Sorry, everyone knows that Apple likes total and complete control
I hear this and I hear people buying into it and it's just a foolish statement. I can develop whatever I want for OSX and that works out just fine. Sure, Apple tends to be a controlling company, but their flagship product is so useful precisely because it isn't overly controlled. Hell, they embraced a UNIX underpinning and let people run X-Windows and Windows/Fusion stuff now. And it's great -- that flexibility is a huge part of what I like about OSX.
The iPhone approval process isn't so bad as to kill things (as this article implies), but it's a disadvantage. Restricting a platform/OS is always a disadvantage. Currently the iPhone has enough other advantages that it doesn't matter, and maybe it'll stay that way. But it's still stupid.
Oh, and the article named three developers (two people and one compnay) so "all" is appropriate and "developers (people) and others (company)" is also appropriate. If you're going to read the sentence carefully, as you said. I agree though that they're trying to make far more out of it than it is.
Everyone is different, but I used low-carb eating to lose about 35 lbs back in 2002, and I've kept it off. I eat carbs, but they are the first thing I restrict when I notice I'm putting on weight.
As far as I can tell, weight loss is just calories in vs. calories burned. But feeling hungry is closely related to fat vs. carb intake.
I've got a question for you (and everyone else who flips out about low-carb diets): is there any way to remove fat from the body _other_ than ketosis?
As far as I know, there is not. Even on a traditional low-fat diet, the goal is the same: run your body low on fuel so it has to break down fat -- i.e. ketosis.
All weight loss diets are forms of (hopefully) mild starvation.
I think you might be missing the point. Of course it was normal back then and it might be unfair to judge some of that in hindsight. But that's only true if we're accepting that the bible is the world of man.
If it's the word of god, then you'd expect it to be... divine? More enlightened than the popular thinking at the time? But it's not -- it reads exactly as if a bunch of people got together a few thousand years ago and put down their best ideas. It just doesn't seem like it was written by anyone who had a view from outside those cultures.
I've really appreciated just being able to pull down a single executable from a site and have it "just work".
Have you ever done that? Even once?
Absolutely yes. And if you're willing to forgive the word "executable" and allow a dmg with a single app in it that I can just drag and drop without picking which one to use or running any scripts, then I've done it quite often.
The universal binary system on osx was pretty sweet during transition. I went from PowerPC to Intel and very rarely had to think about it at all. If you think that's nothing special, fine, but to a lot of users that's a very nice feature.
It's Apple's OS, they developed it, spend years and millions of $$$ making it - why shouldn't they be allowed to say what machines can and can't run it?
Follow that through to its conclusion: by that logic Toyota, who spent millions developing each car model, can tell you where and how to drive the car. Your microwave oven manufacturer can tell you what brand of popcorn you can pop. Likewise the popcorn maker can tell you what brand of microwave to use.
The idea that you can sell (or license, whatever) a product to someone and then restrict their personal use absurd. Any laws that encourage such rediculousness should be repealed. I support reasonable copyright law. This is not it.
That's what always baffles me about the people who do draw that conclusion: the numbers, if anything, indicate that since the dawn of violent video games things have got better. I don't believe there's causation either way, but you'd think that such facts would put a nail in the coffin of those who think there is.
I absolutely hate DRM -- it creates problems for legitimate users and does virtually nothing to stop piracy.
But... I think that it is attempting (and failing) to address a very real problem. It's all well and good for us to say "just don't worry about the pirates", but it's probably not a long term solution. Eventually, honest users feel like suckers for paying for music/software/movies/etc and they start moving towards taking stuff for free as well. I know that CD sales went up while Napster was big, but it is truly hard to imagine that such a situation unchecked would have continued for, say, a decade. At some point people just decide it's stupid to buy stuff they can get for free.
And as much as we've become accustomed to the idea of free creative works, it's not really a cure-all either. Yes, some stuff will get created even without any notion of intellectual property, but some very valuable stuff won't get created in such a world. So without any other obvious solution to the problem, it's not so hard to see why DRM is attractive to desperate content creators.
I don't have a solution. But I do believe there will be a growing problem for funding digitizable media in the future.
In all fairness, there are a lot of good journalists out there doing good work. It's just a shame that there are so many bad ones too. And the bad ones have learned that sensationalism is more lucrative than actual reporting, which creates an incentive for more bad journalism.
It seems that the ethics class that they take is considered a joke, now. I don't know why that is. Ethics for doctors isn't considered a joke (though there are still some violators). And journalists indeed do hold people's lives in their hands. Though indirectly, they may in some cases influence more lives than a doctor would.
It's just sad when a culture of low standards seeps in. Some means of revitalizing journalistic integrity would be most welcome.
I agree that there are certainly enough ambiguous gender cases to make the whole male/female sports separation to be a poor idea.
I don't know enough about male/female performance and sports to know if weight classes would be fair enough? Is it true that generally speaking women and men of similar weight perform similarly? Is the only advantage men have the ability to grow more muscle tissue? Or is it more complex than that? If the weight thing would allow world class women (and intersexed people) to compete fairly against others in their weight class, that seems like the ideal and inevitable solution to this kind of thing.
People are born with ambiguous genitals quite often. People can have a complete mismatch between their apparent gender and their chromosomal gender. Even if those match, there can be gender identity conflict with appearance, chromosomes, or both. Heck, some people even get romantically and sexually attracted to their own sex. Oh the humanity.
Though it is true that the vast majority of people fall very close to the ends of the gender spectrum, the fact is, that gender is not strictly binary. We've built a world that revolves largely around this notion, but we're seeing more and more signs of ambiguity as we become a more open society.
Personally I don't find it scary at all. No more so than when I learned a person doesn't have to be black or white, but can in fact be a mix of both. People like to be able to make distinct categories. Gray areas bother most folks, but they exist and you eventually have to get used to them or spend your life being very frustrated. Gender ambiguity seems to be the one that bothers people the most on a visceral level, though. It'll be a while before we start dealing with it in a healthy way as a society.
As to this runner -- I don't know if she's male or female or something in between. But whatever the case, they're a damn good runner.
The old days were very exciting, and sometimes horrifically dangerous. I always think of that when I think about the long ongoing path of mankind's discovery.
They were playing with plutonium cores and neutron reflectors with their bare hands for heaven's sake!
I don't know -- I'm skeptical of the whole arable-land-for-fuel idea. Whatever we're growing, we're still using up a very valuable and limited resource to fuel vehicles. It just seems a step in the wrong direction.
I understand the difference between works-now and pie-in-the-sky approaches -- and maybe biodiesel is a good very-short-term solution. But here's my sense of the medium term solution:
Before we worry too much about where the energy is coming from, we need a good energy storage & transport medium. Something that abstracts the source of the energy from what we ship around and ultimately extract it from. Examples would be electricity + batteries or electricty + hydrogen fuel cells. Though I don't see how we'll ever make storage and transport of hydrogen simple and cost effective. It's just terribly difficult stuff to work with.
Whatever we end up figuring out, that'll be the point where we can use whatever energy source we want to power vehicles. Plug in to nuclear, wind, solar, geothermal, or whatever.
There's no solid evidence that anything happened before we were born either. But you know, sometimes it gets a bit ridiculous to look at things that way.
I think the problem there is how different groups get hit by higher priced gas. A very large number of people already drive economy cars, so there's little room to reduced their consumption and can't afford a gas tax hike. Another large number of people drive gas guzzlers and could care less how expensive gas gets. Hitting the first group improves nothing. Hitting the second group, which would improve things, is nearly impossible without destroying the first group. My sense is that there is only a small number of swing people in the middle who could be convinced to buy more efficient cars via higher prices, but I doubt it's enough to move the market. If you've got an explanation as to how it would work, I'm curious.
Amtrack, Postal Service, Social Security... Nope, they all suck.
Nice cherry picking, which I'll get to in a moment but first: they all suck?
Compared to what? Which private companies have stepped up to provide these services? Ever tried doing all your mailing through UPS? And when all those private retirement plans fall through like they do once in a while (1930s, 2000s) who takes up the slack? I won't defend Amtrack, but I will defend many metro transit systems, even with all their faults, that provide low-cost transportation that allows cities to function.
It's maddening that some people don't get it yet: the government provides services that private industry cannot or will not provide. Services that are very useful for society. There are things that are good for society as a whole that are not profitable for a single company. The interstate highway system is the most obvious example. I'm not saying the government does a great job at these things, but it does the job that nobody wants to do but everybody wants the benefits of.
As to cherry-picking, what about the military and law enforcement? For all their faults, would you really want to extend your argument to privatizing those?
Here's what I really think after watching my dad work in the public sector most of his life and my own work in the private sector for the past decade: private companies are no better, no more efficient than government agencies at performing tasks of the same complexity and magnitude. The reason they might appear so is because private companies generally are taking on smaller, more manageable tasks, and because private companies spend a lot of money convincing you that they are doing a great job, even when they're not.
There's really something to this. I have a large number of not-very-scientifically-minded people in my family. The kind of people that get angry at doctors who won't prescribe them antibiotics for a viral infection. They tend to not be very healthy in general (failing at basic diet and exercise tasks), they tend to have obsessive cleanliness habits (using hand sanitizer constantly despite years of evidence that this is counter-productive), and they fear health care reform like the plague itself.
But... perception is reality in many ways. Even if health care reform is put through, and even if by every metric things improve, these people will still be terribly unhappy that they can't get antibiotics for their viral infections.
I think the key in the parent post was "moderate exercise". I know a lot of people who exercise a lot as you describe and have some similar problems. Perhaps we're really not meant to run marathons. I know this sounds like heresy to most athletic folks, but then there's all those blown knees, bad backs, and illness from cold weather exercise to take into account.
With all due respect, I have been socializing and working with a significant number of Harvard grads and I'm beginning to think it's a guarantee of insanity. Any Harvard grads want to back me up?
How come the new kids who come in can't tell the difference between progress and two-steps-forward-two-steps-back? You make a valid point that some people resist change for poor reasons, but I would say an equal or greater problem is people embracing change for poor reasons.
DHTML is fine when it works, and it's just starting to get there. But I'd say that web usability was at an all-time low between 2000 and 2006 when the new kids thought everything should be dynamic without the slightest understanding of usability or browser compatibility. The number of high-profile busted pages I encountered was staggering. It wouldn't be so annoying to go through such phases if there was an honest recognition of the shortcomings, but the new kids are always religious zealots who think anyone criticizing their "progress" is a stupid old fart.
It's like how young web developers can't fathom why anyone would still want to use tables for layout when it's fairly easy to explain (i.e. lack of grid layouts/element size dependencies). Fine, I'm happy about CSS too, but because you're having so much fun masturbating over it and won't admit that there are some things lacking, we can't make _real_ progress.
Ah well, it all works out in the end after 10 rewrites to get the same functionality you had in the first place.
Yeah, but "randomizing" is not really "humanizing". A good drummer doesn't vary the tempo randomly, tiny tempo changes would go with what feels right for the song. There are many reasons why a particular section of a song might feel better with a slight tempo change. There may be some randomizing going on as well, but that is certainly not the whole picture, or in my estimation the most important part.
Even if you program in slight tempo changes for different sections of the song (which I've done on occasion) there's still an interplay between the different performers trying to stay in sync that causes slight leads and hesitations between different instrument that add to the depth of the music. If everything is quantized that is lost too, and randomizing doesn't bring it back.
I've recorded with and without click tracks for various reasons, and quantized or not for various reasons. Neither is right or wrong, it just depends on what you're trying to create. But there is a lot of depth that comes out of having people playing live together that is nearly impossible to replicate when the recording is highly controlled.
Perhaps. I wasn't critical of the people reading my post, though. I try to be polite even when I'm talking about bad news. At worst, I guess I look a little strange.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, everyone knows that Apple likes total and complete control
I hear this and I hear people buying into it and it's just a foolish statement. I can develop whatever I want for OSX and that works out just fine. Sure, Apple tends to be a controlling company, but their flagship product is so useful precisely because it isn't overly controlled. Hell, they embraced a UNIX underpinning and let people run X-Windows and Windows/Fusion stuff now. And it's great -- that flexibility is a huge part of what I like about OSX.
The iPhone approval process isn't so bad as to kill things (as this article implies), but it's a disadvantage. Restricting a platform/OS is always a disadvantage. Currently the iPhone has enough other advantages that it doesn't matter, and maybe it'll stay that way. But it's still stupid.
Oh, and the article named three developers (two people and one compnay) so "all" is appropriate and "developers (people) and others (company)" is also appropriate. If you're going to read the sentence carefully, as you said. I agree though that they're trying to make far more out of it than it is.
Cheers.
Everyone is different, but I used low-carb eating to lose about 35 lbs back in 2002, and I've kept it off. I eat carbs, but they are the first thing I restrict when I notice I'm putting on weight.
As far as I can tell, weight loss is just calories in vs. calories burned. But feeling hungry is closely related to fat vs. carb intake.
Just my experience.
I've got a question for you (and everyone else who flips out about low-carb diets): is there any way to remove fat from the body _other_ than ketosis?
As far as I know, there is not. Even on a traditional low-fat diet, the goal is the same: run your body low on fuel so it has to break down fat -- i.e. ketosis.
All weight loss diets are forms of (hopefully) mild starvation.
Cheers.
I think you might be missing the point. Of course it was normal back then and it might be unfair to judge some of that in hindsight. But that's only true if we're accepting that the bible is the world of man.
If it's the word of god, then you'd expect it to be... divine? More enlightened than the popular thinking at the time? But it's not -- it reads exactly as if a bunch of people got together a few thousand years ago and put down their best ideas. It just doesn't seem like it was written by anyone who had a view from outside those cultures.
Anyway, just my observation.
I've really appreciated just being able to pull down a single executable from a site and have it "just work".
Have you ever done that? Even once?
Absolutely yes. And if you're willing to forgive the word "executable" and allow a dmg with a single app in it that I can just drag and drop without picking which one to use or running any scripts, then I've done it quite often.
The universal binary system on osx was pretty sweet during transition. I went from PowerPC to Intel and very rarely had to think about it at all. If you think that's nothing special, fine, but to a lot of users that's a very nice feature.
Cheers.
It's Apple's OS, they developed it, spend years and millions of $$$ making it - why shouldn't they be allowed to say what machines can and can't run it?
Follow that through to its conclusion: by that logic Toyota, who spent millions developing each car model, can tell you where and how to drive the car. Your microwave oven manufacturer can tell you what brand of popcorn you can pop. Likewise the popcorn maker can tell you what brand of microwave to use.
The idea that you can sell (or license, whatever) a product to someone and then restrict their personal use absurd. Any laws that encourage such rediculousness should be repealed. I support reasonable copyright law. This is not it.
"I'm not trying to say degradation of society is directly linked to violence in video games"
Good thing you're not saying that since there is actually no degradation of society to speak of:
http://reason.com/blog/2009/09/14/us-violent-crime-rates-lowest
That's what always baffles me about the people who do draw that conclusion: the numbers, if anything, indicate that since the dawn of violent video games things have got better. I don't believe there's causation either way, but you'd think that such facts would put a nail in the coffin of those who think there is.
Cheers
A bit rude, but damn -- that was awesome.
If someone makes a factual claim that seems off, you can provide data to indicate they are wrong. Saying "data please" is lazy minded arguing.
Cheers
I absolutely hate DRM -- it creates problems for legitimate users and does virtually nothing to stop piracy.
But... I think that it is attempting (and failing) to address a very real problem. It's all well and good for us to say "just don't worry about the pirates", but it's probably not a long term solution. Eventually, honest users feel like suckers for paying for music/software/movies/etc and they start moving towards taking stuff for free as well. I know that CD sales went up while Napster was big, but it is truly hard to imagine that such a situation unchecked would have continued for, say, a decade. At some point people just decide it's stupid to buy stuff they can get for free.
And as much as we've become accustomed to the idea of free creative works, it's not really a cure-all either. Yes, some stuff will get created even without any notion of intellectual property, but some very valuable stuff won't get created in such a world. So without any other obvious solution to the problem, it's not so hard to see why DRM is attractive to desperate content creators.
I don't have a solution. But I do believe there will be a growing problem for funding digitizable media in the future.
Cheers.
In all fairness, there are a lot of good journalists out there doing good work. It's just a shame that there are so many bad ones too. And the bad ones have learned that sensationalism is more lucrative than actual reporting, which creates an incentive for more bad journalism.
It seems that the ethics class that they take is considered a joke, now. I don't know why that is. Ethics for doctors isn't considered a joke (though there are still some violators). And journalists indeed do hold people's lives in their hands. Though indirectly, they may in some cases influence more lives than a doctor would.
It's just sad when a culture of low standards seeps in. Some means of revitalizing journalistic integrity would be most welcome.
I agree that there are certainly enough ambiguous gender cases to make the whole male/female sports separation to be a poor idea.
I don't know enough about male/female performance and sports to know if weight classes would be fair enough? Is it true that generally speaking women and men of similar weight perform similarly? Is the only advantage men have the ability to grow more muscle tissue? Or is it more complex than that? If the weight thing would allow world class women (and intersexed people) to compete fairly against others in their weight class, that seems like the ideal and inevitable solution to this kind of thing.
Cheers.
People are born with ambiguous genitals quite often. People can have a complete mismatch between their apparent gender and their chromosomal gender. Even if those match, there can be gender identity conflict with appearance, chromosomes, or both. Heck, some people even get romantically and sexually attracted to their own sex. Oh the humanity.
Though it is true that the vast majority of people fall very close to the ends of the gender spectrum, the fact is, that gender is not strictly binary. We've built a world that revolves largely around this notion, but we're seeing more and more signs of ambiguity as we become a more open society.
Personally I don't find it scary at all. No more so than when I learned a person doesn't have to be black or white, but can in fact be a mix of both. People like to be able to make distinct categories. Gray areas bother most folks, but they exist and you eventually have to get used to them or spend your life being very frustrated. Gender ambiguity seems to be the one that bothers people the most on a visceral level, though. It'll be a while before we start dealing with it in a healthy way as a society.
As to this runner -- I don't know if she's male or female or something in between. But whatever the case, they're a damn good runner.
Cheers.
Or read this story: Criticality Accident.
The old days were very exciting, and sometimes horrifically dangerous. I always think of that when I think about the long ongoing path of mankind's discovery.
They were playing with plutonium cores and neutron reflectors with their bare hands for heaven's sake!
Crazy.
I don't know -- I'm skeptical of the whole arable-land-for-fuel idea. Whatever we're growing, we're still using up a very valuable and limited resource to fuel vehicles. It just seems a step in the wrong direction.
I understand the difference between works-now and pie-in-the-sky approaches -- and maybe biodiesel is a good very-short-term solution. But here's my sense of the medium term solution:
Before we worry too much about where the energy is coming from, we need a good energy storage & transport medium. Something that abstracts the source of the energy from what we ship around and ultimately extract it from. Examples would be electricity + batteries or electricty + hydrogen fuel cells. Though I don't see how we'll ever make storage and transport of hydrogen simple and cost effective. It's just terribly difficult stuff to work with.
Whatever we end up figuring out, that'll be the point where we can use whatever energy source we want to power vehicles. Plug in to nuclear, wind, solar, geothermal, or whatever.
There's no solid evidence that anything happened before we were born either. But you know, sometimes it gets a bit ridiculous to look at things that way.
Cheers.
I think the problem there is how different groups get hit by higher priced gas. A very large number of people already drive economy cars, so there's little room to reduced their consumption and can't afford a gas tax hike. Another large number of people drive gas guzzlers and could care less how expensive gas gets. Hitting the first group improves nothing. Hitting the second group, which would improve things, is nearly impossible without destroying the first group. My sense is that there is only a small number of swing people in the middle who could be convinced to buy more efficient cars via higher prices, but I doubt it's enough to move the market. If you've got an explanation as to how it would work, I'm curious.
Cheers
Amtrack, Postal Service, Social Security... Nope, they all suck.
Nice cherry picking, which I'll get to in a moment but first: they all suck?
Compared to what? Which private companies have stepped up to provide these services? Ever tried doing all your mailing through UPS? And when all those private retirement plans fall through like they do once in a while (1930s, 2000s) who takes up the slack? I won't defend Amtrack, but I will defend many metro transit systems, even with all their faults, that provide low-cost transportation that allows cities to function.
It's maddening that some people don't get it yet: the government provides services that private industry cannot or will not provide. Services that are very useful for society. There are things that are good for society as a whole that are not profitable for a single company. The interstate highway system is the most obvious example. I'm not saying the government does a great job at these things, but it does the job that nobody wants to do but everybody wants the benefits of.
As to cherry-picking, what about the military and law enforcement? For all their faults, would you really want to extend your argument to privatizing those?
Here's what I really think after watching my dad work in the public sector most of his life and my own work in the private sector for the past decade: private companies are no better, no more efficient than government agencies at performing tasks of the same complexity and magnitude. The reason they might appear so is because private companies generally are taking on smaller, more manageable tasks, and because private companies spend a lot of money convincing you that they are doing a great job, even when they're not.
Cheers.
There's really something to this. I have a large number of not-very-scientifically-minded people in my family. The kind of people that get angry at doctors who won't prescribe them antibiotics for a viral infection. They tend to not be very healthy in general (failing at basic diet and exercise tasks), they tend to have obsessive cleanliness habits (using hand sanitizer constantly despite years of evidence that this is counter-productive), and they fear health care reform like the plague itself.
But... perception is reality in many ways. Even if health care reform is put through, and even if by every metric things improve, these people will still be terribly unhappy that they can't get antibiotics for their viral infections.
Cheers.
I do everything in moderation.
Help me! I'm addicted to moderation!
But seriously, excellent post. Whenever I have found myself obsessed over something it was usually because I was trying to avoid something else.
Cheers.
I think the key in the parent post was "moderate exercise". I know a lot of people who exercise a lot as you describe and have some similar problems. Perhaps we're really not meant to run marathons. I know this sounds like heresy to most athletic folks, but then there's all those blown knees, bad backs, and illness from cold weather exercise to take into account.
Cheers.
Bingo. There must have been some other reason they didn't include this feature, as that solution is obvious and simple.
...going to Harvard is not a guarantee of sanity.
With all due respect, I have been socializing and working with a significant number of Harvard grads and I'm beginning to think it's a guarantee of insanity. Any Harvard grads want to back me up?
Cheers.
How come the new kids who come in can't tell the difference between progress and two-steps-forward-two-steps-back? You make a valid point that some people resist change for poor reasons, but I would say an equal or greater problem is people embracing change for poor reasons.
DHTML is fine when it works, and it's just starting to get there. But I'd say that web usability was at an all-time low between 2000 and 2006 when the new kids thought everything should be dynamic without the slightest understanding of usability or browser compatibility. The number of high-profile busted pages I encountered was staggering. It wouldn't be so annoying to go through such phases if there was an honest recognition of the shortcomings, but the new kids are always religious zealots who think anyone criticizing their "progress" is a stupid old fart.
It's like how young web developers can't fathom why anyone would still want to use tables for layout when it's fairly easy to explain (i.e. lack of grid layouts/element size dependencies). Fine, I'm happy about CSS too, but because you're having so much fun masturbating over it and won't admit that there are some things lacking, we can't make _real_ progress.
Ah well, it all works out in the end after 10 rewrites to get the same functionality you had in the first place.
Yeah, but "randomizing" is not really "humanizing". A good drummer doesn't vary the tempo randomly, tiny tempo changes would go with what feels right for the song. There are many reasons why a particular section of a song might feel better with a slight tempo change. There may be some randomizing going on as well, but that is certainly not the whole picture, or in my estimation the most important part.
Even if you program in slight tempo changes for different sections of the song (which I've done on occasion) there's still an interplay between the different performers trying to stay in sync that causes slight leads and hesitations between different instrument that add to the depth of the music. If everything is quantized that is lost too, and randomizing doesn't bring it back.
I've recorded with and without click tracks for various reasons, and quantized or not for various reasons. Neither is right or wrong, it just depends on what you're trying to create. But there is a lot of depth that comes out of having people playing live together that is nearly impossible to replicate when the recording is highly controlled.
Cheers.
Perhaps. I wasn't critical of the people reading my post, though. I try to be polite even when I'm talking about bad news. At worst, I guess I look a little strange.
Cheers :)