Most local and state governments cannot just decide to run deficits in the way that the federal government does. That's one of the reasons why state and local governments are having to severely cut services and get rid of employees over the course of this economic turmoil.
That's a fair enough point, but even if that money is going to eventually come out of consumers' pockets (mine included), I'd prefer to have the prices of goods that I purchase represent their true costs, including their fair share of the infrastructure that taxes provide.
Doing so makes it easier for consumers to be better informed about the purchases they make.
I guess they could, but what would be the point? Right now Apple's got it both ways. They've got their tightly controlled iOS selling like crazy and making them money, and they've got their OSX line selling computer hardware with profit margins that the rest of the pc makers can only dream of.
It'd be one thing if the OSX machines were having poor sales, or losing money, or something like that, but OSX marketshare has been increasing and they're making plenty of money selling Macs. Why Apple would want to risk giving up the Mac hardware income stream, kill an OS that's profitable and generally well regarded, while at the same time giving up a large amount of control over the dev environment for their iOS... I just don't see the logic in it, even if they thought it would help them sell a few more 99 cent apps.
Maybe. But the revenue that Apple is making selling iOS devices is well beyond what they make selling Macs. Raising the cost of entry for developers is going to reduce the number of developers for iOS, not everyone is going to shell out a couple grand for a Mac Pro. The huge app market is one of the biggest selling points for the iPhone/iPad/iPod, and that being the case I think it would be unwise for Apple to potentially lock out so many developers just to squeeze a little more money out of their mac pro line.
Apple already makes margins on their lower end computers that most computer makers would kill for. It's not like their desktop/laptop lines are unprofitable.
I think the costs for continuing work on OSX are but a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of cash Apple has just sitting around right now. And even if you take all the iOS devices' revenue out of the picture, Apple is making lots of money selling macs with OSX. It more than pays for itself.
You don't necessarily hold it. Often times my iPad sits on the table or on my lap (many of the cases fold up to hold the screen at a bit of an angle), while I use it.
I don't think the idea here is to replace an iPad, it's just to give you another option. Anyways, making the iMac display be detachable doesn't make much sense in that A)they're pretty big/heavy, and B)they don't have a battery in them.
The laptop/detachable tablet makes more sense, but the connecting mechanism just seems like a huge potential point of failure to me. I know they exist, but have never used one, so I could be wrong.
Fair enough, but it's amazing how short the memory of the population tends to be. The fact that a year of jawing about fiscal responsibility has somehow given the GOP the high ground after 8 years of them shoveling money down the drain is incredible. Doubly so when the party has not laid out any reasonable plan to actually reduce spending or raise revenues, and I find it amazing that there are so many people who take them seriously.
I think that the evolution of iOS will follow a similar path as the desktop MacOS did. More and more capabilities will be added, the interface designers will come up with satisfactory ways to accomplish more tasks, and consumers will build their touch-interface "skillset", allowing more more complicated interactions, and eventually more complicated applications.
Despite all the talk about "intuitive" interfaces, that won't actually get you very far, everything is learned. What's important is some consistency and a gentler learning curve. I think that Apple is aware of this, and is very deliberate as to increase the capability of iOS without making it intimidating to a new user.
You have no idea how the world works. The smartest people in the world can have a really hard time getting anything useful done under poor management, bad priorities, and unwise resource allocation. All of those smart people at pixar weren't born there, somebody had to pick the right people, see their potential, give them some direction and resources, and keep them focused and motivated.
And you can talk about 20 year old hardware that nobody bought all that you want. I didn't claim that Apple invented those devices, but they certainly changed the marketplace in those areas.
A phone without a physical keyboard isn't inherently stupid, it's a trade-off with significant pros and cons. While your priorities might make the presence of physical keyboard a no-brainer for you, that still doesn't make a touch-screen only device stupid, or even a bad idea.
Maybe I just want to play my iOS games on a larger screen. Maybe my kids wants to use a "fingerpaint" app on the computer. There are things that a touchscreen interface is better for than a keyboard/mouse. Why not have a machine that can switch between the two interfaces depending on what you want to do?
Well I said he was involved in those things. Apple has lots of smart people who are working really hard, no doubt. But they had lots of smart, hardworking people back in the 90's as well, when the company was crash and burn'ing. The turn-around started when Jobs came back, and has continued strong for about a decade. It could just be coincidence, but it's more likely that Jobs is providing at least some useful direction/focus.
Good point. We're talking about a guy who started Apple (and then later came back and basically saved it), turned Pixar from a small company into a movie powerhouse, and has been involved in basically reinventing the music industry, the cellphone industry, and maybe the tablet computer market. Sounds like a textbook case of stupidity.
Apple is not going to kill the desktop OS that is required to write applications for their mobile OS.. Steve Jobs isn't stupid, he knows that people aren't going to be coding 3D games or run photoshop or whatever on iOS. Killing OSX would kill iOS, and Apple knows that.
Houses should be built differently depending on what part of the country and climate they're in. In the northeast, dealing with the winters is your biggest priority. In the south, you've got lots of heat and humidity. In the southwest, you've got a lot less humidity, and bigger temperature swings at night. Depending on your latitude, the best angle for your solar panels change, The best orientation of your building changes. The best place for windows changes.
Modular has its benefits, as does mass production. They can both bring down costs as well as substantially reduce construction waste. But there's not some ideal super sustainable design out there that is appropriate for all climates.
That's a fair point, but you could also argue that each of those different Windows environments has way more marketshare than all the different linux flavors combined. I can certainly see the business case that suggests that linux is more trouble than it's worth for game developers.
Almost any weapon can be considered defensive in that it could give a potential attacker a strategic reason not to start a fight. Iran isn't going to use this drone to stop invading troops, but they could potentially use it to attack somewhere in response to aggression against them.
In a conventional battle, Iran's military would be able to do little to directly stop an attack by the USA, so they use weapons like this as a deterrent. If they're attacked, then they attack the oil infrastructure along the gulf, they attack their neighbors, they have plans to create as much trouble outside of Iran as they can. That discourages attacks against them far more than any defensive capabilities their military might have.
It's about as important a concern as is sentient robots enslaving the human race. Sure, I can imagine scenarios in which it could happen, but there's no evidence that we're headed down such a path.
We could argue all day about what's happening in regards to the USA's position and authority in the world, but we're an awful long way from the UN or anybody else pressuring our government into accepting mandates on anything.
This guy is just combining fear-mongering, american exceptionalism, and paranoid delusions to try and make his political opponents look bad. He is saying nothing of value.
I'm reminded of a mildly profound part of the first Matrix movie, where Agent Smith is describing to Morpheus how the first attempt of the matrix was intended to have all of the residents happy and carefree, and how the people rejected it, because misery is one of the defining parts of human existence.
While I'm not sure I entirely agree with that, I certainly have come across people who seem to enjoy being upset. People who will dwell on the smallest things, express their anger constantly to anyone within earshot, and take pride in their ability to hold grudges.
For people like this, the fact that modern civilization has basically solved most of their real needs sure is inconvenient. It can't be nearly as fulfilling to complain all day about how close someone parked to their car as it would be to complain about not having enough food to eat. These people need to spend some time in a third world country, and see what real problems look like.
They were smart enough to bring a lot of convenience with Steam, and for many people that more than outweighs the annoyances. The fact that they're consistently having great sales doesn't hurt either.
I'm not convinced that all these major breakthroughs in computing are just sitting right out of reach, waiting for a little war funding to make it happen. Computer technology has been moving so quickly the past couple of decades, and there's so much money to be made in these various fields, I'm sure the best and brightest are already working plenty hard on it.
These days, if you're involved in anything worth talking about, somebody's probably going to talk about it somewhere online. You can avoid facebook as fervently as you can, and that won't do much of anything to stop your friends/family from posting pictures of you and tagging it with your name. Or an old classmate scanning and posting your highschool year book. Or the local newspaper posting their archives, including a quote from you from when you were 8 years old, or whatever.
I don't think that equating clicking an "add to friends" button and having sex with someone is a particularly useful comparison, and your description of the most extreme cases isn't a very strong argument.
Humans are overall very social, and the internet presents a lot of really good ways to communicate. Our advances in communication technology have been one of the most important parts of the growth and productivity of our civilization. While I'm not advocating that you make hiring decisions based on which applicant has the most facebook friends, I'd be rather curious why anybody under the age of 40 or so wouldn't have some sort of internet footprint at this point. If you went to high school and/or college in the past 10-15 years, and were involved in just about anything other than going to class and going to bed, then chances are your name is bouncing around somewhere on the internet. Maybe a club you were in got a story in the school newspaper, maybe you were listed on the basketball team roster, or maybe you're just in a group picture that one of your friends posted on their facebook page.
I can certainly understand if you don't twitter what you had for lunch every day, but if you've been involved in anything worth talking about, then somebody's probably talked about it online. And if you haven't, then why would I want someone as boring as you around?
True, but there's also a larger context on which you will be judged, and that can change. A couple of generations ago, your gender was all that many people needed to know in order to judge whether or not you were qualified for a particular job. Today that is significantly less prevalent, although we still have a ways to go. The same can be said (to various degress) about race and sexual orientation. Anybody who's judging you on the stupid stuff you did when you were a kid is only able to do so because they're able to ignore/forget all the stupid stuff that they did when they were that age. If the internet makes that stuff unforgettable, then the larger context of what society is willing to accept will change. There will always be holier-than-thou asholes, just like there will always be sexist assholes, but our culture in general is constantly shifting its standards based on what's going on in the world.
Sorry, but this is nonsense. Anybody running for office already has tons of dirt dug up on them, and if that's not enough, dirt gets manufactured by taking stuff out of context or just plain making stuff up. The only thing that is changing is that digging up that dirt is getting easier.
Nobody thinks that our current politicians are saints. Half of campaigning is publicizing bad things about your opponent. Ever hear the phrase "lesser of two evils"? The world has worked that way for a long time, politicians have always chosen their words very carefully, and the people have never demanded perfection from their elected officials.
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Most local and state governments cannot just decide to run deficits in the way that the federal government does. That's one of the reasons why state and local governments are having to severely cut services and get rid of employees over the course of this economic turmoil.
That's a fair enough point, but even if that money is going to eventually come out of consumers' pockets (mine included), I'd prefer to have the prices of goods that I purchase represent their true costs, including their fair share of the infrastructure that taxes provide.
Doing so makes it easier for consumers to be better informed about the purchases they make.
I guess they could, but what would be the point? Right now Apple's got it both ways. They've got their tightly controlled iOS selling like crazy and making them money, and they've got their OSX line selling computer hardware with profit margins that the rest of the pc makers can only dream of.
It'd be one thing if the OSX machines were having poor sales, or losing money, or something like that, but OSX marketshare has been increasing and they're making plenty of money selling Macs. Why Apple would want to risk giving up the Mac hardware income stream, kill an OS that's profitable and generally well regarded, while at the same time giving up a large amount of control over the dev environment for their iOS... I just don't see the logic in it, even if they thought it would help them sell a few more 99 cent apps.
Maybe. But the revenue that Apple is making selling iOS devices is well beyond what they make selling Macs. Raising the cost of entry for developers is going to reduce the number of developers for iOS, not everyone is going to shell out a couple grand for a Mac Pro. The huge app market is one of the biggest selling points for the iPhone/iPad/iPod, and that being the case I think it would be unwise for Apple to potentially lock out so many developers just to squeeze a little more money out of their mac pro line.
Apple already makes margins on their lower end computers that most computer makers would kill for. It's not like their desktop/laptop lines are unprofitable.
I think the costs for continuing work on OSX are but a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of cash Apple has just sitting around right now. And even if you take all the iOS devices' revenue out of the picture, Apple is making lots of money selling macs with OSX. It more than pays for itself.
You don't necessarily hold it. Often times my iPad sits on the table or on my lap (many of the cases fold up to hold the screen at a bit of an angle), while I use it.
I don't think the idea here is to replace an iPad, it's just to give you another option. Anyways, making the iMac display be detachable doesn't make much sense in that A)they're pretty big/heavy, and B)they don't have a battery in them.
The laptop/detachable tablet makes more sense, but the connecting mechanism just seems like a huge potential point of failure to me. I know they exist, but have never used one, so I could be wrong.
Fair enough, but it's amazing how short the memory of the population tends to be. The fact that a year of jawing about fiscal responsibility has somehow given the GOP the high ground after 8 years of them shoveling money down the drain is incredible. Doubly so when the party has not laid out any reasonable plan to actually reduce spending or raise revenues, and I find it amazing that there are so many people who take them seriously.
I think that the evolution of iOS will follow a similar path as the desktop MacOS did. More and more capabilities will be added, the interface designers will come up with satisfactory ways to accomplish more tasks, and consumers will build their touch-interface "skillset", allowing more more complicated interactions, and eventually more complicated applications.
Despite all the talk about "intuitive" interfaces, that won't actually get you very far, everything is learned. What's important is some consistency and a gentler learning curve. I think that Apple is aware of this, and is very deliberate as to increase the capability of iOS without making it intimidating to a new user.
You have no idea how the world works. The smartest people in the world can have a really hard time getting anything useful done under poor management, bad priorities, and unwise resource allocation. All of those smart people at pixar weren't born there, somebody had to pick the right people, see their potential, give them some direction and resources, and keep them focused and motivated.
And you can talk about 20 year old hardware that nobody bought all that you want. I didn't claim that Apple invented those devices, but they certainly changed the marketplace in those areas.
A phone without a physical keyboard isn't inherently stupid, it's a trade-off with significant pros and cons. While your priorities might make the presence of physical keyboard a no-brainer for you, that still doesn't make a touch-screen only device stupid, or even a bad idea.
Maybe I just want to play my iOS games on a larger screen. Maybe my kids wants to use a "fingerpaint" app on the computer. There are things that a touchscreen interface is better for than a keyboard/mouse. Why not have a machine that can switch between the two interfaces depending on what you want to do?
Well I said he was involved in those things. Apple has lots of smart people who are working really hard, no doubt. But they had lots of smart, hardworking people back in the 90's as well, when the company was crash and burn'ing. The turn-around started when Jobs came back, and has continued strong for about a decade. It could just be coincidence, but it's more likely that Jobs is providing at least some useful direction/focus.
Good point. We're talking about a guy who started Apple (and then later came back and basically saved it), turned Pixar from a small company into a movie powerhouse, and has been involved in basically reinventing the music industry, the cellphone industry, and maybe the tablet computer market. Sounds like a textbook case of stupidity.
Apple is not going to kill the desktop OS that is required to write applications for their mobile OS.. Steve Jobs isn't stupid, he knows that people aren't going to be coding 3D games or run photoshop or whatever on iOS. Killing OSX would kill iOS, and Apple knows that.
Houses should be built differently depending on what part of the country and climate they're in. In the northeast, dealing with the winters is your biggest priority. In the south, you've got lots of heat and humidity. In the southwest, you've got a lot less humidity, and bigger temperature swings at night. Depending on your latitude, the best angle for your solar panels change, The best orientation of your building changes. The best place for windows changes.
Modular has its benefits, as does mass production. They can both bring down costs as well as substantially reduce construction waste. But there's not some ideal super sustainable design out there that is appropriate for all climates.
That's a fair point, but you could also argue that each of those different Windows environments has way more marketshare than all the different linux flavors combined. I can certainly see the business case that suggests that linux is more trouble than it's worth for game developers.
Almost any weapon can be considered defensive in that it could give a potential attacker a strategic reason not to start a fight. Iran isn't going to use this drone to stop invading troops, but they could potentially use it to attack somewhere in response to aggression against them.
In a conventional battle, Iran's military would be able to do little to directly stop an attack by the USA, so they use weapons like this as a deterrent. If they're attacked, then they attack the oil infrastructure along the gulf, they attack their neighbors, they have plans to create as much trouble outside of Iran as they can. That discourages attacks against them far more than any defensive capabilities their military might have.
It's about as important a concern as is sentient robots enslaving the human race. Sure, I can imagine scenarios in which it could happen, but there's no evidence that we're headed down such a path.
We could argue all day about what's happening in regards to the USA's position and authority in the world, but we're an awful long way from the UN or anybody else pressuring our government into accepting mandates on anything.
This guy is just combining fear-mongering, american exceptionalism, and paranoid delusions to try and make his political opponents look bad. He is saying nothing of value.
I'm reminded of a mildly profound part of the first Matrix movie, where Agent Smith is describing to Morpheus how the first attempt of the matrix was intended to have all of the residents happy and carefree, and how the people rejected it, because misery is one of the defining parts of human existence.
While I'm not sure I entirely agree with that, I certainly have come across people who seem to enjoy being upset. People who will dwell on the smallest things, express their anger constantly to anyone within earshot, and take pride in their ability to hold grudges.
For people like this, the fact that modern civilization has basically solved most of their real needs sure is inconvenient. It can't be nearly as fulfilling to complain all day about how close someone parked to their car as it would be to complain about not having enough food to eat. These people need to spend some time in a third world country, and see what real problems look like.
They were smart enough to bring a lot of convenience with Steam, and for many people that more than outweighs the annoyances. The fact that they're consistently having great sales doesn't hurt either.
I'm not convinced that all these major breakthroughs in computing are just sitting right out of reach, waiting for a little war funding to make it happen. Computer technology has been moving so quickly the past couple of decades, and there's so much money to be made in these various fields, I'm sure the best and brightest are already working plenty hard on it.
These days, if you're involved in anything worth talking about, somebody's probably going to talk about it somewhere online. You can avoid facebook as fervently as you can, and that won't do much of anything to stop your friends/family from posting pictures of you and tagging it with your name. Or an old classmate scanning and posting your highschool year book. Or the local newspaper posting their archives, including a quote from you from when you were 8 years old, or whatever.
I don't think that equating clicking an "add to friends" button and having sex with someone is a particularly useful comparison, and your description of the most extreme cases isn't a very strong argument.
Humans are overall very social, and the internet presents a lot of really good ways to communicate. Our advances in communication technology have been one of the most important parts of the growth and productivity of our civilization. While I'm not advocating that you make hiring decisions based on which applicant has the most facebook friends, I'd be rather curious why anybody under the age of 40 or so wouldn't have some sort of internet footprint at this point. If you went to high school and/or college in the past 10-15 years, and were involved in just about anything other than going to class and going to bed, then chances are your name is bouncing around somewhere on the internet. Maybe a club you were in got a story in the school newspaper, maybe you were listed on the basketball team roster, or maybe you're just in a group picture that one of your friends posted on their facebook page.
I can certainly understand if you don't twitter what you had for lunch every day, but if you've been involved in anything worth talking about, then somebody's probably talked about it online. And if you haven't, then why would I want someone as boring as you around?
True, but there's also a larger context on which you will be judged, and that can change. A couple of generations ago, your gender was all that many people needed to know in order to judge whether or not you were qualified for a particular job. Today that is significantly less prevalent, although we still have a ways to go. The same can be said (to various degress) about race and sexual orientation. Anybody who's judging you on the stupid stuff you did when you were a kid is only able to do so because they're able to ignore/forget all the stupid stuff that they did when they were that age. If the internet makes that stuff unforgettable, then the larger context of what society is willing to accept will change. There will always be holier-than-thou asholes, just like there will always be sexist assholes, but our culture in general is constantly shifting its standards based on what's going on in the world.
Sorry, but this is nonsense. Anybody running for office already has tons of dirt dug up on them, and if that's not enough, dirt gets manufactured by taking stuff out of context or just plain making stuff up. The only thing that is changing is that digging up that dirt is getting easier.
Nobody thinks that our current politicians are saints. Half of campaigning is publicizing bad things about your opponent. Ever hear the phrase "lesser of two evils"? The world has worked that way for a long time, politicians have always chosen their words very carefully, and the people have never demanded perfection from their elected officials.