if you completely replace everything with linux or other free alternatives you're just creating another monoculture, and push a free-only view; which is, to my mind, just as bad.
Replacing everything with Linux *or* other free alternatives might create a software monoculture, but that's only if everyone really chooses the same free alternative. Replacing some things with Ubuntu, some things with SuSE, some things with FreeBSD, some things with Solaris, etc., would not quite be a monoculture.
There's a lot of options with the scope of "free software", and if the purpose is to educate the students, they would ideally be exposed to multiple different software packages. This might but need not include Microsoft products, but the point is this: if people learn to use multiple word processors, they'll be more able to figure out whatever new word processor you put in front of them.
Part of what's fueled the rumors is that some people did that and simply stripped the name/email and ran a checksum, found they were different. However, further investigation showed that the data appeared to be the same between the two files, but there were numerous additional pieces of metadata tags that were different. AFAIK, no one has really parsed all the metadata that Apple uses to know whether anything else in there might serve to identify users, but certainly it's possible that there are valid reasons to have different metadata, eg. if it stores date created/modified in the metadata.
Now, of course even a "date purchased" field could possibly allow Apple to identify a user under some conditions. Given a couple more songs presumed to be on the same account, they could narrow the list further. If the songs are unpopular enough, you might only need a couple songs to identify someone uniquely. Not knowing what, exactly, is in the metadata, it's impossible to tell how easy it would be for Apple to identify the purchaser.
Of course, none of this should scare anyone very much. Even if Apple could identify the purchaser easily, such an identification would require that (a) the file was widely distributed enough that Apple got ahold of it, (b) that you didn't scrub/transcode the file enough to hide/remove the identifying information, and (c) that Apple cared or was compelled to care.
At this point, every book, record or mag anyone buys online has, imagine, a name and address in it that is verified to a credit card.
So long as the data is just some text that I can scrub from these online purchases, it doesn't really bother me enough to think about scrubbing them. Of course, whenever you buy anything with a credit card, there's a record of that, and that record follows you (so to speak). That's not completely comforting, but I wonder if there's a system whereby we can have verifiable online purchases that can't be traced back to the purchaser. I'd worry that any such system would be abused for fraud.
IIRC Google uses some of the spotlight stuff (memory is hazy so I can't say how) to their advantage. It's not as simple as "a different front-end for spotlight with Gmail indexing added", but it makes use of some of the spotlight mechanisms to index local resources.
So I guess one question would be as to whether Windows' indexing is open enough that Google can make use of any of it. Is that the difference?
Also, AFAIK, Apple wasn't determined to be a monopoly guilty of anti-trust violations. Is that the difference?
Yes, of course. It's not obvious how to go about shopping for laptops from Dell. But is that a good thing or bad thing? For the consumer or for Dell? Some people love different options, even if it makes it hard to find the choice you want. Maybe it helps Dell hide what's going on with their pricing.
Personally, i tend to avoid Dell's consumer lineup (Dimension and Inspiron). XPS models are aimed at gamers, and they're decent for that purpose, but probably not the best value otherwise. I my day, real gamers built their own rigs-- it was part of the process, like Jedis building their own lightsabers.... but I digress.
The Precision line are workstations, by which I mean that it's more aimed towards engineers and such rather than home users or gamers. Precision laptops are more like desktop-replacements. Most people, most of the time, (IMHO) should really buy a Latitude for laptops and Optiplex for desktops.
Also, honestly, there's one thing that really pisses me off about Trillian: it doesn't store user settings/logs in the user profiles. It actually stores login information and logs in the program folder. So obviously if you have a multi-user system and you log in using Trillian, all the other users will automatically have access to your account and chat transcripts.
I'm sorry, but any programmers still doing this sort of thing is completely incompetent. I don't see how anyone can take that piece of software seriously.
There are rumors from people who have (supposedly) seem/operated the iPhone who say it operates about how you would expect. Regarding the slow network connection, it may be slow when using the Cell network (what can Apple do about that?), but it should at least be decent when within range of WiFi.
I didn't say it was a good thing. It's certainly not as though Apple does this on accident.
However, the post I was responding to was saying that Apple *seemed* more expensive because they lacked low-end models, and though that's true, I think that's only one example of a large phenomenon. The larger issue that causes Macs to seem more expensive is this limitation of choice.
In my last post, I gave the example of being unable to buy a laptop without a built-in camera. This is just an example, but if you had a Dell laptop without a built-in camera that was otherwise identical to a Macbook, and otherwise priced equally part-for-part, then the Apple would be more expensive by the price of the camera. So what might happen is that someone who doesn't care about the camera specs out "equivalent" systems, Apple with the camera and Dell without, and finds that the Apple laptop is slightly more expensive-- but the price would equal out if you bought a camera with the Dell.
And this happens often enough. Mac minis are can be more expensive than comparably powerful machines, but not really more expensive than comparable machines with a similar form factor. If you want a tiny machine, you'll pay a premium, but people who don't care about the form-factor will complain that they can buy a mini-tower for cheaper than the mini.
Similarly, a lot of people argue that you should factor in the value of Apple software (like iLife) when looking at price comparisons. There's something to the argument, but of course Apple doesn't allow you to purchase their computer at a discount without the software, and some people might not use the software, so it's hard to attach a value to the software. If I'm going to wipe the drive and install Linux either way, then perhaps the pre-installed software isn't valuable.
All I'm really saying is that because Apple doesn't have as many configuration options as Dell, the question of "which is a better value" depends a fair amount on what you need. If you're going to get a laptop with all the feature-set of a Macbook no matter what, a similarly configured Dell won't be much cheaper (if at all). However, if you want to be able to choose the precise features you want and skimp on money wherever you can, you might be able to cut enough out of the Dell laptop to make it cheaper. Even though it'll have less, it might not have less of any of the things you want.
I think not just their lack of a low end, but a general lack of options. Don't get me wrong, I'm a mac user and I like them, but Dell (for example) has something like 10 very different laptop models, while Apple basically has three models with limited configuration options. Try to go in the Apple store and buy a laptop without a built-in camera. With Dell, you can choose to have XP installed, one of the 20 different versions of Vista, or even (recently added) Ubuntu. With Apple, you get OSX.
Many of their choices are very good, but if you have specific needs, then your needs might not be met by Apple's lineup.
Yeah, the reason i put "reading" was that, IIRC, there's support in the kernel for reading/writing but not creating HFS+ partitions. I didn't want to say "writing" and have someone make a big deal about that small inaccuracy.
Yeah, but it shouldn't be that much worse, really. You're only getting this if you buy a new Mac or seek out a Leopard upgrade. In the second case, you should have some idea of what you're doing anyway, and you should always backup your data before doing a major OS update. (you should be doing regular backups anyway)
IMO, if you lose much by reformatting your hard drive, you're using your computer wrong. You should always have some kind of backup, keep disks and serial numbers for all your software, etc. Any decent OS will keep all your configuration files in sensible places, too, and therefore easy to backup. In the case of OSX, dragging your home folder onto an external harddrive is enough for most people.
If they move to an open source file system, iTunes for Windows could easily include a ZFS driver.
I'm not sure it's so easy to include ZFS support in Windows-- at least, I don't see why it would be harder than including HFS+ support. There's already support for reading HFS+ in Linux, but Linux doesn't support ZFS.
The ipod was/is huge becuase it was a relatively early entrant in a market that was just on the verge of exploding in size, and it was hugely advertised and hyped, and there wasn't any real competition for at least a couple of years.
Not true. There were plenty of MP3 players on the market before the iPod, some with more space ("Less space than a nomad"). I even know lots of geeks who owned MP3 players. Most people didn't own them because-- well, for a lot of reasons but mostly because they *sucked*. They worked, by which I mean it was entirely possible to play music on them, but the experience of using them sucked hard-core. They were annoying to operate, had nonsensical interfaces, and the programs that transfered music to the players were total crap.
You still haven't proven your point. You've demonstrated perhaps that atheists tend to be very attached to scientific knowledge, but not necessarily that it was the scientific knowledge that made them atheists in the first place.
Sorry, but no amount of insisting makes it more true. If you're such a man of science, you'll understand that.
Unfortunately your tip is worthless. The fact is, across the world high rates of scientific literacy is inversely correlated with religious belief....[snip]... Every new scientific discovery that reaches the popular consciousness chips away at religion and superstition.
Talk about scientific literacy... correlation =/= causation.
Yeah, it's pretty decently cool, too. Personally, I thought the magazine and the car ad with highly detailed information "printed" really small was as interesting a concept at anything-- it looked like it might provide a reading experience that would make sense for an online magazine, and the small print bends the concept of your printable space in an interesting way. So long as there are sufficient hints that the tiny text was there, it would allow you to put a lot of information into a small "space".
The rest of it definitely is neat, but if the recognition is done automatically, I wonder how accurate it will be. It should be good fun for some hacker to try to game this system and get goatse.cx into random places.
You may be aware that this was based on a literal interpretation of the Bible and it was later found to be wrong. That is, the interpretation was wrong, the Bible doesn't say that the (physical) position of the earth is at the centre of the universe, the theologians, the Roman-Catholic Church, philosophers and Aristotle himself were saying that the earth was at the centre of the universe for some reason that reflected their ignorance and interests at the time.
As a matter of trivia, I'd just like to mention that the issue is more complicated than that. We tend to think that people of the time thought the Earth was flat and stationary, but neither the idea of the earth being round nor the idea of the earth being in motion was completely new. Pretty much everyone knew the Earth was round, and even Ptolemy acknowledged the possibility that the Earth may be moving, and according to his own calculations basically show the planets going around the sun (though it'd take some work to explain that claim).
But what people often fail to understand is that they had calculated the motion of these objects and recognized that the Earth might be stationary or might be in motion. The "laws of physics" that they understood were simple and from direct experience-- unimpeded, heavy things moved towards the center of the earth. Given this sort of thinking, there simply wasn't a reason to think that the earth would be in motion, because "what would be moving it?" And really, it didn't matter-- for all of their purposes, the earth was stationary, and they were unable to effect any change in heavenly bodies anyhow.
Either way, they didn't have any theory that could explain why the sun, planets, and stars moved the way they did. An explanation for that didn't come until Newton/gravity, which only came a couple hundred years ago. What Copernicus had done was take Ptolemy's old calculations, change almost nothing, and posit that the sun was the center (which people had known before could be done) and say that he preferred this model because it was "simpler". Even still, Capernicus wasn't able to give an explanation of the forces which governed this heliocentric model, nor could he explain why physical objects move towards Earth. In his explanation (IIRC) the planets were still moved by "angels".
A) It could still be Firefox + features - features (the result of which could theoretically be more or less than "Firefox").
-and-
B) From the "What's new" page on Netscape 9:
Extension Compatibility
Navigator 9 shares an architecture with the latest Mozilla technologies; as such, Navigator 9 will let you install extensions that are compatible with Firefox ® 2.
That being said, I don't see anything in Netscape that I want that isn't already in Firefox.
Slashdot Mirror
if you completely replace everything with linux or other free alternatives you're just creating another monoculture, and push a free-only view; which is, to my mind, just as bad.
Replacing everything with Linux *or* other free alternatives might create a software monoculture, but that's only if everyone really chooses the same free alternative. Replacing some things with Ubuntu, some things with SuSE, some things with FreeBSD, some things with Solaris, etc., would not quite be a monoculture.
There's a lot of options with the scope of "free software", and if the purpose is to educate the students, they would ideally be exposed to multiple different software packages. This might but need not include Microsoft products, but the point is this: if people learn to use multiple word processors, they'll be more able to figure out whatever new word processor you put in front of them.
Part of what's fueled the rumors is that some people did that and simply stripped the name/email and ran a checksum, found they were different. However, further investigation showed that the data appeared to be the same between the two files, but there were numerous additional pieces of metadata tags that were different. AFAIK, no one has really parsed all the metadata that Apple uses to know whether anything else in there might serve to identify users, but certainly it's possible that there are valid reasons to have different metadata, eg. if it stores date created/modified in the metadata.
Now, of course even a "date purchased" field could possibly allow Apple to identify a user under some conditions. Given a couple more songs presumed to be on the same account, they could narrow the list further. If the songs are unpopular enough, you might only need a couple songs to identify someone uniquely. Not knowing what, exactly, is in the metadata, it's impossible to tell how easy it would be for Apple to identify the purchaser.
Of course, none of this should scare anyone very much. Even if Apple could identify the purchaser easily, such an identification would require that (a) the file was widely distributed enough that Apple got ahold of it, (b) that you didn't scrub/transcode the file enough to hide/remove the identifying information, and (c) that Apple cared or was compelled to care.
At this point, every book, record or mag anyone buys online has, imagine, a name and address in it that is verified to a credit card.
So long as the data is just some text that I can scrub from these online purchases, it doesn't really bother me enough to think about scrubbing them. Of course, whenever you buy anything with a credit card, there's a record of that, and that record follows you (so to speak). That's not completely comforting, but I wonder if there's a system whereby we can have verifiable online purchases that can't be traced back to the purchaser. I'd worry that any such system would be abused for fraud.
Cheaper to buy the whole government than to fix your business model?
IIRC Google uses some of the spotlight stuff (memory is hazy so I can't say how) to their advantage. It's not as simple as "a different front-end for spotlight with Gmail indexing added", but it makes use of some of the spotlight mechanisms to index local resources.
So I guess one question would be as to whether Windows' indexing is open enough that Google can make use of any of it. Is that the difference?
Also, AFAIK, Apple wasn't determined to be a monopoly guilty of anti-trust violations. Is that the difference?
I'm not English so I don't know... is the licensing fee mandatory (just part of your taxes), or is it optional?
Yes, of course. It's not obvious how to go about shopping for laptops from Dell. But is that a good thing or bad thing? For the consumer or for Dell? Some people love different options, even if it makes it hard to find the choice you want. Maybe it helps Dell hide what's going on with their pricing.
Personally, i tend to avoid Dell's consumer lineup (Dimension and Inspiron). XPS models are aimed at gamers, and they're decent for that purpose, but probably not the best value otherwise. I my day, real gamers built their own rigs-- it was part of the process, like Jedis building their own lightsabers.... but I digress.
The Precision line are workstations, by which I mean that it's more aimed towards engineers and such rather than home users or gamers. Precision laptops are more like desktop-replacements. Most people, most of the time, (IMHO) should really buy a Latitude for laptops and Optiplex for desktops.
Also, honestly, there's one thing that really pisses me off about Trillian: it doesn't store user settings/logs in the user profiles. It actually stores login information and logs in the program folder. So obviously if you have a multi-user system and you log in using Trillian, all the other users will automatically have access to your account and chat transcripts.
I'm sorry, but any programmers still doing this sort of thing is completely incompetent. I don't see how anyone can take that piece of software seriously.
There are rumors from people who have (supposedly) seem/operated the iPhone who say it operates about how you would expect. Regarding the slow network connection, it may be slow when using the Cell network (what can Apple do about that?), but it should at least be decent when within range of WiFi.
Looks like you just threw away your first effort at spelling.
(Not a spelling Nazi. Just trying to be funny.)
I didn't say it was a good thing. It's certainly not as though Apple does this on accident.
However, the post I was responding to was saying that Apple *seemed* more expensive because they lacked low-end models, and though that's true, I think that's only one example of a large phenomenon. The larger issue that causes Macs to seem more expensive is this limitation of choice.
In my last post, I gave the example of being unable to buy a laptop without a built-in camera. This is just an example, but if you had a Dell laptop without a built-in camera that was otherwise identical to a Macbook, and otherwise priced equally part-for-part, then the Apple would be more expensive by the price of the camera. So what might happen is that someone who doesn't care about the camera specs out "equivalent" systems, Apple with the camera and Dell without, and finds that the Apple laptop is slightly more expensive-- but the price would equal out if you bought a camera with the Dell.
And this happens often enough. Mac minis are can be more expensive than comparably powerful machines, but not really more expensive than comparable machines with a similar form factor. If you want a tiny machine, you'll pay a premium, but people who don't care about the form-factor will complain that they can buy a mini-tower for cheaper than the mini.
Similarly, a lot of people argue that you should factor in the value of Apple software (like iLife) when looking at price comparisons. There's something to the argument, but of course Apple doesn't allow you to purchase their computer at a discount without the software, and some people might not use the software, so it's hard to attach a value to the software. If I'm going to wipe the drive and install Linux either way, then perhaps the pre-installed software isn't valuable.
All I'm really saying is that because Apple doesn't have as many configuration options as Dell, the question of "which is a better value" depends a fair amount on what you need. If you're going to get a laptop with all the feature-set of a Macbook no matter what, a similarly configured Dell won't be much cheaper (if at all). However, if you want to be able to choose the precise features you want and skimp on money wherever you can, you might be able to cut enough out of the Dell laptop to make it cheaper. Even though it'll have less, it might not have less of any of the things you want.
I think not just their lack of a low end, but a general lack of options. Don't get me wrong, I'm a mac user and I like them, but Dell (for example) has something like 10 very different laptop models, while Apple basically has three models with limited configuration options. Try to go in the Apple store and buy a laptop without a built-in camera. With Dell, you can choose to have XP installed, one of the 20 different versions of Vista, or even (recently added) Ubuntu. With Apple, you get OSX.
Many of their choices are very good, but if you have specific needs, then your needs might not be met by Apple's lineup.
Microsoft doesn't play with words like that. Just think of all the genuine advantages windows provides to users through WGA.
Do you think Mr. Anderson plays LoTR, he keeps his distance from Rivendell so as not to attract Elrond's attention.
"Tell me, Mr. Baggins... what good is the one ring... if you're unable to speak?"
Yeah, the reason i put "reading" was that, IIRC, there's support in the kernel for reading/writing but not creating HFS+ partitions. I didn't want to say "writing" and have someone make a big deal about that small inaccuracy.
5 years from testing... so how long before I can buy one to carry me home when I'm drunk?
Yeah, but it shouldn't be that much worse, really. You're only getting this if you buy a new Mac or seek out a Leopard upgrade. In the second case, you should have some idea of what you're doing anyway, and you should always backup your data before doing a major OS update. (you should be doing regular backups anyway)
IMO, if you lose much by reformatting your hard drive, you're using your computer wrong. You should always have some kind of backup, keep disks and serial numbers for all your software, etc. Any decent OS will keep all your configuration files in sensible places, too, and therefore easy to backup. In the case of OSX, dragging your home folder onto an external harddrive is enough for most people.
If they move to an open source file system, iTunes for Windows could easily include a ZFS driver.
I'm not sure it's so easy to include ZFS support in Windows-- at least, I don't see why it would be harder than including HFS+ support. There's already support for reading HFS+ in Linux, but Linux doesn't support ZFS.
The ipod was/is huge becuase it was a relatively early entrant in a market that was just on the verge of exploding in size, and it was hugely advertised and hyped, and there wasn't any real competition for at least a couple of years.
Not true. There were plenty of MP3 players on the market before the iPod, some with more space ("Less space than a nomad"). I even know lots of geeks who owned MP3 players. Most people didn't own them because-- well, for a lot of reasons but mostly because they *sucked*. They worked, by which I mean it was entirely possible to play music on them, but the experience of using them sucked hard-core. They were annoying to operate, had nonsensical interfaces, and the programs that transfered music to the players were total crap.
You still haven't proven your point. You've demonstrated perhaps that atheists tend to be very attached to scientific knowledge, but not necessarily that it was the scientific knowledge that made them atheists in the first place.
Sorry, but no amount of insisting makes it more true. If you're such a man of science, you'll understand that.
Talk about scientific literacy... correlation =/= causation.
Yeah, it's pretty decently cool, too. Personally, I thought the magazine and the car ad with highly detailed information "printed" really small was as interesting a concept at anything-- it looked like it might provide a reading experience that would make sense for an online magazine, and the small print bends the concept of your printable space in an interesting way. So long as there are sufficient hints that the tiny text was there, it would allow you to put a lot of information into a small "space".
The rest of it definitely is neat, but if the recognition is done automatically, I wonder how accurate it will be. It should be good fun for some hacker to try to game this system and get goatse.cx into random places.
You may be aware that this was based on a literal interpretation of the Bible and it was later found to be wrong. That is, the interpretation was wrong, the Bible doesn't say that the (physical) position of the earth is at the centre of the universe, the theologians, the Roman-Catholic Church, philosophers and Aristotle himself were saying that the earth was at the centre of the universe for some reason that reflected their ignorance and interests at the time.
As a matter of trivia, I'd just like to mention that the issue is more complicated than that. We tend to think that people of the time thought the Earth was flat and stationary, but neither the idea of the earth being round nor the idea of the earth being in motion was completely new. Pretty much everyone knew the Earth was round, and even Ptolemy acknowledged the possibility that the Earth may be moving, and according to his own calculations basically show the planets going around the sun (though it'd take some work to explain that claim).
But what people often fail to understand is that they had calculated the motion of these objects and recognized that the Earth might be stationary or might be in motion. The "laws of physics" that they understood were simple and from direct experience-- unimpeded, heavy things moved towards the center of the earth. Given this sort of thinking, there simply wasn't a reason to think that the earth would be in motion, because "what would be moving it?" And really, it didn't matter-- for all of their purposes, the earth was stationary, and they were unable to effect any change in heavenly bodies anyhow.
Either way, they didn't have any theory that could explain why the sun, planets, and stars moved the way they did. An explanation for that didn't come until Newton/gravity, which only came a couple hundred years ago. What Copernicus had done was take Ptolemy's old calculations, change almost nothing, and posit that the sun was the center (which people had known before could be done) and say that he preferred this model because it was "simpler". Even still, Capernicus wasn't able to give an explanation of the forces which governed this heliocentric model, nor could he explain why physical objects move towards Earth. In his explanation (IIRC) the planets were still moved by "angels".
-and-
B) From the "What's new" page on Netscape 9:
That being said, I don't see anything in Netscape that I want that isn't already in Firefox.
Well it doesn't take much. It's mostly Firefox rebranded, with a couple features added here and there.