Well I think that what Microsoft has tried to claim is that WGA is supposed to protect people from installing pirated versions that might have malware or other malicious hacks pre-installed. It is possible to slipstream hacks into an install DVD and then try to sell it as a real copy. So theoretically WGA could help customers detect that.
On the other hand, I don't particularly see that as the effect of WGA. For one thing, if someone is clever enough to engage in that sort of behavior, it wouldn't surprise me too much if they figured out some ways around WGA. Once you know how to get around it, you can slipstream it right into the disk. You could even have everything phone home for updates in order to find ways around any updates that Microsoft issues to WGA. At least in theory.
But beyond that, if the intent was to help the customer detect that their version of Windows was not genuine, then why would they then use that technology to disable the computer? Why not just issue the warning and allow things to continue as they have been? The only answer is that they think the customers won't care, because the customers will not be disadvantaged by using non-genuine Windows. It's just DRM, and it has all the same problems that DRM has when you have DRM-wrapped music or movies.
Yeah, especially since it's followed by, "Other Microsoft operating systems and anti-piracy measures, including Windows Genuine Advantage, allowed users to delay 'activation', but Windows 7 will make it harder to ignore repeated messages."
So they make it harder for customers to activate when it's convenient for the customer, and makes it harder to ignore the nagging to activate. And the purpose of that is to protect the interests of customers?
The name "Windows Genuine Advantage" has always seemed like a cruel joke.
Ok, but let's say the resource forks were kept in the filesystem as they were intended. It would be just as hidden, but I bet you wouldn't have a problem with it.
The problem is both a cross-platform compatibility problem as well as a psychological/perceptual problem (no offense, I'm not saying your crazy). OSX uses metadata that other operating systems don't have support for, and you don't like knowing the files are there, even if they're not causing a problem.
it's not particularly hard to find out if your processor supports virtualization extensions.
It's not all that insanely simple, either. I don't know which of my computers support virtualization extensions, though I'm sure some do and some don't. I could probably figure it out with some research, but it's not obvious. Looking at the computer in front of me, I see a sticker that says it has an "Intel Pentium D" and another sticker telling me the computer is designed for Windows XP. I can right click on "My Computer" and it will tell me the processor speed and how much RAM I have. None of that tells me anything about virtualization extensions.
It's not entirely clear to me, either, that virtualization extensions are necessary for virtualization. I was under the impression that those extensions improved performance, but I've run virtual machines and emulators on machines without those extensions before.
I disagree with that statement on principle: I don't want my OS hiding any files from me, regardless of what whoever copied them onto my device thought.
Well in my opinion, it's a little silly to demand that your computer show you everything, only to turn around and complain that you're seeing too many things and it's cluttered. Sure, I want the *option* of being able to see anything I want to see, but I definitely also want the option of saying, "I don't need to see this, so don't show me.
Even in Unix command lines, there are hidden files. The gross majority of the time, I don't need to see.bash_history or.ssh when I get a directory listing of my home directory. So hide them it's fine. I know they're there, and if I'm not sure, it's easy enough to get the shell to show them to me.
What's wrong with that? The ideal interface would be one that always showed you the things you needed to see and never showed you anything you didn't need to see. Of course, the computer can't really know what you do or do not need to see, so we're left with someone's best guess along with the option to override.
Well first of all, the post you're replying to isn't pushing a specific solution or elaborate "central planning", but only that public transportation shouldn't be dismissed out of hand as "communist" just because it's public and might involve some intervention by some level of government.
Second, transportation infrastructure doesn't always need to be planned "centrally" (by the federal government). Local roads can be controlled and planned locally, large roads by the state, and interstate highways by the federal government. The same model can be used for trains and busses. Local public transportation is already usually developed locally anyway.
Third, one could argue that part of the reason Amtrak is inefficient is because it's so underdeveloped relative to the highway system. We've poured tons of money, both in terms of tax dollars and private investment, into building a national infrastructure for car travel as well as building the cars to drive on those roads. If we had put as much money into our train systems, it might travel enough places to actually be a useful way to get around the country.
As it is, it's sort of in a death spiral-- it doesn't go many places and isn't a convenient way to travel, so people don't use it. Since people don't use it, it doesn't make money. Because it doesn't make money, there's no money to invest into improvements and repairs. Because it's not being improved and repaired, it remains an inconvenient way to travel.
However, Amtrak's route between Boston and Washington is actually pretty good. It's a fast, convenient, and comfortable way to travel. From what I understand, that section is actually profitable, but those profits are syphoned off to pay for the rest of Amtrak, and so the Boston to Washington route isn't getting the funding it needs in spite of being profitable.
Well they should be more or less hidden in any operating system you move them to. I think it sets the flag for Windows to be a hidden file, and starts the filename with a period, which should take care of hiding them in Unix variants. Windows does something pretty much just as obnoxious by adding "Thumbs.db" all over the place, except that doesn't get hidden in non-Windows operating systems.
Anyway, I agree that it's annoying. One of the first things I do with a new Mac is tell it to not write ".DS_Store" files to network shares. In my opinion, the real solution is to get better support for metadata into more operating systems. If we're going to be hamstrung to only support metadata that's supported in the lowest-common-denominator of filesystems, then it's be nice if the lowest-common-denominator weren't so damned low.
Why the hell do I want "book report" with a ".book report" file saying it should open in Word?
Because that's not all resource forks do. These days, they're pretty much reserved for non-vital metadata. I can associate all of my Word documents to open in Word, but then I can set a particular Word document to open in OpenOffice or Pages in that file's resource fork, or I can add keywords or a "Label" (in OSX you can make files show up as highlighted in a different color). The resource fork might also include a thumbnail preview so I can see the contents of the file in Finder.
But those are just the things resource forks are typically used for now. Once upon a time, some Mac files were perfectly useless without their resource forks. Font files, for example, might include pretty much all their data in the resource fork and no data in the data fork-- don't ask me why because I have no clue.
Now all of those resource forks are perfectly useless if you're viewing the file from a Windows machine, so I can understand the desire to delete them. However, I've see a Windows admin delete all the resource forks from a Windows server even though that server was being used for no purpose other than as a file server for Mac clients, which was a pretty pointless thing to do. The people using that file server were not happy, especially since they had some old fonts that were rendered completely useless.
On the other hand, one of the beneficial things about using the file-type as part of the filename is it allows you to have multiple files of different file-types but with the same filename in the same directory. So if I have a word document called "example.doc" and I convert it into a PDF called "example.pdf", then those two files can coexist in the same directory without accidentally overwriting one with the other.
Not that this is necessarily the only or even the best way to deal with that.
our towns and cities are designed the way they are because that is what has worked.
This is one place where you're wrong. Cities and towns are designed the way they are in this country because there was a conscious decision decades ago to build our infrastructure that way. People sat down and said, "Do we want to build our cities and towns to support cars, or do we want to support pedestrians, bikes, trains and other public transportation?" And then they decided on cars. There wasn't really that clear of an answer at the time, and for years cars seemed like a good idea. Now with energy problems, environmental problems, and traffic congestion, it's looking like less of a good idea.
Now I agree that there will continue to be people who live in rural areas and those people will continue to need cars-- or more to the point, they'll probably even need trucks. But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about cities and towns, large and small, and the suburbs around them. And it's not about trying to make everyone lead a completely urban lifestyle. It's just about smarter civic planning. You can basically have suburbs, but instead of having housing developments going for miles with nothing but houses, with a highway nearby that leads to a strip mall with a grocery store, you build a town square in the middle of the development. You make it accessible enough that people can walk or ride bikes. Then you offer public transportation that connects local town-squares to each other, and to larger public transportation hubs that can take them to cities. Suddenly public transportation is capable of taking most people where they need to go most of the time, but they don't need to travel so far for grocery shopping, getting a cup of coffee, or shooting a game of pool at the local bar. Or whatever it is you want to do.
Now your telecommuting idea is helpful, but it still doesn't address the issue. I could work from home, but if the grocery store is still 5-10 miles away, I'll still need to own a car and drive to get there. The big idea here is to put most of the things that you need on a day-to-day basis within several blocks of your house, with sidewalks and bike paths going between so that you don't really need cars on a daily basis, just to live. That won't work if you're living on a farm, but it will if you're living in a small town or in the suburbs.
In fact, there are suburbs doing this right now, and it works. It requires planning and development, but it's not less functional than our current system.
Don't know what bus you have been on, but on all the ones I have been on, its been anything but relaxing or regenerating. You sit down next to some person who smells, listen to half a dozen phone conversations, see someone who you just know has every type of communal sickness imaginable, etc.
You do recognize, though, that this isn't an absolute? Just because the public transportation in a given area is inconvenient or unpleasant doesn't mean that public transportation is always unpleasant and inconvenient. It doesn't even mean that the public transportation in your area has to be unpleasant and inconvenient.
It's a little like saying, "Driving dangerous. I was driving drunk in downtown D.C. and the road I was on had lots of pot holes, and I was in an old Pinto-- you know, the exploding cars? Anyway, that sure was dangerous. I have my doubts about driving."
Municipalities run it "as a business" rather than admitting it's a service, a public utility, and admitting that hey, we need to put in enough tax money to make it cover enough areas.
Of course, the problem there is that there's a horrible political stigma attached to public transportation. Anything "public" has for decades been considered "communist" and therefore "evil". We can't, as a people, pool our resources or share anything because "sharing" is for hippies. However, once you say, "we're pooling our resources in order to run a cut-throat business that will profit through amoral methods," well... that's ok then. Just make sure no morals creep in there.
I mean, I hate commies and hippies as much as the next guy, but can't we try to come up with efficient solutions for our society without getting too caught up in an ideology? Can we consider that people of a community pooling their money and talent for the common good might occasionally be worthwhile?
I live in NYC and ignoring travel outside of the city, I probably spend something like $240 a year on transportation (ignoring the portion of my taxes that go to the MTA).
I ride a bike to work. I live in a neighborhood where there's stuff to do, and I can walk to the grocery store.
I think people don't understand the real concept behind public transportation. They live in the suburbs, 5 miles from the nearest grocery store because they're in the middle of an enormous development, and "public transportation" for them means walking a mile to get onto a bus that will take them 4.5 miles to get within a mile of their grocery store. That's the public transportation in their area, at best.
The problem is that we've designed our towns and cities and catered our lifestyles specifically to a culture of each person owning their own car. So looking through that prism, public transportation seems terribly inconvenient. But if we had designed our lifestyle and our towns around public transportation instead of cars, then I'm sure cars would seem terribly inconvenient. People would be saying, "Oh, well there's no road that goes right there, so I'd have to part a mile away and then walk. It's much easier to ride my bike on the bike path." Or whatever.
How can one possibly save $12,600 per year, when the inflated estimates of 15,000 miles per year at only 23.4 miles and $2.039 per gallon costs only $1,310, and a high parking rate of $460 per month results in under $5600. Is the discrepancy made up of tolls, repairs, the cost of buying a car and ignoring train station parking fees?
Well yes, of course they're counting things like that. Why shouldn't they? The cost of owning a car is not limited to gas. If you think it is, then either you've never owned a car or your not paying attention.
Take the cost of buying the car, plus whatever interest you're paying, and spread that over the number of years you're going to keep the car. Add insurance, gas, regular maintenance (oil changes), and any costs of repairs. Add in tolls, parking costs, parking tickets, speeding tickets, and any other costs that you incur from owning a car that you would not incur if you didn't own a car. There's your total cost of ownership.
"ignoring train station parking fees"? I think you're missing the point. You don't have a car, so there are no parking fees at the train station. If you don't live close enough to a train station, then you take a bus or ride a bike. So for the costs of public transportation, add the fare that you pay to the taxes you're paying to support the public transportation. Add the cost of a bike if you like. If you really want to get stingy, you can add the time lost by not having a direct route, but if you have a good enough public transportation system and efficient civic development, the public transportation might be faster.
But if you are stingy enough to add the cost of time-lost to public transportation, then subtract from that time-lost the amount of time you spend at the gym on the treadmill, and maybe the cost of your gym membership. You won't need it so much.
Sure, but in fairness that's because you don't have much of a public transportation system to speak of. It's not quite a fair argument to say, "investing in public transportation isn't worthwhile because the public transportation in my area is so underfunded and underdeveloped as to be virtually useless."
Yeah, sorry if it wasn't clear, my point was that if you copied/pasted and accidentally left the quotes in (which is why I put the single-quotes in the <quote> tags).
Why you would have a path that included such a script is another problem, which is why I said, "I'm being ridiculous". But whatever, nitpick because you don't want to acknowledge that anything could ever go wrong while using a CLI.
It wouldn't do anything unless he typed 'firefox\ foo.html'.
Yeah, I'm saying if the file were called "firefox foo.html" (all that in the quotes) and therefore in order to name it you had to type "firefox\ foo.html", but when copying/pasting you accidentally copied the quotes.
But yeah, whatever, my point wasn't that this particular thing was likely to turn into a major problem, but rather that it's possible to do stupid things in either a GUI or CLI. How many people have done "rm/rf" only to realize afterwards that they were in the wrong directory or on the wrong machine?
Yes, I think resource forks were a good idea. On the other hand, once you have to transfer files to any platform that doesn't support them, it's not practical. Also, I saw many problems with OSX accidentally dropping/corrupting resource forks on its own, making some files completely useless, so the reality wasn't all rosy.
I'm not sure who you're talking about here, but Apple did have a sort of solution for this. When writing to a foreign filesystem, OSX will write the resource fork to a hidden file with a "._" prefix. It works well enough until someone with another OS decides to move those files around without moving the resource fork file, or some Windows administrator gets annoyed with all those mysterious hidden files and decides to delete them. I know that happens when you copy via SMB, so I would assume it would work over NFS.
Still, it's a problem. Until other operating systems support this sort of thing, both in the filesystem and in network protocols, you have to assume that the resource fork can be lost.
That's a pretty good summary, and though I take your question to be sarcastic, I'm going to try to answer it anyway.
AFAICT, filename extensions are enduring because we can't get enough people to agree on a common filesystem, or at least a common specification for metadata stored in the filesystem. HFS basically had an alternate solution with resource forks, but other operating systems didn't support HFS as the default/native filesystem, and the filesystems and network protocols didn't really support resource forks. The result was that if you copied a file from the old MacOS over a network or to another OS, you were risking losing any data stored in the resource fork. Even though OSX doesn't have resource forks, Apple has discouraged putting any important information in those resource forks to prevent important information from being lost.
Now I'm not expert, but as far as I know NTFS, UFS, and ext3 (some of the other most common filesystems) don't have sufficient metadata support to hold these kind of resource forks. When transferring a text file from Linux to Windows to OSX and back, there's no way to identify it as a text file except in the file name. Seeing as we can't even get all the open source operating systems to agree on a new filesystem, I don't see how we're going to get Microsoft to go along.
Now OSX 10.6 has been said to support ZFS, and I've heard rumors that ZFS would be able to support this kind of metadata, and that Apple may be looking to drop HFS+ in favor of ZFS. Could that be a way forward? I don't know, but people seem to think that ZFS licensing is incompatible with the GPL, so I'm not holding my breath.
On the other hand, I don't really know what I'm talking about.
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Well I think that what Microsoft has tried to claim is that WGA is supposed to protect people from installing pirated versions that might have malware or other malicious hacks pre-installed. It is possible to slipstream hacks into an install DVD and then try to sell it as a real copy. So theoretically WGA could help customers detect that.
On the other hand, I don't particularly see that as the effect of WGA. For one thing, if someone is clever enough to engage in that sort of behavior, it wouldn't surprise me too much if they figured out some ways around WGA. Once you know how to get around it, you can slipstream it right into the disk. You could even have everything phone home for updates in order to find ways around any updates that Microsoft issues to WGA. At least in theory.
But beyond that, if the intent was to help the customer detect that their version of Windows was not genuine, then why would they then use that technology to disable the computer? Why not just issue the warning and allow things to continue as they have been? The only answer is that they think the customers won't care, because the customers will not be disadvantaged by using non-genuine Windows. It's just DRM, and it has all the same problems that DRM has when you have DRM-wrapped music or movies.
Yeah, especially since it's followed by, "Other Microsoft operating systems and anti-piracy measures, including Windows Genuine Advantage, allowed users to delay 'activation', but Windows 7 will make it harder to ignore repeated messages."
So they make it harder for customers to activate when it's convenient for the customer, and makes it harder to ignore the nagging to activate. And the purpose of that is to protect the interests of customers?
The name "Windows Genuine Advantage" has always seemed like a cruel joke.
Ok, but let's say the resource forks were kept in the filesystem as they were intended. It would be just as hidden, but I bet you wouldn't have a problem with it.
The problem is both a cross-platform compatibility problem as well as a psychological/perceptual problem (no offense, I'm not saying your crazy). OSX uses metadata that other operating systems don't have support for, and you don't like knowing the files are there, even if they're not causing a problem.
it's not particularly hard to find out if your processor supports virtualization extensions.
It's not all that insanely simple, either. I don't know which of my computers support virtualization extensions, though I'm sure some do and some don't. I could probably figure it out with some research, but it's not obvious. Looking at the computer in front of me, I see a sticker that says it has an "Intel Pentium D" and another sticker telling me the computer is designed for Windows XP. I can right click on "My Computer" and it will tell me the processor speed and how much RAM I have. None of that tells me anything about virtualization extensions.
It's not entirely clear to me, either, that virtualization extensions are necessary for virtualization. I was under the impression that those extensions improved performance, but I've run virtual machines and emulators on machines without those extensions before.
I disagree with that statement on principle: I don't want my OS hiding any files from me, regardless of what whoever copied them onto my device thought.
Well in my opinion, it's a little silly to demand that your computer show you everything, only to turn around and complain that you're seeing too many things and it's cluttered. Sure, I want the *option* of being able to see anything I want to see, but I definitely also want the option of saying, "I don't need to see this, so don't show me.
Even in Unix command lines, there are hidden files. The gross majority of the time, I don't need to see .bash_history or .ssh when I get a directory listing of my home directory. So hide them it's fine. I know they're there, and if I'm not sure, it's easy enough to get the shell to show them to me.
What's wrong with that? The ideal interface would be one that always showed you the things you needed to see and never showed you anything you didn't need to see. Of course, the computer can't really know what you do or do not need to see, so we're left with someone's best guess along with the option to override.
Well first of all, the post you're replying to isn't pushing a specific solution or elaborate "central planning", but only that public transportation shouldn't be dismissed out of hand as "communist" just because it's public and might involve some intervention by some level of government.
Second, transportation infrastructure doesn't always need to be planned "centrally" (by the federal government). Local roads can be controlled and planned locally, large roads by the state, and interstate highways by the federal government. The same model can be used for trains and busses. Local public transportation is already usually developed locally anyway.
Third, one could argue that part of the reason Amtrak is inefficient is because it's so underdeveloped relative to the highway system. We've poured tons of money, both in terms of tax dollars and private investment, into building a national infrastructure for car travel as well as building the cars to drive on those roads. If we had put as much money into our train systems, it might travel enough places to actually be a useful way to get around the country.
As it is, it's sort of in a death spiral-- it doesn't go many places and isn't a convenient way to travel, so people don't use it. Since people don't use it, it doesn't make money. Because it doesn't make money, there's no money to invest into improvements and repairs. Because it's not being improved and repaired, it remains an inconvenient way to travel.
However, Amtrak's route between Boston and Washington is actually pretty good. It's a fast, convenient, and comfortable way to travel. From what I understand, that section is actually profitable, but those profits are syphoned off to pay for the rest of Amtrak, and so the Boston to Washington route isn't getting the funding it needs in spite of being profitable.
Well they should be more or less hidden in any operating system you move them to. I think it sets the flag for Windows to be a hidden file, and starts the filename with a period, which should take care of hiding them in Unix variants. Windows does something pretty much just as obnoxious by adding "Thumbs.db" all over the place, except that doesn't get hidden in non-Windows operating systems.
Anyway, I agree that it's annoying. One of the first things I do with a new Mac is tell it to not write ".DS_Store" files to network shares. In my opinion, the real solution is to get better support for metadata into more operating systems. If we're going to be hamstrung to only support metadata that's supported in the lowest-common-denominator of filesystems, then it's be nice if the lowest-common-denominator weren't so damned low.
Why the hell do I want "book report" with a ".book report" file saying it should open in Word?
Because that's not all resource forks do. These days, they're pretty much reserved for non-vital metadata. I can associate all of my Word documents to open in Word, but then I can set a particular Word document to open in OpenOffice or Pages in that file's resource fork, or I can add keywords or a "Label" (in OSX you can make files show up as highlighted in a different color). The resource fork might also include a thumbnail preview so I can see the contents of the file in Finder.
But those are just the things resource forks are typically used for now. Once upon a time, some Mac files were perfectly useless without their resource forks. Font files, for example, might include pretty much all their data in the resource fork and no data in the data fork-- don't ask me why because I have no clue.
Now all of those resource forks are perfectly useless if you're viewing the file from a Windows machine, so I can understand the desire to delete them. However, I've see a Windows admin delete all the resource forks from a Windows server even though that server was being used for no purpose other than as a file server for Mac clients, which was a pretty pointless thing to do. The people using that file server were not happy, especially since they had some old fonts that were rendered completely useless.
Good point, but at least that's your choice. Your operating system doesn't cease to recognize the file if you remove the date from the filename.
On the other hand, one of the beneficial things about using the file-type as part of the filename is it allows you to have multiple files of different file-types but with the same filename in the same directory. So if I have a word document called "example.doc" and I convert it into a PDF called "example.pdf", then those two files can coexist in the same directory without accidentally overwriting one with the other.
Not that this is necessarily the only or even the best way to deal with that.
Good thing those are the only two nights people go out drinking.
Yes, I know it's a cultural thing specific to the United States. It's a vestige of the Cold War that really should just go away.
our towns and cities are designed the way they are because that is what has worked.
This is one place where you're wrong. Cities and towns are designed the way they are in this country because there was a conscious decision decades ago to build our infrastructure that way. People sat down and said, "Do we want to build our cities and towns to support cars, or do we want to support pedestrians, bikes, trains and other public transportation?" And then they decided on cars. There wasn't really that clear of an answer at the time, and for years cars seemed like a good idea. Now with energy problems, environmental problems, and traffic congestion, it's looking like less of a good idea.
Now I agree that there will continue to be people who live in rural areas and those people will continue to need cars-- or more to the point, they'll probably even need trucks. But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about cities and towns, large and small, and the suburbs around them. And it's not about trying to make everyone lead a completely urban lifestyle. It's just about smarter civic planning. You can basically have suburbs, but instead of having housing developments going for miles with nothing but houses, with a highway nearby that leads to a strip mall with a grocery store, you build a town square in the middle of the development. You make it accessible enough that people can walk or ride bikes. Then you offer public transportation that connects local town-squares to each other, and to larger public transportation hubs that can take them to cities. Suddenly public transportation is capable of taking most people where they need to go most of the time, but they don't need to travel so far for grocery shopping, getting a cup of coffee, or shooting a game of pool at the local bar. Or whatever it is you want to do.
Now your telecommuting idea is helpful, but it still doesn't address the issue. I could work from home, but if the grocery store is still 5-10 miles away, I'll still need to own a car and drive to get there. The big idea here is to put most of the things that you need on a day-to-day basis within several blocks of your house, with sidewalks and bike paths going between so that you don't really need cars on a daily basis, just to live. That won't work if you're living on a farm, but it will if you're living in a small town or in the suburbs.
In fact, there are suburbs doing this right now, and it works. It requires planning and development, but it's not less functional than our current system.
Don't know what bus you have been on, but on all the ones I have been on, its been anything but relaxing or regenerating. You sit down next to some person who smells, listen to half a dozen phone conversations, see someone who you just know has every type of communal sickness imaginable, etc.
You do recognize, though, that this isn't an absolute? Just because the public transportation in a given area is inconvenient or unpleasant doesn't mean that public transportation is always unpleasant and inconvenient. It doesn't even mean that the public transportation in your area has to be unpleasant and inconvenient.
It's a little like saying, "Driving dangerous. I was driving drunk in downtown D.C. and the road I was on had lots of pot holes, and I was in an old Pinto-- you know, the exploding cars? Anyway, that sure was dangerous. I have my doubts about driving."
Municipalities run it "as a business" rather than admitting it's a service, a public utility, and admitting that hey, we need to put in enough tax money to make it cover enough areas.
Of course, the problem there is that there's a horrible political stigma attached to public transportation. Anything "public" has for decades been considered "communist" and therefore "evil". We can't, as a people, pool our resources or share anything because "sharing" is for hippies. However, once you say, "we're pooling our resources in order to run a cut-throat business that will profit through amoral methods," well... that's ok then. Just make sure no morals creep in there.
I mean, I hate commies and hippies as much as the next guy, but can't we try to come up with efficient solutions for our society without getting too caught up in an ideology? Can we consider that people of a community pooling their money and talent for the common good might occasionally be worthwhile?
I live in NYC and ignoring travel outside of the city, I probably spend something like $240 a year on transportation (ignoring the portion of my taxes that go to the MTA).
I ride a bike to work. I live in a neighborhood where there's stuff to do, and I can walk to the grocery store.
I think people don't understand the real concept behind public transportation. They live in the suburbs, 5 miles from the nearest grocery store because they're in the middle of an enormous development, and "public transportation" for them means walking a mile to get onto a bus that will take them 4.5 miles to get within a mile of their grocery store. That's the public transportation in their area, at best.
The problem is that we've designed our towns and cities and catered our lifestyles specifically to a culture of each person owning their own car. So looking through that prism, public transportation seems terribly inconvenient. But if we had designed our lifestyle and our towns around public transportation instead of cars, then I'm sure cars would seem terribly inconvenient. People would be saying, "Oh, well there's no road that goes right there, so I'd have to part a mile away and then walk. It's much easier to ride my bike on the bike path." Or whatever.
That's still a loss of $1400/year, not including gas, insurance, maintenance, etc. The cost isn't insubstantial.
How can one possibly save $12,600 per year, when the inflated estimates of 15,000 miles per year at only 23.4 miles and $2.039 per gallon costs only $1,310, and a high parking rate of $460 per month results in under $5600. Is the discrepancy made up of tolls, repairs, the cost of buying a car and ignoring train station parking fees?
Well yes, of course they're counting things like that. Why shouldn't they? The cost of owning a car is not limited to gas. If you think it is, then either you've never owned a car or your not paying attention.
Take the cost of buying the car, plus whatever interest you're paying, and spread that over the number of years you're going to keep the car. Add insurance, gas, regular maintenance (oil changes), and any costs of repairs. Add in tolls, parking costs, parking tickets, speeding tickets, and any other costs that you incur from owning a car that you would not incur if you didn't own a car. There's your total cost of ownership.
"ignoring train station parking fees"? I think you're missing the point. You don't have a car, so there are no parking fees at the train station. If you don't live close enough to a train station, then you take a bus or ride a bike. So for the costs of public transportation, add the fare that you pay to the taxes you're paying to support the public transportation. Add the cost of a bike if you like. If you really want to get stingy, you can add the time lost by not having a direct route, but if you have a good enough public transportation system and efficient civic development, the public transportation might be faster.
But if you are stingy enough to add the cost of time-lost to public transportation, then subtract from that time-lost the amount of time you spend at the gym on the treadmill, and maybe the cost of your gym membership. You won't need it so much.
Yeah, I think when I was in DC, it was that the bars shut down at 2am but the public transportation shut down at 11pm. (something like that)
I always thought, "Are they trying to get people to drive drunk?"
Sure, but in fairness that's because you don't have much of a public transportation system to speak of. It's not quite a fair argument to say, "investing in public transportation isn't worthwhile because the public transportation in my area is so underfunded and underdeveloped as to be virtually useless."
Yeah, sorry if it wasn't clear, my point was that if you copied/pasted and accidentally left the quotes in (which is why I put the single-quotes in the <quote> tags).
Why you would have a path that included such a script is another problem, which is why I said, "I'm being ridiculous". But whatever, nitpick because you don't want to acknowledge that anything could ever go wrong while using a CLI.
It wouldn't do anything unless he typed 'firefox\ foo.html'.
Yeah, I'm saying if the file were called "firefox foo.html" (all that in the quotes) and therefore in order to name it you had to type "firefox\ foo.html", but when copying/pasting you accidentally copied the quotes.
But yeah, whatever, my point wasn't that this particular thing was likely to turn into a major problem, but rather that it's possible to do stupid things in either a GUI or CLI. How many people have done "rm /rf" only to realize afterwards that they were in the wrong directory or on the wrong machine?
Yes, I think resource forks were a good idea. On the other hand, once you have to transfer files to any platform that doesn't support them, it's not practical. Also, I saw many problems with OSX accidentally dropping/corrupting resource forks on its own, making some files completely useless, so the reality wasn't all rosy.
Heaven forbid they do it themselves
I'm not sure who you're talking about here, but Apple did have a sort of solution for this. When writing to a foreign filesystem, OSX will write the resource fork to a hidden file with a "._" prefix. It works well enough until someone with another OS decides to move those files around without moving the resource fork file, or some Windows administrator gets annoyed with all those mysterious hidden files and decides to delete them. I know that happens when you copy via SMB, so I would assume it would work over NFS.
Still, it's a problem. Until other operating systems support this sort of thing, both in the filesystem and in network protocols, you have to assume that the resource fork can be lost.
Why are suffixes so enduring? How can this be?
That's a pretty good summary, and though I take your question to be sarcastic, I'm going to try to answer it anyway.
AFAICT, filename extensions are enduring because we can't get enough people to agree on a common filesystem, or at least a common specification for metadata stored in the filesystem. HFS basically had an alternate solution with resource forks, but other operating systems didn't support HFS as the default/native filesystem, and the filesystems and network protocols didn't really support resource forks. The result was that if you copied a file from the old MacOS over a network or to another OS, you were risking losing any data stored in the resource fork. Even though OSX doesn't have resource forks, Apple has discouraged putting any important information in those resource forks to prevent important information from being lost.
Now I'm not expert, but as far as I know NTFS, UFS, and ext3 (some of the other most common filesystems) don't have sufficient metadata support to hold these kind of resource forks. When transferring a text file from Linux to Windows to OSX and back, there's no way to identify it as a text file except in the file name. Seeing as we can't even get all the open source operating systems to agree on a new filesystem, I don't see how we're going to get Microsoft to go along.
Now OSX 10.6 has been said to support ZFS, and I've heard rumors that ZFS would be able to support this kind of metadata, and that Apple may be looking to drop HFS+ in favor of ZFS. Could that be a way forward? I don't know, but people seem to think that ZFS licensing is incompatible with the GPL, so I'm not holding my breath.
On the other hand, I don't really know what I'm talking about.