Well yes. But how hard would it be to have a colum in the either the gui or the command line file list that provided that info right beside the file name. indeed that's what OS9 and all it's predecessors did.
That's great if you only look at files in detail view. In the file explorer.
Sorry, but in the real world, files are all over the place. I've got a bunch of them sitting as icons on my desktop. There's another one as an attachment to an email I've got up on the screen. And links to download a few more on the website I was just at. Then I open up photoshop and decide to open a recent file via the "Open Recent" menu item... something.pdf, somethingelse.psd, anotherfile.eps...
By embedding the type into the name, its ALWAYS there.
Why can't I just use 'touch' on every file on my harddrive, giving them all random modification times from between a few years ago and the present?
Care to explain this photo sequence of the 2008 Christmas Parade -- see that float right there with the big Christmas 2008 banner on it? Take this set... dcc_144.jpg, dcc_145.jpg, dcc_146.jpg; these photos were clearly taken in sequence just seconds apart; why do they all have completely random time stamps? Stranger still most of these time stamps pre-date the event in the photo!
Even if you were a little smarter about how you dated things...
Care to explain why the various event logs don't correlate with your filesystem at all? This Java Install log indicates that it wrote this version of this in this folder on May 5th, 2009. Yet the file on disk is dated Jan 11, 2003...this is also odd, because that's 5 years before it was written.
If I were a greater man and wasn't in a rush I'm sure I could make a little one-liner to do exactly that.
I wouldn't attempt any computer data fraud with your l33t hacking skills just yet.
Theoretically, couldn't a person just set the BIOS clock to a date and time prior to the legislation, do multiple shreds and formats on the HDD, reinstall the OS with the BIOS clock still 'in the past', and have it seem as though nothing changed since the initiation of the litigation?
Yes, theoretically it can be done.
So, right out of the gate, there would be evidence that the drive had been formated and shredded just prior to the litigation. That's not 'criminal', but its suspicious enough to maybe look into it, and try and determine if it was in fact done before or after. And in practice most people, especially regular people, will make mistakes.
Ok... so the OS and installation logs etc proudly proclaim they were all insalled before such and such a date. But hmmm... what's this strange 4 month gap in the time stamps in the event log, starting 2 days after the OS was reinstalled.... or maybe our genius thought of that, but then why was the machine booted up and down each 'day' yet did nothing else...and it did this for 4 straight months... that looks a LOT more like someone rebooting, advancing the bios date, rebooting, advancing the bios date...etc than actually using it.
And then on top of that, why does the java auto update log show that the latest Java Update was installed 2 months before it was released... and this folder here... it contains mp3s with file creation dates before they were even recorded.
So they might come back and say, clearly someone was messing around with the clock and doing strange things with the PC. Couple that with the evidence the PC was wiped and shredded... we, of course, can't PROVE, the defendant tampered with the drive to destroy evidence... there are other possible explanations. But this is evidence of tampering, we think the jury will agree that the drive was tampered with, as opposed to being conveniently afflicted by a bizarre set of circumstances that make it merely look like it was tampered with.
Like anything digital, yes, your perfect crime is theoretically possible, but its probably much harder than you think.
Why are you trying to prove that people may have wrongly thought the world wasn't round? This is a bizarre argument.
I am trying to demonstrate that the fact that 'boats disappeared over the horizon' and returned to tell their tale does not make it obvious that the world is spherical.
Suddenly you are forgetting that people buy things that bring value. No matter how sophisticated Windows might be, if it has no function the buyer needs there will be no sale.
Right! That must be why I wrote:
"It just goes to prove that 'Price' and 'how much it can do / how complicated that stuff is' are completely unrelated."
I must have wrote that because I was forgetting it.
I am happy to pay for additional content and functionality, but to ask me to pay $250 every few/several years to receive the same old bloated code is ludicrous.
I bought XP in 2002. So 6 years later they released a new version with a mountain of new code. And they sold it in an 'upgrades' version for people like me who had already bought the previous version for half the price. How exactly is that 'ludicrous'?
2) Virtually nobody pays full retail anyway. When they buy a new PC, they get it bundled with it, and its a fraction of the retail price that way.
Add in the fact their competitors are Apple ($150 I think for OS X?)
That would effectively be an upgrade version. (Because if you have a Mac to install it on, you've already paid for the OS at least once...) And if your mac dies, and you replace it, you can't just buy a new Mac without an OS and use your existing one... nope you have to buy the OS again...
Windows also comes with remote desktop support, permission to run in a VM, FAR more hardware support,... I'm sure OSX comes with something missing from Windows too... Calendar software... DVD playback codec (only available out of the box in Home Premium and Ultimate in Vista...) but the point is, they aren't exactly equivalent, and you could make a case for their being more 'value' in Windows than in OSX. (Of course it would be hotly contested, but that's beside the point...)
Comparing an OS to a software package that is completely different doesn't validate it.
The point was the OS is a VASTLY larger and more sophisticated piece of software than Acrobat 9.
I don't run Windows at home because I'm not about to fork over that kinda money for each machine.
Most people get it -with- their PC, and the incremental cost over getting a PC without windows is virtually zilch, unless you are building the PC yourself... but then you aren't "most people".
Doesn't explain why you see the top of the mast of an oncoming ship first.
If we can make the statue of liberty 'disappear' I'm quite sure we can contrive an optical illusion to give the effect of an object sinking into the ground as it moves away on a flat surface.
But no matter how far you go from your starting point, you still get the same effect of ships revealing themselves "top-down" from the horizon.
Contacts lenses are often spherical; its just that most of the sphere is missing. Ships moving around on it will see the same effect everywhere, until one goes off the edge.
Finally, no matter how far people traveled (and there is evidence that some ancient mariners traveled really far) nobody ever a) fell off the edge
How do we know that? If they fell off the edge, they didn't come back. Lots of travelers never came back.
or b)got to the edge and came back to report their experience.
Perhaps getting close enough to the edge to see it is too close. Perhaps its perpetually stormy near the edge... perhaps a lot of things...
Plus, when the Nephilim came and brought edible wheat plants to the Sumerians, they probably let slip that the earth was round, which they would have obviously seen on their way in from Orion.
Only the last two (#3 and #4) would take into account the fact that the mast is the last thing to disappear,
#2 - Be a bit more creative in your interpretation of "trick of the light". There is no reason, some trick of the light couldn't result in the ship appearing to sink below the ground, with the highest part the last to disappear.
whereas I don't think they had contact lenses
I'm sure they had other similar things...turn a soup bowl or even a dinner plate upside down, for example.
It's by calculating the curve that they were able to deduce the radius of the earth.
Which is worthless if the optics are distorted by a trick of the light. Like estimate angles and distances looking through a fisheye lens, without knowing you were doing so.
If the earth weren't round, the water would flow over the curved edge and disappear, and the seas would have dried up
And replenished by the rains.
Also, there would have been a current taking all ships with it over the edge. No such current, so the earth was round, not just "curved like a contact lense.
1) Yet there are currents. Lots of them going all different directions. What was the explanation for those? With no edges to spill down?
2) Have you ever slowly poured the water out of a bucket with something floating on the surface near the middle. It is quite easy to do it so that you can empty over half the bucket before the floatee so much as moves. Does the absense of a current pulling the floating out of the bucket mean I'm not emptying the bucket?
ships have to climb UP a bulge, which takes energy,
1) put a toy boat in a tub and make gentle waves. The boat goes up and down without wind or rowers. 2) they could be pretty gentle bulges. A 4km 0.5 degree incline will give you a ~40 meter tall bulge to hide another boat behind.
Or it could be a combination of several factors...
But the point was that the op suggested, that it was either 'the earth is round or its flat', and my response was to highlight that it wasn't that simple. Particularly when the properties at the edge of the earth are allowed to differ from the properties at home in England, Greece, Egypt, Babylon. After all demonstrating the earth is rounded around greece doesn't prove that the curvature is constant all the way around to form a sphere.
If a small group of asswad shithead anarchists want to kick the gov't out of any rented space, all they have to do is show up, block the entrance, and the "option" for the property owner is not to kick out the shithead anarchists
Unless of course, the property owner rented the space knowing the government could be protested, and is perfectly fine with some people standing peacefully in front of the space he's rented the government, as long as the government pays its bill on time.
On the other hand, if that small group of asswad shithead anarchists are disturbing people, interfering with other shoppers, blocking entrances, etc... then they are breaking the law and can be arrested. Same as if they were behaving like that anywhere else.
Fuck you. That's not how it works, and you know it. Your entire argument is bullshit.
I think $250 for full retail of an OS is a bit much, but that's just me.
Its all relative.
It does a hell of a lot more than most software. And its a hell of a lot more complicated than most software too. File systems, threading, memory management, security, networking, printing, hardware abstraction...
Yet people drop more than that amount for 'Apple remote desktop' which is SSH, VNC, SCP, and a few tricks. Or check out the price of Acrobat 9, Simply Accounting Premium (with Reports!!!111), or Filemaker Pro 10...
Suddenly retail OSes seems cheap.
It just goes to prove that 'Price' and 'how much it can do / how complicated that stuff is' are completely unrelated.
It was obvious to any sea-farers that the earth was round - boats disappeared over the horizon, which could only be explained by either a curved surface, or them falling over the edge.
There are plenty of other explanations, such as:
"the horizon is the limit of sight through atmosphere, just as deeper water becomes increasingly hard to see through until eventually you can't." or "the horizon is a trick of the light that affects things at extreme distances, similar to a mirage" or "the earth is shaped like a contact lens -- curved yes, but not a sphere that goes all the way around" or "the ocean is not flat but actually has slight bulges, such that a ship going over one seems to to disappear, and by the time it climbs the next it it is too far too be seen at all" etc
Right, I'm a fanboy, it has nothing to do that no serious superior alternative is going to pop up within the foreseeable future.
Just before Google there wasn't anyone standing around saying, "Just you wait, any day now I predict a company is going to offer web search that blows yahoo and hotbot out of the water."
Any particular reason nobody couldn't improve on google? There are lots of big shortcomings in google.
When I don't want to buy something, but google a product for reviews etc I have to sift through piles of garbage 'price comparison sites', and sites with: "0 reviews... be the first to review it".
When I -do- want to buy something, I STILL don't want a pile of link-spam price comparison sites, mostly pointing to companies that won't ship to Canada anyway.
Google sucks for localized/regional or country specific information searches.
Googles image search could use significant improvements.
When I search for answers to technical questions (programming / troubleshooting / etc), I'll find a link to a question asked on some forum, with answers. If that doesn't help, I don't need the next 7 links all to be to other sites with the EXACT SAME question and answers. (Apparently a lot of forum sites spider each other and/or usenet for their content...) I don't need to see that. I also don't much need links to forums where the question was asked six months ago, and never answered.
And going off on a bit of a tangent... 'expertsexchange' (WFT? 'expert sex change'??) Someone should really properly spider that waste of space. Sure the information is there... but what the hell??? A question, 2 pages of 'obscured' answers, then four pages of advertising for expertsexchange to get answers... but keep scrolling, and there is the question again, now with the un-obscured answers, and 2 pages of bickering about how the stupid effing points should be awarded.
Sure the signal is there but the S/N ratio is through the roof.
For me, other sites have -already- supplanted google as superior ways to find certain types of information.
Wikipedia is for example is far more useful than google as a search tool to get information and links to relevant sites for a lot of topics. There's a reason an awful lot of top google hits simply take you to wikipedia... might as well cut out the middle man.
According to you, the government has no right to rent space anywhere. That's bullshit.
If the government rents space somewhere, the space around its entrance should become available to protesters, same as if the government owned it.
If the owner of the mall doesn't want to allow protestrs to gather in front of spaces he's leased to the government, then he can elect not to lease space to the government.
The alternative is absurd. The government can simply sell all its property to private management companies, and then lease it back from them, and suddenly you can't even protest on the street... its the property of the LRX Holding Company... and the government is just leasing it... they'd be happy to let you protest on it, -but- LRX is the owner you see... so they call the shots. We'd like to help... but... LRX is calling the shots... sorry.
Yes, but if caching stuff to RAM impedes running applications, it defeats the purpose it began with.
It doesn't do that. It caches things when its idle, and it takes no time at all to flush pages of memory that don't need to be written to disk if something running needs the memory, so why bring it up?
It does however show that its using a lot of RAM so twits looking at total ram allocated and then running around squawking about how high it is aren't contributing anything to the discussion.
Well, I wouldn't switch away from Google no matter what...
You sound like a fanboy. That's not a sign of intelligent or rational thought.
Me, I'd switch from google the moment something better comes along. I might switch even sooner if something came along that was very nearly as good and wasn't hell bent on profiling me .
Why wouldn't you? Are they holding your family hostage?
Explain to me how corporations pay taxes. Please. You do realize that all private wealth is held by individuals, don't you?
Unless those individuals shelter it in corporations. I know a number of CEOs who draw virtually no salary, while their corporation covers all manner of their living, vacation (I mean business trip), car expenses, food, hockey tickets, box seats, plays, the yacht, etc... (I mean current/potential client entertainment expenses) some of which are taxable benefits, but many of which end up not.
When a tax is levied on a corporation, it is paid by one of two groups of individuals: its shareholders, or its customers. Considering that a corporation's biggest responsibility is to generate wealth for its shareholders, who do you think ends up paying the taxes?
That's a ridiculously simplistic world-view you have there.
In most industries you can't just simply 'pass an added expense to the consumer' that simply because consumers will start choosing alternative products. Suppose, for example, Microsoft were unable to leverage various tax shelters... would it simply jack the price of its products up to cover it? Would people pay?
Or would Linux netbooks suddenly be more attractive than XP one's again? Would a Red Hat service contract suddenly be more attractive? Would companies stick with Office 2003 instead of move ahead with Office 2007? Would anyone pay even more for a WindowsMobile device, or would they switch to Symbian/Android/Apple/etc products?
Or, let me put this another way. Since you think the corporation's sole objective is to generate shareholders weatlh... let me ask you this:
If Microsoft could simply raise prices X% and have their revenue rise X% in response (which is essentially what you are suggesting they would do if their tax rate went up), why the hell haven't they already done it? Why the hell aren't the shareholders demanding that they do it?
Ironically, a first year economics course covers this: prices are set by supply and demand, not by product cost. If the costs go up, and the demand doesn't, profitability goes down. And attempting to raising the price to boost per-unit profitability back up, effectively reduces the demand.
Bottom line, yes all costs of doing business are inevitably payed by the consumer. But that in no way necessarily translates to ones ability to set price. If your costs rise, your profit drops. It drops EVEN IF YOU PASS THEM ON TO THE CONSUMER -- because you'll have fewer consumers.
Secondly, you don't bother to actually say why the parent is ignorant but you seem to attack the fair tax
I'm not the person you are responding to, AND I think the "fair tax" is demented because it penalizes the lower middle class most.
However, one can have a reasonable debate about the fair tax... but did you read the whole signature line, or just the first sentence? Try the second one...
Slashdot Mirror
Well yes. But how hard would it be to have a colum in the either the gui or the command line file list that provided that info right beside the file name. indeed that's what OS9 and all it's predecessors did.
That's great if you only look at files in detail view. In the file explorer.
Sorry, but in the real world, files are all over the place. I've got a bunch of them sitting as icons on my desktop. There's another one as an attachment to an email I've got up on the screen. And links to download a few more on the website I was just at. Then I open up photoshop and decide to open a recent file via the "Open Recent" menu item... something.pdf, somethingelse.psd, anotherfile.eps...
By embedding the type into the name, its ALWAYS there.
Why can't I just use 'touch' on every file on my harddrive, giving them all random modification times from between a few years ago and the present?
Care to explain this photo sequence of the 2008 Christmas Parade -- see that float right there with the big Christmas 2008 banner on it? Take this set... dcc_144.jpg, dcc_145.jpg, dcc_146.jpg; these photos were clearly taken in sequence just seconds apart; why do they all have completely random time stamps? Stranger still most of these time stamps pre-date the event in the photo!
Even if you were a little smarter about how you dated things...
Care to explain why the various event logs don't correlate with your filesystem at all? This Java Install log indicates that it wrote this version of this in this folder on May 5th, 2009. Yet the file on disk is dated Jan 11, 2003...this is also odd, because that's 5 years before it was written.
If I were a greater man and wasn't in a rush I'm sure I could make a little one-liner to do exactly that.
I wouldn't attempt any computer data fraud with your l33t hacking skills just yet.
I thought the big fuel expense was breaking atmo. What happened to coasting in space?
Nothing. Coasting in space works great. But how do you plan to power the cameras and radios on it?
Out past jupiter the sun is too far away for us to get enough energy from solar. What else is there?
Theoretically, couldn't a person just set the BIOS clock to a date and time prior to the legislation, do multiple shreds and formats on the HDD, reinstall the OS with the BIOS clock still 'in the past', and have it seem as though nothing changed since the initiation of the litigation?
Yes, theoretically it can be done.
So, right out of the gate, there would be evidence that the drive had been formated and shredded just prior to the litigation. That's not 'criminal', but its suspicious enough to maybe look into it, and try and determine if it was in fact done before or after. And in practice most people, especially regular people, will make mistakes.
Ok... so the OS and installation logs etc proudly proclaim they were all insalled before such and such a date. But hmmm... what's this strange 4 month gap in the time stamps in the event log, starting 2 days after the OS was reinstalled.... or maybe our genius thought of that, but then why was the machine booted up and down each 'day' yet did nothing else...and it did this for 4 straight months... that looks a LOT more like someone rebooting, advancing the bios date, rebooting, advancing the bios date...etc than actually using it.
And then on top of that, why does the java auto update log show that the latest Java Update was installed 2 months before it was released... and this folder here... it contains mp3s with file creation dates before they were even recorded.
So they might come back and say, clearly someone was messing around with the clock and doing strange things with the PC. Couple that with the evidence the PC was wiped and shredded... we, of course, can't PROVE, the defendant tampered with the drive to destroy evidence... there are other possible explanations. But this is evidence of tampering, we think the jury will agree that the drive was tampered with, as opposed to being conveniently afflicted by a bizarre set of circumstances that make it merely look like it was tampered with.
Like anything digital, yes, your perfect crime is theoretically possible, but its probably much harder than you think.
and you will never see a red cent from me again.
Right, like you are paying them anything now.
Which is something that minix, *bsd, linux and others does for free for decades.
I'm glad kernel development is a long finished job. I wonder why Linus didn't get the memo.
These are commodity today.
Sure, if you want an old one.
No, they are not worth $250.
Someone should really tell Linus to stop wasting his time.
Getting a free (as in speech) one and building somthing better over that wouldn't hurt. Hey, someone already did that! http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/unix.html
Are you seriously trying to argue that Apple is using a kernel that's been finished for decades? I happen to know for a fact that isn't true.
In other words, you're making an overly-complex "explanation" that the people at the time never bought into.
We know people at the time thought it was rounded. That doesn't mean we know they thought it was a sphere.
It's ludicrous because I don't see any functionality that I really want or need in either Vista or 7.
So the price is 'ludicrous' because you don't need it? Is the price of a new car ludicrous too? Simply because you already have a car that works?
Not needing something doesn't make it's price ludicrous, especially since you don't have to pay it.
I don't want to spend the time or patience or money on it unless there is a viciously compelling reason.
I already use software that no longer supports windows XP.
Full retail or bundled, paying for it still makes no sense to us.
I'm curious what happens when your (growing) business needs to add a new staff member and equip him with a PC.
Why are you trying to prove that people may have wrongly thought the world wasn't round? This is a bizarre argument.
I am trying to demonstrate that the fact that 'boats disappeared over the horizon' and returned to tell their tale does not make it obvious that the world is spherical.
Suddenly you are forgetting that people buy things that bring value. No matter how sophisticated Windows might be, if it has no function the buyer needs there will be no sale.
Right! That must be why I wrote:
"It just goes to prove that 'Price' and 'how much it can do / how complicated that stuff is' are completely unrelated."
I must have wrote that because I was forgetting it.
I am happy to pay for additional content and functionality, but to ask me to pay $250 every few/several years to receive the same old bloated code is ludicrous.
I bought XP in 2002. So 6 years later they released a new version with a mountain of new code. And they sold it in an 'upgrades' version for people like me who had already bought the previous version for half the price. How exactly is that 'ludicrous'?
2) Virtually nobody pays full retail anyway. When they buy a new PC, they get it bundled with it, and its a fraction of the retail price that way.
Add in the fact their competitors are Apple ($150 I think for OS X?)
That would effectively be an upgrade version. (Because if you have a Mac to install it on, you've already paid for the OS at least once...) And if your mac dies, and you replace it, you can't just buy a new Mac without an OS and use your existing one... nope you have to buy the OS again...
Windows also comes with remote desktop support, permission to run in a VM, FAR more hardware support,... I'm sure OSX comes with something missing from Windows too... Calendar software... DVD playback codec (only available out of the box in Home Premium and Ultimate in Vista...) but the point is, they aren't exactly equivalent, and you could make a case for their being more 'value' in Windows than in OSX. (Of course it would be hotly contested, but that's beside the point...)
Comparing an OS to a software package that is completely different doesn't validate it.
The point was the OS is a VASTLY larger and more sophisticated piece of software than Acrobat 9.
I don't run Windows at home because I'm not about to fork over that kinda money for each machine.
Most people get it -with- their PC, and the incremental cost over getting a PC without windows is virtually zilch, unless you are building the PC yourself... but then you aren't "most people".
Doesn't explain why you see the top of the mast of an oncoming ship first.
If we can make the statue of liberty 'disappear' I'm quite sure we can contrive an optical illusion to give the effect of an object sinking into the ground as it moves away on a flat surface.
But no matter how far you go from your starting point, you still get the same effect of ships revealing themselves "top-down" from the horizon.
Contacts lenses are often spherical; its just that most of the sphere is missing. Ships moving around on it will see the same effect everywhere, until one goes off the edge.
Finally, no matter how far people traveled (and there is evidence that some ancient mariners traveled really far) nobody ever a) fell off the edge
How do we know that? If they fell off the edge, they didn't come back. Lots of travelers never came back.
or b)got to the edge and came back to report their experience.
Perhaps getting close enough to the edge to see it is too close. Perhaps its perpetually stormy near the edge... perhaps a lot of things...
Plus, when the Nephilim came and brought edible wheat plants to the Sumerians, they probably let slip that the earth was round, which they would have obviously seen on their way in from Orion.
Obviously.
Only the last two (#3 and #4) would take into account the fact that the mast is the last thing to disappear,
#2 - Be a bit more creative in your interpretation of "trick of the light". There is no reason, some trick of the light couldn't result in the ship appearing to sink below the ground, with the highest part the last to disappear.
whereas I don't think they had contact lenses
I'm sure they had other similar things...turn a soup bowl or even a dinner plate upside down, for example.
It's by calculating the curve that they were able to deduce the radius of the earth.
Which is worthless if the optics are distorted by a trick of the light. Like estimate angles and distances looking through a fisheye lens, without knowing you were doing so.
If the earth weren't round, the water would flow over the curved edge and disappear, and the seas would have dried up
And replenished by the rains.
Also, there would have been a current taking all ships with it over the edge. No such current, so the earth was round, not just "curved like a contact lense.
1) Yet there are currents. Lots of them going all different directions. What was the explanation for those? With no edges to spill down?
2) Have you ever slowly poured the water out of a bucket with something floating on the surface near the middle. It is quite easy to do it so that you can empty over half the bucket before the floatee so much as moves. Does the absense of a current pulling the floating out of the bucket mean I'm not emptying the bucket?
ships have to climb UP a bulge, which takes energy,
1) put a toy boat in a tub and make gentle waves. The boat goes up and down without wind or rowers.
2) they could be pretty gentle bulges. A 4km 0.5 degree incline will give you a ~40 meter tall bulge to hide another boat behind.
Or it could be a combination of several factors...
But the point was that the op suggested, that it was either 'the earth is round or its flat', and my response was to highlight that it wasn't that simple. Particularly when the properties at the edge of the earth are allowed to differ from the properties at home in England, Greece, Egypt, Babylon. After all demonstrating the earth is rounded around greece doesn't prove that the curvature is constant all the way around to form a sphere.
If a small group of asswad shithead anarchists want to kick the gov't out of any rented space, all they have to do is show up, block the entrance, and the "option" for the property owner is not to kick out the shithead anarchists
Unless of course, the property owner rented the space knowing the government could be protested, and is perfectly fine with some people standing peacefully in front of the space he's rented the government, as long as the government pays its bill on time.
On the other hand, if that small group of asswad shithead anarchists are disturbing people, interfering with other shoppers, blocking entrances, etc... then they are breaking the law and can be arrested. Same as if they were behaving like that anywhere else.
Fuck you. That's not how it works, and you know it. Your entire argument is bullshit.
- /pokes moryath with stick
I think $250 for full retail of an OS is a bit much, but that's just me.
Its all relative.
It does a hell of a lot more than most software. And its a hell of a lot more complicated than most software too. File systems, threading, memory management, security, networking, printing, hardware abstraction...
Yet people drop more than that amount for 'Apple remote desktop' which is SSH, VNC, SCP, and a few tricks. Or check out the price of Acrobat 9, Simply Accounting Premium (with Reports!!!111), or Filemaker Pro 10...
Suddenly retail OSes seems cheap.
It just goes to prove that 'Price' and 'how much it can do / how complicated that stuff is' are completely unrelated.
It was obvious to any sea-farers that the earth was round - boats disappeared over the horizon, which could only be explained by either a curved surface, or them falling over the edge.
There are plenty of other explanations, such as:
"the horizon is the limit of sight through atmosphere, just as deeper water becomes increasingly hard to see through until eventually you can't."
or
"the horizon is a trick of the light that affects things at extreme distances, similar to a mirage"
or
"the earth is shaped like a contact lens -- curved yes, but not a sphere that goes all the way around"
or
"the ocean is not flat but actually has slight bulges, such that a ship going over one seems to to disappear, and by the time it climbs the next it it is too far too be seen at all"
etc
Right, I'm a fanboy, it has nothing to do that no serious superior alternative is going to pop up within the foreseeable future.
Just before Google there wasn't anyone standing around saying, "Just you wait, any day now I predict a company is going to offer web search that blows yahoo and hotbot out of the water."
Any particular reason nobody couldn't improve on google? There are lots of big shortcomings in google.
When I don't want to buy something, but google a product for reviews etc I have to sift through piles of garbage 'price comparison sites', and sites with: "0 reviews... be the first to review it".
When I -do- want to buy something, I STILL don't want a pile of link-spam price comparison sites, mostly pointing to companies that won't ship to Canada anyway.
Google sucks for localized/regional or country specific information searches.
Googles image search could use significant improvements.
When I search for answers to technical questions (programming / troubleshooting / etc), I'll find a link to a question asked on some forum, with answers. If that doesn't help, I don't need the next 7 links all to be to other sites with the EXACT SAME question and answers. (Apparently a lot of forum sites spider each other and/or usenet for their content...) I don't need to see that. I also don't much need links to forums where the question was asked six months ago, and never answered.
And going off on a bit of a tangent... 'expertsexchange' (WFT? 'expert sex change'??) Someone should really properly spider that waste of space. Sure the information is there... but what the hell??? A question, 2 pages of 'obscured' answers, then four pages of advertising for expertsexchange to get answers... but keep scrolling, and there is the question again, now with the un-obscured answers, and 2 pages of bickering about how the stupid effing points should be awarded.
Sure the signal is there but the S/N ratio is through the roof.
For me, other sites have -already- supplanted google as superior ways to find certain types of information.
Wikipedia is for example is far more useful than google as a search tool to get information and links to relevant sites for a lot of topics. There's a reason an awful lot of top google hits simply take you to wikipedia... might as well cut out the middle man.
According to you, the government has no right to rent space anywhere. That's bullshit.
If the government rents space somewhere, the space around its entrance should become available to protesters, same as if the government owned it.
If the owner of the mall doesn't want to allow protestrs to gather in front of spaces he's leased to the government, then he can elect not to lease space to the government.
The alternative is absurd. The government can simply sell all its property to private management companies, and then lease it back from them, and suddenly you can't even protest on the street... its the property of the LRX Holding Company... and the government is just leasing it... they'd be happy to let you protest on it, -but- LRX is the owner you see... so they call the shots. We'd like to help... but... LRX is calling the shots... sorry.
Yes, but if caching stuff to RAM impedes running applications, it defeats the purpose it began with.
It doesn't do that. It caches things when its idle, and it takes no time at all to flush pages of memory that don't need to be written to disk if something running needs the memory, so why bring it up?
It does however show that its using a lot of RAM so twits looking at total ram allocated and then running around squawking about how high it is aren't contributing anything to the discussion.
Well, I wouldn't switch away from Google no matter what...
You sound like a fanboy. That's not a sign of intelligent or rational thought.
Me, I'd switch from google the moment something better comes along. I might switch even sooner if something came along that was very nearly as good and wasn't hell bent on profiling me .
Why wouldn't you? Are they holding your family hostage?
Explain to me how corporations pay taxes. Please. You do realize that all private wealth is held by individuals, don't you?
Unless those individuals shelter it in corporations. I know a number of CEOs who draw virtually no salary, while their corporation covers all manner of their living, vacation (I mean business trip), car expenses, food, hockey tickets, box seats, plays, the yacht, etc... (I mean current/potential client entertainment expenses) some of which are taxable benefits, but many of which end up not.
When a tax is levied on a corporation, it is paid by one of two groups of individuals: its shareholders, or its customers. Considering that a corporation's biggest responsibility is to generate wealth for its shareholders, who do you think ends up paying the taxes?
That's a ridiculously simplistic world-view you have there.
In most industries you can't just simply 'pass an added expense to the consumer' that simply because consumers will start choosing alternative products. Suppose, for example, Microsoft were unable to leverage various tax shelters... would it simply jack the price of its products up to cover it? Would people pay?
Or would Linux netbooks suddenly be more attractive than XP one's again? Would a Red Hat service contract suddenly be more attractive? Would companies stick with Office 2003 instead of move ahead with Office 2007? Would anyone pay even more for a WindowsMobile device, or would they switch to Symbian/Android/Apple/etc products?
Or, let me put this another way. Since you think the corporation's sole objective is to generate shareholders weatlh... let me ask you this:
If Microsoft could simply raise prices X% and have their revenue rise X% in response (which is essentially what you are suggesting they would do if their tax rate went up), why the hell haven't they already done it? Why the hell aren't the shareholders demanding that they do it?
Ironically, a first year economics course covers this: prices are set by supply and demand, not by product cost. If the costs go up, and the demand doesn't, profitability goes down. And attempting to raising the price to boost per-unit profitability back up, effectively reduces the demand.
Bottom line, yes all costs of doing business are inevitably payed by the consumer. But that in no way necessarily translates to ones ability to set price. If your costs rise, your profit drops. It drops EVEN IF YOU PASS THEM ON TO THE CONSUMER -- because you'll have fewer consumers.
Secondly, you don't bother to actually say why the parent is ignorant but you seem to attack the fair tax
I'm not the person you are responding to, AND I think the "fair tax" is demented because it penalizes the lower middle class most.
However, one can have a reasonable debate about the fair tax... but did you read the whole signature line, or just the first sentence? Try the second one...
"Promote Peace, Kill more bad guys."
That's about as ignorant as it gets.
Care to elaborate?
TIFF at this point is basically a container. You can stick anything into a TIFF, including a JPG.
50m is still bigger than all the next-gen (PSWii60) consoles combined.
Say what now? Wii has 50M pretty much all by itself.