While I am 100% against fingerprinting CITIZENS of this country, I couldn't give a shit less if someone from outside of the US is fingerprinted.
These things work tit-for-tat: if the US fingerprints citizens of other nations, then other nations will fingerprint US citizens. If the US details citizens of other nations without due process, other nations will do the same to US citizens. Now, maybe you are enough of a redneck that you never travel outside the US, but other people do, and to them this matters. And the US isn't going to invade France or China to bail people out when their fingerprints come up for a match there.
Your attitude also sets a bad international example because it reinforces the notion that Americans "give a shit" about the rights of non-Americans, which is actually at the root of a lot of the conflicts that the US is involved in right now.
but then again, computers can nowadays compare fingerprints with ease, so it's no big deal.
Fingerprints have a certain false positive rate, and that causes huge problems if you go on fishing expeditions. Worse, the errors are not random (so the same people are going to have problems over and over again), and the DHS has no way for you to correct their records (if they screw up, it's your problem not theirs).
I have the hunch that the next fashion fad for privacy concerned people will be gloves.
Giving your fingerprints is mandatory; gloves don't help.
Air travel is a private business. Now, it might be possible to create a law that would require them to let you fly without identification, but by default, a private business should be able to make showing identification part of the process of boarding a plane.
You are clearly not finished reading the Bible and the Koran, they largely tell the same tales and teach the same values.
Well, they may be "largely the same", but that's not the same as "identical". In order to refer to the same entity, given their infallibility, the Bible and the Koran would have to be completely consistent, and they are not.
Now you seem one of those sad men that instead of searching for what unites looks for what divides.
Even if one could unite the three major Abrahamic religions, where would that leave the rest of the world? No matter what kind of naive claims you want to make about the consistency of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, they are thoroughly incompatible with other world religions.
The solution to the problem of religious strife is not to "search for what unites", it is to accept diversity and differences. But, of course, that's a concept that's foreign to all three Abrahamic religions, which each claim absolute, infallible truth. That's the real reason why Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are at each other's throats and have been so intolerant of the religious beliefs and practices of the rest of humanity.
Allah as the Muslims call God and God (Yahweh) as the Christians and Jews see their deity are one and the same, it's according to all three scriptures the God of Abraham.
The deities described by the three religions are very different: they have different histories, different goals, different purposes, and different moralities.
The fact that, at times, adherents of some of those religions have described their own deities as "the same" as some of the other religions is a political and rhetorical trick, not a fact.
And that's what makes the disagreements between these three 'religions' so sad...
No, what's sad is that people are so gullible that they talk about bogus identities of imaginary entities as if they were objective facts. And people who repeat that sort of nonsense contribute to those "disagreements".
Okay, I'm guessing what happened is that GGGP selected the wrong network once, and Mac OS X now assumes that this is his preferred network. To fix that, go to your Network settings, go to Airport [...]
I know how to fix it. My point is that Macintosh network configuration is confusing to non-experts. My parents trip over this, and then they call me for help, at which point I have to walk them through several dialog boxes over the phone. And this is only one problem of many. Macintosh network configuration simply isn't a very usable design.
1. What are you talking about? The active window gets the menu bar. How is that confusing?
Well, it confuses people because you can get into situations where there is only one window visible, and the menu bar doesn't correspond to it. Or, users may have multiple non-overlapping windows on the screen and it may not be obvious which one corresponds to the menu bar.
In any case, whatever the explanation, the fact remains that I frequently see real users trip over this.
There's no "configuration panel" in which to select wireless networks at all.
Sure there is: System Preferences... > Network > Show: Airport.
You just click on the WiFi icon in the menu bar then select one from the list.
Well, as I was saying "Wireless configuration causes no end of problems for them: the configuration panel is confusing to them, and the Mac often picks the wrong wireless network even if it could easily figure out what the right one is."
(Even for experts, it's a nuisance. I can't boot my iMac without half a dozen messages about not being able to connect to the right network because f*cking OS X doesn't find my preferred network before it has started up lots of other services. OS X network configuration is a mess; don't try making lame excuses for it.)
Guess what, if you can change the settings without a password, so can XYZ Soft that you downloaded and ran for some other reason. There is a reason that Windows has a spyware problem and OS X doesn't this is it.
No, that's not the reason. Among other things, a lot of software asks for install passwords anyway and software can simply lie about why it's asking for a password and install spyware anyway.
You're just making stuff up. [...] It's called security.
No, actually you are making stuff up, that is, when you aren't simply parroting Apple's marketing materials.
So how can Tesla, a startup company with little manufacturing and car experience relative to GM, build an electric car that can [...]
Easy: their cars start at $93k.
There is lots of fun and innovative stuff you can do in areas such as cars, homes, computers, furniture, sports equipment, etc., once you abandon the mass market and once you stop worrying about giving people better bang-for-the-buck than they can get with existing technologies.
The hard part is not innovating, it's coming up with innovation that delivers better bang-for-the-buck.
If you have XSS vulnerabilities, you're screwed. That's just a fact, and it's unrelated to prototypes or AJAX. And XSS won't get fixed by changing prototypes or by not using AJAX.
In different words, the paper is irrelevant and stupid.
Since when did Apple sign illegal OEM deals that forced OEMs to not ship competing products to prevent them from entering the market?
Apple is leveraging its market dominance in iTunes and iPods in ways that keep down competition. And Apple is also trying to use OS X as a way to set proprietary standards in the UNIX and education market (of course, that's silliness, but it still tells us about what kind of company Apple is).
If the software was well-written, it would be platform independent.
No, if the software was well-writte, it would be platform specific: it would integrate correctly with the desktop, follow all the UI conventions for the platform, etc. That means platform specific coding.
Now, for well-written applications, that shouldn't be a lot of work. But none of the cross-platform toolkits (Java, wxWidgets, Gnome, Qt, etc.) yield acceptable cross-platform behavior. Even Mozilla can only get away with its shitty platform integration because it works well on Windows and other platforms just have to live with it.
We no longer purchase apps that are of general interest to research unless they support at least Mac and Windows.
As well you should. Nevertheless, if the software is well-written, it's not "cross platform", it's effectively different apps for different platforms that share a lot of code.
Luxpro would get a little more sympathy from me if they had avoided copying the shuffle so literally. That's not even a legal question (there's nothing innovative about the old iPod Shuffle, and Apple copied a lot from other designs), they just lack common sense. They should at least have changed the shape of the pseudo-click wheel to square or something.
Buy something that has dedicated commercial support for the next 20-40 years
You mean like DEC or any of the other out-of-business dinosaurs?
As someone who has been through this, I can only say: do NOT buy anything that depends on "dedicated commercial support"; the companies and industry standards you think are going to be around for "20-40 years" are probably either not going to be, or they are not going to give a damn about you.
Use open standards and open formats, with multi-vendor support; that's the only way to go. And you need to keep your eyes open and move to new formats and standards as the world changes.
If LTO is the right choice, it's the right choice because of that. But I'm not convinced that LTO is going to be long-lived enough as a standard, no matter how many companies have tied their fortunes to it right now.
You can't determine whether something is usable by writing a review, you have to observe actual users and what problems they have. And in that regard, I have seen little indication that OS X is significantly better than Windows or Gnome. Just from observing my parents on some of the points discussed in the article, I noticed
* They keep getting confused about which application is active; among other things since the frontmost window may not correspond to the menu bar.
* Wireless configuration causes no end of problems for them: the configuration panel is confusing to them, and the Mac often picks the wrong wireless network even if it could easily figure out what the right one is.
* Having to confirm some System Preferences changes with a password is a feature that makes OS X more secure in a corporate environment, where random people may walk up to your desktop trying to change things; it's a nuisance in a home environment.
* The green button thingy is as unintuitive to them as it is to me.
That's just some off the top of my head; there are many other usability problems in OS X.
Not having tried Vista, I don't know whether OS X is "better than Vista" in terms of its UI, but I don't see that it's a breakthrough in usability and it doesn't seem to be better than XP for real-world users. I suspect something like "Sugar" may be way more usable than either OS X or Windows "for the rest of us".
So, if it reduces "noise cooling requirements", this means that users are OK with having their computers run hotter and be noisier if they are cooled with swimming pool water? I don't see why.
(If you mean "cooling with swimming pool water is less noisy than cooling with fans", say so.)
Integrating structure I/O and databases into programming languages was a fad in the 60's and 70's. Even Pascal and C ended up having embedded SQL.
People moved away from it because they realized that it was better to give people general purpose language constructs rather than hardcode a bunch of database code into the language compiler.
Just merge C, Ruby, & COBOL syntax into one compiler.
That's roughly what.NET is; it's a bunch of front-ends and a single back-end compiler. And it can handle those language, plus Java (and probably Perl 6 as well).
Business only has one real question: "How much money did I make last year?" COBOL provides all the tools to answer it.
Well, if you use COBOL to code your web frontends, graphics, analytics, etc., the answer to that question will be near zero.
In order to make money these days, you need to do more than can humanly be done in COBOL.
there is none of this fancy renaming variables on the fly and obfuscating code with magic numbers stuff that is all the rage in C++, Java, and other "modern" languages.
C++ and Java are not "modern" languages; their designs are barely more modern than COBOL, actually.
Computer viruses are not an unavoidable fact of life. In fact, computer viruses are largely limited to Windows. Maybe computer viruses threaten VoIP on Windows, but other platforms and embedded systems are fine. Really.
I never attacked the gplv3. You read way too much into what was written.
No, you attacked the authors of the GPLv3, and in an uncalled-for manner:
"A lot of people take the GPL to be the opposite of free, masquerading as free."
"v3 is about pushing an agenda within a license from what I can tell, rather than sticking to what it is, a license. It's their license, fine, but pushing their own goals through"
Those are attacks on the integrity and honesty of the GPLv3 authors.
The GPLv3 authors are trying to accomplish one thing: keep software free-as-in-freedom while navigating a legal minefield of patents, copyrights, and international laws. They are clear about what they're doing, it's an open process, and contributions are highly valued. Given their goals and the process, I find it outrageous that you attack their integrity and accuse them of "masquerading" and having hidden agendas.
If you don't like the license, just don't use it, but don't accuse them of hidden agendas.
(Given Jobs' past attempts to circumvent the intent of the GPL, it's ironic that an Apple developer would accuse the authors of the GPL of hidden agendas; Jobs' own behavior is a good illustration of why we need the GPL and why it needs to be carefully worded, just like the Novell/Microsoft deal is a good illustration of why we need GPLv3.)
This approach may turn out to be useful, but it's important to keep in mind that "cancer" isn't a single disease, it's hundreds of different ones (albeit related); as a result, there is unlikely ever to be "the cure for cancer". Also, note that the researchers have only shown that the treatment kills cancer cells, but it still remains to be shown that it doesn't cause other problems, something that's a real possibility given its mechanism of action.
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While I am 100% against fingerprinting CITIZENS of this country, I couldn't give a shit less if someone from outside of the US is fingerprinted.
These things work tit-for-tat: if the US fingerprints citizens of other nations, then other nations will fingerprint US citizens. If the US details citizens of other nations without due process, other nations will do the same to US citizens. Now, maybe you are enough of a redneck that you never travel outside the US, but other people do, and to them this matters. And the US isn't going to invade France or China to bail people out when their fingerprints come up for a match there.
Your attitude also sets a bad international example because it reinforces the notion that Americans "give a shit" about the rights of non-Americans, which is actually at the root of a lot of the conflicts that the US is involved in right now.
but then again, computers can nowadays compare fingerprints with ease, so it's no big deal.
Fingerprints have a certain false positive rate, and that causes huge problems if you go on fishing expeditions. Worse, the errors are not random (so the same people are going to have problems over and over again), and the DHS has no way for you to correct their records (if they screw up, it's your problem not theirs).
I have the hunch that the next fashion fad for privacy concerned people will be gloves.
Giving your fingerprints is mandatory; gloves don't help.
Air travel is a private business. Now, it might be possible to create a law that would require them to let you fly without identification, but by default, a private business should be able to make showing identification part of the process of boarding a plane.
You are clearly not finished reading the Bible and the Koran, they largely tell the same tales and teach the same values.
Well, they may be "largely the same", but that's not the same as "identical". In order to refer to the same entity, given their infallibility, the Bible and the Koran would have to be completely consistent, and they are not.
Now you seem one of those sad men that instead of searching for what unites looks for what divides.
Even if one could unite the three major Abrahamic religions, where would that leave the rest of the world? No matter what kind of naive claims you want to make about the consistency of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, they are thoroughly incompatible with other world religions.
The solution to the problem of religious strife is not to "search for what unites", it is to accept diversity and differences. But, of course, that's a concept that's foreign to all three Abrahamic religions, which each claim absolute, infallible truth. That's the real reason why Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are at each other's throats and have been so intolerant of the religious beliefs and practices of the rest of humanity.
Allah as the Muslims call God and God (Yahweh) as the Christians and Jews see their deity are one and the same, it's according to all three scriptures the God of Abraham.
The deities described by the three religions are very different: they have different histories, different goals, different purposes, and different moralities.
The fact that, at times, adherents of some of those religions have described their own deities as "the same" as some of the other religions is a political and rhetorical trick, not a fact.
And that's what makes the disagreements between these three 'religions' so sad...
No, what's sad is that people are so gullible that they talk about bogus identities of imaginary entities as if they were objective facts. And people who repeat that sort of nonsense contribute to those "disagreements".
Okay, I'm guessing what happened is that GGGP selected the wrong network once, and Mac OS X now assumes that this is his preferred network. To fix that, go to your Network settings, go to Airport [...]
I know how to fix it. My point is that Macintosh network configuration is confusing to non-experts. My parents trip over this, and then they call me for help, at which point I have to walk them through several dialog boxes over the phone. And this is only one problem of many. Macintosh network configuration simply isn't a very usable design.
1. What are you talking about? The active window gets the menu bar. How is that confusing?
Well, it confuses people because you can get into situations where there is only one window visible, and the menu bar doesn't correspond to it. Or, users may have multiple non-overlapping windows on the screen and it may not be obvious which one corresponds to the menu bar.
In any case, whatever the explanation, the fact remains that I frequently see real users trip over this.
There's no "configuration panel" in which to select wireless networks at all.
Sure there is: System Preferences... > Network > Show: Airport.
You just click on the WiFi icon in the menu bar then select one from the list.
Well, as I was saying "Wireless configuration causes no end of problems for them: the configuration panel is confusing to them, and the Mac often picks the wrong wireless network even if it could easily figure out what the right one is."
(Even for experts, it's a nuisance. I can't boot my iMac without half a dozen messages about not being able to connect to the right network because f*cking OS X doesn't find my preferred network before it has started up lots of other services. OS X network configuration is a mess; don't try making lame excuses for it.)
Guess what, if you can change the settings without a password, so can XYZ Soft that you downloaded and ran for some other reason. There is a reason that Windows has a spyware problem and OS X doesn't this is it.
No, that's not the reason. Among other things, a lot of software asks for install passwords anyway and software can simply lie about why it's asking for a password and install spyware anyway.
You're just making stuff up. [...] It's called security.
No, actually you are making stuff up, that is, when you aren't simply parroting Apple's marketing materials.
So how can Tesla, a startup company with little manufacturing and car experience relative to GM, build an electric car that can [...]
Easy: their cars start at $93k.
There is lots of fun and innovative stuff you can do in areas such as cars, homes, computers, furniture, sports equipment, etc., once you abandon the mass market and once you stop worrying about giving people better bang-for-the-buck than they can get with existing technologies.
The hard part is not innovating, it's coming up with innovation that delivers better bang-for-the-buck.
If you have XSS vulnerabilities, you're screwed. That's just a fact, and it's unrelated to prototypes or AJAX. And XSS won't get fixed by changing prototypes or by not using AJAX.
In different words, the paper is irrelevant and stupid.
Since when did Apple sign illegal OEM deals that forced OEMs to not ship competing products to prevent them from entering the market?
Apple is leveraging its market dominance in iTunes and iPods in ways that keep down competition. And Apple is also trying to use OS X as a way to set proprietary standards in the UNIX and education market (of course, that's silliness, but it still tells us about what kind of company Apple is).
Because when Apple does it, it becomes a well documented, open API.
Yeah, Apple is "open" when they take open source software and interface it to their proprietary system.
They are somewhat less "open" when it matters to their bottom line.
If the software was well-written, it would be platform independent.
No, if the software was well-writte, it would be platform specific: it would integrate correctly with the desktop, follow all the UI conventions for the platform, etc. That means platform specific coding.
Now, for well-written applications, that shouldn't be a lot of work. But none of the cross-platform toolkits (Java, wxWidgets, Gnome, Qt, etc.) yield acceptable cross-platform behavior. Even Mozilla can only get away with its shitty platform integration because it works well on Windows and other platforms just have to live with it.
We no longer purchase apps that are of general interest to research unless they support at least Mac and Windows.
As well you should. Nevertheless, if the software is well-written, it's not "cross platform", it's effectively different apps for different platforms that share a lot of code.
Quite honestly, they are right to. Dell sold the batteries, and they should have tested them to see if they were faulty.
You're naive if you think that that sort of testing is feasible.
Luxpro would get a little more sympathy from me if they had avoided copying the shuffle so literally. That's not even a legal question (there's nothing innovative about the old iPod Shuffle, and Apple copied a lot from other designs), they just lack common sense. They should at least have changed the shape of the pseudo-click wheel to square or something.
Buy something that has dedicated commercial support for the next 20-40 years
You mean like DEC or any of the other out-of-business dinosaurs?
As someone who has been through this, I can only say: do NOT buy anything that depends on "dedicated commercial support"; the companies and industry standards you think are going to be around for "20-40 years" are probably either not going to be, or they are not going to give a damn about you.
Use open standards and open formats, with multi-vendor support; that's the only way to go. And you need to keep your eyes open and move to new formats and standards as the world changes.
If LTO is the right choice, it's the right choice because of that. But I'm not convinced that LTO is going to be long-lived enough as a standard, no matter how many companies have tied their fortunes to it right now.
You can't determine whether something is usable by writing a review, you have to observe actual users and what problems they have. And in that regard, I have seen little indication that OS X is significantly better than Windows or Gnome. Just from observing my parents on some of the points discussed in the article, I noticed
* They keep getting confused about which application is active; among other things since the frontmost window may not correspond to the menu bar.
* Wireless configuration causes no end of problems for them: the configuration panel is confusing to them, and the Mac often picks the wrong wireless network even if it could easily figure out what the right one is.
* Having to confirm some System Preferences changes with a password is a feature that makes OS X more secure in a corporate environment, where random people may walk up to your desktop trying to change things; it's a nuisance in a home environment.
* The green button thingy is as unintuitive to them as it is to me.
That's just some off the top of my head; there are many other usability problems in OS X.
Not having tried Vista, I don't know whether OS X is "better than Vista" in terms of its UI, but I don't see that it's a breakthrough in usability and it doesn't seem to be better than XP for real-world users. I suspect something like "Sugar" may be way more usable than either OS X or Windows "for the rest of us".
This greatly reduces noise cooling requirements.
So, if it reduces "noise cooling requirements", this means that users are OK with having their computers run hotter and be noisier if they are cooled with swimming pool water? I don't see why.
(If you mean "cooling with swimming pool water is less noisy than cooling with fans", say so.)
Then the drunks will just drive hands-free; they'll think it's much more fun anyway.
Integrating structure I/O and databases into programming languages was a fad in the 60's and 70's. Even Pascal and C ended up having embedded SQL.
People moved away from it because they realized that it was better to give people general purpose language constructs rather than hardcode a bunch of database code into the language compiler.
Just merge C, Ruby, & COBOL syntax into one compiler.
.NET is; it's a bunch of front-ends and a single back-end compiler. And it can handle those language, plus Java (and probably Perl 6 as well).
That's roughly what
Business only has one real question: "How much money did I make last year?" COBOL provides all the tools to answer it.
Well, if you use COBOL to code your web frontends, graphics, analytics, etc., the answer to that question will be near zero.
In order to make money these days, you need to do more than can humanly be done in COBOL.
there is none of this fancy renaming variables on the fly and obfuscating code with magic numbers stuff that is all the rage in C++, Java, and other "modern" languages.
C++ and Java are not "modern" languages; their designs are barely more modern than COBOL, actually.
Computer viruses are not an unavoidable fact of life. In fact, computer viruses are largely limited to Windows. Maybe computer viruses threaten VoIP on Windows, but other platforms and embedded systems are fine. Really.
I never attacked the gplv3. You read way too much into what was written.
No, you attacked the authors of the GPLv3, and in an uncalled-for manner:
"A lot of people take the GPL to be the opposite of free, masquerading as free."
"v3 is about pushing an agenda within a license from what I can tell, rather than sticking to what it is, a license. It's their license, fine, but pushing their own goals through"
Those are attacks on the integrity and honesty of the GPLv3 authors.
The GPLv3 authors are trying to accomplish one thing: keep software free-as-in-freedom while navigating a legal minefield of patents, copyrights, and international laws. They are clear about what they're doing, it's an open process, and contributions are highly valued. Given their goals and the process, I find it outrageous that you attack their integrity and accuse them of "masquerading" and having hidden agendas.
If you don't like the license, just don't use it, but don't accuse them of hidden agendas.
(Given Jobs' past attempts to circumvent the intent of the GPL, it's ironic that an Apple developer would accuse the authors of the GPL of hidden agendas; Jobs' own behavior is a good illustration of why we need the GPL and why it needs to be carefully worded, just like the Novell/Microsoft deal is a good illustration of why we need GPLv3.)
HARM uses highly localized and short-term heating. I doubt the platters as a whole are noticeably affected.
This approach may turn out to be useful, but it's important to keep in mind that "cancer" isn't a single disease, it's hundreds of different ones (albeit related); as a result, there is unlikely ever to be "the cure for cancer". Also, note that the researchers have only shown that the treatment kills cancer cells, but it still remains to be shown that it doesn't cause other problems, something that's a real possibility given its mechanism of action.