Lots of employees (esp. bank employees) but especially some gov't employees (i.e. those who work in the money mints) work under the knowledge that they are being recorded, for good reason.
I think police officers should also work under the knowledge or assumption that they are being recorded. If a cop is going to say "well, I have a right to be aware that I'm being recorded, so I don't get caught harassing and abusing people" then I guess that's ok - but I don't think it should be each citizen's responsibility to remind the pig that he's being recorded. It should go with the job. Just as a cop is aware that he may be shot at by a crazed motorist (which is why they follow certain safety procedures), the cop should be aware that he may be recorded, which is why he should follow certain CIVILITY procedures.
Being a public employee should essentially mean you must ALWAYS assume that you are being recorded, WHILE ON DUTY. Of course, when you're off duty, you're not under that assumption.
It's not that cops are in a different category, it's that they do not have a right to privacy while on duty, and they should assume they're being recorded (and maybe they should stop acting like assholes so much of the time).
Paradox was a database? I thought it was a torture device!;-)
(I did have to work with it a bit in about 1997, but honestly I'd blocked it from memory. Maybe that was a good thing. Thanks a LOT for remind me of it!;-)
I agree, porting this to have a nice Cocoa-based GUI wrapper would be a LOT of work. OTOH, the same is true with GIMP, which may be more worthwhile (maybe). I do wonder if just starting a Cocoa office suite from scratch might be a good idea. Any old NeXT users around? What was "the" word processor for NeXTStep? Was there one? Does it still exist, and if so, who owns it? I know "the" spreadsheet was Mesa, which rocks.
Frankly, I've been pinning my hopes on Nisus, which is rewriting Writer for Cocoa (not Carbon) and has always had a sweet word processor. However, these days, just a good wp and spreadsheet isn't enough; people want integration with that abomination powerpoint (ugh, the bane of corporate presentations... not cuz the app sucks, but cuz the presentations suck), the worst database ever (access), and other MS garbage.
Frankly, I think the most crucial feature of an office suite is TRANSPARENT handling of ALL the features (cruft) of MSOffice documents - revisions, that stupid highlighting stuff, etc - and that's hard to do. I still worry that many users will be "forced" into using MSOffice, not because better suites aren't available, but because MS has embraced/extended what a word processor or spreadsheet should do to the point where nobody can really compete.
The comment about "So many people tend to subconsciously believe that their password has to sum up the very essence of their being in one word," reminds me of the Orson Scott Card short story, The Dogwalker. Basically, a password thief discovers by psychoanalysis of sorts what a password is... it is basically derived from someone's personality.
In MacOS versions after 7.5.5 but before X, the OS DOES have MP support (much improved in Mac OS 9, btw) but it's asymmetric MP rather than symmetric. Furthermore, the OS itself does not take any advantage of it, and ALL processes are spawned on CPU 0. However, applications can execute threads on either CPU, which means that applications (quicktime, photoshop, itunes, Quake 3...) can take advantage of multiple CPUs.
This is completely different from the SMP model in Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, Windoze NT/2000, etc.
The engineering cost, advertising and promotion cost, etc. are all fixed. They are the same amount whether 1000 CDs are sold or 1,000,000.
The only things that are dependent on the number of CDs shipped or sold are the distribution costs and manufacturing costs. In large volumes, both of those are small. What eats up a lot of the money is the cost of advertising, etc. Thus, total sales revenue needs to be maximized (rather than maximizing the price of each CD). If CD prices were lowered, and sales were much greater, the record companies WOULD turn a greater profit, the artists' pitiful pay would be a little better, and so on.
Wow. Don't they understand the basics of supply and demand? Regardless of the reason, whether it's Napster or shitty product, if sales are down that means demand is down (if prices have stayed the same). That means to compensate, they should LOWER prices.
And these people have business degrees??
Re:Democrats & Entertainment, backstabbing?
on
Killing Video Games
·
· Score: 1
It isn't just Democrats doing this silliness. Furthermore, true Liberal Democrats are NOT so prone to this hysteria. For the record, Lieberman is as right-wing as a Democrat can get.
"The Open Group's intent is that this applies only to the kernel of the operating system, without regard to any bundled utilities or application software. This includes all known distributions of Linux and BSD distributions. To find out if an operating system qualifies check whether kernel sources are available under criteria meeting the OSI's Open Source Definition."
Since only the kernel has to be Open Source (not necessarily Free in the RMS view) Mac OS X would be allowed to run this, it would seem.
Ok, this seems like a good thing at first. But what about partially-free OSs? I'm assuming this license would NOT let someone use Open Motif on something like Mac OS X, which has lots of non-Free stuff on top of Free stuff (OTOH, you could use Open Motif on Darwin!)
So that begs the question of where do you draw the line? How much non-free stuff added to a free OS makes it non-Free? There has to be some allowance, or any Linux distro that came with some bundled commercial app would be non-Free (or worse, even Debian would become non-Free if someone installed some non-Free utility or driver on it).
But Mac OS X becomes an interesting question. You could replace the kernel of Mac OS X with the kernel from Darwin - they're identical - and what you truly would have is a bunch of non-free userland stuff running on a Free kernel.
This seems like a good first step for Apple to be taken more seriously, especially given public concerns about Apple not taking security seriously.
I'm glad to have the opportunity to look into this framework now. Hopefully Apple will keep addressing the security holes that'll pop up elsewhere in the OS from time to time.
Will this silence the rabid anti-Apple critics who haven't used a Mac since 1984 (if ever)? Not a chance.
Hardly. Microsoft is a minority shareholder, and hardly has much weight to throw around in that manner.
The main leverage Microsoft has on Apple is the threat of cancelling MS Office for the Mac. But that does make MS a ton of money, so they're not just doing it for leverage purposes.
Ok, then riddle me this - why do all of these "collaborative groupware" software titles have to have such AWFUL email components? Ok, Outlook isn't that bad. But Notes is bleedin' awful. I haven't used Groupwise since 1995, but back then it was also a horrible piece of software.
True, though, Outlook/Exchange are probably the best of these. And that's really scary.
No. Microsoft marketing/advertising is really good at convincing people that Windows has everything they need built in... except for large corporations, who obviously need to pay large sums of money for crap like Exchange/Outlook rather than using "communist" software like sendmail and a standards-compliant mail client.
The bug fixes so far have fixed some rather significant problems, and added features that were essentially "missing" from OS X (as in, they'd been there in OS 9).
The thing to keep in mind is that OS X 10.0.x is still an "early adopters'" release, and early adopters have been screaming for these updates. I'm sure the 10.1 release in July will be more stable with respect to updates (as far as stability - with respect to SYSTEM stability, 10.0.x is solid so far.
Except that Microsoft marketing is very good at convincing people that their crap is really good, and the IT groupthink mentality is really good at prohibiting people from trying anything else. So mediocre stuff gets perpetuated.
Getting more for your money can be bad for the consumer, if it isn't *really* more for your money.
If you get, for free, a really mediocre set of tools that are "just good enough" that people generally stick with them as opposed to installing 3rd party tools (even if those 3rd party tools are free), then the quality of the whole system goes down. Look, if Microsoft didn't have such a near monopoly on bundled e-mail apps, there wouldn't be such a unified target for virus authors.
The main reason China (and other nations) haven't YET cut off all internet access, and probably won't, is that as much as the governments love their ideology, they also love money and foreign investments. China, for example, knows it can't survive without foreign investment and commerce, and the internet helps facilitate that. Thus, I don't think China would ever completely cut off its citizens from the internet - though it might restrict things to a very few "approved" web sites.
Ok, if your cell phone is playing a full 3 minute pop song every time someone calls, you probably are violating copyrights (as well as risking justifiable homicide).
But if your phone is playing a 3-second clip from a song (never mind if that song is 200+ years old and the copyright has long since expired, like Beethoven's Fifth or something), that really seems like it should fall under the doctrine of fair use. Where do you draw the line? Is it a violation of fair use if I hum a few bars of a song? I don't think so.
But anything to get their greedy little paws on more cash, I guess...
I wouldn't be worried about the safety, as long as there's no chance of the intensity of the laser increasing suddenly. Interestingly, I'm wondering if it really is a laser - the article never states that it is a laser, except by implication in the sentence,
"At first glance, pointing a laser directly into your eyeball seems to fall somewhere between the risky and the downright foolhardy. "
but it may just be a narrow, projected beam of light, not lased light. I'd be curious to find out more about that. After all, if it's a laser, and you want a color display, you'll need THREE lasers, for each of the primary colors, scanning along side each other (unlike a CRT's phosphors, our retinas do not have separate 'pixels' for red, green, and blue).
What can Perl do that Java can't? Nothing at all; they both let you approximate a Turing machine, so they can accomplish exactly the same things. BASIC , Lisp, and Fortran are also equally powerful in this regard (heck, I love Lisp)
My point is that regular expressions are very natural and easy in Perl (assuming you understand regular expressions conceptually, and find them easy on that level). In Java, to my knowledge, they aren't. According to some other peoples' posts, there are some Java libs for REs, but they're written in Java, so aren't as fast as the Perl and PHP RE functions that are written in C and compiled to machine-specific code.
You don't truly NEED regular expressions in a language, because you can parse them yourself using your own stack. In this way, you could do regular expressions in Fortran (and hell, they'd be damn fast if you coded them well). At issue is convenience features in a given language, and how well documented they are, and how streamlined their use is. REs in Perl work great. I can't speak for PHP, because I don't know the language. Heck, as much as I despise the syntax of ASP (BASIC), I'd be surprised if you can't do REs fairly easily in that Microsoftish language (please, someone - surprise me!!!)
What I find hard to believe is that all the rich string-manipulation functionality of Perl was left out. The main reason that Perl, despite its poor performance compared with PHP and Java, is so cool is the regular-expression stuff that's built in. I don't know PHP; maybe it has all that stuff, but Java has no regular expression libraries by default. Maybe some exist, but I haven't seen them. Don't underestimate the power of REs!!:)
I'm surprised that article didn't mention O'Meara's recent deal with Apple. G-Force is the default (and, currently, the only) viz plugin for iTunes (which is especially weird since there were many viz plugins for SoundJam, from which iTunes is derived). Anyways, O'Meara must be doing well from this deal - at least, I hope he is.
On a side note, something that I think would be interesting (though I don't know how possible) would be a visualizer that used some of the algorithms that have been developed for musical comparison (the same sort of algorithms that are being used to identify mp3s of copyrighted songs, for example). Looking at the structure of the music, rather than just a spectrum analysis, might allow some really cool visualizers:)
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Lots of employees (esp. bank employees) but especially some gov't employees (i.e. those who work in the money mints) work under the knowledge that they are being recorded, for good reason.
I think police officers should also work under the knowledge or assumption that they are being recorded. If a cop is going to say "well, I have a right to be aware that I'm being recorded, so I don't get caught harassing and abusing people" then I guess that's ok - but I don't think it should be each citizen's responsibility to remind the pig that he's being recorded. It should go with the job. Just as a cop is aware that he may be shot at by a crazed motorist (which is why they follow certain safety procedures), the cop should be aware that he may be recorded, which is why he should follow certain CIVILITY procedures.
Being a public employee should essentially mean you must ALWAYS assume that you are being recorded, WHILE ON DUTY. Of course, when you're off duty, you're not under that assumption.
It's not that cops are in a different category, it's that they do not have a right to privacy while on duty, and they should assume they're being recorded (and maybe they should stop acting like assholes so much of the time).
Paradox was a database? I thought it was a torture device! ;-)
;-)
(I did have to work with it a bit in about 1997, but honestly I'd blocked it from memory. Maybe that was a good thing. Thanks a LOT for remind me of it!
I agree, porting this to have a nice Cocoa-based GUI wrapper would be a LOT of work. OTOH, the same is true with GIMP, which may be more worthwhile (maybe). I do wonder if just starting a Cocoa office suite from scratch might be a good idea. Any old NeXT users around? What was "the" word processor for NeXTStep? Was there one? Does it still exist, and if so, who owns it? I know "the" spreadsheet was Mesa, which rocks.
Frankly, I've been pinning my hopes on Nisus, which is rewriting Writer for Cocoa (not Carbon) and has always had a sweet word processor. However, these days, just a good wp and spreadsheet isn't enough; people want integration with that abomination powerpoint (ugh, the bane of corporate presentations... not cuz the app sucks, but cuz the presentations suck), the worst database ever (access), and other MS garbage.
Frankly, I think the most crucial feature of an office suite is TRANSPARENT handling of ALL the features (cruft) of MSOffice documents - revisions, that stupid highlighting stuff, etc - and that's hard to do. I still worry that many users will be "forced" into using MSOffice, not because better suites aren't available, but because MS has embraced/extended what a word processor or spreadsheet should do to the point where nobody can really compete.
The comment about "So many people tend to subconsciously believe that their password has to sum up the very essence of their being in one word," reminds me of the Orson Scott Card short story, The Dogwalker. Basically, a password thief discovers by psychoanalysis of sorts what a password is... it is basically derived from someone's personality.
o rt-story.html if anyone's interested.
Kind of interesting, I think. The story's at http://www.frescopictures.com/movies/dogwalker/sh
In MacOS versions after 7.5.5 but before X, the OS DOES have MP support (much improved in Mac OS 9, btw) but it's asymmetric MP rather than symmetric. Furthermore, the OS itself does not take any advantage of it, and ALL processes are spawned on CPU 0. However, applications can execute threads on either CPU, which means that applications (quicktime, photoshop, itunes, Quake 3...) can take advantage of multiple CPUs.
This is completely different from the SMP model in Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, Windoze NT/2000, etc.
install the developer tools that CAME with the OS. then you'll have gcc and make.
"That is the intent and 50 years after the death of the author is just rediculous for computer games."
;-)
Solution: Kill all the game developers now, so all the games will be free in 50 years!
The engineering cost, advertising and promotion cost, etc. are all fixed. They are the same amount whether 1000 CDs are sold or 1,000,000.
The only things that are dependent on the number of CDs shipped or sold are the distribution costs and manufacturing costs. In large volumes, both of those are small. What eats up a lot of the money is the cost of advertising, etc. Thus, total sales revenue needs to be maximized (rather than maximizing the price of each CD). If CD prices were lowered, and sales were much greater, the record companies WOULD turn a greater profit, the artists' pitiful pay would be a little better, and so on.
Wow. Don't they understand the basics of supply and demand? Regardless of the reason, whether it's Napster or shitty product, if sales are down that means demand is down (if prices have stayed the same). That means to compensate, they should LOWER prices.
And these people have business degrees??
It isn't just Democrats doing this silliness. Furthermore, true Liberal Democrats are NOT so prone to this hysteria. For the record, Lieberman is as right-wing as a Democrat can get.
Ok, I don't usually reply to my own posts. Sorry!
But from the Open Motif license FAQ,
"The Open Group's intent is that this applies only to the kernel of the operating system, without regard to any bundled utilities or application software. This includes all known distributions of Linux and BSD distributions. To find out if an operating system qualifies check whether kernel sources are available under criteria meeting the OSI's Open Source Definition."
Since only the kernel has to be Open Source (not necessarily Free in the RMS view) Mac OS X would be allowed to run this, it would seem.
Ok, this seems like a good thing at first. But what about partially-free OSs? I'm assuming this license would NOT let someone use Open Motif on something like Mac OS X, which has lots of non-Free stuff on top of Free stuff (OTOH, you could use Open Motif on Darwin!)
So that begs the question of where do you draw the line? How much non-free stuff added to a free OS makes it non-Free? There has to be some allowance, or any Linux distro that came with some bundled commercial app would be non-Free (or worse, even Debian would become non-Free if someone installed some non-Free utility or driver on it).
But Mac OS X becomes an interesting question. You could replace the kernel of Mac OS X with the kernel from Darwin - they're identical - and what you truly would have is a bunch of non-free userland stuff running on a Free kernel.
What do people think?
This seems like a good first step for Apple to be taken more seriously, especially given public concerns about Apple not taking security seriously.
I'm glad to have the opportunity to look into this framework now. Hopefully Apple will keep addressing the security holes that'll pop up elsewhere in the OS from time to time.
Will this silence the rabid anti-Apple critics who haven't used a Mac since 1984 (if ever)? Not a chance.
Hardly. Microsoft is a minority shareholder, and hardly has much weight to throw around in that manner.
The main leverage Microsoft has on Apple is the threat of cancelling MS Office for the Mac. But that does make MS a ton of money, so they're not just doing it for leverage purposes.
Ok, then riddle me this - why do all of these "collaborative groupware" software titles have to have such AWFUL email components? Ok, Outlook isn't that bad. But Notes is bleedin' awful. I haven't used Groupwise since 1995, but back then it was also a horrible piece of software.
True, though, Outlook/Exchange are probably the best of these. And that's really scary.
No. Microsoft marketing/advertising is really good at convincing people that Windows has everything they need built in... except for large corporations, who obviously need to pay large sums of money for crap like Exchange/Outlook rather than using "communist" software like sendmail and a standards-compliant mail client.
The bug fixes so far have fixed some rather significant problems, and added features that were essentially "missing" from OS X (as in, they'd been there in OS 9).
The thing to keep in mind is that OS X 10.0.x is still an "early adopters'" release, and early adopters have been screaming for these updates. I'm sure the 10.1 release in July will be more stable with respect to updates (as far as stability - with respect to SYSTEM stability, 10.0.x is solid so far.
Except that Microsoft marketing is very good at convincing people that their crap is really good, and the IT groupthink mentality is really good at prohibiting people from trying anything else. So mediocre stuff gets perpetuated.
Getting more for your money can be bad for the consumer, if it isn't *really* more for your money.
If you get, for free, a really mediocre set of tools that are "just good enough" that people generally stick with them as opposed to installing 3rd party tools (even if those 3rd party tools are free), then the quality of the whole system goes down. Look, if Microsoft didn't have such a near monopoly on bundled e-mail apps, there wouldn't be such a unified target for virus authors.
The main reason China (and other nations) haven't YET cut off all internet access, and probably won't, is that as much as the governments love their ideology, they also love money and foreign investments. China, for example, knows it can't survive without foreign investment and commerce, and the internet helps facilitate that. Thus, I don't think China would ever completely cut off its citizens from the internet - though it might restrict things to a very few "approved" web sites.
Ok, if your cell phone is playing a full 3 minute pop song every time someone calls, you probably are violating copyrights (as well as risking justifiable homicide).
But if your phone is playing a 3-second clip from a song (never mind if that song is 200+ years old and the copyright has long since expired, like Beethoven's Fifth or something), that really seems like it should fall under the doctrine of fair use. Where do you draw the line? Is it a violation of fair use if I hum a few bars of a song? I don't think so.
But anything to get their greedy little paws on more cash, I guess...
I wouldn't be worried about the safety, as long as there's no chance of the intensity of the laser increasing suddenly. Interestingly, I'm wondering if it really is a laser - the article never states that it is a laser, except by implication in the sentence,
"At first glance, pointing a laser directly into your eyeball seems to fall somewhere between the risky and the downright foolhardy. "
but it may just be a narrow, projected beam of light, not lased light. I'd be curious to find out more about that. After all, if it's a laser, and you want a color display, you'll need THREE lasers, for each of the primary colors, scanning along side each other (unlike a CRT's phosphors, our retinas do not have separate 'pixels' for red, green, and blue).
What can Perl do that Java can't? Nothing at all; they both let you approximate a Turing machine, so they can accomplish exactly the same things. BASIC , Lisp, and Fortran are also equally powerful in this regard (heck, I love Lisp)
My point is that regular expressions are very natural and easy in Perl (assuming you understand regular expressions conceptually, and find them easy on that level). In Java, to my knowledge, they aren't. According to some other peoples' posts, there are some Java libs for REs, but they're written in Java, so aren't as fast as the Perl and PHP RE functions that are written in C and compiled to machine-specific code.
You don't truly NEED regular expressions in a language, because you can parse them yourself using your own stack. In this way, you could do regular expressions in Fortran (and hell, they'd be damn fast if you coded them well). At issue is convenience features in a given language, and how well documented they are, and how streamlined their use is. REs in Perl work great. I can't speak for PHP, because I don't know the language. Heck, as much as I despise the syntax of ASP (BASIC), I'd be surprised if you can't do REs fairly easily in that Microsoftish language (please, someone - surprise me!!!)
What I find hard to believe is that all the rich string-manipulation functionality of Perl was left out. The main reason that Perl, despite its poor performance compared with PHP and Java, is so cool is the regular-expression stuff that's built in. I don't know PHP; maybe it has all that stuff, but Java has no regular expression libraries by default. Maybe some exist, but I haven't seen them. Don't underestimate the power of REs!! :)
I'm surprised that article didn't mention O'Meara's recent deal with Apple. G-Force is the default (and, currently, the only) viz plugin for iTunes (which is especially weird since there were many viz plugins for SoundJam, from which iTunes is derived). Anyways, O'Meara must be doing well from this deal - at least, I hope he is.
:)
On a side note, something that I think would be interesting (though I don't know how possible) would be a visualizer that used some of the algorithms that have been developed for musical comparison (the same sort of algorithms that are being used to identify mp3s of copyrighted songs, for example). Looking at the structure of the music, rather than just a spectrum analysis, might allow some really cool visualizers