Channel 9 - Discussions by maxharris

Coffeehouse - Why do we let Beer28 continue?

maxharris — Fri, 21 Oct 2005 07:08:32 GMT

I wish Beer28 would go away for good.

Censorship is wrong only when it violates someone else's rights (examples: when the government forcibly silences someone saying something non-murderous with their own money, or when someone executes a DoS attack on a website they don't own). Beer28 has no moral right to trash Microsoft on their dollar.

Coffeehouse - Apple announce OSX on PC.

maxharris — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 19:49:14 GMT

"why do you need mac on x86 when there's linux and solaris for free?"

Linux and Solaris both suck (no standard user interface, no innovation). I use Windows because it's great; with Windows I can get more work done.

Coffeehouse - Upgrading to Windows Vista will be too expensive and users will move to Linux

maxharris — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 19:26:17 GMT

"will (sic) people trade price for looks?
Some will, some buy luxery (sic) cars. Alot (sic) of people don't."

The improvements made in Windows Vista are not luxuries (the singular form of which is spelled "luxury"). Your mindset is typical: it shows why Linux is and will probably remain so far behind on the desktop.

"Couple that with the fact that linux and mac do run the same compositing and transparency effects with widgets right now if you have a decent video card."

This is not true. If you would actually watch any of the videos or read anything about WPF (Avalon), you would know that it has many capabilities that X-Windows* doesn't have at all (X-Windows is two decades behind everything else in terms of the way it's designed; even the latest x.org stuff doesn't achieve parity with GDI+).

Quartz (the main graphics layer on OS X) does compositing on a per-window basis, doesn't really integrate 3D, and still (as far as I know) is quite resolution-dependent.

XAML is better than Display PDF because it's XML-based, which really means you can do stuff to it with code you wrote yourself. Binary formats should really be a thing of the past (except where they're really needed). And yes, I know that XAML and Display PDF don't quite do the same thing, but they're close enough in scope that it doesn't matter.

Finally, it is plainly obvious that Linux is not the system to use if you just want things to work.

*I refuse to call it "The X Window System", because it would be too grand a title for something so broken and ill-conceived.

Coffeehouse - Ballmer: I've never thrown a chair in my life

maxharris — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 05:08:22 GMT

"I (stare) DID NOT HAVE (look away) sexual relations with that woman."

But Mr. Ballmer, we asked you whether you threw a chair into a desk in front of Lucovsky or not?

I wish you would not post garbage like this. You probably relish the idea that Microsoft is hosting a forum that you can troll, but I think they should just kick you off and be done with it.

Coffeehouse - Ballmer: I've never thrown a chair in my life

maxharris — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 03:01:53 GMT

"Steve ballmer is obviously lying."

Why are you bashing Microsoft here? (Bashing the CEO is effectively the same as speaking out against the company.)

If you want to post trash like this, please pick another place to do it.

Coffeehouse - Why are pictures always rectangular?

maxharris — Fri, 12 Aug 2005 17:31:31 GMT

Here's another puzzling question. If with the honey comb shape, we can have the most inner space with the least material, why do we continue to build retangular houses?

Non-rectangular houses save neither labor nor material in today's market.

Currently, the cost of labor accounts for roughly two-thirds of the total cost of building. Building corners of any kind is far more labor-intensive than building a straight wall.

Also remember that common residential construction materials are universally made and sold in standardized rectangular shapes.

Houses with non-rectangular shapes can cause problems with furniture placement. Often the proper solution is to provide built-in furniture, but some homeowners don't like that (I like built-ins, but we're talking about the whole market).

Finally, wouldn't a spherical house provide the most cubic footage for the least amount of material? Again, this is useless as a housing concept (people try to build things like this today, but they don't work too well).

This situation (for residential architecture) could change with new materials and construction methods.