Today's Apple isn't the same Apple. When you replace all of your computers internal components and reinstall a completely different OS, isn't it a completely different computer, even though it has the same case?
"Fakes?" said Vimes. "They were all fakes?"
Suddenly the King was holding his mining axe again. "This, milord, is my family's axe. We have owned it for almost nine hundred years, see. Of course, sometimes it needed a new blade. And sometimes it has required a new handle, new designs on the metalwork, a little refreshing of the ornamentation... but is this not the nine-hundred-year-old axe of my family? And because it has changed gently over time, it is still a pretty good axe, y'know. Pretty good. Will you tell me this is a fake too?"
Microsoft doesn't have to suffer this minor inconvenience, since all new PeeCees come with Windows whether you like it or not, business has been well-and-truly locked in for fifteen years, and most people don't even know that there are better and free alternatives.
1998 called, wants its comment back.
I mean, really, nowadays you can get both desktops and laptops with Linux pre-installed... Linux is becoming a viable alternative, and in certain markets it's threatening Windows so much that Windows is becoming the alternative (eeePC et al.).
Even Dell offers PCs with pre-installed Linux. Somehow, I think the lock-in is getting weaker by the day.
I take it you weren't exactly a straight A student, then?
No, not exactly.
I was a straight A student at one point in my schooling, and I know full well what a bunch of crap that was.
Currently, I am among the very best students in my generation. Not because of my grades, because grades don't mean all that much, but because I actually grok my areas of interest, and I grok them well. I am a rather good translator, and I don't do badly in computational linguistics and cognitive science.
Oh, and I was among the best in my country in physics and chemistry (and I would have been among the best in biology, but the chemistry and biology competitions always took place on the same day, and chemistry interested me more), way back in high school.
And even so -- or maybe just because -- I don't believe in straight As.
I know far too many straight A students who only learned to the test, and my teachers tell me the same.
I don't believe in perfection in all areas, so if someone is able to attain the highest grades in all 15+ subjects in a typical Croatian high school, I cry foul. Not because I couldn't do it -- i was perfectly capable to do so, but because it shouldn't be possible. Tests should be nearly impossible to score perfectly at, so that the few times somebody does score perfectly, his genius and interest are easily recognized.
School should be hard, because easy is not challenging enough.
And no, schools should not teach criticisms to accepted theories unless they are backed with sufficient evidence. That would be teaching faith, and not critical thinking.
But if funds are appropriated for materials criticising the theory of evolution, and knowing the common critiques and how plausible they sound to the uneducated despite being completely and utterly wrong (or even damned lies), I don't think science will be given fair treatment.
However, I don't really care.
As far as I'm concerned, any school system may teach whatever the hell they want to, and parents may or may not enrol their children in such schools.
If they are taught crap, they will remain uneducated. Or the quality of universities will drop to accomodate them.
Natural selection works in mysterious ways, and in the long run, this kind of crap will prove to be either irrelevant, or so detrimental to your schools that you will eventually be bought out by the Chinese and kept as cheap, uneducated labour force.
So yeah, go ahead, teach your kids crap. Teach them that critique without any foundation in reality is good. Teach them empty rhetoric. Hell, teach them religion, while you're at it.
People who care about education will put their kids in private schools. Or move away. Or both.
The rest will get approximately what they pay for.
And yes, I'm bitter about public schools (not in the British sense, mind you), and I intend to start a private school in my country. Someday.
That's also true. I'm a very happy IE7 user at home, but at work, I'm stuck with IE6, since our apps aren't tested with IE7, and thus IE7 is not kosher.
Seems to me that in this case, Microsoft's lock-in started to work against them. Now that people are bound to IE6 in their workplaces for certain work-related applications, there is no way for them to upgrade to IE7. However, depending on the workplace, this needn't completely prevent the adoption of Firefox. Though I guess many companies have strict rules about this kind of thing, there are some with a more relaxed stance, at least towards advanced users.
Besides, there's IE tab, too.
Maybe you should complain to the right people next time.
You mean like the people who broke backwards compatibility and made needless API changes?
Why do you think they were needless?
I'll admit I'm not versed in the arts of programming, but whatever changes they'd made, I find Firefox 3 much better than Firefox 2 in every single aspect.
Anyway, I can't tell whether the changes were needed, but they are damned well justified.
Actually, Mozilla did a fine job upsetting their loyal customers -- just look at the "AwesomeBar" which is anything but.
Well, it seems to me that it's just a very vocal minority.
And I know some previously very vocal people who have come to like the Awesome Bar very very much.
The tip one of them gave me was: purge your history before you upgrade, let Firefox learn from scratch.
I'd upgraded long before that, of course, but maybe there is something in this piece of advice.
I suspect, though, that Awesome Bar requires some adjustment, and maybe even breaking some habits of the mind.
For instance, you may have to stop thinking where you want to go, and instead start thinking of what you want to find.
I find it most useful, especially with all the bookmark tagging -- I often want to quickly find whatever tidbit I'd once bookmarked and now seems so relevant. The sites I attend regularly are not only bookmarked, but also in Speed Dial; I rarely need to type anything to access them.
The only addition I would like to see in Awesome Bar is Safari-like autocomplete -- with the default choice pre-loaded in the bar, so if I'm happy with it, I could simply press Enter.
I just ignore ads, and do so with ease. I never understood the need for an addon to do it, but maybe I'm just really good at ignoring ads or something. Some can be really nasty, but the majority I run into are easily filtered out mentally.
Come to think of it, that'll be a good comeback to the snarky "Oh, TFA has ads? I didn't notice, cause I use adblock" comments... "Oh, you use adblock? How quaint, I trained my mind to do that ages ago."
Really, the power of your mind truly amazes me.
I have never been able to ignore those lovely ads that cover half the page I'm trying to view with the power of my mind alone.
ZOMG, they're working on their next version, this one must have sucked!
"Leopard=fail, Apple is already working on 10.6"
Since when is working on the next version of your OS a sign of failure, and not a sign of good business sense and continual development?
GP is the ultimate Apple fanboi.
Leopard is less than perfect, and the ultimate Apple fanboi expects nothing less than perfection from Apple. Therefore, Leopard == fail.
Well, I thought it pretty obvious, but somebody must be thinking I was joking.
Some things are simply better done with some simple rules -- both faster and more accurately.
Yes, throwing more data and more computing power at a problem can help solve it the hard way, but this is throwing brawn, not brains at a problem.
Kind of like computing every possible chess gme in the universe. If you have a computer fast enough, with enough RAM, yeah, you could do it by brawn alone. But the smart way is to use some algorithms.
Thirty or forty years ago, people speculated that robots will make sure people will never have to work. Now, it seems that computers are supposed to relieve us of the need to think.
That's not funny. That's sad.
And no matter the amounts of data, no matter the computing power, I don't think pure statistics will ever be able to analyze human language efficiently.
The easiest way from the bottom is 'up'. Really? last time i looked the easiest way from the bottom was actually nowhere or jail. don't let the american ideal fool you, if your born poor and work your ass off all your life, you'll die pretty much still at the bottom.
I wasn't speaking about economy; I was speaking of self-importance and self-respect.
Life is much easier once you lose the illusions of grandeur.
And I do not subscribe to the American ideal.
In fact, I am not an American in the first place.
Vista really showed the flaws in the old, monolithic process of Microsoft's. I hope Windows 7 will be better, but MS often overhyped future products to forestall any decisions by the purchaser in favor of a competitor.
Previously, Microsoft's hype would stop people from buying a competitor's product in favour of whatever Microsoft was promising.
Now the hype prevents people from buying Microsoft's current product. Instead, they decid to tough it out with the old product, because the new one is known to be buggy, and maybe the next one won't suck as much.
At this point, Microsoft's biggest competition is Microsoft. In the worst possible way.
Linux gaining ground is more or less a side-effect, though it doesn't mean it won't become a major one in the future. Maybe Linux will become Microsoft's next biggest competition, but it still isn't today.
I unfortunately know him well enough to understand that he is a borderline psychopath in regards to his empathy for other human beings.
I believe there is some cause and effect here. People with antisocial personality disorder have little empathy towards others and many emotions are muted. As a result, they learn rules for what actions and appearance of emotion will elicit a given reaction from other people. Instead of empathizing with a woman who is emotionally distressed, they think of themselves, what it is they want from that person, and what action is likely to get them what it is they want. Anyone can do this and learn to manipulate others, but not many people really do study it. People with antisocial personality disorder are forced to learn it from a young age just to get by, and tend to be very good at it.
You may be on to something here.
I am fairly anti-social, and I remember having to learn -- deduce -- most of those things.
On the other hand, I am also fairly good-natured, so I tend not to exploit it. But if I were a bit more anti-social, I see how I could behave.
Girls are attracted to that guy who steps on everybody's toes for his own personal gains. A go getter, powerful person who aims high. These are people with leadership qualities, and in the "badboy" circle, they're "ring leaders."
I know a guy like that... he's in college with me; very intelligent, rather charismatic, extremely eloquent and well-educated -- and at the same time very arrogant, narcissistic and even a bit Macchiavellian. Oh, and either very insecure, or very threatened by me. Or both.
Unlike him, I'm rather anti-social and quite geeky and nerdy. When we met, I was in a stable relationship, which has ended in the meantime. He had some short flings, of which I've heard from his ex girlfriends.
Now, when my relationship ended some year and a half ago, we were near the point of mutual disdain; I don't know what exactly about me bothered him, but I find it convenient to simply reciprocate other people's attitudes. Anyway, at that point he was trying to establish his macho identity, juggling around four girlfriends at any given time, though never really getting to sex. That is why some of the single girls he was toying with dumped him. But mostly, he kept trying to steal other guys' partners; I know of at least three relationships he tried to destroy.
Then I got involved with my current girlfriend, who is in college with us, and who is almost as anti-social as I am, and a far better judge of character (so what you're reading is in great part her analysis, as presented to me). And he tried for a coup de grace: stealing his arch-nemesis' girlfriend. I had been pretty broken up about my first break-up, so the second one should have destroyed me, I guess.
Needless to say, my girlfriend would never suffer the likes of me if she weren't madly in love. So his advances were unsuccessful; even more so because I do not act jealous, especially when there is a possibility that I am simply being provoked. She saw through his plan, too (his previous actions with other couples were a dead giveaway), and outright rejected him.
He ended up with a freshman girl, and now appears to be monogamous.
Now, what was this lengthy and probably fairly boring story about: even the so-called bad guys, with everything working for them, don't end up with all the girls.
Most of the girls my colleague had been juggling were quite entranced with him; one of them told me she'd been considering breaking up with her boyfriend for him. But apparently, the bad boy failed to steal a single good guy's girlfriend.
BTW, I don't know whether I qualify as a good guy; I don't care much how people perceive me, but I do know that I tend to come off as arrogant and cynical until you get to know me better.
Point is, bad boys spend quite a bit of energy on getting girls. I watched some of my colleague's efforts, I heard rather more about them, and I know I would never invest so much energy in such a venture. The reason they get more girls, when they do get them, is also correlated with the amount of energy they invest.
I invest my energy in one girl at a time. That means that if I do not succeed, I fail 100%. My colleague, juggling four girls at any given time, fails only 25% whenever he is rejected. And even if each of us courts the same number of girls, he will have gone through his girls much faster than I. This alone gives him "more girls".
Slashdot Mirror
Today's Apple isn't the same Apple. When you replace all of your computers internal components and reinstall a completely different OS, isn't it a completely different computer, even though it has the same case?
"Fakes?" said Vimes. "They were all fakes?"
Suddenly the King was holding his mining axe again. "This, milord, is my family's axe. We have owned it for almost nine hundred years, see. Of course, sometimes it needed a new blade. And sometimes it has required a new handle, new designs on the metalwork, a little refreshing of the ornamentation... but is this not the nine-hundred-year-old axe of my family? And because it has changed gently over time, it is still a pretty good axe, y'know. Pretty good. Will you tell me this is a fake too?"
Microsoft doesn't have to suffer this minor inconvenience, since all new PeeCees come with Windows whether you like it or not, business has been well-and-truly locked in for fifteen years, and most people don't even know that there are better and free alternatives.
1998 called, wants its comment back.
I mean, really, nowadays you can get both desktops and laptops with Linux pre-installed... Linux is becoming a viable alternative, and in certain markets it's threatening Windows so much that Windows is becoming the alternative (eeePC et al.).
Even Dell offers PCs with pre-installed Linux. Somehow, I think the lock-in is getting weaker by the day.
I take it you weren't exactly a straight A student, then?
No, not exactly.
I was a straight A student at one point in my schooling, and I know full well what a bunch of crap that was.
Currently, I am among the very best students in my generation. Not because of my grades, because grades don't mean all that much, but because I actually grok my areas of interest, and I grok them well. I am a rather good translator, and I don't do badly in computational linguistics and cognitive science.
Oh, and I was among the best in my country in physics and chemistry (and I would have been among the best in biology, but the chemistry and biology competitions always took place on the same day, and chemistry interested me more), way back in high school.
And even so -- or maybe just because -- I don't believe in straight As.
I know far too many straight A students who only learned to the test, and my teachers tell me the same.
I don't believe in perfection in all areas, so if someone is able to attain the highest grades in all 15+ subjects in a typical Croatian high school, I cry foul. Not because I couldn't do it -- i was perfectly capable to do so, but because it shouldn't be possible. Tests should be nearly impossible to score perfectly at, so that the few times somebody does score perfectly, his genius and interest are easily recognized.
School should be hard, because easy is not challenging enough.
And no, schools should not teach criticisms to accepted theories unless they are backed with sufficient evidence.
That would be teaching faith, and not critical thinking.
Yeah, lovely.
But if funds are appropriated for materials criticising the theory of evolution, and knowing the common critiques and how plausible they sound to the uneducated despite being completely and utterly wrong (or even damned lies), I don't think science will be given fair treatment.
However, I don't really care.
As far as I'm concerned, any school system may teach whatever the hell they want to, and parents may or may not enrol their children in such schools.
If they are taught crap, they will remain uneducated. Or the quality of universities will drop to accomodate them.
Natural selection works in mysterious ways, and in the long run, this kind of crap will prove to be either irrelevant, or so detrimental to your schools that you will eventually be bought out by the Chinese and kept as cheap, uneducated labour force.
So yeah, go ahead, teach your kids crap. Teach them that critique without any foundation in reality is good. Teach them empty rhetoric. Hell, teach them religion, while you're at it.
People who care about education will put their kids in private schools. Or move away. Or both.
The rest will get approximately what they pay for.
And yes, I'm bitter about public schools (not in the British sense, mind you), and I intend to start a private school in my country. Someday.
IE Tab?
Look, my father-in-law knows NOTHING about computing, but a LOT about using the Internet. We bought him a computer several years ago. His browser?
IE5, of course. Why? Because that's what was installed on the machine when we bought it.
Oh, I see where you're going with that.
You have come to /. to horrify the nerd masses and coerce them into buying your father-in-law a new computer.
"Pay up -- or the internet gets it!"
Well played, sir. Well played.
That's also true. I'm a very happy IE7 user at home, but at work, I'm stuck with IE6, since our apps aren't tested with IE7, and thus IE7 is not kosher.
Seems to me that in this case, Microsoft's lock-in started to work against them. Now that people are bound to IE6 in their workplaces for certain work-related applications, there is no way for them to upgrade to IE7. However, depending on the workplace, this needn't completely prevent the adoption of Firefox. Though I guess many companies have strict rules about this kind of thing, there are some with a more relaxed stance, at least towards advanced users.
Besides, there's IE tab, too.
Maybe you should complain to the right people next time.
You mean like the people who broke backwards compatibility and made needless API changes?
Why do you think they were needless?
I'll admit I'm not versed in the arts of programming, but whatever changes they'd made, I find Firefox 3 much better than Firefox 2 in every single aspect.
Anyway, I can't tell whether the changes were needed, but they are damned well justified.
So sure, go back and use FF2 for another 6 months. And then give FF3 another shot, see if it's up to speed for the things you need.
Yeah, real nice.
And then, just as he gets used to Firefox 3, there will be some Alpha or Beta of Firefox 4, and all his troubles will start anew.
Actually, Mozilla did a fine job upsetting their loyal customers -- just look at the "AwesomeBar" which is anything but.
Well, it seems to me that it's just a very vocal minority.
And I know some previously very vocal people who have come to like the Awesome Bar very very much.
The tip one of them gave me was: purge your history before you upgrade, let Firefox learn from scratch.
I'd upgraded long before that, of course, but maybe there is something in this piece of advice.
I suspect, though, that Awesome Bar requires some adjustment, and maybe even breaking some habits of the mind.
For instance, you may have to stop thinking where you want to go, and instead start thinking of what you want to find.
I find it most useful, especially with all the bookmark tagging -- I often want to quickly find whatever tidbit I'd once bookmarked and now seems so relevant. The sites I attend regularly are not only bookmarked, but also in Speed Dial; I rarely need to type anything to access them.
The only addition I would like to see in Awesome Bar is Safari-like autocomplete -- with the default choice pre-loaded in the bar, so if I'm happy with it, I could simply press Enter.
I just ignore ads, and do so with ease. I never understood the need for an addon to do it, but maybe I'm just really good at ignoring ads or something. Some can be really nasty, but the majority I run into are easily filtered out mentally.
Come to think of it, that'll be a good comeback to the snarky "Oh, TFA has ads? I didn't notice, cause I use adblock" comments... "Oh, you use adblock? How quaint, I trained my mind to do that ages ago."
Really, the power of your mind truly amazes me.
I have never been able to ignore those lovely ads that cover half the page I'm trying to view with the power of my mind alone.
Ah.
So, they are taking on OS X as well?
GP is the ultimate Apple fanboi.
Leopard is less than perfect, and the ultimate Apple fanboi expects nothing less than perfection from Apple. Therefore, Leopard == fail.
Well, I thought it pretty obvious, but somebody must be thinking I was joking.
Some things are simply better done with some simple rules -- both faster and more accurately.Yes, throwing more data and more computing power at a problem can help solve it the hard way, but this is throwing brawn, not brains at a problem.
Kind of like computing every possible chess gme in the universe. If you have a computer fast enough, with enough RAM, yeah, you could do it by brawn alone. But the smart way is to use some algorithms.
Thirty or forty years ago, people speculated that robots will make sure people will never have to work. Now, it seems that computers are supposed to relieve us of the need to think.
That's not funny. That's sad.
Quite.
And no matter the amounts of data, no matter the computing power, I don't think pure statistics will ever be able to analyze human language efficiently.
I wasn't speaking about economy; I was speaking of self-importance and self-respect.
Life is much easier once you lose the illusions of grandeur.
And I do not subscribe to the American ideal.
In fact, I am not an American in the first place.
Trivial as it may sound, this is one of the most important things one can realize in this day and age.
The sooner you realize it is all true, the sooner you'll learn to be happy with your life.
The easiest way from the bottom is 'up'.
Eight equals D?
I thought D equaled 13...
Vista really showed the flaws in the old, monolithic process of Microsoft's. I hope Windows 7 will be better, but MS often overhyped future products to forestall any decisions by the purchaser in favor of a competitor.
Previously, Microsoft's hype would stop people from buying a competitor's product in favour of whatever Microsoft was promising.
Now the hype prevents people from buying Microsoft's current product. Instead, they decid to tough it out with the old product, because the new one is known to be buggy, and maybe the next one won't suck as much.
At this point, Microsoft's biggest competition is Microsoft. In the worst possible way.
Linux gaining ground is more or less a side-effect, though it doesn't mean it won't become a major one in the future. Maybe Linux will become Microsoft's next biggest competition, but it still isn't today.
Wait and see, that's what we do.
And don't I know it.
Of course, hopefully the wannabe Casanova won't try to make Zapp Brannigan a goal.Why would he court Zap Brannigan?
Now that just sounds kinky.
I believe there is some cause and effect here. People with antisocial personality disorder have little empathy towards others and many emotions are muted. As a result, they learn rules for what actions and appearance of emotion will elicit a given reaction from other people. Instead of empathizing with a woman who is emotionally distressed, they think of themselves, what it is they want from that person, and what action is likely to get them what it is they want. Anyone can do this and learn to manipulate others, but not many people really do study it. People with antisocial personality disorder are forced to learn it from a young age just to get by, and tend to be very good at it.
You may be on to something here.
I am fairly anti-social, and I remember having to learn -- deduce -- most of those things.
On the other hand, I am also fairly good-natured, so I tend not to exploit it. But if I were a bit more anti-social, I see how I could behave.
Yes, but it considered particularly rude and offensive to do so.
Yes, that is sort-of the point.
If it were not rude, It wouldn't echo so loudly.
And that is often the only way to make yourself heard.
When this topic arises, I often, if not always, link to the article What Happened to All the Nice Guys? .
Every nice guy's recommended reading.
Girls are attracted to that guy who steps on everybody's toes for his own personal gains. A go getter, powerful person who aims high. These are people with leadership qualities, and in the "badboy" circle, they're "ring leaders."
I know a guy like that... he's in college with me; very intelligent, rather charismatic, extremely eloquent and well-educated -- and at the same time very arrogant, narcissistic and even a bit Macchiavellian. Oh, and either very insecure, or very threatened by me. Or both.
Unlike him, I'm rather anti-social and quite geeky and nerdy. When we met, I was in a stable relationship, which has ended in the meantime. He had some short flings, of which I've heard from his ex girlfriends.
Now, when my relationship ended some year and a half ago, we were near the point of mutual disdain; I don't know what exactly about me bothered him, but I find it convenient to simply reciprocate other people's attitudes. Anyway, at that point he was trying to establish his macho identity, juggling around four girlfriends at any given time, though never really getting to sex. That is why some of the single girls he was toying with dumped him. But mostly, he kept trying to steal other guys' partners; I know of at least three relationships he tried to destroy.
Then I got involved with my current girlfriend, who is in college with us, and who is almost as anti-social as I am, and a far better judge of character (so what you're reading is in great part her analysis, as presented to me). And he tried for a coup de grace: stealing his arch-nemesis' girlfriend. I had been pretty broken up about my first break-up, so the second one should have destroyed me, I guess.
Needless to say, my girlfriend would never suffer the likes of me if she weren't madly in love. So his advances were unsuccessful; even more so because I do not act jealous, especially when there is a possibility that I am simply being provoked. She saw through his plan, too (his previous actions with other couples were a dead giveaway), and outright rejected him.
He ended up with a freshman girl, and now appears to be monogamous.
Now, what was this lengthy and probably fairly boring story about: even the so-called bad guys, with everything working for them, don't end up with all the girls.
Most of the girls my colleague had been juggling were quite entranced with him; one of them told me she'd been considering breaking up with her boyfriend for him. But apparently, the bad boy failed to steal a single good guy's girlfriend.
BTW, I don't know whether I qualify as a good guy; I don't care much how people perceive me, but I do know that I tend to come off as arrogant and cynical until you get to know me better.
Point is, bad boys spend quite a bit of energy on getting girls. I watched some of my colleague's efforts, I heard rather more about them, and I know I would never invest so much energy in such a venture. The reason they get more girls, when they do get them, is also correlated with the amount of energy they invest.
I invest my energy in one girl at a time. That means that if I do not succeed, I fail 100%. My colleague, juggling four girls at any given time, fails only 25% whenever he is rejected. And even if each of us courts the same number of girls, he will have gone through his girls much faster than I. This alone gives him "more girls".