> 2) The "robots.txt" argument misses the point because the publishers never gave permission to use their content, so the presence of an "opt-out" mechanism is irrelevant. The mechanism must be "opt-in", i.e., Google must ask to use their content.
The crux of the matter is that you're missing the newspapers motive. They don't want Google to ask their permission, they want google to pay them, which is a huge difference. They DON'T want google to ask for their permission and then delist them from Google News if they had to pay for it.
I am on Google's side on this matter, this sounds like extortion. Google should be free to delist them if they want money from their link, in a capitalist society you should be free to chose who you deal with in your business. I live in France, our government wants to tax google to help the newspapers and they didn't take google's answer (that they'd delist the newspapers) well, because they don't want google to respect their IP and ask for permission, they want Google to pay up no matter what.
>The crux of the matter is that you're missing the newspapers motive. They don't want Google to ask their permission, they want google to pay them, which is a huge difference. They DON'T want google to ask for their permission and then delist them from Google News if they had to pay for it.
I haven't missed their motive. Of course they don't want to be delisted from Google News. In a sense, they're like patent trolls, but with more of a moral high ground. Unlike patent trolls, they have produced something and sent it out into the world. It is not their job to preempt what they rightfully view as copyright infringement, even if that infringement might benefit them.
>Google should be free to delist them if they want money from their link
The fact that Ubuntu is open source wouldn't change anything if those things were true. Just because you can look at the source does not mean you're looking at the source of the code you're running, because you almost certainly did not compile the whole Ubuntu distribution from the source, rather than that, 99+% users just downloaded the precompiled iso and installed from the official binaries, where a backdoor could slip by and you'd be none the wiser even if you did the insane task of reading all of the code you're running (which is not possible for a single human being) and then there's also the fact that you can slip a backdoor that even a great programmer wouldn't necessarily notice at a glance while looking at the sources, so there is that.
The crux of the matter is, you can't trust your computer.
Even if you did trust nearly every single human being involved in the process, it just takes a compiler writer to break the chain of trust.
http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html
Not if we're talking about the real world (implementation), rather than the theoretical capability of a language in itself. Perl and Ruby don't see much love on Windows, particularly with GUI toolkits and the like. Python is the only one of the three that feels comfortable using on Windows, from the skeleton of the app down to actually distributing it.
Java is really good at cross platform apps though.
This is one of the few things that irks me in programming communities, often you'll seen criticism or praise of a point in a language, and then some language lawyer comes and talks about what said language can do in theory, rather than looking at the practicalities of actual, real world implementations, the community and culture surrounding it and so on. No one gives a crap if any dynamic language COULD be made to work the right way on many OS, people care if the work is done, not if it COULD be done.
The worst offenders are of course people victim of the sufficiently smart compiler curse.
This is what I was wondering about, because I have so far failed to install a single Python package on Windows without it breaking on some Unix dependency.
If you're pulling a pure python package (like Django, Tornado or requests) then you're golden on any platform python is available for. If you're pulling a python package that contains C bits (like PIL, msgpack-python) then you'll need the compiler toolchain and associated libraries.
Luckily, most such packages (the popular ones at least) can be obtained in other ways (PIL through a win only download, or get a pure-python alternative like msgpack-pure-python).
I use Ruby for light scripting on a Windows machine. RubyInstaller worked just fine and so do the irb shell and my scripts. Dropbox is a web app, so who cares about GUI toolkits? Perhaps you're right that the Python community tried harder, earlier, to support Windows and other non-UNIX platforms. But it's hard to imagine Dropbox actually selecting Python to build their web app for that reason. Maybe in their earlier days they used a hosting service that supported Python but not Ruby, Perl, etc.? Who knows...
You wrote 513 characters about a subject you don't know anything about. Why is that ? You didn't use dropbox, you don't know how it works (hint, what made it so popular is the desktop client that syncs your data in the first place. And it's written with wxpython.), but you felt compelled to write 513 chars about your ignorance and wild speculation ("Maybe in their earlier days blabla").
Then comparing apples to oranges "I use Ruby for light scripting" vs "widely deployed desktop app with users from the three major desktop systems (Windows, OS X, Linux)."
This kind of behavior is a serious annoyance in online discussions.
I'm sorry if I annoyed you, but there's really no need to be rude. It's a subject I never claimed to know a lot about, but it's also false to say that I don't know "anything" about it. I'm here to learn more, not to show off what I already know.
If you were actually here to contribute, you might give a concrete example of why Python is more cross-platform compatible than other interpreted languages (because someone built a better Windows GUI toolkit for it?), but if you just want to put down and feel smarter than someone you don't know, you're wasting your time and keystrokes.
The fact that you actually bothered to count how many characters I typed strongly suggests the latter.
Dropbox also have a desktop client that's written in python. Presumably with a slightly different UI layer and packaging method depending on the target OS, but with the underlying functionality shared.
> I don't want this question to sound loaded and threaded with negative connotations for/against apple but why would you label the computer as "one of the best I have ever used" if one of the primary interfaces to the user is repeatedly faulty?
Because mac users tend to put the weight and thinness of the machine over anything else and since the rMBP is the thinnest and lightest 15" laptop it makes it the "best". Hell, Apple is doing the "thin/small and light" thing even with their "desktop" machines like the iMac and Mac Mini.
Mac and PC users just have different set of priorities. I used to own macs but I fully went back to the PC because being able to handle repairs myself in a timely manner is much more important than the niceties of OS X for me, particularly with desktop machines. The mac mini is not good enough for me, and the iMac is exactly what I don't want, if anything fails in the computer I want to be able to replace the part in five minutes and be done with it. That and the fact that the screen tends to outlive my computers in usefulness, I replace them less often than the parts of my desktop PC so buying a computer attached to the screen feels offensive to me.
The Mac Pro could've been an alternative but.. 2600 euros for a computer that is outdated in every single way out of the box is not attractive. Its GPU used to be a mid-range gamer card, used to, because it's not even mid-range in 2012, it's low end. If you build your own computer a GPU with that kind of performance will cost about ~100 to 150 euros, which is not acceptable for a 2600 eur computer. The rest (cpu, ram) is decent but still doesn't really warrant the price tag. It was good when it first launched.. that's about it.
I've had the same experience with my own family. I tried to fix their tv only to get yelled at because I was wasting the space on the screen with the black bars. They'd rather see distorted faces than black bars, over saturated colors over calibrated.. there are many in HN who put faith in customer satisfaction surveys. I don't. There are way too many people who are satisfied with their shiny pile of turds for me to put credit in their happiness with a brand.
Who would trust the average customer over an issue like screen ghosting ? Even if 99% of rMBP's owners said that they had no screen issue it still wouldn't mean anything at all. Many could actually have the issue but lack the level of perception required to notice anything.
To speak about a competitor in a different market, Samsung has been pushing their amoled crap for a long time now in the smartphone sector, and it's still the most popular brand to this day. The S3 cost as much as something like the One X, except that the S3 has a screen that is dimmer, less sharp, worse, unnatural colors and worst of all, is that amoled screens tend to severely suffer from burn in over time. People still chose the S3 over the competition in the android market, no matter how cheap its body feels (flimsy plastic vs harder plastics), no matter how bad the screen is.. I could understand the choice if the S3 was cheaper than the competition, but it's not.
The markup on the typecover is hard to justify when looking at the competition. The keyboard on the asus transformer cost about the same except that it also has a big battery inside, extending the battery life of the tablet when used in laptop mode.
And it can be used as a laptop, in your bed, in your lap.. not like the Surface RT which doesn't rely on the type cover but a stand that is only stable when put on a desk or table.
1/ It's 2012 and Windows 8 has decided it can't play DVD movies. Yes, that's right. You now NEED to install third party software just to play a legitimately bought DVD movie !
Aperture a professional staple? This is funny because I can see Adobe Lightroom installed everywhere but no aperture in sight. I'd say, the vast majority of pro photographers favor Lightroom.
>Aperture a professional staple? This is funny because I can see Adobe Lightroom installed everywhere but no aperture in sight. I'd say, the vast majority of pro photographers favor Lightroom.
I use Lightroom myself (part-time professional photograph). Lightroom just got better, faster, plus is cross-platform.
So, yes, Aperture plays second fiddle to Lightroom, but still Aperture remains the major competitor to Lightroom, and is used by many pros. Plus, it came out before Lightroom, and paved the way for this kind of photography workflow app as opposed to mere editing.
While there are some particularly bad examples of cult of personality in free software, I wouldn't say this is one of them. I think that people are relaying Linus's opinion on desktops so much because he's sharing our thought process and gives us an opportunity to spread our own opinion through his fame, rather than just following everything he says just because of his kernel expertise.
Look at the reaction people had when Gnome 3 was introduced, and Unity in Ubuntu. People didn't wait for Linus to complain against those changes driven by UI designers gone insane.
Lots, and lots of linux users had the SAME reaction Linus had, BEFORE he even publicly talked about it. I went to Gnome 2 from the KDE4 transition since I liked KDE3 but hated KDE4, and went to Xfce after the Gnome 3 and Unity debacle. And I didn't wait for Linus to talk about his thoughts on the linux desktop to switch everytime something bugged me.
Aaron Seigo is asking us to not care about Linus opinion ? But we don't give a crap about yours, man, you're the reason why KDE4 went to hell, the man behind Plasma. After so many years acting like you know better what your users want than they do you're getting all hurt when people listen to someone like Linus instead of you ? the thing about Linus is, he's just a user like the rest of us rather than a desktop developer, but with his fame he can make his opinion reach your ears and it seems you don't quite like what regular users think of your "innovations".
"Look at the reaction people had when Gnome 3 was introduced, and Unity in Ubuntu. People didn't wait for Linus to complain against those changes driven by UI designers gone insane."
Not insane, just designing for a model of a user that does not include many here. I think the 'shock of the new' plays a part. I've been using GS 3.6 on the Gnome Ubuntu Remix (12.10) on the desktop for a bit and it isn't slowing me down much at all, but I'm basically an end user...
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/inxile/wasteland-2 http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/obsidian/project-eternit... http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/inxile/torment-tides-of-... http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/70755535/dead-state-the-... http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/redthread/dreamfall-chap...
The future of gaming has a few alternatives that look very promising and they're all DRM free.