Have you actually used PgAdmin on a Mac, or just used it on Windows and/or Linux? The Mac port is hardly a quality piece of software.
It does database operations in the main thread, causing the GUI to lockup whenever an operation takes a long time. I'm not sure if this is distinct from the other versions, but it's nonetheless aggravating when you have to sit and wait for a doomed connection attempt to timeout before you can do anything else.
It only supports vertical scrolling from the mouse, despite the fact that 360 degree scrolling of table view windows would be a perfect fit.
You get exactly one main database browser window, and closing it closes all other opened windows. This may be SOP in Windows, but it's totally out of place on a Mac. It also really messes up your workflow when you're working on 2 or 3 things at once with each on a separate workspace.
PgAdmin does get the job done, but compared to the other applications I use in my day to day workflow (Transmit, Chrome, MacVim, Terminal, OmniFocus, etc.), it really stands out as a pain to use. I wish I had another Postgres GUI I could recommend, but unfortunately, I've yet to find one. Navicat would be a step up, but the pricing on their pro version is so absurd it's laughable, and the lite version is licensed for non-commercial use only. Any of you guys have a good, quality Postgres GUI for Mac to recommend?
OS X and iOS merging, Apple branded television, Macs switching to ARMs, subscription based iTunes, iTunes steaming, etc., etc. These things have been predicted by members of the media constantly for years, with subscription based iTunes being rumored for nearly a decade now. Why is this news? When drivers for Macintosh hardware start showing up in prerelease builds of iOS, then you've got a story worth printing. Until then, your argument has about as much weight as me saying they're switching to BeOS on Itanium based chips.
The antitrust inquiry is for their search product, where they have an overwhelming percent of the market (to the point where Googling is a common verb, even among non-techies). Priority Inbox is a feature of their largely unrelated email product. While Gmail has a nice chunk of the market, it's hardly overwhelming. Hotmail and Yahoo both have nice chunks of market share as well.
They claim you need to install a codec not because you actually need one, but because the vast majority of users have no idea what a codec is. They simply recognize it as some nerd term and take it as fact that they need it if they want to watch the video. The program that gets downloaded probably doesn't install a codec at all. It merely installs the virus. For that matter, the advertised video may not even exist. Sure, the user will get upset when they go though all that work and never get their video, but it doesn't matter. The damage is already done.
So let me get this straight. We're paying billions upon billions and sacrificing our constitutional rights to guard our airports from purely theoretical terrorist threats. Meanwhile, we're cutting funding for satellites that warn us about very real weather threats. Glad to see we've got our priorities straight.
When driving, for example, it is next to impossible to resist answering the phone when it rings.
I have a proven, reliable algorithm for not answering the phone when it rings, either while driving, or in a movie theater, or even while coding. Here it is, in all its unpatented glory:
Linux seems to finally have video to an acceptable level
Not even that. Just a couple months ago, I spent two days trying to get Ubuntu 10.04 to run at the native resolution of my bog standard 19" monitor, and finally concluded that it's either not possible, or so obscure that I'll never figure it out. Not doing anything fancy or unusual here, just trying to use an LCD that was lying around the office on the cheap on-board video card this machine came with. At this point, Linux on the server is great, but I've pretty much given up on Linux as a client OS. Even the "easy to use" distros don't even have the basics in place.
Now that 4.0 allows you to background a VOIP app and still place and receive calls, what's stopping you from installing a VOIP client on your iPod Touch and telling Google Voice to use that number?
The main characters take down a technically far superior alien species by exploiting a security vulnerability to upload a virus on to the mothership. Since the entire alien fleet is networked together (and apparently unfirewalled), the virus spreads to and disables the entire fleet in just moments. Since that movie was made, we've started to look a lot more like that alien race: one giant global network that many, many systems are linked to one way or another. The lesson is that, just like those aliens, lax security can allow our infrastructure to be shut off in an instant by a single malicious program if it can spread unchecked through the network. Moral: SCADA systems don't belong on the Internet.
After awhile, you really gotta wonder what people like you really do with their machines (if anything)
I use my MacBook Pro for full time software development and system administration, plus web browsing, email, chat, ebooks, and playing Starcraft 2 with friends. Even with SC2, a Windows virtual machine, and a handful of dev tools, I'm still only sitting at 46 GB of used space. Source code doesn't really use up much storage, and I don't do graphics, audio, or video work. I don't even own any high def movies, much less carry them around on my laptop. At this rate, the 120 GB of space on my SSD should easily outlive the laptop. Meanwhile, replacing the stock hard drive with an SSD has had a much larger impact on system performance than most of the upgrades I've done over the years.
Is the coding/assembly so different that it doesn't translate? Do they only do certain kinds of processing really well (it is a GPU after all), so it couldn't handle other more 'mundane' OS needs?
Yes, exactly. CPUs are built from the ground up to do scalar math really, really fast. That lends itself well to doing tasks that must be performed in sequence, such as running an individual thread. However, they've only recently gained the ability to do more than one thing at a time (dual core processors), and even now high end CPUs can only do six calculations at once (6 core processors).
Meanwhile, GPUs are built to do vector math really, really fast. They can't do individual adds anywhere near as fast as a CPU can, but they can do dozens of them at the same time.
Which type of processor is best for which job depends entirely on the nature of the math involved and how parallelizable the task is. In the case of 3D graphics, drawing a frame involves tons of vector arithmetic work, which is why your 1 GHz GPU will run circles around your 3 GHz CPU for that task (and is also where the GPU gets its name from). In the case mentioned in the article, password cracking is highly parallelizable: you've gotta run 100 million tests, and the outcome of any one test has zero influence on the other tests, so the more you can run at the same time, the better. By running it on the GPU, each individual test will take a bit longer than running it on the CPU would, but you'll be able to run dozens simultaneously instead of just a few, and will thus get your results much faster.
CPUs certainly have their place, though. Some tasks simply must be done in sequence and cannot be easily divided up in to seperate parallel tasks. The CPU will get these done much faster, since running them on the GPU would incur the speed penalty without realizing any benefit.
I've simplified it a bit for the sake of explanation, but that's the gist of it. Hope that helps!
Blizzard only allows one authenticator per account at the moment, but I believe they are planning on changing that.
As for losing your authenticator, when you first add the authenticator to your account, they tell you to write down the authenticator's serial number, keep it secret, and store it in a safe place. (For software authenticators, the "serial number" is randomly generated the first time you launch the app). If you lose the authenticator or it quits working, you can supply that number and the answer to your secret question to remove the authenticator from the account without calling support.
Another big factor to my mind is the lack of anything resembling post-counts, avatars, images, or anything that would be regarded as cruft
You pretty much nailed it right there for me. I absolutely cannot stand it when forums allow avatars and images. The exact same posts plus avatars and images (especially animated ones) would have driven me off many years ago. Incidentally, the tendency for +3 and higher posts to contain mostly accurate spelling and grammar is also quite a nice change of pace compared to most forums, not to mention the distinct lack of "lol" and other such abominations.
I recently learned that, in some applications, you can command click the zoom button to make the window zoom to full screen regardless of content. This is great for applications such as MacVim. In that app, sometimes I know a window will be dedicated to a particular document, so sizing to to fit that document makes sense. Windows I'm using to code, however, almost invariably get split in to three or four viewports by the time I'm done, so I can use every pixel I can get. In that case, full screen makes the most sense, even if it wastes space at the moment.
That's why the founding fathers set it up so that federal judges aren't dependent on public opinion. Once a judge is appointed, they stay in office for life. It literally takes an act of Congress to kick a federal judge out of office, and then it requires an impeachment trial. You can't impeach a someone simply for low public opinion: they have to have actually committed a crime.
As for state judges, each state is free to select their own terms for how judges are appointed, how long they are appointed for, and the terms under which they are kicked out of office.
Even without the threat of you switching, power companies do have an incentive to keep you up as much as possible. Remember that power is not a subscription plan: you only pay for what you use. The longer your power is out, the longer you're not buying their product, and thus the less profit they make.
Control signals can be sent over the transmission lines, but I'd hardly call it broadband. It is extremely low bandwidth. It does have its uses, but the power company can often achieve much faster and more accurate diagnostics over a bigger pipe.
No, syncing through iTunes wouldn't circumvent any DRM. DRMed files from the iTunes store are still ordinary files that you can copy just like any other file. However, the contents are encrypted, and only iTunes and iPods have the decryption algorithm. Syncing the encrypted files on to your Palm Pre wouldn't do any good regardless of technique.
As far as files having DRM, anything you rip from CD or otherwise import yourself has no DRM on it. It's kept in the original format (MP3, AAC, whatever) unless you explicitly tell iTunes to convert it to something else, and even then, it won't add DRM. Originally, purchases from the iTunes Music Store were encumbered with DRM. However, they started phasing that out on new purchases some time last year, and finished back in May or so. All new music purchases are plain AAC files that will play on anything. Note that this is just for music. Unfortunately, video is still DRMed, and until the studios are convinced to do otherwise, it will remain DRMed.
As for the DMCA, I don't think it's really clear just how that comes in to play. All iTunes music purchases, DRMed or not, can be burned to CD. There is no DRM on audio CDs, so that effectively removes the DRM, and you can do whatever you want to the files then. If you burn a CD and rip it, does that constitute cracking the DRM? It's a pain, but you can use that technique to get rid of the DRM on older purchases. Luckily, you don't need to do that anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
It does database operations in the main thread, causing the GUI to lockup whenever an operation takes a long time. I'm not sure if this is distinct from the other versions, but it's nonetheless aggravating when you have to sit and wait for a doomed connection attempt to timeout before you can do anything else.
PgAdmin does get the job done, but compared to the other applications I use in my day to day workflow (Transmit, Chrome, MacVim, Terminal, OmniFocus, etc.), it really stands out as a pain to use. I wish I had another Postgres GUI I could recommend, but unfortunately, I've yet to find one. Navicat would be a step up, but the pricing on their pro version is so absurd it's laughable, and the lite version is licensed for non-commercial use only. Any of you guys have a good, quality Postgres GUI for Mac to recommend?
OS X and iOS merging, Apple branded television, Macs switching to ARMs, subscription based iTunes, iTunes steaming, etc., etc. These things have been predicted by members of the media constantly for years, with subscription based iTunes being rumored for nearly a decade now. Why is this news? When drivers for Macintosh hardware start showing up in prerelease builds of iOS, then you've got a story worth printing. Until then, your argument has about as much weight as me saying they're switching to BeOS on Itanium based chips.
You did notice this article is talking about Australia, right?
The antitrust inquiry is for their search product, where they have an overwhelming percent of the market (to the point where Googling is a common verb, even among non-techies). Priority Inbox is a feature of their largely unrelated email product. While Gmail has a nice chunk of the market, it's hardly overwhelming. Hotmail and Yahoo both have nice chunks of market share as well.
Sure, but what does that have to do with nude body scans and groping four year olds at the airport?
They claim you need to install a codec not because you actually need one, but because the vast majority of users have no idea what a codec is. They simply recognize it as some nerd term and take it as fact that they need it if they want to watch the video. The program that gets downloaded probably doesn't install a codec at all. It merely installs the virus. For that matter, the advertised video may not even exist. Sure, the user will get upset when they go though all that work and never get their video, but it doesn't matter. The damage is already done.
So let me get this straight. We're paying billions upon billions and sacrificing our constitutional rights to guard our airports from purely theoretical terrorist threats. Meanwhile, we're cutting funding for satellites that warn us about very real weather threats. Glad to see we've got our priorities straight.
I have a proven, reliable algorithm for not answering the phone when it rings, either while driving, or in a movie theater, or even while coding. Here it is, in all its unpatented glory:
Works every time!
Linux seems to finally have video to an acceptable level
Not even that. Just a couple months ago, I spent two days trying to get Ubuntu 10.04 to run at the native resolution of my bog standard 19" monitor, and finally concluded that it's either not possible, or so obscure that I'll never figure it out. Not doing anything fancy or unusual here, just trying to use an LCD that was lying around the office on the cheap on-board video card this machine came with. At this point, Linux on the server is great, but I've pretty much given up on Linux as a client OS. Even the "easy to use" distros don't even have the basics in place.
Now that 4.0 allows you to background a VOIP app and still place and receive calls, what's stopping you from installing a VOIP client on your iPod Touch and telling Google Voice to use that number?
The main characters take down a technically far superior alien species by exploiting a security vulnerability to upload a virus on to the mothership. Since the entire alien fleet is networked together (and apparently unfirewalled), the virus spreads to and disables the entire fleet in just moments. Since that movie was made, we've started to look a lot more like that alien race: one giant global network that many, many systems are linked to one way or another. The lesson is that, just like those aliens, lax security can allow our infrastructure to be shut off in an instant by a single malicious program if it can spread unchecked through the network. Moral: SCADA systems don't belong on the Internet.
After awhile, you really gotta wonder what people like you really do with their machines (if anything)
I use my MacBook Pro for full time software development and system administration, plus web browsing, email, chat, ebooks, and playing Starcraft 2 with friends. Even with SC2, a Windows virtual machine, and a handful of dev tools, I'm still only sitting at 46 GB of used space. Source code doesn't really use up much storage, and I don't do graphics, audio, or video work. I don't even own any high def movies, much less carry them around on my laptop. At this rate, the 120 GB of space on my SSD should easily outlive the laptop. Meanwhile, replacing the stock hard drive with an SSD has had a much larger impact on system performance than most of the upgrades I've done over the years.
Thank you!
A more important question though, is how on earth do you last two months with only a 4 pack of toilet paper?
That's how we know he's a terrorist!
Thanks! I had never even considered the branching issue, but that does make a lot of sense.
Is the coding/assembly so different that it doesn't translate? Do they only do certain kinds of processing really well (it is a GPU after all), so it couldn't handle other more 'mundane' OS needs?
Yes, exactly. CPUs are built from the ground up to do scalar math really, really fast. That lends itself well to doing tasks that must be performed in sequence, such as running an individual thread. However, they've only recently gained the ability to do more than one thing at a time (dual core processors), and even now high end CPUs can only do six calculations at once (6 core processors).
Meanwhile, GPUs are built to do vector math really, really fast. They can't do individual adds anywhere near as fast as a CPU can, but they can do dozens of them at the same time.
Which type of processor is best for which job depends entirely on the nature of the math involved and how parallelizable the task is. In the case of 3D graphics, drawing a frame involves tons of vector arithmetic work, which is why your 1 GHz GPU will run circles around your 3 GHz CPU for that task (and is also where the GPU gets its name from). In the case mentioned in the article, password cracking is highly parallelizable: you've gotta run 100 million tests, and the outcome of any one test has zero influence on the other tests, so the more you can run at the same time, the better. By running it on the GPU, each individual test will take a bit longer than running it on the CPU would, but you'll be able to run dozens simultaneously instead of just a few, and will thus get your results much faster.
CPUs certainly have their place, though. Some tasks simply must be done in sequence and cannot be easily divided up in to seperate parallel tasks. The CPU will get these done much faster, since running them on the GPU would incur the speed penalty without realizing any benefit.
I've simplified it a bit for the sake of explanation, but that's the gist of it. Hope that helps!
[Citation Needed]
Blizzard only allows one authenticator per account at the moment, but I believe they are planning on changing that.
As for losing your authenticator, when you first add the authenticator to your account, they tell you to write down the authenticator's serial number, keep it secret, and store it in a safe place. (For software authenticators, the "serial number" is randomly generated the first time you launch the app). If you lose the authenticator or it quits working, you can supply that number and the answer to your secret question to remove the authenticator from the account without calling support.
You pretty much nailed it right there for me. I absolutely cannot stand it when forums allow avatars and images. The exact same posts plus avatars and images (especially animated ones) would have driven me off many years ago. Incidentally, the tendency for +3 and higher posts to contain mostly accurate spelling and grammar is also quite a nice change of pace compared to most forums, not to mention the distinct lack of "lol" and other such abominations.
I recently learned that, in some applications, you can command click the zoom button to make the window zoom to full screen regardless of content. This is great for applications such as MacVim. In that app, sometimes I know a window will be dedicated to a particular document, so sizing to to fit that document makes sense. Windows I'm using to code, however, almost invariably get split in to three or four viewports by the time I'm done, so I can use every pixel I can get. In that case, full screen makes the most sense, even if it wastes space at the moment.
That's why the founding fathers set it up so that federal judges aren't dependent on public opinion. Once a judge is appointed, they stay in office for life. It literally takes an act of Congress to kick a federal judge out of office, and then it requires an impeachment trial. You can't impeach a someone simply for low public opinion: they have to have actually committed a crime.
As for state judges, each state is free to select their own terms for how judges are appointed, how long they are appointed for, and the terms under which they are kicked out of office.
And in my view, unlike pretty much anywhere else, I sometimes glance and them and realize one of them is exactly what I was look for. Fancy that.
Even without the threat of you switching, power companies do have an incentive to keep you up as much as possible. Remember that power is not a subscription plan: you only pay for what you use. The longer your power is out, the longer you're not buying their product, and thus the less profit they make.
Control signals can be sent over the transmission lines, but I'd hardly call it broadband. It is extremely low bandwidth. It does have its uses, but the power company can often achieve much faster and more accurate diagnostics over a bigger pipe.
No, syncing through iTunes wouldn't circumvent any DRM. DRMed files from the iTunes store are still ordinary files that you can copy just like any other file. However, the contents are encrypted, and only iTunes and iPods have the decryption algorithm. Syncing the encrypted files on to your Palm Pre wouldn't do any good regardless of technique.
As far as files having DRM, anything you rip from CD or otherwise import yourself has no DRM on it. It's kept in the original format (MP3, AAC, whatever) unless you explicitly tell iTunes to convert it to something else, and even then, it won't add DRM. Originally, purchases from the iTunes Music Store were encumbered with DRM. However, they started phasing that out on new purchases some time last year, and finished back in May or so. All new music purchases are plain AAC files that will play on anything. Note that this is just for music. Unfortunately, video is still DRMed, and until the studios are convinced to do otherwise, it will remain DRMed.
As for the DMCA, I don't think it's really clear just how that comes in to play. All iTunes music purchases, DRMed or not, can be burned to CD. There is no DRM on audio CDs, so that effectively removes the DRM, and you can do whatever you want to the files then. If you burn a CD and rip it, does that constitute cracking the DRM? It's a pain, but you can use that technique to get rid of the DRM on older purchases. Luckily, you don't need to do that anymore.