Posts by PJI 315 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Jun 2009
Do tell, is ignorance really bliss? I've got Opera and a couple of other browsers on my iPhone, as well as Safari, just for fun and in case some sites are awkward. However, Safari is first choice as it seems the pleasantest to use and generally most capable.
Why do n't people check their facts before broadcasting their ignorant prejudices? Where did you get your idea that there is only one browser for the iPhone?
The Danelaw was not insignificant. Over half of modern England was under Viking control and extensive settlement with Danish kings such as Knut. York was a very important Viking city. So English was heavily marked e.g. "Th" words and much grammar, Geordie and Cumbrian., Manx parliament.
Language tends to adapt to the dominant culture, even in computing. Look at the sad effect of American media on English or even German For centuries the ruling class spoke Norman French, the courts and church used Latin and French and the rest spoke 'English'. The English before the conquest was more or less mutually intelligible with the speech of Scandinavia, Netherlands, N Germany and so on. Even now with some effort you should get the gist of written Dutch or Norwegian. The sounds have moved rather apart as with all dialects and the differing spelling conventions confuse things further.
Nonsence. Of the 100 commonest everyday words, 70 or so are Anglo-Saxon. Most of the rest are Norse. then come lots of Norman French, Latin and Greek as well as German etc. of course the N. European languages are closely related and overlapping. The various Celtic languages are scarcely represented apart fro place names. Latin and Greek tend to be used in technical, scientific and legal contexts. But the basics, with grammar simplified as Saxon and Scandinavian invaders and settlers mixed, are not French. food and art are heavily French and Italian.
USA English vocabulary and grammar are strongly influenced by their main immigrant sources, such as ex slaves, East Europe and Yiddish, Hispanic languages and German, resulting in tendencies to new speech patterns, intonation and words as all the immigrants adapt English to their familiar patterns, with a curious retention of some archaic English and Irish forms through separation until modern times.
University facilities and support plus education. Not having to do a demanding, full time commercial job and no starving if he did not. Rightly he built on existing work and ideas, not least of which are UNIX and MINIX. GNU provided the top layer and much else. BSD provides more.
This does not belittle the work. But it is not a work of great orginality or genius.
The incredible financial support in such cases is: no personal risk, available equipment, technical and academic support, advice and time.
Added to which: Internet/cloud dependency is all very well for the stay-at-homes and those always near free wi-fi. But you need deep pockets and to stay on the beaten track if you travel at all. Fat lot of good all your maps, pictures and books are in the cloud when you've got no connection or a kb of data costs as much as dinner for one.
How old are you? 12? Look around when you start work. You may be surprised how many rather good and innovative engineers are older than you. Think about it, idiot. Do you think Linus Torvalds or Tim Berners-lee (about 42 and 57 respectively) are still teenagers or lost their marbles the day they reached 21? Dreadful and unexpected; but the moving spirits behind UNIX, C, shell etc. are about 70, some even old enough to have died of old age, which you will not live long enough to see with your out-dated attitude.
No wonder the quality of young informatics types' code and design is so piss poor if you are that ignorant and rude. You are condemned to repeat the mistakes of your silly forbearers.
This is a terrible precedent that should frighten every one of us.
Like it or not (I do not), it is rather hard to live in the developed world, today, without using credit or debit cards and the banking system. If one wants to own or rent a telephone, travel, rent a car, pay a large bill, do any transaction not face-to-face, fill your car with petrol late at night, pay for a holiday, lots of things, one must use credit cards, debit cards and the banking system.
This makes the privately managed, consumer level financial system more than just some business selling bread or cars or computers; to say that it is private and can do what it likes is ignorant. To all intents and purposes, in most fields, credit and debit cards have replaced money. So the refusal of a provider to give service to customers is akin to banning a customer from using traditional money.
This means that, whatever the alleged (i.e. not tried and proved in a court of law) offence and even for a proved offence, to withdraw access is not comparable with refusing to sell a television or something, as some of the ill-thought-out comments above seem to think. The fact that just about all governments do not prosecute Visa or the banks for processing payments to illegal activities supports this.
It is irrelevant how nice or nasty you think somebody or his activities is. Payment processing by finance companies has become essential to our way of life, to our survival as a society. So, until the USA does apply such strictures to IRA payments, with punishment for all such deeds to date, or to illegal gambling payments or to illegal finance industry speculation payments by whatever means, the victimisation of Assenge is clearly wrong in every sense and a great danger to all of us in the precedent it sets..
I am in late middle age, to put it politely. From the age of about 10 I was taught only metric units, or SI I think we called them. GB made Metric units legal in the mid 19th century (having had proposers of something similar for a couple of centuries before that) and went officially metric in the early 1960s. It is said that only Myanmar, Liberia and USA are not metric. But the first two seem to be increasingly so and even the USA is getting there. Actually, good, old Imperial was formalised as late at the 1840s.
So, get up to date, into the computer age too. If we were all like the anti-metrics, I suppose we would be back in the late Middle Ages, if we were lucky.
The number of nights in the country is something like 60 allowed per year for UK plus other evidence concerning domicile and residence. But, though some commenters seem to. be confused about which country they inhabit, GB is not part of the USA and has a completely different legal and tax system. According to all my American friends, quite a few where I live in continental Europe, they have to complete tax returns every year and pay if required, no matter if they never even set foot in the USA, for ever. In addition, since the latest Swiss problems with USA demands, most banks here will no longer conduct business with them. By the way, the total USA tax level is not that benign and the state gives precious little back for it, depending on which state.
Also, Tax Evasion is illegal. Tax Avoidance is legal, being simply the using of permittied allowances and devices to reduce one's tax assessment
When first I lived in England, "bonk" meant, to hit someone, usually playfully on the head. After some years away it had changed to mean the act of sexual intercourse, possibly still playfully. Now the yanks have appropriated it to mean, I think, touching one mobile against another.
Curious. Is this telephone sex?
But English is fragmented for the very reason you give. American is very different from English as spoken by most English people. Then we have got Indian English ( actually quite a close one to that spoken in England, closer than American as used by the average American), Canadian, Australian, NZ, South African and more. Yes, there is a common core. But very quickly one finds unique words and phrases and different semantics and syntax.
I'm no Java expert; but it does seem highly fragmented in the different libraries etc. for, say, string handling or platforms. Compare Perl or even C or Pyton.
The thing stinks of some young yank who has been no further than his nearest McD coming up with a clever wheeze.
Somebody should remind them that a lot of customers are over 16 and live a long way from USA. I abhor seeing American spelling and cultural assumptions used in my small country of jnearly 70 millions. I should have thought any yank firm should be able to translate to English just as well as they can to German or different dialects of Spanish, out of respect for customers often paying higher than USA prices.
Except the Telegraph - still preferring Fahrenheit, a good Scandinavian concoction.
I agree. Even I, uncomfortably near pension age, learnt metric or SSI units before going to secondary school and 'O' levels. I was shocked, when accompanying a late thirties or early forties English woman to a skiing shop in Davos to rent kit: when asked her height and weight, she could say it only in feet and inches and in stones: she claimed to be a "remedial maths teacher" in Birmingham.
That, to me, explains a lot about English educational problems. To me, she should not have even known the Imperial measures, let alone used them. What is she teaching those poor children?
I think he can not have meant that. So, I think, oh, want to be in sync with my friend in Timbuctoo, let's change the system to Timbuctoo time. My wife, son, whoever, logs in to the system, with their own UID and finds the date command and display is "wrong" and dates their files etc., date macros etc. wrongly, breaks make(1) ....
This is a UNIX look-alike. Never heard of the TZ variable? In your own environment you can set that to provide any time zone you like, including one of your own devising, while leaving the system default hopefully set by NTP with a system default time zone, in good order for other users and system programmes that are a bit fussy about time stamps, such as incremental back-ups.
Of course you may have to learn about the shell and so on. But then if you are going to fiddle with system time, one hopes you have done this already, even if you were once an innovative rewriter of a kernel (design was old hat and even the concept of reimplementation had been covered by Minix and others).
If Linux suppliers and advocates really want it to become a mainstream system, chosen by professionals and firms, then of course printers and other peripherals must be controlled. This could be a matter of security (e.g. printing confidential documents on a printer in the wrong department or a public area may be thought to be undesirable, or adding a printer with a scanning+email capability, fax ....) or it could just be money: most firms seem to object to unnecessary, or even vaguely necessary printing in colour on cost grounds. So they restrict the use of colour printers.
Of course, at home, the user can take what risks he likes. But a school, for instance, may well object to some smart-alec adding the printer in the headmaster's office and printing his or her sense of humour-inspired work of genius on it. Yes, there are other, more expensive ways, such as smart cards, subnets etc.; but the simplest way is usually the best They may want to prevent the accidental choice of a printer in the school library for confidential letters to the local council.
I suggest that those who think otherwise need to get a job in a reasonably sized firm or institution, with responsibility for budget or security and get burnt a couple of times. Being wonderful at software or design does not make one an infallible expert in the realities and practicalities of life.
"Yes and Mac OS is just BSD UNIX with apple-sauce on top."
Which is possibly why it is so good, a real UNIX and not some rehash by a load of variable quality "contributors".
I worked for a while with someone who claimed to have got a bug fix for the ext2 file systems accepted. I have had to correct and extend his code since then; I would not let him provide a fix to "Hallo World".
Think you are either spuddling, thick or ignorant. Numbers apply to profits, not items. Which is still in business, BMW, Rolls Royce, British Leyland, Woolworths? Which is just about the richest firm? Apple? Samsung? LTC? Nokia? Sony?
It is here. Thankfully, you are wrong: why should one "get over it"? How defeatist. The customer is king, remember? If the customer does not like it, it has failed, e.g. Vista. Never, ever "get over it" if you are paying for "it".
Just suffered my first few days of W7 at work (after XP). Horrible is too kind a word. Those fussy, bulky, almost old fashioned-style window borders and scores of options in a ribbon competing for attention and space. So you can 'disable' them, except they reappear as soon as you choose anything. And slow! Aaaaargh!
Thank Heavens OS X is getting leaner and cleaner if anything, for the most part. MS needs some good designers trained in Europe.
Still, W8 should make it even worse, so W7 will be just a short footnote (except for those of us in large firms that have just jumped to w7).
Symbian is excellent at what it does. I heard good things about the (not-Android) Nokia Linux implementation.
Do not assume that because this survey covers the USA it is valid for Great Britain, France, Australasia, Asia or the rest of Europe.
Contrary to the popular press, even England has a totally different set of social ideas and mores from the USA, as does Canada. This is a social survey.
Wikipedia? Are you serious that that is your legal reference?
Anyway, you seem to support AC after a fashion: it is significantly different from USA law, as one should expect. So, he is to a large extent right: check your own nationality rather than that of the most recent television show or report.
Ever noticed how those on the loosing side of an argument get ever more abusive and shrill? It's hard being uncertain of oneself or knowing that your pet beliefs are being shattered.
Get over it, retrieve your calmness and put that energy into adjusting to the changing world.
And, dear Linux fans: never forget that it is an incomplete UNIX imitation and, despite all the roaring and cheering for many years now, has not and is unlikely ever to make it into the hands of the common man. It may work if, like OSX vis a vis IOS, it takes the lessons learnt from Android mobile telephones (well, some of them) and becomes more user friendly.
Until then, huff and puff and sheer rudeness will not work. Unlike you, most of the world hates neither Apple nor Microsoft (and barely knows the difference, just like you I suspect).
Are you sure you used OS X? Not confusing it with IOS? I take it that you never learnt how to use it and know even less about UNIX (BSD variant, as OS X).
I use Windows XP, Windows 7, OS X, Solaris, Cygwin and have used most varieties of Linux (gave up when I got OS X and found a better implementation of UNIX and no longer had to support it at work) - mixture of work requirements and home pleasure. Windows is the most annoying, "locked/walled" system, with its fussy interfaces, rough edges even on mature products and constantly trying to be too clever. The only thing I appreciate is Excel. But the implementation by MS for OSX seems to be faster and more reliable. Actually, MS Office is rather decent on OS X. I am sure it would be more than passable on IOS too.
gcc(1) not on the terminal? Good Heavens, you're right. It's a binary called from the shell. In a shell session, via the terminal app or an xterm, type "man gcc" at the prompt and see if you can understand the result. Bit hard to find the programme, /usr/bin/cc or /usr/bin/gcc - oops, gave it away.
Try the same for ruby, python, perl, m4, sh, ksh, csh, etc., X, xterm, awk, make, sed and so on. Enable apache, set up printers using CUPS. Use vi/vim, emacs. Set up Postfix. Try a real UNIX implementation, even run twm. If you have not installed it (most of it is in the standard, installed distribution), it's in the free developer kit provided with every mac. But if you want to play it the Linux way, go to Sourceforge, GNU, Macports or wherever you like and download source or binary. Even disable the GUI completely and work completely from the shell (command line) or use an X server and twm or download something slow like Gnome. Install Eclipse for your Java development.
Install VirtualBox and run Windows, another Mac OS, Linux, whatever you like.
I hate OS X, it is so restricting and closed. Naughty Apple, naughty, naughty, naughty.
open source safe combinations? So we can all check them? Surely, in this case the algorithms must be kept secret at least to slow down casual attacks.
I just love this idea that clever people with an interest in improving security will, for nothing, spend hours of their spare time vetting code for banks and telling them how to fix it.
Do tell us, how much of your spare time do you devote to reading other peoples' "open source" code and delivering back reasoned, informed and accurate reviews? Do send us the links to your samples.
Ah, altruism for the sake of commerce. Good Lord, just saw a whole flock of spotted pigs fly by in question mark formation.
Anyway, according to its proponents, everything from Google is open source, so what went wrong? Did they just get fed up fixing code for nothing for one of the wealthier firms in the advertising business?
How long were you here, a week? Where, just one small village?
After many, many years here, I can say you are wrong and spouting pure propaganda. You also have not got a very good eye for scarves or their prices. I also visit UK, seem to find myself a fair bit in Germany and so on. They too seem very fond of iPhones. But UK seems the most fanatical.
I actually thought it would be cheaper to get an iPhone in UK - wrong of course. Worse, the demand is so high in UK that on two visits, last November and December, all Apple shops had none left (having found this so in Manchester I checked on line for the whole country) and that the competition to get one is so intense that, unlike in Switzerland, one has to book one's purchase by 21.00 hours the evening before and turn up to the right shop at the appointed time to collect it or lose your chance to purchase it. In Switzerland, I just walked into a shop and bought one there and then. A shop assistant in UK explained to me, that they had big queues, fights breaking out and had to employ security men to control the situation; so they had introduced the booking system.
Are you sure you were in Switzerland, the one with four main languages, some rather tall hills and 20% foreigners?
I can confirm the informal observations of other writers: From Zurich to Geneva, on ICs, S-Bahns and Regional trains, trams and buses, the iPhones and iPads have it, with a pretty good showing by macbooks.
As for money being a factor: possibly. But then, in our society, money tends to be a product of success; successful people tend to have better judgement and ability than unsuccessful ones; so very often their choice of goods, being less constrained by immediate cash needs, is often better. Please do not claim that the less well off have no interest in fashion, even if it is not your fashion.
I can imagine that buyers of iPhones hang onto their mobiles for longer than buyers of other makes and so those who want one have got one, with the inevitable result that, after a while, that market is close to saturation and the frequent swappers dominate the market with non-iPhone models. This is not to say which is best for most people, nor which is cheapest.
How long has California been bankrupt in part or whole? I say, Michigan, especially Flint, is doing really well. Detroit is a model for the world. I gather from Americans who saw the old Soweto that Soweto seemed to be better off than some areas in the American South in the prosperous times! I believe it has got no better and even the USA has had its credit rating questioned or was it down-graded?
I bet you are glad the Euro is having problems as it lessens the risk that the holders of American purse strings, the Arabs and Chinese, will switch their reserves precipitously. But note how the Chinese are considering supporting the Euro.
What you have got is size and bluster. But much of your talent, ideas, invention is actually imported, even from Great Britain.
Sorry, how many people did you say have got no medical insurance? 20 % of the country and even those with it are financially buggered if seriously ill for more than a week or two?
Must be great to be such a runaway success as a world leader. And you call that democracy and justice? How many mistaken executions occur, let alone wrongful convicitions leading to hundreds of years of imprisonment? No wonder extreme religiosity is so popular in USA, God is the only hope many of its citizens have got. Still, you can get a cheap gun whenever you want, so that's all right.
What baffles me is why the rest of the world misses the good parts of it and imports the rubbish parts of its language, failed attitudes and "culture".
What's more, I think it was agreed at a conference in the USA as a tribute to the work and formalisation of time zones by those awful people (now, clear out your chromosomes), the British (hence the passing of the line through Greenwich, England.
http://wwp.greenwichmeantime.com/info/time-zones-history.htm
What's so clever about discarding history?
Very doubtful that the Maoris had a name for the whole place and, then again, which Maoris? What about the Moriori? Also, what the hell is Ragnorok? Some other fanciful takeover of a Europeanised Maori word from one of the old dialects or, as it sounds, some kind of adoption of fantastical Norse?
Or are you just one of those Pakehas keen to hold the "Maori" back in their pre-European state, untainted by the advantages of modern medicine, education, food, transport, housing and the gift of a mother tongue that happens to have become a world language? Into the ghetto, you Maoris. Let's reintroduce cannibalism and slavery and none of this feminist nonsense about women on Maraes. Let's get them to use their old weights and measures, that should help them along the way.
By the way, it must be between 50 years and a century since there were any "pure" Maoris. Perhaps there is a handy operation to remover the impure genes. Racialist horror, I find you.
And do not tell me how disadvantaged "Maoris" are: I remember in the 1980s when both the Police minister and the head of the armed forces were "Maori", poor, repressed souls. They can vote on the general roll and have a couple of reserved parliamentary seats and there are, sadly, nowadays some no-go areas for non-maoris (especially in the North, plus lots of formerly public land and coast for which you now need permission from "Maori" and DOC to go there).
Pay them proper respect as modern, capable people and do not patronise them by stealing their original language to satisfy your feelings of inadequacy.
Perhaps you should learn to take pride in the many good things that Europeans (that's you according to your name) achieved in their whole history and specifically their courage and success in New Zealand (Is n't it nice that the British colonists respected the Dutch name? Dig dig). Mind you, if the French had been a day or two earlier, we could all be speaking French.
I recall being taught all about the greenhouse effect, complete with feedback diagrams, for O level biology in the mid 1960's. There were also considerable worries about deforestation, the effects of water shortage, the effects of the water grid in UK (e.g. water from the North of England - Kielder was coming into use - with its particular chemical composition mixing with and so changing natural waters in the South. Somehow, if school children were being taught this stuff then, I doubt it was brand new research. Most of it has proved true to a greater or lesser extent since.
So, please do not imagine this is all something new, dreamed up to make money. If anything, the new bit is the vociferous and desperate political "sceptic" lobby; the same nitwits who think the population can expand infinitely to keep the supply of cheap labour going in UK, who think we can concrete over the whole country, who think oil will last forever because we shall always find new sources (just like coal in the British coal fields?), who blame the EU for overfishing (which was well underway before we joined it), if they even accept that the lack of fish could be a sign of overfishing.
I know nothing is yet proved on either side; but the weight of evidence is against the sceptics and, in something so important, I prefer the precautionary principle as the consequences of a mistake in the sceptic direction are almost too awful to contemplate and tend towards the irreversible.
I find it unlikely that English pints are defined in USA units.
Much as I distrust Wiki:
1 imperial pint = 20 imperial fluid ounces (fl. oz.)
= 0.56826125 litres (exactly)
≈ 568 ml
≈ 1.20 U.S. wet pints
≈ 1.03 U.S. dry pints
1 U.S. wet pint = 16 U.S. fl. oz.
= 0.473176473 litres (exactly)
≈ 473 ml
≈ 0.83 imperial pints
≈ 0.86 U.S. dry pints
1 U.S. dry pint = 0.5506104713575 litres (exactly)
≈ 551 ml
≈ 0.97 imperial pints
≈ 1.16 U.S. wet pints
My two year old Nokia, C-5 has another nifty feature: it has a good stab at saying the name of the caller if in the contacts - very handy when busy, to let you know at once who it is. And, as all ready said, the ability to control call handling by groups is very useful.
I wonder how long it will take for "smart" 'phones to fulfil the "'phone" part of the name properly.
How about a review of all these types, based on telephone call management, SMS and MMS capabilities? i.e. compare them as telephones.
Just yesterday a colleague was complaining about his HTC android something or other and then pulled out an old Nokia that he carries to make 'phone calls (without having to plug it in daily). Symbian does a better job of localisation too, at least to UK English. The move to Windows should solve that advantage for Android and IOS however.
Both were in English and Swiss newspapers. Jobs got more coverage because most people have got direct experience of the results of his work, i.e. they have probably heard of him and certainly got direct experience of what he achieved. Ritchie, excellent as he was, did the stuff that even programmers know, about many years ago and, by the nature of his contribution (actually also not his alone, as with most great work) C etc. are tools of which the vast majority of people, even in informatics, have got little or no idea even if they have heard of it. Most people seem to think C is shorthand for C++, if they know what that is.
What is wrong with you nasty little people that you feel the need to put two cooperating people and fields of work, types of people, in some sort of artificial competition, the loser being denigrated out of sheer jealousy and ignorance? What use would Ritchie's and Thompson's and Bourne's and .... work have been without people like Jobs and firms like Sun and Apple to use it?
The chap who can make a wonderful material to build a car engine piston is probably useless at designing a car and selling it. For that you need a BMW, a Ford or a Tata to create a use for it and sell it.
Grow up.
As for "slave labour": silly canard that can be thrown at every manufacturer of everything from cheap clothes to radios to tea sets. If you imagine that Samsung or whoever keeps especially nasty conditions for staff producing Apple products, while the makers of your cheap components for your home-assembled Linux or Windows machine pay top rates to happy workers, please give up the drugs and become sober.
Somebody in one of these posts pointed out that C came from B. I would add that B was a derivative of BCPL from Cambridge University, England, a good tool that I used briefly. Curiously, Bourne, of Bourne shell fame, was also English (an Algol specialist), if I remember correctly. One wonders what it was about England, specifically Cambridge, that gave rise to this.
You need both, as with most good things. The Bell people and their predecessors were necessary to lay the foundations, build the tools to build the next generation. Jobs and his people were/are brilliant at using these to produce the technology in well designed, attractive packages of use to the "common man", to make it widespread and profitable outside computer specialists.
C and UNIX, my bread and butter and delight for thirty years, was not doing well against Windows and others. Even Linux and Minix were just fringe activities in the wider world. Apple made it, is making it, mainstream. Android built on the market stimulated by Jobs, who built his on clever design and use of existing tools, most built on C and UNIX.
You can not separate them. Both men in this case are extraordinary in their fields and all, including Windows phone and Android phone makers and users, should be grateful to both.
Life is seldom "either or".
ry using a GPS navigator when you do not know the coordinates of the destination or the road diversion is not yet in your GPS's idea of the world; A map would at least show the lie of the land.
I could be wrong; but he did not know where either place was, just worked on a theory of where it may be, plus being in a vessel with rather less refined methods of overcoming wind and tide and no charts, not even a school atlas, of any part of the route. T
GPS is not always, or even often, as accurate as you seem to think. A couple of hundred metres out could be interesting in some parts of the sea.
You know, liferafts and the like could well have a small engine; but for some reason, they tend to include some oars, just in case. Ocean yachtsman have very snazzy self-steering gear; but the ability to steer "by hand" is somehow seen as useful. Electricity in the home is wonderful. Oddly, most people have got a torch and even candles just in case it fails.
Technology is useful, fun even. But humans have not changed, nor has the underlying physical world.
Most "free" software is a pain in the neck to install, not as portable or universally installable as many imagine. I have experienced hundreds of such pieces of badly designed, poor interface software (and some really rather good items too) on VMS, Primos, heaven knows how many varieties of UNIX and Linux/GNU.
Actually, oddly, OSX has proved to be the easiest for "free" software, either from Apple, GNU or Mac Ports. BSD with ports is the next. What is more, OSX comes with much of the really useful stuff installed, e.g. Apache, PHP, Perl, Python, gcc, X and much more. I do have to download gpg, costs about two minutes, real pain.
I used to think Linux was all right, till I got fed up with newer releases needing more and more fiddling to make them work on my old hardware, the size increasing fast with every upgrade, every release being a beta. Commercial Redhat and SUSE were all right; but then, we had a team of our own supporters to test it, make sure that things worked and we were fairly limited in how we used it and I, being an engineer and paid for my time, was happy enough to work around the bad links to MS Exchange, rotten calendar management and half-baked "office" software (I hear that has become almost office-capable at last). Of course, the secretaries had MS Windows.
Then I got a Mac laptop (cheap from a student who had won it and needed the cash more than the machine) and suddenly, Linux seemed just pointless - all that hassle and still not as good. For my X yearnings, I quickly got X and twm configured and even KDM working (abandoned KDM and Gnome and the like: OS X provides a more reliable, quick and useful interface for those times when more convenient than command line).
As for consumer devices, mobiles: I like walled gardens. I do not want my mobile crippled by a virus or some app that spends all its time 'phoning home or eats all the memory. Walled gardens are delightful oases in which, even in a bracing English climate, one can grow peaches, grapes and apricots against a sunny, sheltered wall; in which the noise of traffic and people is kept out or at least muted; in which I can sun bathe, naked or not, chat to friends and family in privacy and security, have, for a few moments, freedom to be me.
Stallman and his ilk are privileged twirps who have no idea how people outside their little scrapyards live and work, nor how they have to pay for it. Clearly, their way is not "a better mousetrap" or the competition, whether Nokia, Apple, MS, IBM, Cray or whoever would all have gone or never started long ago. Interesting that much of the successful "free" software is supported through the good graces of commercial sponsors providing staff, machines and money e.g. MySQL, OpenOfice, much of Linux (go on, I bet you thought Google, Redhat and Canonical were charities peopled by volunteers in their spare time)
It sounds (reads) as if most of you went to a university when you should have gone to study City and Guilds or NVQs or some sort of apprenticeship or whatever the modern job training system is. A good degree, with the exception of certain professions, trains the mind. Even medicine and law top up the academic education with practical, work related training.
As an employer or manager, one of your most important jobs is to teach new staff the reality of working and the new skills required for that, not to make smug observations, challenge them with your pet programming job, probably badly specified because you never learnt how to specify and document.
The two worst types of horror I have experience are the Windows and the Linux "hacker". They get something working; but it costs a fortune to correct, maintain and understand for ever afterwards, using all the tweaks available only in their pet, home environment. I have suffered these opinionated fools in three countries. Aaaaaaarrrrhhhh!
Solaris has a complete shadow of your directory, in your directory, with lots of versions (hourly, nightly ...). It is hidden ( a dot directory); but apart from space taken, find(1) can waste an awful lot of time perusing it. It is called .snapshot. Been there for years.
So actually, one could see, comparing George 3, VMS, Solaris and no doubt others OS X is late to the party.
I love the idea that concrete for windmill bases is terrible, concrete for power stations and the infrastructure to deliver their fuel is cheap and good.
How does one measure the cost of coal spoil heaps, long term, safe storage of nuclear byproducts, damage to fisheries and other environaments from oil extraction (and leakage, accidents ...)?
Ask large, industrial areas of China and India about the cost of cheap coal - better still, go and live there and tell us yourself. Go to South Wales and admire the spoil from old, dead coalmines and tell us how much that land costs or earns. I can show you land that has been out of pracital use for over a century and land likely to follow that grand tradition, because nobody has to pay that cost in cash. Chat to the retired miners and ask them how their lungs and damaged bodies feel.
I love the idea that the "poor" will not be even poorer as fossil fuels go up in price and are not affected by the pollution and land loss; perhaps only the wealthy have to live in the damaged areas.
What wonderful optimism that the finite earth will continue to deliver fuel from somewhere in the world at somebody's expense in health and spoiation so that we, in Northern Europe, can have more cash to spend on gadgets or better food than the miners get.
Odd that most of Europe, East and West, North and South, is rather keen on Wind Power and Solar panels. Yet they all have got the same problem as UK and in most of them, electicity is cheaper.
Good thing your atttiude was not around when calculators cost as much as a modern netbook and even home PCs cost as much as today's low-end servers - too expensive, will only get more expensive .....
For once, governmente have responded to their electorates and are trying to think long and medium term and use imagination. I suggest you do the same and avoid cheap and scare-mongering headlines to tendentious articles. No doubt, a few weeks ago you were bashing nuclear power (with a little more justification perhaps).
Of course, renewable energy has drawbacks too; but do you seriuosly believe that improvements in energy storage and buffering technology, for instance, are confined to your mobile telephone and computer? That other energy sources are not subject to fluctuation? What a pessimist. Is a field of windmills really more offensive than hectares of shale pits, mining works, nuclear power sites? At least there is some green among the windmills and I doubt the noise is worse than the "traditional" alternatives.
Oh, and find the English spelling checker and learn how to spell sCeptical.
Come off your out-dated opposition to the new and think it through properly.
I'm "into technology" if you mean working and developing in it. Lots of colleagues do buy Apple kit, just because they know and understand technology.
But I suspect you mean just "interested as a hobby", so just following the usual, uninformed, "popular = bad" fashion.
Take a risk, learn UNIX and get an Apple computer. The risk is, you would have to eat your words.
I am not slagging off Linux, Windows, Free BSD or whatever fetish takes your fantasy.
There are even a couple knocking around here in Zurich. At least one "English" pub has got one and I have seen others in other parts of Switzerland. I'm sureI saw one in New Zealand this year and one in Melbourne too.
Good design is always in fashion. Why not adapt with "internet" displays for people just needing to do look up a timetable, search an online map or whatever who want something bigger to read than their mobile 'phone? And not all areas have got good or even any mobile reception, nor wireless hotspots.
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