But what about the features offered by the tuner? With my DishNetwork tuner I can do everything from looking at the TV schedule 7 days in advance, to paying my DishNetwork bill online, to playing dinky stupid video games. If it was piped directly into my TV, I wouldn't be able to do any of those things.
That's also ignoring the fact that Dish tuners require a unique identifier to tell what channels each user has permissions to watch. Are you going to suggest that all TVs should have a card slot for that also?
Troll or no troll, what the hell place do you live in where there's a channel telling you whether trash pickups will be late? Seriously, what weird mutant TV channels do you have?
I mean, we have local access... but as far as I can tell, they've never aired petty little pieces of trivia like that. They usually just let on people willing to pay a few dozen dollars a half-hour for idiotic 'entertainment.'
Well, yeah, but look: For home users who would be interested in the Internet in that time period, there were two OSes, Macintosh and Windows. You're arguing that Windows was "behind the Internet curve" and I'm saying that Macintosh was a lot MORE "behind the curve" than Microsoft was.
If your criteria is "Microsoft making their own web browser" then by your standards, Apple didn't start paying attention to the Internet until 2002... what sense does that make?
I'm sure Linux and Unix had PPP dialers in 1994-1998, but nobody used it in their home, so that's kind of a moot point.
To me this whole "Microsoft ignored the Internet" thing sounds like FUD from anti-Microsoft Linux users.
Think about the hinges. If your door swings outward, any knucklehead with a screwdriver can break into your house in mere moments by simply removing the hinges.
I mean, yeah, the fire safety thing might be a point, but you make it sound as if it's the *only* thing to consider.
But on the other hand... this is a world where Lotus Notes exists. A HUGE software package from a giant corporation with thousands of man-hours devoted to every release that's been under constant development from 1985 and the best error message it can give me is "this object has an undefined attribute?"
Existing catalog systems give you a number to write on the disk when it's done burning/being indexed so that you can easily find it again. "Insert Disk 23" instead of "Insert 'Burned Files 3.4.02'"
My big gripe is that iTunes doesn't put "Best Of" albums in a folder for the artist. This makes sense for "Best Of" albums with more than one artist, like movie soundtracks, but for "Best of Red Hot Chili Peppers" it makes no sense at all.
Maybe I'm the only one, but I always check the preferences of an application BEFORE I use it to prevent things like this from happening. Usually you find that if you changes preferences later on, you're SOL for certain things.
In any case, if he didn't have a backup of his music directory before importing, it's his own fault.
I'd think it was quite obvious what Microsoft hopes to gain by this. Of course, it'll benefit everybody else also... it's not as good as disallowing software patents altogether, but at least it makes things a little more reasonable. (And will hopefully reduce patent lawsuits by a good amount.)
Yeah, but how is that any different from AOL's viewpoint at the time, or Apple's eWorld viewpoint at the time?
It still seems to me that Microsoft was at least even with all the other developers at the time in regards to their attitude to the Internet, and quite possibly ahead.
(After all, Windows *did* let you dial-up to a PPP account before any other commercial OS I know about. Even if they thought MSN was the future, they left the option open for direct Internet access... Apple didn't.)
With MS shills, it has come to a point where they firmly believe that BSOD does not exist anymore in WinXP or later !!!
Of course it exists, I don't think I've ever seen anybody claim it doesn't exist. But it can only be caused by *hardware problems*... that's the part that Linux users seem to miss all the time.
If WinXP bluescreens more than Linux, the only thing that tells you is that most WinXP computers have cheap faulty hardware in them... and really, isn't that common sense anyway? (After all, anybody who knew PCs well enough to use Linux also knows how to build a computer with quality components.)
Since drivers mostly come with the hardware, I put those both in the same catagory. In short, if you get a BSOD on Windows XP, your computer hardware has something wrong with it and you should fix it.
It may be true that Windows XP has more BSODs than Linux has kernel panics, but that means nothing other than: More Windows users are using crappy hardware than Linux users are using crappy hardware. (And that's pretty much self-evident anyway.)
Read through any anti-MS slashdot article on any given day and count the number of horribly outdated criticisms of Microsoft you see (BSOD's; bloat; Clippy(!))
Be happy the Microsoft Bob people are mostly gone.
"Hahaha, sure Redhat might not support your network card but... uh... but Microsoft Bob was really bad! Hahaha!"
What are you talking about, "Microsoft ignoring the Internet?" Where does that claim come from?
Given, I'm not a Linux user, but from my Macintosh experience, Microsoft had built-in dial-up PPP Internet access long before Apple did. (We had to download a freeware application to provide that.)
I guess the concept of "cooking at home" is completely alien to you? The choices are "eating at McDonalds" or "eating at The Keg steakhouse?"
Seriously, man, people who are truly poor don't go out to eat, whether it's McDonalds or The Keg or anywhere. They cook their own meals, bring their own lunch to work, etc.
The true problem is that there are a ton of lower-income people in America who don't make wise purchasing decisions. For instance, most smokers in America are lower income... why? If they quit, they'd have enough money to go to the Keg a couple times a week... smoking is expensive! Additionally, a lot of lower income people eat at places like McDonalds several times a week. Why? Cooking at home is a lot cheaper, and a lot more healthy, and the only trade off is a little bit of time.
It's all about money management skills. Things like managing credit, making wise purchasing decisions, planning for the long-term and not the short-term, those are entirely foreign to most lower-income people in the US. (And some that are well-off! I had a buddy whose parents both worked at a Boeing plant, making good pay with a good union behind them, and lived paycheck-to-paycheck with a healthy dose of payday loans. Why? Well, they bought a new TV this month, then a new truck the next month, then that swimming pool...)
1) In the Mac world, the vast majority of applications simply do not use shared libraries for anything. They use OS libraries/frameworks and staticly-linked libraries... it's been like this as long as MacOS has been around. (I have to say, I'm with the Mac developers here. Static linking makes everything just much, much easier for everybody involved... and it's not like 'wasted' disk space is a big deal on my 80 GB HD.)
2) MacOS has also always had a way for applications to store their various resources in a single file. In MacOS Classic, there was the "resource fork" a file fork containing pre-formatted data for things like icons, menu templates, window templates, sounds, cursors, even quicktime movies. In MacOS X, there is the.app bundling system, where all the files are kept in a folder tree that looks like a single file in the file manager.
3) The.app bundle doesn't preclude applications from making use of installers. In fact, OS X also has a standard install system (.pkg if I recall correctly) that a lot of applications use to put shared libraries, or other resources, onto the target computer. (IBM ViaVoice is the most recent installer I've dealed with.)
I know a couple people have already posted on this, but I have no clue whatsoever what he did to a Mac Mini (a computer that couldn't possibly be more than, what, 6 months old?) to require reformatting *twice*! I can't imagine what he did to it to require reformatting once, for that matter... OS X is very hard to screw up.
Slashdot Mirror
the one that captained a space garbage truck and had identical blonde twins (okay, one was a clone of the other one) as crew.
Holy shit I'm glad I never saw that episode!!
Yes. Yes it will.
But what about the features offered by the tuner? With my DishNetwork tuner I can do everything from looking at the TV schedule 7 days in advance, to paying my DishNetwork bill online, to playing dinky stupid video games. If it was piped directly into my TV, I wouldn't be able to do any of those things.
That's also ignoring the fact that Dish tuners require a unique identifier to tell what channels each user has permissions to watch. Are you going to suggest that all TVs should have a card slot for that also?
Troll or no troll, what the hell place do you live in where there's a channel telling you whether trash pickups will be late? Seriously, what weird mutant TV channels do you have?
I mean, we have local access... but as far as I can tell, they've never aired petty little pieces of trivia like that. They usually just let on people willing to pay a few dozen dollars a half-hour for idiotic 'entertainment.'
Oh, thanks for the tip. I just go by the CDDB information, usually... so I guess the problem is with the CDDB and not Apple specifically?
Actually, I downloaded it from a dial-up BBS. I got to the BBS using ZTerm that I got off a shareware disk attached to a Mac magazine. ;)
But yeah, they were really nasty hacks that worked perhaps half the time.
Well, yeah, but look: For home users who would be interested in the Internet in that time period, there were two OSes, Macintosh and Windows. You're arguing that Windows was "behind the Internet curve" and I'm saying that Macintosh was a lot MORE "behind the curve" than Microsoft was.
If your criteria is "Microsoft making their own web browser" then by your standards, Apple didn't start paying attention to the Internet until 2002... what sense does that make?
I'm sure Linux and Unix had PPP dialers in 1994-1998, but nobody used it in their home, so that's kind of a moot point.
To me this whole "Microsoft ignored the Internet" thing sounds like FUD from anti-Microsoft Linux users.
Think about the hinges. If your door swings outward, any knucklehead with a screwdriver can break into your house in mere moments by simply removing the hinges.
I mean, yeah, the fire safety thing might be a point, but you make it sound as if it's the *only* thing to consider.
But on the other hand... this is a world where Lotus Notes exists. A HUGE software package from a giant corporation with thousands of man-hours devoted to every release that's been under constant development from 1985 and the best error message it can give me is "this object has an undefined attribute?"
Existing catalog systems give you a number to write on the disk when it's done burning/being indexed so that you can easily find it again. "Insert Disk 23" instead of "Insert 'Burned Files 3.4.02'"
My big gripe is that iTunes doesn't put "Best Of" albums in a folder for the artist. This makes sense for "Best Of" albums with more than one artist, like movie soundtracks, but for "Best of Red Hot Chili Peppers" it makes no sense at all.
Maybe I'm the only one, but I always check the preferences of an application BEFORE I use it to prevent things like this from happening. Usually you find that if you changes preferences later on, you're SOL for certain things.
In any case, if he didn't have a backup of his music directory before importing, it's his own fault.
Remember Eolas?
I'd think it was quite obvious what Microsoft hopes to gain by this. Of course, it'll benefit everybody else also... it's not as good as disallowing software patents altogether, but at least it makes things a little more reasonable. (And will hopefully reduce patent lawsuits by a good amount.)
Yeah, but how is that any different from AOL's viewpoint at the time, or Apple's eWorld viewpoint at the time?
It still seems to me that Microsoft was at least even with all the other developers at the time in regards to their attitude to the Internet, and quite possibly ahead.
(After all, Windows *did* let you dial-up to a PPP account before any other commercial OS I know about. Even if they thought MSN was the future, they left the option open for direct Internet access... Apple didn't.)
With MS shills, it has come to a point where they firmly believe that BSOD does not exist anymore in WinXP or later !!!
Of course it exists, I don't think I've ever seen anybody claim it doesn't exist. But it can only be caused by *hardware problems*... that's the part that Linux users seem to miss all the time.
If WinXP bluescreens more than Linux, the only thing that tells you is that most WinXP computers have cheap faulty hardware in them... and really, isn't that common sense anyway? (After all, anybody who knew PCs well enough to use Linux also knows how to build a computer with quality components.)
BSODs in Windows XP can be caused by two things:
1) Faulty drivers
2) Faulty hardware
Since drivers mostly come with the hardware, I put those both in the same catagory. In short, if you get a BSOD on Windows XP, your computer hardware has something wrong with it and you should fix it.
It may be true that Windows XP has more BSODs than Linux has kernel panics, but that means nothing other than: More Windows users are using crappy hardware than Linux users are using crappy hardware. (And that's pretty much self-evident anyway.)
Read through any anti-MS slashdot article on any given day and count the number of horribly outdated criticisms of Microsoft you see (BSOD's; bloat; Clippy(!))
Be happy the Microsoft Bob people are mostly gone.
"Hahaha, sure Redhat might not support your network card but... uh... but Microsoft Bob was really bad! Hahaha!"
What are you talking about, "Microsoft ignoring the Internet?" Where does that claim come from?
Given, I'm not a Linux user, but from my Macintosh experience, Microsoft had built-in dial-up PPP Internet access long before Apple did. (We had to download a freeware application to provide that.)
I guess the concept of "cooking at home" is completely alien to you? The choices are "eating at McDonalds" or "eating at The Keg steakhouse?"
Seriously, man, people who are truly poor don't go out to eat, whether it's McDonalds or The Keg or anywhere. They cook their own meals, bring their own lunch to work, etc.
The true problem is that there are a ton of lower-income people in America who don't make wise purchasing decisions. For instance, most smokers in America are lower income... why? If they quit, they'd have enough money to go to the Keg a couple times a week... smoking is expensive! Additionally, a lot of lower income people eat at places like McDonalds several times a week. Why? Cooking at home is a lot cheaper, and a lot more healthy, and the only trade off is a little bit of time.
It's all about money management skills. Things like managing credit, making wise purchasing decisions, planning for the long-term and not the short-term, those are entirely foreign to most lower-income people in the US. (And some that are well-off! I had a buddy whose parents both worked at a Boeing plant, making good pay with a good union behind them, and lived paycheck-to-paycheck with a healthy dose of payday loans. Why? Well, they bought a new TV this month, then a new truck the next month, then that swimming pool...)
Unless they use Lotus Notes for mail, in which case abandon all hope ye who enter.
... or simply make GTK 2.6 a superset of 2.4.
Three points:
.app bundling system, where all the files are kept in a folder tree that looks like a single file in the file manager.
.app bundle doesn't preclude applications from making use of installers. In fact, OS X also has a standard install system (.pkg if I recall correctly) that a lot of applications use to put shared libraries, or other resources, onto the target computer. (IBM ViaVoice is the most recent installer I've dealed with.)
1) In the Mac world, the vast majority of applications simply do not use shared libraries for anything. They use OS libraries/frameworks and staticly-linked libraries... it's been like this as long as MacOS has been around. (I have to say, I'm with the Mac developers here. Static linking makes everything just much, much easier for everybody involved... and it's not like 'wasted' disk space is a big deal on my 80 GB HD.)
2) MacOS has also always had a way for applications to store their various resources in a single file. In MacOS Classic, there was the "resource fork" a file fork containing pre-formatted data for things like icons, menu templates, window templates, sounds, cursors, even quicktime movies. In MacOS X, there is the
3) The
Well, if nobody else in the Linux world, Linspire seems to be pretty dedicated to get Linux out to average Joe users.
I know a couple people have already posted on this, but I have no clue whatsoever what he did to a Mac Mini (a computer that couldn't possibly be more than, what, 6 months old?) to require reformatting *twice*! I can't imagine what he did to it to require reformatting once, for that matter... OS X is very hard to screw up.
Good post, man. I agree with you 100% entirely. The best way to solve problems is to step back from them and take a look at the big picture.