No. This would be like if McDonald's charged you $2.50 for a burger with fries, and $3.00 for a burger without fries, or just wouldn't sell you the burger without fries. It's forcing you to buy something you don't want, and, no matter how the economics work for the vendor, you are still paying for the bundled OS! Just because it's universal doesn't make it a good practice.
Touché. But with hard drives they at least give you a choice of different sizes and speeds and (sometimes) brands. With operating systems it's Microsoft no matter what.
Neither I nor the French Law says it has to be only without an OS, only available without an OS. If they want to offer Windows XP for $5 as an "upgrade", that's fine. Or offer Windows XP for $5 and a $20 instant rebate, so it's $15 cheaper, fine. But they need to offer it without as well, and they'll probably have a hard time explaining how they're doing that if it's cheaper with Windows.
Right, and since mechanics can install a transmission in their own car, all cars should be sold without transmissions, too.
No. The difference is that an operating system runs on the computer. It isn't a necessary part. You could netboot the computer, or boot it off of a CD. Both are perfectly legitimate reasons for wanting to be able to buy a computer OS-free.
Do you honestly think it should be mandated that computers must come OS-free? And I'm not talking about "should be" in terms of how it would reduce the inept-user population, I'm talking about "should be" in terms of freedom and government non-interference. You are free to go buy a computer without an OS, or buy the parts and assemble them yourself, etc. Should companies not be free to sell OSes pre-installed on computers? Should people not be free to buy them?
No, I think it should be mandated that computers can be purchased OS-free for a price that is less than the price of one with the OS by a difference of the retail price of the OS. I think people should have the choice.
Yes, you can do something with it. You can take another computer, copy a bootloader to some form of media, boot that computer off of it, and install your own OS. It is functional enough to boot off of CD's, which I consider "working".
3D games like first person shooters and strategy games have their place, but I have a place in my heart for 2D puzzle games, like Marble Drop or Lemmings. I'd like to see more of them, and more sophisticated ones. (Of course, I prefer Quake 2 to anything newer because the shinier graphics in the newer ones--especially Quake 3--are actually distracting.)
Slashdot comments should be editable, like Wiki pages! Instead of posting irritating comments, Grammar Nazi(TM)'s could just edit the offending posts directly.
Yeah... it's like this: X is a square wheel, and Apple decided to reinvent it, better. But instead of building a circular wheel that was backwards-compatible with the roads for square wheels, they built a round wheel, and then built an ugly trailer you can hitch to your car that allows it to drive on square wheel roads. Then their users complain that the foreign, square-wheeled cars are a bumpy ride when riding on the flat roads designed for round wheels. Reinventing the wheel was great, but they should have done it in a way that was compatible with the existing infrastructure.
I took a couple of programming classes when it was still Java 1.3/1.4 a few years ago and totally missed the jump to Java 5/6.
You were using the JDK 1.3/1.4, which implements Java 3/4. The language versions are numbered N, but Sun's JDK's are numbered 1.N.
Java 5 has added:
auto boxing/unboxing, so if the compiler expects an int when you provide an Integer (or vice-versa, for any native type), it will automatically convert by either taking (for example) Integer.intValue or creating a new Integer object.
generics, so you don't have to cast objects when taking them out of a collection. Here (warning: PDF!) is a good tutorial on generics, so I don't have to explain them. Essentially you can do List<String> l= new LinkedList<String>(); l.add("foo"); System.out.println(l.first()); without the usual cast.
annotations, so you can mark up your code with annotations like bug reports or deprecation. Reflection encompasses annotations, so your code can see what you've said about it. This is a half-hearted description--you can do really cool stuff with it; I just haven't done anything with it yet.
foreach loop: for (Type thing : Collection things) {/* do stuff */ } pretty much explains it. It handles the iteration for you, and (I think) the right hand of the for loop (after the colon) can be anything that implements Iterable.
Java 6, I'm not as knowledgeable about. But Java 5 is certainly an improvement--it makes things less wordy, although most of the changes are skin-deep; the compiler implements generics as implicit casts (which are added to the class files), and the foreach loop with an implicit iterator. And of course boxing/unboxing slows things down too. But it's prettier, and besides, if you're using Java you probably already have a handle on where the performance is good and where it suffers.
I think it's a little ridiculous to be surprised that people would want to avoid this inconsistency, especially with such a revered system as OS X.
Frankly, what I am annoyed about is that these users use a platform with small market share, and that they get used to having software developed "just for them". Almost every Mac user I've met uses special Mac variants of the software I use on my Linux system. The Mac is different from other Unices, in many ways--file paths, windowing, user administration, and the list goes on--yet Mac users expect their own versions of every piece of software, and whine when software that is portable across every Linux distro, several variants of BSD, and even Windows doesn't... work? No, it works fine on their quirky system. It doesn't look pretty. That's pretty absurd, when you think about it. They are a minority, and should stop complaining that when people port software to their system it doesn't look nice enough. I feel like the Mac community doesn't participate in the notion of writing portable software that works equally well on every OS. They want the software tailored to their system, even if it means rewriting large chunks of it to use proprietary API's that only exist on the Mac. Everyone else is happy to share their software and interfaces, but Mac users think they deserve for programmers to make a special exception for them.
I always found it ridiculous that OpenOffice has to run on an X session, it always seemed like a horrible kludge to me, especially getting printing to work.
I've always found it ridiculous how Mac users don't like running cross-platform applications under X. X is a standard for windowing on *nix systems, even if it's old and a little broken. If it's such a big deal, why doesn't Apple integrate Aqua and X better? And in terms of printing, Mac OS X uses CUPS, which is the same thing most people use on Linux.
Mmm, yes. Cingular is nice. They're often willing to forgive half or all of an overage charge if it's your first month with a new service and you underestimated your usage.
Sure it is. Just press SHIFT-F11 and it switches to small screen mode, which emulates the behavior of Opera (the regular version, not Mini) on cell phones (Symbian, I think).
What bothered me about your initial message was the implication that because SMART data is difficult to interpret, and therefore far from automatic in its current state, that it wasn't of any value.
It is of very little value, if not none. The point of SMART is to be automatic. The spec is simple, there are a set of attributes, each with a "failure" threshold. The values should be right, and the thresholds should be set appropriately. You shouldn't have to interpret the data--if you have a SMART client, then it should be accurate and useful, without requiring you to reason that "Well, the threshold for reallocated sectors is 50, but the drive is at 80 [percentage values, not raw values], but I think it's failing anyway, so I'll replace it". It's "self-monitoring and analysis technology". The monitoring works fine, but the analysis isn't right.
For example, kids attending Hauptschule tend to spend a lot of the later years of their schooling doing practical training and internships. In fact, I'd say the German system does a better job training skilled laborers like plumbers and mechanics.
This is good. I've never figured out why there is such an attitude in the US of "everyone needs to be really smart and go to college". I'm pretty smart, and I'm planning to go to college, and almost definitely will. But the entire world can't be just "knowledge workers", sitting in their offices crunching financial data, or writing memos, or creating advertisements. Someone's gotta build and ship the computers, someone's gotta build the office buildings, someone's gotta wire everything, someone's gotta keep the place clean, etc.... I'm not joking, I'm serious. What we should try to do is give everyone a chance to discover different types of work--intellectual, physical, etc...--and see what they're attracted to.
...reallocated sectors is the #1 thing to watch for to determine when a drive is failing. I wonder whether you had smartd.conf setup correctly if that number was going up and you weren't getting warnings screaming that the drive was going bad.
But SMART has a mechanism for the drive makers to indicate what is and isn't a "failing" value for a particular attribute. If n bad sectors is enough to cause concern, then the drive should have said it was failing!
Kids these days have keystroke habits? I don't think I've seen anyone other than the handful of compsci geeks at my school who knows how to use keyboard shortcuts. It's immensely painful watching someone switch between the mouse and the keyboard every second, especially when they're entering data into a long web form or something like that.
A lot of people have asked why you would want to use Linux for your BIOS. Generally it comes down to speed and flexibility. First, a Linux BIOS can be faster, because instead of having to check all the system RAM, test out all the integrated hardware, do SMART drive checks, and all the stuff a modern BIOS does to be "user friendly", it can just look for the disk it needs and boot, after initializing things like the memory controller. Second, a Linux BIOS is more flexible, because it can be programmed to boot off of any local media, or even, theoretically, do something crazy like netbooting over wireless.
I have no problem running a *nix box as we run several already.
Ah. I thought you meant you wanted the telephony server to run on Mac OS X. (Or is that what you meant?)
So, we will not be going cheap on the hardware.
Oh, I didn't mean cheap as in crappy. I just meant that an equivalent PC without Apple's "extras" (that are most useful on desktop systems, not servers) would cost less. It might be a moot point, though, since the telephony cards are likely to be the biggest cost, not the server itself.
My company works with Mac OS X. I wonder the same ask slashdot, but for Macs only.
I'm not trying to be a troll, but you're probably stuck with a PC for the server hardware. I'm sure you can find a good softphone app for Macs if that's what you want, but I just can't see a vendor offering a Mac with a pile of telephony cards in it. Besides, using a Mac for telephony wastes most of the benefits you get with a Mac, which are the nice-looking hardware, the user-friendly interface, and the extra software, like iLife. When it comes to telephony, you might as well just run some other *nix, and use cheaper hardware, since there's even less difference between the hardware now that PC's and Macs use the same processor.
You kind of have to keep SOMETHING back... otherwise why would anyone buy it at all? They could all just use the free Beta2 copies...
The betas are programmed to expire in about 9 months (June 2007, IIRC). Withholding drivers is dumb because it withholds part of the experience of the OS.
I once thought of a similar analogy--your RAM is your desk space, and your hard drive is your filing cabinet. It's how much you can store vs. how much you can work on at once. But I like your analogy too.
I can attest to this. I've been running Kismet on long drives between colleges in Pennsylvania, and I haven't seen a single 802.11a access point. I've stopped even scanning A just so I can get more packets on the BG band.
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No. This would be like if McDonald's charged you $2.50 for a burger with fries, and $3.00 for a burger without fries, or just wouldn't sell you the burger without fries. It's forcing you to buy something you don't want, and, no matter how the economics work for the vendor, you are still paying for the bundled OS! Just because it's universal doesn't make it a good practice.
Touché. But with hard drives they at least give you a choice of different sizes and speeds and (sometimes) brands. With operating systems it's Microsoft no matter what.
Neither I nor the French Law says it has to be only without an OS, only available without an OS. If they want to offer Windows XP for $5 as an "upgrade", that's fine. Or offer Windows XP for $5 and a $20 instant rebate, so it's $15 cheaper, fine. But they need to offer it without as well, and they'll probably have a hard time explaining how they're doing that if it's cheaper with Windows.
No. The difference is that an operating system runs on the computer. It isn't a necessary part. You could netboot the computer, or boot it off of a CD. Both are perfectly legitimate reasons for wanting to be able to buy a computer OS-free.
No, I think it should be mandated that computers can be purchased OS-free for a price that is less than the price of one with the OS by a difference of the retail price of the OS. I think people should have the choice.
Yes, you can do something with it. You can take another computer, copy a bootloader to some form of media, boot that computer off of it, and install your own OS. It is functional enough to boot off of CD's, which I consider "working".
(This should have been a poll as well.)
3D games like first person shooters and strategy games have their place, but I have a place in my heart for 2D puzzle games, like Marble Drop or Lemmings. I'd like to see more of them, and more sophisticated ones. (Of course, I prefer Quake 2 to anything newer because the shinier graphics in the newer ones--especially Quake 3--are actually distracting.)
Slashdot comments should be editable, like Wiki pages! Instead of posting irritating comments, Grammar Nazi(TM)'s could just edit the offending posts directly.
Yeah... it's like this: X is a square wheel, and Apple decided to reinvent it, better. But instead of building a circular wheel that was backwards-compatible with the roads for square wheels, they built a round wheel, and then built an ugly trailer you can hitch to your car that allows it to drive on square wheel roads. Then their users complain that the foreign, square-wheeled cars are a bumpy ride when riding on the flat roads designed for round wheels. Reinventing the wheel was great, but they should have done it in a way that was compatible with the existing infrastructure.
You were using the JDK 1.3/1.4, which implements Java 3/4. The language versions are numbered N, but Sun's JDK's are numbered 1.N.
Java 5 has added:
Java 6, I'm not as knowledgeable about. But Java 5 is certainly an improvement--it makes things less wordy, although most of the changes are skin-deep; the compiler implements generics as implicit casts (which are added to the class files), and the foreach loop with an implicit iterator. And of course boxing/unboxing slows things down too. But it's prettier, and besides, if you're using Java you probably already have a handle on where the performance is good and where it suffers.
Frankly, what I am annoyed about is that these users use a platform with small market share, and that they get used to having software developed "just for them". Almost every Mac user I've met uses special Mac variants of the software I use on my Linux system. The Mac is different from other Unices, in many ways--file paths, windowing, user administration, and the list goes on--yet Mac users expect their own versions of every piece of software, and whine when software that is portable across every Linux distro, several variants of BSD, and even Windows doesn't... work? No, it works fine on their quirky system. It doesn't look pretty. That's pretty absurd, when you think about it. They are a minority, and should stop complaining that when people port software to their system it doesn't look nice enough. I feel like the Mac community doesn't participate in the notion of writing portable software that works equally well on every OS. They want the software tailored to their system, even if it means rewriting large chunks of it to use proprietary API's that only exist on the Mac. Everyone else is happy to share their software and interfaces, but Mac users think they deserve for programmers to make a special exception for them.
Sorry about the rant.
I've always found it ridiculous how Mac users don't like running cross-platform applications under X. X is a standard for windowing on *nix systems, even if it's old and a little broken. If it's such a big deal, why doesn't Apple integrate Aqua and X better? And in terms of printing, Mac OS X uses CUPS, which is the same thing most people use on Linux.
Mmm, yes. Cingular is nice. They're often willing to forgive half or all of an overage charge if it's your first month with a new service and you underestimated your usage.
Sure it is. Just press SHIFT-F11 and it switches to small screen mode, which emulates the behavior of Opera (the regular version, not Mini) on cell phones (Symbian, I think).
It is of very little value, if not none. The point of SMART is to be automatic. The spec is simple, there are a set of attributes, each with a "failure" threshold. The values should be right, and the thresholds should be set appropriately. You shouldn't have to interpret the data--if you have a SMART client, then it should be accurate and useful, without requiring you to reason that "Well, the threshold for reallocated sectors is 50, but the drive is at 80 [percentage values, not raw values], but I think it's failing anyway, so I'll replace it". It's "self-monitoring and analysis technology". The monitoring works fine, but the analysis isn't right.
This is good. I've never figured out why there is such an attitude in the US of "everyone needs to be really smart and go to college". I'm pretty smart, and I'm planning to go to college, and almost definitely will. But the entire world can't be just "knowledge workers", sitting in their offices crunching financial data, or writing memos, or creating advertisements. Someone's gotta build and ship the computers, someone's gotta build the office buildings, someone's gotta wire everything, someone's gotta keep the place clean, etc.... I'm not joking, I'm serious. What we should try to do is give everyone a chance to discover different types of work--intellectual, physical, etc...--and see what they're attracted to.
But SMART has a mechanism for the drive makers to indicate what is and isn't a "failing" value for a particular attribute. If n bad sectors is enough to cause concern, then the drive should have said it was failing!
Kids these days have keystroke habits? I don't think I've seen anyone other than the handful of compsci geeks at my school who knows how to use keyboard shortcuts. It's immensely painful watching someone switch between the mouse and the keyboard every second, especially when they're entering data into a long web form or something like that.
At one naive point in my life, I believed that SMART would actually serve its intended purpose and warn me when my hard drive was going to die. SMART doesn't always work! The drive started making funny noises months before SMART even noticed.
A lot of people have asked why you would want to use Linux for your BIOS. Generally it comes down to speed and flexibility. First, a Linux BIOS can be faster, because instead of having to check all the system RAM, test out all the integrated hardware, do SMART drive checks, and all the stuff a modern BIOS does to be "user friendly", it can just look for the disk it needs and boot, after initializing things like the memory controller. Second, a Linux BIOS is more flexible, because it can be programmed to boot off of any local media, or even, theoretically, do something crazy like netbooting over wireless.
Ah. I thought you meant you wanted the telephony server to run on Mac OS X. (Or is that what you meant?)
Oh, I didn't mean cheap as in crappy. I just meant that an equivalent PC without Apple's "extras" (that are most useful on desktop systems, not servers) would cost less. It might be a moot point, though, since the telephony cards are likely to be the biggest cost, not the server itself.
I'm not trying to be a troll, but you're probably stuck with a PC for the server hardware. I'm sure you can find a good softphone app for Macs if that's what you want, but I just can't see a vendor offering a Mac with a pile of telephony cards in it. Besides, using a Mac for telephony wastes most of the benefits you get with a Mac, which are the nice-looking hardware, the user-friendly interface, and the extra software, like iLife. When it comes to telephony, you might as well just run some other *nix, and use cheaper hardware, since there's even less difference between the hardware now that PC's and Macs use the same processor.
The betas are programmed to expire in about 9 months (June 2007, IIRC). Withholding drivers is dumb because it withholds part of the experience of the OS.
I once thought of a similar analogy--your RAM is your desk space, and your hard drive is your filing cabinet. It's how much you can store vs. how much you can work on at once. But I like your analogy too.
I can attest to this. I've been running Kismet on long drives between colleges in Pennsylvania, and I haven't seen a single 802.11a access point. I've stopped even scanning A just so I can get more packets on the BG band.