb compression settings for PNG.)
JPEG is fully supported by most browsers, PNG is mostly supported (especially the alpha chanel makes problems with IE
PNG is extensible, JPEG isn't.
JPEG is patent-ncumbered, PNG isn't.
See. Back then we used to take all tablets and copy them onto a few clay-RWs. (Those were the days when you could backup a whole drive by dropping it in wet clay!) What the vendors didn't tell you was that by heating a clay-RW could be turned into a brick-R, thus making the data read-only (without any data loss, at least if you had the right burner). Not quite as stable as a stone tablet-R, but great for redundant backup copies.
Slashdot Mirror
The hardware isn't _that_ much better than what you can buy in the Windows world.
Depending on the market you're looking at it's not that much better but that much cheaper/easier. Try finding a decent entry-level notebook guaranteed to run a unixoid OS. You have the Thinkpad, but IBM/Lenovo charges even more for the name tag than Apple does. Then you have... various laptops that might or might not work (and usually won't completely). And you have the iBook, a notebook known for it's robustness and for an OS actually worth paying a premium for, which also happens to weigh less than the usual notebook. And come with a usable 3D card. Not to mention the decent price. And the fact that you can choose the size of your mainboard/RAM/etc. when buying from Apple's online store. With no shipping costs. And did I mention the fact that students get a price cut?
If you want a cheap notebook that runs something besides Windows Apple makes a _very_ good offer. I hope that the iBook stays the same with the switch to Intel (cheap, light and silent with decent battery life that is).
Interesting. Most sources, when asked about how to convert a C++ string into a C character array only know about c_str.
Note that I mentioned design flaws, not design errors. A design flaw can be a working part of a design that just isn't that good. For example the C compatibility is part of C++s basic design decisions and it works. But it introduces (sometimes unnecessary) redundance into the language (malloc/free vs. new/delete, char* vs. std::string, printf vs. cout etc.) and leads to C++ coders using C practices for which C++ has better alternatives (like many instances of pointer arithmetic).
Maybe it's just because I don't trust the programmer (seriously, after seeing the modern software world who would?) and because I don't believe in mixing code from two different languages (C and C++), but I think that C++ could have been a less annoying language. (Another thing that gets me: Definitions like char foo, *bar, barf;. If char and *char are different types why can they be declared in the same line?)
Between PHP, Python, Ruby, Java, various Basic flavors, UnrealScript, C++ and even Haskell C++ is by far the most annoying language. Most off the annoyingness comes from the fact that to me C++ feels like a hack to make C object-oriented and not an attempt at a new language. I know that C++ is powerful and I know that some people much smarter than me spend a lot of time working it out, but still it feels badly designed.
In case you want to make an argument á la "You hate C++ because it isn't an easy scripting language like PHP": I worked with C++ before I worked with scripting languages. It feels weird on its own right.
Why didn't the STL developers simply add a function that returns a copy (like string.str() as opposed to the static std.c_str())? Sure, it's just a matter of convenience, but still it would have been easy for them to implement and it would have made the language a bit less verbose.
Not quite. What annoys me to no end are some of the consequences of C compatibility, the lack of checks (for example when handling out-of-bounds pointers into arrays) and the fact that STL-related errors tend to be ridiculously long. And of course: Why the $EXPLETIVE can std::strings covert themselves to const char* but not char* when most functions dealing with strings expect a char* as a parameter?
Sure, C++s design flaws are not exactly showstoppers, but whenever I code in C++ I regularly end up cursing Bjarne Stroustrup, even though he probably doesn't have anything to do with the quirk I'm yelling about.
Actually, I have never heard of D being used in any kind of project. Which I find sad as D looks like C++ without all the egregious design flaws.
...woould be a hack to make Intel OS X run on my G4 iBook. With the processor behaving exactly like an x86 processor. Without performance loss.
Okay, so I want an Intel iBook. But seriously, I've been thinking about trying to run OSx86 on my beige box, simply because OS X is great and I can't afford thir current Intel offerings. Then again, I value OS X as a great notebook OS (as things like WLAN have to Just Work) and I like it enough to feel bad about pirating it. Also, I'd like it to actually work.
If Apple would just release the Intel iBook already this would be a non-issue for me. Damn them for hooking me on their stuff, I need another fix before I lose all dignity and become a hip iPod owner!
Its soo nice to everything and everyone...
...as in beer, but only because there are ads everywhere. It's their right to show me ads, but it doesn't mean that Google is the big selfless benefactor that gives away everything for free.
While their web-based services are of good quality I have heard people bitch and moan over Google Ads (people who signed up to put them on their site). Google is nice to many, but not to everyone.
It works everywhere...
Google Search works pretty much everywhere. Google Mail does now, too, but it didn't always. All client-side Google apps are Win-only (okay, except for Picasa, which is coming to linux as a half-baked winelib port). Googe Talk couldn't even talk to the rest of the Jabber network until recently. Google Earth should be called "Google USA and UK", as pretty much everything else is only available at rather low resolutions,
Uless you're talking web stuff Google works only in a very specific environment.
Its Free...
It offers soo many features...
And here I thought that Google was the master of the simplistic interface. Seriously, Google Sarch desperately needs more options (most of them called "search for what I typed exactly as I typed it, without ignoring all non-alphanumeric characters"). Google Mail offers not much more than most other free webmail providers. Google Earth is a nice toy but not exactly useful. Google Talk is nothing more than a proprietary Jabber client. Google Maps - well, it's just that, a map. Not much in the way of features there.
Its a globaly know company...
The same applies to Microsoft, SCO, IBM (remember when Big Blue used to be Big Evil?), ExxonMobil, DaimlerChrysler (known for good cars in the first world and for landmines in the third world)... The fact that a corporation is globally known is an indicator for it being evil, if anything.
I think the catch to Google is that a) they're not that great, they just have exceptional marketing skills and b) they are turning into Yet Another Corporation, willing to do everything for the shareholder value.
Seeing that wine 0.9.3 runs just fine on my AMD64 Gentoo (and yes, it's compiled in 64 bit mode) I'd say that either your distribution's package repository sucks or you haven't even tried installing wine.
If you'll excuse me, I have just noticed that the 0.9.5 ebuild is out. *goes off to emerge -uDavN world*
The basic networking stuff is handled by Winsock, but everything involving HTML goes through Trident (aka MSHTML), which is IE's HTML rendering engine. Most HTML-enabled non-browser Win apps use Trident. HTTP is probably handled by another library.
So it will still look butt ugly? Wine'd apps are not exactly the prettiest programs on my computer.
Unless the blog in question is Slashdot, in which case it's filled with more than one silly opinion. ;)
*sigh* I forgot to escape the brackets. The subject sould have read: "Vista > XP. Vista way, way > XP"
Are you kidding? Vista has much higher requirements and DRM that has generated a lot of bad press - enough for even normal people to notice it. It has a confusing mess of versions and the people who actually take a look at the different versions are appalled by the ridiculous "Starter Edition". Most people don't see any reason to upgrade besides "new stuff won't be released for XP". And every half-educated user who looks at Vista's feature list eagerly awaiting all the exciting new stuff becomes more and more disillusioned as the deadline gets pushed further back and feature after feature disappears from the release while Mac are discussing with the Linux crowd about who has the better implementation two years before Vista ships.
Windows Vista is one of the best arguments to switch to Linux or OS X. At least a half dozen people I know are in the process of getting a Mac or making ther system dualboot-ready in order to emancipate themselves from Microsoft before Vista beceomes a necessity. I love it, really.
I meant: "Why have they been ordering people to specifically look at distant things?" Probably because it was already known that spending hours focusing on small letters twenty centimeters from your face is unhealthy.
It is exactly that episode. "The goggles, they do nothing" is a misquote.
But it sounds like this theory of myopia is the same; muscles get conditioned by too much near-focussing, to be in cronic spasm. Maybe excercises, like alternate focussing on near/far objects for some time could forstall the process that causes the eyeball elongation?
Why do you think video game manuals have been recommending exactly that for the last ten years? (At least they recommend to make a pause every half to full hour, giving the eyes some rest by focusing on distant objects.)
And to cool off your hot (in legal sense) American heads, I have to remind that European legal system is NOT precedent-based. IOW, one case over here means nothing. Judge decides the case after looking into the circumstances of the case before him, not by searching prehistoric records of how Gutenberg/etc were judged.
However, precedent is not entirely meaningless - a judge might factor it in when (s)he makes a decision. In some cases a widely known decision might even influence the legislative. So precedent still has some importance over here, even though it's not like in the USA where according to Redneckville vs. Sixpack it's allowed for a person to compare backwater towns with less than ten inhabitants with Podunk, VA. (Watch out for hyperbole. Might cause diarrhea when consumed in large quantities. Celebrity voices impersonated.)
The King Of All Cosmos is not evil. I man, after he accidentally destroyed all stars he sent his son to replace them... with balls of... random stuff... involving houses...
Well...
Opery, Konqueror et al. are nice, but what makes Firefox so great is the extensibility. What do you think made Winamp big? The skin support (i.e. absence of standard widgets and window decorations)? It was the fact that you could make it do pretty much everything if you had the right plugin. What I love about Firefox is not the fact that it's from Mozilla, it's things like Greasemonkey, Web Devloper, DownThemAll, Translation Panel, DictionarySearch, the Download Statusbar... The extensions are what makes Firefox stand out. And the fact that Konqueror tends to be unstable.
If you could give me a lightweight browser that hat the extensibility of Firefox I might consider a switch, Until then I guess I'll stick with Mozilla's offer - even if it's not the most efficient bowser out there.
You forgot:
- How the hell do we find out whether a mail is legit?
By looking at the address? Great, now joe-jobs cause even more damage! By looking at the sender's IP address? Can comeone say "spoofing"? By scanning the contents, for example for a certain header? It'll take the spammers about two weeks to forge it.
There is pretty much nothing in an e-mail that can't be spoofed - so how do they intend to find out which mails are legit? The only way I'd see would be by checksumming the whole thing and comparing the result to a list of allowed checksums, but that would be impractical as it'd put a much higher load on the mail servers.
From my personal experience you're lucky if they only crash. I can distinctly remember haveing to replace half of a Windows installation when NAV 2001 ate the sys tray, completely blocked access to the NIC and became unkillable.
l f software would be something to investigate if it didn't come from a company that has worked up a reputation of releasing software more dangerous to Windows installs than the malware it's supposed to protect against...
This all-in-one-super-mighty-oh-my-god-I-just-wet-myse
PNG is lossless, JPG is lossy.
Deriving from that, JPEG usually produces the smaller images, especially with photos.
PNG allows for binary transparency and transparency via alpha channel, JPEG doesn't support transparency.
PNG supports color correction, JPEG doesn't.
PNG has many ways of compressing an image, JPEG has one. (This makes the use of PNG optimizers like OptiPNG a good idea - some programs tend to use dumb compression settings for PNG.)
JPEG is fully supported by most browsers, PNG is mostly supported (especially the alpha chanel makes problems with IE PNG is extensible, JPEG isn't.
JPEG is patent-ncumbered, PNG isn't.
See. Back then we used to take all tablets and copy them onto a few clay-RWs. (Those were the days when you could backup a whole drive by dropping it in wet clay!) What the vendors didn't tell you was that by heating a clay-RW could be turned into a brick-R, thus making the data read-only (without any data loss, at least if you had the right burner). Not quite as stable as a stone tablet-R, but great for redundant backup copies.
Dat's mighty curious, aye.