80% success rate is worse than a lot of properly trained text categorization tools. I'm also suspecting from skimming the article that this system is even easier to throw off track than most text categorization tools built on solid algorithms.
Just word yourself a little differently, use the british spelling of a few words instead of your usual american spelling, try to use shorter or longer paragraphs than you would usually use et voilà, you are now a very poor match for those anonymous death threats sent to your boss.
It's a bit like trying to categorize documents written by someone who also wrote the documents you used for training data and who doesn't want you to successfully categorize the documents...
Sadly a lot of FTTH providers pull the same stunt by offering 10/2, 50/5, 100/10 or 100/20 connections. Luckily where I live there is plenty of competition which means there are several providers offering 100/100 connections.
For xDSL there's still the issue of them throttling the upstream even further than the technical limitations. When I first got ADSL back in the '90s I was paying for 512/512 kbps access but my ISP at the time only throttled the downstream so in practice I had 512/800 kbps. Most ISPs here in Sweden have been pretty good about not throttling the upstream but when I talk to american friends I frequently hear about them having 5000/256 kbps or 2500/128 kbps connections which doesn't quite make sense to me, you've barely got enough upstream bandwidth to use the downstream...
The problem with books like "The Black Book of Communism" and similar writings that go "See!? Communism is just as evil as nazism! There! Proof! The Soviets were just as bad as the nazis! and the Soviets were commie pinko bastards! They said so themselves" is of course in the definition of the actual ideologies.
Definition of communism (grabbed from Wikipedia because I can't be bothered using a dead tree encyclopedia and copying the entry there): "Communism is a sociopolitical movement that aims for a classless and stateless society structured upon common ownership of the means of production, free access to articles of consumption, and the end of wage labour and private property in the means of production and real estate.". That's the core of communism, after that it splits into various factions that either agree enough to cooperate or hate each other's guts.
Compare this to the definition of national socialism (a name which has little to do with the actual ideology): "Nazism (...) was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany. It was a unique variety of fascism that involved biological racism and antisemitism. Nazism presented itself as politically syncretic, incorporating policies, tactics and philosophies from right- and left-wing ideologies; in practice, Nazism was a far right form of politics."
To criticize communism as an ideology simply doesn't make that much sense, the implementations in the USSR, the DPRK and China (among others) can definitely be criticized and since the end of the cold war (and thus the end of the need for socialists and communists around the world to use "the enemy of my enemy..." reasoning) most socialists and communists have openly criticized China and other purportedly communist countries. I know it's a worn out phrase but it is true, there hasn't actually been a proper implementation of communism anywhere in the, nazism on the other hand was pretty much defined by Nazi Germany as they went along so there's no discrepancy between the ideology and the implementation there...
One is selling Unix machines. Since MS has a dominant position in this market, Apple business model is to provide a higher value to the customer.
The other Apple makes mp3 players and phones. Having just acquired a dominant position, it can do whatever it wants. Locking you in as much as it can to get as much revenue as possible from its users. Without the Jailbreak my ipad would be useless!
I think that's actually a very good summary of Apple's two main business areas. Unfortunately I also think a lot of people get them mixed up, something which is commonly seen when discussing Apple's products, I've lost count of the number of people who think that you have to use the App store to install software on OS X (this applies pre-Mac App Store as well), that you aren't allowed to sell software for OS X without giving Apple 30% of the profits, that Apple has "stolen" a bunch of Open source software and of course that they have locked down OS X so that you can't change system files or even use a terminal without "jailbreaking" it.
Personally, I didn't buy a Mac because I thought other computers were too difficult to use, I bought a Mac because I wanted my main desktop to be a *nix machine that I didn't have to spend hours tweaking every time I installed software updates. I have plenty of other machines that run everything from Plan 9 to FreeBSD but for my main desktop I want something that's stable and configured "good enough" out of the box.
That's the "walled garden" bit. You're not refuting the parent post.
If I put it this way then? Was it Apple or MS that implemented Kerberos and then "extended" it just enough to break compatibility with other implementations? (hint: the answer is MS). That's the difference between Apple and MS, Apple has actually increasingly been using standard tech behind the scenes (which means if you know anything about *nix it's a lot easier to deal with interoperability than it is with Windows), MS otoh is still trying to push various MS standards.
Or to put it another way: When some new cool tech comes out Apple will adopt it and build and integrate into OS X their own simplified GUI tool but will generally leave the underlying bits in place and even contribute back to whatever OSS projects they've taken code from. MS will create a competing standard or an standards-incompatible implementation to try to push the original/standards-compliant version(s) into obscurity.
That's why Apple isn't as bad as MS in my eyes anyway (although with some of their design choices for OS X 10.7 "Lion" I may end up eventually switching back to Linux on the desktop but I'm waiting until I get a chance to try it out).
Except of course for the fact that this was not what I wrote.
If you look back to the mid-to-late '90s you'll notice that the average Windows user was using 800x600 or even 640x480, meanwhile the *nix world had pretty much "standardized" on 1280x1024@72Hz.
There's also the issue of lots of new computer users being introduced to both computers and GUIs through Windows at that time, a time when it was often necessary to run your applications fullscreen if you wanted them to be usable.
Now throw in the fact that while in 1995 the average Windows user had a 486 or a low-end Pentium the *nix world frequently had workstations with 200-300 MHz CPUs and often had two or more CPUs. And of course there's RAM, Windows 95 required 4 MiB of RAM while many workstations could handle a lot more than that. SGI's mid-range Indigo^2 series with R4400 CPUs could handle up to 384 MiB of RAM and they were released in 1993. If I recall correctly they originally shipped with 96 MiB, not exactly memory starved when compared to the average desktop wintel machine of 1995.
Of course there are plenty of reasons to run software maximized, I was thinking more of the vast mass of users "trained" to always maximize everything. I see this at work sometimes, co-workers who are by no means computer illiterate (they work in IT or software development) yet they run everything that's full-screen if possible, then they use alt-tab to find the window they're looking for.
The only truths I've found are that the more screen space you have, the more uses you'll find for it, and that you eventually always want one more screen,
True, I myself have 2560x1440 + 1920x1080 for my main desktop at home and I still use six virtual desktops to maintain some semblance of order.
It may not be uncommon but that doesn't mean it's something that makes sense doing. While a lot (as in, most) people I know maximize pretty much every window they can. What do all of these people have in common? They started out using Windows, generally on low-res monitors and learned the behavior from others who did the same. That doesn't mean it makes sense to maximize everything when you've got a monitor with a resolution of 1920x1080 or higher.
Personally I transitioned away from the MS world around the same time as Windows 95 was popular (I had never been a fan of Windows) and wound up in the *nix world where the idea of maximizing windows was generally met with snide remarks about how you should get a better monitor. This is something I've noticed in others who don't maximize habitually, they were Mac or *nix users fairly early on and never got into the habit of always maximizing their windows.
I always assumed that WinME was for those too stupid to make the obviously correct choice when upgrading from Win98. Personally I was already running Linux (Red Hat at the time IIRC) and decided that I wanted a Windows install for gaming. Since Win98 and WinME didn't support more than one CPU and crashed if you looked at them the wrong way Win2k was what I ended up with. I was thoroughly mocked by my gamer friends who told me Win2k was "slow" and "bloated", yet they were the ones who would have their games (or rather, Windows) crash all the time if they didn't remember to shut down their IRC clients before playing...
In my eyes Win2k was a consumer OS, just not the "buy this crap that we're force-feeding you" type of consumer OS.
Not to mention the annoying habit some companies have of putting files online but then moving them to their FTP server (which is inaccessible for approx. 20 hours out of every day since it seems to be on a 1.5 Mbps line somewhere in Taiwan).
I've had that issue with a whole bunch of hardware manufacturers, the moment some piece of hardware is no longer their latest and greatest all the drivers and docs end up dumped on some FTP that it takes me days to fetch the files from. Much better to just archive stuff locally.
Oh well, even that was worse in the '90s, one major motherboard manufacturer actually seemed to have a completely non-functional FTP server back then (down most of the time, when it wasn't down it took ages to respond only to finally tell you that anonymous access wasn't allowed).
Actually, considering the tone of the parent post I'd be more inclined to suspect the once rare Windows fanboy, their numbers do seem to have swelled exponentially after MS released the Xbox. Or to invoke Godwin's law, it is as if modern-day nazis started handing out food to homeless people and every teenager out there just kind of went "Well you know, I think nazis are awesome, all you 'veterans', 'jews' and other pinko bastards are just pissed because they're better than you are. I don't see you handing out free food to homeless people.
Technically the operating system is called Mac OS X, not just OS X. I suppose the Windows equivalent would be "Microsoft/IBM Windows n" with n being a number or something.
If anything causes problems with development and staging systems my experience tells me that nine out of ten times it's net connectivity issues (for any kind of networked server). Nothing like having your dev environment on a 10.x.x.x/24 subnet that requires a proxy and other magic to talk to anything, then a staging environment that's stuck "behind" the backend servers for the live system (with a firewall in between). And then of course there are tunnels going all over the place to make sure that it's actually possible to test automatic file synchronization with a partner company's server (or simply another server belonging to your organization).
I dream of an environment where you could just create an exact image of the production environment, copy it to the dev environment, build your software, package it, test a deploy on a staging server and know that if it worked in dev and staging it should work in production (more likely it will first fail on the staging system and then on the production server as well, maybe not spectacularly but in some way there will be a problem).
By narrow, I mean if you want to turn on a LED when a switch closes, use a freaking dropping resistor and some wire, not a microcontroller. Or a SSR or old fashioned physical relay, or whatever. If you want to do anything "complicated" like more than a line or two of Perl, or anything video or DSPish, use an embedded PC running linux or an embedded RTOS. If you're trying to optimize the heck out of power consumption or price, you might be stuck microcontrolling but no one whom knows anything likes to do that for fun, certainly not as a one-off or prototype. The gap in between where a microcontroller is ideal is technologically small (even if economically big). Something like a dishwasher controller or a clothes dryer controller is just about right.
The thing is that for a lot of hobbyists it tends to make sense to use a microcontroller (or something "between" a microcontroller and a regular computer) to control those LEDs rather than building custom stuff that needs to be replaced every time they want to make a change.
Personally I cut my teeth on analog electronics as a kid, took a special "program" (that's what it's called here in Sweden) in HS that focused on digital electronics which meant I got to spend most of those years playing with transistors, registers, ALUs and other stuff. I also got my first taste of using a single chip computer (the 68HC11 to be exact) and honestly, for a whole lot of stuff I'd rather have some somewhat generic hardware for interfacing with things like switches, LEDs and other digital/analog IO while the actual logic takes place in a microcontroller. Maybe I'm lazy, maybe it's not "economic" to "waste" a few extra bucks on a microcontroller when I could "just" spend a weekend building in hardware what takes me a couple of hours to do in code or whatever other thing people might think of me, I like not having to dismantle a hobby project of mine and then spending days rebuilding it because of minor logic bugs or because I wanted to make some little feature change.
Well, there's another fairly generic meaning for the term "Windows", in reference to windows in a WIMP GUI environment. Microsoft basically named their GUI shell/OS after a generic user interface element.
Now, as for "app store", it does have other uses but I'd have to say it's less generic than "Windows".
But anyway, if this flight of fantasy ever saw the light of day, it would be the end of civilization.
Or it would average us all out, and it would be the last invention.
How about some strong emergence? The whole is greater than the sum of its parts and all that. That is, imagine what would happen if a few hundred people linked together, almost immediately utilized their combined abilities to work out what needed to be accomplished and then set about performing those tasks without any needs for verbal or written explanations, instructions or agreements. John just knows what piece he should weld to what other piece, Dave knows exactly how the control software should work and so on. Yes, it would eerily borg-like but also amazing and quite possibly a huge leap forward for mankind. Not that there aren't possible major problems...
Yes, and I'm actually looking forward to it, at least in a way. Hopefully it will help people understand each other and cooperate on a level previously not seen.
Of course, there are obvious possible downsides, but let's just stay positive here...
Well, when the mainstream media is picking up the story and running a whole bunch of articles on the theme of "will this be the end Apple?", "Should you sell your Apple stock?" and asking industry experts if they think Apple is done for, that's hype.
Here in Sweden I saw several papers and magazines running stories where they asked various industry experts how big the problem was here in Sweden (with questions clearly phrased in a way that indicated they were fishing for worst case scenarios) but most of the replies they got were along the lines of "Nah, not that much of a problem here, we have a pretty solid 3G network with good reception, this is mostly a problem if you both hold the phone a very specific way and have poor reception to begin with".
But hey, if the hype-machine says the hype isn't hype it must be true. After all, it keeps repeating that mantra over and over again while chasing ad impressions...
There's a difference between disagreeing with someone's choice and screaming "YOU MADE THE WRONG CHOICE!" at the top of your lungs.
I happened to watch the latest episode of the Big Bang Theory and there was a quote by Sheldon that kind of sums up how a lot of the anti-Apple haters react to Apple users, "They were having fun the wrong way".
Uh, the machine you linked has a six core CPU, weighs 5.3 kg (11.66 lbs), has a 17.3" monitor and is more of a luggable than a laptop to most people. It's kind of like the Dell Precision I use for work, a "mobile workstation" that's not really meant to be brought everywhere, it's just portable enough to qualify as portable although no sane person would actually use such beast if they wanted true mobility (except of course for truly niche purposes such as someone who absolutely has to have both portability and a local six core CPU with 24 gigs of RAM to do his/her job).
Well, the pwn2own losses for OS X have all been due to flaws in Safari. While still serious it's hardly proof of OS X being inherently less secure than Windows or Linux.
...and the first is ameliorated by the _vastly_ superior "keyboardability" of Windows and PC hardware
I assume you're referring to the myth that OS X has no keyboard shortcuts (I've heard this one plenty of times) and this just isn't true, pretty much everything has a keyboard shortcut and after using OS X for a while they feel a lot more "natural" than the Windows equivalents.
As for the hardware, I'm a huge fan of Apple's keyboards so I have to disagree with you there. My experience from other machines is that the keyboard on wintel machines tends to be one of the weak spots. I have a $2500 Dell "mobile workstation" laptop for work with a keyboard that felt ok the first month or so, after that it's been getting increasingly spongy. And this isn't the only wintel laptop I've had such issues with, netbooks tend to be even worse.
Also, a good trackpad is very useful in keeping you, the user, from getting extremely frustrated. My Dell laptop's trackpad is ok compared to most laptops but unfortunately even after close to a year of using it they have not released a stable driver for it (every once in a while the driver goes tits up and the trackpad just stops working, only a reboot seems to fix it).
Heck, for the most part I'd take a 96 kbps MP3 mixed by some teen on their laptop, so long as they hadn't been indoctrinated into the cult of "clip the hell out of it."
I take it you don't download a lot of pirated movies.:)
One thing I've been having issues with for years is when whoever ripped the movie to a 4 GiB h.264 video file tries to save a few megs by messing with the audio track. Step one seems to be to transcode from whatever the original format was to 128/160 kbps mp3. Step two is apparently to compress the dynamic range and finally Step three is to apply a high-pass or band-pass filter that nukes any frequencies low enough that he can't hear them on his $20 computer speakers. It's "fun" to watch such movie rips with a good pair of speakers and a nice amp, if the movie starts quietly you tend to first pick up on some weird clipping sounds when a car drives by or some other low frequency sound in the movie, then there's a loud noise, any loud noise and you get to hear what happens when you try passing a low frequency square wave to your speakers (with some random other loud noises, it all seems to be artifacts left over by excessive use of high-pass or band-pass filters).
But hey! He saved a few megs of space which is oh so important when creating a multi-gigabyte file...
You should probably consider trying out Maya and 3dsmax before stating that Blender is "the fastest, best-designed 3D software for the task; but also the most difficult, complex to use..". That sounds like what the open source zealot Blender fans have been saying for a long time (since it was open-sourced basically). I've heard countless times from people who at the most have installed blender once and toyed with it a bit that it is better than Maya because it has plugins (because obviously Maya doesn't have those...), keyboard shortcuts (yeah, not a single one of those in Maya...) and is somehow better in every other imaginable way (even though Maya and 3dsmax actually have the same features).
Sorry if I sound a bit cranky but every time I mention that I don't see any clear advantage to using Blender short of it being free and open source someone seems to drag out the old myths about 3D software that isn't Blender...
Basically, the learning curve for Maya and 3dsmax to use them properly is pretty much as steep as the Blender learning curve (if not steeper depending on what tasks you are trying to perform). They're also very competent software packages and I've been hearing that Blender kicks Maya and 3dsmax's collective asses since back when Blender wasn't anywhere near comparable to those two so I have a healthy amount of skepticism when someone tells me that Blender is amazing, it's the open source version of Steve Jobs' infamous reality distortion field, if there's an Open Source application that does foo then it's the best application that does foo regardless of any other facts such as actual features, user interface and such thing.
Slashdot Mirror
80% success rate is worse than a lot of properly trained text categorization tools. I'm also suspecting from skimming the article that this system is even easier to throw off track than most text categorization tools built on solid algorithms.
Just word yourself a little differently, use the british spelling of a few words instead of your usual american spelling, try to use shorter or longer paragraphs than you would usually use et voilà, you are now a very poor match for those anonymous death threats sent to your boss.
It's a bit like trying to categorize documents written by someone who also wrote the documents you used for training data and who doesn't want you to successfully categorize the documents...
Sadly a lot of FTTH providers pull the same stunt by offering 10/2, 50/5, 100/10 or 100/20 connections. Luckily where I live there is plenty of competition which means there are several providers offering 100/100 connections.
For xDSL there's still the issue of them throttling the upstream even further than the technical limitations. When I first got ADSL back in the '90s I was paying for 512/512 kbps access but my ISP at the time only throttled the downstream so in practice I had 512/800 kbps. Most ISPs here in Sweden have been pretty good about not throttling the upstream but when I talk to american friends I frequently hear about them having 5000/256 kbps or 2500/128 kbps connections which doesn't quite make sense to me, you've barely got enough upstream bandwidth to use the downstream...
The problem with books like "The Black Book of Communism" and similar writings that go "See!? Communism is just as evil as nazism! There! Proof! The Soviets were just as bad as the nazis! and the Soviets were commie pinko bastards! They said so themselves" is of course in the definition of the actual ideologies.
Definition of communism (grabbed from Wikipedia because I can't be bothered using a dead tree encyclopedia and copying the entry there): "Communism is a sociopolitical movement that aims for a classless and stateless society structured upon common ownership of the means of production, free access to articles of consumption, and the end of wage labour and private property in the means of production and real estate.". That's the core of communism, after that it splits into various factions that either agree enough to cooperate or hate each other's guts.
Compare this to the definition of national socialism (a name which has little to do with the actual ideology): "Nazism (...) was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany. It was a unique variety of fascism that involved biological racism and antisemitism. Nazism presented itself as politically syncretic, incorporating policies, tactics and philosophies from right- and left-wing ideologies; in practice, Nazism was a far right form of politics."
To criticize communism as an ideology simply doesn't make that much sense, the implementations in the USSR, the DPRK and China (among others) can definitely be criticized and since the end of the cold war (and thus the end of the need for socialists and communists around the world to use "the enemy of my enemy..." reasoning) most socialists and communists have openly criticized China and other purportedly communist countries. I know it's a worn out phrase but it is true, there hasn't actually been a proper implementation of communism anywhere in the, nazism on the other hand was pretty much defined by Nazi Germany as they went along so there's no discrepancy between the ideology and the implementation there...
One is selling Unix machines. Since MS has a dominant position in this market, Apple business model is to provide a higher value to the customer. The other Apple makes mp3 players and phones. Having just acquired a dominant position, it can do whatever it wants. Locking you in as much as it can to get as much revenue as possible from its users. Without the Jailbreak my ipad would be useless!
I think that's actually a very good summary of Apple's two main business areas. Unfortunately I also think a lot of people get them mixed up, something which is commonly seen when discussing Apple's products, I've lost count of the number of people who think that you have to use the App store to install software on OS X (this applies pre-Mac App Store as well), that you aren't allowed to sell software for OS X without giving Apple 30% of the profits, that Apple has "stolen" a bunch of Open source software and of course that they have locked down OS X so that you can't change system files or even use a terminal without "jailbreaking" it.
Personally, I didn't buy a Mac because I thought other computers were too difficult to use, I bought a Mac because I wanted my main desktop to be a *nix machine that I didn't have to spend hours tweaking every time I installed software updates. I have plenty of other machines that run everything from Plan 9 to FreeBSD but for my main desktop I want something that's stable and configured "good enough" out of the box.
That's the "walled garden" bit. You're not refuting the parent post.
If I put it this way then? Was it Apple or MS that implemented Kerberos and then "extended" it just enough to break compatibility with other implementations? (hint: the answer is MS). That's the difference between Apple and MS, Apple has actually increasingly been using standard tech behind the scenes (which means if you know anything about *nix it's a lot easier to deal with interoperability than it is with Windows), MS otoh is still trying to push various MS standards.
Or to put it another way: When some new cool tech comes out Apple will adopt it and build and integrate into OS X their own simplified GUI tool but will generally leave the underlying bits in place and even contribute back to whatever OSS projects they've taken code from. MS will create a competing standard or an standards-incompatible implementation to try to push the original/standards-compliant version(s) into obscurity.
That's why Apple isn't as bad as MS in my eyes anyway (although with some of their design choices for OS X 10.7 "Lion" I may end up eventually switching back to Linux on the desktop but I'm waiting until I get a chance to try it out).
Except of course for the fact that this was not what I wrote.
If you look back to the mid-to-late '90s you'll notice that the average Windows user was using 800x600 or even 640x480, meanwhile the *nix world had pretty much "standardized" on 1280x1024@72Hz.
There's also the issue of lots of new computer users being introduced to both computers and GUIs through Windows at that time, a time when it was often necessary to run your applications fullscreen if you wanted them to be usable.
Now throw in the fact that while in 1995 the average Windows user had a 486 or a low-end Pentium the *nix world frequently had workstations with 200-300 MHz CPUs and often had two or more CPUs. And of course there's RAM, Windows 95 required 4 MiB of RAM while many workstations could handle a lot more than that. SGI's mid-range Indigo^2 series with R4400 CPUs could handle up to 384 MiB of RAM and they were released in 1993. If I recall correctly they originally shipped with 96 MiB, not exactly memory starved when compared to the average desktop wintel machine of 1995.
Sadly, that doesn't always work. I've run a few different apps that simply forced the window back to its original size...
Of course there are plenty of reasons to run software maximized, I was thinking more of the vast mass of users "trained" to always maximize everything. I see this at work sometimes, co-workers who are by no means computer illiterate (they work in IT or software development) yet they run everything that's full-screen if possible, then they use alt-tab to find the window they're looking for.
The only truths I've found are that the more screen space you have, the more uses you'll find for it, and that you eventually always want one more screen,
True, I myself have 2560x1440 + 1920x1080 for my main desktop at home and I still use six virtual desktops to maintain some semblance of order.
It may not be uncommon but that doesn't mean it's something that makes sense doing. While a lot (as in, most) people I know maximize pretty much every window they can. What do all of these people have in common? They started out using Windows, generally on low-res monitors and learned the behavior from others who did the same. That doesn't mean it makes sense to maximize everything when you've got a monitor with a resolution of 1920x1080 or higher.
Personally I transitioned away from the MS world around the same time as Windows 95 was popular (I had never been a fan of Windows) and wound up in the *nix world where the idea of maximizing windows was generally met with snide remarks about how you should get a better monitor. This is something I've noticed in others who don't maximize habitually, they were Mac or *nix users fairly early on and never got into the habit of always maximizing their windows.
I always assumed that WinME was for those too stupid to make the obviously correct choice when upgrading from Win98. Personally I was already running Linux (Red Hat at the time IIRC) and decided that I wanted a Windows install for gaming. Since Win98 and WinME didn't support more than one CPU and crashed if you looked at them the wrong way Win2k was what I ended up with. I was thoroughly mocked by my gamer friends who told me Win2k was "slow" and "bloated", yet they were the ones who would have their games (or rather, Windows) crash all the time if they didn't remember to shut down their IRC clients before playing...
In my eyes Win2k was a consumer OS, just not the "buy this crap that we're force-feeding you" type of consumer OS.
Not to mention the annoying habit some companies have of putting files online but then moving them to their FTP server (which is inaccessible for approx. 20 hours out of every day since it seems to be on a 1.5 Mbps line somewhere in Taiwan).
I've had that issue with a whole bunch of hardware manufacturers, the moment some piece of hardware is no longer their latest and greatest all the drivers and docs end up dumped on some FTP that it takes me days to fetch the files from. Much better to just archive stuff locally.
Oh well, even that was worse in the '90s, one major motherboard manufacturer actually seemed to have a completely non-functional FTP server back then (down most of the time, when it wasn't down it took ages to respond only to finally tell you that anonymous access wasn't allowed).
Actually, considering the tone of the parent post I'd be more inclined to suspect the once rare Windows fanboy, their numbers do seem to have swelled exponentially after MS released the Xbox. Or to invoke Godwin's law, it is as if modern-day nazis started handing out food to homeless people and every teenager out there just kind of went "Well you know, I think nazis are awesome, all you 'veterans', 'jews' and other pinko bastards are just pissed because they're better than you are. I don't see you handing out free food to homeless people.
Technically the operating system is called Mac OS X, not just OS X. I suppose the Windows equivalent would be "Microsoft/IBM Windows n" with n being a number or something.
If anything causes problems with development and staging systems my experience tells me that nine out of ten times it's net connectivity issues (for any kind of networked server). Nothing like having your dev environment on a 10.x.x.x/24 subnet that requires a proxy and other magic to talk to anything, then a staging environment that's stuck "behind" the backend servers for the live system (with a firewall in between). And then of course there are tunnels going all over the place to make sure that it's actually possible to test automatic file synchronization with a partner company's server (or simply another server belonging to your organization).
I dream of an environment where you could just create an exact image of the production environment, copy it to the dev environment, build your software, package it, test a deploy on a staging server and know that if it worked in dev and staging it should work in production (more likely it will first fail on the staging system and then on the production server as well, maybe not spectacularly but in some way there will be a problem).
By narrow, I mean if you want to turn on a LED when a switch closes, use a freaking dropping resistor and some wire, not a microcontroller. Or a SSR or old fashioned physical relay, or whatever. If you want to do anything "complicated" like more than a line or two of Perl, or anything video or DSPish, use an embedded PC running linux or an embedded RTOS. If you're trying to optimize the heck out of power consumption or price, you might be stuck microcontrolling but no one whom knows anything likes to do that for fun, certainly not as a one-off or prototype. The gap in between where a microcontroller is ideal is technologically small (even if economically big). Something like a dishwasher controller or a clothes dryer controller is just about right.
The thing is that for a lot of hobbyists it tends to make sense to use a microcontroller (or something "between" a microcontroller and a regular computer) to control those LEDs rather than building custom stuff that needs to be replaced every time they want to make a change.
Personally I cut my teeth on analog electronics as a kid, took a special "program" (that's what it's called here in Sweden) in HS that focused on digital electronics which meant I got to spend most of those years playing with transistors, registers, ALUs and other stuff. I also got my first taste of using a single chip computer (the 68HC11 to be exact) and honestly, for a whole lot of stuff I'd rather have some somewhat generic hardware for interfacing with things like switches, LEDs and other digital/analog IO while the actual logic takes place in a microcontroller. Maybe I'm lazy, maybe it's not "economic" to "waste" a few extra bucks on a microcontroller when I could "just" spend a weekend building in hardware what takes me a couple of hours to do in code or whatever other thing people might think of me, I like not having to dismantle a hobby project of mine and then spending days rebuilding it because of minor logic bugs or because I wanted to make some little feature change.
Well, there's another fairly generic meaning for the term "Windows", in reference to windows in a WIMP GUI environment. Microsoft basically named their GUI shell/OS after a generic user interface element.
Now, as for "app store", it does have other uses but I'd have to say it's less generic than "Windows".
But anyway, if this flight of fantasy ever saw the light of day, it would be the end of civilization. Or it would average us all out, and it would be the last invention.
How about some strong emergence? The whole is greater than the sum of its parts and all that. That is, imagine what would happen if a few hundred people linked together, almost immediately utilized their combined abilities to work out what needed to be accomplished and then set about performing those tasks without any needs for verbal or written explanations, instructions or agreements. John just knows what piece he should weld to what other piece, Dave knows exactly how the control software should work and so on. Yes, it would eerily borg-like but also amazing and quite possibly a huge leap forward for mankind. Not that there aren't possible major problems...
Yes, and I'm actually looking forward to it, at least in a way. Hopefully it will help people understand each other and cooperate on a level previously not seen.
Of course, there are obvious possible downsides, but let's just stay positive here...
Well, when the mainstream media is picking up the story and running a whole bunch of articles on the theme of "will this be the end Apple?", "Should you sell your Apple stock?" and asking industry experts if they think Apple is done for, that's hype.
Here in Sweden I saw several papers and magazines running stories where they asked various industry experts how big the problem was here in Sweden (with questions clearly phrased in a way that indicated they were fishing for worst case scenarios) but most of the replies they got were along the lines of "Nah, not that much of a problem here, we have a pretty solid 3G network with good reception, this is mostly a problem if you both hold the phone a very specific way and have poor reception to begin with".
But hey, if the hype-machine says the hype isn't hype it must be true. After all, it keeps repeating that mantra over and over again while chasing ad impressions...
There's a difference between disagreeing with someone's choice and screaming "YOU MADE THE WRONG CHOICE!" at the top of your lungs.
I happened to watch the latest episode of the Big Bang Theory and there was a quote by Sheldon that kind of sums up how a lot of the anti-Apple haters react to Apple users, "They were having fun the wrong way".
Uh, the machine you linked has a six core CPU, weighs 5.3 kg (11.66 lbs), has a 17.3" monitor and is more of a luggable than a laptop to most people. It's kind of like the Dell Precision I use for work, a "mobile workstation" that's not really meant to be brought everywhere, it's just portable enough to qualify as portable although no sane person would actually use such beast if they wanted true mobility (except of course for truly niche purposes such as someone who absolutely has to have both portability and a local six core CPU with 24 gigs of RAM to do his/her job).
Well, the pwn2own losses for OS X have all been due to flaws in Safari. While still serious it's hardly proof of OS X being inherently less secure than Windows or Linux.
...and the first is ameliorated by the _vastly_ superior "keyboardability" of Windows and PC hardware
I assume you're referring to the myth that OS X has no keyboard shortcuts (I've heard this one plenty of times) and this just isn't true, pretty much everything has a keyboard shortcut and after using OS X for a while they feel a lot more "natural" than the Windows equivalents.
As for the hardware, I'm a huge fan of Apple's keyboards so I have to disagree with you there. My experience from other machines is that the keyboard on wintel machines tends to be one of the weak spots. I have a $2500 Dell "mobile workstation" laptop for work with a keyboard that felt ok the first month or so, after that it's been getting increasingly spongy. And this isn't the only wintel laptop I've had such issues with, netbooks tend to be even worse.
Also, a good trackpad is very useful in keeping you, the user, from getting extremely frustrated. My Dell laptop's trackpad is ok compared to most laptops but unfortunately even after close to a year of using it they have not released a stable driver for it (every once in a while the driver goes tits up and the trackpad just stops working, only a reboot seems to fix it).
Heck, for the most part I'd take a 96 kbps MP3 mixed by some teen on their laptop, so long as they hadn't been indoctrinated into the cult of "clip the hell out of it."
I take it you don't download a lot of pirated movies. :)
One thing I've been having issues with for years is when whoever ripped the movie to a 4 GiB h.264 video file tries to save a few megs by messing with the audio track. Step one seems to be to transcode from whatever the original format was to 128/160 kbps mp3. Step two is apparently to compress the dynamic range and finally Step three is to apply a high-pass or band-pass filter that nukes any frequencies low enough that he can't hear them on his $20 computer speakers. It's "fun" to watch such movie rips with a good pair of speakers and a nice amp, if the movie starts quietly you tend to first pick up on some weird clipping sounds when a car drives by or some other low frequency sound in the movie, then there's a loud noise, any loud noise and you get to hear what happens when you try passing a low frequency square wave to your speakers (with some random other loud noises, it all seems to be artifacts left over by excessive use of high-pass or band-pass filters).
But hey! He saved a few megs of space which is oh so important when creating a multi-gigabyte file...
You should probably consider trying out Maya and 3dsmax before stating that Blender is "the fastest, best-designed 3D software for the task; but also the most difficult, complex to use..". That sounds like what the open source zealot Blender fans have been saying for a long time (since it was open-sourced basically). I've heard countless times from people who at the most have installed blender once and toyed with it a bit that it is better than Maya because it has plugins (because obviously Maya doesn't have those...), keyboard shortcuts (yeah, not a single one of those in Maya...) and is somehow better in every other imaginable way (even though Maya and 3dsmax actually have the same features).
Sorry if I sound a bit cranky but every time I mention that I don't see any clear advantage to using Blender short of it being free and open source someone seems to drag out the old myths about 3D software that isn't Blender...
Basically, the learning curve for Maya and 3dsmax to use them properly is pretty much as steep as the Blender learning curve (if not steeper depending on what tasks you are trying to perform). They're also very competent software packages and I've been hearing that Blender kicks Maya and 3dsmax's collective asses since back when Blender wasn't anywhere near comparable to those two so I have a healthy amount of skepticism when someone tells me that Blender is amazing, it's the open source version of Steve Jobs' infamous reality distortion field, if there's an Open Source application that does foo then it's the best application that does foo regardless of any other facts such as actual features, user interface and such thing.