.NET is still struggling to gain market share on java, thats part of the reason microsoft did this deal, so they can hedge their bets. If.NET fails then they can fall back onto java and vice-versa.
Maybe, but from the OSS perspective, neither.NET nor Java are acceptable because both are proprietary. However, OSS's adoption of C# as part of a non-proprietary platform like Mono might boost Microsoft's.NET initiative and hurt Java.
Sun shot themselves in the foot there: if Sun hadn't been so greedy and controlling about Java, Java could be the mainstream OSS programming language. Instead, Java will probably just end up being more and more marginalized.
The PC market is owned by companies like Dell, Compaq/HP, Acer, etc., companies who know how to make PCs on razor thin margins, have the distribution channels and the credibility. And then there is Apple, which has created an upscale image for itself and sells for a little more.
OSS companies are nimble companies with comparatively few employees that are eminently sensitive to the needs, wants, and whinings of the OSS community.
Sun is a big hardware company with lots of costs, production facilities, hardware engineers, hardware support staff. During the Internet bubble, they jettissoned pretty much all remnants of their university beginnings and turned into a vendor of expensive server machines. And their attitude towards software is that they can do it better and they are going to own it: that's what they have said about desktops and what they have said about Java, and a significant chunk of the OSS community dislikes and/or distrusts them.
And now they are going to succeed as a PC vendor and OSS company? I don't think so.
You thought that "looking nice with your furniture" was more important than the spec of the system, or the OS it ran.
Yes--why is that so difficult to understand? If you have a machine in your living room, wouldn't you like it to look nice? Oh, I see, you probably don't really have a living room.
You were so taken with how much they matched your furniture that you bought 3 of them before you realised that you didn't like Mac OS.
No, I realized that after the first one. But, hard as that may be for you to comprehend, sometimes people buy machines because they need to get work done, and if that work happens to involve MacOS, then they buy a Macintosh, whether they like the OS or not. You know, just like lots of people buy Windows machines even though they don't like them. You, as a Mac zealot, should be able to relate to that, since Mac users often complain about having to use Windows machines.
Fortunately, after one is through using them for their work-related purpose, one can install Linux on both Macs and Windows machines, which makes me really happy.
"It just works" is about useability,
You mean like QuickTime? Or dragging volumes into the trash in order to unmount them? Or replacing a three button mouse with Apple-Option-click combos? Or the Top Nine Reasons the Apple Dock Still Sucks? The last one was written by that anti-Mac bigot and well-known troll by the name of Bruce Tognazzini. And then there are well-known anti-Macintosh rags like MacOpinion pointing out usability problems in OS X.
Apple is paying attention to usability, but so is everybody else. Apple doesn't have any magic solutions, and their products have the same kinds of problems that all other operating systems and GUIs have. They just make theirs look prettier and pretend they aren't there.
That doesn't make their machines bad, it just makes them not as good as Apple likes to claim.
Anyway, we both know full well that you're trolling.
No, the trolls are people like you who post to discussions about Linux that people should just use OS X instead because it "just works".
And when someone like me says that Apples are pretty nice, but that Apple, like everybody else has usability problems, you throw hissy fits.
Trolls are people who first claim to have bought a Mac because "it looked nice and fit in well with my furniture.
No, Trolls are people who deliberately make provocative and untrue statements in order to elicit an angry response.
I just told you why and how I bought my Macs and how I used them. I'm sorry if that offends you, but that doesn't make it a troll: I like the Mac look, but the Mac software doesn't do much for me. And, in fact, lots of other Linux users on Mac hardware obviously agree with me, otherwise there wouldn't be any Linux for Mac.
They claim that updating Linux is much easier, and use the X86 based Suse and Debian distro's to prove it, rather then the Mac based Yellow Dog Linux. Because they don't own a Mac at all, or because YDL isn't easy to update at all?
Debian also runs on Mac. In fact, that's what I'm running on my Macs, because it's easier to update than YDL.
They keep repeating that others are making "erroneous statements about Linux" without actually saying which points and correcting them.
I did correct you: your statements about how Linux is maintained and updated, for example. And your statements about how "consistent" the Mac GUI is when, in fact, out of the box, it ships with several different, incompatible UI styles, and there are several more that are in common use.
But you went on to reveal that you are just a Linux Bigot, who hates Macs
Ah, yes, that must be why I said that they make good home computers and why I bought several, right?
People like you really turn people off Linux.
If it turns off people like you, all the better, as far as I'm concerned: it doesn't sound like you'd be able to contribute anything to Linux. On the other hand, Apple is struggling to get customers, and paying customers like me are a bad thing for them to lose.
Worse, you try to make yourself sound credible by claiming to own a Mac, or some Macs, when most everything you say makes it clear that you don't.
Perhaps we have such different views of Macs because I do a little more with them than just run iTunes and iChat, which I can only conclude your "just works" view of the world must be based on.
If you don't believe me, just go back two days on Slashdot: Monday Releases Cause Crashes. To which another Mac user, wisely, responded:
Er...ooops. (Score:5, Interesting)
by System.out.println() (755533)
I really need to learn to wait a few days before installing things. I'm so impatient.
Even worse, I check a dozen or so Mac sites several times daily, (yes I need a life) so I probably get every update within 8 hours or so of release, if that.
Do go check those "Mac sites" yourself. Macs have lots of problems--Apple hasn't found the silver bullet to software or usability problems--they just market their machines as if they had.
As I was saying, Apple does a decent job at making hardware and software, no more and no less.
... a complete reversal of the actual situation. You were the one starting the uninformed bashing. The first post in the thread merely asked a question about why pick a Mac rather than an x86 to run Linux on.
This is what started the thread:
I don't get this. I mean you buy the expensive hardware because it comes with that great operating system that just plain "works" and you put linux on it?
I.e., OS X "just works" while Linux doesn't.
what justifies the price of the hardware if you're not using that beautiful os?
I.e., OS X is beautiful while Linux isn't.
My response to that, having used both extensively, it is my experience that those statements are wrong. You then started extensively bashing Linux, making lots of incorrect statements about Linux, and calling me a liar.
The claims of superiority of Linux as a desktop OS over Mac OS are plain nonsense - at least at the current state of Linux developments.
I made no claims that Linux is "superior" as a desktop OS. In fact, I explicitly said that OS X is "a good home computing platform", mostly because that's what it is targetted at. This notion of "superiority" is another one of those hangups that people like you have.
Sorry I don't buy your story that you own Macs at all.
Well, that's not surprising. Given your erroneous statements about Linux, you just don't seem to be willing to accept any facts that don't fit your world view.
You are a troll.
No, trolls are Macintosh zealots like you and Stewyn that post in a thread on the release of YDL messages "asking" why people don't just use "the beautiful OS that just works". And when people oppose your Apple marketing-speak, you start flaming them and get insulting. People like you really give Apple a bad name.
I see you've been modded -1 overrated, which just about says it all, given that there isn't an "uninformative" mod available.
Yes: just about any post that is critical of OS X is modded down on Slashdot.
Perhaps you've briefly used someone elses, or used one in a computer room at whatever institution it is you attend.
Actually, I own a Powerbook, an iMac, and a G4 iBook. The iBook is still running OS X, the other systems are running Linux now.
You claim Linux is more easily updatable on the basis that you can get a new version of the entire distro and manually install it.
No, that's not the basis on which I claim that. I claim it on the basis that Linux distributions like SuSE and Debian are updated automatically, regularly, over the Internet. It's like Apple's automatic software update, only that it works for all the installed software and generally just works better.
It also automates both installing and uninstalling of software, to the point where you basically just say "I want to run SoftwareX", and all the downloads and updates happen automatically. And if you want to get rid of something, you basically just say "I don't want to run SoftwareX anymore" and it gets removed. It's Macintosh-like simplicity--too bad that Macintosh doesn't achieve it.
Yet OSX has software update that will update all of the Apple "distro". Yes, not just the OS, but all the common applications too.
The difference is that the Apple "distro" includes so little functionality compared to a Linux distro. Almost all Apple users will have third party drivers, applications, and utilities installed, and those don't get updated by Apple. In fact, they frequently get broken by Apple's updates.
Most Linux users get all the software they need from their distro and they never have to worry about any sort of updates beyond the simple, automatic Internet update.
You claim that Cocoa and Carbon have different UIs, but they are virtually identical compared to the differences between Gnome and KDE.
So what's your point? Gnome and wxWindows also have different UIs but are virtually identical. We can find lots of pairs of toolkits that are "virtually identical" on both platforms. The point is that the Mac has lots of inconsistencies as well. I don't even see this as a problem. It's only that Apple tries to portray itself as being different and then use that as a marketing advantage. Well, it's not a feature that the Mac has, and even if it did, it wouldn't matter to most people anyway.
This can happen manually or automatically, but in either case it is far simpler than anything Linux offers you.
Again, you demonstrate your complete ignorance of things related to Linux.
This thread started with the usual, uninformed bashing of Linux by Macintosh users. Why don't you guys just shut up and stop bashing Linux? We don't want to hear that OS X is better--if we thought that OS X were better, we'd be running it, rather than YDL. In fact, I don't even see the Apple stories anymore because the Mac and OS X really don't interest me.
But when you do make stupid, uninformed claims about Linux, as you did, you have to expect that people answer.
I have. In fact, I still have an OS X machine because I need it for work. I find it no easier to maintain or update than a Windows machine, and it's considerably more work to maintain than a Linux machine (Linux machines basically just update the entire system and applications automatically; on OS X, only the OS updates itself and may even break applications in the process).
Furthermore, OS X applications crash with roughly the same frequency as Windows applications in my experience (big change from a few years ago, when Windows was horrible).
The thing about Mac OS isn't that it looks good, it's about usability of the GUI.
That, too, is a myth. Macintosh applications are all over the place when it comes to usability. There are some really good ones and some really lousy ones. The applications Apple ships out of the box are, overall, probably a bit better than average.
And the OS X UI is far from consistent; in fact, arguably, its consistency is worse than either Linux or Windows. OS X has Cocoa, Carbon, Cocoa/Carbon with the "device" look, the OS 9 UI, X11 (including Gtk+, Qt, wxWindows, and Tcl/Tk apps), Windows ports, and other interfaces, all running on the same screen. They all look and behave differently. Even Cocoa and Carbon, where Apple has tried hardest to make them consistent, don't have consistent key bindings, don't have consistent ways of remapping keys, and don't see the file system the same way.
Linux doesn't even have universal cut'n'paste for Christ's sake,
Sure it does. Of course, just like OS X, not every application supports cut-and-paste. Unlike OS X, Linux does at least have a standard mechanism that every GUI application (no matter what toolkit it is written in) could use if it chose to use it.
OS X has all the inconsistencies of X11 (because it supports X11), and it adds to that its own set of inconsistencies that go far beyond what X11 has. On X11, at least all toolkits see the same key maps and same cut-and-paste mechanisms. On OS X, you don't even get that much.
Of course, your objection is likely going to be "X11, Carbon, and OS 9 don't count, they are just add-ons". Well, yes, if you only look at one of the many UIs running on OS X, you get more consistency. But in that case, it does make sense to compare OS X/Cocoa to all of Linux, you have to compare OS X/Cocoa to Linux/Gnome, and then Linux/Gnome still wins in terms of its consistency and overall integration.
Anyway you cut it, Apple doesn't walk on water. They make a decent product with nice graphical design and reasonable support. But they don't have any technology or ideas that other companies don't have as well.
For a client with ssh integrated into it, look around with Google for Java implementations of vnc and ssh; it's been done and is prettx easy to find. I used to run it on some servers.
If you don't want to install ssh on your Windows machine, use stunnel. It's an easy install on Windows and works well with VNC.
On linux, UNIX, and MacOS, running VNC securely is trivial. The fact that it's more work on Windows is a limitation of Windows, not VNC.
Note that for the regular edition of XP, you don't even have a choice: it just doesn't support RDP. Even if it did, if you started relying on it, you'd have to worry about MSFT making incompatible changes with any upgrade.
It's a myth that OSX "just plain works". Maybe it works for you (it's a good home computing platform), but OSX has many of the same system management hassles of other operating systems, and it has fewer tools for dwaling with them.
In terms of appearances, it's easy to match the look and style of OSX with Linux themes, so that's not a deciding factor. If anything, you get far more choice of slick, profesional themes with Linux than with OSX.
I can answer that because I did it: a Mac looked nice and fit in well with my furniture. But after trying OSX, I didn't find it to be a good replacement for Linux, so I wiped the disk and replaced it with Linux and have been quite happy with the machine since.
Of course, VNC is encrypted, it just isn't built into all VNC clients/servers. Usually, people run it over ssh, which has the added advatage over Remote Desktop that you don't need any new firewall rules (since ssh usually is already there) and that you don't have to figure out a new key management system.
If you like, of course, you can also run VNC over stunnel or IPsec.
When it is useful, some VNC clients/servers (e.g. clients running as Java applets) have the encryption built in.
As usual, the UNIX solution is simpler, more elegant, more flexible, and more functional than the Windows solution. And, as usual, Windows users like yourself just don't get it.
Actually, we don't have to "trust" them, we can verify the proof using proof verification software. And if you really get picky about it, you can verify the proof verification software using itself.
The situation really is no different from numerical software. We perform long, tedious computations by computer, computations that we wouldn't trust any human to do correctly, if anybody even was willing to spend the time. We have software and methods for checking those numerical results. Well, mathematical proofs are no different.
The mathematical literature is full of errors, oversights, invalid proofs, unstated assumptions, and probably even a certain share of deliberate fraud. See Lounesto's misconceptions of research mathematicians for one expert digging into the mathematical literature.
Computers are far better at ferretting out oversights, missing assumptions, and making sure that every t is crossed and i is dotted. If a software system for doing proofs has shown itself to be fairly reliable on a bunch of samples, I'd trust it a lot more than I'd trust any working mathematician to carry out a complex proof correctly.
But if I go to a shop I want a pressed CD - these hold longer.
Actually, that's probably not the casel. Pressed CDs apparently often use a material for the data layer that easily oxidizes. Some CD-R disks use considerably more stable dyes. Under normal environmental conditions, those CD-Rs probably last much longer than the pressed CD.
Most natural language processing is done at the sentence level, so this is quite common. And plenty of work has been done on information retrieval using sentence and paragraph context.
It's less common to expose this to users, but it isn't clear that the sentence level is what should be exposed anyway. Better semantic markup of web pages into related sections or topics might be useful. But given that we can't even get authors to generate correct HTML the way it is, it's doubtful much would come of such a proposal.
To me the authors are vandals not revolutionaries, and may have ensured WMA becomes the standard.
Well, and if Apple produces a DRM system with gaping holes, then from the point of view of the music industry, that's exactly what should happen. Or do you think people aren't also hard at work cracking WMA?
If Apple wants to be a provider of DRM, then they better do it right or they don't do it at all.
It's appropriate that you should mention the NYT, because they lost a court case over a similar issue.
I'm not sure why you think that issue is similar. If anything, the courts interpreted copyright more narrowly there.
you implicitly grant a license to pretty much anyone, including Google, to reproduce your post for usenet-related purposes.
Yes, and "USENET-related purposes", until DejaNews, meant distribution and temporary storage, not the creation of a permanent index. Arguably, once DejaNews (and similar services) came into wide use, indexing and republishing became a USENET related purpose.
(This is imho. I don't think anybody's ever actually tested it by suing Google for breach of copyright. You could be the first!)
That takes lots of time and money, and while Google probably technically violated copyright, there would be no penalty, so the outcome would at best be to get them to stop publishing my articles. Legal questions aside, I just find the behavior of DejaNews and Google in this matter rude; to me, it's like if they had rummaged through my home videos, accidentally available at a garage sale, and put them on the web.
An applet platform? You're kidding right? Applets were, are, and never will be anything but bloated and slow.
Java applets are bloated and slow because Sun screwed up, not because executable content in web pages necessarily has to be bloated and slow. Flash shows that executable content in web pages does not have to be painfully slow or bloated. But Flash is oriented towards animations, not GUI toolkits, so it isn't a good platform to write applets in (great for games, though).
Thin clients beats applets all day long.
Applets are thin clients.
Even Microsoft didn't try to implement anything like it in.NET, which is supposed to do everything but tie your shoes for you.
Sure they have. You can write ActiveX components in.NET, which, like other ActiveX components, can be put onto web pages. Furthermore, they are supposed to be sandboxed. But the problem with.NET for applets is the same problem as Java has for applets: it's too much of a general purpose platform. We need a specific applet platform. In fact, J2ME would be a lot closer to a good applet platform than J2SE.
This story brought it into focus for me: I was an early adopter of Java, but I just don't care about Java anymore. Sun promised to deliver an applet platform, but then changed directions to server-side programming and a half-hearted effort at a cross-platform toolkit. Frankly, for server-side programming and cross-platform GUIs, there are far better choices than Java.
I'd still like to see something better than JavaScript and Flash for applet-like functionality, but it's clear Sun isn't going to deliver anymore.
Logic gates that can be "programmed" to do any operation are pretty easy to implement in terms of regular transistors and binary logic.
If, on the other hand, we start using multiple voltage levels as part of digital circuits, it is still more efficient to use them as part of elements with dedicated functions.
Altogether, this doesn't seem like something that lets us do anything that we couldn't do before. The reason it isn't being done is probably that it's not useful (even FPGAs generally choose to fix the functions of individual gates but allow you to interconnect them in new ways).
I think you have it backwards: Google has no copyright issue with usenet archives, but does with e-mail. When you write to a newsgroup, you know your (automatically copyrighted) work will be distributed throughout the internet, so there's an implied license.
Until about 2000, posting to USENET meant posting to a temporary discussion forum: the data could be copied and distributed for the purpose of reading it on USENET. How anyone can read into that that means that a poster somehow has given Google (or anybody else) "implicit permission" to republish their postings as part of a business venture, I don't understand. And by making USENET searchable, DejaNews (now Google) has single-handedly destroyed USENET as a place where people could have informal on-line discussions in cyberspace using their real names, because with no effort anybody can retrieve anything ever posted by anyone. Besides, why doesn't the same argument apply to the NYT print edition? It's been distributed throughout the world.
This does not exist with private e-mail, so Google cannot publish it.
If you subscribe to Gmail, you have a business relationship with them and you explicitly agree to the TOS, whatever they may say. If they said that Google can arbitrarily publish your E-mail, then that's what they can do.
However, there are an infinite number of gravitational theories you can write down, described by the space of post-Newtonian parameters (PPN formalism). GPB puts constraints on the possible values of some of the parameters, parameters which heretofore have been largely unconstrained.
Thanks for the nice response. I did some digging. It turns out that the only two PPN parameters that are related to frame dragging are the amount of space curvature produced per unit mass (gamma) and a parameter related to preferred frame effects (alpha1).
Since the amount of curvature produced by a mass is known fairly well from other observations, that means that GPB mainly becomes an attempt to identify a preferred frame effect (alpha1 significantly different from zero). Note, however, that if the experiment yields a result that agrees with GR, we can't even place an upper bound on alpha1, since there are plausible (indeed, probable) scenarios in which there are preferred frame effects but we happen to get a result that agrees with GR in this particular experiment.
So, GPB cannot exclude any alternative theory to GR: after GPB returns a result that agrees with GR, the same set of alternative theories will be valid as before.
Overall, it seems that we can say that GPB is only a test that, if we are lucky and GR is wrong, may find (but not exclude) of a preferred frame.
It's nice, and it helps, but it's no refrigerator. Note that effectiveness depends on humidity.
Evaporative cooling has been use in kitchens for millenia, although it is usually used to keep water cool (unglazed pots). For storage of more than a few hours, a cellar, solid stone building, or cave is less hassle. You easily get guaranteed 70F or below long-term storage in most regions of the world, and if you are architecturally clever, you can actually get lower-than average-long-term temperatures without any maintenance or needing to re-fill water into little jugs.
Slashdot Mirror
.NET is still struggling to gain market share on java, thats part of the reason microsoft did this deal, so they can hedge their bets. If .NET fails then they can fall back onto java and vice-versa.
.NET nor Java are acceptable because both are proprietary. However, OSS's adoption of C# as part of a non-proprietary platform like Mono might boost Microsoft's .NET initiative and hurt Java.
Maybe, but from the OSS perspective, neither
Sun shot themselves in the foot there: if Sun hadn't been so greedy and controlling about Java, Java could be the mainstream OSS programming language. Instead, Java will probably just end up being more and more marginalized.
The PC market is owned by companies like Dell, Compaq/HP, Acer, etc., companies who know how to make PCs on razor thin margins, have the distribution channels and the credibility. And then there is Apple, which has created an upscale image for itself and sells for a little more.
OSS companies are nimble companies with comparatively few employees that are eminently sensitive to the needs, wants, and whinings of the OSS community.
Sun is a big hardware company with lots of costs, production facilities, hardware engineers, hardware support staff. During the Internet bubble, they jettissoned pretty much all remnants of their university beginnings and turned into a vendor of expensive server machines. And their attitude towards software is that they can do it better and they are going to own it: that's what they have said about desktops and what they have said about Java, and a significant chunk of the OSS community dislikes and/or distrusts them.
And now they are going to succeed as a PC vendor and OSS company? I don't think so.
Lack of regulation isn't "liberal", it's "libertarian". The rwo mean very different things.
You thought that "looking nice with your furniture" was more important than the spec of the system, or the OS it ran.
Yes--why is that so difficult to understand? If you have a machine in your living room, wouldn't you like it to look nice? Oh, I see, you probably don't really have a living room.
You were so taken with how much they matched your furniture that you bought 3 of them before you realised that you didn't like Mac OS.
No, I realized that after the first one. But, hard as that may be for you to comprehend, sometimes people buy machines because they need to get work done, and if that work happens to involve MacOS, then they buy a Macintosh, whether they like the OS or not. You know, just like lots of people buy Windows machines even though they don't like them. You, as a Mac zealot, should be able to relate to that, since Mac users often complain about having to use Windows machines.
Fortunately, after one is through using them for their work-related purpose, one can install Linux on both Macs and Windows machines, which makes me really happy.
"It just works" is about useability,
You mean like QuickTime? Or dragging volumes into the trash in order to unmount them? Or replacing a three button mouse with Apple-Option-click combos? Or the Top Nine Reasons the Apple Dock Still Sucks? The last one was written by that anti-Mac bigot and well-known troll by the name of Bruce Tognazzini. And then there are well-known anti-Macintosh rags like MacOpinion pointing out usability problems in OS X.
Apple is paying attention to usability, but so is everybody else. Apple doesn't have any magic solutions, and their products have the same kinds of problems that all other operating systems and GUIs have. They just make theirs look prettier and pretend they aren't there.
That doesn't make their machines bad, it just makes them not as good as Apple likes to claim.
Anyway, we both know full well that you're trolling.
No, the trolls are people like you who post to discussions about Linux that people should just use OS X instead because it "just works".
And when someone like me says that Apples are pretty nice, but that Apple, like everybody else has usability problems, you throw hissy fits.
No, Trolls are people who deliberately make provocative and untrue statements in order to elicit an angry response.
I just told you why and how I bought my Macs and how I used them. I'm sorry if that offends you, but that doesn't make it a troll: I like the Mac look, but the Mac software doesn't do much for me. And, in fact, lots of other Linux users on Mac hardware obviously agree with me, otherwise there wouldn't be any Linux for Mac.
They claim that updating Linux is much easier, and use the X86 based Suse and Debian distro's to prove it, rather then the Mac based Yellow Dog Linux. Because they don't own a Mac at all, or because YDL isn't easy to update at all?
Debian also runs on Mac. In fact, that's what I'm running on my Macs, because it's easier to update than YDL.
They keep repeating that others are making "erroneous statements about Linux" without actually saying which points and correcting them.
I did correct you: your statements about how Linux is maintained and updated, for example. And your statements about how "consistent" the Mac GUI is when, in fact, out of the box, it ships with several different, incompatible UI styles, and there are several more that are in common use.
But you went on to reveal that you are just a Linux Bigot, who hates Macs
Ah, yes, that must be why I said that they make good home computers and why I bought several, right?
People like you really turn people off Linux.
If it turns off people like you, all the better, as far as I'm concerned: it doesn't sound like you'd be able to contribute anything to Linux. On the other hand, Apple is struggling to get customers, and paying customers like me are a bad thing for them to lose.
Worse, you try to make yourself sound credible by claiming to own a Mac, or some Macs, when most everything you say makes it clear that you don't.
Perhaps we have such different views of Macs because I do a little more with them than just run iTunes and iChat, which I can only conclude your "just works" view of the world must be based on.
If you don't believe me, just go back two days on Slashdot: Monday Releases Cause Crashes. To which another Mac user, wisely, responded:
Do go check those "Mac sites" yourself. Macs have lots of problems--Apple hasn't found the silver bullet to software or usability problems--they just market their machines as if they had.
As I was saying, Apple does a decent job at making hardware and software, no more and no less.
This is what started the thread:
I.e., OS X "just works" while Linux doesn't.
I.e., OS X is beautiful while Linux isn't.
My response to that, having used both extensively, it is my experience that those statements are wrong. You then started extensively bashing Linux, making lots of incorrect statements about Linux, and calling me a liar.
The claims of superiority of Linux as a desktop OS over Mac OS are plain nonsense - at least at the current state of Linux developments.
I made no claims that Linux is "superior" as a desktop OS. In fact, I explicitly said that OS X is "a good home computing platform", mostly because that's what it is targetted at. This notion of "superiority" is another one of those hangups that people like you have.
Sorry I don't buy your story that you own Macs at all.
Well, that's not surprising. Given your erroneous statements about Linux, you just don't seem to be willing to accept any facts that don't fit your world view.
You are a troll.
No, trolls are Macintosh zealots like you and Stewyn that post in a thread on the release of YDL messages "asking" why people don't just use "the beautiful OS that just works". And when people oppose your Apple marketing-speak, you start flaming them and get insulting. People like you really give Apple a bad name.
I see you've been modded -1 overrated, which just about says it all, given that there isn't an "uninformative" mod available.
Yes: just about any post that is critical of OS X is modded down on Slashdot.
Perhaps you've briefly used someone elses, or used one in a computer room at whatever institution it is you attend.
Actually, I own a Powerbook, an iMac, and a G4 iBook. The iBook is still running OS X, the other systems are running Linux now.
You claim Linux is more easily updatable on the basis that you can get a new version of the entire distro and manually install it.
No, that's not the basis on which I claim that. I claim it on the basis that Linux distributions like SuSE and Debian are updated automatically, regularly, over the Internet. It's like Apple's automatic software update, only that it works for all the installed software and generally just works better.
It also automates both installing and uninstalling of software, to the point where you basically just say "I want to run SoftwareX", and all the downloads and updates happen automatically. And if you want to get rid of something, you basically just say "I don't want to run SoftwareX anymore" and it gets removed. It's Macintosh-like simplicity--too bad that Macintosh doesn't achieve it.
Yet OSX has software update that will update all of the Apple "distro". Yes, not just the OS, but all the common applications too.
The difference is that the Apple "distro" includes so little functionality compared to a Linux distro. Almost all Apple users will have third party drivers, applications, and utilities installed, and those don't get updated by Apple. In fact, they frequently get broken by Apple's updates.
Most Linux users get all the software they need from their distro and they never have to worry about any sort of updates beyond the simple, automatic Internet update.
You claim that Cocoa and Carbon have different UIs, but they are virtually identical compared to the differences between Gnome and KDE.
So what's your point? Gnome and wxWindows also have different UIs but are virtually identical. We can find lots of pairs of toolkits that are "virtually identical" on both platforms. The point is that the Mac has lots of inconsistencies as well. I don't even see this as a problem. It's only that Apple tries to portray itself as being different and then use that as a marketing advantage. Well, it's not a feature that the Mac has, and even if it did, it wouldn't matter to most people anyway.
This can happen manually or automatically, but in either case it is far simpler than anything Linux offers you.
Again, you demonstrate your complete ignorance of things related to Linux.
This thread started with the usual, uninformed bashing of Linux by Macintosh users. Why don't you guys just shut up and stop bashing Linux? We don't want to hear that OS X is better--if we thought that OS X were better, we'd be running it, rather than YDL. In fact, I don't even see the Apple stories anymore because the Mac and OS X really don't interest me.
But when you do make stupid, uninformed claims about Linux, as you did, you have to expect that people answer.
No, it's not myth. You really should try it.
I have. In fact, I still have an OS X machine because I need it for work. I find it no easier to maintain or update than a Windows machine, and it's considerably more work to maintain than a Linux machine (Linux machines basically just update the entire system and applications automatically; on OS X, only the OS updates itself and may even break applications in the process).
Furthermore, OS X applications crash with roughly the same frequency as Windows applications in my experience (big change from a few years ago, when Windows was horrible).
The thing about Mac OS isn't that it looks good, it's about usability of the GUI.
That, too, is a myth. Macintosh applications are all over the place when it comes to usability. There are some really good ones and some really lousy ones. The applications Apple ships out of the box are, overall, probably a bit better than average.
And the OS X UI is far from consistent; in fact, arguably, its consistency is worse than either Linux or Windows. OS X has Cocoa, Carbon, Cocoa/Carbon with the "device" look, the OS 9 UI, X11 (including Gtk+, Qt, wxWindows, and Tcl/Tk apps), Windows ports, and other interfaces, all running on the same screen. They all look and behave differently. Even Cocoa and Carbon, where Apple has tried hardest to make them consistent, don't have consistent key bindings, don't have consistent ways of remapping keys, and don't see the file system the same way.
Linux doesn't even have universal cut'n'paste for Christ's sake,
Sure it does. Of course, just like OS X, not every application supports cut-and-paste. Unlike OS X, Linux does at least have a standard mechanism that every GUI application (no matter what toolkit it is written in) could use if it chose to use it.
OS X has all the inconsistencies of X11 (because it supports X11), and it adds to that its own set of inconsistencies that go far beyond what X11 has. On X11, at least all toolkits see the same key maps and same cut-and-paste mechanisms. On OS X, you don't even get that much.
Of course, your objection is likely going to be "X11, Carbon, and OS 9 don't count, they are just add-ons". Well, yes, if you only look at one of the many UIs running on OS X, you get more consistency. But in that case, it does make sense to compare OS X/Cocoa to all of Linux, you have to compare OS X/Cocoa to Linux/Gnome, and then Linux/Gnome still wins in terms of its consistency and overall integration.
Anyway you cut it, Apple doesn't walk on water. They make a decent product with nice graphical design and reasonable support. But they don't have any technology or ideas that other companies don't have as well.
For a client with ssh integrated into it, look around with Google for Java implementations of vnc and ssh; it's been done and is prettx easy to find. I used to run it on some servers.
If you don't want to install ssh on your Windows machine, use stunnel. It's an easy install on Windows and works well with VNC.
On linux, UNIX, and MacOS, running VNC securely is trivial. The fact that it's more work on Windows is a limitation of Windows, not VNC.
Note that for the regular edition of XP, you don't even have a choice: it just doesn't support RDP. Even if it did, if you started relying on it, you'd have to worry about MSFT making incompatible changes with any upgrade.
It's a myth that OSX "just plain works". Maybe it works for you (it's a good home computing platform), but OSX has many of the same system management hassles of other operating systems, and it has fewer tools for dwaling with them.
In terms of appearances, it's easy to match the look and style of OSX with Linux themes, so that's not a deciding factor. If anything, you get far more choice of slick, profesional themes with Linux than with OSX.
I can answer that because I did it: a Mac looked nice and fit in well with my furniture. But after trying OSX, I didn't find it to be a good replacement for Linux, so I wiped the disk and replaced it with Linux and have been quite happy with the machine since.
Of course, VNC is encrypted, it just isn't built into all VNC clients/servers. Usually, people run it over ssh, which has the added advatage over Remote Desktop that you don't need any new firewall rules (since ssh usually is already there) and that you don't have to figure out a new key management system.
If you like, of course, you can also run VNC over stunnel or IPsec.
When it is useful, some VNC clients/servers (e.g. clients running as Java applets) have the encryption built in.
As usual, the UNIX solution is simpler, more elegant, more flexible, and more functional than the Windows solution. And, as usual, Windows users like yourself just don't get it.
Actually, we don't have to "trust" them, we can verify the proof using proof verification software. And if you really get picky about it, you can verify the proof verification software using itself.
The situation really is no different from numerical software. We perform long, tedious computations by computer, computations that we wouldn't trust any human to do correctly, if anybody even was willing to spend the time. We have software and methods for checking those numerical results. Well, mathematical proofs are no different.
The mathematical literature is full of errors, oversights, invalid proofs, unstated assumptions, and probably even a certain share of deliberate fraud. See Lounesto's misconceptions of research mathematicians for one expert digging into the mathematical literature.
Computers are far better at ferretting out oversights, missing assumptions, and making sure that every t is crossed and i is dotted. If a software system for doing proofs has shown itself to be fairly reliable on a bunch of samples, I'd trust it a lot more than I'd trust any working mathematician to carry out a complex proof correctly.
the moment you put down $400 for your copy of Windows, regardless of whether the CD lasts more than 6 months or not.
But if I go to a shop I want a pressed CD - these hold longer.
Actually, that's probably not the casel. Pressed CDs apparently often use a material for the data layer that easily oxidizes. Some CD-R disks use considerably more stable dyes. Under normal environmental conditions, those CD-Rs probably last much longer than the pressed CD.
Most natural language processing is done at the sentence level, so this is quite common. And plenty of work has been done on information retrieval using sentence and paragraph context.
It's less common to expose this to users, but it isn't clear that the sentence level is what should be exposed anyway. Better semantic markup of web pages into related sections or topics might be useful. But given that we can't even get authors to generate correct HTML the way it is, it's doubtful much would come of such a proposal.
To me the authors are vandals not revolutionaries, and may have ensured WMA becomes the standard.
Well, and if Apple produces a DRM system with gaping holes, then from the point of view of the music industry, that's exactly what should happen. Or do you think people aren't also hard at work cracking WMA?
If Apple wants to be a provider of DRM, then they better do it right or they don't do it at all.
It's appropriate that you should mention the NYT, because they lost a court case over a similar issue.
I'm not sure why you think that issue is similar. If anything, the courts interpreted copyright more narrowly there.
you implicitly grant a license to pretty much anyone, including Google, to reproduce your post for usenet-related purposes.
Yes, and "USENET-related purposes", until DejaNews, meant distribution and temporary storage, not the creation of a permanent index. Arguably, once DejaNews (and similar services) came into wide use, indexing and republishing became a USENET related purpose.
(This is imho. I don't think anybody's ever actually tested it by suing Google for breach of copyright. You could be the first!)
That takes lots of time and money, and while Google probably technically violated copyright, there would be no penalty, so the outcome would at best be to get them to stop publishing my articles. Legal questions aside, I just find the behavior of DejaNews and Google in this matter rude; to me, it's like if they had rummaged through my home videos, accidentally available at a garage sale, and put them on the web.
An applet platform? You're kidding right? Applets were, are, and never will be anything but bloated and slow.
.NET, which is supposed to do everything but tie your shoes for you.
.NET, which, like other ActiveX components, can be put onto web pages. Furthermore, they are supposed to be sandboxed. But the problem with .NET for applets is the same problem as Java has for applets: it's too much of a general purpose platform. We need a specific applet platform. In fact, J2ME would be a lot closer to a good applet platform than J2SE.
Java applets are bloated and slow because Sun screwed up, not because executable content in web pages necessarily has to be bloated and slow. Flash shows that executable content in web pages does not have to be painfully slow or bloated. But Flash is oriented towards animations, not GUI toolkits, so it isn't a good platform to write applets in (great for games, though).
Thin clients beats applets all day long.
Applets are thin clients.
Even Microsoft didn't try to implement anything like it in
Sure they have. You can write ActiveX components in
This story brought it into focus for me: I was an early adopter of Java, but I just don't care about Java anymore. Sun promised to deliver an applet platform, but then changed directions to server-side programming and a half-hearted effort at a cross-platform toolkit. Frankly, for server-side programming and cross-platform GUIs, there are far better choices than Java.
I'd still like to see something better than JavaScript and Flash for applet-like functionality, but it's clear Sun isn't going to deliver anymore.
Logic gates that can be "programmed" to do any operation are pretty easy to implement in terms of regular transistors and binary logic.
If, on the other hand, we start using multiple voltage levels as part of digital circuits, it is still more efficient to use them as part of elements with dedicated functions.
Altogether, this doesn't seem like something that lets us do anything that we couldn't do before. The reason it isn't being done is probably that it's not useful (even FPGAs generally choose to fix the functions of individual gates but allow you to interconnect them in new ways).
I think you have it backwards: Google has no copyright issue with usenet archives, but does with e-mail. When you write to a newsgroup, you know your (automatically copyrighted) work will be distributed throughout the internet, so there's an implied license.
Until about 2000, posting to USENET meant posting to a temporary discussion forum: the data could be copied and distributed for the purpose of reading it on USENET. How anyone can read into that that means that a poster somehow has given Google (or anybody else) "implicit permission" to republish their postings as part of a business venture, I don't understand. And by making USENET searchable, DejaNews (now Google) has single-handedly destroyed USENET as a place where people could have informal on-line discussions in cyberspace using their real names, because with no effort anybody can retrieve anything ever posted by anyone. Besides, why doesn't the same argument apply to the NYT print edition? It's been distributed throughout the world.
This does not exist with private e-mail, so Google cannot publish it.
If you subscribe to Gmail, you have a business relationship with them and you explicitly agree to the TOS, whatever they may say. If they said that Google can arbitrarily publish your E-mail, then that's what they can do.
However, there are an infinite number of gravitational theories you can write down, described by the space of post-Newtonian parameters (PPN formalism). GPB puts constraints on the possible values of some of the parameters, parameters which heretofore have been largely unconstrained.
Thanks for the nice response. I did some digging. It turns out that the only two PPN parameters that are related to frame dragging are the amount of space curvature produced per unit mass (gamma) and a parameter related to preferred frame effects (alpha1).
Since the amount of curvature produced by a mass is known fairly well from other observations, that means that GPB mainly becomes an attempt to identify a preferred frame effect (alpha1 significantly different from zero). Note, however, that if the experiment yields a result that agrees with GR, we can't even place an upper bound on alpha1, since there are plausible (indeed, probable) scenarios in which there are preferred frame effects but we happen to get a result that agrees with GR in this particular experiment.
So, GPB cannot exclude any alternative theory to GR: after GPB returns a result that agrees with GR, the same set of alternative theories will be valid as before.
Overall, it seems that we can say that GPB is only a test that, if we are lucky and GR is wrong, may find (but not exclude) of a preferred frame.
(A good site for this stuff seems to be Living Reviews in Relativity.)
Evaporative cooling has been use in kitchens for millenia, although it is usually used to keep water cool (unglazed pots). For storage of more than a few hours, a cellar, solid stone building, or cave is less hassle. You easily get guaranteed 70F or below long-term storage in most regions of the world, and if you are architecturally clever, you can actually get lower-than average-long-term temperatures without any maintenance or needing to re-fill water into little jugs.