Everyone seems to be condemning what he says pretty quickly which sort of proves his point about punditry and religion. Not to say I agree with him, I think his problem with the "command line" is completely silly and arbitrary, he doesn't like it, but that doesnt mean its not efficient, it is if you know how to use it and furthermore it increases productivity over GUI apps if you reach a certain level of aptitude with it.
However I digress, and would like to add that he does make some good points: 1) Files are crap and they will and should go away. 2) Computing is being held back by vendor lock in, punditry and religion. 3) Linux/BSD/other free UNIXs are not the end all be all of computing(although I disagree that they are contributing to the problem, they are just solving a different problem than the one he is trying to answer).
DISCLOSURE: My primary OS is Linux and I use DragonFlyBSD/Mac OS X/Solaris/Win XP on a day to day basis.
is when you look at it you are wondering ok is this a phone thats also a game system or a game system thats also a phone? cell phone companies have failed to recognize that consumers don't want multipurpose devices. They want individual devices that do one thing really really well. Thats why the ROKR is crap and the iPod is boss. Thats why the NGage is crap and the PSP(or Nintendo DS) is king.
Pressure to always bust a myth?
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Ask The Mythbusters
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Is there pressure to always bust(or bust as often as possible) a Myth? Many times I have watched your show and felt that you gave up too early or simply weren't trying hard enough, or I've come up with something that I'd like to try(are you guys hiring?).
AN ASIDE: I've wanted to make time to write ever since I saw your gun barrel peeling like a banana episode. First I'd like to point out my observation that the plug that you welded into the barrel would essentially garuntee that the gun wouldn't peel back in such a fashion, since you are forcibly holding the barrel shut so as to prevent any peeling it would be infinitely more likely that your weld would break(it did) or some imperfection halfway down the barrel would blow out the side.
ANECDOTE: My uncles shotgun peeled back in the exact manner in which you were going for. He tripped while hunting in the woods and the barrel poked itself into some mud, unoticed by him he continued hunting until finally he took a shot at a pheasant. The gun barrel ripped apart a la elmer fudd, we all remarked on how it looked exactly like the cartoon. I imagine the fact that he was not injured at all was just his dumb luck.
Send me 5 easy payments of 29.99 and you too can be making big bucks with open source. In my open source training program you will hear how individuals like yourself have increased there net worth by millions of dollars. And whats more is that it requires a minimal amount of time invested. Just listen to the testimony:
I spend about 15 hours a week on my open source business and last month I cleared 34,000 dollars in profit. And its all thanks to Lamer's open source training program. - seanz0r
Act today and I'll knock off one of the 5 payments. My program covers all aspects of open source development, services, support and training. You will have the tools you need to build a successful future.
Your right, lets all "think like developers". Limit the kernel to a finite number of lines of code in the name of some standard of stability which I might add you have not demonstrated to be a real problem.
Your talking about a non issue. Devices that are popular and used by businesses will always be supported and tested well because guess what people are using them. The devices that are neglected are the ones that these people will not use and thus, unmaintained or poorly maintained or buggy code will NOT affect them.
In order to have a stable kernel, each and every module need not be maintained to the same standard. If some module is broken and stops compiling(or just causes problems when its used) oh well its gonna get dropped(or fixed if someone cares enough about it).
With the 2.6 the de facto development codebase, that's not something to ignore.
I think it is something to ignore, because you still havent showed why its a problem. Your accusations and really a random buzz/marketing statement "your not thinking like a developer" don't cut it as a real reason to at all consider the current development model flawed, or 2.6 unstable.
for instance asking for ratings on video games so they can make informed decisions
So what your saying is that when parents cant be bothered to take the time to look at the games there children are asking for they should be provided with ratings to make that part of there job easier. And then when the ratings are just that ratings and companies are not required to use that ratings system as a basis for denying sales to children parents should complain until government makes it law that Mature games are only sold to 15+.
Will you ever reach a point where you say ok, enough government interference, and let the parents be parents. Or do you think its acceptable for parents to be delegating there responsibilities to the government?
or sending their child into a child friendly chat room.
see when you use wording like this it becomes incredibly difficult to explain to you why you are wrong. Mostly because you fail to grasp the fundamental truth behind having a child. Your child is not some pet that you place in a fence in area where should it get loose you can sue the fence manufaturer or installer. No your child needs to be treated with respect and dignity. Your child needs to be taught in specific and open terms what kind of behavior is unacceptable on the internet. Lets face it children are not as naive as you would like to think. 15 year olds are not led astray by the big bad wolf of the internet. 15 year olds look for ways to get attention to get back at their parents for a lack of positive reinforcement. A parent, who sits from on high and says "if you ever do something like that I'll kill you, how could someone be so stupid to find a boy/girl friend on the internet" creates problems for themselves by creating a rift with there child. Hell parents who simply say you are not old enough to date create problems, because they are creating a situation where the child has cause for rebellion and hiding from the parents. If for instance a child cannot come to his/her parents and be open about decisions in there life without fear of reprisal or punishment then the parents have created a situation where that child is prime to be taken advantage of.
I am not saying however that there should be no discipline. What I am saying is that children who are afraid to communicate with there parents are the ones that end up in these dangerous situations. And a child isnt born afraid of his/her parents, thats learned through the parent not being a positive force in that childs life.
Ultimately a good parent has no need for forced censorship of media/video games/books/internet. Because a good parent has a trusting relationship with their child and knows about what is going on daily in a childs life. Not through forced interviews, not through badgering but through free and open exchange with their child.
NEWSFLASH: Arbitrary age requirements for video games or television content are dumb. Thats the problem you don't seem to get when you said:
A parents group spending their time and effort to try to have age-limits applied on video games? WHERE'S THE PARENTS! Television censored after massive complaints about inappropriate content? WHERE'S THE PARENTS!
What you are failing to see is that some 15 year olds are mature enough to handle what other 15 year olds are not. Your solution is apparently the nanny state(implied not stated explicitly). Which has been to simply write legislation when one immature unstable child goes wild or hurts themselves because they were not mature enough to handle tv/books/etc.
Where's the parents is an apt thing to ask when Momma Jones is complaining to her congressman about her child playing GTA. Sorry but its not the governments job to control content flow to your child.
Whats idealistic bullshit is what your spouting, that governmetn regulation/lawsuits/regulation of media will somehow magically make all parents good parents. Hell I have another newsflash: Most parents are mediocre at best at parenting.
Parents can't watch their children 24/7 and create healthy children
Holy crap this is the only insightful thing you said, but unfortunately, I doubt you meant it in a way that is insightful. Part of growing up and becoming healthy stable adults is not getting watched 24/7, getting the oppurtunity to fuck up and make mistakes. A sheltered child kept completely away from strife, dissapointment, disgust, shame, and pain creates some of the most pathetically useless members of our society: selfish fools.
So why don't you get off your high horse and put the blame where it belongs. On the parents. We no longer have any responsibility in our society because of sentiment like yours. Your passing the buck along to your child and the people he/she makes a mistake with when ultimately its your own damn fault if your child seeks a destructive relationship over the internet.
I've used both, I prefer netflix for 2 reasons. Better selection and cleaner/less annoying interface for movie selection.
I agree the articial wait stuff is annoying but, blockbuster is playing good now, you just watch and see what happens when they can no longer subsidize their online service with there brick and mortar stores. What it comes down to is that they can take losses and just soak up cash from there already existing business. They aren't commited to offering you this service, they are commited to burying netflix and then they will go back to the brick and mortar which is WAY more profitable. Watch and see..
What is it with the attitude that _____ is dying. For instance in this case omg netflix was dying but its a good thing amazon jumped in to save them. Thats not whats happening here, netflix was never dying and they did not need amazon to resuce them.
Apple is dying, Tivo is dying, BSD is dying, netflix is dying etc etc etc.../me is tired of hearing this kind of nonsense.
..it will never put a dent in Windows' mind share or market share..
..things never change, companys NEVER go out of business and they never ever go from having 95% of a market to having nothing.
I call one big bullshit on this whole mentality. MS and Windows will one day go away. Whether or not linux will still be around by then is up for debate but to suggest somehting will never go away is a pretty foolish thing to do. Hell you can't even say that about the sun, and to suggest it about microsoft is incredibly short sighted.
Personally my opinion is that the current way we do computing will be gone in 30 years. We will be looking back at this time period going, man what the hell where they thinking using those primitive things. And as such an OS like we see it today will be completely obsolete, destroying MS mindshare and market share in one fell swoop.
My experiences moving from win32 to cocoa.
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Modern Mac Development?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
During my senior year of college I decided I wanted exposure to OSX development so I got myself a mac, installed the dev tools and went to town with the same assignments I had for my MFC/C++ programming class. Turns out what took me a semester to do in MFC/C++ took about 3 weeks using Cocoa/Objective-C. I then decided to port a semester long project from win32 MFC/C++ code from visual studio to OSX and hell that took about 2 weeks. Apple has what they like to call Objective-C++(which allows you to mix, objective-c, pure c, and c++ code in the same project) and I just plopped about 85% of my code into the project and bam it worked WITHOUT EDITING, it took me roughly two weeks to build it a new interface and link up all the actions properly.
All I have to say is that Apple documentation is very bad and mostly unhelpful. Learning Cocoa/Objective-C from oreilly is near useless. In fact I did 2 examples from it following its directions and havent used it since. Learning Objective-c and Cocoa to the point where an advanced reference is what you need is borderline trivial. I suggest not bothering with introductory texts and simply grab some examples work through them, muck around with adding a few controls to them and you will be all set.
Really, if you know C you will have no problem moving to Objective-C, and Cocoa is in my opinion very very intuitive making MFC look like a bastard child.
See I think your making broad baseless assumptions. This priest is the only one at said college that I had a positive experience with. Most that I dealt with were in fact worse than "normal" individuals and I frequently butted heads with them on a variety of issues. I find it odd that you would think them capable of understanding logic/analytical thought because of theological training when every indication for me was that the opposite was true. I've found that most priests are masters of moving arguments away from logic as logic/analysis is generally against the grain of what they are trying to prove simply because no logical conclusion can be formed that proves or disproves Gods existance. Mostly logic/anaylsis can be used to show why arguments from other side are flawed, but that doesnt prove one way or the other whats "true".
Also, do not try to argue something stupid. Don't take a contrary opinion to the professor or to popular opinion on the college campus.
There are plenty of perfectly reasonably professors out there where this is not the case.
Example: I went to a catholic college and had to take several theology courses. A priest taught my Morality class. As an atheist, my mid term paper was basically an elaborate argument against the existence of God and why belief in God is not necessary for a person to be ethical and live a "moral" lifestyle. I was the only student in the class who received a perfect score on the midterm. One of the comments on my paper was: "You have adequately defended against every rebuttal I could readily come up with, however, I disagree."
There are two ways to get the grade by "knowing your professor" one is to know what they want to hear and give it to them. And the second is to know their objections and address them. Personally I find arguing a contrarian opinion and succeeding to be much more rewarding than a mere A.
I never really understood the fear actors have of being typecast.
I liken it to my fear that every perl script i ever write will be exactly the same. But I have to type it over again from scratch each time. What it amounts to is that doing the same thing day in and day out is boring.
It also has to do with once you are "typecast" the number of roles you are offered greatly diminishes, and if for some reason it becomes popular to not have this type of character in movies or tv shows your shit out of luck.
Re:Business Our Way
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Hacking Mac OS X
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· Score: 4, Interesting
You have to send your machine to the one Apple service center in the country (Texas) which will cost you a minimum non-refundable $250+ just to "look at it". They're infamous for wrecking unrelated parts and damaging stuff, and you can pretty much foget any data on the system...and how many of us have the facilities to back up 60GB? Not me.
Overall I'm not impressed with your comment as I think its largely irrelevant/innaccurate. This snippet I take particular issue, when you send them some hardware, they ask you on the phone "is the data backed up or do we need to do that?" They make a note in your case and bam they do that for you(they charge you for that).
My experience with Apple is that with AppleCare support is incredible. Direct sales is useless to me as I don't need some rep to tell me what to order, I order that and it appears at the office in a few days, why do i need to talk to somebody?
You make issue of losing the computer for a few days, but any business will/should have backup workstations/loaners for this purpose. If fact I cannot imagine a business so small, that they could afford a IT staff but not have the money to have a spare iBook chilling around for emergencies.
Oh and FYI, 60gb worth of backup space is what ~$30 now(cheap IDE drive that i pop in format, copy files over and rip out in time to send machine out.. before you come back foaming at the mouth this does not violate warranties so your gonna have to complain from a different angle).
By the time they started doing really revolutionary stuff on Revolver
Whoa whoa whoa slow down a minute. They were doing revolutionary stuff right from the get go. Hell they were turned down by a number of labels before they got to that point because they all thought it was crap and wouldn't sell.
Quote:"Guitar groups are on the way out, Mr. Epstein." - Dick Rowe head of Decca recording in London.
They had freedom in the beginning to do whatever because people genuinely didn't care and didn't think they were talented or would get anywhere. As much as you can poke fun "Love me do" and "eight days a week" are revolutionary songs. As revolutionary as say "while my guitar gently weeps" and "let it be". In fact without the original boy bandish revolution the later beatles would have never materialized as they built off there earlier musical innovation.
How can a student respond to such an accusation in order to defend the validity of BitTorrent and continue to benefit from its legitimate uses?
Get MS to use bittorrent to assist in distrobution of patches through the windows update system. Garunteed within 30 days there would be a federal law that makes blocking bit torrent a crime.
Here comes the wave of posts titled: NEVER, NOT IN A MIILION YEARS, GIVE ME FREE MUSIC OR GIVE ME DEATH.
Trouble is people are not logically evaluating DRM especially the scheme introduced by Apple with iTMS.
Number one concern of people is if company X goes out of business DRM will make me lose my music. Not so with Apple, you have a fail safe where you can rerip after having burnt that to disk. The whiners complain about how thats a hassle but for pennies a disc why not just burn those once and toss them in some box.
Number two concern of people: DRM is not freedom, INFORMATION SHOULD BE FREE!!! This is not an argument, just mindless chanting of some slogan. This reminds me of a Futurama quote:
Free Waterfall Jr: You can't OWN property man. Professor: I can but thats because I'm not a penniless hippy.
Sorry but information is and should be property to respect the authors that create it. Whether or not the RIAA is abusive is another issue, what is important is that I can have something to show for my hard work. Whether I want to give it away or sell it should be entirely up to me.
Now back to DRM... I don't care about DRM on my stuff just so long as I can use it how I want. If I can burn it to a CD, put it on portable music device, listen to it on my computers, and there is little risk of me losing my content should something happen to the company in the future. Apple satisfies all these conditions, the pundits of theft and "freedom" are only mindlessly fighting against it because DRM is to them synonymous with evil(crap you mean I actually have to pay for something, wtf?).
Suddenly, everyone has an iPod or some other non-flash-based player, and I look like an idiot.
If image is what you are primarily concerned with you have answered your own question: Why does apple, traditionally the company of great expense an zealous fanboys, suddenly have such mass market appeal, compared to its competitors?
I would like to note however that Apple is not succeeding on image alone. Interface and usability go along way.
Why do people act like Apple was the first people to make mp3 players?
Before Apple came out with the ipod mp3 players weren't number one on little kids christmas/birthday lists. Apple made a very good product, they made it not suck(like every other mp3 player out there) and they showed people that devices did not have to be ugly and awkward pieces of junk.
So in otherwords your post is: stages of development and innovation are pointless. Why don't we just make the best thing first and not waste our time on intermediate inventions and trials?
Wow this is perhaps the most genius post ever, why didn't we think of just doing it properly first instead of spending decades improving technology step by step???
Surely your revelation will usher in a new era of computing. Hell before this we hadn't even been thinking thanks fsterman, thanks.
WARNING: Comment may include sarcasm in reply to a horribly naive and foolish post.
How? God speaking to you is not sufficient proof, hundreds of people suffer from delusions of people existing and talking to them without ever existing. Rather than discuss this in depth I'll just tell you to go see "A Beautiful Mind".
I wonder if some religious people realize they turn more people away from the faith with such acts than they shield. Its really a major issue when you're trying to help with your fellow man's eternal salvation!
Are you suggesting that I do not have a right or I am too stupid to decide on my own that I do not want salvation through your methods. The arrogance of you and your religion is staggering and offensive. You presume that you are right and that all others are wrong and that the only way to happiness is through your life choices. This attitude is disgusting, intolerant and hate filled.
The Smithsonian museum of Natural history has dinosaurs and talks about the world's age in billions of years. Maybe the world is only 6000 years old made to look billions
This argument is perhaps the most cowardly and ignorant stance someone could take. First off it lacks any credibility. Its sole purpose is to stop meaningful discussion because you have been argued into a corner and have no way to further argue your position. The only reason for this argument is to stifle discussion and take a stance that CANNOT be proven/disproven.
We cannot allow such foolish and faulty reasoning to be presented as reasonable because you devalue thought and discussion when you peddle this filth.
Yeah cus oh man, for poor people education is useless. Instead lets give them handouts, like food and such. You definitely wouldn't want them learning some trade or being exposed to a tool that could possibly help them get a job(or better job).
Hell we shouldn't let poor people go to school or read books because they could be more aptly spending there time toiling in spice mines.
How about you STFU cus you are a troll, this is flamebait and above all stupid(too bad there isnt -1 stupid option in the modding, i would have modded instead of ranting).
Slashdot Mirror
However I digress, and would like to add that he does make some good points: 1) Files are crap and they will and should go away. 2) Computing is being held back by vendor lock in, punditry and religion. 3) Linux/BSD/other free UNIXs are not the end all be all of computing(although I disagree that they are contributing to the problem, they are just solving a different problem than the one he is trying to answer).
DISCLOSURE: My primary OS is Linux and I use DragonFlyBSD/Mac OS X/Solaris/Win XP on a day to day basis.
Let's be nice, some of us like Steven Tyler...
depends on your definition of *good* i have yet to see a sub $2000 digital camera that takes *good* photos.
is when you look at it you are wondering ok is this a phone thats also a game system or a game system thats also a phone? cell phone companies have failed to recognize that consumers don't want multipurpose devices. They want individual devices that do one thing really really well. Thats why the ROKR is crap and the iPod is boss. Thats why the NGage is crap and the PSP(or Nintendo DS) is king.
AN ASIDE: I've wanted to make time to write ever since I saw your gun barrel peeling like a banana episode. First I'd like to point out my observation that the plug that you welded into the barrel would essentially garuntee that the gun wouldn't peel back in such a fashion, since you are forcibly holding the barrel shut so as to prevent any peeling it would be infinitely more likely that your weld would break(it did) or some imperfection halfway down the barrel would blow out the side.
ANECDOTE: My uncles shotgun peeled back in the exact manner in which you were going for. He tripped while hunting in the woods and the barrel poked itself into some mud, unoticed by him he continued hunting until finally he took a shot at a pheasant. The gun barrel ripped apart a la elmer fudd, we all remarked on how it looked exactly like the cartoon. I imagine the fact that he was not injured at all was just his dumb luck.
I spend about 15 hours a week on my open source business and last month I cleared 34,000 dollars in profit. And its all thanks to Lamer's open source training program. - seanz0r
Act today and I'll knock off one of the 5 payments. My program covers all aspects of open source development, services, support and training. You will have the tools you need to build a successful future.
Don't wait another minute... ACT NOW!!!
Sincerely,
Lamer Sheets
Your talking about a non issue. Devices that are popular and used by businesses will always be supported and tested well because guess what people are using them. The devices that are neglected are the ones that these people will not use and thus, unmaintained or poorly maintained or buggy code will NOT affect them.
In order to have a stable kernel, each and every module need not be maintained to the same standard. If some module is broken and stops compiling(or just causes problems when its used) oh well its gonna get dropped(or fixed if someone cares enough about it).
With the 2.6 the de facto development codebase, that's not something to ignore.
I think it is something to ignore, because you still havent showed why its a problem. Your accusations and really a random buzz/marketing statement "your not thinking like a developer" don't cut it as a real reason to at all consider the current development model flawed, or 2.6 unstable.
END OF LINE
So what your saying is that when parents cant be bothered to take the time to look at the games there children are asking for they should be provided with ratings to make that part of there job easier. And then when the ratings are just that ratings and companies are not required to use that ratings system as a basis for denying sales to children parents should complain until government makes it law that Mature games are only sold to 15+.
Will you ever reach a point where you say ok, enough government interference, and let the parents be parents. Or do you think its acceptable for parents to be delegating there responsibilities to the government?
or sending their child into a child friendly chat room.
see when you use wording like this it becomes incredibly difficult to explain to you why you are wrong. Mostly because you fail to grasp the fundamental truth behind having a child. Your child is not some pet that you place in a fence in area where should it get loose you can sue the fence manufaturer or installer. No your child needs to be treated with respect and dignity. Your child needs to be taught in specific and open terms what kind of behavior is unacceptable on the internet. Lets face it children are not as naive as you would like to think. 15 year olds are not led astray by the big bad wolf of the internet. 15 year olds look for ways to get attention to get back at their parents for a lack of positive reinforcement. A parent, who sits from on high and says "if you ever do something like that I'll kill you, how could someone be so stupid to find a boy/girl friend on the internet" creates problems for themselves by creating a rift with there child. Hell parents who simply say you are not old enough to date create problems, because they are creating a situation where the child has cause for rebellion and hiding from the parents. If for instance a child cannot come to his/her parents and be open about decisions in there life without fear of reprisal or punishment then the parents have created a situation where that child is prime to be taken advantage of.
I am not saying however that there should be no discipline. What I am saying is that children who are afraid to communicate with there parents are the ones that end up in these dangerous situations. And a child isnt born afraid of his/her parents, thats learned through the parent not being a positive force in that childs life.
Ultimately a good parent has no need for forced censorship of media/video games/books/internet. Because a good parent has a trusting relationship with their child and knows about what is going on daily in a childs life. Not through forced interviews, not through badgering but through free and open exchange with their child.
A parents group spending their time and effort to try to have age-limits applied on video games? WHERE'S THE PARENTS! Television censored after massive complaints about inappropriate content? WHERE'S THE PARENTS!
What you are failing to see is that some 15 year olds are mature enough to handle what other 15 year olds are not. Your solution is apparently the nanny state(implied not stated explicitly). Which has been to simply write legislation when one immature unstable child goes wild or hurts themselves because they were not mature enough to handle tv/books/etc.
Where's the parents is an apt thing to ask when Momma Jones is complaining to her congressman about her child playing GTA. Sorry but its not the governments job to control content flow to your child.
Whats idealistic bullshit is what your spouting, that governmetn regulation/lawsuits/regulation of media will somehow magically make all parents good parents. Hell I have another newsflash: Most parents are mediocre at best at parenting.
Parents can't watch their children 24/7 and create healthy children
Holy crap this is the only insightful thing you said, but unfortunately, I doubt you meant it in a way that is insightful. Part of growing up and becoming healthy stable adults is not getting watched 24/7, getting the oppurtunity to fuck up and make mistakes. A sheltered child kept completely away from strife, dissapointment, disgust, shame, and pain creates some of the most pathetically useless members of our society: selfish fools.
So why don't you get off your high horse and put the blame where it belongs. On the parents. We no longer have any responsibility in our society because of sentiment like yours. Your passing the buck along to your child and the people he/she makes a mistake with when ultimately its your own damn fault if your child seeks a destructive relationship over the internet.
I agree the articial wait stuff is annoying but, blockbuster is playing good now, you just watch and see what happens when they can no longer subsidize their online service with there brick and mortar stores. What it comes down to is that they can take losses and just soak up cash from there already existing business. They aren't commited to offering you this service, they are commited to burying netflix and then they will go back to the brick and mortar which is WAY more profitable. Watch and see..
Apple is dying, Tivo is dying, BSD is dying, netflix is dying etc etc etc... /me is tired of hearing this kind of nonsense.
I call one big bullshit on this whole mentality. MS and Windows will one day go away. Whether or not linux will still be around by then is up for debate but to suggest somehting will never go away is a pretty foolish thing to do. Hell you can't even say that about the sun, and to suggest it about microsoft is incredibly short sighted.
Personally my opinion is that the current way we do computing will be gone in 30 years. We will be looking back at this time period going, man what the hell where they thinking using those primitive things. And as such an OS like we see it today will be completely obsolete, destroying MS mindshare and market share in one fell swoop.
All I have to say is that Apple documentation is very bad and mostly unhelpful. Learning Cocoa/Objective-C from oreilly is near useless. In fact I did 2 examples from it following its directions and havent used it since. Learning Objective-c and Cocoa to the point where an advanced reference is what you need is borderline trivial. I suggest not bothering with introductory texts and simply grab some examples work through them, muck around with adding a few controls to them and you will be all set.
Really, if you know C you will have no problem moving to Objective-C, and Cocoa is in my opinion very very intuitive making MFC look like a bastard child.
See I think your making broad baseless assumptions. This priest is the only one at said college that I had a positive experience with. Most that I dealt with were in fact worse than "normal" individuals and I frequently butted heads with them on a variety of issues. I find it odd that you would think them capable of understanding logic/analytical thought because of theological training when every indication for me was that the opposite was true. I've found that most priests are masters of moving arguments away from logic as logic/analysis is generally against the grain of what they are trying to prove simply because no logical conclusion can be formed that proves or disproves Gods existance. Mostly logic/anaylsis can be used to show why arguments from other side are flawed, but that doesnt prove one way or the other whats "true".
There are plenty of perfectly reasonably professors out there where this is not the case.
Example: I went to a catholic college and had to take several theology courses. A priest taught my Morality class. As an atheist, my mid term paper was basically an elaborate argument against the existence of God and why belief in God is not necessary for a person to be ethical and live a "moral" lifestyle. I was the only student in the class who received a perfect score on the midterm. One of the comments on my paper was: "You have adequately defended against every rebuttal I could readily come up with, however, I disagree."
There are two ways to get the grade by "knowing your professor" one is to know what they want to hear and give it to them. And the second is to know their objections and address them. Personally I find arguing a contrarian opinion and succeeding to be much more rewarding than a mere A.
I liken it to my fear that every perl script i ever write will be exactly the same. But I have to type it over again from scratch each time. What it amounts to is that doing the same thing day in and day out is boring.
It also has to do with once you are "typecast" the number of roles you are offered greatly diminishes, and if for some reason it becomes popular to not have this type of character in movies or tv shows your shit out of luck.
Overall I'm not impressed with your comment as I think its largely irrelevant/innaccurate. This snippet I take particular issue, when you send them some hardware, they ask you on the phone "is the data backed up or do we need to do that?" They make a note in your case and bam they do that for you(they charge you for that).
My experience with Apple is that with AppleCare support is incredible. Direct sales is useless to me as I don't need some rep to tell me what to order, I order that and it appears at the office in a few days, why do i need to talk to somebody?
You make issue of losing the computer for a few days, but any business will/should have backup workstations/loaners for this purpose. If fact I cannot imagine a business so small, that they could afford a IT staff but not have the money to have a spare iBook chilling around for emergencies.
Oh and FYI, 60gb worth of backup space is what ~$30 now(cheap IDE drive that i pop in format, copy files over and rip out in time to send machine out.. before you come back foaming at the mouth this does not violate warranties so your gonna have to complain from a different angle).
Whoa whoa whoa slow down a minute. They were doing revolutionary stuff right from the get go. Hell they were turned down by a number of labels before they got to that point because they all thought it was crap and wouldn't sell.
Quote:"Guitar groups are on the way out, Mr. Epstein." - Dick Rowe head of Decca recording in London.
They had freedom in the beginning to do whatever because people genuinely didn't care and didn't think they were talented or would get anywhere. As much as you can poke fun "Love me do" and "eight days a week" are revolutionary songs. As revolutionary as say "while my guitar gently weeps" and "let it be". In fact without the original boy bandish revolution the later beatles would have never materialized as they built off there earlier musical innovation.
Get MS to use bittorrent to assist in distrobution of patches through the windows update system. Garunteed within 30 days there would be a federal law that makes blocking bit torrent a crime.
Trouble is people are not logically evaluating DRM especially the scheme introduced by Apple with iTMS.
Number one concern of people is if company X goes out of business DRM will make me lose my music. Not so with Apple, you have a fail safe where you can rerip after having burnt that to disk. The whiners complain about how thats a hassle but for pennies a disc why not just burn those once and toss them in some box.
Number two concern of people: DRM is not freedom, INFORMATION SHOULD BE FREE!!! This is not an argument, just mindless chanting of some slogan. This reminds me of a Futurama quote:
Free Waterfall Jr: You can't OWN property man.
Professor: I can but thats because I'm not a penniless hippy.
Sorry but information is and should be property to respect the authors that create it. Whether or not the RIAA is abusive is another issue, what is important is that I can have something to show for my hard work. Whether I want to give it away or sell it should be entirely up to me.
Now back to DRM... I don't care about DRM on my stuff just so long as I can use it how I want. If I can burn it to a CD, put it on portable music device, listen to it on my computers, and there is little risk of me losing my content should something happen to the company in the future. Apple satisfies all these conditions, the pundits of theft and "freedom" are only mindlessly fighting against it because DRM is to them synonymous with evil(crap you mean I actually have to pay for something, wtf?).
If image is what you are primarily concerned with you have answered your own question: Why does apple, traditionally the company of great expense an zealous fanboys, suddenly have such mass market appeal, compared to its competitors?
I would like to note however that Apple is not succeeding on image alone. Interface and usability go along way.
Why do people act like Apple was the first people to make mp3 players?
Before Apple came out with the ipod mp3 players weren't number one on little kids christmas/birthday lists. Apple made a very good product, they made it not suck(like every other mp3 player out there) and they showed people that devices did not have to be ugly and awkward pieces of junk.
Wow this is perhaps the most genius post ever, why didn't we think of just doing it properly first instead of spending decades improving technology step by step???
Surely your revelation will usher in a new era of computing. Hell before this we hadn't even been thinking thanks fsterman, thanks.
WARNING: Comment may include sarcasm in reply to a horribly naive and foolish post.
God forbid us feeble nerds be subjected to the lifting of a small amount of weight.
How? God speaking to you is not sufficient proof, hundreds of people suffer from delusions of people existing and talking to them without ever existing. Rather than discuss this in depth I'll just tell you to go see "A Beautiful Mind".
I wonder if some religious people realize they turn more people away from the faith with such acts than they shield. Its really a major issue when you're trying to help with your fellow man's eternal salvation!
Are you suggesting that I do not have a right or I am too stupid to decide on my own that I do not want salvation through your methods. The arrogance of you and your religion is staggering and offensive. You presume that you are right and that all others are wrong and that the only way to happiness is through your life choices. This attitude is disgusting, intolerant and hate filled.
The Smithsonian museum of Natural history has dinosaurs and talks about the world's age in billions of years. Maybe the world is only 6000 years old made to look billions
This argument is perhaps the most cowardly and ignorant stance someone could take. First off it lacks any credibility. Its sole purpose is to stop meaningful discussion because you have been argued into a corner and have no way to further argue your position. The only reason for this argument is to stifle discussion and take a stance that CANNOT be proven/disproven.
We cannot allow such foolish and faulty reasoning to be presented as reasonable because you devalue thought and discussion when you peddle this filth.
Hell we shouldn't let poor people go to school or read books because they could be more aptly spending there time toiling in spice mines.
How about you STFU cus you are a troll, this is flamebait and above all stupid(too bad there isnt -1 stupid option in the modding, i would have modded instead of ranting).