Actually, I've always disliked the "gas giant" terminology for planets. I prefer to think of them as planets that have much thicker and larger atmospheres than some others.
Jupiter, just as an example, (probably) has a "core" of rock. I think of this "core" as the planet itself, and everything outside of that core to be the atmosphere.
12 years ago I was caught hacking in the educational facility I was (theoretically) studying at. I didn't change my grades, but I did have complete access to, if I'd thought about it (which I didn't). All I did do was fix a minor bug (an "oops, inc instead of dec" bug, nothing big) in a tutor's program. My main motivation was boredom - one should not be forced to take "Introductory Certificate in Computing" (this is a mouse - see how the arrow on the screen moves when you move it?) before being allowed to take real courses.
Suffice to say, it was not appreciated. I was kicked out of the school permanently - HOWEVER, no legal action was brought against me (in that instance).
For the record, I did not go on to start a successful PC company, however I did make a killing doing network security pre-Y2K and was offered a position in the military (which I declined due to my abhorrence of the idea of 6 months basic training).
Actually, it's not even that small in the third dimension when you're talking on scales of planck lengths - it's pretty thick. But that was why I put "2 dimensional" in quotes... even if paper WERE truly 2 dimensional, the same would still be true.
Please note: Everything below is just how I understand it with my very rudimentary understanding of the subject. I am likely to be extremely wrong, and if so, I'd appreciate being enlightened rather than modded down!
one of the major hurdles to string theory is gravity.
As I understand it, while gravity is a problem for string theory, it's more of a problem for pretty much every other theory. String theory seems to handle gravity MUCH more cleanly than other theories.
why is it as weak as it is?
The strings that form "gravitons" (elementary particles of gravity) are, due to their shape, capable of moving out of the plane of influence ("brane" (from "membrane")) of other strings (matter and energy in general) that are tied to the brane. Therefore their strength appears significantly weaker since significantly less of them directly interact.
The sibling post to this one may be correct and I may be flat out wrong, but my understanding was that a "string" can be described as a one dimensional object that has the ability to move through (probably) 11 dimensions. Similar to how a "2 dimensional" object such as a piece of paper can happily be folded in 3 dimensions while still itself being 2 dimensional.
Keeping an eye on a 870,000 mile wide ball of fusing hydrogen... Didn't your mother ever tell you not to do that?
Ah yes, I'll never forget the day my mother came to me and said, "YttriumOxide, it's very important that you never keep your eye on an eight hundred and seventy thousand mile wide ball of fusing hydrogen...".
The main reason I won't forget it is of course that measuring things in miles just seemed so quaint since I grew up with the metric system.
As another note, I have yet to have a firefox lockup on OSX, except with dodgy addons (which also happens on my Windows and Linux boxes)
Things like gchat didn't work. Maybe they do now. As far as lockups - just google as I advised.
Okay, I did some searching and yes, it appears people have had this problem. Since it's as solid as a rock on my system though, there must be some reason it's not working so well on other people's systems. Computer's aren't mystical devices - if it works for me, then it is definite that it CAN work okay and it's just a matter of finding the difference between my system and one that it doesn't work on.
If this is more work than you're interested in doing though (as it sounds from other comments you made), I'd recommend not working in a field relating to computers to be quite honest. The added advantage of troubleshooting this issue is that you can already rule out hardware, or at least consider it much less, as someone else's hardware will be just like mine.
Exactly, it is a GDI printer. I am ok with hacking things around, but don't bullshit me, that everything just works.. If I knew I need to spend time for getting a windows printer to work, I could have done it in linux.
So, you're complaining that a WINDOWS ONLY device was hard to set up under MacOS... and then you say that you could hack around to get it working under Ubuntu... yes, you could... and that "hacking around" would be IDENTICAL on MacOS - they both use CUPS as the print system and it's almost certain you'd use the same toolset to make it work.
No virtual desktops.
Correct - same as Windows... but coming in a future OS thankfully. I miss them myself since my other main environment is an Ubuntu box where I use them quite heavily. I do have to say though that once you get used to functions like Expose and keeping programs open with no window displayed (the standard state of Thunderbird on my system for example), it does make it less of a pain
Pay for every fucking add-one, for example divx.
Last I checked, divx cost the same on every platform - free for the player, pay for the Pro package... it was a while ago I checked though, because VLC handles all my video needs (which is, of course, free)
The vast majority of "add ons" I have on my Mac are open source packages. I use Firefox as my web browser, Thunderbird for email, NeoOffice for my office suite and so on. It's true that there's not as much freeware/shareware as the Windows world, but since most larger projects from the open source world are available for MacOS, I've never felt too constrained by this - certainly no less than my Linux boxes.
Shit package management, that is not followed by most piece of software. Download manually, etc.
I wasn't actually aware MacOS claimed to have any kind of package management. It's a different philosophy for applications - somewhere closer to the Windows world of no package management. Applications are installed by copying them to your computer. They are removed by deleting them. Some applications have installers that copy things to other locations, and when they don't have other installers, yes it's a pain in the arse. I've had that same kind of pain on other systems such as Windows and similar but different pain on Linux systems where the program ISN'T managed by my package manager where everything else is. As long as the app keeps with the "way of doing things on that platform", I'm happy with it.
Look, I hate linux, it giving me hard time on so many fronts, but ubuntu is a more pleasant experience, all in all.
Fair enough. I don't hate Linux, or MacOS... I have a mild distate for Windows in general, but don't hate it either (due to my work, the majority of programming I do is under Windows).
If you prefer Ubuntu, great - keep using it, and preferably do what you ca
That's okay. Rarely do I get negative moderation anyway (I honestly don't recall the last time), so my Karma can handle it. People often complain about the moderation system here, but overall I find it generally works quite well. There are the occasional times it falls down - like the guy calling me a "fucking idiot" getting modded "Informative" (wtf?) - but in general it works okay and I'm hardly going to lose any sleep over it.
I'm 100% in favour of your sig by the way. For that, and the post I'm replying to, you just made my friends list:) (even though I still think it was a crappy joke!;) )
Clearly his joke was VERY poor - I read it as serious. And no, I'm not an idiot - I was just attempting to explain the difference in case the person really didn't understand it.
I also completely do not understand the "troll" mod I received. It could perhaps be construed as flamebait, as I was a little harsh (considering I thought the person must be pretty dumb), but certainly not a troll. At least one mod has modded me informative though, so that shows there's someone that got what I was getting at.
Some people don't even believe "free will" exists, and many have an agnostic viewpoint about it. If it does exist in humans, I don't see any reason that animals wouldn't have it, or that it wouldn't be "natural".
Mod parent up for this!
I consider "free will" to be a combination of the complexity of the factors that determine a choice and how well the individual understands these factors. If there is a lot of complexity, with little understanding of the factors involved, then it appears as free will. You'd have a hard time finding a creature with more complexity AND less understanding than a human being, and so we consider ourselves to have free will.
From this, you can see that I consider everything to be determined. And I'm okay with this - free will implies randomness, and I am strongly opposed to the idea that anything is random (yes, God Does NOT Play Dice! (I even have the same views on supposed "chance" in quantum mechanics, but that's another topic entirely)). So, if one believes in a lack of "free will" should one act any differently? Not really. I can fully accept that I don't understand all of the factors involved in my conscious "decisions" and therefore I can continue to act as if it is free will, while still holding the belief that it isn't.
If the above makes no sense to you, ignore it - it's my viewpoint, and it's shared by many others, but it probably isn't going to change your life.
There is no rational basis for even the most basic of ethics we have today.
I often see this argument in favour of religion and against atheism, but I fail to understand it. I am an atheist, and I have ethics and morals (they may be slightly different to other people's, but by and large they're similar enough. Most people tend to have roughly the same set).
I can give plenty of rational reasons for my behaviour...
1) Why I don't rape women: Because I know that doing so would hurt them. And that would make them more likely to desire bad things happening to me. And the more people that desire bad things happening to me, the more likely bad things will happen to me. And I don't want bad things to happen to me. I gain next to nothing, I stand a very good chance of losing a lot. This "idea" has been so ingrained in to me, that the very idea of rape is abhorrent and sickening to me - which is how I consider myself to be "against the idea of rape". But I don't fool myself about the rationale behind this idea.
2) Why I don't murder: See #1, but generally the families/friends/society of the person rather than the person themselves.
3) Why I don't steal: See #1, but it's more "inconvenience" than "hurt" - the end result is the same though.
4) Why I don't (lots of other things): See #1
Get the idea?
Now, I'm sure someone reading this will think I'm selfish and ego-centric. Yes, I am. I consider true selflessness to be a serious mental illness. Everything a sane person does is selfish when you get right down to it, and there's nothing wrong with that. Even many religious folk are only "good people" because they're told that they'll be rewarded in the afterlife for it. Can any Christians (or even anyone else) here honestly say that if they believed they'd go to heaven for rape and murder, but go to hell for kindness and compassion that they'd be kind and compassionate?
If you doubt for a second that people can't be persuaded away from their beliefs by stronger ones (such as "fear of authority" for a large percentage of the world's population), you only need look at things like "The Third Wave", the Stanford Prison Experiment, and the Milgram experiment, just to name three.
I've never met a Richard Head, but I did once meet a "Richard Edward Meyer" (Dick Ed Meyer). The surname doesn't really have any bearing on the joke, but I do have to wonder what his parents were thinking (or not thinking) when they chose his middle name along with that first name.
Oh, I also used to work with Alice Cooper... her parents assumed that the somewhat more famous person by that name wouldn't be so well known by the time young Alice grew up. How wrong could they be?
You are aware that a "visa" is a small document (often included as a slip of paper in your passport) that says you're allowed to stay in a particular country and outlines the basic rules of what you're allowed to do while there (e.g. can't work/can work, can stay for a year/can only stay for a month etc etc), right? Many countries allow citizens of certain other countries to stay for a limited period of time without a visa (so you don't need to get a visa every time you go on holiday outside of your home country), however it appears that is not the case for American citizens travelling to Nigeria.
A "visa" is a totally different thing to a "Visa", which is a credit card. Journalistic headlines are generally written with caps for each first letter ("Bill Gates Denied Visa To Nigeria"), which I see could cause some confusion about the difference, however it really can be very easily gleaned from context.
I *literally* just got done installing Vista on a laptop. It took at least half as much time as an XP install, and had far fewer points where I needed to input any information.
And therefore has far more points post installation where you need to set this!
I've honestly never understood the "less questions during install the better" crowd. I WANT to be asked about how my system should look, behave, feel and so on during install. I WANT to be able to choose what things I do and don't have installed. And to be able to do any of this, it HAS TO ask me.
I installed Vista in a VM the other day for work, simply because I need it for testing my software under Vista. It really bugged me that after install, I had to go through damn near every control panel item before the system was actually set up remotely how I wanted it (note: Regional Settings included!)
This just sucks. It baffles me that Konica does not have Mac drivers, really.
As per my other post, we do. The grandparent obviously either doesn't know how to look at our website to get a driver if it's a product that is supported on Mac OS, or just failed to pay attention to the fact that not all of our products are. (exactly as per every other printer manufacturer out there)
A hint for the Slashdot community at large: Printer "drivers" aren't really like other drivers. They don't talk directly to the hardware. What Printer "drivers" do is output a print language (often a Page Description Language) such as PostScript, PCL or others, which then gets sent to the print device via whatever method (parallel, USB, network, etc). Therefore, unlike most other types of hardware, it's TRIVIAL to get a printer to print (just with some features missing) as long as it supports a standard print language simply by using the driver from another product that uses that same language. The only big exception to the rule is "GDI" printers (AKA "Windows only" printers) and good luck trying to get those horrible things to work under anything. Thankfully we don't make too many of those, and I fully expect I'll eventually win my crusade for them to be removed from existence completely (Microsoft pushing XPS oddly enough is helping with that!) (all of the above is actually slightly irrelevant since for all PostScript products we make, we DO supply MacOS X drivers (and Linux drivers too!))
Now, I'm no Mac fanatic - my main system is an iMac with OS X 10.4, but I also couldn't live without my Linux boxes, and to a lesser extent my Windows system. So, I consider myself fairly OS agnostic most of the time. But I have to strongly disagree with almost everything you've said here.
a) E-mail. gmail poorly supported under safari. firefox experience constant lock-up : google for "firefox freeze mac" if you don't believe that
My main email account is with gmail. I actually use the POP/SMTP interface of gmail with Thunderbird, so haven't really used the web interface that much, but when I did and I had no problems under Safari or Firefox.
As another note, I have yet to have a firefox lockup on OSX, except with dodgy addons (which also happens on my Windows and Linux boxes)
b) word-processor: neooffice useless, word is incredibily slow on a dual core machine and constantly brings machine with 1/2 gb to swapping. I know it is rosetta emulated, but this is not my problem.
What's useless about NeoOffice? It's my main office suite at home and I've never had any problems with it. It even plays nicely with all of my MSOffice documents from work. Maybe if you're more specific about the problems, someone can offer a solution.
c) Printer - had to install compiler suite to compile driver for linux to get my konica minolta working. It felt like early days of linux, haven't done that in ages.
Woah there... I work for Konica Minolta and have done for the last 5 and a half years (I started with Minolta about a year before the merger). I can guarantee you that every PostScript device we have is fully supported on MacOS. If you'd said an older Konica or Minolta device, then maybe I could believe it was a LITTLE more work (but still not much), but certainly not for a post-merger Konica Minolta device. Did you even CHECK our website for drivers?
If it was a PCL device, then you might have had a bit more difficulty, but those products (especially the home printers) are quite clearly marked as not being supported on MacOS. Even though we don't support them, getting them to work is pretty trivial (an HP Color LaserJet driver will do the trick pretty much perfectly)
In the unlikely event that it's a GDI printer ("Windows only"), I'm actually pretty surprised you made it work at all, but hey, you would've had the same problems under any non Microsoft OS.
Disclaimer: I work for the Business Equipment side of the company, which works with the bigger office MFPs, not the home printers. But I do know the printers pretty well anyway since over the last few years we've been sharing tech very closely between the two lines.
d) Websites: movies didn't work and flip4mac didn't help either. My wife was furious. Luckily the converted to flash movies.
When you say "movies didn't work", what format were they in? I don't have this problem with my Firefox web browsing, and I must (shamefully) admit to often visiting websites with embedded video.
Metered? yes... expensive? Depends on your viewpoint. I always thought my connection there was really well priced. AUD$64.95 a month for 10Mbit down, 1.5Mbit up. (and limited to 36GB a month - 12GB "on peak" and 24GB "off peak". After which, I would be capped to near dial-up speeds (but not charged any extra))
Since I've moved to Europe, I find the prices here for a slower connection to be MUCH cheaper, but if I want something the speed I had in Australia, I'll pay almost much in Euro as I used to in AUD.
I know my email could be read by my ISP, but I mostly trust them not to do it. And I would feel pretty angry and upset if I found out an employee was sitting their reading all my email for kicks. I would expect that he be fired at the very least once caught. If I had anything truly private that I didn't want to risk I would take it upon myself to secure it betterl but just because I didn't encrypt something that doesn't mean I expect or give permission to everyone on the planet to read it.
Even if your ISP specifically said, "We will read your email for the purposes of serving you targetted advertising"? That's what Google does, and if you've signed up and agreed to this, there's not a single reason you have to be angry at them for doing so. If you don't like it, don't use it. If you didn't read that part of the sign-up process, that's your own fault - you still agreed to it.
As many others have already pointed out, email is like a postcard, not a letter. If I send you a postcard, I fully expect that someone at a Post Office somewhere along the route has a very good chance of reading it, and I accept this. If I want to send you something with the expectation of privacy, I will seal it in an envelope. For digital communication, the equivalent of sealing it in an envelope is encrypting it (because simply wrapping headers around it still leaves it exposed - data isn't 3D).
Just as a note, you can use gmail through POP and SMTP... I haven't touched gmail's web interface in a LONG time. So if I used some kind of encryption system (which I don't, because I don't care if Google (or anyone else) reads my email), it would be just as secure as any other mail system.
Also, as other posters have pointed out, there's things like FireGPG for those who do use the web interface.
I use Wikipedia very often at work - for work related things. I consider it an excellent starting point for a general overview of a topic. I never expect it to be 100% accurate, and realise fully that it can be biased. But if there's a topic I've never even heard of, and want to get an idea of what it is at a fundamental level, Wikipedia provides me the information.
To use a real world example. I work in the business equipment industry (copiers/printers/scanners/MFPs). The only kinds of scanning I was familiar with were TWAIN and the various "send" methods such as FTP, Email, SMB and so on. Someone asked me a question about ISIS... Right, first step - check Wikipedia and figure out what on earth ISIS is, determine the basics of how it works, and then answer the question. Should further questions have come (they didn't), I would then have a good base of ideas in which direction I should extend my research. Without Wikipedia, yes, I could have just Googled it and found the information I needed, but the level of trust I could put in that information would be no greater or less than my results from Wikipedia.
(and before any scanner geeks come along and tell me that I should have known about ISIS considering what I do for a living - none of our products handle ISIS and I'd only been in the industry 3 years at the time, so could hardly be expected to know EVERY piece of technology associated with the field, especially when it's not something I've direct contact with)
The problem with both AROS and UAE are the goals of those projects. They give a reasonably nice 3.1-ish environment (AROS) or a complete but glitchy anywhere-up-to-3.9 environment (UAE).
For those of us that did move to OS4, going to back to 3.x just feels like entering the stone age. Until UAE can handle PPC emulation and run OS4, I'm afraid I won't go near it.
Mod parent up. He's completely right. When I read this article, I immediately thought of how easy it would be to do... so I think I'll do it tomorrow just to prove a point.
Step 1: Find OCR engine for various character sets (there's plenty around, and I have a licensed one at work, but I'll try to find a free one) Step 2: Write code to receive scanned image from copier and pass it to the OCR engine. Step 3: Pass output of OCR to online translation tool. Step 4: Read translation from online translation tool. Step 5: Paste translation back in to correct positions over scanned image (the only part that's even REMOTELY tricky) Step 6: Submit back as a print job to the copier. Step 7: Profit! (sorry, had to say it)
I really think this entire thing would take me less than a day to write. I could even add in some fancy stuff like interfacing with the copiers control panel to give fancy options that you can select at the time of scanning (courtesy of the fact that that's my day job)
I couldn't agree with you more... except on one little point.
There is, of course, another, darker reason: revisionism. Nazis did horrible things. So did their collaborators in other countries. It is less-than-honorable period in Germany's and many other countries history, so they'd rather pretend it never happened. I've heard that Japan has a similar problem with its own atrocities, often committed against the civilians of its empire: they simply aren't mentioned in history books.
As a foreigner now living in Germany that also has a lot of contact with Japan, I can tell you you're half right. Japan does indeed seem to practice revisionist history in in it's schools and general attitudes. Germany however, I can assure you, does not. Most German schoolchildren know FAR more about the second world war than school children in any other country. They are taught about the horrible things done by horrible people, and they are taught about the great things done by great people. I would actually hazard a guess to say that it's LESS revisionist than elsewhere in the world. How many stories of greatness, goodness and heroism do you hear about the GERMAN side of world war 2? Yes, terrible things were done, and I would not and will not defend Germany for any of these terrible things... but I am more than ready to applaud the great men and women that were there and did amazing things.
On the other side of the same coin, how much do Americans and British learn about the atrocities committed by the allied soldiers during WW2? Such as gunning down groups of German prisoners because it's easier than taking them with you and processing them? Soldiers doing horrible things is neither a recent phenomenon nor ever only one-sided.
I've gotten slightly offtopic here I'm afraid. To get back to my main point, no, Germany does not practice revisionist history. It is not proud of its past, but it realises that one of the best ways to stop it happening again is to teach about it. Yes, it is illegal here for me to goose-step down the street waving a swastika on a flag and yelling "Heil Hitler"... But not because people want to suppress the memory of it - simply that they understand how dangerous words and actions can be - especially when there are still people alive today that remember when it happened. I would not be surprised if, in 50 to 100 years, those laws no longer exist here in Germany. (If Germany as a country still exists rather than a "state of the EU", but that's another topic!)
The vast majority of people under the age of 35 have an attitude that basically says, "Yes, our country screwed up. Yes, they did horrible things that are inexcusable. BUT, can we please just get over it now and move on? Don't forget it, but stop focusing on it and realise that there's more to Germany than events from 60 years ago.". And I agree with them - shall we hold modern America responsible for mass slavery of Africans? Or shall we hold Australia responsible for treating the aboriginal people like animals and shooting them for sport? Or shall we hold Spain responsible for the Spanish Inquisition? All of these are longer ago, that's true, but at some point, you just have to move on.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I've always disliked the "gas giant" terminology for planets. I prefer to think of them as planets that have much thicker and larger atmospheres than some others.
Jupiter, just as an example, (probably) has a "core" of rock. I think of this "core" as the planet itself, and everything outside of that core to be the atmosphere.
12 years ago I was caught hacking in the educational facility I was (theoretically) studying at. I didn't change my grades, but I did have complete access to, if I'd thought about it (which I didn't). All I did do was fix a minor bug (an "oops, inc instead of dec" bug, nothing big) in a tutor's program. My main motivation was boredom - one should not be forced to take "Introductory Certificate in Computing" (this is a mouse - see how the arrow on the screen moves when you move it?) before being allowed to take real courses.
Suffice to say, it was not appreciated. I was kicked out of the school permanently - HOWEVER, no legal action was brought against me (in that instance).
For the record, I did not go on to start a successful PC company, however I did make a killing doing network security pre-Y2K and was offered a position in the military (which I declined due to my abhorrence of the idea of 6 months basic training).
Actually, it's not even that small in the third dimension when you're talking on scales of planck lengths - it's pretty thick. But that was why I put "2 dimensional" in quotes... even if paper WERE truly 2 dimensional, the same would still be true.
You sir, win the pedant award of 2007.
No, no, no! God Wrote in LISP code.
I'm not religious, but if I were, I'd be strongly inclined to agree.
Mods: Even if you don't believe in God (like me), please mod the parent up as Insightful - because it is, even if he's wrong!
Please note: Everything below is just how I understand it with my very rudimentary understanding of the subject. I am likely to be extremely wrong, and if so, I'd appreciate being enlightened rather than modded down!
one of the major hurdles to string theory is gravity.As I understand it, while gravity is a problem for string theory, it's more of a problem for pretty much every other theory. String theory seems to handle gravity MUCH more cleanly than other theories.
why is it as weak as it is?The strings that form "gravitons" (elementary particles of gravity) are, due to their shape, capable of moving out of the plane of influence ("brane" (from "membrane")) of other strings (matter and energy in general) that are tied to the brane. Therefore their strength appears significantly weaker since significantly less of them directly interact.
The sibling post to this one may be correct and I may be flat out wrong, but my understanding was that a "string" can be described as a one dimensional object that has the ability to move through (probably) 11 dimensions.
Similar to how a "2 dimensional" object such as a piece of paper can happily be folded in 3 dimensions while still itself being 2 dimensional.
Ah yes, I'll never forget the day my mother came to me and said, "YttriumOxide, it's very important that you never keep your eye on an eight hundred and seventy thousand mile wide ball of fusing hydrogen...".
The main reason I won't forget it is of course that measuring things in miles just seemed so quaint since I grew up with the metric system.
As another note, I have yet to have a firefox lockup on OSX, except with dodgy addons (which also happens on my Windows and Linux boxes)
Things like gchat didn't work. Maybe they do now. As far as lockups - just google as I advised.
Okay, I did some searching and yes, it appears people have had this problem. Since it's as solid as a rock on my system though, there must be some reason it's not working so well on other people's systems. Computer's aren't mystical devices - if it works for me, then it is definite that it CAN work okay and it's just a matter of finding the difference between my system and one that it doesn't work on.
If this is more work than you're interested in doing though (as it sounds from other comments you made), I'd recommend not working in a field relating to computers to be quite honest. The added advantage of troubleshooting this issue is that you can already rule out hardware, or at least consider it much less, as someone else's hardware will be just like mine.
Exactly, it is a GDI printer. I am ok with hacking things around, but don't bullshit me, that everything just works.. If I knew I need to spend time for getting a windows printer to work, I could have done it in linux.
So, you're complaining that a WINDOWS ONLY device was hard to set up under MacOS... and then you say that you could hack around to get it working under Ubuntu... yes, you could... and that "hacking around" would be IDENTICAL on MacOS - they both use CUPS as the print system and it's almost certain you'd use the same toolset to make it work.
No virtual desktops.
Correct - same as Windows... but coming in a future OS thankfully. I miss them myself since my other main environment is an Ubuntu box where I use them quite heavily. I do have to say though that once you get used to functions like Expose and keeping programs open with no window displayed (the standard state of Thunderbird on my system for example), it does make it less of a pain
Pay for every fucking add-one, for example divx.
Last I checked, divx cost the same on every platform - free for the player, pay for the Pro package... it was a while ago I checked though, because VLC handles all my video needs (which is, of course, free)
The vast majority of "add ons" I have on my Mac are open source packages. I use Firefox as my web browser, Thunderbird for email, NeoOffice for my office suite and so on. It's true that there's not as much freeware/shareware as the Windows world, but since most larger projects from the open source world are available for MacOS, I've never felt too constrained by this - certainly no less than my Linux boxes.
Shit package management, that is not followed by most piece of software. Download manually, etc.
I wasn't actually aware MacOS claimed to have any kind of package management. It's a different philosophy for applications - somewhere closer to the Windows world of no package management. Applications are installed by copying them to your computer. They are removed by deleting them. Some applications have installers that copy things to other locations, and when they don't have other installers, yes it's a pain in the arse. I've had that same kind of pain on other systems such as Windows and similar but different pain on Linux systems where the program ISN'T managed by my package manager where everything else is. As long as the app keeps with the "way of doing things on that platform", I'm happy with it.
Look, I hate linux, it giving me hard time on so many fronts, but ubuntu is a more pleasant experience, all in all.
Fair enough. I don't hate Linux, or MacOS... I have a mild distate for Windows in general, but don't hate it either (due to my work, the majority of programming I do is under Windows).
If you prefer Ubuntu, great - keep using it, and preferably do what you ca
That's okay. Rarely do I get negative moderation anyway (I honestly don't recall the last time), so my Karma can handle it.
:) (even though I still think it was a crappy joke! ;) )
People often complain about the moderation system here, but overall I find it generally works quite well. There are the occasional times it falls down - like the guy calling me a "fucking idiot" getting modded "Informative" (wtf?) - but in general it works okay and I'm hardly going to lose any sleep over it.
I'm 100% in favour of your sig by the way. For that, and the post I'm replying to, you just made my friends list
Clearly his joke was VERY poor - I read it as serious. And no, I'm not an idiot - I was just attempting to explain the difference in case the person really didn't understand it. I also completely do not understand the "troll" mod I received. It could perhaps be construed as flamebait, as I was a little harsh (considering I thought the person must be pretty dumb), but certainly not a troll. At least one mod has modded me informative though, so that shows there's someone that got what I was getting at.
Mod parent up for this!
I consider "free will" to be a combination of the complexity of the factors that determine a choice and how well the individual understands these factors. If there is a lot of complexity, with little understanding of the factors involved, then it appears as free will. You'd have a hard time finding a creature with more complexity AND less understanding than a human being, and so we consider ourselves to have free will.
From this, you can see that I consider everything to be determined. And I'm okay with this - free will implies randomness, and I am strongly opposed to the idea that anything is random (yes, God Does NOT Play Dice! (I even have the same views on supposed "chance" in quantum mechanics, but that's another topic entirely)). So, if one believes in a lack of "free will" should one act any differently? Not really. I can fully accept that I don't understand all of the factors involved in my conscious "decisions" and therefore I can continue to act as if it is free will, while still holding the belief that it isn't.
If the above makes no sense to you, ignore it - it's my viewpoint, and it's shared by many others, but it probably isn't going to change your life.
I often see this argument in favour of religion and against atheism, but I fail to understand it. I am an atheist, and I have ethics and morals (they may be slightly different to other people's, but by and large they're similar enough. Most people tend to have roughly the same set).
I can give plenty of rational reasons for my behaviour...
1) Why I don't rape women: Because I know that doing so would hurt them. And that would make them more likely to desire bad things happening to me. And the more people that desire bad things happening to me, the more likely bad things will happen to me. And I don't want bad things to happen to me. I gain next to nothing, I stand a very good chance of losing a lot. This "idea" has been so ingrained in to me, that the very idea of rape is abhorrent and sickening to me - which is how I consider myself to be "against the idea of rape". But I don't fool myself about the rationale behind this idea.
2) Why I don't murder: See #1, but generally the families/friends/society of the person rather than the person themselves.
3) Why I don't steal: See #1, but it's more "inconvenience" than "hurt" - the end result is the same though.
4) Why I don't (lots of other things): See #1
Get the idea?
Now, I'm sure someone reading this will think I'm selfish and ego-centric. Yes, I am. I consider true selflessness to be a serious mental illness. Everything a sane person does is selfish when you get right down to it, and there's nothing wrong with that. Even many religious folk are only "good people" because they're told that they'll be rewarded in the afterlife for it. Can any Christians (or even anyone else) here honestly say that if they believed they'd go to heaven for rape and murder, but go to hell for kindness and compassion that they'd be kind and compassionate?
If you doubt for a second that people can't be persuaded away from their beliefs by stronger ones (such as "fear of authority" for a large percentage of the world's population), you only need look at things like "The Third Wave", the Stanford Prison Experiment, and the Milgram experiment, just to name three.
I've never met a Richard Head, but I did once meet a "Richard Edward Meyer" (Dick Ed Meyer). The surname doesn't really have any bearing on the joke, but I do have to wonder what his parents were thinking (or not thinking) when they chose his middle name along with that first name.
Oh, I also used to work with Alice Cooper... her parents assumed that the somewhat more famous person by that name wouldn't be so well known by the time young Alice grew up. How wrong could they be?
You are aware that a "visa" is a small document (often included as a slip of paper in your passport) that says you're allowed to stay in a particular country and outlines the basic rules of what you're allowed to do while there (e.g. can't work/can work, can stay for a year/can only stay for a month etc etc), right? Many countries allow citizens of certain other countries to stay for a limited period of time without a visa (so you don't need to get a visa every time you go on holiday outside of your home country), however it appears that is not the case for American citizens travelling to Nigeria.
A "visa" is a totally different thing to a "Visa", which is a credit card. Journalistic headlines are generally written with caps for each first letter ("Bill Gates Denied Visa To Nigeria"), which I see could cause some confusion about the difference, however it really can be very easily gleaned from context.
And therefore has far more points post installation where you need to set this!
I've honestly never understood the "less questions during install the better" crowd. I WANT to be asked about how my system should look, behave, feel and so on during install. I WANT to be able to choose what things I do and don't have installed. And to be able to do any of this, it HAS TO ask me.
I installed Vista in a VM the other day for work, simply because I need it for testing my software under Vista. It really bugged me that after install, I had to go through damn near every control panel item before the system was actually set up remotely how I wanted it (note: Regional Settings included!)
As per my other post, we do. The grandparent obviously either doesn't know how to look at our website to get a driver if it's a product that is supported on Mac OS, or just failed to pay attention to the fact that not all of our products are. (exactly as per every other printer manufacturer out there)
A hint for the Slashdot community at large: Printer "drivers" aren't really like other drivers. They don't talk directly to the hardware. What Printer "drivers" do is output a print language (often a Page Description Language) such as PostScript, PCL or others, which then gets sent to the print device via whatever method (parallel, USB, network, etc). Therefore, unlike most other types of hardware, it's TRIVIAL to get a printer to print (just with some features missing) as long as it supports a standard print language simply by using the driver from another product that uses that same language. The only big exception to the rule is "GDI" printers (AKA "Windows only" printers) and good luck trying to get those horrible things to work under anything. Thankfully we don't make too many of those, and I fully expect I'll eventually win my crusade for them to be removed from existence completely (Microsoft pushing XPS oddly enough is helping with that!)
(all of the above is actually slightly irrelevant since for all PostScript products we make, we DO supply MacOS X drivers (and Linux drivers too!))
Now, I'm no Mac fanatic - my main system is an iMac with OS X 10.4, but I also couldn't live without my Linux boxes, and to a lesser extent my Windows system. So, I consider myself fairly OS agnostic most of the time. But I have to strongly disagree with almost everything you've said here.
a) E-mail. gmail poorly supported under safari. firefox experience constant lock-up : google for "firefox freeze mac" if you don't believe thatMy main email account is with gmail. I actually use the POP/SMTP interface of gmail with Thunderbird, so haven't really used the web interface that much, but when I did and I had no problems under Safari or Firefox.
As another note, I have yet to have a firefox lockup on OSX, except with dodgy addons (which also happens on my Windows and Linux boxes)
b) word-processor: neooffice useless, word is incredibily slow on a dual core machine and constantly brings machine with 1/2 gb to swapping. I know it is rosetta emulated, but this is not my problem.What's useless about NeoOffice? It's my main office suite at home and I've never had any problems with it. It even plays nicely with all of my MSOffice documents from work. Maybe if you're more specific about the problems, someone can offer a solution.
c) Printer - had to install compiler suite to compile driver for linux to get my konica minolta working. It felt like early days of linux, haven't done that in ages.Woah there... I work for Konica Minolta and have done for the last 5 and a half years (I started with Minolta about a year before the merger). I can guarantee you that every PostScript device we have is fully supported on MacOS. If you'd said an older Konica or Minolta device, then maybe I could believe it was a LITTLE more work (but still not much), but certainly not for a post-merger Konica Minolta device. Did you even CHECK our website for drivers?
If it was a PCL device, then you might have had a bit more difficulty, but those products (especially the home printers) are quite clearly marked as not being supported on MacOS. Even though we don't support them, getting them to work is pretty trivial (an HP Color LaserJet driver will do the trick pretty much perfectly)
In the unlikely event that it's a GDI printer ("Windows only"), I'm actually pretty surprised you made it work at all, but hey, you would've had the same problems under any non Microsoft OS.
Disclaimer: I work for the Business Equipment side of the company, which works with the bigger office MFPs, not the home printers. But I do know the printers pretty well anyway since over the last few years we've been sharing tech very closely between the two lines.
d) Websites: movies didn't work and flip4mac didn't help either. My wife was furious. Luckily the converted to flash movies.When you say "movies didn't work", what format were they in? I don't have this problem with my Firefox web browsing, and I must (shamefully) admit to often visiting websites with embedded video.
Metered? yes... expensive? Depends on your viewpoint. I always thought my connection there was really well priced. AUD$64.95 a month for 10Mbit down, 1.5Mbit up. (and limited to 36GB a month - 12GB "on peak" and 24GB "off peak". After which, I would be capped to near dial-up speeds (but not charged any extra))
Since I've moved to Europe, I find the prices here for a slower connection to be MUCH cheaper, but if I want something the speed I had in Australia, I'll pay almost much in Euro as I used to in AUD.
Even if your ISP specifically said, "We will read your email for the purposes of serving you targetted advertising"? That's what Google does, and if you've signed up and agreed to this, there's not a single reason you have to be angry at them for doing so. If you don't like it, don't use it. If you didn't read that part of the sign-up process, that's your own fault - you still agreed to it.
As many others have already pointed out, email is like a postcard, not a letter. If I send you a postcard, I fully expect that someone at a Post Office somewhere along the route has a very good chance of reading it, and I accept this. If I want to send you something with the expectation of privacy, I will seal it in an envelope. For digital communication, the equivalent of sealing it in an envelope is encrypting it (because simply wrapping headers around it still leaves it exposed - data isn't 3D).
Just as a note, you can use gmail through POP and SMTP... I haven't touched gmail's web interface in a LONG time. So if I used some kind of encryption system (which I don't, because I don't care if Google (or anyone else) reads my email), it would be just as secure as any other mail system.
Also, as other posters have pointed out, there's things like FireGPG for those who do use the web interface.
I use Wikipedia very often at work - for work related things. I consider it an excellent starting point for a general overview of a topic. I never expect it to be 100% accurate, and realise fully that it can be biased. But if there's a topic I've never even heard of, and want to get an idea of what it is at a fundamental level, Wikipedia provides me the information.
To use a real world example. I work in the business equipment industry (copiers/printers/scanners/MFPs). The only kinds of scanning I was familiar with were TWAIN and the various "send" methods such as FTP, Email, SMB and so on. Someone asked me a question about ISIS... Right, first step - check Wikipedia and figure out what on earth ISIS is, determine the basics of how it works, and then answer the question. Should further questions have come (they didn't), I would then have a good base of ideas in which direction I should extend my research. Without Wikipedia, yes, I could have just Googled it and found the information I needed, but the level of trust I could put in that information would be no greater or less than my results from Wikipedia.
(and before any scanner geeks come along and tell me that I should have known about ISIS considering what I do for a living - none of our products handle ISIS and I'd only been in the industry 3 years at the time, so could hardly be expected to know EVERY piece of technology associated with the field, especially when it's not something I've direct contact with)
The problem with both AROS and UAE are the goals of those projects. They give a reasonably nice 3.1-ish environment (AROS) or a complete but glitchy anywhere-up-to-3.9 environment (UAE).
For those of us that did move to OS4, going to back to 3.x just feels like entering the stone age. Until UAE can handle PPC emulation and run OS4, I'm afraid I won't go near it.
Mod parent up. He's completely right. When I read this article, I immediately thought of how easy it would be to do... so I think I'll do it tomorrow just to prove a point.
Step 1: Find OCR engine for various character sets (there's plenty around, and I have a licensed one at work, but I'll try to find a free one)
Step 2: Write code to receive scanned image from copier and pass it to the OCR engine.
Step 3: Pass output of OCR to online translation tool.
Step 4: Read translation from online translation tool.
Step 5: Paste translation back in to correct positions over scanned image (the only part that's even REMOTELY tricky)
Step 6: Submit back as a print job to the copier.
Step 7: Profit! (sorry, had to say it)
I really think this entire thing would take me less than a day to write. I could even add in some fancy stuff like interfacing with the copiers control panel to give fancy options that you can select at the time of scanning (courtesy of the fact that that's my day job)
I couldn't agree with you more... except on one little point.
There is, of course, another, darker reason: revisionism. Nazis did horrible things. So did their collaborators in other countries. It is less-than-honorable period in Germany's and many other countries history, so they'd rather pretend it never happened. I've heard that Japan has a similar problem with its own atrocities, often committed against the civilians of its empire: they simply aren't mentioned in history books.As a foreigner now living in Germany that also has a lot of contact with Japan, I can tell you you're half right. Japan does indeed seem to practice revisionist history in in it's schools and general attitudes. Germany however, I can assure you, does not. Most German schoolchildren know FAR more about the second world war than school children in any other country. They are taught about the horrible things done by horrible people, and they are taught about the great things done by great people. I would actually hazard a guess to say that it's LESS revisionist than elsewhere in the world. How many stories of greatness, goodness and heroism do you hear about the GERMAN side of world war 2? Yes, terrible things were done, and I would not and will not defend Germany for any of these terrible things... but I am more than ready to applaud the great men and women that were there and did amazing things.
On the other side of the same coin, how much do Americans and British learn about the atrocities committed by the allied soldiers during WW2? Such as gunning down groups of German prisoners because it's easier than taking them with you and processing them? Soldiers doing horrible things is neither a recent phenomenon nor ever only one-sided.
I've gotten slightly offtopic here I'm afraid. To get back to my main point, no, Germany does not practice revisionist history. It is not proud of its past, but it realises that one of the best ways to stop it happening again is to teach about it. Yes, it is illegal here for me to goose-step down the street waving a swastika on a flag and yelling "Heil Hitler"... But not because people want to suppress the memory of it - simply that they understand how dangerous words and actions can be - especially when there are still people alive today that remember when it happened. I would not be surprised if, in 50 to 100 years, those laws no longer exist here in Germany. (If Germany as a country still exists rather than a "state of the EU", but that's another topic!)
The vast majority of people under the age of 35 have an attitude that basically says, "Yes, our country screwed up. Yes, they did horrible things that are inexcusable. BUT, can we please just get over it now and move on? Don't forget it, but stop focusing on it and realise that there's more to Germany than events from 60 years ago.". And I agree with them - shall we hold modern America responsible for mass slavery of Africans? Or shall we hold Australia responsible for treating the aboriginal people like animals and shooting them for sport? Or shall we hold Spain responsible for the Spanish Inquisition? All of these are longer ago, that's true, but at some point, you just have to move on.