"Didn't Apple choose Intel over AMD partially because of some of the trusted computing initiatives the former was involved in?"
No, because AMD are every bit as involved with the Trusted Computing Group as Intel, and their forthcoming "Presidio" series will have hardware support for TPM-based storage sealing, secure initialization, and remote attestation (in addition to other trusted computing stuff that isn't TPM-based). Neither vendors' current CPUs have trusted computing support, but both will offer it in their next generation at more or less the same time, so conspiracy buffs will have to find another reason for Apple selecting Intel instead of AMD.
The "dark ages" were over by the 1300s -- indeed, the very phrase is believed to derive from writings by Petrarch in the 1330s when talking about times prior to his own. Note though that opinions of the Early Mediaeval period to which it was later generally applied have been significantly revised during the 20th century, and it is now used by historians (if at all) solely as a reference to a period which is dark to us through a lack of written chronicles, not "dark" in any perjorative sense.
Most _popular_ Western music has always been in major keys, especially if it's meant for dancing to (e.g. waltzes, polkas, square dances, etc.). Same thing for Western folk music, with a few notable exceptions, often due to non-Western influences.
"The length of popular songs has generally decreased over the past few decades"
This is untrue. The standard length of a popular song has been around 3 minutes for a pretty long time, hence the fact that 78 RPM records playing for a maximum of 4 minutes per side of a 12" disk was not considered much of a limitation.
33.33 RPM was first introduced for use with films in the late 1920s because they needed something that could hold the full length of a movie reel on each side (reels generally ran for 11 minutes); it was not however commercially available to the general public until 1947. 45 RPM singles were introduced a couple of years later, primarily to give juke-boxes a greater capacity / space ratio than was possible the older and much bigger 78 RPM disks. Their playing time was limited to around five minutes, which was again considered more than adequate for something aimed at popular music.
"Do you think that Apple just forgot to tell people that they are not actually "buying" music. No. They say "Buy a song", instead of "Buy a license" because they are intentionally misleading the customer"
But to "buy" that music, you need an iTunes store account, and the process of signing up for one presents you with terms and conditions that clearly state (among various other things) how your purchase can (and cannot) be used. Anyone who goes ahead without reading these terms and conditions isn't being misled, as it is (a) the very first step in creating an account, and (b) you cannot move on to subsequent steps without agreeing to it (there are two buttons marked "Agree" and "Cancel").
"It's MY MUSIC (they did not say "purchase a limited use contract" they said "BUT IT NOW")"
Amazon.com also have a "buy it" button. It does not say "Buy a box and plastic disk together with a limited license to whatever is recorded on said plastic disk". People who take your money at checkouts in record stores also tend to omit phrases such as "You are of course aware that you are only buying the box and plastic disk, not what is recorded on it". But guess what? This does not alter the fact that you have not bought anything more than a box, a piece of plastic, and a limited license.
"They want me to play fair? then they need to play fair by not lying to people anymore over CD's Music and Movies. Advertise you are buying a limited use contract that can be nullified at any time for any reason and then I'll be happy."
There is a "terms of service" statement that you must agree to before creating an iTunes store account. It clearly and unequivocally tells you precisely what you are buying, and what you can do with it. The agreement can also be reviewed at any time by clicking the "terms of service" link at the bottom of iTunes store pages. Apple are not therefore "lying": you have the option to cancel the account creation process if you do not agree to their terms, and thereby avoid buying any limited licenses from the iTunes store.
"their sales will drop so far below ground not even the core of the planet will be ableto look up to see them."
Impedance and resistance are only equivalent for direct current. With alternating current sources (e.g. audio), impedance is a mixture of resistance and reactance.
I remember a real poll which asked men all over the UK how big their penises were. The results suggested that men in London had, on average, penises that are two inches longer than those of men in the North of England, whose average member length ended up being in-line with medical averages which are _based on measurements_ rather than polls.
The pollsters, after analysing said results, concluded that there was obviously a significant regional variation is size which medical data was failing to account for. I on the other hand think it shows something rather different, i.e. that Northerners tended to answer the question a lot more truthfully than their exaggeration-prone London counterparts. There could of course have been excellent reasons for the honesty difference, e.g. questioners in the North being middle-aged men, while those in London were pretty students to whom few men would admit to having a lack in the meat and two veg, department!
Whatever the reasons, it was yet another of those weird British polls that produce silly results, just like exit polls during elections invariably indicate that the party which ends up losing is going to win by a massive landslide, and the Lib-Dems will gain huge numbers of seats.
"What? Didn't you say plug ins for eclipse made eclipse worse then VS"
No. I said that it had advantages and disadvantages, and listed a couple of potential advantages for Eclipse's use of plug-ins for certain pieces of functionality that are integral to VS. I have never said VS is "better than" Eclipse in a general sense, merely that it has a number of advantages for those who want to write software that which will only ever be expected to run on Windows.
"Oh and why would a windows shop use a tool not made by MS?"
For the same reason that Windows shops use Delphi, and TrueBASIC, and Dolphin Smalltalk, and ActiveDeveloper, etc., etc.
"Would a windows shop allow the use of non MS plug ins on VS.NET?"
See above.
"Well DUH!. Eclipse itself is nothing but a platform for installing and managing plug ins. The entire java development environment itself is a plug in."
Once again, you display your total ignorance of VS, otherwise you'd know that it is also a plug-in framework for language development environments: MS supply four, and a variety of others are available from third parties. The more you write, the more obvious it is that you know absolutely nothing about what it is you are criticising.
""No matter which way you pitch it, Java's multi-platform nature makes it difficult to access Windows-specific features without stepping outside Java itself""
"Yeabut there is no real need to. Java has libraries for everything windows does and more."
Well blow me down, a language that supports libraries has libraries! Whatever will they think of next?
NB: this is yet another non-answer, which is to be expected given your demonstrable lack of any actual knowledge about the subject matter.
"Yes the fact that individual features of VS which are shitty and crappy is what makes eclipse so much better then VS."
More stupid statements devoid of an attempt to back them up with something resembling a fact.
"But hey go ahead and take things out of context"
You have no context to be taken out of. Nothing you have written rises above the level of a small child saying "My dad's better than your dad, because your dad's crap".
"I fully expect that from a fan boi."
The saddest thing about this whole thing is that Eclipse and Java are both good enough to merit an advocate who is capable of decent arguments rather than somebody shouting "crap, shit, it can do it, it's got it, crap, shit, zealot, fanboi". There are in fact a number of real negative points about both VS and.NET _today_ when compared to Eclipse and Java that anyone with a real, practical knowledge of both systems could have used to mount an excellent and well-reasoned argument for using the latter rather than the former, so it is therefore unfortunate that in this case at least, Java's advocate is either a bot, or a parrot with an owner who can type.
"Blackcomb is the real next-gen OS. It's supposed to be largely rebuilt."
Which is what they said about Cairo (which turned into Windows/NT 4), and Windows-2000, and Windows-XP, and Longhorn (Windows Vista). Each was supposed to be a true next generation OS which would be completely re-built, and have all sorts of amazing features, because amazing features and complete re-builds of very complex pieces of software are extremely easy to write about, but rather less easy to do.
So the amazing features get lopped off, and the complete re-build becomes "we rewrote these two bits, but it's basically what you already have with some extra stuff nailed on". And the project completion dates slip and slip because they yet again wasted years trying to do a rewrite, found it didn't work with all the legacy stuff, and had to go back to the old code base and try to tack on at least some of the promised amazing features, albeit in a less amazing way.
The really surprising thing is that despite years and years of making _exactly_ the same claims about every forthcoming OS offering, and then failing to fulfil them in exactly the same way they did the last time, people still believe it.
Prediction: Blackcomb will not be a complete rewrite, and in addition to lacking many of the features promised for it, will also still lack several that were promised for Cairo, which was supposed to be launched in 1994.
"I will not believe that the pro apps work well as long as they run using Rossetta."
They don't run under Rosetta either -- in fact, the Pro apps don't run at all on Intel Macs at the moment. Apple claim there will be Intel-compatible versions in March, but how well optimised they'll be is something we won't know until they appear.
"for convincing people that expensive, low quality, DRM crippled tunes are somehow "cool.""
It's actually the convenience and availability factor that Apple are selling. iTunes is a store that's always open, has a vast collection of titles, makes it easy for people to find what they want, and equally easy to buy, download, listen to, rip to CD, stream, or put on their iPod. Of course, Apple marketing will doubtless say that this is the ideal solution for people with busy, modern life-styles or something equally blasé, but this is actually just droid-speak for "lazy bastard who will pay for someone else to do all the hard work".
There used to be a saying among programmers (anecdotally attributed to IBM) which stated that "if an idiot can use it, only idiots will want to use it". Like P.T. Barnham before him, Steve Jobs' genius lay in realising that idiots exist in vast numbers, and not all of them are poor.
It's Google DRM, so it cannot by definition be evil, because Google does no evil. It's all pretty simple really:
MS is pure concentrated evil run by the terrifying Gatesor and his minion, a bellowing beast of fire and shadow known as the Balmrog. Nothing comes out of MS unless it has been through base and terrible rituals where live babies are eaten and entire litters of puppies are thrown into furnaces.
Apple are potentially evil, but in a cuddly, well designed way. Those who venture too close to King joberon must however take care lest they fall prey to an awful gease which will force them to buy all things carrying the mark of the Apple, and defend their marvellousness unto death.
Google are good, and everything they do is good, because they say so, and it must therefore be true. Any who question this are either evil puppy-burning worshippers of Microsoft, or have been enslaved by Joberon's gease.
Helped by the fact that all Mac users are slender, arty types and not fat bastards like me. The iMac G5 I think is sitting between Windows and Linux machines is therefore an illusion due peripheral eddies in reality caused by the event-horizon of Steve Jobs' distortion field.
What they actually did was raise the default security levels, and change the wording of the confirmation dialog. If you had the right security setting enabled, IE would always (well, maybe not always, but has for a long tome at any rate) ask whether you wanted to run scripts or download ActiveX controls, but the confirmation dialog for both would say that "this is usually safe". This meant that people mostly clicked the "Yes" button, and then discovered that it wasn't anything like as safe as MS had led them to believe, so it doesn't say that anymore.
"However IE and Windows and IIS were fairly insecure from the very start but even so they weren't exploited very much until they had reached a fairly large marketshare. You were pretty safe surfing the web with IE3 and even to a lesser extent IE4 (at least initially) despite being insecure pieces of crud."
Market share had nothing whatsoever to do with it. There weren't many scams telling people they'd won a competition and then forcing them to listen to a long message on a premium-rate number in the 1980s either, but that wasn't due to a lack of telephones.
Here are some other factors that just _might_ have had an effect:
1) Internet usage in general was much lower in 1996, and virtually non-existent in many of the countries that are now sources of a great many viruses, bots, and other assorted malware.
2) Those who did have Internet access were usually using "pay per minute" dial-up rates for slow and unreliable connections, so they spent a lot less time connected. Malware would therefore have taken a lot longer to spread than is the case today.
3) Many of today's attack vectors were rare or non-existent. There was no dominant Email program that was guaranteed to be scriptable and have large contact lists, so how was a piece of malware going to propagate widely? OK, I'll write a piece of malware to read (for example) Eudora contacts and send itself to all three people in the average list. Problem: those contacts spend a total of four hours each a week connected to the Internet, and none of them use Eudora, so by the time the malware manages to get on to any of their machines, it stops.
4) Because of the above, the bot-nets that are central to many of today's criminal activities were completely impractical. Using a total of five PCs with slow dial-up connections as spam relays or to mount denial-of-service attacks is an exercise in futility when none of them are guaranteed to be on-line at any particular moment!
5) There were many, many fewer web sites, and those that existed were usually displaying static pages written in pure HTML. JavaScript had only appeared the year before and virtually nobody was using it; ActiveX had just come out in IE3, and again, was virtually unused. Scratch two more potential attack vectors.
6) Programming tools such as MS Visual C++ 1 & 2 and Borland C++ usually came on two dozen floppies accompanied by a crate of books. This meant that (a) they didn't tend to find their way onto warez sites (which there were a lot less of anyway); (b) even if they had, a total lack of on-line help would have meant that little shits without access to the large accompanying book collection would have been unable to use them; and (c) in the event that somebody went to all the effort of scanning said books, downloading the contents of 20 floppies plus image files of 16 large books would have been a frustrating and expensive experience on an unreliable pay-per-minute dial-up link.
7) Office-95 and various other large packages were similarly "un-warez-friendly".
8) Pre-built hacking kits and malware programs did not exist, so today's culture of "script kiddies" who use a mildly modified version of something they download didn't exist either. In those days, downloading a virus meant getting infected by it!
9) Because there weren't many viruses around for people to see, the though of writing one was a lot less likely to occur to those who take pleasure from damaging the property of others.
It was thus the nature of the Internet at that time together with the Windows PCs that were connected to it which meant that not only were most of today's motivations for writing malware non-existent, but also that the barriers to entry for prospective mal-ware authors were a lot higher.
"Only a windows zealot would argue that VS build tools pre VS2005 were anywhere near as good as maven and ant integrated with eclipse."
Nobody made that argument. I never said anything about VS pre 2005, so this is a straw man. Oh and by the way, you can integrate Ant with VS if you wish, via a (trumpet fanfare) PLUG-IN!!!
"Only a windows zealot would argue that VS had/has anything as good as xdoclet, javadoc, doxygen etc."
Again, nobody tried to. Yet another straw man.
"The comfort of the windows zealot is that although their tools are inferior at least they don't have to install a plug-in"
They do install plug-ins, though. As I said before, the VS IDE supports them, so there a fair number of them around, including commercial ones, which would not exist if people did not use them. The difference is that VS already comes with various things built into it that are supplied by plug-ins with Eclipse. And as I said in my last post, this has both advantages and disadvantages. Unlike you, I am not attempting to push one system or the other: my original assertion was that VS _is_ (note: present rather than past tense) a better option for those writing software that _exclusively targets Windows_.
No matter which way you pitch it, Java's multi-platform nature makes it difficult to access Windows-specific features without stepping outside Java itself, whereas these same features can be used from _within_.NET because MS wrote.NET _for_ Windows, while Java happens to run _on_ Windows. And while many arguments can be made about the undesirability of locking one's self to MS, anybody who wants to use various Windows-specific features is already locked in by definition, so such arguments are moot. This would be just as much the case if they were using Java, because there would be a bunch of DLLs doing Windows-specific things that would need to be ported to other platforms. Such rewrites would be far from trivial if one of those platforms happens to either lack a piece of critical functionality or implement it in a completely different way, so wanting to use any platform-specific functionality equates to being locked into that platform, irrespective of what language, libraries, abstraction layers, etc. are being used.
"Any organization who believes that no matter what the problem is only tools made by MS can be used is by definition run by zealots."
Balderdash. The people who make policy decisions of that sort do so because they believed Microsoft's marketing, just like they believed the marketing of whoever supplied office furniture, company cars, and whatever else they use. Such people do not think that MS tools are the only tools for any jobs, or even the best tools, because they know little to nothing about the jobs themselves, or how tools will be applied to them. All they're worried about is finding _a_ solution from a vendor who will still be around to support it several years down the line, arse covered, job done, move on to finding a reliable company to maintain the elevators because they're breaking down far too often.
"You know the old adage "best tool for the job"? Sometimes the best tool is actually available from a different vendor."
No argument there. But business people don't buy programming tools, they buy packages from companies that can combine tools, support, training, and the security of being big enough to stand a good chance of staying around for the long-haul. If they end up using Java and Eclipse, it is most likely because they decided to go with IBM's WebSphere rather than any deep knowledge of, and enthusiasm for, the tools and technologies themselves. To them, the best tool is the one that involves the lowest possible risks from a business viewpoint, not what makes life easiest for programmers.
"People who refuse to evaluate or use tools simply because they are not made by MS are zealots. I don't know how any rational person can disagree with that."
"If it's an eclipse plug-in that what is your damage?"
You need different ones for web and UI instead of a single one that does both. Each will have a different set of capabilities different ways of being used that must be learned. Note though that there are also certain advantages to this approach because each can support functionality which is specific to the task at hand, so it is a case of losing on the swings, and gaining on the roundabouts.
"This is where VS is totally outclassed by eclipse. For two years now eclipse had real refactoring support while VS had nothing."
Agreed.
"Eclipse had read debugging while VS had crappy debugging."
I'm not so sure about this one. And of course, due to your "this is true because I say it" attitude, you as usual provide no examples to show what about Eclipse is "read [sic]" compared to the "crappy" debugging in VS.
"Eclipse had real build and deployment tools while VS had shit."
See above.
"Same goes goes for documentation and such too."
See above. Meaningless assertions devoid of examples.
""I have seen two solutions to using RMI applications with SOAP that do not require significant rewrites. ""
"I hate to break it to you but Java supports SOAP without RMI."
This indicates that you didn't even know what I was talking about, so I can only conclude that you are parroting other peoples' opinions of VS and.NET rather than having any experience of them yourself. If that were not the case, you would have known what I meant when I said _transparent SOAP support via remoting_, because the nearest technology to remoting that Java has is RMI. That was why I replied in the way I did, while citing two Java mechanisms for doing something similar. This is a sign of somebody who has _used_ a technology instead of merely having read what somebody else says about it.
"Windows shops are zealots by definition"
It is quite obviously you who is the zealot. Your posts have been nothing more than a series of unfounded claims which have now become little more than rants. You say that Java + Eclipse is great, VS +.NET is crap, but you never even attempt to justify your assertions with a single example, because you have never used what you are criticising, and cannot produce any meaningful examples.
If I wish to read the opinions of others, then I will go to the sources instead of wading through your second-hand versions, so nothing further that you have to say is of any interest.
"I'd think that a foreign internet company would have two options when negotiating with the Chinese government: obey to whatever they tell you to do, or have ones sites firewalled off for good."
Yes. Morally it's definitely better to be firewalled off for good. Financially, it's obviously better to obey the Chinese government. This is why "moral" and "fiducuciary responsibility to shareholders" are in most cases mutually exclusive.
"China is, indeed, an odd place. I thought those billion+ people would have rebeled against their government by now, but I must think that this is not they culture."
It has nothing to do with culture, because the Chinese are far from being the only ones to suffer under a totalitarian regime for decades. Totalitarians manage to maintain their hold because they know that populations contain five basic types of people:
1. The vast majority. These might moan about the way things are, but they will only form a dangerous mob if pushed very hard. "Hard" in this sense means killing enough of them that the rest think they have nothing to lose by rising up, so this must be avoided unless it is done small, isolated communities, in which case it's best to leave no witnesses.
2. The militant minority. These can be quite dangerous, but will usually be contained by expert use of brutal repression because they are in most cases poorly disciplined. Most people of type 1 above will accept this because they see type 2 as "trouble makers".
3. Potential leaders. These are charismatic, motivated people who can turn the usually undisciplined type 2 into an organised centre that can in its turn gain significant support from type 1. Must be removed from society immediately.
4. The military. Necessary for oppressing the rest, and therefore disciplined, well armed, and well led. It is therefore essential to keep them on your side by ensuring that the higher ranks are extremely well rewarded, but while remaining frightened by what they know will happen to their families if they are disloyal.
5. Snitches. Greedy and usually cowardly individuals who are willing to sell the liberty and even lives of others for personal reward. Sprinkle them liberally among the other four groups so you can identify and weed out potential sources of problems. It's a good thing there are usually lots of snitches, because they have a high attrition rate due to the fact that nobody from the other four groups likes them.
"But let's focus on our freaking government for a while: Mr. Bush's administration is trying really hard to take away all our freedom and privacy (maybe convert us to the People's -- cough -- Republic of America)."
I'm not American, and don't live there, but do receive US cable and satellite TV channels. It seems that people have forgotten Benjamin Franklin's famous "Those who would trade liberty for security deserve neither".
"And the most interesting thing is that he was already a convicted moron when re-elected."
Is being a moron illegal in the US, then? Sounds like an excellent law that a lot of countries would do well to emulate!
No, the best feature of a real puppy given to a wife is that it _can't_ be switched off. It will bound around, and crap, and vomit, and want attention all the time, so the woman won't have time to pester you with irrelevancies.
"I am willing to bet that those who picked ID didn't look farther than their noses."
Knowing the Brits as I do, I'm willing to bet that nearly everyone said the first thing that came into their heads to get rid of the pollsters so they could get on with whatever they were doing before being accosted. Things only came out they way they did because these were multiple choice questions that required specific answers. If they'd asked something that actually required stating a position, they'd have found that most people fell into the "mildly weighted non-commital" category. For example, responses to a question that asked "Do you believe that God created the universe" would probably have looked something like:
"He might have" : 40% "Not really": 30% "Dunno": 20% Strong opinion one way or the other: 10%
It is for this reason that, despite a fair number of people professing to believe in God, more or less, sort of, virtually nobody goes to church on Sundays because they'd much rather sleep for an extra couple of hours. And most of those who kind of reckon that maybe there might not be a God after all can't be bothered to argue the point, because hey, people can believe what they want as long as they don't try to shove it down _my_ throat.
Getting into long, heated debates is therefore rather pointless, because most of that poll's respondents would say something completely different if you asked them the same questions a week later.
Slashdot Mirror
"Didn't Apple choose Intel over AMD partially because of some of the trusted computing initiatives the former was involved in?"
No, because AMD are every bit as involved with the Trusted Computing Group as Intel, and their forthcoming "Presidio" series will have hardware support for TPM-based storage sealing, secure initialization, and remote attestation (in addition to other trusted computing stuff that isn't TPM-based). Neither vendors' current CPUs have trusted computing support, but both will offer it in their next generation at more or less the same time, so conspiracy buffs will have to find another reason for Apple selecting Intel instead of AMD.
Same here. Ran it as a "standard" (i.e. non-admin) user, and the calculator popped up after
clicking the link.
"Setting an embassy on fire is an act of war."
It is only an act of war if it is deliberately done by a government or duly delegated representative(s) thereof.
The "dark ages" were over by the 1300s -- indeed, the very phrase is believed to derive from writings by Petrarch in the 1330s when talking about times prior to his own. Note though that opinions of the Early Mediaeval period to which it was later generally applied have been significantly revised during the 20th century, and it is now used by historians (if at all) solely as a reference to a period which is dark to us through a lack of written chronicles, not "dark" in any perjorative sense.
"Religion is a choice"
If you are fortunate enough to live in certain places at specific times.
"Most popular songs today are in major keys"
Most _popular_ Western music has always been in major keys, especially if it's meant for dancing to (e.g. waltzes, polkas, square dances, etc.). Same thing for Western folk music, with a few notable exceptions, often due to non-Western influences.
"The length of popular songs has generally decreased over the past few decades"
This is untrue. The standard length of a popular song has been around 3 minutes for a pretty long time, hence the fact that 78 RPM records playing for a maximum of 4 minutes per side of a 12" disk was not considered much of a limitation.
33.33 RPM was first introduced for use with films in the late 1920s because they needed something that could hold the full length of a movie reel on each side (reels generally ran for 11 minutes); it was not however commercially available to the general public until 1947. 45 RPM singles were introduced a couple of years later, primarily to give juke-boxes a greater capacity / space ratio than was possible the older and much bigger 78 RPM disks. Their playing time was limited to around five minutes, which was again considered more than adequate for something aimed at popular music.
"Bands aren't manufactured today any more than they were in the 60's."
An excellent example of a totally manufactured 60s band was the Monkees.
"Do you think that Apple just forgot to tell people that they are not actually "buying" music. No. They say "Buy a song", instead of "Buy a license" because they are intentionally misleading the customer"
But to "buy" that music, you need an iTunes store account, and the process of signing up for one presents you with terms and conditions that clearly state (among various other things) how your purchase can (and cannot) be used. Anyone who goes ahead without reading these terms and conditions isn't being misled, as it is (a) the very first step in creating an account, and (b) you cannot move on to subsequent steps without agreeing to it (there are two buttons marked "Agree" and "Cancel").
"It's MY MUSIC (they did not say "purchase a limited use contract" they said "BUT IT NOW")"
Amazon.com also have a "buy it" button. It does not say "Buy a box and plastic disk together with a limited license to whatever is recorded on said plastic disk". People who take your money at checkouts in record stores also tend to omit phrases such as "You are of course aware that you are only buying the box and plastic disk, not what is recorded on it". But guess what? This does not alter the fact that you have not bought anything more than a box, a piece of plastic, and a limited license.
"They want me to play fair? then they need to play fair by not lying to people anymore over CD's Music and Movies. Advertise you are buying a limited use contract that can be nullified at any time for any reason and then I'll be happy."
There is a "terms of service" statement that you must agree to before creating an iTunes store account. It clearly and unequivocally tells you precisely what you are buying, and what you can do with it. The agreement can also be reviewed at any time by clicking the "terms of service" link at the bottom of iTunes store pages. Apple are not therefore "lying": you have the option to cancel the account creation process if you do not agree to their terms, and thereby avoid buying any limited licenses from the iTunes store.
"their sales will drop so far below ground not even the core of the planet will be ableto look up to see them."
See above.
Impedance and resistance are only equivalent for direct current. With alternating current sources (e.g. audio), impedance is a mixture of resistance and reactance.
I remember a real poll which asked men all over the UK how big their penises were. The results suggested that men in London had, on average, penises that are two inches longer than those of men in the North of England, whose average member length ended up being in-line with medical averages which are _based on measurements_ rather than polls.
The pollsters, after analysing said results, concluded that there was obviously a significant regional variation is size which medical data was failing to account for. I on the other hand think it shows something rather different, i.e. that Northerners tended to answer the question a lot more truthfully than their exaggeration-prone London counterparts. There could of course have been excellent reasons for the honesty difference, e.g. questioners in the North being middle-aged men, while those in London were pretty students to whom few men would admit to having a lack in the meat and two veg, department!
Whatever the reasons, it was yet another of those weird British polls that produce silly results, just like exit polls during elections invariably indicate that the party which ends up losing is going to win by a massive landslide, and the Lib-Dems will gain huge numbers of seats.
"What? Didn't you say plug ins for eclipse made eclipse worse then VS"
.NET _today_ when compared to Eclipse and Java that anyone with a real, practical knowledge of both systems could have used to mount an excellent and well-reasoned argument for using the latter rather than the former, so it is therefore unfortunate that in this case at least, Java's advocate is either a bot, or a parrot with an owner who can type.
No. I said that it had advantages and disadvantages, and listed a couple of potential advantages for Eclipse's use of plug-ins for certain pieces of functionality that are integral to VS. I have never said VS is "better than" Eclipse in a general sense, merely that it has a number of advantages for those who want to write software that which will only ever be expected to run on Windows.
"Oh and why would a windows shop use a tool not made by MS?"
For the same reason that Windows shops use Delphi, and TrueBASIC, and Dolphin Smalltalk, and ActiveDeveloper, etc., etc.
"Would a windows shop allow the use of non MS plug ins on VS.NET?"
See above.
"Well DUH!. Eclipse itself is nothing but a platform for installing and managing plug ins. The entire java development environment itself is a plug in."
Once again, you display your total ignorance of VS, otherwise you'd know that it is also a plug-in framework for language development environments: MS supply four, and a variety of others are available from third parties. The more you write, the more obvious it is that you know absolutely nothing about what it is you are criticising.
""No matter which way you pitch it, Java's multi-platform nature makes it difficult to access Windows-specific features without stepping outside Java itself""
"Yeabut there is no real need to. Java has libraries for everything windows does and more."
Well blow me down, a language that supports libraries has libraries! Whatever will they think of next?
NB: this is yet another non-answer, which is to be expected given your demonstrable lack of any actual knowledge about the subject matter.
"Yes the fact that individual features of VS which are shitty and crappy is what makes eclipse so much better then VS."
More stupid statements devoid of an attempt to back them up with something resembling a fact.
"But hey go ahead and take things out of context"
You have no context to be taken out of. Nothing you have written rises above the level of a small child saying "My dad's better than your dad, because your dad's crap".
"I fully expect that from a fan boi."
The saddest thing about this whole thing is that Eclipse and Java are both good enough to merit an advocate who is capable of decent arguments rather than somebody shouting "crap, shit, it can do it, it's got it, crap, shit, zealot, fanboi". There are in fact a number of real negative points about both VS and
"Blackcomb is the real next-gen OS. It's supposed to be largely rebuilt."
Which is what they said about Cairo (which turned into Windows/NT 4), and Windows-2000, and Windows-XP, and Longhorn (Windows Vista). Each was supposed to be a true next generation OS which would be completely re-built, and have all sorts of amazing features, because amazing features and complete re-builds of very complex pieces of software are extremely easy to write about, but rather less easy to do.
So the amazing features get lopped off, and the complete re-build becomes "we rewrote these two bits, but it's basically what you already have with some extra stuff nailed on". And the project completion dates slip and slip because they yet again wasted years trying to do a rewrite, found it didn't work with all the legacy stuff, and had to go back to the old code base and try to tack on at least some of the promised amazing features, albeit in a less amazing way.
The really surprising thing is that despite years and years of making _exactly_ the same claims about every forthcoming OS offering, and then failing to fulfil them in exactly the same way they did the last time, people still believe it.
Prediction: Blackcomb will not be a complete rewrite, and in addition to lacking many of the features promised for it, will also still lack several that were promised for Cairo, which was supposed to be launched in 1994.
"I will not believe that the pro apps work well as long as they run using Rossetta."
They don't run under Rosetta either -- in fact, the Pro apps don't run at all on Intel Macs at the moment. Apple claim there will be Intel-compatible versions in March, but how well optimised they'll be is something we won't know until they appear.
"for convincing people that expensive, low quality, DRM crippled tunes are somehow "cool.""
It's actually the convenience and availability factor that Apple are selling. iTunes is a store that's always open, has a vast collection of titles, makes it easy for people to find what they want, and equally easy to buy, download, listen to, rip to CD, stream, or put on their iPod. Of course, Apple marketing will doubtless say that this is the ideal solution for people with busy, modern life-styles or something equally blasé, but this is actually just droid-speak for "lazy bastard who will pay for someone else to do all the hard work".
There used to be a saying among programmers (anecdotally attributed to IBM) which stated that "if an idiot can use it, only idiots will want to use it". Like P.T. Barnham before him, Steve Jobs' genius lay in realising that idiots exist in vast numbers, and not all of them are poor.
"Music subscription services don't have 'rental periods' like Blockbuster, you keep it as long as you pay for it."
Same with Blockbuster. You can keep their stuff for as long as you like if you keep paying the rental fee.
It's Google DRM, so it cannot by definition be evil, because Google does no evil. It's all pretty simple really:
MS is pure concentrated evil run by the terrifying Gatesor and his minion, a bellowing beast of fire and shadow known as the Balmrog. Nothing comes out of MS unless it has been through base and terrible rituals where live babies are eaten and entire litters of puppies are thrown into furnaces.
Apple are potentially evil, but in a cuddly, well designed way. Those who venture too close to King joberon must however take care lest they fall prey to an awful gease which will force them to buy all things carrying the mark of the Apple, and defend their marvellousness unto death.
Google are good, and everything they do is good, because they say so, and it must therefore be true. Any who question this are either evil puppy-burning worshippers of Microsoft, or have been enslaved by Joberon's gease.
All clear now?
Helped by the fact that all Mac users are slender, arty types and not fat bastards like me. The iMac G5 I think is sitting between Windows and Linux machines is therefore an illusion due peripheral eddies in reality caused by the event-horizon of Steve Jobs' distortion field.
What they actually did was raise the default security levels, and change the wording of the confirmation dialog. If you had the right security setting enabled, IE would always (well, maybe not always, but has for a long tome at any rate) ask whether you wanted to run scripts or download ActiveX controls, but the confirmation dialog for both would say that "this is usually safe". This meant that people mostly clicked the "Yes" button, and then discovered that it wasn't anything like as safe as MS had led them to believe, so it doesn't say that anymore.
"However IE and Windows and IIS were fairly insecure from the very start but even so they weren't exploited very much until they had reached a fairly large marketshare. You were pretty safe surfing the web with IE3 and even to a lesser extent IE4 (at least initially) despite being insecure pieces of crud."
Market share had nothing whatsoever to do with it. There weren't many scams telling people they'd won a competition and then forcing them to listen to a long message on a premium-rate number in the 1980s either, but that wasn't due to a lack of telephones.
Here are some other factors that just _might_ have had an effect:
1) Internet usage in general was much lower in 1996, and virtually non-existent in many of the countries that are now sources of a great many viruses, bots, and other assorted malware.
2) Those who did have Internet access were usually using "pay per minute" dial-up rates for slow and unreliable connections, so they spent a lot less time connected. Malware would therefore have taken a lot longer to spread than is the case today.
3) Many of today's attack vectors were rare or non-existent. There was no dominant Email program that was guaranteed to be scriptable and have large contact lists, so how was a piece of malware going to propagate widely? OK, I'll write a piece of malware to read (for example) Eudora contacts and send itself to all three people in the average list. Problem: those contacts spend a total of four hours each a week connected to the Internet, and none of them use Eudora, so by the time the malware manages to get on to any of their machines, it stops.
4) Because of the above, the bot-nets that are central to many of today's criminal activities were completely impractical. Using a total of five PCs with slow dial-up connections as spam relays or to mount denial-of-service attacks is an exercise in futility when none of them are guaranteed to be on-line at any particular moment!
5) There were many, many fewer web sites, and those that existed were usually displaying static pages written in pure HTML. JavaScript had only appeared the year before and virtually nobody was using it; ActiveX had just come out in IE3, and again, was virtually unused. Scratch two more potential attack vectors.
6) Programming tools such as MS Visual C++ 1 & 2 and Borland C++ usually came on two dozen floppies accompanied by a crate of books. This meant that (a) they didn't tend to find their way onto warez sites (which there were a lot less of anyway); (b) even if they had, a total lack of on-line help would have meant that little shits without access to the large accompanying book collection would have been unable to use them; and (c) in the event that somebody went to all the effort of scanning said books, downloading the contents of 20 floppies plus image files of 16 large books would have been a frustrating and expensive experience on an unreliable pay-per-minute dial-up link.
7) Office-95 and various other large packages were similarly "un-warez-friendly".
8) Pre-built hacking kits and malware programs did not exist, so today's culture of "script kiddies" who use a mildly modified version of something they download didn't exist either. In those days, downloading a virus meant getting infected by it!
9) Because there weren't many viruses around for people to see, the though of writing one was a lot less likely to occur to those who take pleasure from damaging the property of others.
It was thus the nature of the Internet at that time together with the Windows PCs that were connected to it which meant that not only were most of today's motivations for writing malware non-existent, but also that the barriers to entry for prospective mal-ware authors were a lot higher.
"Only a windows zealot would argue that VS build tools pre VS2005 were anywhere near as good as maven and ant integrated with eclipse."
.NET because MS wrote .NET _for_ Windows, while Java happens to run _on_ Windows. And while many arguments can be made about the undesirability of locking one's self to MS, anybody who wants to use various Windows-specific features is already locked in by definition, so such arguments are moot. This would be just as much the case if they were using Java, because there would be a bunch of DLLs doing Windows-specific things that would need to be ported to other platforms. Such rewrites would be far from trivial if one of those platforms happens to either lack a piece of critical functionality or implement it in a completely different way, so wanting to use any platform-specific functionality equates to being locked into that platform, irrespective of what language, libraries, abstraction layers, etc. are being used.
Nobody made that argument. I never said anything about VS pre 2005, so this is a straw man. Oh and by the way, you can integrate Ant with VS if you wish, via a (trumpet fanfare) PLUG-IN!!!
"Only a windows zealot would argue that VS had/has anything as good as xdoclet, javadoc, doxygen etc."
Again, nobody tried to. Yet another straw man.
"The comfort of the windows zealot is that although their tools are inferior at least they don't have to install a plug-in"
They do install plug-ins, though. As I said before, the VS IDE supports them, so there a fair number of them around, including commercial ones, which would not exist if people did not use them. The difference is that VS already comes with various things built into it that are supplied by plug-ins with Eclipse. And as I said in my last post, this has both advantages and disadvantages. Unlike you, I am not attempting to push one system or the other: my original assertion was that VS _is_ (note: present rather than past tense) a better option for those writing software that _exclusively targets Windows_.
No matter which way you pitch it, Java's multi-platform nature makes it difficult to access Windows-specific features without stepping outside Java itself, whereas these same features can be used from _within_
"Any organization who believes that no matter what the problem is only tools made by MS can be used is by definition run by zealots."
Balderdash. The people who make policy decisions of that sort do so because they believed Microsoft's marketing, just like they believed the marketing of whoever supplied office furniture, company cars, and whatever else they use. Such people do not think that MS tools are the only tools for any jobs, or even the best tools, because they know little to nothing about the jobs themselves, or how tools will be applied to them. All they're worried about is finding _a_ solution from a vendor who will still be around to support it several years down the line, arse covered, job done, move on to finding a reliable company to maintain the elevators because they're breaking down far too often.
"You know the old adage "best tool for the job"? Sometimes the best tool is actually available from a different vendor."
No argument there. But business people don't buy programming tools, they buy packages from companies that can combine tools, support, training, and the security of being big enough to stand a good chance of staying around for the long-haul. If they end up using Java and Eclipse, it is most likely because they decided to go with IBM's WebSphere rather than any deep knowledge of, and enthusiasm for, the tools and technologies themselves. To them, the best tool is the one that involves the lowest possible risks from a business viewpoint, not what makes life easiest for programmers.
"People who refuse to evaluate or use tools simply because they are not made by MS are zealots. I don't know how any rational person can disagree with that."
The people who make the decisions in com
"If it's an eclipse plug-in that what is your damage?"
.NET rather than having any experience of them yourself. If that were not the case, you would have known what I meant when I said _transparent SOAP support via remoting_, because the nearest technology to remoting that Java has is RMI. That was why I replied in the way I did, while citing two Java mechanisms for doing something similar. This is a sign of somebody who has _used_ a technology instead of merely having read what somebody else says about it.
.NET is crap, but you never even attempt to justify your assertions with a single example, because you have never used what you are criticising, and cannot produce any meaningful examples.
You need different ones for web and UI instead of a single one that does both. Each will have a different set of capabilities different ways of being used that must be learned. Note though that there are also certain advantages to this approach because each can support functionality which is specific to the task at hand, so it is a case of losing on the swings, and gaining on the roundabouts.
"This is where VS is totally outclassed by eclipse. For two years now eclipse had real refactoring support while VS had nothing."
Agreed.
"Eclipse had read debugging while VS had crappy debugging."
I'm not so sure about this one. And of course, due to your "this is true because I say it" attitude, you as usual provide no examples to show what about Eclipse is "read [sic]" compared to the "crappy" debugging in VS.
"Eclipse had real build and deployment tools while VS had shit."
See above.
"Same goes goes for documentation and such too."
See above. Meaningless assertions devoid of examples.
""I have seen two solutions to using RMI applications with SOAP that do not require significant rewrites. ""
"I hate to break it to you but Java supports SOAP without RMI."
This indicates that you didn't even know what I was talking about, so I can only conclude that you are parroting other peoples' opinions of VS and
"Windows shops are zealots by definition"
It is quite obviously you who is the zealot. Your posts have been nothing more than a series of unfounded claims which have now become little more than rants. You say that Java + Eclipse is great, VS +
If I wish to read the opinions of others, then I will go to the sources instead of wading through your second-hand versions, so nothing further that you have to say is of any interest.
"I'd think that a foreign internet company would have two options when negotiating with the Chinese government: obey to whatever they tell you to do, or have ones sites firewalled off for good."
Yes. Morally it's definitely better to be firewalled off for good. Financially, it's obviously better to obey the Chinese government. This is why "moral" and "fiducuciary responsibility to shareholders" are in most cases mutually exclusive.
"China is, indeed, an odd place. I thought those billion+ people would have rebeled against their government by now, but I must think that this is not they culture."
It has nothing to do with culture, because the Chinese are far from being the only ones to suffer under a totalitarian regime for decades. Totalitarians manage to maintain their hold because they know that populations contain five basic types of people:
1. The vast majority. These might moan about the way things are, but they will only form a dangerous mob if pushed very hard. "Hard" in this sense means killing enough of them that the rest think they have nothing to lose by rising up, so this must be avoided unless it is done small, isolated communities, in which case it's best to leave no witnesses.
2. The militant minority. These can be quite dangerous, but will usually be contained by expert use of brutal repression because they are in most cases poorly disciplined. Most people of type 1 above will accept this because they see type 2 as "trouble makers".
3. Potential leaders. These are charismatic, motivated people who can turn the usually undisciplined type 2 into an organised centre that can in its turn gain significant support from type 1. Must be removed from society immediately.
4. The military. Necessary for oppressing the rest, and therefore disciplined, well armed, and well led. It is therefore essential to keep them on your side by ensuring that the higher ranks are extremely well rewarded, but while remaining frightened by what they know will happen to their families if they are disloyal.
5. Snitches. Greedy and usually cowardly individuals who are willing to sell the liberty and even lives of others for personal reward. Sprinkle them liberally among the other four groups so you can identify and weed out potential sources of problems. It's a good thing there are usually lots of snitches, because they have a high attrition rate due to the fact that nobody from the other four groups likes them.
"But let's focus on our freaking government for a while: Mr. Bush's administration is trying really hard to take away all our freedom and privacy (maybe convert us to the People's -- cough -- Republic of America)."
I'm not American, and don't live there, but do receive US cable and satellite TV channels. It seems that people have forgotten Benjamin Franklin's famous "Those who would trade liberty for security deserve neither".
"And the most interesting thing is that he was already a convicted moron when re-elected."
Is being a moron illegal in the US, then? Sounds like an excellent law that a lot of countries would do well to emulate!
No, the best feature of a real puppy given to a wife is that it _can't_ be switched off. It will bound around, and crap, and vomit, and want attention all the time, so the woman won't have time to pester you with irrelevancies.
"I am willing to bet that those who picked ID didn't look farther than their noses."
Knowing the Brits as I do, I'm willing to bet that nearly everyone said the first thing that came into their heads to get rid of the pollsters so they could get on with whatever they were doing before being accosted. Things only came out they way they did because these were multiple choice questions that required specific answers. If they'd asked something that actually required stating a position, they'd have found that most people fell into the "mildly weighted non-commital" category. For example, responses to a question that asked "Do you believe that God created the universe" would probably have looked something like:
"He might have" : 40%
"Not really": 30%
"Dunno": 20%
Strong opinion one way or the other: 10%
It is for this reason that, despite a fair number of people professing to believe in God, more or less, sort of, virtually nobody goes to church on Sundays because they'd much rather sleep for an extra couple of hours. And most of those who kind of reckon that maybe there might not be a God after all can't be bothered to argue the point, because hey, people can believe what they want as long as they don't try to shove it down _my_ throat.
Getting into long, heated debates is therefore rather pointless, because most of that poll's respondents would say something completely different if you asked them the same questions a week later.