The already had "photo tagging", actually in OS X, you can tag any files, and search or such for that later based on those. Events, to me, is just a more automated way of creating and organizing albums, nothing revolutionary, but evolutionary for their product, as creating albums and organizing them is something you do a lot of (not me, though, as I'm old school, I still organize my photos in folders and don't use any such fancy photo apps).
Let them do whatever they want with artists who have signed to their subsidiaries. Artists don't have to sign the same old contracts any more now that the Internet exists, so let economics figure it out. Yup, I agree, I think the RIAA should totally lock down their music in every way possible; both technically and legally. They deserve all the pennies they can squeeze from the their moronic listeners out there. It's their music, they can do whatever they like with it.
The end result: artists won't sign with them anymore as a majority of their audience leaves them for independant artists, or artists under labels that know the term "penny-wise, pound foolish"
Oh, and Microsoft, do the same please, Apple and Redhat will happily help you create the technology.
You're leaving off a whole bunch of stuff, before that "slap on the wrist" happens:
* Police officer's time was wasted on a trivial technical offense; in the real world of limited resources, their time was taken from crimes everyone would agree are more important. * The prosecutor's time will be wasted, another person who has very limited time, which isn't cheap * If the police and prosecutor are forced, by this company to actually prosecute, then a Judge, court staff, 14 citizen's (12 jurors, and 2 alternates), a bailiff, and tons of support personnel's time will be wasted. This will cost the local taxpayers a ton of money.
The end result, will mostly likely be a dropped case, or a slap on the wrist. What a complete waste of precious resources. Any company with a "zero-tolerance" rule on anything to do with a crime, should be fined by the judge, handsomely, for theft of government services.
There is a reason that people, not computers, decide wether something is worth prosecuting.
I don't have many problems with.DS_STORE files. For you readers that followed us into OFF-TOPIC land,.DS_STORE files are used by OS X to store folder settings (window size, color, icon, etc) for each folder that Finder (Explorer for OS X) touches.
Personally I think the.DS_STORE system is poorly designed, which is odd in a very well designed OS. And hopefully they will rip this blight from Finder in some future version. But they don't seem to cause me much pain, really. All OS X aware apps ignore them, even subversion, which I installed using MacPorts ignores them, but does read other hidden dotfiles. Perhaps, an IDE that is cross platform and not aware of these files includes them in the project or something, but I really haven't had to deal with this problem.
The only problem with them I find, is when I read a disk that Finder has touched with Windows which doesn't treat them as hidden files and doesn't ignore them. This can be an issue when creating a zip file to send to Windows peeps; and since they are so skittish of mysterious files, they probably re-install Windows to get rid of the weird.DS_STORE virus.
Windows, of course does a similar annoying thing with its Thumbs.db files, but that doesn't make it right.
Launchy? Um, no, I've used it, it's just a launcher. Deskbar, better, but still no; it's mainly a launcher and a search mechanism. I don't use KDE, and I haven't tried Katapult; so I can't say, but it looks like they are trying to clone Quicksilver, although it appears to just launch stuff at this point (their website was down, so I was looking at other sites for information).
If anyone thinks Launchy is like Quicksilver, I would bet they've never actually used Quicksilver. Every-time someone mentions Quicksilver, these get pull out of a google search. This is the equivalent to saying DOS is just like the command-line in Unix; true it's a black screen which you type commands into; but that is where the similarities end.
Quicksilver is more than a launcher and more the a way to search files (OS X already comes with this, it's called Spotlight). Quicksilver is a graphical command line, with same concepts, such as piping output from one command to the next. Sure it can launch Firefox, and allow you to search your Desktop for files, but that is just the tip of the iceberg.
As an example, using only my keyboard and Quicksilver's very nice GUI I can: Append "Hello World" to a file on my desktop, then email it to 4 different people. Basically you do this by: starting Quicksilver (ctrl;), the enter text (.Hello World), tab, select Append To by typing first few letters (ap), tab, select Desktop (des), space, select foo.txt by typing first few letters (fo), enter
start Quicksilver (ctrl;), select foo.txt by typing first few letters (fo), tab, compose an email (com), tab, select each person from my address book (John D, Mar, Tom D, Ste), enter
This all happens very quickly, basically you always have a noun, verb, noun: take this text, append it, to foo.txt.
Here are all the keystrokes without the comments:
[ctrl] ; . Hello World [tab] ap [tab] des [space] foo [enter] [ctrl] ; foo [tab] com [tab] John D [comma] Mar [comma] Tom D [comma] Ste [enter]
Truly, if I'm speaking to a tech oriented person asking me what OS to choose I always say learn Unix, which one is less relevant. If you learn *nix, you can easily use OS X, Linux, BSD, Solaris, etc. If you learn Windows, you can well, use, um, Windows.
In addition to learning the GUI stuff, learn some of the command line; you are most productive with a mixture of the two. Also, the shell (command line/cli) is fairly static, and your knowledge transfers to every OS, er, except, for, um, Windows.
As for OS X vs Ubuntu. At work, I use both on the desktop (an OS X box right next to a PC running 7.04, using synergy to span my mouse and keyboard), and I prefer OS X; but mainly that is because I love TextMate so much; if I still used VIM primarily, I wouldn't prefer one over the other (although Cream in LInux is very nice, so that may sway me). On servers, it's Linux all the way, period.
For home, it's a no brainer, I use OS X. I'm a programmer, so I want to tweak my shell and my editor to a very fine point, but for stuff like music and movies, I just want the stuff to work, frankly. Oh and Quicksilver, Linux really needs a Quicksilver clone (no, you don't have one, if you think you do then you've never actually used Quicksilver)
Typical American (I'm one too), the quality of life is ONLY measured by the size and amount of things one owns.
I've only traveled to 10 countries so far, so I may be wrong, but from my observations, most countries value leisure time, family, job security, education, and other qualities of life over having the biggest SUV you can squeeze into your 3 car garage.
I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one suffering while using Comcast's oh so lame DVR (Dynamic Variable Replay). It's like playing roulette with your remote, "fast forward, come on fast forward.... I'd really like it to fast forward......clink, whiz, whirl........pause, stop, fast forward.....rewind, doh!"
People just can't get their idea, which they formed years ago, of what UNIX is out of their head. UNIX often has GUIs. UNIX can be very user friendly. UNIX doesn't require you to edit your documents in VI. Just because UNIX can power a mainframe calculating quantum physics, doesn't mean you can't take nudie pictures, of your girlfriend, easily with your iPhone running UNIX.
Serious question, is there anyone but Microsoft not using Unix?
Heh, yeah, I see your point. That is horrible logic, I'll rephrase: Wal*Mart isn't doing anything illegal, and I don't think we should legislate new laws to stop them. We, the consumers, already have the power to make changes, with our wallets and where we choose to shop.
Off topic, sort of, but there are plenty of reasons to dislike Wal*Mart without blinding following the "right documentaries". Simply go there, look around, and pay attention. Wal*Mart to many of us represents a move from an open free market where people can live the American dream by starting small companies and having their success based on their hard work, to a quasi communist state where everything is owned and controlled by a few.
I find it ironic that those who should be the most against such a company tend to love it; those whose manufacturing jobs got moved to China and who were laid off from their job at the local hardware store, where they made a living, only to be forced to work for minimum wage dressed in a smock with only a first name. Wal*Mart is a leading reason that so much manufacturing is done in China and not the US. Don't take my word for it, listen to traditional iconic American companies which say themselves that the only reason they moved work overseas is because Wal*Mart forced them to.
I don't think we should legislate against companies such as Wal*Mart, they aren't doing anything illegal. We simply shouldn't shop there. Go down the street, buy something from your neighbor's store. Sure you won't have as much stuff, because it's slightly more expensive, but in the long run we'll all be better off. Buying a Ford truck made in Mexico, and putting a huge flag on it, doesn't make you patriotic, buying your goods from Tom and Amy's hardware store down the street does.
I got through 6th grade with a Commodore 64 and a "cracked" copy of Ultima 4 and "The Bard's Tale".
Anyone remember how we use to have to "crack" these games? For you younger peeps, gather 'round, grandpa's got a story for ya. It involved 1 of 2 things (let me know if I'm remembering this wrong):
* Some games had a key you entered every time you played. The crack here was simply copying the paper or card with the keys as well as the diskette(s), which was harder than you might imagine as photocopiers only existed at big companies and libraries. Sometimes they made it harder by having this little wheel you had to spin around or the keys were on the bottom of the book it came with (go to page 56, type in key 5, sort of thing).
* Some games had copy protection on the diskettes, so you couldn't copy them; this was done in various ways (similar to how some CD/DVDs are done today). Usually we would have a program, that would have a list of games it could copy, and for each game it would have specific instructions on how to make a clean copy of it. We all had these "cracking" programs. You would have to get new versions every once in a while with the latest list of games.
My friends and I would have "LAN" parties, which, of course, as there was no networking, involved us dragging our computers over to our friends house and playing games NEXT to each other, rather than with each other. It was cool though, as when you found something new, your friend could walk over and verify that indeed, you are the ultimate Ultima fighting champion.
I think it depends on what kind of development you are talking about. If you're talking about desktop development, then yes if you include 3rd party components, then.net has and advantage because of the huge number of 3rd party vendors.
If you are talking about large scale (AT&T, Social Security, etc) business logic or database intensive applications, then Java outdoes.net by a mile..net is immature when it comes to middle tier, message queuing, and other such technologies. Java EE running on big iron rules this space.
I disagree that.net is "easy". It is easy to do basic stuff, using 3rd party components, and the built in tools and wizards. But it becomes very hard, when you need to move outside what the tools provide; which happens in most applications that are more than trivial. You gain speed in the beginning, only to loose it later as you spend days finding a work-around for some problem.
Other technologies require a little more up front work to do the basic stuff, but after that are much easier. Microsoft's approach to the problem of complexity has always been the same (not surprising as they are a tool company); they make something complex easy by providing a tool that takes simple input and produces the complex code underneath. I prefer the other approach, which is simply to create new technology that is easy, rather than make a tool that wraps the complexity.
A great example of this is a DataSet. I have one here, that was created using the tools in Visual Studio. The nice GUI creates a c# class with 50,904 lines of code in it (I'm not even joking). I do admit, that this DataSet probably has 40 tables or so, so it isn't a small one, but wtf? 50k lines of code to define 40 tables; the SQL statements for that would be tiny in comparison. Now you might argue that it doesn't matter because the nice GUI takes care of it; but it does matter. Because in this case, for special reasons, we needed to manually modify this code; as you can imagine that was nightmare. The GUI saved a little bit of time only to waste a ton of time later.
On the other hand you have something like ActiveRecord in Ruby (Ruby on Rails uses this too). Which is a beautifully simple system for handling database access. They didn't create a tool that hides the complexity of it, they created a new simple system. I don't personally use notepad to write code for it, but it would be easy to do so. Yes, you have to actually learn something, but the something is very simple.
2 different ways to accomplish the same thing, and after years of experience I don't think Microsoft's solution is the right one.
People write this sometimes and it baffles me. I use Visual Studio 2005 all the time, and it's a fine IDE, but it has some major issues and I don't find it any better than Eclipse, IDEA, or NetBeans for Java (all of which run on Windows, OS X, and Linux). I'm not saying Visual Studio is bad, it isn't, but it's hardly awesome like some people describe it. My assumption is that people who say that haven't really spent any time with those other IDEs.
When writing Java in IDEA 5 years ago, it had all the fancy editor stuff like re-factoring that Visual Studio just got. Later when I would switch over to c# from Java I always missed IDEA, Visual Studio was lagging in many ways.
For stuff like MFC work in c++, OS X has a very nice development environment with their X-Code.
Take a look at NetBeans 6 or Eclipse, I think you may be surprised. If you are doing web development, give up your IDE, which is just a crutch for such work, buy a Mac, buy TextMate, then learn Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Get your work done faster, smile more, and release your code on any platform you like; just my humble opinion, of course.
Yeah, I agree. I don't particularly like his music, but I'm inclined to buy a CD just to support him. If an artist with Prince's power, can't create some art, and give it away (or do whatever else they darn well please), then what hope is there for "lesser" artists to be able to enjoy their freedoms.
Yup, no one said these features were hard. But if the feature only required you to change the letter 'A' to 'B' and recompile it, what does that change?
If Sprint refused to do it for Apple, wether it's easy or hard to do doesn't matter. Apple can't support that carrier without disabling that feature. And Apple is well known for being very specific that everything "just works", which means they need all the features to work, not just most of them. Other companies would just disable this, but that's not Apple's way; good or bad.
so what are you supporting Linux and open source with? My mouth, my wallet, and my time, just as I support Apple with. I'm not sure what else someone could support open-source with, I'd give blood, but I don't think we're the same type.
Microsoft loves every-time a misdirected open-source advocate badmouths Apple. They giggle with glee; seriously, glee, I've seen in it person, but a NDA keeps me from posting the video on YouTube; unfortunately.
If you think Apple is truly no better than MS and other entities that are working hard to destroy open-source, then feel free to keep using your time and resources to bring them down. However, us open-source advocates with some basic logic ability will continue to support a proprietary company that is flanking MS with a sizable army and effective battle plans. It doesn't detract from our battle plan, it just augments it.
Who is really saying this? Apple is public corporation, legally, the CEO can get fired if they do something for any reason other than to increase profits, reduce expenses, or increase shareholder value. I don't think anyone thinks APL is doing anything for the benefit of humanity; that's slightly absurd.
However, I do think that people think that Apple pushes technology markets in exciting new ways; people get excited about that. And people think that Apple is doing their part to fight the monopolistic juggernaut from the north; and people really get excited about that. I think that people enjoy using their products, which is really all the reason most people need to be a fan of a company.
I personally support Linux and open-source, which I believe truly is a benefit for humanity and a powerful engine for small company innovation; which is very important to me. However, I'm also a supporter of Apple; not because they are great humanitarians, but because in the real world, nothing is ideal, and you have to take sides; and Apple is the proprietary side I'll be supporting with my mouth, my wallet, and my time.
Apple only has a contract with AT&T, no one else was willing to support the iPhone. The iPhone requires additional features from the carrier (which they had to build) to make it work (visual voice mail, etc), this has been stated many times by Apple. Apple wanted iPhone users to be able to do stuff that other carriers wouldn't agree to, which also has been reported many times before.
Of course Apple would love their phone to work on any carrier. I'd love purple flying monkeys to bring me tea in the morning. However, just because we would like something to be possible doesn't mean it is.
The issue is not that there is no freeware, in fact, I used Handbrake and Transmission and Colloquy in the article. Yes, you did, I stand corrected. The link for/. went directly to the conclusion page, and I didn't notice there were other pages to the article, so I only read part of TFA.
There isn't as much open source software on OS X as there is on LInux, for sure, but there are a lot of really great apps. Most console based open source apps exist, of course, it's just the GUI stuff that takes a little longer. The nice thing about OS X, however, is the thriving independent software community. Unlike in Windows, in OS X, a single developer can create really high quality software using OS X built in libraries (such as Quicktime, Core Image, etc) and make a good living selling it. This is because there is a culture in Macs of both trusting independent software (perhaps because of a lack of viruses) as well as a willingness to pay for them. Of course there is "shareware" in Windows, but the culture just isn't the same; most Mac owners have bought some sort of Shareware, that isn't true in Windows. Lastly, an independent developer can actually get shelf space in a Apple store, that is impossible in the CompUSAs of the world.
I think Linux rules for open source apps, Windows for Commercial apps, and OS X is in the middle somewhere.
I Agree with Apple not offering a mod-able box cheaper than the Mac Pro. But for most users, the "upgradable" model between the Mini and the Mac Pro is the iMac, which you can upgrade the hard-drive and the memory easily. This is a real complaint of mine for Macs, they don't address the group of users who would normally build their PC, or the group of users who play games. And I fully expect these users to shun Macs until they do. Because I fall into these groups, I'm torn between building a quad core Linux box for myself or buying a Mac Pro.
Yup, or MacPorts, and "port install" whatever you want. But shh, there isn't any open source software on the Mac, this guy says so, so it must be so.
Other things he is completely wrong about: * NeoOffice is the Mac port of OpenOffice, it does not require X11 to run. It works well, IMHO. * There are plenty of free open source apps, just like in Linux and Windows: Handbrake and MacTheRipper for DVD ripping, etc. * The model between the Mini and MacPro is the iMac
I use OS X and Linux a lot, and there are some real issues with OS X, that's for sure. But this article didn't go into any of them. I could go on, but I'm sure this thread went from 3 comments to 200 by the time I hit submit.
This is actually a great idea. If the school district has high-school age kids, you could have them work on it too, for elective, or computer science credits.
You take some of the money you saved from not paying Microsoft's extortion payments, and you hire one good (as in expensive) programmer who is articulate and enjoys mentoring. Their mission is to specifically fix problems in NeoOffice that the school district is experiencing. They would do this themselves, as well as fulfill their other mission, which is to work with a small group (small is important) of gifted and motivated students; which they mentor in the craft of programming. It's important that the group be very small, so that one person could manage it, as well as make it productive. As students leave, new students could join the group, a revolving 4 people for example.
If this program were successful, you could create other groups like this. A single professional programmer, with 4 students. You could apply these groups to different parts of Neo Office, or better yet, different applications.
I see no downside to this whatsoever. The professional programmers are well compensated (if they aren't it won't work at all), and they get to work on open source projects. The students get credit for something they probably already like to do; plus they get real world experience that will place them above other applicants if they seek programming work in the future. The open source community gets patches to it's software. And the school saves money, and increases education.
'Wheres Internet Explorer?' or 'Does this thing have google?' I think you over estimate people, if you think they would ask either one of those questions. They may ask where the "Internet" is, perhaps, but probably not even that, as they actually think MSN or Yahoo is the Internet.
Most people don't even know what "Windows" is, although they've heard of it, and they know they have it... somewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
No, VI is emacs for smart people.
The already had "photo tagging", actually in OS X, you can tag any files, and search or such for that later based on those. Events, to me, is just a more automated way of creating and organizing albums, nothing revolutionary, but evolutionary for their product, as creating albums and organizing them is something you do a lot of (not me, though, as I'm old school, I still organize my photos in folders and don't use any such fancy photo apps).
The end result: artists won't sign with them anymore as a majority of their audience leaves them for independant artists, or artists under labels that know the term "penny-wise, pound foolish"
Oh, and Microsoft, do the same please, Apple and Redhat will happily help you create the technology.
You're leaving off a whole bunch of stuff, before that "slap on the wrist" happens:
* Police officer's time was wasted on a trivial technical offense; in the real world of limited resources, their time was taken from crimes everyone would agree are more important.
* The prosecutor's time will be wasted, another person who has very limited time, which isn't cheap
* If the police and prosecutor are forced, by this company to actually prosecute, then a Judge, court staff, 14 citizen's (12 jurors, and 2 alternates), a bailiff, and tons of support personnel's time will be wasted. This will cost the local taxpayers a ton of money.
The end result, will mostly likely be a dropped case, or a slap on the wrist. What a complete waste of precious resources. Any company with a "zero-tolerance" rule on anything to do with a crime, should be fined by the judge, handsomely, for theft of government services.
There is a reason that people, not computers, decide wether something is worth prosecuting.
I don't have many problems with .DS_STORE files. For you readers that followed us into OFF-TOPIC land, .DS_STORE files are used by OS X to store folder settings (window size, color, icon, etc) for each folder that Finder (Explorer for OS X) touches.
.DS_STORE system is poorly designed, which is odd in a very well designed OS. And hopefully they will rip this blight from Finder in some future version. But they don't seem to cause me much pain, really. All OS X aware apps ignore them, even subversion, which I installed using MacPorts ignores them, but does read other hidden dotfiles. Perhaps, an IDE that is cross platform and not aware of these files includes them in the project or something, but I really haven't had to deal with this problem.
.DS_STORE virus.
Personally I think the
The only problem with them I find, is when I read a disk that Finder has touched with Windows which doesn't treat them as hidden files and doesn't ignore them. This can be an issue when creating a zip file to send to Windows peeps; and since they are so skittish of mysterious files, they probably re-install Windows to get rid of the weird
Windows, of course does a similar annoying thing with its Thumbs.db files, but that doesn't make it right.
Launchy? Um, no, I've used it, it's just a launcher. Deskbar, better, but still no; it's mainly a launcher and a search mechanism. I don't use KDE, and I haven't tried Katapult; so I can't say, but it looks like they are trying to clone Quicksilver, although it appears to just launch stuff at this point (their website was down, so I was looking at other sites for information).
;), the enter text (.Hello World), tab, select Append To by typing first few letters (ap), tab, select Desktop (des), space, select foo.txt by typing first few letters (fo), enter
;), select foo.txt by typing first few letters (fo), tab, compose an email (com), tab, select each person from my address book (John D, Mar, Tom D, Ste), enter
If anyone thinks Launchy is like Quicksilver, I would bet they've never actually used Quicksilver. Every-time someone mentions Quicksilver, these get pull out of a google search. This is the equivalent to saying DOS is just like the command-line in Unix; true it's a black screen which you type commands into; but that is where the similarities end.
Quicksilver is more than a launcher and more the a way to search files (OS X already comes with this, it's called Spotlight). Quicksilver is a graphical command line, with same concepts, such as piping output from one command to the next. Sure it can launch Firefox, and allow you to search your Desktop for files, but that is just the tip of the iceberg.
As an example, using only my keyboard and Quicksilver's very nice GUI I can: Append "Hello World" to a file on my desktop, then email it to 4 different people. Basically you do this by:
starting Quicksilver (ctrl
start Quicksilver (ctrl
This all happens very quickly, basically you always have a noun, verb, noun: take this text, append it, to foo.txt.
Here are all the keystrokes without the comments:
[ctrl] ;
.
Hello World
[tab]
ap
[tab]
des
[space]
foo
[enter]
[ctrl] ;
foo
[tab]
com
[tab]
John D
[comma]
Mar
[comma]
Tom D
[comma]
Ste
[enter]
Truly, if I'm speaking to a tech oriented person asking me what OS to choose I always say learn Unix, which one is less relevant. If you learn *nix, you can easily use OS X, Linux, BSD, Solaris, etc. If you learn Windows, you can well, use, um, Windows.
In addition to learning the GUI stuff, learn some of the command line; you are most productive with a mixture of the two. Also, the shell (command line/cli) is fairly static, and your knowledge transfers to every OS, er, except, for, um, Windows.
As for OS X vs Ubuntu. At work, I use both on the desktop (an OS X box right next to a PC running 7.04, using synergy to span my mouse and keyboard), and I prefer OS X; but mainly that is because I love TextMate so much; if I still used VIM primarily, I wouldn't prefer one over the other (although Cream in LInux is very nice, so that may sway me). On servers, it's Linux all the way, period.
For home, it's a no brainer, I use OS X. I'm a programmer, so I want to tweak my shell and my editor to a very fine point, but for stuff like music and movies, I just want the stuff to work, frankly. Oh and Quicksilver, Linux really needs a Quicksilver clone (no, you don't have one, if you think you do then you've never actually used Quicksilver)
Typical American (I'm one too), the quality of life is ONLY measured by the size and amount of things one owns.
I've only traveled to 10 countries so far, so I may be wrong, but from my observations, most countries value leisure time, family, job security, education, and other qualities of life over having the biggest SUV you can squeeze into your 3 car garage.
I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one suffering while using Comcast's oh so lame DVR (Dynamic Variable Replay). It's like playing roulette with your remote, "fast forward, come on fast forward.... I'd really like it to fast forward......clink, whiz, whirl........pause, stop, fast forward.....rewind, doh!"
"UNIX-Like"?
3 555.htm
True, if by "UNIX-Like" you mean "is UNIX". OS X is no less of a UNIX than any other UNIX. And OS X Leopard has officially been certified as UNIX 03:
http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand
People just can't get their idea, which they formed years ago, of what UNIX is out of their head. UNIX often has GUIs. UNIX can be very user friendly. UNIX doesn't require you to edit your documents in VI. Just because UNIX can power a mainframe calculating quantum physics, doesn't mean you can't take nudie pictures, of your girlfriend, easily with your iPhone running UNIX.
Serious question, is there anyone but Microsoft not using Unix?
Heh, yeah, I see your point. That is horrible logic, I'll rephrase: Wal*Mart isn't doing anything illegal, and I don't think we should legislate new laws to stop them. We, the consumers, already have the power to make changes, with our wallets and where we choose to shop.
Off topic, sort of, but there are plenty of reasons to dislike Wal*Mart without blinding following the "right documentaries". Simply go there, look around, and pay attention. Wal*Mart to many of us represents a move from an open free market where people can live the American dream by starting small companies and having their success based on their hard work, to a quasi communist state where everything is owned and controlled by a few.
I find it ironic that those who should be the most against such a company tend to love it; those whose manufacturing jobs got moved to China and who were laid off from their job at the local hardware store, where they made a living, only to be forced to work for minimum wage dressed in a smock with only a first name. Wal*Mart is a leading reason that so much manufacturing is done in China and not the US. Don't take my word for it, listen to traditional iconic American companies which say themselves that the only reason they moved work overseas is because Wal*Mart forced them to.
I don't think we should legislate against companies such as Wal*Mart, they aren't doing anything illegal. We simply shouldn't shop there. Go down the street, buy something from your neighbor's store. Sure you won't have as much stuff, because it's slightly more expensive, but in the long run we'll all be better off. Buying a Ford truck made in Mexico, and putting a huge flag on it, doesn't make you patriotic, buying your goods from Tom and Amy's hardware store down the street does.
That's all I'm sayin'
I got through 6th grade with a Commodore 64 and a "cracked" copy of Ultima 4 and "The Bard's Tale".
Anyone remember how we use to have to "crack" these games? For you younger peeps, gather 'round, grandpa's got a story for ya.
It involved 1 of 2 things (let me know if I'm remembering this wrong):
* Some games had a key you entered every time you played. The crack here was simply copying the paper or card with the keys as well as the diskette(s), which was harder than you might imagine as photocopiers only existed at big companies and libraries. Sometimes they made it harder by having this little wheel you had to spin around or the keys were on the bottom of the book it came with (go to page 56, type in key 5, sort of thing).
* Some games had copy protection on the diskettes, so you couldn't copy them; this was done in various ways (similar to how some CD/DVDs are done today). Usually we would have a program, that would have a list of games it could copy, and for each game it would have specific instructions on how to make a clean copy of it. We all had these "cracking" programs. You would have to get new versions every once in a while with the latest list of games.
My friends and I would have "LAN" parties, which, of course, as there was no networking, involved us dragging our computers over to our friends house and playing games NEXT to each other, rather than with each other. It was cool though, as when you found something new, your friend could walk over and verify that indeed, you are the ultimate Ultima fighting champion.
I think it depends on what kind of development you are talking about. If you're talking about desktop development, then yes if you include 3rd party components, then .net has and advantage because of the huge number of 3rd party vendors.
.net by a mile. .net is immature when it comes to middle tier, message queuing, and other such technologies. Java EE running on big iron rules this space.
.net is "easy". It is easy to do basic stuff, using 3rd party components, and the built in tools and wizards. But it becomes very hard, when you need to move outside what the tools provide; which happens in most applications that are more than trivial. You gain speed in the beginning, only to loose it later as you spend days finding a work-around for some problem.
If you are talking about large scale (AT&T, Social Security, etc) business logic or database intensive applications, then Java outdoes
I disagree that
Other technologies require a little more up front work to do the basic stuff, but after that are much easier. Microsoft's approach to the problem of complexity has always been the same (not surprising as they are a tool company); they make something complex easy by providing a tool that takes simple input and produces the complex code underneath. I prefer the other approach, which is simply to create new technology that is easy, rather than make a tool that wraps the complexity.
A great example of this is a DataSet. I have one here, that was created using the tools in Visual Studio. The nice GUI creates a c# class with 50,904 lines of code in it (I'm not even joking). I do admit, that this DataSet probably has 40 tables or so, so it isn't a small one, but wtf? 50k lines of code to define 40 tables; the SQL statements for that would be tiny in comparison. Now you might argue that it doesn't matter because the nice GUI takes care of it; but it does matter. Because in this case, for special reasons, we needed to manually modify this code; as you can imagine that was nightmare. The GUI saved a little bit of time only to waste a ton of time later.
On the other hand you have something like ActiveRecord in Ruby (Ruby on Rails uses this too). Which is a beautifully simple system for handling database access. They didn't create a tool that hides the complexity of it, they created a new simple system. I don't personally use notepad to write code for it, but it would be easy to do so. Yes, you have to actually learn something, but the something is very simple.
2 different ways to accomplish the same thing, and after years of experience I don't think Microsoft's solution is the right one.
People write this sometimes and it baffles me. I use Visual Studio 2005 all the time, and it's a fine IDE, but it has some major issues and I don't find it any better than Eclipse, IDEA, or NetBeans for Java (all of which run on Windows, OS X, and Linux). I'm not saying Visual Studio is bad, it isn't, but it's hardly awesome like some people describe it. My assumption is that people who say that haven't really spent any time with those other IDEs.
When writing Java in IDEA 5 years ago, it had all the fancy editor stuff like re-factoring that Visual Studio just got. Later when I would switch over to c# from Java I always missed IDEA, Visual Studio was lagging in many ways.
For stuff like MFC work in c++, OS X has a very nice development environment with their X-Code.
Take a look at NetBeans 6 or Eclipse, I think you may be surprised. If you are doing web development, give up your IDE, which is just a crutch for such work, buy a Mac, buy TextMate, then learn Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Get your work done faster, smile more, and release your code on any platform you like; just my humble opinion, of course.
Yeah, I agree. I don't particularly like his music, but I'm inclined to buy a CD just to support him. If an artist with Prince's power, can't create some art, and give it away (or do whatever else they darn well please), then what hope is there for "lesser" artists to be able to enjoy their freedoms.
I wasn't a fan before, but I am now.
Yup, no one said these features were hard. But if the feature only required you to change the letter 'A' to 'B' and recompile it, what does that change?
If Sprint refused to do it for Apple, wether it's easy or hard to do doesn't matter. Apple can't support that carrier without disabling that feature. And Apple is well known for being very specific that everything "just works", which means they need all the features to work, not just most of them. Other companies would just disable this, but that's not Apple's way; good or bad.
Microsoft loves every-time a misdirected open-source advocate badmouths Apple. They giggle with glee; seriously, glee, I've seen in it person, but a NDA keeps me from posting the video on YouTube; unfortunately.
If you think Apple is truly no better than MS and other entities that are working hard to destroy open-source, then feel free to keep using your time and resources to bring them down. However, us open-source advocates with some basic logic ability will continue to support a proprietary company that is flanking MS with a sizable army and effective battle plans. It doesn't detract from our battle plan, it just augments it.
Who is really saying this? Apple is public corporation, legally, the CEO can get fired if they do something for any reason other than to increase profits, reduce expenses, or increase shareholder value. I don't think anyone thinks APL is doing anything for the benefit of humanity; that's slightly absurd.
However, I do think that people think that Apple pushes technology markets in exciting new ways; people get excited about that. And people think that Apple is doing their part to fight the monopolistic juggernaut from the north; and people really get excited about that. I think that people enjoy using their products, which is really all the reason most people need to be a fan of a company.
I personally support Linux and open-source, which I believe truly is a benefit for humanity and a powerful engine for small company innovation; which is very important to me. However, I'm also a supporter of Apple; not because they are great humanitarians, but because in the real world, nothing is ideal, and you have to take sides; and Apple is the proprietary side I'll be supporting with my mouth, my wallet, and my time.
Apple only has a contract with AT&T, no one else was willing to support the iPhone. The iPhone requires additional features from the carrier (which they had to build) to make it work (visual voice mail, etc), this has been stated many times by Apple. Apple wanted iPhone users to be able to do stuff that other carriers wouldn't agree to, which also has been reported many times before.
Of course Apple would love their phone to work on any carrier. I'd love purple flying monkeys to bring me tea in the morning. However, just because we would like something to be possible doesn't mean it is.
There isn't as much open source software on OS X as there is on LInux, for sure, but there are a lot of really great apps. Most console based open source apps exist, of course, it's just the GUI stuff that takes a little longer. The nice thing about OS X, however, is the thriving independent software community. Unlike in Windows, in OS X, a single developer can create really high quality software using OS X built in libraries (such as Quicktime, Core Image, etc) and make a good living selling it. This is because there is a culture in Macs of both trusting independent software (perhaps because of a lack of viruses) as well as a willingness to pay for them. Of course there is "shareware" in Windows, but the culture just isn't the same; most Mac owners have bought some sort of Shareware, that isn't true in Windows. Lastly, an independent developer can actually get shelf space in a Apple store, that is impossible in the CompUSAs of the world.
I think Linux rules for open source apps, Windows for Commercial apps, and OS X is in the middle somewhere.
I Agree with Apple not offering a mod-able box cheaper than the Mac Pro. But for most users, the "upgradable" model between the Mini and the Mac Pro is the iMac, which you can upgrade the hard-drive and the memory easily. This is a real complaint of mine for Macs, they don't address the group of users who would normally build their PC, or the group of users who play games. And I fully expect these users to shun Macs until they do. Because I fall into these groups, I'm torn between building a quad core Linux box for myself or buying a Mac Pro.
Yup, or MacPorts, and "port install" whatever you want. But shh, there isn't any open source software on the Mac, this guy says so, so it must be so.
Other things he is completely wrong about:
* NeoOffice is the Mac port of OpenOffice, it does not require X11 to run. It works well, IMHO.
* There are plenty of free open source apps, just like in Linux and Windows: Handbrake and MacTheRipper for DVD ripping, etc.
* The model between the Mini and MacPro is the iMac
I use OS X and Linux a lot, and there are some real issues with OS X, that's for sure. But this article didn't go into any of them. I could go on, but I'm sure this thread went from 3 comments to 200 by the time I hit submit.
This is actually a great idea. If the school district has high-school age kids, you could have them work on it too, for elective, or computer science credits.
You take some of the money you saved from not paying Microsoft's extortion payments, and you hire one good (as in expensive) programmer who is articulate and enjoys mentoring. Their mission is to specifically fix problems in NeoOffice that the school district is experiencing. They would do this themselves, as well as fulfill their other mission, which is to work with a small group (small is important) of gifted and motivated students; which they mentor in the craft of programming. It's important that the group be very small, so that one person could manage it, as well as make it productive. As students leave, new students could join the group, a revolving 4 people for example.
If this program were successful, you could create other groups like this. A single professional programmer, with 4 students. You could apply these groups to different parts of Neo Office, or better yet, different applications.
I see no downside to this whatsoever. The professional programmers are well compensated (if they aren't it won't work at all), and they get to work on open source projects. The students get credit for something they probably already like to do; plus they get real world experience that will place them above other applicants if they seek programming work in the future. The open source community gets patches to it's software. And the school saves money, and increases education.
You take the first 10, let me know when you're done, then we'll assign the next 10.
Most people don't even know what "Windows" is, although they've heard of it, and they know they have it... somewhere.