It seems like when you say "the iPhone is nothing but another phone" every Apple apologist in the world jumps all over you telling you that the iPhone is actually a full blown computer.
But as soon as you want to do something crazy like, say, run more than one program at once, you hear "Well, the iPhone is first and foremost a phone. .."
So which is it? If I want to quit an application I imagine I am completely capable of doing so, and the iPhone runs OS X which these same people tell me is the most advanced OS around, and it ought to be perfectly capable of not giving a program in the background a lot of resources. Why is security on an iPhone suddenly such a huge deal, if its really a computer?
Maybe you missed the part where nearly every iPhone update has tried to block the jailbreak?
I was literally days away from buying an iPhone before the SDK release, was just waiting to make sure it would make the phone worth it (honestly, without 3rd party applications the iPhone is worth about 1/5 of what it costs). But now I'm not so sure that I'll be getting one at all.
Are you suggesting that the government should be allowed to punish people (or businesses) because what they did was "wrong" even though its not against any rule? Or are saying there is actually some rule against this, and you are simply not referencing it?
Don't get me wrong, I think Comcast needs to stop, and if they violated any actual regulations I hope they are punished for it, but if they didn't actually break any rules then what that means is not that they should be punished anyway, but that the rules need to be fixed.
I never even understood why you would want to board the plane first in first class. You lose your freedom of movement sooner, and once you are seated they go ahead and file everyone else right through the first class cabin. They should just have nice reserved seating in the waiting areas for first class passengers, then board from the back of the plane forward. Even if they don't do it perfectly, it could hardly be worse than making everyone wait for the person in front of them to finish stuffing crap in the overhead bins before even going back to their seat.
You forgot to account for the cost of flying them all over the country. And probably having to frequently get food and housing for them on the other end of flights (either that or you are looking at huge inefficiencies in placing them on flights if you need to have them back in their home town every day). None of which is insignificant.
And thats not to mention administrative costs, etc. Plus you can build in about 50-200% extra just because its being done by feds who don't care about their bottom line.
Well, there may be some truth to it. But like most decisions, there are a lot of things at work here:
1. Having a giant hydrazine tank land on someone's house would be a PR nightmare.
2. Having a spy satellite presumably filled with highly-classified stuff fall into the wrong hands is something They(tm) try to avoid.
3. Demonstrating to the rest of the world that we can blow their satellites into much less useful pieces is somewhat in line with the agenda of the Bush administration.
4. It can also be pointed to as a success of the missile defense program.
So I wouldn't write off the whole hydrazine tank issue entirely, but I doubt its the primary motivator.
First having the Olympics in China, now this. My family plans to attend the winter Olympics in Canada in a few years, and I told them in no uncertain terms that I will never again in my life watch, even on TV, the Olympics.
Even aside from the absurd profiteering, human rights violations, etc, when will people grow up and realize that we aren't monkeys anymore? Like a few weeks back when they told the guy with the prosthetic limb that he could not compete. Why is it alright for someone to dedicate their life to trying to run faster, but not alright to use actual innovation to do so?
The only difference between the Olympics and the NFL is the audience.
Whatever your reason for doing so, I would encourage anyone who wants to join me in permanently boycotting the Olympics to do so.
Back when I turned 18 I got thing in the mail from the Selective Service suggesting that if I had not already registered with them, I could simply put my name, address, date of birth, social security number, etc on the back of this handy dandy prepaid postcard included and stick it in my mailbox. I've seen this mentioned a few places, including a transcript from Congress at some point a while back when someone brought it up, but as of a year and a half ago or so they are apparently still mailing these things out. At the time I felt like I should have been shocked, but for some reason I wasn't...
I've always thought that things coming down from space have a tendency to burn up in the atmosphere, but on the other hand chunks of that space shuttle landed all over the place. Can someone who knows what they're talking about enlighten me as to how much of this satellite is likely to survive?
Which brings me to something else: do these satellites have some sort of self destruct mechanism? What was to stop, say, the Soviets or Chinese from going up and physically stealing a very expensive satellite that presumably contains technology/information we don't want them getting their hands on?
Who here agrees that this is probably either
a) A Putin-backed operation to get the blame off of Russia, or
b) A joint effort of factions in the Estonian and Russian governments trying to "put that incident in the past". And/or bribes.
I'm sorry, this whole thing is just a little too convenient, considering we're talking about an ex KGB guy who doesn't seem to have ever moved beyond plotting and assassinations.
Gates isn't known for being especially conservative. He was actually a big supporter of the democratic party until all the anti trust stuff got started against Microsoft under the Clinton administration. Even now he contributes to a lot of causes across the board, including Obama's campaign.
The only thing he wants that Republicans tout is a free market. Other than that hes basically a liberal.
Unless some people who 1)have the technical knowledge and 2)don't care about licensing restrictions make a linux port of it anyway. Seriously, who is going to do anything about it? Is Sun going to sue people for increasing compatibility with their products? Or is Richard Stallman going to hunt them down and beat them to death with the Free Software club?
Frankly, no one is going to do anything about it, so I look forward to the day that common sense breaks out and we quit letting legal mumbo jumgo get in the way of progress.
Sony wasn't exactly telling anyone anything new. It has always been the case that any DRMed format that can be burned to an audio CD can be overcome by ripping it from the CD. But you do get a major decrease in the audio quality when you do that.
What I would be curious to know is whether this even works with watermarking. If the watermark is actually in the audio stream, I would think that if you did a lossless rip of the CD the watermark would still be there. Probably not nearly as easily detected if their detection software is looking for audio in a certain format, but still there nonetheless. Basically I would think that the watermark would only go away if you rip the CD (or just transcode the music) to such a low quality file that something as subtle as a watermark can't survive.
Whatever trivial little social goods you might be able to do with the 6.5 billion that hubble has cost over its lifetime are far outweighed by the increase in our understanding of the universe we live in that hubble has brought about.
Just think if we took all the money being spent on science around the world and spent it on food instead. We could fix world hunger! Thats what I call a long term solution./sarcasm
I can't believe people around here still believe that they can blame government corruption and stupidity on Republicans. Since the democrats have taken back congress if anything congress has gotten worse on these issues. Where before we would have bills sponsored by a bunch of republicans with maybe a few democrats, and a bunch of democrats opposing it just because they hate republicans, now we have bunches of democrats sponsoring some of the most blatantly stupid and corrupt bills I have ever seen, and bunches of republicans backing them.
Re:The best tools stay out of the way...
on
Goodbye Cruel Word
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Right, but I use mail merges for much more than just printing addresses. The spreadsheet I have my mother maintain has probably 15 columns of information about the people in question that she can use to fill in forms on all sorts of letters and the like.
I don't imagine that most consumer level users do the same, but for businesses the ability to fill in forms from a database seems rather indispensable.
Re:The best tools stay out of the way...
on
Goodbye Cruel Word
·
· Score: 1
I use a Mac for all of my school work, and Pages works quite well for the most part. But it has a good way to go before it can truly replace Word (of which I own both the windows and mac versions, but don't have installed anywhere).
Just for example, over break my mother asked me to design and mail a christmas card for her. Pages, despite being very layout oriented did not provide some image manipulation (borders, etc) that would have made my job much easier. So I used Gimp to fix up the images, and the card came out ok.
Then it was time to make envelopes. Except Pages has absolutely miserable support for "mail merges". My mother stores her christmas card mailing list in an open document spreadsheet, but the only source that Pages supports for mail merges is Apple's address book (which I don't use). I ended up converting the file to an excel spreadsheet then using Word 2003 to do the mail merge.
But for just writing papers and stuff, and certain layout oriented tasks Pages is great.
And why, pray, would the American "propoganda machine" be interested in ruining people's perceptions of china? If you haven't noticed, the big businesses that run the media rely on consumers buying tons of goods manufactured in China. How many times have you actually heard about human rights violations in China on the nightly news in, say, the last 5 years?
Sorry, it was a joke. I was trying to decide whether it would be funnier if I said that they were rich until they bought an iPhone, which, on reflection might have been a better choice. Still, no offense intended, I'm hoping to buy one myself pretty soon here.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems like when you say "the iPhone is nothing but another phone" every Apple apologist in the world jumps all over you telling you that the iPhone is actually a full blown computer.
."
But as soon as you want to do something crazy like, say, run more than one program at once, you hear "Well, the iPhone is first and foremost a phone. .
So which is it? If I want to quit an application I imagine I am completely capable of doing so, and the iPhone runs OS X which these same people tell me is the most advanced OS around, and it ought to be perfectly capable of not giving a program in the background a lot of resources. Why is security on an iPhone suddenly such a huge deal, if its really a computer?
I guess I just don't get it.
*Gets ready to be modded -9999 Troll*
Who the hell is Chief Dyer? Some actor or something? Why should I have heard of them?
Maybe you missed the part where nearly every iPhone update has tried to block the jailbreak?
I was literally days away from buying an iPhone before the SDK release, was just waiting to make sure it would make the phone worth it (honestly, without 3rd party applications the iPhone is worth about 1/5 of what it costs). But now I'm not so sure that I'll be getting one at all.
Are you suggesting that the government should be allowed to punish people (or businesses) because what they did was "wrong" even though its not against any rule? Or are saying there is actually some rule against this, and you are simply not referencing it?
Don't get me wrong, I think Comcast needs to stop, and if they violated any actual regulations I hope they are punished for it, but if they didn't actually break any rules then what that means is not that they should be punished anyway, but that the rules need to be fixed.
I never even understood why you would want to board the plane first in first class. You lose your freedom of movement sooner, and once you are seated they go ahead and file everyone else right through the first class cabin. They should just have nice reserved seating in the waiting areas for first class passengers, then board from the back of the plane forward. Even if they don't do it perfectly, it could hardly be worse than making everyone wait for the person in front of them to finish stuffing crap in the overhead bins before even going back to their seat.
.. about learning anything from Microsoft. They're probably just going to sue you for it.
I don't think it was 1999 because I'm pretty sure neither OS X (desktop version) or XP came out until 2001.
You forgot to account for the cost of flying them all over the country. And probably having to frequently get food and housing for them on the other end of flights (either that or you are looking at huge inefficiencies in placing them on flights if you need to have them back in their home town every day). None of which is insignificant.
And thats not to mention administrative costs, etc. Plus you can build in about 50-200% extra just because its being done by feds who don't care about their bottom line.
Well, there may be some truth to it. But like most decisions, there are a lot of things at work here:
1. Having a giant hydrazine tank land on someone's house would be a PR nightmare.
2. Having a spy satellite presumably filled with highly-classified stuff fall into the wrong hands is something They(tm) try to avoid.
3. Demonstrating to the rest of the world that we can blow their satellites into much less useful pieces is somewhat in line with the agenda of the Bush administration.
4. It can also be pointed to as a success of the missile defense program.
So I wouldn't write off the whole hydrazine tank issue entirely, but I doubt its the primary motivator.
First having the Olympics in China, now this. My family plans to attend the winter Olympics in Canada in a few years, and I told them in no uncertain terms that I will never again in my life watch, even on TV, the Olympics.
Even aside from the absurd profiteering, human rights violations, etc, when will people grow up and realize that we aren't monkeys anymore? Like a few weeks back when they told the guy with the prosthetic limb that he could not compete. Why is it alright for someone to dedicate their life to trying to run faster, but not alright to use actual innovation to do so?
The only difference between the Olympics and the NFL is the audience.
Whatever your reason for doing so, I would encourage anyone who wants to join me in permanently boycotting the Olympics to do so.
Get rid of the "www."
Back when I turned 18 I got thing in the mail from the Selective Service suggesting that if I had not already registered with them, I could simply put my name, address, date of birth, social security number, etc on the back of this handy dandy prepaid postcard included and stick it in my mailbox. I've seen this mentioned a few places, including a transcript from Congress at some point a while back when someone brought it up, but as of a year and a half ago or so they are apparently still mailing these things out. At the time I felt like I should have been shocked, but for some reason I wasn't...
I've always thought that things coming down from space have a tendency to burn up in the atmosphere, but on the other hand chunks of that space shuttle landed all over the place. Can someone who knows what they're talking about enlighten me as to how much of this satellite is likely to survive?
Which brings me to something else: do these satellites have some sort of self destruct mechanism? What was to stop, say, the Soviets or Chinese from going up and physically stealing a very expensive satellite that presumably contains technology/information we don't want them getting their hands on?
Who here agrees that this is probably either a) A Putin-backed operation to get the blame off of Russia, or b) A joint effort of factions in the Estonian and Russian governments trying to "put that incident in the past". And/or bribes. I'm sorry, this whole thing is just a little too convenient, considering we're talking about an ex KGB guy who doesn't seem to have ever moved beyond plotting and assassinations.
Gates isn't known for being especially conservative. He was actually a big supporter of the democratic party until all the anti trust stuff got started against Microsoft under the Clinton administration. Even now he contributes to a lot of causes across the board, including Obama's campaign. The only thing he wants that Republicans tout is a free market. Other than that hes basically a liberal.
Unless some people who 1)have the technical knowledge and 2)don't care about licensing restrictions make a linux port of it anyway. Seriously, who is going to do anything about it? Is Sun going to sue people for increasing compatibility with their products? Or is Richard Stallman going to hunt them down and beat them to death with the Free Software club?
Frankly, no one is going to do anything about it, so I look forward to the day that common sense breaks out and we quit letting legal mumbo jumgo get in the way of progress.
Sony wasn't exactly telling anyone anything new. It has always been the case that any DRMed format that can be burned to an audio CD can be overcome by ripping it from the CD. But you do get a major decrease in the audio quality when you do that.
What I would be curious to know is whether this even works with watermarking. If the watermark is actually in the audio stream, I would think that if you did a lossless rip of the CD the watermark would still be there. Probably not nearly as easily detected if their detection software is looking for audio in a certain format, but still there nonetheless. Basically I would think that the watermark would only go away if you rip the CD (or just transcode the music) to such a low quality file that something as subtle as a watermark can't survive.
This is exactly why its more secure by design. Its hard to go through the source if you don't have it.
Is this story different than this one?
Whatever trivial little social goods you might be able to do with the 6.5 billion that hubble has cost over its lifetime are far outweighed by the increase in our understanding of the universe we live in that hubble has brought about.
/sarcasm
Just think if we took all the money being spent on science around the world and spent it on food instead. We could fix world hunger! Thats what I call a long term solution.
I can't believe people around here still believe that they can blame government corruption and stupidity on Republicans. Since the democrats have taken back congress if anything congress has gotten worse on these issues. Where before we would have bills sponsored by a bunch of republicans with maybe a few democrats, and a bunch of democrats opposing it just because they hate republicans, now we have bunches of democrats sponsoring some of the most blatantly stupid and corrupt bills I have ever seen, and bunches of republicans backing them.
Right, but I use mail merges for much more than just printing addresses. The spreadsheet I have my mother maintain has probably 15 columns of information about the people in question that she can use to fill in forms on all sorts of letters and the like.
I don't imagine that most consumer level users do the same, but for businesses the ability to fill in forms from a database seems rather indispensable.
I use a Mac for all of my school work, and Pages works quite well for the most part. But it has a good way to go before it can truly replace Word (of which I own both the windows and mac versions, but don't have installed anywhere).
Just for example, over break my mother asked me to design and mail a christmas card for her. Pages, despite being very layout oriented did not provide some image manipulation (borders, etc) that would have made my job much easier. So I used Gimp to fix up the images, and the card came out ok.
Then it was time to make envelopes. Except Pages has absolutely miserable support for "mail merges". My mother stores her christmas card mailing list in an open document spreadsheet, but the only source that Pages supports for mail merges is Apple's address book (which I don't use). I ended up converting the file to an excel spreadsheet then using Word 2003 to do the mail merge.
But for just writing papers and stuff, and certain layout oriented tasks Pages is great.
And why, pray, would the American "propoganda machine" be interested in ruining people's perceptions of china? If you haven't noticed, the big businesses that run the media rely on consumers buying tons of goods manufactured in China. How many times have you actually heard about human rights violations in China on the nightly news in, say, the last 5 years?
Sorry, it was a joke. I was trying to decide whether it would be funnier if I said that they were rich until they bought an iPhone, which, on reflection might have been a better choice. Still, no offense intended, I'm hoping to buy one myself pretty soon here.