carrying around a one pound brick and surfing the net while you wait in the middle of the subway station. People with iPods want to bring music with them. People with PDAs want to bring work with them. Who would you rather hang around? (Forgetting that 'neither' is probably the best answer, I mean.)
As far as I know, no state has really passed a really good law. Also, there's a good argument to be made (which I think you're effectively making) that says effective tort reform will have to come at a national level. Right now the states with reform are probably just subsidizing the malpractice industry (if that word can be applied) in other states. Where else are the doctors going to go? So, I think it's fair to say that one state doing the right thing is probably not enough. You probably need a critical mass.
Fortunately, you're also in a small minority, or we'd all be homeless and sobbing for each other. The guy who invents the first working fusion reactor will do more for every poor person in the world than a million mother theresas. We need both, to be sure, but what definitely WON'T solve any problems is mindless pablum.
Welcome to the moon. I'm afraid we have to blame the Democrats for this one (the politicians, not the good people who vote for them). They are pretty much in the back pocket of the trial lawyers lobby. It's a shame more liberals don't know about this, because I suspect most of them would be irate if they knew that their beloved "party of the people" was largely responsible for the disgusting mess our parasitic legal system has become.
It makes me barf when these supposedly "liberal" politicians like Hillary go on about health care costs for the poor when they could immediately and easily cut health care costs (for everybody) by a huge amount (the malpractice insurance is sometimes as high as a third of the cost of a given procedure) if they wouldn't obstruct medical tort reform. Fucking disgrace. (And no, I'm not suggesting the Republicans don't have their own set of degerate hypocracy, like being against people welfare but for corporate welfare.)
I agree that there are quality problems, but it seems to be worse recently. I've noticed, in the past few weeks, a rash of vandalism on articles that never had any problems. For example, last week or so some vandal went around randomly deleting little snippets from the Swarthmore College article. You'd never notice it, and most didn't, continuing to just add their own edits. But after several edits, the vandal had deleted over half the article, and nobody noticed! I checked the IP of the anonymous user, and they'd done the same thing at various college websites all over Wikipedia.
I've also noticed a trend whereby people will do stealth vandalism, changing one tiny fact or number. This is far more insidious than the harmless dorks who replace an entire article with "Brent Stevens eats babies". This is clearly an effort by people to discredit the very idea of Wikis.
Thanks for the info! I hope they just decide to move the file/type information into the data fork, like MS did with properties. I really like the ability to associate files on a file-by-file basis.
I agree that resource forks are a problem; I would love to get rid of HFS entirely and use UFS, but there are too many programs that still use resources. Also, I think it's very inelegant that right now Mac OS X is on top of UNIX, but none of the native UNIX commands know anything about the resource fork.
The problem with file types, as far as I can tell, is that they abandoned the elegant type/creator notion they previously had with the Mac and went with the UNIX/PC extension plus a database (which can and does get corrupted) to link files to apps, oddly similar to the registry. So, now we Mac users have been sent BACK to 1983, where now a Mathematica.m file and a MATLAB.m file are confused by the OS. The idea that you can change the type of a file my just rewriting its name is crazy, and one of the worst ideas in computer science. I'm disappointed that Apple adopted it, though maybe they had no choice.
I've had problems with HFS+ recently, though that's obviously not a statistically meaningful piece of data. However, I can't remember the last time I had trouble with ext3, or even NTFS.
I'd be too worried they Microsoft it up. And so I'm a bit worried that Apple with Apple up OS X. Which is to say, let it languish and die a slow death while they entertain us with trivialities like window border patterns while ignoring underlying problems and failing to advance the platform in a technologically meaningful way. Hopefully, it doesn't look like they will from the start of things, but there are warning signs. From an outsider's perspective, they appear to be spending more time tweaking the window gradient of iTunes than addressing problems with HFS+ or file types. I hope I'm wrong...
It sounds like he will be working on all manner of clients. In his blog he simply stated that he's working on Google Talk. If he's going to be working on Gaim MORE now, then it begs the question of why Google would bother to hire him.
I don't see how you can characterize it as an act of brilliance. Maybe it was brilliant as far as acts of desperation go, but I don't see how you can call failing at building an OS for a decade to be any part of a good strategy. Had they gone for NeXT from the start, ten years earlier, things might be different. But they didn't choose NeXT, they had to scramble for something at the last minute and NeXT was the best option available to them outside their company.
If NeXT was really that good, why didn't they choose it before embarking on the failed Copland attempt? We have to admit that we're using an OS that might as well be called OS Plan B.
Seriously, it would be like Microsoft finally giving up on shipping Vista in 2010 and then buying BeOS and calling it Windows. You have to wonder why a company that couldn't produce a good OS on their own could possibly be successful in the long run after merging with a company that couldn't sell a good OS on their own.
Where the hell are you getting this bullshit? There's NO evidence that people are avoiding science due to any religious rhetoric. The people that are going into business school or law school in lieu of engineering aren't also going into churches at the same rate are they? If you were right, those same people would eschew working for tech companies. The evidence doesn't support that, either. We have a plethora of technology companies (and executives) in our country. The problem is we're losing engineers to other disciplines. It has nothing to do with religion. I think that's a personal issue you're dealing with. Nobody really listens to the quacks who think the world is 6000 years old or believe in ID. They are sort of a self contained sort who don't really affect the minds of the people who are deciding between being a lawyer and an engineer.
If you want to find a scapegoat, I think you're going to have to look at society and media and our economic motivators for choosing jobs. The fact is that in our country (and probably all others) a person with below average intelligence* can go get a two year MBA and out earn a guy of far above average intelligence who spent 6 years studying for a PhD in chemisty. I therefore find it laughable that you decide the problem is religion. I find it even funnier that people modded you up.
*According to the people who make the GRE, the business majors score lower in math than the english majors, and lower in verbal ability than the engineers. They are, all around, the dumbest people to apply to graduate school in every area. And yet they will be the richest.
Why not let each country manage their own top level domain? Maybe the US can keep.com,.gov, etc. since we started them, but what's wrong with letting.uk be completely controlled by the UK? Am I missing something? Does France really think they have a right to have any say in.com? We came up with it. If the French had started the Internet, it would've been.ent or something.
Inherently, no. My point was that there is probably a correlation between the quality of something, and how much money somebody was willing to risk to make it. Both in terms of motivation, as well as resources. Let me give you an example, when you've got an hour of available time, will you put it towards your pet OSS project, or an hour of consulting programming for which somebody is paying you $100 an hour. I know which way I'd spend my free hour. So OSS projects get the time of people who either have very invaluable time who nobody else wants, or they get the few spare hours a week of people who are good. So it's either slow or shoddy, hopefully just the former.
I know some companies pay people to write OSS software, but the same thing applies there, too. If you've got a project which makes you money and an OSS project you're helping on guess which one gets short shrift when time gets tight? Guess which one get's the time of your best programmers.
Which part, that it was a desperate move or that the improvements were mostly cosmetic? I'm not really denigrating it (I'm actually a Mac user since the Plus) because I think the graphics improvements are fantastic, but otherwise it's really not that advanced from NeXT. From what I understand, under the hood it's actually not even as advanced as the linux kernel.
No, I pointed out that OS X was Apple's desperate last ditch act of buying a dead OS and then making it pretty to replace their failed attempt at building a modern OS of their own and that it's actually quite old technology that has been given a superficial face lift. Now that I think of it, I guess I can see why I was modded flamebait and you were modded funny....
Funny, the last time I made the same point, it was modded down as flamebait. I guess it pays to post in the right topic: If you're going to say something about Apple, do it on a story about Palm.
I agree with everything you said, I just thought it was a bit overdone for the editor to take the ecological potshot at the military for something like this.
When asked about the possible ecological effects on marine life the military had no comment.
Uh, yeah. Good point. Because a sinking ship (full of people no less) has no environmental impact. If you don't care about the dead people, at least the diesel fuel? That works for you?
Look, I hate the evil capitalist pigs as much as the next comrade (and I actually say that with little irony when it comes to the recording industry) but it's the title "Greed 2.0" a bit over-the-top, even for a fake news source like/.?
I probably earned a lot of criticism in what I wrote, but yours was just pissy semantics. Yet I felt compelled to let you draw me into a bunch of ad hominum with no substance whatsoever. So you're partially right. What I need to do is grow up and learn to ignore people like you. Obviously, I'm not planning to start until after this post...
Here's some advice to you: don't be a pretentious ass who picks apart petty semantic points just to try to make others look bad. I'm sorry you've taken this whole thing so seriously. I suggest getting out more and finding other things in life that are important to you besides your computer operating system.
Seriously, what IS the difference between mocking ignorance and deliberately mistaking my point in this instance? You knew damn what what I meant. It was clear, but just not technically unambigious, like 99% of what people say in real life. Admit it, you were just being a jerk because it was easier than making a valid point. Everybody else here knew what I meant when I said "XML versus text" with regard to piping between unix commands. My point not being to present the idea in detail but to point out that the UNIX interprocess communication model hasn't advanced much. Most people got that, but you thought you'd call me names since I didn't specify 'text' precisely enough. Yup, you got me, sport.
I agree with everything you said. However, it hits on one of my main points. If linux goes too far in copying MS, then it begs the question: what niche does it fill besides being cheap? That's not enough for most people. I really don't consider spending $120 every three years to be even worth mentioning, which brings me to another question I have:
Why is it that the people who are so against paying for software tend to be the first people to live in trendy overpriced costal cities and pay $5 for a cup of coffee? Why don't you have the same hatred of greedy real estate agents and Starbucks? You people in San Fran obviously don't have a problem overpaying for everything, except you go crazy when MS over charges for their software, even though you pay for more a month of lattes than you would for three years of Windows XP. Isn't $5 for a coffee evil? Aren't housing prices that make people spend 75% of their income on mortgage evil? Isn't cost of living that excludes anybody who makes less than $50k evil? It all seems a bit contrived.
I'm really not fond of MS. It's just that I'm not a religious nut when it comes to computer operating systems. You'd be amazed at the kind of objectivity you can have when your ego is not tied to something as stupid as a computer.
As for my XML shell idea: don't be a patronizing twit. Think about it before you dismiss it on a stupid pendantic point which misreads my post. Obviously XML is text. But when you pipe ls to something, does that something even know it's getting a list of files? No. There's no way to really know it's even a table, which is why you have that stupid -c command if you want to do something like sort. I think adding some symantic information to shell commands would allow for interesting stuff. You could do things like ls -R . | filter -attribute filesize | sum. Or something along those lines. But I guess it's easier to be dick and just say something stupid like "uh, XML is text".
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carrying around a one pound brick and surfing the net while you wait in the middle of the subway station. People with iPods want to bring music with them. People with PDAs want to bring work with them. Who would you rather hang around? (Forgetting that 'neither' is probably the best answer, I mean.)
As far as I know, no state has really passed a really good law. Also, there's a good argument to be made (which I think you're effectively making) that says effective tort reform will have to come at a national level. Right now the states with reform are probably just subsidizing the malpractice industry (if that word can be applied) in other states. Where else are the doctors going to go? So, I think it's fair to say that one state doing the right thing is probably not enough. You probably need a critical mass.
You must be new here.
Fortunately, you're also in a small minority, or we'd all be homeless and sobbing for each other. The guy who invents the first working fusion reactor will do more for every poor person in the world than a million mother theresas. We need both, to be sure, but what definitely WON'T solve any problems is mindless pablum.
It makes me barf when these supposedly "liberal" politicians like Hillary go on about health care costs for the poor when they could immediately and easily cut health care costs (for everybody) by a huge amount (the malpractice insurance is sometimes as high as a third of the cost of a given procedure) if they wouldn't obstruct medical tort reform. Fucking disgrace. (And no, I'm not suggesting the Republicans don't have their own set of degerate hypocracy, like being against people welfare but for corporate welfare.)
I've also noticed a trend whereby people will do stealth vandalism, changing one tiny fact or number. This is far more insidious than the harmless dorks who replace an entire article with "Brent Stevens eats babies". This is clearly an effort by people to discredit the very idea of Wikis.
I agree that resource forks are a problem; I would love to get rid of HFS entirely and use UFS, but there are too many programs that still use resources. Also, I think it's very inelegant that right now Mac OS X is on top of UNIX, but none of the native UNIX commands know anything about the resource fork.
I've had problems with HFS+ recently, though that's obviously not a statistically meaningful piece of data. However, I can't remember the last time I had trouble with ext3, or even NTFS.
I'd be too worried they Microsoft it up. And so I'm a bit worried that Apple with Apple up OS X. Which is to say, let it languish and die a slow death while they entertain us with trivialities like window border patterns while ignoring underlying problems and failing to advance the platform in a technologically meaningful way. Hopefully, it doesn't look like they will from the start of things, but there are warning signs. From an outsider's perspective, they appear to be spending more time tweaking the window gradient of iTunes than addressing problems with HFS+ or file types. I hope I'm wrong...
It sounds like he will be working on all manner of clients. In his blog he simply stated that he's working on Google Talk. If he's going to be working on Gaim MORE now, then it begs the question of why Google would bother to hire him.
If NeXT was really that good, why didn't they choose it before embarking on the failed Copland attempt? We have to admit that we're using an OS that might as well be called OS Plan B.
Seriously, it would be like Microsoft finally giving up on shipping Vista in 2010 and then buying BeOS and calling it Windows. You have to wonder why a company that couldn't produce a good OS on their own could possibly be successful in the long run after merging with a company that couldn't sell a good OS on their own.
If you want to find a scapegoat, I think you're going to have to look at society and media and our economic motivators for choosing jobs. The fact is that in our country (and probably all others) a person with below average intelligence* can go get a two year MBA and out earn a guy of far above average intelligence who spent 6 years studying for a PhD in chemisty. I therefore find it laughable that you decide the problem is religion. I find it even funnier that people modded you up.
*According to the people who make the GRE, the business majors score lower in math than the english majors, and lower in verbal ability than the engineers. They are, all around, the dumbest people to apply to graduate school in every area. And yet they will be the richest.
Why not let each country manage their own top level domain? Maybe the US can keep .com, .gov, etc. since we started them, but what's wrong with letting .uk be completely controlled by the UK? Am I missing something? Does France really think they have a right to have any say in .com? We came up with it. If the French had started the Internet, it would've been .ent or something.
Isn't it also another example of reverse Darwinism in the OSS community? My guess is the time he spends working on GAIM will go down.
I know some companies pay people to write OSS software, but the same thing applies there, too. If you've got a project which makes you money and an OSS project you're helping on guess which one gets short shrift when time gets tight? Guess which one get's the time of your best programmers.
Which part, that it was a desperate move or that the improvements were mostly cosmetic? I'm not really denigrating it (I'm actually a Mac user since the Plus) because I think the graphics improvements are fantastic, but otherwise it's really not that advanced from NeXT. From what I understand, under the hood it's actually not even as advanced as the linux kernel.
No, I pointed out that OS X was Apple's desperate last ditch act of buying a dead OS and then making it pretty to replace their failed attempt at building a modern OS of their own and that it's actually quite old technology that has been given a superficial face lift. Now that I think of it, I guess I can see why I was modded flamebait and you were modded funny....
Funny, the last time I made the same point, it was modded down as flamebait. I guess it pays to post in the right topic: If you're going to say something about Apple, do it on a story about Palm.
I agree with everything you said, I just thought it was a bit overdone for the editor to take the ecological potshot at the military for something like this.
Uh, yeah. Good point. Because a sinking ship (full of people no less) has no environmental impact. If you don't care about the dead people, at least the diesel fuel? That works for you?
Look, I hate the evil capitalist pigs as much as the next comrade (and I actually say that with little irony when it comes to the recording industry) but it's the title "Greed 2.0" a bit over-the-top, even for a fake news source like /.?
I probably earned a lot of criticism in what I wrote, but yours was just pissy semantics. Yet I felt compelled to let you draw me into a bunch of ad hominum with no substance whatsoever. So you're partially right. What I need to do is grow up and learn to ignore people like you. Obviously, I'm not planning to start until after this post...
Seriously, what IS the difference between mocking ignorance and deliberately mistaking my point in this instance? You knew damn what what I meant. It was clear, but just not technically unambigious, like 99% of what people say in real life. Admit it, you were just being a jerk because it was easier than making a valid point. Everybody else here knew what I meant when I said "XML versus text" with regard to piping between unix commands. My point not being to present the idea in detail but to point out that the UNIX interprocess communication model hasn't advanced much. Most people got that, but you thought you'd call me names since I didn't specify 'text' precisely enough. Yup, you got me, sport.
Why is it that the people who are so against paying for software tend to be the first people to live in trendy overpriced costal cities and pay $5 for a cup of coffee? Why don't you have the same hatred of greedy real estate agents and Starbucks? You people in San Fran obviously don't have a problem overpaying for everything, except you go crazy when MS over charges for their software, even though you pay for more a month of lattes than you would for three years of Windows XP. Isn't $5 for a coffee evil? Aren't housing prices that make people spend 75% of their income on mortgage evil? Isn't cost of living that excludes anybody who makes less than $50k evil? It all seems a bit contrived.
As for my XML shell idea: don't be a patronizing twit. Think about it before you dismiss it on a stupid pendantic point which misreads my post. Obviously XML is text. But when you pipe ls to something, does that something even know it's getting a list of files? No. There's no way to really know it's even a table, which is why you have that stupid -c command if you want to do something like sort. I think adding some symantic information to shell commands would allow for interesting stuff. You could do things like ls -R . | filter -attribute filesize | sum. Or something along those lines. But I guess it's easier to be dick and just say something stupid like "uh, XML is text".