Ruby on Rails was a fortuitous side-effect of the design process (genius?) at 37 Signals. It wasn't an open-source project, it was a project that became open-sourced. To phrase another way: it wasn't innovative open-source, it was innovation which was open-sourced.
That's true. I remember reading an article way back when about performance comparisons (on the same hardware) between Linux and OS X, using MySQL. The determination was that Linux was significantly faster at heavy write operations than OS X was. It didn't take too long for someone to point out that on OS X, the writes were written synchronously, 'killing performance', compared to Linux, which transparently write-cached despite the software requesting otherwise.
It's sad when people think that performance > stability. Benchmarks don't reflect this nearly often enough.
I've seen this before in AD groups. Windows will do a 'delayed write' of a file, then let you know later on if the write failed. Great if you're copying files up, terrible if you're saving a document while quitting the application and you get told 30 seconds later that your data was lost.
Planned obsolescence and crufty undocumented file formats are perfectly in Microsoft's favor For an example of crufy file formats in action, read about Word 98's classic security hole - including random chunks of data/disk into its files. Present in Office 98 for Mac, as well as Office 97 for Windows, and older Mac versions (As far back as 6).
Then again, I suppose this sort of thing isn't guaranteed against with ODF, since anyone can write a terrible parser for any file format. Microsoft is just really good at it, that's all.
Microsoft's Xbox representative Major Nelson assures us it's not meant to 'annoy' users of the service, but to provide additional value to Gold subscribers. In other words, 'We divided XBL into Silver and Gold, but Gold wasn't worth the money, so instead of adding value to Gold, we're stripping it from Silver.
This is the belief that killed the Polish immigrant who couldn't speak English and was frustrated enough at Customs' ineptitude to try to break through the glass wall separating him from his mother.
To clarify: the glass wall that did not directly separate him from his mother at any time, and which, at the time of his frustrated outburst, did not separate him from her at all, since she had gone home several hours earlier after being told repeatedly by airport staff that her son was not in the airport.
Also, the man had already passed through customs; in fact, he was waiting on the far side of the door between the arrival area (where his mother had told him to wait) and the main part of the airport (where his mother waited for him).
I'm not trying to say that his tasering was a good (or even reasonable) course of action, but people seem to be screaming bloody murder because the police just waltzed on into the airport, looked for the first foreigner they could find, and tased him at the first excuse; in reality, he had been waiting there for eight hours because his mother told him to wait in the wrong place and airport staff were too lazy/incompetent to find him. By the time the police arrived and enacted their screwup, everyone else had done theirs already; if they hadn't, he'd still be alive.
And which could be covered by a "cinematic" sequence, such as HL2 has. Another G-Man-in-the-face sequence, even. No reason to also freeze the whole world with a "loading" screen with nothing happening, no motion, no sound, no even a progress bar.
I read something (no source, sorry) about the Playstation 2 which said that the PS2 has a technique that developers could take advantage of which essentially provided three 'tracks' in a FMV - the video track, the audio track, and a 'data' track. The idea was that while the PS2 was playing the FMV (which takes less than the DVD's full bandwidth) it would also be caching the next level. Thus every FMV was (for good developers) an opportunity to cache everything you needed, and help eliminate load times.
Brilliant idea, I always thought. Doesn't work in this era of in-game cutscenes though.
My guess is that the dvd app paused when it lost focus, or got minimized?
The reality is, this feature is easily turned off, even if you want to leave UAC on.
Type 'secpol.msc' into the start menu's "search/run" text area, go to Local Policies->Security options and change User Account Control: Switch to secure desktop when prompting for elevation to be disabled. Oh! Well if it's that easy, he can just call up his wife and tell her how stupid they both were for not noticing this right away and fixing it beforehand...
Honestly, if the fix for 'bad UI' is 'go dig around in the system for an obscure setting to disable', that's bad engineering.
Storage: | 4 or 8 gigs (fixed). | Unlimited. The E70 can use hot-swappable 2 GB mini SD cards, so you can have as much storage as you want.
People keep waving this one around, but honestly, I'd rather have 8G of internal storage than fumble with a handful of mini-SD cards at $75 apiece.
Can customize ringtones with your own mp3s: | NO | YES
Which you can actually do.
Can record video: | NO | YES
I dunno about this one... my current cellphone can record video, but I never use the feature, and I've never found a situation where I might want to. Is this really that commonly-used of a feature?
Screen turns into a smudgy piece of shit after a few minutes of use: | YES | NO
All the people I've spoken to that have one or have used one disagree on this, and the iPhones I've used didn't display that problem while I was using them. Seriously, do you people not wash your hands?
Can send MMS messages: | NO | YES
I've never used MMS messages either; I frankly don't see the use, since most cellphones have such shitty cameras that you can't tell what it is you're looking at anyway, and most have such shitty screens that you can't make out any detail on the pictures people send you.
You have to send your phone to Apple when the battery dies and risk getting your phone lost, stolen, or damaged in transit: Yes. No.
Judging from my experience with a third-gen iPod, this is going to take years, by which time the iPhone you have now won't be worth anything and a new, fancy version will be out. The battery on my 3Gen iPod did eventually die, but my now-fiancée, who has no technical background, replaced the battery herself.
Holds your phone hostage to Apple for new software updates because Apple won't allow everyone to develop applications for it: | YES | NO
Apple is releasing an SDK, and in the meantime, there are tons of homebrew apps.
Voice dialing: | NO | YES
Thank god! My current phone has this feature, and Motorola thinks it's so amazing and important that they assign a physical button to it, which I always end up hitting inadvertantly. I then have to wait for their shitty interface to load so I can cancel out of it and use my damn phone. I've tried to actually use it, but apparently despite supporting tons of features of the phone (not just calling), it can never fucking understand me.
Can record voice: | NO | YES
This is a feature on my old phone, which I've given to my fiancée. She always ends up hitting the (permanant, physical) button while on calls, and her phone's memory fills up with random clips of conversations.
Instant messaging: No. Yes.
This one I'll give him, but considering other phones I've used also don't have this feature, it's not that big of a deal for me. Besides, I'm sure we'll see a homebrew Adium soon enough.
Can't do fundamental tasks like copy & paste text: Yes. No. Double negative, bitches!
Nothing to say about this, except having never used this feature before on my phone (which has it, and is a pain to type on).
A friend of mine is getting DoS'ed for some reason (http://whatsmyip.org/), and he couldn't figure out why, or what to do about it. I suggested scanning the apache logs and firewalling off any IPs that make too many requests, dropping the packets so the application never sees it. Looking through his logs, though, I saw something interesting - the vast majority of connections to his site were from a user-agent of 'Java 1.6' (or somesuch). Configuring Apache to ignore requests from that user-agent resulted in his site becoming responsive again - all of the 'bad' clients were Java clients. Go figure.
I still think he should use that as a basis for firewalling IPs off, but I guess it doesn't matter in the end.
In university, I moved in with a roommate into a 'rear suite' (the street number was 669 1/2) which had recently been renovated, but which had also spent a great deal of time uninhabited. As a result, the utilities had been shut off, since no one was using them. 'Utilities' in this case, however, refers only to electricity, since in this area (Fredericton, NB), any heat sources other than electricity and oil (which would be hauled to your home in a tank truck) was unthinkable. Natural gas was 'too new' and 'dangerous', and how could it be trusted, even though the rest of the world has been using it for decades?
So the place is heated by electricity, and we move in literally 20 minutes after seeing the place (my roommate was on his way into town with a moving truck while I was apartment hunting) so we don't have time to get the electricity turned on. Furthermore, it will take a day or two for NB Hydro to get a guy out there to do the job. So, now we have a poorly-insulated (despite renovations) apartment with no heat, no electricity, no lights, etc. It's basically a box with doors at this point.
Except - what's this! - the electrical sockets on the front wall of the unit, the wall that we shared with the house itself, were apparently on the house's breakers. Curiously enough, this was where we had decided to plug our computers in already. Well, problem solved.
After arranging furniture, setting up two tables, plugging in our switch, computers, monitors, etc., and loading up Serious Sam, we found ourselves in a much more comfortable situation until we could get the heat turned back on.
Moral of the story: never underestimate the capability of AMD, ATI, and Samsung to make your December more comfortable.
Time Machine looks like a simplified interface to something like Netbackup or (more likely) Miranda to me. It's a handy thing to have natively but I was less than happy about how it works out of the box: in short it claims to take weekly full backups plus incremental changes every ten minutes.
Time Machine keeps:
Hourly backups for the past 24 hours
Daily backups for the past month
Weekly backups until your backup disk is full
When the disk is full, it deletes the least recent backup(s) as necessary to complete the most recent backup. You may optionally receive a warning when this is about to occur.
The weekly full backups are taken until the disk is full (Apple's words). I can see that a lot of people are going to get caught out by this: on my Mac Mini the full backup came to 44Gb, which on an empty 300Gb external drive (which seems to be about the most common size sold in Maplin and PCWorld these days) will come to five or six weeks of full backups.
Because OS X now supports directory hardlinks, it is possible to keep full backups while only taking the disk space for new changes. I plugged in my TM disk after about a week last night, and it backed up 1.8 G of stuff. A few minutes later, it backed up 52kb of stuff. A few minutes after that, 15 megs of stuff. Each of these directories looks, when you browse it in the FS, as though it takes up the entirety of the space required for a full backup, but in actuality, it only takes up the space required for an incremental backup. I pastebinned an example of this last night. the 'sparsebundle' file is a disk image containing the directories indicated. Note that despite having three backups of 9.1G, one of 1.8G, and one in-progress of 5.3G, the total size of the disk image is a whopping 12G.
Thus, we can see that backing up your 44G mini will take 44G initially, and then each additional backup will only take the space that a delta would require - if you change 200M of files, your next backup takes an additional 200M from the drive, not an additional 44G.
There's no indication of what it does then: does it overwrite the oldest backup? Are you prompted to delete the oldest backup? Does it suggest you go and buy another drive? In an enterprise environment decisions would have to be made about what was kept and for what duration: you wouldn't keep everything indefinitely.
As mentioned above, it deletes the eldest, optionally prompting you.
I'm going to have to see if it's possible to write some usable rules this weekend: off the top of my head, keep music and video and photos and the like backed up regularly and maybe only back the OS and applications up periodically, in the case of the OS particularly before the 10.5.1 update as I have bad feelings about it. I think there might well be some wailing and screaming from people who have just switched it on in a few weeks time when their external drive is full...
I don't see that situation happening for months, possibly years depending on their usage patterns, and the people who enable it and have it backing up their 5G torrents left and right will soon learn to add ~/Torrents to their exclude list.
BTW, worthy tip for anyone who's looking to enable Time Machine - exclude ~/Library/Caches. Seriously, it's gigs of crap for nothing, and it can all be regenerated when needed. I hardly need TM to back up my Safari browser history.
At least one (where I was able to talk with people) said they had to buy special software to view the images.
Well, you do need 'special software' - you need a radiological image viewer. You need to 'buy' one in the same sense that you need to 'buy' server licenses if you're going to run a fileserver - the vast majority of people do so.
In all honesty, the Mayo Clinic can afford to spend $20k on a dedicated (and custom) workstation for computerized tomography, and you know what? They should. The system is built for it, optimized for it, and is designed with it in mind.
Do you NEED one? No. If you're a radiologist starting your own practice, you can get by with an iMac or Mac Pro and a copy of OsiriX, and you can do diagnostic imaging perfectly well. What a specialized workstation for one of these systems gets you is a customized input designed for the task at hand (not just a keyboard and mouse), tools that can make use of non-standard metadata embedded in the images by the scanner (this is allowed by the DICOM standard, since all the necessary metadata is put into standard tags already), customized displays, custom hardware, and so on.
So do you *need* need a custom workstation or custom software? No, of course not. Why you *need* them is for the extras that make them $20,000 workstations instead of $1500 workstations - not to mention enterprise-level support.
That $4,000,000 MRI can still send to my $400 Mac Mini just fine though. Just... don't leave it in the room while you're acquiring.
secure system that doesn't do what needs to be done is worthless. Is qmail secure? Yes. Does it do what people need an MTA to do? No. Is it maintainable? No.
To me, qmail is akin to openBSD - secure by default, useless by default. The only difference is that with OpenBSD, it's easy to add 'functionality' via installing apps, whereas with qmail, you have to recompile every time you need a new feature, and doing so disclaims any guarantee of security.
Sorry to pick on you, since this is a very common talking point, but why? Both conditions -- Crohn's and Erectile Dysfunction -- degrade the quality of life. It's not even clear to me that Crohn's degrades it more than ED. Imagine never being able to experience any kind of sexual pleasure. Most people would do an awful lot to avoid that. If I personally had to make the choice, I'd rather have intestinal surgery every few years than lose all ability to experience sexual pleasure for the rest of my life.
If only it were that simple.
I have Crohn's Disease, and I've been incredibly lucky. Lucky in part because I live in Canada, where I don't have to pay medical expenses for the two weeks I was in the hospital when I was first diagnosed. Lucky that I didn't have to pay more expenses the second time I was in the hospital, two months later, when the drugs they gave me, which barely worked in the first place, stopped working entirely.
Not being able to experience sexual pleasure? Imagine not being able to eat. When I was in the hospital, they had me on a strict diet; by 'strict', I mean that they would give me bland jell-o and chicken broth. One of each per day.
I couldn't drink coffee or tea without agonizing pain. Same with milk. I couldn't eat anything else. No chips from the vending machine, no pizza, no rice, no pasta, no meat, no potatoes. All I could eat without making my condition dramatically worse was chicken broth and jell-o.
Not that it didn't have its effects. Within moments of starting to eat either of them, I got sick. It felt like food poisoning; if you've ever eaten an egg salad sandwich that you forgot about in a warm place for twelve hours then ate anyway, that's what it felt like to drink the broth and eat the jell-o. Still, doing so was survivable - it was only hurting my stomach, which was healthy, and not my intestines, which were devastated.
When I first went to the hospital, you could see - not just feel, but SEE - the inflammation in my intestines. It was protruding very obviously from my abdomen. It felt like a velvet-lined baseball. Soft to touch, but firm when you did. And it hurt. It felt like appendicitis, and all the doctors I spoke with (until my CT scan) thought so too.
Now I have to be careful what I do and what I eat. I can eat real food now, but not all of it. I have to severely cut back on pasta and rice, and I can't eat potatoes without an incredible amount of pain. I can't run. I can usually walk without much pain. Walking uphill provides no such comforts. I can walk on the beach outside my apartment, but if my foot slips (likely) and I twist wrong, it hurts, and will continue to do so for the rest of the day.
I can't have sex. I mean, I can, but the very nature of intercourse (movement which changes direction, friction, etc.) exacerbates my condition. My fiancée and I occasionally indulge, but when we do, the pain comes back for several days; at its worst, it stayed for two weeks, and limited my mobility to that of the 60-year-olds I routinely see on transit or at the mall.
I can't stand for long periods of time. This makes public transit uncomfortable, at best. Unfortunately, while people will gladly give up their seat to a 60-year-old with a bad hip, no one will offer (or concede) their seat to a healthy-looking 25-year-old male.
My doctors tell me that I have a few options, none of which are likely to work any better than the ones we have now, but hopefully they won't kill me as fast as the medication I'm on, letting me live long enough until better treatments are devised. My doctor has explicitly told me that I should not expect to get better. There is no cure, only treatment, and I will likely have this until I die, which may be sooner than one would expect.
Surgery is not an option, because someone in my condition (which, incidentally, is 'otherwise healthy') could certainly have the part of their small intestines removed, but there's an 80% chance that I would
The health care equipment market is full of proprietary lockins that prevent health care providers from interoperating equipment and software. For example, certain MRI results can only be viewed via expensive proprietary software.
Radiology equipment built any time recently will conform to the DICOM standard for storing, transmitting, receiving, and printing radiological imaging data (Wikipedia reference). On the radiologist's end, you can use software that is sold by the various large-scale healthcare systems providers, such as McKesson, GE, Philips, and so on, you can use a third-party viewer such as eFilm, or you can even grab a copy of the open-source OsiriX viewer for your Mac. All of these, including the free option, will interoperate with any of the others. If you doubt the industry's demand for interoperability, check out the IHE Connectathon, and note that all the big names, and the little ones, do their best to attend, find, and fix bugs like crazy. Successfully passing all the tests is quite a badge of honor among the programmers that attend.
Some implementations may have bugs, quirks, or might screw something up, or they might only implement part of the standard, but when hasn't that been the case? Still, to say that interoperability doesn't exist, or even to say that it's not a high-priority design goal (and huge selling feature) indicates a dramatic lack of understanding about the industry and the companies involved. When all you need to do diagnostic imaging from an MRI is a Macbook and an ethernet cable, you can't honestly say that proprietary software or lockin is an issue.
Cons: even with its current pile of money (iPhone and Ipod are two very successful products after all), I am not sure Apple has enough money to buy Adobe. Not to mention Microsoft would certainly file an anti-trust suit. It also raises all kind of legal snafus in Europe for instance, which would certainly frown upon it.
Adobe's market capitalization is $27.47bn USD. Apple (as of their October quarterly earnings report) has $15.4bn in cash on hand. That's enough to buy a controlling interest and still have 1.4bn left over (which would make no sense at all).
What they could do is a straight stock swap, giving Adobe some of Apple's share, with Apple's market cap at $163bn or so right now. Affordable, but not practical.
One complaint of just about any book that attempts to teach a new language or technology is a presumed level of expertise by the authors.
I'm going to dispute this assertion. I'm sick and tired of browsing through programming books at Chapters, picking up a copy of 'Advanced Python: Things that Guido van Rossam Doesn't Know' and having it start with four chapters on 'What is a programming language?' and 'What is a variable?', treating the user like a simpleton for the majority of the book, before spending three footnotes in the appendix mentioning 'highly advanced' topics like writing C modules.
I want to see MORE of what the reviewer is apparently complaining about. I want to see a Python book that doesn't assume I've never heard of programming before. Who does this? Do people give random programming language books as gifts? My family members are smart enough not to grab a random book off the shelf, but I suppose I can't assume this for everyone.
If you're teaching me something, teach me that something. If I need to know a technology beforehand, then hey, here's a thought - refer me to another book and tell me to buy that one first. If there isn't one then write two and make twice the money, but don't make me pay $79.99 for a book that spends 2/3 of its time telling me the origins of functional programming.
Perhaps, but while the ease of use is handy, it sets up a POP account for you automatically if you tell it to do things on its own... I dunno if that will change with IMAP support being added, but I doubt it.
Downloading the KOffice builds for OS X is a staggering experience; in order to install KOffice, I need 692 MB of libraries and 526 MB of application code, for a grand total of 1.2G - for an office suite?
In comparison, iWork '08 (the entire installation media) is about 583 MB, and Office 2003 (admittedly a little outdated, but it works surprisingly well) takes up a shocking 654 MB. Granted that iWork has 'only' presentations, word processing, and spreadsheets (though my personal favorite implementations of all three), and Office 2003 isn't universal, but I still don't think that remedying either situation would cause those applications to double in size.
Compare that with OpenOffice, whose 135 MB download on OS X is their third-largest, with the SPARC Solaris build edging them out by 2 MB and the Linux x86 RPM by 1 MB; or, compare with NeoOffice, whose (admittedly non-UniversaL) download tallies about 134 MB.
I'll weight until I actually try it to determine whether its speed is notable, but its size is astonishing... I hope that this is as a result of debugging symbols, unoptimized builds, or some other reason, but I'm not convinced that they can knock off the 1 GB that they'd need to match OpenOffice, or the 600M they'd need to match the other Mac office suites.
Monetary Units: None. In fact there are three freely convertible currencies in the Galaxy, but none of them count. The Altairian Dollar has recently collapsed, the Flainian Pobble Bead is only exchangable for other Flainian Pobble Beads, and the Trigantic Pu has its own very special problems. Its exchange rate of eight Nighis to one Pu is simple enough, but since a Ningi is a triangular rubber coin six thousand eight hundred miles along each side, no one has ever collected enough to own one Pu. Ningis are not negotiable currencies, because the Galactibanks refuse to deal in fiddling small change. From this basic premise it is very simple that Glactibanks are also the products of a deranged imagination.
Hear hear. I'm getting more than a little tired of Linux migrants who complain over and over that 'everything's different on OS X' or 'why did Apple have to change everything', when OS X is more UNIXy than Linux and its GNU userspace ever was. Don't get me wrong, I grew up on Debian and the GNU userspace, but at least I'm aware that it's not the original gold standard of compliance.
Developing as a moral human being requires growth and maturity, not (for example) flogging yourself whenever you have naughty thoughts about women you are not married to.
To my understanding, naughty thoughts about women is the number one catalyst for flogging oneself...
Slashdot Mirror
Ruby on Rails was a fortuitous side-effect of the design process (genius?) at 37 Signals. It wasn't an open-source project, it was a project that became open-sourced. To phrase another way: it wasn't innovative open-source, it was innovation which was open-sourced.
That's awfully nice of them. Now if they'll just do the same to their other offerings, the world would be a better place.
Ah well, one thing at a time.
That's true. I remember reading an article way back when about performance comparisons (on the same hardware) between Linux and OS X, using MySQL. The determination was that Linux was significantly faster at heavy write operations than OS X was. It didn't take too long for someone to point out that on OS X, the writes were written synchronously, 'killing performance', compared to Linux, which transparently write-cached despite the software requesting otherwise.
It's sad when people think that performance > stability. Benchmarks don't reflect this nearly often enough.
I've seen this before in AD groups. Windows will do a 'delayed write' of a file, then let you know later on if the write failed. Great if you're copying files up, terrible if you're saving a document while quitting the application and you get told 30 seconds later that your data was lost.
Example: http://cdslash.net/temp/images/datalost.png
Quite frustrating. I've yet to lose serious amounts of data so far, but I'm sure it'll happen.
http://www.macintouch.com/o98security.html
Then again, I suppose this sort of thing isn't guaranteed against with ODF, since anyone can write a terrible parser for any file format. Microsoft is just really good at it, that's all.
To clarify: the glass wall that did not directly separate him from his mother at any time, and which, at the time of his frustrated outburst, did not separate him from her at all, since she had gone home several hours earlier after being told repeatedly by airport staff that her son was not in the airport.
Also, the man had already passed through customs; in fact, he was waiting on the far side of the door between the arrival area (where his mother had told him to wait) and the main part of the airport (where his mother waited for him).
I'm not trying to say that his tasering was a good (or even reasonable) course of action, but people seem to be screaming bloody murder because the police just waltzed on into the airport, looked for the first foreigner they could find, and tased him at the first excuse; in reality, he had been waiting there for eight hours because his mother told him to wait in the wrong place and airport staff were too lazy/incompetent to find him. By the time the police arrived and enacted their screwup, everyone else had done theirs already; if they hadn't, he'd still be alive.
I read something (no source, sorry) about the Playstation 2 which said that the PS2 has a technique that developers could take advantage of which essentially provided three 'tracks' in a FMV - the video track, the audio track, and a 'data' track. The idea was that while the PS2 was playing the FMV (which takes less than the DVD's full bandwidth) it would also be caching the next level. Thus every FMV was (for good developers) an opportunity to cache everything you needed, and help eliminate load times.
Brilliant idea, I always thought. Doesn't work in this era of in-game cutscenes though.
The reality is, this feature is easily turned off, even if you want to leave UAC on.
Type 'secpol.msc' into the start menu's "search/run" text area, go to
Local Policies->Security options and change
User Account Control: Switch to secure desktop when prompting for elevation to be disabled. Oh! Well if it's that easy, he can just call up his wife and tell her how stupid they both were for not noticing this right away and fixing it beforehand...
Honestly, if the fix for 'bad UI' is 'go dig around in the system for an obscure setting to disable', that's bad engineering.
People keep waving this one around, but honestly, I'd rather have 8G of internal storage than fumble with a handful of mini-SD cards at $75 apiece.
Which you can actually do.
I dunno about this one... my current cellphone can record video, but I never use the feature, and I've never found a situation where I might want to. Is this really that commonly-used of a feature?
All the people I've spoken to that have one or have used one disagree on this, and the iPhones I've used didn't display that problem while I was using them. Seriously, do you people not wash your hands?
I've never used MMS messages either; I frankly don't see the use, since most cellphones have such shitty cameras that you can't tell what it is you're looking at anyway, and most have such shitty screens that you can't make out any detail on the pictures people send you.
Judging from my experience with a third-gen iPod, this is going to take years, by which time the iPhone you have now won't be worth anything and a new, fancy version will be out. The battery on my 3Gen iPod did eventually die, but my now-fiancée, who has no technical background, replaced the battery herself.
Apple is releasing an SDK, and in the meantime, there are tons of homebrew apps.
Thank god! My current phone has this feature, and Motorola thinks it's so amazing and important that they assign a physical button to it, which I always end up hitting inadvertantly. I then have to wait for their shitty interface to load so I can cancel out of it and use my damn phone. I've tried to actually use it, but apparently despite supporting tons of features of the phone (not just calling), it can never fucking understand me.
This is a feature on my old phone, which I've given to my fiancée. She always ends up hitting the (permanant, physical) button while on calls, and her phone's memory fills up with random clips of conversations.
This one I'll give him, but considering other phones I've used also don't have this feature, it's not that big of a deal for me. Besides, I'm sure we'll see a homebrew Adium soon enough.
Nothing to say about this, except having never used this feature before on my phone (which has it, and is a pain to type on).
A friend of mine is getting DoS'ed for some reason (http://whatsmyip.org/), and he couldn't figure out why, or what to do about it. I suggested scanning the apache logs and firewalling off any IPs that make too many requests, dropping the packets so the application never sees it. Looking through his logs, though, I saw something interesting - the vast majority of connections to his site were from a user-agent of 'Java 1.6' (or somesuch). Configuring Apache to ignore requests from that user-agent resulted in his site becoming responsive again - all of the 'bad' clients were Java clients. Go figure.
I still think he should use that as a basis for firewalling IPs off, but I guess it doesn't matter in the end.
In university, I moved in with a roommate into a 'rear suite' (the street number was 669 1/2) which had recently been renovated, but which had also spent a great deal of time uninhabited. As a result, the utilities had been shut off, since no one was using them. 'Utilities' in this case, however, refers only to electricity, since in this area (Fredericton, NB), any heat sources other than electricity and oil (which would be hauled to your home in a tank truck) was unthinkable. Natural gas was 'too new' and 'dangerous', and how could it be trusted, even though the rest of the world has been using it for decades?
So the place is heated by electricity, and we move in literally 20 minutes after seeing the place (my roommate was on his way into town with a moving truck while I was apartment hunting) so we don't have time to get the electricity turned on. Furthermore, it will take a day or two for NB Hydro to get a guy out there to do the job. So, now we have a poorly-insulated (despite renovations) apartment with no heat, no electricity, no lights, etc. It's basically a box with doors at this point.
Except - what's this! - the electrical sockets on the front wall of the unit, the wall that we shared with the house itself, were apparently on the house's breakers. Curiously enough, this was where we had decided to plug our computers in already. Well, problem solved.
After arranging furniture, setting up two tables, plugging in our switch, computers, monitors, etc., and loading up Serious Sam, we found ourselves in a much more comfortable situation until we could get the heat turned back on.
Moral of the story: never underestimate the capability of AMD, ATI, and Samsung to make your December more comfortable.
Time Machine keeps:
When the disk is full, it deletes the least recent backup(s) as necessary to complete the most recent backup. You may optionally receive a warning when this is about to occur.
The weekly full backups are taken until the disk is full (Apple's words). I can see that a lot of people are going to get caught out by this: on my Mac Mini the full backup came to 44Gb, which on an empty 300Gb external drive (which seems to be about the most common size sold in Maplin and PCWorld these days) will come to five or six weeks of full backups.Because OS X now supports directory hardlinks, it is possible to keep full backups while only taking the disk space for new changes. I plugged in my TM disk after about a week last night, and it backed up 1.8 G of stuff. A few minutes later, it backed up 52kb of stuff. A few minutes after that, 15 megs of stuff. Each of these directories looks, when you browse it in the FS, as though it takes up the entirety of the space required for a full backup, but in actuality, it only takes up the space required for an incremental backup. I pastebinned an example of this last night. the 'sparsebundle' file is a disk image containing the directories indicated. Note that despite having three backups of 9.1G, one of 1.8G, and one in-progress of 5.3G, the total size of the disk image is a whopping 12G.
Thus, we can see that backing up your 44G mini will take 44G initially, and then each additional backup will only take the space that a delta would require - if you change 200M of files, your next backup takes an additional 200M from the drive, not an additional 44G.
There's no indication of what it does then: does it overwrite the oldest backup? Are you prompted to delete the oldest backup? Does it suggest you go and buy another drive? In an enterprise environment decisions would have to be made about what was kept and for what duration: you wouldn't keep everything indefinitely.As mentioned above, it deletes the eldest, optionally prompting you.
I'm going to have to see if it's possible to write some usable rules this weekend: off the top of my head, keep music and video and photos and the like backed up regularly and maybe only back the OS and applications up periodically, in the case of the OS particularly before the 10.5.1 update as I have bad feelings about it. I think there might well be some wailing and screaming from people who have just switched it on in a few weeks time when their external drive is full...I don't see that situation happening for months, possibly years depending on their usage patterns, and the people who enable it and have it backing up their 5G torrents left and right will soon learn to add ~/Torrents to their exclude list.
BTW, worthy tip for anyone who's looking to enable Time Machine - exclude ~/Library/Caches. Seriously, it's gigs of crap for nothing, and it can all be regenerated when needed. I hardly need TM to back up my Safari browser history.
Well, you do need 'special software' - you need a radiological image viewer. You need to 'buy' one in the same sense that you need to 'buy' server licenses if you're going to run a fileserver - the vast majority of people do so.
In all honesty, the Mayo Clinic can afford to spend $20k on a dedicated (and custom) workstation for computerized tomography, and you know what? They should. The system is built for it, optimized for it, and is designed with it in mind.
Do you NEED one? No. If you're a radiologist starting your own practice, you can get by with an iMac or Mac Pro and a copy of OsiriX, and you can do diagnostic imaging perfectly well. What a specialized workstation for one of these systems gets you is a customized input designed for the task at hand (not just a keyboard and mouse), tools that can make use of non-standard metadata embedded in the images by the scanner (this is allowed by the DICOM standard, since all the necessary metadata is put into standard tags already), customized displays, custom hardware, and so on.
So do you *need* need a custom workstation or custom software? No, of course not. Why you *need* them is for the extras that make them $20,000 workstations instead of $1500 workstations - not to mention enterprise-level support.
That $4,000,000 MRI can still send to my $400 Mac Mini just fine though. Just... don't leave it in the room while you're acquiring.
secure system that doesn't do what needs to be done is worthless. Is qmail secure? Yes. Does it do what people need an MTA to do? No. Is it maintainable? No.
To me, qmail is akin to openBSD - secure by default, useless by default. The only difference is that with OpenBSD, it's easy to add 'functionality' via installing apps, whereas with qmail, you have to recompile every time you need a new feature, and doing so disclaims any guarantee of security.
If only it were that simple.
I have Crohn's Disease, and I've been incredibly lucky. Lucky in part because I live in Canada, where I don't have to pay medical expenses for the two weeks I was in the hospital when I was first diagnosed. Lucky that I didn't have to pay more expenses the second time I was in the hospital, two months later, when the drugs they gave me, which barely worked in the first place, stopped working entirely.
Not being able to experience sexual pleasure? Imagine not being able to eat. When I was in the hospital, they had me on a strict diet; by 'strict', I mean that they would give me bland jell-o and chicken broth. One of each per day.
I couldn't drink coffee or tea without agonizing pain. Same with milk. I couldn't eat anything else. No chips from the vending machine, no pizza, no rice, no pasta, no meat, no potatoes. All I could eat without making my condition dramatically worse was chicken broth and jell-o.
Not that it didn't have its effects. Within moments of starting to eat either of them, I got sick. It felt like food poisoning; if you've ever eaten an egg salad sandwich that you forgot about in a warm place for twelve hours then ate anyway, that's what it felt like to drink the broth and eat the jell-o. Still, doing so was survivable - it was only hurting my stomach, which was healthy, and not my intestines, which were devastated.
When I first went to the hospital, you could see - not just feel, but SEE - the inflammation in my intestines. It was protruding very obviously from my abdomen. It felt like a velvet-lined baseball. Soft to touch, but firm when you did. And it hurt. It felt like appendicitis, and all the doctors I spoke with (until my CT scan) thought so too.
Now I have to be careful what I do and what I eat. I can eat real food now, but not all of it. I have to severely cut back on pasta and rice, and I can't eat potatoes without an incredible amount of pain. I can't run. I can usually walk without much pain. Walking uphill provides no such comforts. I can walk on the beach outside my apartment, but if my foot slips (likely) and I twist wrong, it hurts, and will continue to do so for the rest of the day.
I can't have sex. I mean, I can, but the very nature of intercourse (movement which changes direction, friction, etc.) exacerbates my condition. My fiancée and I occasionally indulge, but when we do, the pain comes back for several days; at its worst, it stayed for two weeks, and limited my mobility to that of the 60-year-olds I routinely see on transit or at the mall.
I can't stand for long periods of time. This makes public transit uncomfortable, at best. Unfortunately, while people will gladly give up their seat to a 60-year-old with a bad hip, no one will offer (or concede) their seat to a healthy-looking 25-year-old male.
My doctors tell me that I have a few options, none of which are likely to work any better than the ones we have now, but hopefully they won't kill me as fast as the medication I'm on, letting me live long enough until better treatments are devised. My doctor has explicitly told me that I should not expect to get better. There is no cure, only treatment, and I will likely have this until I die, which may be sooner than one would expect.
Surgery is not an option, because someone in my condition (which, incidentally, is 'otherwise healthy') could certainly have the part of their small intestines removed, but there's an 80% chance that I would
Radiology equipment built any time recently will conform to the DICOM standard for storing, transmitting, receiving, and printing radiological imaging data (Wikipedia reference). On the radiologist's end, you can use software that is sold by the various large-scale healthcare systems providers, such as McKesson, GE, Philips, and so on, you can use a third-party viewer such as eFilm, or you can even grab a copy of the open-source OsiriX viewer for your Mac. All of these, including the free option, will interoperate with any of the others. If you doubt the industry's demand for interoperability, check out the IHE Connectathon, and note that all the big names, and the little ones, do their best to attend, find, and fix bugs like crazy. Successfully passing all the tests is quite a badge of honor among the programmers that attend.
Some implementations may have bugs, quirks, or might screw something up, or they might only implement part of the standard, but when hasn't that been the case? Still, to say that interoperability doesn't exist, or even to say that it's not a high-priority design goal (and huge selling feature) indicates a dramatic lack of understanding about the industry and the companies involved. When all you need to do diagnostic imaging from an MRI is a Macbook and an ethernet cable, you can't honestly say that proprietary software or lockin is an issue.
Adobe's market capitalization is $27.47bn USD. Apple (as of their October quarterly earnings report) has $15.4bn in cash on hand. That's enough to buy a controlling interest and still have 1.4bn left over (which would make no sense at all).
What they could do is a straight stock swap, giving Adobe some of Apple's share, with Apple's market cap at $163bn or so right now. Affordable, but not practical.
I'm going to dispute this assertion. I'm sick and tired of browsing through programming books at Chapters, picking up a copy of 'Advanced Python: Things that Guido van Rossam Doesn't Know' and having it start with four chapters on 'What is a programming language?' and 'What is a variable?', treating the user like a simpleton for the majority of the book, before spending three footnotes in the appendix mentioning 'highly advanced' topics like writing C modules.
I want to see MORE of what the reviewer is apparently complaining about. I want to see a Python book that doesn't assume I've never heard of programming before. Who does this? Do people give random programming language books as gifts? My family members are smart enough not to grab a random book off the shelf, but I suppose I can't assume this for everyone.
If you're teaching me something, teach me that something. If I need to know a technology beforehand, then hey, here's a thought - refer me to another book and tell me to buy that one first. If there isn't one then write two and make twice the money, but don't make me pay $79.99 for a book that spends 2/3 of its time telling me the origins of functional programming.
Perhaps, but while the ease of use is handy, it sets up a POP account for you automatically if you tell it to do things on its own... I dunno if that will change with IMAP support being added, but I doubt it.
Judging from all the hard drives, electronics, and appliances I've ever owned, three years and six days.
I'm not so sure about this...
Downloading the KOffice builds for OS X is a staggering experience; in order to install KOffice, I need 692 MB of libraries and 526 MB of application code, for a grand total of 1.2G - for an office suite?
In comparison, iWork '08 (the entire installation media) is about 583 MB, and Office 2003 (admittedly a little outdated, but it works surprisingly well) takes up a shocking 654 MB. Granted that iWork has 'only' presentations, word processing, and spreadsheets (though my personal favorite implementations of all three), and Office 2003 isn't universal, but I still don't think that remedying either situation would cause those applications to double in size.
Compare that with OpenOffice, whose 135 MB download on OS X is their third-largest, with the SPARC Solaris build edging them out by 2 MB and the Linux x86 RPM by 1 MB; or, compare with NeoOffice, whose (admittedly non-UniversaL) download tallies about 134 MB.
I'll weight until I actually try it to determine whether its speed is notable, but its size is astonishing... I hope that this is as a result of debugging symbols, unoptimized builds, or some other reason, but I'm not convinced that they can knock off the 1 GB that they'd need to match OpenOffice, or the 600M they'd need to match the other Mac office suites.
Still, we'll see...
Hear hear. I'm getting more than a little tired of Linux migrants who complain over and over that 'everything's different on OS X' or 'why did Apple have to change everything', when OS X is more UNIXy than Linux and its GNU userspace ever was. Don't get me wrong, I grew up on Debian and the GNU userspace, but at least I'm aware that it's not the original gold standard of compliance.
To my understanding, naughty thoughts about women is the number one catalyst for flogging oneself...