Say Apple releases new API's you want to use in your app. Here's what you do as an Xcode coder:
1) Download the new Xcode with new API's 2) Modify your code to use new API's 3) Recompile 4) Submit to store
Here's what you do if you want to use new capabilities from your Flash app:
1) Wait for Adobe to download new XCode 2) Wait for Adobe to use new hooks in code and expose them to you in new functions. 3) Buy new version of Flash development. 4) Modify your code 5) Export as iPhone app 6) Submit to store
I would rather have to code in Objective-C than wait for and have to buy a new version of Adobe Flash, just to get the capabilities made available by Apple's Xcode.
I get your point - but I expect there's also a lot of iPhone/etc. apps that don't need the latest-and-greatest APIs...
The iPad is designed for sitting in bed with a coffee and browsing the day's news, not for installing Open Office and hacking the Linux kernel.
There is some middle ground there, however, which would be rather useful for such a device. Some conceivable uses that lie somewhere between "dicking around on the web" and "desktop app suites and kernel hacking". I am interested in such uses, which is why I'm not interested in an iPad. (And, honestly, why should installing Open Office be outside the scope of this machine's functions? The machine is good enough to run "iWork Pages"...)
Oh, and going back to that whole "dicking around on the web" thing, I like playing flash games on the web sometimes.:)
To approach this from the other side - I'm a long time PalmOS fan, so I can appreciate a system that does things a little differently in order to serve its role better... So I can also appreciate some of what Apple's doing here. One of their contentions about Flash is that it's made for a mouse, not a touchscreen, and so allowing Flash would enable a whole lot of ill-fitted shovelware and they want to avoid that. But I don't believe for a minute that that's why they don't allow Flash. Store apps still go through an approval process, right? So if something were developed using Flash and installed to the iPad as an application, it could be rejected if it didn't work nicely with the touchscreen. This is about power... Diminishing Adobe's power and leveraging Apple's power.
talk about changing times, when i was in first grade, i took a boy scout knife to school for show and tell. another kid took it and was messing about and cut another kid on the finger, i got a 1 day suspension from school. imagine if now...
Hmmm...
So you'd get your one-day suspension immediately and miss out on show-and-tell, and your classmate would be spared from getting cut on the finger?:)
If this EVER happend to my kid, I would be down at this principal's office, telling him to shove thier policy up their ass sideways and my son would absolutely not be serving any detention over a friggin' piece of candy.
They want to press? I'll be pressing buttons on the phone for my lawyer and the local newsmedia myself. Legal nightmare, PR nightmare, financial nightmare... they'll have all of that for sure.
It's attitudes like that which make it needlessly difficult for schools to maintain discipline, and fuel childrens' sense of entitlement.
I know the rule seems stupid - and the teachers involved may agree with you - but if you go undermining their authority every time something like this comes up, the kids won't take school authority seriously.
Idiocracy implies that there are idiots from top to bottom.
In practice, this is simply what happens when rules written by people who are quite intelligent and well-meaning and only part-idiot (because they don't anticipate the problems) are supposed to be carried out in practice by a lot of average joes.
"Have less candies in schools" is a good rule. Achieving this goal by expelling children with candies is a bad attempt at enforcing a good rule.
What if she were diabetic and her blood sugar was low?
What if we built a rocketship and flew to Alpha Centauri? Would the aliens let us have our Jolly Ranchers in peace?
If she were diabetic, then probably the school would already know about it - and she wouldn't need to be getting her candy from a classmate in any case.
The bigger question is does this law pertain to the "educators" as well? Shouldn't a teacher get a dock in pay if caught with a Jolly Rancher for not setting a proper example?
The pay cuts will continue until morale improves... Is that what we're going for with regard to school teachers?
Since there is no restriction on what foods the parents pack for their kids, as a parent I would be compelled to make a statement by sending my child to school with a large lunchbox filled to the rim with Jolly Ranchers with instructions to sit through detention enjoying them visibly and loudly. I would make sure I spoke with the administration beforehand so they understood I will be doing this.
Good one. So what happens then? If the kid shares her candy, she'll get in trouble, and the others in detention will get in trouble, too. If she doesn't share her candy, the other kids will resent her for it.
+4, +3 Insightful? Wow Mods, whoosh. This is funny. Your lack of noticing the tongue-in-cheek comment is even funnier.
Sometimes it's funnier to mod a funny post "insightful". It's a way of drawing even more attention to the comment in an even more serious light - which makes undercutting this with humor even more effective...
Granted, it's sort of an abuse of the moderation system, but, god damn it, just because someone reacts differently to a joke than you did does not mean they didn't get it! I'm sick of "whoosh", people overuse it and misuse it all the time.
Not only that -- the phrase "too much unnecessary porn" implies that there is an appropriate, non-zero amount of unnecessary pornography that should be hosted on Wikimedia servers.
Well, no, it implies that there is a certain level that is considered tolerable and not worth further removal efforts... Kind of like the legal limit on how much rat feces may be present in restaurant food.
Do you also develop for linux? with your freedom stance.. I would think you do.. if so how do you explain the packaging requirements for the various distros? do you write only simple command line tools that say "I AM GREAT YOU ARE SUCK DONT BUY CLOSED PRODUCTS" and package them only as source?
Because if you do anything.. on any other platform.. like it or not you are buying in to the quirks and rules of a given system.. Clearly linux should support DirectX right?
There's actually a project seeking to provide exactly that...
To use a non-car analogy, Apple's position on Flash would be like Microsoft declaring that, even if someone took the time to write a compatibility layer to allow Mac apps to run natively on Windows, its use would be forbidden...
I can appreciate the arguments for why Apple's behavior isn't "wrong" - though personally I don't like what they're doing one bit. For this reason I mostly stay out of this discussion. I hate what they're doing, but I don't know that it's wrong. People can do things that are entirely within their rights and it can still be a shitty thing to do, you know?
Light Peak devices are 6 years away (at best). USB 3 devices are here now. Will USB3 take off? It already has.
Well, I wouldn't go that far. USB3 is out, but personally I feel like it's "early adopters" using it at this point. After a couple years, once new machines have included it for a while and a fair number of people have upgraded, then maybe it will have "taken off"...
When Slashdot and Advertisements come together... Slashvertisements! You could have learned as much or more by reading the press release where it is revealed that "Enyo USB 3.0 Portable SSDs will begin shipping this now and will be available through OCZ's extensive worldwide channel." Thank goodness, I thought I would have to wait for the next now.
And since it is a USB3 SSD, that is a pretty big deal to be honest, even if the lines "this is an advertisement" were present as well.
Why is it a big deal? I mean, did anyone not see this coming? We have the USB3 standard coming out (well, it's already out, but a lot of people still don't have the hardware for it) - was the application of USB3 to flash storage somehow not obvious? It was bound to happen sooner or later.
if you're going to go that far, then why didn't these satellites also have nukes or lasers to eliminate indigenous problems with also?
First, orbital weapons are more expensive than satellites that just run a clock and broadcast the time. (Remember this was a commercial operation...)
Second, at the start of the film the Na'vi were treated as dangerous but not as a major threat. The situation hadn't broken down into all-out war yet, and there was still some discussion of finding more-or-less peaceful resolution to the conflict. So the characters could have felt such weaponry simply wasn't called for (i.e. the cost of it wasn't justified) - so they wouldn't have orbital weapons platforms for the same reason they didn't have bombers.
But going back up the thread a bit - the basic question was why the avatars, being so valuable, didn't have some sort of lo-jack system via GPS. The answer to that isn't "because there's no GPS satellites" - because it would be a relatively simple and inexpensive process to deploy some.
But why computers? Why do we have to suffer from a lack of this suspension? It works for hospital dramas where they hire doctors to make it accurate, it works for military dramas where they either get clued consultants or even gain the support of the military altogether, it works for pretty much any kind of setting. Why not computers?
Is it because hacking is, when done properly, not really a spectator sport, so they have to "spice it up"?
Does it? I've never watched a hospital drama with a doctor in the room - and I've never watched a war movie with a military man in the room...
Well, I did watch "Aliens" with my dad in the room, and he thought the dropship pilot was delightful - but that, I think, was more a matter of a caricature that resonated with him, rather than any kind of factual accuracy about military pilots.
I haven't seen the movie, but isn't it set on another planet? GPS doesn't do much without all those satellites.
If you're visiting an alien world with the intention of locating and strip-mining valuable mineral deposits, it seems one of the most useful investments you could make early on would be to toss a couple dozen GPS satellites into orbit. Can't be that hard when you've got interstellar space travel and all - though supposedly the magic rocks also played hell with all manner of communications devices as well...
And that, to me, is the bigger plot hole. The one piece of communications that somehow never fails is the link between operator and avatar. How does that work?
These things didn't really affect my enjoyment of the movie - but a plot hole is a plot hole, you know?
What's TPM? I Googled it and got nothing (well, except a political blog.)
Just as a tip: acronyms should only be used if you're sure the party you're talking to is going to understand what the holy hell you mean.
"The Phantom Menace". The article cited it as one of the worst films ever made. I wouldn't go that far - it was just a bad combination of dull characters and annoying characters and boring sequences and sensory overload and lots and lots of hype.
I always find it annoying how everything one can do on a Hollywood computer makes a sound. Moving a mouse across the screen? Woosh! Enlarging a window? Zipp!
Hey, in the early 90s we paid good money to get software to do that... And then most of that functionality was included by default in Windows 95. Do you want your computer to make random jungle sounds when you click on a button? Here you go, part of your desktop theme...
Over time most people came to realize that this just got annoying after a short while - so while the functionality remains most of the sounds tend to be turned off.
The smartest man in the world who was secretly plotting a world-changing event that entirely hinged on secret to pull it off, one who was perfectly willing to murder all his top staff and confidants and assistants....
just maybe he might not use a simple alpha-only password based on his very public alter-ego?
Yeah, based on Veidt's "smartest man in the world" persona (and the fact that, in the story, he does appear to have been smart enough to outmaneuver absolutely everyone) it does seem implausible that he wouldn't be able to choose a password that Dreiburg would be unable to crack.
So does one take this as a plot hole, or assume that Veidt intentionally gave Dreiburg a puzzle he'd be able to solve?
Many of Veidt's maneuverings prior to the confrontation in Antarctica had to do with keeping Kovacs, Dreiburg, and especially Osterman out of his way long enough for him to complete his plan. Once he was sure he couldn't be stopped, there was just the matter of secrecy, and of easing his own conscience. So leaving a trail for Dreiburg to follow would be a way to keep him occupied, to make sure he wasn't killed by the psychic trauma/exploding reactors, give Veidt a potential confidant and the opportunity to kill him off if it seemed like he couldn't be counted on to keep the secret.
Granting that assumption - that the weak password was an intentional choice - is perhaps a bit generous... So I wouldn't reject the idea that the whole thing is simply a plot hole. Still, I think it makes a certain amount of sense. Veidt was almost impossibly formidable, and very confident as well. (And, given his ultimate failure to stop Kovacs getting information out, overconfident...) He was also troubled by a guilty conscience and in need of validation - so it wouldn't be out of character for him to seek a potential confidant - given how sure he was of his ability to manipulate people, he probably believed he could do this without endangering his plan...
(Oh, and Morgan Freeman's character was named "Lucius Fox"...)
2. An explosion with lots of flames can throw a person 500' without injuring them
I always thought of this as the "Bruce Willis effect" - primarily as a reference to the Die Hard movies. The key thing is the character has to be in the air for this to work. Standing on top of a building when it explodes means you die. Jumping off the building just before the explosion means you live. The fact that jumping only puts you an extra couple feet away doesn't matter - since you are airborne, the force of the explosion simply propels you farther away from danger.
Slashdot Mirror
Say Apple releases new API's you want to use in your app. Here's what you do as an Xcode coder:
1) Download the new Xcode with new API's
2) Modify your code to use new API's
3) Recompile
4) Submit to store
Here's what you do if you want to use new capabilities from your Flash app:
1) Wait for Adobe to download new XCode
2) Wait for Adobe to use new hooks in code and expose them to you in new functions.
3) Buy new version of Flash development.
4) Modify your code
5) Export as iPhone app
6) Submit to store
I would rather have to code in Objective-C than wait for and have to buy a new version of Adobe Flash, just to get the capabilities made available by Apple's Xcode.
I get your point - but I expect there's also a lot of iPhone/etc. apps that don't need the latest-and-greatest APIs...
The iPad is designed for sitting in bed with a coffee and browsing the day's news, not for installing Open Office and hacking the Linux kernel.
There is some middle ground there, however, which would be rather useful for such a device. Some conceivable uses that lie somewhere between "dicking around on the web" and "desktop app suites and kernel hacking". I am interested in such uses, which is why I'm not interested in an iPad. (And, honestly, why should installing Open Office be outside the scope of this machine's functions? The machine is good enough to run "iWork Pages"...)
Oh, and going back to that whole "dicking around on the web" thing, I like playing flash games on the web sometimes. :)
To approach this from the other side - I'm a long time PalmOS fan, so I can appreciate a system that does things a little differently in order to serve its role better... So I can also appreciate some of what Apple's doing here. One of their contentions about Flash is that it's made for a mouse, not a touchscreen, and so allowing Flash would enable a whole lot of ill-fitted shovelware and they want to avoid that. But I don't believe for a minute that that's why they don't allow Flash. Store apps still go through an approval process, right? So if something were developed using Flash and installed to the iPad as an application, it could be rejected if it didn't work nicely with the touchscreen. This is about power... Diminishing Adobe's power and leveraging Apple's power.
talk about changing times, when i was in first grade, i took a boy scout knife to school for show and tell. another kid took it and was messing about and cut another kid on the finger, i got a 1 day suspension from school. imagine if now...
Hmmm...
So you'd get your one-day suspension immediately and miss out on show-and-tell, and your classmate would be spared from getting cut on the finger? :)
If this EVER happend to my kid, I would be down at this principal's office, telling him to shove thier policy up their ass sideways and my son would absolutely not be serving any detention over a friggin' piece of candy.
They want to press? I'll be pressing buttons on the phone for my lawyer and the local newsmedia myself. Legal nightmare, PR nightmare, financial nightmare... they'll have all of that for sure.
It's attitudes like that which make it needlessly difficult for schools to maintain discipline, and fuel childrens' sense of entitlement.
I know the rule seems stupid - and the teachers involved may agree with you - but if you go undermining their authority every time something like this comes up, the kids won't take school authority seriously.
Idiocracy implies that there are idiots from top to bottom.
In practice, this is simply what happens when rules written by people who are quite intelligent and well-meaning and only part-idiot (because they don't anticipate the problems) are supposed to be carried out in practice by a lot of average joes.
"Have less candies in schools" is a good rule. Achieving this goal by expelling children with candies is a bad attempt at enforcing a good rule.
There was no expulsion involved in this case...
What if she were diabetic and her blood sugar was low?
What if we built a rocketship and flew to Alpha Centauri? Would the aliens let us have our Jolly Ranchers in peace?
If she were diabetic, then probably the school would already know about it - and she wouldn't need to be getting her candy from a classmate in any case.
From our so-called educators.
The bigger question is does this law pertain to the "educators" as well? Shouldn't a teacher get a dock in pay if caught with a Jolly Rancher for not setting a proper example?
The pay cuts will continue until morale improves... Is that what we're going for with regard to school teachers?
Since there is no restriction on what foods the parents pack for their kids, as a parent I would be compelled to make a statement by sending my child to school with a large lunchbox filled to the rim with Jolly Ranchers with instructions to sit through detention enjoying them visibly and loudly. I would make sure I spoke with the administration beforehand so they understood I will be doing this.
Good one. So what happens then? If the kid shares her candy, she'll get in trouble, and the others in detention will get in trouble, too. If she doesn't share her candy, the other kids will resent her for it.
+4, +3 Insightful? Wow Mods, whoosh. This is funny. Your lack of noticing the tongue-in-cheek comment is even funnier.
Sometimes it's funnier to mod a funny post "insightful". It's a way of drawing even more attention to the comment in an even more serious light - which makes undercutting this with humor even more effective...
Granted, it's sort of an abuse of the moderation system, but, god damn it, just because someone reacts differently to a joke than you did does not mean they didn't get it! I'm sick of "whoosh", people overuse it and misuse it all the time.
What is this NES you speak of?
The only way to clean your Atari 2600 cartridges is to blow in them. Wiping is for butts.
Your mom likes blowing
Wow, that totally added to the conversation.
So did that.
And that.
And that last one, too.
Not only that -- the phrase "too much unnecessary porn" implies that there is an appropriate, non-zero amount of unnecessary pornography that should be hosted on Wikimedia servers.
Well, no, it implies that there is a certain level that is considered tolerable and not worth further removal efforts... Kind of like the legal limit on how much rat feces may be present in restaurant food.
Do you also develop for linux? with your freedom stance.. I would think you do.. if so how do you explain the packaging requirements for the various distros? do you write only simple command line tools that say "I AM GREAT YOU ARE SUCK DONT BUY CLOSED PRODUCTS" and package them only as source?
Because if you do anything.. on any other platform.. like it or not you are buying in to the quirks and rules of a given system.. Clearly linux should support DirectX right?
There's actually a project seeking to provide exactly that...
To use a non-car analogy, Apple's position on Flash would be like Microsoft declaring that, even if someone took the time to write a compatibility layer to allow Mac apps to run natively on Windows, its use would be forbidden...
I can appreciate the arguments for why Apple's behavior isn't "wrong" - though personally I don't like what they're doing one bit. For this reason I mostly stay out of this discussion. I hate what they're doing, but I don't know that it's wrong. People can do things that are entirely within their rights and it can still be a shitty thing to do, you know?
Light Peak devices are 6 years away (at best). USB 3 devices are here now. Will USB3 take off? It already has.
Well, I wouldn't go that far. USB3 is out, but personally I feel like it's "early adopters" using it at this point. After a couple years, once new machines have included it for a while and a fair number of people have upgraded, then maybe it will have "taken off"...
I love my bluetooth mouse, but am too paranoid to go with a wireless keyboard until they come out with one with more serious encryption.
Don't conventional, wired keyboards put out enough RF noise to be effectively sniffable anyway?
Pfff. I remeber when a 5 MB drive cost $3,000
The six million dollar gigabyte?
Not quite. $600,000 gigabyte.
When Slashdot and Advertisements come together... Slashvertisements! You could have learned as much or more by reading the press release where it is revealed that "Enyo USB 3.0 Portable SSDs will begin shipping this now and will be available through OCZ's extensive worldwide channel." Thank goodness, I thought I would have to wait for the next now.
When will "then" be "now"?
soon...
And since it is a USB3 SSD, that is a pretty big deal to be honest, even if the lines "this is an advertisement" were present as well.
Why is it a big deal? I mean, did anyone not see this coming? We have the USB3 standard coming out (well, it's already out, but a lot of people still don't have the hardware for it) - was the application of USB3 to flash storage somehow not obvious? It was bound to happen sooner or later.
if you're going to go that far, then why didn't these satellites also have nukes or lasers to eliminate indigenous problems with also?
First, orbital weapons are more expensive than satellites that just run a clock and broadcast the time. (Remember this was a commercial operation...)
Second, at the start of the film the Na'vi were treated as dangerous but not as a major threat. The situation hadn't broken down into all-out war yet, and there was still some discussion of finding more-or-less peaceful resolution to the conflict. So the characters could have felt such weaponry simply wasn't called for (i.e. the cost of it wasn't justified) - so they wouldn't have orbital weapons platforms for the same reason they didn't have bombers.
But going back up the thread a bit - the basic question was why the avatars, being so valuable, didn't have some sort of lo-jack system via GPS. The answer to that isn't "because there's no GPS satellites" - because it would be a relatively simple and inexpensive process to deploy some.
But why computers? Why do we have to suffer from a lack of this suspension? It works for hospital dramas where they hire doctors to make it accurate, it works for military dramas where they either get clued consultants or even gain the support of the military altogether, it works for pretty much any kind of setting. Why not computers?
Is it because hacking is, when done properly, not really a spectator sport, so they have to "spice it up"?
Does it? I've never watched a hospital drama with a doctor in the room - and I've never watched a war movie with a military man in the room...
Well, I did watch "Aliens" with my dad in the room, and he thought the dropship pilot was delightful - but that, I think, was more a matter of a caricature that resonated with him, rather than any kind of factual accuracy about military pilots.
I haven't seen the movie, but isn't it set on another planet? GPS doesn't do much without all those satellites.
If you're visiting an alien world with the intention of locating and strip-mining valuable mineral deposits, it seems one of the most useful investments you could make early on would be to toss a couple dozen GPS satellites into orbit. Can't be that hard when you've got interstellar space travel and all - though supposedly the magic rocks also played hell with all manner of communications devices as well...
And that, to me, is the bigger plot hole. The one piece of communications that somehow never fails is the link between operator and avatar. How does that work?
These things didn't really affect my enjoyment of the movie - but a plot hole is a plot hole, you know?
What's TPM? I Googled it and got nothing (well, except a political blog.)
Just as a tip: acronyms should only be used if you're sure the party you're talking to is going to understand what the holy hell you mean.
"The Phantom Menace". The article cited it as one of the worst films ever made. I wouldn't go that far - it was just a bad combination of dull characters and annoying characters and boring sequences and sensory overload and lots and lots of hype.
I always find it annoying how everything one can do on a Hollywood computer makes a sound. Moving a mouse across the screen? Woosh! Enlarging a window? Zipp!
Hey, in the early 90s we paid good money to get software to do that... And then most of that functionality was included by default in Windows 95. Do you want your computer to make random jungle sounds when you click on a button? Here you go, part of your desktop theme...
Over time most people came to realize that this just got annoying after a short while - so while the functionality remains most of the sounds tend to be turned off.
Who didn't use stupid passwords?
The smartest man in the world might....
The smartest man in the world who was secretly plotting a world-changing event that entirely hinged on secret to pull it off, one who was perfectly willing to murder all his top staff and confidants and assistants....
just maybe he might not use a simple alpha-only password based on his very public alter-ego?
Yeah, based on Veidt's "smartest man in the world" persona (and the fact that, in the story, he does appear to have been smart enough to outmaneuver absolutely everyone) it does seem implausible that he wouldn't be able to choose a password that Dreiburg would be unable to crack.
So does one take this as a plot hole, or assume that Veidt intentionally gave Dreiburg a puzzle he'd be able to solve?
Many of Veidt's maneuverings prior to the confrontation in Antarctica had to do with keeping Kovacs, Dreiburg, and especially Osterman out of his way long enough for him to complete his plan. Once he was sure he couldn't be stopped, there was just the matter of secrecy, and of easing his own conscience. So leaving a trail for Dreiburg to follow would be a way to keep him occupied, to make sure he wasn't killed by the psychic trauma/exploding reactors, give Veidt a potential confidant and the opportunity to kill him off if it seemed like he couldn't be counted on to keep the secret.
Granting that assumption - that the weak password was an intentional choice - is perhaps a bit generous... So I wouldn't reject the idea that the whole thing is simply a plot hole. Still, I think it makes a certain amount of sense. Veidt was almost impossibly formidable, and very confident as well. (And, given his ultimate failure to stop Kovacs getting information out, overconfident...) He was also troubled by a guilty conscience and in need of validation - so it wouldn't be out of character for him to seek a potential confidant - given how sure he was of his ability to manipulate people, he probably believed he could do this without endangering his plan...
(Oh, and Morgan Freeman's character was named "Lucius Fox"...)
2. An explosion with lots of flames can throw a person 500' without injuring them
I always thought of this as the "Bruce Willis effect" - primarily as a reference to the Die Hard movies. The key thing is the character has to be in the air for this to work. Standing on top of a building when it explodes means you die. Jumping off the building just before the explosion means you live. The fact that jumping only puts you an extra couple feet away doesn't matter - since you are airborne, the force of the explosion simply propels you farther away from danger.