I agree. I read Cryptonomicon on/.'s recommendation. Big mistake. I thought it was just me that was the problem. After all, how could so many geeks rave about the thing? So I gave Snow Crash a try. And it sucked too. I don't understand why so many slashdotters find his work so compelling.
This won't happen in Ontario because crown corporation is an ugly term that the right-leaning "free market" advocates here have taught us all to hate. I'm aware of how successful Sasktel is and that everybody over there seems to have positive feedback about them. But most Ontarians would have a knee-jerk "this can't possibly be good" attitude about a crown corporation offering Internet access.
I was just at one of the Apple Stores in Toronto and they had all 15" Core 2 Duo models in stock ready to sell. Only the 17" model was out-of-stock. They did not have the new models on display though.
No. $500 for ADC membership that comes with extras
on
Tiger Early Start Kit
·
· Score: 4, Informative
You get an ADC membership. This entitles you to an Apple hardware discount, some programming technical support, access to pre-release software and some other niceties. Moreover, this particular deal comes with the WWDC 2004 videos DVD that has already been distributed amongst ADC members. You also get the Tiger beta that developers received at WWDC 2004 (though it's probably a more recent build). The WWDC tutorials are great resources and I'd be more attracted to this offer because of that. One can argue as to whether charging developers for assistance in making software for their platform is a good strategy or not for Apple. But this isn't merely a "$500 for the privilege of beta testing" rip-off.
This sort of reminds me of how the old New York Mafia types used to buy off their neighbors. To listen to the neighbors you'd have thought they were saints. Outside the neighborhood you'd get completely different stories on them though.
Yes I have used Real's service and it's quality is below that of iTunes. I only became a Mac user recently because of OS X. So let's not pretend that I'm some Mac zealot as I'm not -- I use Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. iTunes is an entire solution. The same songs I can buy from the store, I can play on 5 Macs, sync to my iPod and listen to throughout my household with AirTunes. I cannot do this with Real's software.
And if we want to go off-topic for a bit, when I was simply a PC user I did not know what high standards for user experience were. Since moving over to OS X primarily (and quite unexpectedly as I only got a Mac to test a web site with), I've realized what I've been missing. OS X really is that great, but most PC users will not be able to conceptualize why until they use the Mac environment first-hand and in-depth. I fell into that group too. I was all too wound up with individual features and specs that I was missing the forrest for the trees and being penny-wise pound-foolish. I now spend more time getting work done and doing so more effectively and enjoyably. The interface is consistent -- most of the third-party developers (Real not included) respect this consistency on the Mac and create their own excellent and consistent software.
Note that if you do end up checking out a Mac and enjoying it, realize that your eyes will be open to things you didn't bother with before, and nothing will be more frustrating than having to worry about dependencies, or apt-repositories or compilation on the Linux platform; or ill-though-out, poorly skinned, inconsistent user interfaces on Windows. You'll wonder why you even have to run installation/uninstallation wizards instead of just drag & drop setups like on OS X. You won't have to worry about device drivers, and Rendezvous will make you wonder why the hell networking is so convoluted even today. You'll wonder why the hell no other platform offers a single, universal spell-checking feature for all applications to use. It's like opening up Pandora's box but it containing nothing but goodness:-)
The iTunes Music Store generated quite a bit of revenue when it was Mac-only. The Mac marketshare is small. But the demographic is filled with people who have lots of disposable income and are willing to spend it on music. The reason Real will not support the Mac is because it's an inferior service to iTunes. Mac users are more quality-of-service-sensitive than price-sensitive; almost by definition. If I was Glaser and I had such an inferior service, I wouldn't dare try to pawn it off on the Mac community which has such high standards.
People can get hayfever from artificial flowers; or do they simply exhibit symptoms similar to those of hayfever after thinking they are exposed to actual flowers? Can you provide references to this literature you speak of?
Back around 1991-1992, Sega had a marketing campaign in which they said the Genesis hardware was better than SNES because the Genesis could do "blast processing". They used Sonic vs Mario, and an ad with a drag racer vs some station wagon to push the point across. Was "blast processing" anything more than a superficial marketing term? Was it referring to anything in particular with the hardware?
I think you're confusing the APIC with ACPI. The latter involves suspending, hibernating and standing-by your computer. An APIC is the Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller and is the replacement for the standard PIC. APIC allows your system to have more than 16 IRQs. It offers a performance advantage over a standard PIC, although to what extent, I am not sure -- probably not mind-blowing by any means.
[Comic Book Guy]Biggest Let Down EVER[/Comic Book Guy]
The graphics don't look as great as those screenshots we saw a year ago. The game play hasn't changed that much. So I can shoot through that shelf. Can I push it over to help stall the bad guys while I run backwards? Can I spill the contents of those exploding barrels so that the bad guys might slip and fall? Doesn't seem that way from the video. The characters' lips still aren't in sync with the words they're speaking.
I'm not spending several hundred bucks to upgrade my computer so I can play this game. I'll wait until something more immersive comes down the pipe.
You're assuming that prices translate across currencies based on the exchange rate. This isn't true, especially of something as intangible as music. A lot of vending machines charge CDN$1 for a can of Coke. Head down south, and it's often US$1 for a can of Coke. Fast food joints often charge the same price in the US and Canada, except in Canada the price is in Canadian dollars. Similarly, music CDs are often priced at CDN$12.99-$17.99 and I often see the same prices but in U.S. dollars when I'm visiting down south. This is true of many goods and services, though not all. I would suspect that the vast majority of songs on iTunes Canada would be priced at CDN$0.99 with some labels greedily going for CDN$1.29 on up to $1.99.
The statistics aren't easily comparable. More Canadians report their unemployment status because of the social safety net like workfare/welfare, employment insurance and other government assistance programs (i.e. retraining) that are available to them if they do so. Whereas if you're unemployed in the U.S., once your limited social safety net benefits are up, there is less incentive to report to the government about your unemployment status. For instance, how many unemployed high-tech workers bother to go to the government job posting office to check in rather than scouring newspaper ads and the Internet for job postings? I do think Canada has a higher unemployment rate but I don't think the margin is nearly as big as the statistics lead everyone to believe.
Are you kidding me? Do you have any experience whatsoever programming in Obj-C with the Cocoa framework? Cocoa has had distributed objects that were Internet-enabled going on 10 full years. You can write to remote objects as if they were local ones with a sparse amount of code. There are definitely some drawbacks to using Obj-C/Cocoa vs C#. Mainly, the developer has to worry about garbage collection. But as far as blurring the client/server model, I would argue they are neck and neck.
"No evidence was presented that the alleged infringers either distributed or authorized the reproduction of sound recordings. They merely placed personal copies onto shared directories on their computers which were accessible by other computer users via an online download service," the judge wrote.
First off, I'm surprised but elated that the Judge seems to have been technically competent enough to see this. However, downloaders be warned: the music industry will now proceed to actually participate in copyright infringement by downloading those shared songs or otherwise monitoring the downloads of those shared songs. The "my songs are shared out but were not actually downloaded" argument might not work next time.
Speaking as a relatively new Mac OS X user, I'd like to add the following reasons not to try to use cross-platform GUI toolkits. Looks are deceiving. Though they appear to look like native widgets, upon closer inspection some differences become apparent. Moreover, they may not act like native widgets. The keyboard shortcut equivalents may be different than what are available on the native OS' widgets. Scripting support may be available on the native OS' widgets, but unavailable on these cross-platform widgets. As minor as these differences may appear at first-glance, they add enough inconsistency to ruin the user experience - especially on OSes such as Mac OS X.
I used to be a big fan of cross-platform GUI programming, but having worked on all variations of Windows, Linux desktops, and Mac OS X, I am now against the idea. I now believe if you're going to support a platform, use the native toolkits as they bring a level of consistency that is just not there with cross-platform toolkits. Having to use a GTK or QT-based app on Mac OS X these days proves to be tremendously frustrating. Text boxes don't have spell-checking or auto-completion. The red dot in the window decoration does not change if the document does. In fact, there is often no document-based implementation whereas there would be one if a native solution was developed. On Windows and Linux, the differences may only be cosmetic, but on OSes such as Mac OS X looks are only the tip of the iceberg with the problem. Cocoa widgets look pretty, but they also bring with them a lot of functionality that I've yet to see replicated on these cross-platform toolkits.
Do you have your workgroup properly set in the utility located in/Applications/Utility/Directory Access? You need to set your workgroup name there before OS X will be able to properly browse all the samba shares on your network. I had the same problem as you did before I stumbled upon this fix and haven't had any samba problems since.
.NET is good because it takes the best from languages that are already in existence. It's not like there is anything revolutionary in C# that isn't in any other language out there. I used to be stuck in this PC-centric view of the world. Imagine my surprise when I bought a Mac and realized that NeXT had fantastic things like Internet-enabled Distributed Objects available long before much of the world even knew what a web browser was. Yes, C# is good. But the only people that I know that have been blown away by it are those that didn't stray far from Microsoft solutions and were never exposed to tools available from other vendors. Welcome to what much of the rest of the world had available to them in the form of Java since the late 1990s. And before the fanboys come out - yes I know that C# actually improves on some of Java's deficiencies. But I do take issue with the assertion that C# was made possible thanks only in part to a concerted MS R&D effort. It wasn't.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree. I read Cryptonomicon on /.'s recommendation. Big mistake. I thought it was just me that was the problem. After all, how could so many geeks rave about the thing? So I gave Snow Crash a try. And it sucked too. I don't understand why so many slashdotters find his work so compelling.
This won't happen in Ontario because crown corporation is an ugly term that the right-leaning "free market" advocates here have taught us all to hate. I'm aware of how successful Sasktel is and that everybody over there seems to have positive feedback about them. But most Ontarians would have a knee-jerk "this can't possibly be good" attitude about a crown corporation offering Internet access.
I was just at one of the Apple Stores in Toronto and they had all 15" Core 2 Duo models in stock ready to sell. Only the 17" model was out-of-stock. They did not have the new models on display though.
That's an urban legend.
You get an ADC membership. This entitles you to an Apple hardware discount, some programming technical support, access to pre-release software and some other niceties. Moreover, this particular deal comes with the WWDC 2004 videos DVD that has already been distributed amongst ADC members. You also get the Tiger beta that developers received at WWDC 2004 (though it's probably a more recent build). The WWDC tutorials are great resources and I'd be more attracted to this offer because of that. One can argue as to whether charging developers for assistance in making software for their platform is a good strategy or not for Apple. But this isn't merely a "$500 for the privilege of beta testing" rip-off.
This sort of reminds me of how the old New York Mafia types used to buy off their neighbors. To listen to the neighbors you'd have thought they were saints. Outside the neighborhood you'd get completely different stories on them though.
And if we want to go off-topic for a bit, when I was simply a PC user I did not know what high standards for user experience were. Since moving over to OS X primarily (and quite unexpectedly as I only got a Mac to test a web site with), I've realized what I've been missing. OS X really is that great, but most PC users will not be able to conceptualize why until they use the Mac environment first-hand and in-depth. I fell into that group too. I was all too wound up with individual features and specs that I was missing the forrest for the trees and being penny-wise pound-foolish. I now spend more time getting work done and doing so more effectively and enjoyably. The interface is consistent -- most of the third-party developers (Real not included) respect this consistency on the Mac and create their own excellent and consistent software.
Note that if you do end up checking out a Mac and enjoying it, realize that your eyes will be open to things you didn't bother with before, and nothing will be more frustrating than having to worry about dependencies, or apt-repositories or compilation on the Linux platform; or ill-though-out, poorly skinned, inconsistent user interfaces on Windows. You'll wonder why you even have to run installation/uninstallation wizards instead of just drag & drop setups like on OS X. You won't have to worry about device drivers, and Rendezvous will make you wonder why the hell networking is so convoluted even today. You'll wonder why the hell no other platform offers a single, universal spell-checking feature for all applications to use. It's like opening up Pandora's box but it containing nothing but goodness :-)
The iTunes Music Store generated quite a bit of revenue when it was Mac-only. The Mac marketshare is small. But the demographic is filled with people who have lots of disposable income and are willing to spend it on music. The reason Real will not support the Mac is because it's an inferior service to iTunes. Mac users are more quality-of-service-sensitive than price-sensitive; almost by definition. If I was Glaser and I had such an inferior service, I wouldn't dare try to pawn it off on the Mac community which has such high standards.
People can get hayfever from artificial flowers; or do they simply exhibit symptoms similar to those of hayfever after thinking they are exposed to actual flowers? Can you provide references to this literature you speak of?
There is a patch for Norton that you have to apply before installing SP2. There was mention of this on the Symantec tech support web site.
Back around 1991-1992, Sega had a marketing campaign in which they said the Genesis hardware was better than SNES because the Genesis could do "blast processing". They used Sonic vs Mario, and an ad with a drag racer vs some station wagon to push the point across. Was "blast processing" anything more than a superficial marketing term? Was it referring to anything in particular with the hardware?
I think you're confusing the APIC with ACPI. The latter involves suspending, hibernating and standing-by your computer. An APIC is the Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller and is the replacement for the standard PIC. APIC allows your system to have more than 16 IRQs. It offers a performance advantage over a standard PIC, although to what extent, I am not sure -- probably not mind-blowing by any means.
The graphics don't look as great as those screenshots we saw a year ago. The game play hasn't changed that much. So I can shoot through that shelf. Can I push it over to help stall the bad guys while I run backwards? Can I spill the contents of those exploding barrels so that the bad guys might slip and fall? Doesn't seem that way from the video. The characters' lips still aren't in sync with the words they're speaking.
I'm not spending several hundred bucks to upgrade my computer so I can play this game. I'll wait until something more immersive comes down the pipe.
...no other expensive software required. Another reason why I love my Mac.
I guess you've never used NeXT's or Mac OS X's development environments then?
You're assuming that prices translate across currencies based on the exchange rate. This isn't true, especially of something as intangible as music. A lot of vending machines charge CDN$1 for a can of Coke. Head down south, and it's often US$1 for a can of Coke. Fast food joints often charge the same price in the US and Canada, except in Canada the price is in Canadian dollars. Similarly, music CDs are often priced at CDN$12.99-$17.99 and I often see the same prices but in U.S. dollars when I'm visiting down south. This is true of many goods and services, though not all. I would suspect that the vast majority of songs on iTunes Canada would be priced at CDN$0.99 with some labels greedily going for CDN$1.29 on up to $1.99.
The statistics aren't easily comparable. More Canadians report their unemployment status because of the social safety net like workfare/welfare, employment insurance and other government assistance programs (i.e. retraining) that are available to them if they do so. Whereas if you're unemployed in the U.S., once your limited social safety net benefits are up, there is less incentive to report to the government about your unemployment status. For instance, how many unemployed high-tech workers bother to go to the government job posting office to check in rather than scouring newspaper ads and the Internet for job postings? I do think Canada has a higher unemployment rate but I don't think the margin is nearly as big as the statistics lead everyone to believe.
Are you kidding me? Do you have any experience whatsoever programming in Obj-C with the Cocoa framework? Cocoa has had distributed objects that were Internet-enabled going on 10 full years. You can write to remote objects as if they were local ones with a sparse amount of code. There are definitely some drawbacks to using Obj-C/Cocoa vs C#. Mainly, the developer has to worry about garbage collection. But as far as blurring the client/server model, I would argue they are neck and neck.
Variable name length has nothing to do with the resulting binary size.
First off, I'm surprised but elated that the Judge seems to have been technically competent enough to see this. However, downloaders be warned: the music industry will now proceed to actually participate in copyright infringement by downloading those shared songs or otherwise monitoring the downloads of those shared songs. The "my songs are shared out but were not actually downloaded" argument might not work next time.
I used to be a big fan of cross-platform GUI programming, but having worked on all variations of Windows, Linux desktops, and Mac OS X, I am now against the idea. I now believe if you're going to support a platform, use the native toolkits as they bring a level of consistency that is just not there with cross-platform toolkits. Having to use a GTK or QT-based app on Mac OS X these days proves to be tremendously frustrating. Text boxes don't have spell-checking or auto-completion. The red dot in the window decoration does not change if the document does. In fact, there is often no document-based implementation whereas there would be one if a native solution was developed. On Windows and Linux, the differences may only be cosmetic, but on OSes such as Mac OS X looks are only the tip of the iceberg with the problem. Cocoa widgets look pretty, but they also bring with them a lot of functionality that I've yet to see replicated on these cross-platform toolkits.
So please, when in Rome do as the Romans do.
Actually, Mitch Kapor resigned in March of 2003.
Do you have your workgroup properly set in the utility located in /Applications/Utility/Directory Access? You need to set your workgroup name there before OS X will be able to properly browse all the samba shares on your network. I had the same problem as you did before I stumbled upon this fix and haven't had any samba problems since.
.NET is good because it takes the best from languages that are already in existence. It's not like there is anything revolutionary in C# that isn't in any other language out there. I used to be stuck in this PC-centric view of the world. Imagine my surprise when I bought a Mac and realized that NeXT had fantastic things like Internet-enabled Distributed Objects available long before much of the world even knew what a web browser was. Yes, C# is good. But the only people that I know that have been blown away by it are those that didn't stray far from Microsoft solutions and were never exposed to tools available from other vendors. Welcome to what much of the rest of the world had available to them in the form of Java since the late 1990s. And before the fanboys come out - yes I know that C# actually improves on some of Java's deficiencies. But I do take issue with the assertion that C# was made possible thanks only in part to a concerted MS R&D effort. It wasn't.
Yeah it already came with XP Preloaded.