In the long term, I'd put my money on Android if for no other reason than it can multitask.
The iPhone currently multitasks fine (many apple apps have background processes) - they could flip a switch and allow apps to run in the background tomorrow, so I don't think this is a serious problem for Apple. There are good reasons for limiting running apps though, so I see why they do it (battery life foremost among them, responsiveness another).
Glad to hear your Android phone works well - good to have competition in this space, and I think long term your prediction on Android will pan out - it will certainly gain equal traction to the iPhone, and perhaps surpass it if Google can make their interface a little slicker, and get more devs on their store.
In addition to the shortcomings on Android hardware (or perhaps linked to that and the limited time they've been out), the market for Android apps just isn't there yet. This is an interesting comparison of revenue from a game developer:
One example he gives is Trism - $250,000 sales on the iTunes store, $2000 earned on the Android store.
Android is a great first effort though, and it'll be interesting to see what they do with it - the best thing they can do in my opinion is to set themselves up in opposition to Apple as a more open, welcoming alternative, which is on the side of the consumer and is not indifferent to users and downright hostile to outside developers (as Apple occasionally is).
DSL disconnects the POTS line, and replaces it with a central box (DSLAM) that converts the incoming twisted-pair and passes it along to higher-quality fiber or coax.
You're being misleading here in an attempt not to be proved wrong. DSL is indeed over telephone lines (as normal people understand them).
If you redefine 'line' to mean all the terminating equipment too as you do here (hey, why not include the old analog modem as well while you're at it?), then I guess in some sense DSL does not use phone lines (a.k.a. twisted pair), but back here in the real world, when people say line, they mean the wire, not the terminating equipment, because that's all that matters to them - they can unplug a telephone modem, and plug in a DSL modem to the *exact same telephone line all the way to the exchange* (so long as the other end deals with it) and get faster service. The telephone line from customer to exchange is exactly the same, and then at the exchange they need better equipment to multiplex etc. and hand off signals to a more capable backbone, but all of that is not to do with any hard limit on the copper wires themselves.
Would you accept that the limit with old analog modems was in fact not a hard limit of the cable itself, but in fact a limit of the older equipment connected to either end? If that's the case, the analogy kind of breaks down if you're using it to say that wireless can never get faster, because all you are really saying is that that there are hard limits to the broadcast/receive equipment given a certain method of transmitting.
How exactly does WGA piss off MS customers? I seem to recall it only nags the 'non-customers'.
It does nag a lot about updates, and sometimes it gets it wrong anyway.
I installed a new version of Windows recently on a VM, and it accused me of having an unauthorised version and removed the desktop picture, just because I'd changed some hardware (in the VM). Had to go through the activation process to get back to normal, but it was somewhat irksome to be accused of stealing before I'd even been given a chance to correct the situation.
That and the stupid bubbles every 5 minutes from the task bar about how it has found new hardware, and anti-virus updates cannot be downloaded, and are now being downloaded, and it is keeping itself up to date for me, and Windows has detected a new network, etc etc, reminded me why I don't use Windows very much.
I would take issue with one point you're raising here:
After hundreds of years of fighting to establish a industry open to anyone we may see the clock move backward and only the elite will be able to publish their work.
The internet is a level playing field - as you point out later in your screed, anyone can publish for free. It's certainly a democratisation of publishing, just as the printing press was before it, and we are now presented with an embarrassment of riches, some in the form of ebooks, mostly in the form of html pages. There's no way that it will lead to only the elite being able to publish their work - quite the contrary - it has already led to an explosion of content online.
Now as to making money from writing, I think you'll find that this continues to operate much as before - you can make money from written material if you write stuff people want to read and let them access it in a format which is convenient to them. Most people are quite happy to recompense you for work performed, and can't be bothered to try to steal your work if they can just buy it for a small fee (say half the current cost of printed books) - it's simply not worth their time to pirate it. Sure, there'll be exceptions, and some people will crazily go out of their way to actually pirate everything just because it is out there (see the first post on this thread). However most won't bother if they can get their books conveniently for not much money. That sort of fee if collected directly by the author is massively more than publishers currently offer for dead tree books, though many writers will continue to require a publisher for design/editorial services. Publishers should definitely be scared of being made redundant and fighting to stay relevant - authors not so much.
Here are some prominent publishers already making money from digital editions of their books: Apress, Pragmatic Programmers, O'Reilly.
but. . . but. . . security is one of the claimed reasons for sandboxing applications on the iPhone. Apple is lying? Tell me it ain't so!
No, not lying, just complacent.
There should be an option to restrict this, and sandboxing does in fact give Apple the option to add it in the future - it does increase security by not allowing direct access to system files. All access to stuff like phone numbers and addresses is only via an API which Apple control, which they can modify at any time to pop up a dialog asking the user (see their restrictions on core location data).
If the user has Location Services turned off, it'll tell you that it refused the app, and the app gets nothing.
If the user has Location Services turned on, it'll prompt the first time the app asks to use the service. If you say yes, then it'll remember from then on what you decided the first time, so no more prompts. If you say no, you get another prompt next time the app is launched. It's kind of like UAC as it should have been, so nothing like UAC on Vista.
Apps live in a sandbox, so they don't get to see much (or any data from other apps), but they can use system frameworks to access stuff like music, address book, send mail (with user interaction) etc.
They could easily add a setting saying 'allow apps access to the phone book', that users could control in their general settings, and I think they should, as it would stop scummy practices like this. The more control the user has over what data apps access the better as far as I'm concerned, so the iPhone sandboxing could definitely do with some extensions/improvements. Things off the top of my head:
If all those were settable globally, and on an application basis, as the location info is at the moment, it'd make a nice user-adjustable sandbox (though they'd be better to allow the user to set it in one place for apps rather than relying on prompts for each feature).
I believe some other platforms (like Symbian) have some restrictions in place already on this.
To stop, you must ensure that NONE of the 1000+ gas pedals are pressed. If a hacker rides past and manages to press one of those pedals, you crash and burn.
To stop it, you whitelist, don't blacklist (which is what you're describing with the 1000 gas pedals analogy) when filtering user data.
Then you only allow a certain set of very limited tags, attributes and attribute values, and definitely nothing including scripting. Encoding is definitely a problem even with that approach though - personally I wouldn't let anything url encoded through (like attributes) as it's the main source of vulnerabilities.
I agree this is a great idea, please keep pushing it. It has become more relevant recently I think, so it is perhaps an idea whose time has come. In lieu of having it in a browser, adding as standard more aggressive filtering to javascript frameworks would help reduce a lot of this stuff.
Filtering user input properly would have stopped this though. It is not an attack which relies on a flaw specific to javascript - the flaw is a very general one - using untrusted user input without aggressive filtering.
Perhaps you know something I don't that makes the Silicon Film tech unusable, but I don't see why NASA couldn't use color filters.
As has been explained, they could, but they have more important things to do, and the images would not be as useful for science, which was, and remains, the purpose of Hubble. They could have added RGB filters in front of the greyscale sensor (which is basically what you're proposing here), but that would cost launch weight, which means losing other filters, so they went for the more useful ones. The sensors you have linked to are basically a bunch of filters, some built in to the sensor.
Many of these nebulas (for example) would look far less dramatic in the visible range, because all those hot gases wouldn't stand out so well, and they wouldn't be able to discern important details. So in the interests of science AND pretty pictures, they don't bother trying to reproduce a view which humans would see (if they had superman vision) as it'll typically be dusty, dark, and not very interesting. Usually on these pictures you'll see a caption explaining which wavelength(s) they've picked out.
Even so, it still doesn't guarantee access to any enhancements that Microsoft may make to Exchange/Outlook
Actually, in a strange way, it has. Microsoft has now announced their intention to produce outlook for OS X (starting in 2010). I have no doubt they did this to try to wrest control on the client side back again from Apple, and their action is a persuasive demonstration that they do feel threatened by Apple interoperating with Exchange on desktop/mobile.
To keep OS X as a second class platform, they need to control both sides of the equation, so that they can quietly degrade the client software (which is what the user sees and judges after all), once they have captured the market. Entourage used to be their mac client, but it was so bad many have deserted it and it no longer serves as a chokehold on corporate mail clients on OS X. It's an old trick, but it has worked well for them time and time again.
The real answer to the difficulties with Exchange is of course to drop Exchange, and use a proper email protocol, and then a proper calendar/address book protocol too. There's no reason that email/calendar/addressbooks have to be tied in to one set of server software.
Seriously, did you ever need to? I've been in IT since 1998 and I cannot remember ONE situation where I thought "This is so inconvenient, I need a calculator for this shit. Couldn't they just make a Gigabyte 1000'000'000 Bytes?"
Every time someone tries to work out how many n byte files will fit in their hard disk, they have to do these calculations. Every time someone buys a new hard disk, the calculation is required to work out how much of the space they thought they had is not there as the computer uses different units from the rest of the world, the rest of the scientific community, and the hard drive manufacturers.
So we've had a defined standard that was, arguably, not the easiest to understand. THEN harddrive manufacturers started their fraud.
It's not easy to understand, it's a perversion of the proper SI units, and an arbitrary choice of boundary which was chosen to fall close to the SI units because it was felt to be good enough at the time. With large disk sizes, it is no longer close enough.
As to being complicated: If that is your argument, then all the English speaking countries should switch to metric according to your logic.
The severity of the situation is less, but that doesn't mean that one can't model another....You're missing the entire purpose behind analogy.
For an analogy to be effective, there was to be some connection between the two states. Your analogy illustrating analogies notwithstanding (I'm sure the grant-parent grasps the concept of analogies), there is no valid point of comparison between being violently sexually assaulted, and choosing a bad deal in a shop. Infantile jokes about rape really aren't funny or insightful; as with the use of Hitler or the Nazis in comparisons, it's a good indication that the argument is ill thought-out melodramatic nonsense.
The comparison is just that if you want a cell phone in the US, you take the phone from the carrier because you're not saving money by not taking it. If you buy your own phone to connect to the network then you're just paying the same rate as the subsidized customers AND you had to shell out for your own phone.
So basically, you don't delete stuff only when you make mistakes, you delete stuff when you edit too.
Thanks, just curious because I've never used it myself - if I'm editing, typically I'll select a word to delete it. I can see how it'd be useful if you only use the keyboard arrows for editing.
Light is made up of all the colours of the rainbow all mixed together, but some colours of light can travel better through the air. Most of the light from the sun gets to us, but the blue light from the sun gets stopped by the dust and air in the sky, and that's why the sky looks blue.
and getting used to not having a real delete key (but replacing it with the backspace functionality).
I'm curious, as I often see this complaint from ex-Windows users. When I'm typing and notice a mistake, I am always in front of the mistake with the cursor, so I just back up using backspace and then start typing again. When do you use the delete key normally?
PS You can press function-delete if you want forward delete.
Google seems to ignore punctuation, that's why you'd get those results.
You put in "foo, bar, baz", it searches for "foo bar baz". It does not search for foo OR bar OR baz, as you suggested, it just strips the punctuation, and then searches for that exact phrase. There's a guide to the methodology you can google for.
I understand why they omit punctuation, but It'd be nice if you could ask it to search including punctuation easily (not sure if you can), as it makes searching for code or precise phrases (with puncutation) very difficult.
The app didn't "provide access." It contains its own local copy. People really need to ____ ___ _______ _______.
And? A local copy is so much more dangerous right? Much more dangerous than all those local copies of Shakespeare or the Bible, which contain all manner of atrocities and swearing too. Those should be censored too, just in case.
PS Sorry, your post has been redacted - think of the children and concerned parents. We'll be bringing this innovation to all text views in the OS soon, it's the logical next step!
You say that as though I'm the only one with an issue, but I'm not. In fact, there are a lot more of us than there are of you -- and actually, odds are that when you become a parent, you'll join the gang.
Really, what makes you think that you are in a majority?
How can you possibly hope to control whether your children are exposed to these words?
I assume to be safe you have torn out these pages in any dictionaries in your house, and disconnected the house completely from the internet?
How about their friends in the playground, have you eliminated any you think might be borderline and allowed to read a dictionary by their parents?
Wouldn't it be better to read about them in a dictionary and understand they are vulgarities, rather than to hear them without understanding?
as a parent I really appreciate all the parents who put up a stink and got the rating system put in place.
As a parent do you honestly believe you can control whether your children are exposed to words like fuck? Do you let them access the internet? Do you really think they won't have access to it or hear these words in the playground?
I guarantee your children will have encountered the word before they reach the age of 10 - why not educate them and explain that in most contexts these words aren't appropriate instead of trying to blind them to the normal activities of humans?
Parents let their children play violent games where enemies are torn limb from limb, and yet shrink from allowing them to see nudity or profanity - it's insane. Swear words are never going to hurt anyone.
Likewise, I think it's perfectly reasonable for Apple to limit the sort of content in their app store.
It would be reasonable if Apple were reasonable in their decisions, but they have been decidedly unreasonable, and are also using this kind of cover to ban apps they think are competitors to their own. They're abusing their power in this domain and need to be told so in no uncertain terms. I'm considering leaving the platform as a result.
'The issue that the App Store reviewers did find with the Ninjawords application is that it provided access to other more vulgar terms than those found in traditional and common dictionaries, words that many reasonable people might find upsetting or objectionable....
I'd like to see Schiller respond to the developer's allegation that the reviewers sent screenshots of specific common swear words - fuck, etc. explicitly typed in by Apple employees.
Schiller's denial is so vague as to be a non-denial - note he doesn't actually specifically say which words they were rejected for, just hints that this was really quite a dirty, unsavoury dictionary and had no place on a nice store like ours. His implication does contradict the message sent to the developers, which homed in on quite common words which belong as slang in a normal dictionary.
Much like the Kama Sutra rejection, this brings home how farcical Apple trying to be gatekeeper and arbiter of taste on the app store really is. They should give up now before their reputation sinks under the weight of their hypocrisy - every week I hear of a new stupid and arbitrary decision by their app store reviewers.
The Google Voice one was worse than this though - at least these guys got a reason which made some sort of sense.
The darn thing isn't for a pseudo-WYSIWYG XML editor. It's for a specific bundle of features that let you save your non-XML based word processing file as one single XML file, which includes bookmarks, styles, and "formatting hints" as well.
See XHTML, first drafted circa 1998, and SGML way before that. This is so obvious it hurts.
Software patents are fundamentally broken - patents were intended for mechanical designs, and that's where they should have stayed - to protect small inventors from predatory larger companies who could manufacture their design without paying them.
When applied to the world of ideas (software) patents perform the opposite function - to protect large conglomerates from startups and competition. In addition, the current system allowing any idea to be patented leads to so many frivolous applications that the patent office is simply swamped, and effectively non-functional.
Is that the desired effect of the system? It is certainly the observed effect. Copyright should be enough for software.
If you're so pissed off that you're going to kill someone, you're going to find a way to do it.
Hmm. Strange then that the US homicide rate is one of the highest in the western world, and the thing it shares with most countries at the top of that table is... widely available guns.
In fact, I'd say gun ownership does more to prevent crime than it does to encourage it.
Your speculative thoughts on the matter (given your obvious bias) are not really relevant - at least do some research and find some statistics to back up your position.
In the real world, it seems your opinions do not correlate with reality - for example New York City has strict laws against gun use, and has a very low crime per capita rate compared to other US cities like LA where carrying guns is more. There is no positive correlation between low crime and carrying guns, and there may even be a negative correlation. See table of cities half way down this page.
So it seems that the truth (as opposed to NRA cherry-picked stats) is the exact opposite of your assertion.
Personally, I don't trust many of my neighbours with guns, because people do stupid things, often thinking they're not stupid, and am glad I live in a country where their use is tightly controlled. There are many arguments for widespread gun ownership, none of which I find remotely convincing, and the costs outweigh any benefits. Historically citizen gun ownership hasn't been important in revolutions (notwithstanding American myths - the revolution was fought first with declarations on paper and civil disobedience, then with a standing army), is not correlated with low crime (on the contrary), and allows ordinary citizens to make life or death decisions quickly which they are often not qualified or competent to make.
If I lived in a failed state (i.e. one with very weak law enforcement like South Afric right now), I'd consider owning a gun. Otherwise, I can see no argument for it.
Your government will do everything that they legally can to kill you rather than pay for your medical treatment.
Sounds like you've been living in a country where the healthcare is controlled by corporations more interested in their bottom line than your health. Somehow you think that healthcare has to be that way.
Out here in the rest of the world, many countries have a healthcare system which is universally available, efficient, free at the point of treatment, and costs less in tax per capita than healthcare in the US does anyway, even though it doesn't cover most of the population.
The question you should be asking is, what the hell are insurance companies doing involved in your healthcare and decisions on your welfare?
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In the long term, I'd put my money on Android if for no other reason than it can multitask.
The iPhone currently multitasks fine (many apple apps have background processes) - they could flip a switch and allow apps to run in the background tomorrow, so I don't think this is a serious problem for Apple. There are good reasons for limiting running apps though, so I see why they do it (battery life foremost among them, responsiveness another).
Glad to hear your Android phone works well - good to have competition in this space, and I think long term your prediction on Android will pan out - it will certainly gain equal traction to the iPhone, and perhaps surpass it if Google can make their interface a little slicker, and get more devs on their store.
In addition to the shortcomings on Android hardware (or perhaps linked to that and the limited time they've been out), the market for Android apps just isn't there yet. This is an interesting comparison of revenue from a game developer:
http://larvalabs.com/blog/iphone/android-market-sales/
One example he gives is Trism - $250,000 sales on the iTunes store, $2000 earned on the Android store.
Android is a great first effort though, and it'll be interesting to see what they do with it - the best thing they can do in my opinion is to set themselves up in opposition to Apple as a more open, welcoming alternative, which is on the side of the consumer and is not indifferent to users and downright hostile to outside developers (as Apple occasionally is).
DSL disconnects the POTS line, and replaces it with a central box (DSLAM) that converts the incoming twisted-pair and passes it along to higher-quality fiber or coax.
You're being misleading here in an attempt not to be proved wrong. DSL is indeed over telephone lines (as normal people understand them).
If you redefine 'line' to mean all the terminating equipment too as you do here (hey, why not include the old analog modem as well while you're at it?), then I guess in some sense DSL does not use phone lines (a.k.a. twisted pair), but back here in the real world, when people say line, they mean the wire, not the terminating equipment, because that's all that matters to them - they can unplug a telephone modem, and plug in a DSL modem to the *exact same telephone line all the way to the exchange* (so long as the other end deals with it) and get faster service. The telephone line from customer to exchange is exactly the same, and then at the exchange they need better equipment to multiplex etc. and hand off signals to a more capable backbone, but all of that is not to do with any hard limit on the copper wires themselves.
Would you accept that the limit with old analog modems was in fact not a hard limit of the cable itself, but in fact a limit of the older equipment connected to either end? If that's the case, the analogy kind of breaks down if you're using it to say that wireless can never get faster, because all you are really saying is that that there are hard limits to the broadcast/receive equipment given a certain method of transmitting.
How exactly does WGA piss off MS customers? I seem to recall it only nags the 'non-customers'.
It does nag a lot about updates, and sometimes it gets it wrong anyway.
I installed a new version of Windows recently on a VM, and it accused me of having an unauthorised version and removed the desktop picture, just because I'd changed some hardware (in the VM). Had to go through the activation process to get back to normal, but it was somewhat irksome to be accused of stealing before I'd even been given a chance to correct the situation.
That and the stupid bubbles every 5 minutes from the task bar about how it has found new hardware, and anti-virus updates cannot be downloaded, and are now being downloaded, and it is keeping itself up to date for me, and Windows has detected a new network, etc etc, reminded me why I don't use Windows very much.
I hope your books have more paragraphs.
I would take issue with one point you're raising here:
After hundreds of years of fighting to establish a industry open to anyone we may see the clock move backward and only the elite will be able to publish their work.
The internet is a level playing field - as you point out later in your screed, anyone can publish for free. It's certainly a democratisation of publishing, just as the printing press was before it, and we are now presented with an embarrassment of riches, some in the form of ebooks, mostly in the form of html pages. There's no way that it will lead to only the elite being able to publish their work - quite the contrary - it has already led to an explosion of content online.
Now as to making money from writing, I think you'll find that this continues to operate much as before - you can make money from written material if you write stuff people want to read and let them access it in a format which is convenient to them. Most people are quite happy to recompense you for work performed, and can't be bothered to try to steal your work if they can just buy it for a small fee (say half the current cost of printed books) - it's simply not worth their time to pirate it. Sure, there'll be exceptions, and some people will crazily go out of their way to actually pirate everything just because it is out there (see the first post on this thread). However most won't bother if they can get their books conveniently for not much money. That sort of fee if collected directly by the author is massively more than publishers currently offer for dead tree books, though many writers will continue to require a publisher for design/editorial services. Publishers should definitely be scared of being made redundant and fighting to stay relevant - authors not so much.
Here are some prominent publishers already making money from digital editions of their books: Apress, Pragmatic Programmers, O'Reilly.
but. . . but. . . security is one of the claimed reasons for sandboxing applications on the iPhone. Apple is lying? Tell me it ain't so!
No, not lying, just complacent.
There should be an option to restrict this, and sandboxing does in fact give Apple the option to add it in the future - it does increase security by not allowing direct access to system files. All access to stuff like phone numbers and addresses is only via an API which Apple control, which they can modify at any time to pop up a dialog asking the user (see their restrictions on core location data).
If the user has Location Services turned off, it'll tell you that it refused the app, and the app gets nothing.
If the user has Location Services turned on, it'll prompt the first time the app asks to use the service. If you say yes, then it'll remember from then on what you decided the first time, so no more prompts. If you say no, you get another prompt next time the app is launched. It's kind of like UAC as it should have been, so nothing like UAC on Vista.
Apps live in a sandbox, so they don't get to see much (or any data from other apps), but they can use system frameworks to access stuff like music, address book, send mail (with user interaction) etc.
They could easily add a setting saying 'allow apps access to the phone book', that users could control in their general settings, and I think they should, as it would stop scummy practices like this. The more control the user has over what data apps access the better as far as I'm concerned, so the iPhone sandboxing could definitely do with some extensions/improvements. Things off the top of my head:
* Access Music
* Access Photos
* Access Email
* Access Contacts
* Access Network
If all those were settable globally, and on an application basis, as the location info is at the moment, it'd make a nice user-adjustable sandbox (though they'd be better to allow the user to set it in one place for apps rather than relying on prompts for each feature).
I believe some other platforms (like Symbian) have some restrictions in place already on this.
To stop, you must ensure that NONE of the 1000+ gas pedals are pressed. If a hacker rides past and manages to press one of those pedals, you crash and burn.
To stop it, you whitelist, don't blacklist (which is what you're describing with the 1000 gas pedals analogy) when filtering user data.
Then you only allow a certain set of very limited tags, attributes and attribute values, and definitely nothing including scripting. Encoding is definitely a problem even with that approach though - personally I wouldn't let anything url encoded through (like attributes) as it's the main source of vulnerabilities.
I've been proposing a brake pedal for browsers for years: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1384497&cid=29565569
I agree this is a great idea, please keep pushing it. It has become more relevant recently I think, so it is perhaps an idea whose time has come. In lieu of having it in a browser, adding as standard more aggressive filtering to javascript frameworks would help reduce a lot of this stuff.
Filtering user input properly would have stopped this though. It is not an attack which relies on a flaw specific to javascript - the flaw is a very general one - using untrusted user input without aggressive filtering.
Perhaps you know something I don't that makes the Silicon Film tech unusable, but I don't see why NASA couldn't use color filters.
As has been explained, they could, but they have more important things to do, and the images would not be as useful for science, which was, and remains, the purpose of Hubble. They could have added RGB filters in front of the greyscale sensor (which is basically what you're proposing here), but that would cost launch weight, which means losing other filters, so they went for the more useful ones. The sensors you have linked to are basically a bunch of filters, some built in to the sensor.
Many of these nebulas (for example) would look far less dramatic in the visible range, because all those hot gases wouldn't stand out so well, and they wouldn't be able to discern important details. So in the interests of science AND pretty pictures, they don't bother trying to reproduce a view which humans would see (if they had superman vision) as it'll typically be dusty, dark, and not very interesting. Usually on these pictures you'll see a caption explaining which wavelength(s) they've picked out.
Even so, it still doesn't guarantee access to any enhancements that Microsoft may make to Exchange/Outlook
Actually, in a strange way, it has. Microsoft has now announced their intention to produce outlook for OS X (starting in 2010). I have no doubt they did this to try to wrest control on the client side back again from Apple, and their action is a persuasive demonstration that they do feel threatened by Apple interoperating with Exchange on desktop/mobile.
To keep OS X as a second class platform, they need to control both sides of the equation, so that they can quietly degrade the client software (which is what the user sees and judges after all), once they have captured the market. Entourage used to be their mac client, but it was so bad many have deserted it and it no longer serves as a chokehold on corporate mail clients on OS X. It's an old trick, but it has worked well for them time and time again.
The real answer to the difficulties with Exchange is of course to drop Exchange, and use a proper email protocol, and then a proper calendar/address book protocol too. There's no reason that email/calendar/addressbooks have to be tied in to one set of server software.
Seriously, did you ever need to? I've been in IT since 1998 and I cannot remember ONE situation where I thought "This is so inconvenient, I need a calculator for this shit. Couldn't they just make a Gigabyte 1000'000'000 Bytes?"
Every time someone tries to work out how many n byte files will fit in their hard disk, they have to do these calculations. Every time someone buys a new hard disk, the calculation is required to work out how much of the space they thought they had is not there as the computer uses different units from the rest of the world, the rest of the scientific community, and the hard drive manufacturers.
So we've had a defined standard that was, arguably, not the easiest to understand. THEN harddrive manufacturers started their fraud.
It's not easy to understand, it's a perversion of the proper SI units, and an arbitrary choice of boundary which was chosen to fall close to the SI units because it was felt to be good enough at the time. With large disk sizes, it is no longer close enough.
As to being complicated: If that is your argument, then all the English speaking countries should switch to metric according to your logic.
That's a good idea.
The severity of the situation is less, but that doesn't mean that one can't model another....You're missing the entire purpose behind analogy.
For an analogy to be effective, there was to be some connection between the two states. Your analogy illustrating analogies notwithstanding (I'm sure the grant-parent grasps the concept of analogies), there is no valid point of comparison between being violently sexually assaulted, and choosing a bad deal in a shop. Infantile jokes about rape really aren't funny or insightful; as with the use of Hitler or the Nazis in comparisons, it's a good indication that the argument is ill thought-out melodramatic nonsense.
The comparison is just that if you want a cell phone in the US, you take the phone from the carrier because you're not saving money by not taking it. If you buy your own phone to connect to the network then you're just paying the same rate as the subsidized customers AND you had to shell out for your own phone.
And that sounds just like rape, right?
So basically, you don't delete stuff only when you make mistakes, you delete stuff when you edit too.
Thanks, just curious because I've never used it myself - if I'm editing, typically I'll select a word to delete it. I can see how it'd be useful if you only use the keyboard arrows for editing.
Not stopped. Scattered.
Yes sorry, thought scattered was too technical for young kids! But stop is misleading really - the light still has to get to us, as you say.
How about:
Light is made up of all the colours of the rainbow all mixed together, but some colours of light can travel better through the air. Most of the light from the sun gets to us, but the blue light from the sun gets stopped by the dust and air in the sky, and that's why the sky looks blue.
and getting used to not having a real delete key (but replacing it with the backspace functionality).
I'm curious, as I often see this complaint from ex-Windows users. When I'm typing and notice a mistake, I am always in front of the mistake with the cursor, so I just back up using backspace and then start typing again. When do you use the delete key normally?
PS You can press function-delete if you want forward delete.
Google seems to ignore punctuation, that's why you'd get those results.
You put in "foo, bar, baz", it searches for "foo bar baz". It does not search for foo OR bar OR baz, as you suggested, it just strips the punctuation, and then searches for that exact phrase. There's a guide to the methodology you can google for.
I understand why they omit punctuation, but It'd be nice if you could ask it to search including punctuation easily (not sure if you can), as it makes searching for code or precise phrases (with puncutation) very difficult.
The app didn't "provide access." It contains its own local copy. People really need to ____ ___ _______ _______.
And? A local copy is so much more dangerous right? Much more dangerous than all those local copies of Shakespeare or the Bible, which contain all manner of atrocities and swearing too. Those should be censored too, just in case.
PS Sorry, your post has been redacted - think of the children and concerned parents. We'll be bringing this innovation to all text views in the OS soon, it's the logical next step!
You say that as though I'm the only one with an issue, but I'm not. In fact, there are a lot more of us than there are of you -- and actually, odds are that when you become a parent, you'll join the gang.
Really, what makes you think that you are in a majority?
How can you possibly hope to control whether your children are exposed to these words?
I assume to be safe you have torn out these pages in any dictionaries in your house, and disconnected the house completely from the internet?
How about their friends in the playground, have you eliminated any you think might be borderline and allowed to read a dictionary by their parents?
Wouldn't it be better to read about them in a dictionary and understand they are vulgarities, rather than to hear them without understanding?
as a parent I really appreciate all the parents who put up a stink and got the rating system put in place.
As a parent do you honestly believe you can control whether your children are exposed to words like fuck? Do you let them access the internet? Do you really think they won't have access to it or hear these words in the playground?
I guarantee your children will have encountered the word before they reach the age of 10 - why not educate them and explain that in most contexts these words aren't appropriate instead of trying to blind them to the normal activities of humans?
Parents let their children play violent games where enemies are torn limb from limb, and yet shrink from allowing them to see nudity or profanity - it's insane. Swear words are never going to hurt anyone.
Likewise, I think it's perfectly reasonable for Apple to limit the sort of content in their app store.
It would be reasonable if Apple were reasonable in their decisions, but they have been decidedly unreasonable, and are also using this kind of cover to ban apps they think are competitors to their own. They're abusing their power in this domain and need to be told so in no uncertain terms. I'm considering leaving the platform as a result.
'The issue that the App Store reviewers did find with the Ninjawords application is that it provided access to other more vulgar terms than those found in traditional and common dictionaries, words that many reasonable people might find upsetting or objectionable. ...
I'd like to see Schiller respond to the developer's allegation that the reviewers sent screenshots of specific common swear words - fuck, etc. explicitly typed in by Apple employees.
Schiller's denial is so vague as to be a non-denial - note he doesn't actually specifically say which words they were rejected for, just hints that this was really quite a dirty, unsavoury dictionary and had no place on a nice store like ours. His implication does contradict the message sent to the developers, which homed in on quite common words which belong as slang in a normal dictionary.
Much like the Kama Sutra rejection, this brings home how farcical Apple trying to be gatekeeper and arbiter of taste on the app store really is. They should give up now before their reputation sinks under the weight of their hypocrisy - every week I hear of a new stupid and arbitrary decision by their app store reviewers.
The Google Voice one was worse than this though - at least these guys got a reason which made some sort of sense.
The darn thing isn't for a pseudo-WYSIWYG XML editor. It's for a specific bundle of features that let you save your non-XML based word processing file as one single XML file, which includes bookmarks, styles, and "formatting hints" as well.
See XHTML, first drafted circa 1998, and SGML way before that. This is so obvious it hurts.
Software patents are fundamentally broken - patents were intended for mechanical designs, and that's where they should have stayed - to protect small inventors from predatory larger companies who could manufacture their design without paying them.
When applied to the world of ideas (software) patents perform the opposite function - to protect large conglomerates from startups and competition. In addition, the current system allowing any idea to be patented leads to so many frivolous applications that the patent office is simply swamped, and effectively non-functional.
Is that the desired effect of the system? It is certainly the observed effect. Copyright should be enough for software.
If you're so pissed off that you're going to kill someone, you're going to find a way to do it.
Hmm. Strange then that the US homicide rate is one of the highest in the western world, and the thing it shares with most countries at the top of that table is... widely available guns.
In fact, I'd say gun ownership does more to prevent crime than it does to encourage it.
Your speculative thoughts on the matter (given your obvious bias) are not really relevant - at least do some research and find some statistics to back up your position.
In the real world, it seems your opinions do not correlate with reality - for example New York City has strict laws against gun use, and has a very low crime per capita rate compared to other US cities like LA where carrying guns is more. There is no positive correlation between low crime and carrying guns, and there may even be a negative correlation. See table of cities half way down this page.
So it seems that the truth (as opposed to NRA cherry-picked stats) is the exact opposite of your assertion.
Personally, I don't trust many of my neighbours with guns, because people do stupid things, often thinking they're not stupid, and am glad I live in a country where their use is tightly controlled. There are many arguments for widespread gun ownership, none of which I find remotely convincing, and the costs outweigh any benefits. Historically citizen gun ownership hasn't been important in revolutions (notwithstanding American myths - the revolution was fought first with declarations on paper and civil disobedience, then with a standing army), is not correlated with low crime (on the contrary), and allows ordinary citizens to make life or death decisions quickly which they are often not qualified or competent to make.
If I lived in a failed state (i.e. one with very weak law enforcement like South Afric right now), I'd consider owning a gun. Otherwise, I can see no argument for it.
Your government will do everything that they legally can to kill you rather than pay for your medical treatment.
Sounds like you've been living in a country where the healthcare is controlled by corporations more interested in their bottom line than your health. Somehow you think that healthcare has to be that way.
Out here in the rest of the world, many countries have a healthcare system which is universally available, efficient, free at the point of treatment, and costs less in tax per capita than healthcare in the US does anyway, even though it doesn't cover most of the population.
The question you should be asking is, what the hell are insurance companies doing involved in your healthcare and decisions on your welfare?