Thank you for the thoughtful reply. I will freely admit to being ill-informed in Arab/Persian discoveries, a bit of a disgrace. Roger Bacon believed that every educated person should learn Arabic and reported some of the discoveries in optics. I had understood, perhaps wrongly, that medieval near Eastern science was more technology, just as in the West steam power was developed by artisans rather than scientists. The article you cite makes stronger claims than this. I must do some research.
And I salute another lover of poetry on/. In fairness to Aristotle, he was struggling with new ideas and this often leads to a hard read. I dislike Plato because, like some modern philosophers, such as Roger Scruton, he used his talent to make the aristocracy feel good about themselves.
I am guessing it is plain old cast magnesium alloy with a PVD coating, like they used to use for phones before the plastics technology caught up. Alumin(i)um can be hard anodised; oxide coatings don't go down well with magnesium.
It's just an attempt to keep the Microsoft desktop model relevant in the second decade of the 21st century. It's like the GM Volt, which is an attempt to produce a hybrid vehicle which is as much like a traditional US car as possible. The Volt isn't nearly as good as an (insert Toyota/Lexus hybrid of choice here) where the entire power train is designed for efficiency. This thing is going to be outgunned by (Apple/Samsung/Asus) very quickly.
I could be wrong, but I suspect that the history of computing will record that the Microsoft Surface itself was "a 90's era joke moderated up to +5" (by the Microsoft marketing department).
To say that Jesus would have rejected (or accepted) modern Christianity is to make a judgment founded upon ideological principles.
No, it isn't. It is based on a comparison of what is said in the New Testament versus what is propagated by several mainstream churches. Anybody who has had a theological education (guilty) and has then not had to earn a living by espousing one version or another of Christianity is free to see this and say it. To claim that this is an "ideological" issue involves a great deal of tortuous argument that apparently straightforward statements in the NT actually mean something quite different, plus a willingness to give the writings of Saul of Tarsus primacy over the Gospels.
And I was careless. Aristotle believed that knowledge was acquired by sensory experience, unlike Plato who thought that some kind of higher realm was primary and the observed world was, as Yeats put it "a spume that played/upon a ghostly paradigm of things". Aristotle's claim, as I observed in the second half of the sentence, was to have proposed looking at Nature for knowledge; this was quite revolutionary in a world in which people saw a deus in just about every machina. Although his cosmology was pretty strange, he at least had the idea that probably one cause accounted for the movement of things in the sky - his "that which moves without movement", [/. Greek fail]
But why cite Wikipedia when there is so much better information on early history of science? The article you cite describes Alhazen as an "early Islamic scientist" whereas he was pre-scientific, as was Francis Bacon (to whom I am very distantly related, so I have some interest in the subject). Descartes described the experimental method but was a long way from following it. You can argue that Aristotle, by proposing the validity of sensory experience as a clue to understanding the world, was the father of experimental method (experience and experiment have a common root) or you can argue that Galileo was (he actually did experiments to test his ideas), but to try and claim that the moment of truth lies somewhere in between ca. 350 BCE and ca 1600 CE is to try and measure accurately using a jelly stick.
Aristotle was the "father of the experimental method" - he advocated looking at Nature. It wasn't his fault that a load of medieval schoolmen got completely the wrong end of the stick and decided that what he wrote was right for all time. Aristotle wasn't an Aristotelian. But then, Jesus would have made a very bad Christian and Karl Marx would have been horrified by what become of Marxism.
Coincidentally I was reading The Big Short the other day and it was about a very similar theme - how human beings seem to want collectively to believe in something no matter that it is obviously bullshit, and that the people who try to point out that the emperor is naked get no thanks - they even seem to get blamed when the system collapses due to its unsustainability. There is not a lot of difference in principle between believing in the medieval idea of Heaven and believing that junk mortgages could be made AAA by clever repackaging, and that nothing bad would happen.
Marx wanted to find out the truth underlying human society. Jobs wanted to find out what would best satisfy the desires for gadgetry of middle and upper middle class Americans. They were both pretty good at what they did (Marx's analysis of capitalism has turned out about 100% correct), but in the case of Marx his followers screwed up. I strongly expect Jobs's successors to do exactly the same.
Foxes are members of the genus vulpes (the ones we see around are vulpus vulpus). The wolf is canis lupus and the domestic dog is considered to be a subspecies, canis lupus familiaris. Coyotes are a different genus again. Jackal is not a taxonomic description. The dingo is a subspecies of canis lupus and is derived from domestic dogs run wild.
So the GP is right, and you are creating a complete straw man. Wolf, dog and dingo are all part of the same genus but for historic reasons dogs and dingos are only formally called wolves, not in colloquial speech. Foxes and coyotes are from different genera and are not dogs. "Jackal" is a colloquialism. Because pan paniscus and pan troglodytes are in the genus pan, they can both quite properly be called chimpanzees, just as we refer to members of the genus homo as "men", though we are no more like h. afarensis than bonobos are like p. troglodytes. When I tell my dog not to behave like a little wolf, he can reasonably argue that he is one, just one adapted for a specific ecological niche.
You don't know what his contract says. If it says in the small print "Get Microsoft to buy all our shares" and the idiots didn't think of the best way to do that (make them worthless) then they have nothing to sue about. A lot of bonkers management decisions make perfect sense - if you know what they were contracted to do.
The Democrats and Republicans are not really socialist or capitalist parties per se. Everywhere else in the world, red is the colour of Socialism. Hence the song:
The People's flag is deepest red
It shrouded oft our martyred dead
Though cowards scoff and traitors sneer
We'll keep the red flag flying here.
For a capitalist piss-take to the same tune (Tannenbaum)
The working class can kiss my ass
I've got the foreman's job at last....
In the biggest smart phone markets, except for a few strange people like us, it is carriers not end users that buy phones. They want to offer contracts with the best buzzword compliance at the lowest cost and the biggest opportunity to restrict users so they won't use up all their bandwidth allowances. "OS-agnostic" isn't going to appear on a carrier site near you, whereas "Built-in Facebook" and "12MP camera" will.
I would moderate you up, but instead I will agree in print. The upcoming Google tablet looks exactly what is needed. Provide the kids with keyboards and desk stands for writing. Host a few HTML5 applications on your web server. Host an ejabberd or openfire server as a replacement for internal email; far less overhead. There is so much that can be done when you don't need to administer Windows overhead.
The other option is the Blackberry Playbook. Yes, I know there are downsides and the 16Gbytes is being discontinued. It is worth considering because it has a magnetic power adaptor, at least in Europe, and so there is never any need for a child to plug anything into a port. Thus the chance of damage is greatly reduced.
The main problem with both these solutions is the lack of user/admin separation. But it possibly doesn't matter that much. If the worst happens, restore. Every child has its own login, so getting stuff back is not a real problem.
"There is no good or bad karma, there is only karma".
I realise this is slightly OT, but it annoys me a little to have Buddhism replaced by cartoon-Buddhism. Buddhism is not Christianity. It's medieval Catholicism in which the patent lawyers and company executives would spend eternity in a nasty place. For traditional Buddhists, any and all engaging with the illusion that is the world of the five senses is karma.
Modern relativism has largely obsoleted religious sanctions - and I'm not about to regurgitate Durkheim - but the fact is that there are an awful lot of people who in the past would have had the fear of Hell to create a check on their antisocial behaviour. Now, they just don't care. Hence increasing inequality and doctrines like Libertarianism (which basically comes down in the end to, he with the most money to pay lawyers always wins).
We did it because of American pressure; they refused to cooperate with us if we didn't go along with loony McCarthyism. Nobody persecuted Montgomery because his career was over after WW2 and he was of no strategic interest.
You have obviously not test driven recent Kias. BMWs are no longer effortlessly superior; indeed some of their engines for use in German cars are made in England. They are a brand.
New graduates never seem to worry about network speed because they have presumably never had to back up virtual machines or database images. I had one tell me with utter confidence only two months ago that only people stuck in the 1990s worried about network speeds. Well, for baby one page PHP applications with a few hundred records he was right.
And in 2015 they will announce iOS X, with a physical keyboard, and their share price will collapse waiting for product. (typed on a Blackberry Playbook and no, I don't believe it either.)
Nearly 400 years later, they are still disentangling Shakespeare's vulgar jokes. Some people need to grow up. Our English teacher (Newnham, Cambridge) took huge delight in showing that our school version of Merchant of Venice had removed a reference to incontinence but completely missed a vulva joke. I imagine that there will be future PhD theses on early Internet memes.
It now handles bidirectional test, so its market has extended to the users of several dialects of early Classical Greek. This is a must have feature if ever there was one.
Yes, I know. Word processors which handle Hebrew and Arabic allow for changing direction, but this is associated with different languages.
Gladwell, and let me emphasise that this is my personal opinion and I am willing to be persuaded otherwise by evidence, always strikes me as a journalist who has risen without trace, is treated as some sort of philosopher god by a coterie, and yet, like the old Chinese meal joke, ten minutes after reading one of his articles you forget that you read anything and want some intellectual sustenance.
For a real world example though, the biggest medical charity in the world is possibly the Wellcome Trust. Its single biggest achievement is, in effect, preventing Venter from patenting the human genome and thus keeping almost all modern medical research open. How many people know or care who founded it?
I think Microsoft employees are above such stuff. There is plenty of cheap Indian labour to work for their PR astroturfing companies. (Note that the GPP post is not only an account specially created for the job, but the English is poor.)
Slashdot Mirror
And I salute another lover of poetry on /. In fairness to Aristotle, he was struggling with new ideas and this often leads to a hard read. I dislike Plato because, like some modern philosophers, such as Roger Scruton, he used his talent to make the aristocracy feel good about themselves.
I am guessing it is plain old cast magnesium alloy with a PVD coating, like they used to use for phones before the plastics technology caught up. Alumin(i)um can be hard anodised; oxide coatings don't go down well with magnesium.
I could be wrong, but I suspect that the history of computing will record that the Microsoft Surface itself was "a 90's era joke moderated up to +5" (by the Microsoft marketing department).
No, it isn't. It is based on a comparison of what is said in the New Testament versus what is propagated by several mainstream churches. Anybody who has had a theological education (guilty) and has then not had to earn a living by espousing one version or another of Christianity is free to see this and say it. To claim that this is an "ideological" issue involves a great deal of tortuous argument that apparently straightforward statements in the NT actually mean something quite different, plus a willingness to give the writings of Saul of Tarsus primacy over the Gospels.
But why cite Wikipedia when there is so much better information on early history of science? The article you cite describes Alhazen as an "early Islamic scientist" whereas he was pre-scientific, as was Francis Bacon (to whom I am very distantly related, so I have some interest in the subject). Descartes described the experimental method but was a long way from following it. You can argue that Aristotle, by proposing the validity of sensory experience as a clue to understanding the world, was the father of experimental method (experience and experiment have a common root) or you can argue that Galileo was (he actually did experiments to test his ideas), but to try and claim that the moment of truth lies somewhere in between ca. 350 BCE and ca 1600 CE is to try and measure accurately using a jelly stick.
Coincidentally I was reading The Big Short the other day and it was about a very similar theme - how human beings seem to want collectively to believe in something no matter that it is obviously bullshit, and that the people who try to point out that the emperor is naked get no thanks - they even seem to get blamed when the system collapses due to its unsustainability. There is not a lot of difference in principle between believing in the medieval idea of Heaven and believing that junk mortgages could be made AAA by clever repackaging, and that nothing bad would happen.
Marx wanted to find out the truth underlying human society. Jobs wanted to find out what would best satisfy the desires for gadgetry of middle and upper middle class Americans. They were both pretty good at what they did (Marx's analysis of capitalism has turned out about 100% correct), but in the case of Marx his followers screwed up. I strongly expect Jobs's successors to do exactly the same.
Mephitis mephitis.
So the GP is right, and you are creating a complete straw man. Wolf, dog and dingo are all part of the same genus but for historic reasons dogs and dingos are only formally called wolves, not in colloquial speech. Foxes and coyotes are from different genera and are not dogs. "Jackal" is a colloquialism. Because pan paniscus and pan troglodytes are in the genus pan, they can both quite properly be called chimpanzees, just as we refer to members of the genus homo as "men", though we are no more like h. afarensis than bonobos are like p. troglodytes. When I tell my dog not to behave like a little wolf, he can reasonably argue that he is one, just one adapted for a specific ecological niche.
You don't know what his contract says. If it says in the small print "Get Microsoft to buy all our shares" and the idiots didn't think of the best way to do that (make them worthless) then they have nothing to sue about. A lot of bonkers management decisions make perfect sense - if you know what they were contracted to do.
The People's flag is deepest red
It shrouded oft our martyred dead
Though cowards scoff and traitors sneer
We'll keep the red flag flying here.
For a capitalist piss-take to the same tune (Tannenbaum)
The working class can kiss my ass
I've got the foreman's job at last....
In the biggest smart phone markets, except for a few strange people like us, it is carriers not end users that buy phones. They want to offer contracts with the best buzzword compliance at the lowest cost and the biggest opportunity to restrict users so they won't use up all their bandwidth allowances. "OS-agnostic" isn't going to appear on a carrier site near you, whereas "Built-in Facebook" and "12MP camera" will.
The other option is the Blackberry Playbook. Yes, I know there are downsides and the 16Gbytes is being discontinued. It is worth considering because it has a magnetic power adaptor, at least in Europe, and so there is never any need for a child to plug anything into a port. Thus the chance of damage is greatly reduced.
The main problem with both these solutions is the lack of user/admin separation. But it possibly doesn't matter that much. If the worst happens, restore. Every child has its own login, so getting stuff back is not a real problem.
I realise this is slightly OT, but it annoys me a little to have Buddhism replaced by cartoon-Buddhism. Buddhism is not Christianity. It's medieval Catholicism in which the patent lawyers and company executives would spend eternity in a nasty place. For traditional Buddhists, any and all engaging with the illusion that is the world of the five senses is karma.
Modern relativism has largely obsoleted religious sanctions - and I'm not about to regurgitate Durkheim - but the fact is that there are an awful lot of people who in the past would have had the fear of Hell to create a check on their antisocial behaviour. Now, they just don't care. Hence increasing inequality and doctrines like Libertarianism (which basically comes down in the end to, he with the most money to pay lawyers always wins).
We did it because of American pressure; they refused to cooperate with us if we didn't go along with loony McCarthyism. Nobody persecuted Montgomery because his career was over after WW2 and he was of no strategic interest.
Really? So working on biological algorithms and AI wasn't computing?
I think destroying someone's career because of his sexual orientation counts as persecution in most modern societies.
Porsche, now...
New graduates never seem to worry about network speed because they have presumably never had to back up virtual machines or database images. I had one tell me with utter confidence only two months ago that only people stuck in the 1990s worried about network speeds. Well, for baby one page PHP applications with a few hundred records he was right.
And in 2015 they will announce iOS X, with a physical keyboard, and their share price will collapse waiting for product. (typed on a Blackberry Playbook and no, I don't believe it either.)
Nearly 400 years later, they are still disentangling Shakespeare's vulgar jokes. Some people need to grow up. Our English teacher (Newnham, Cambridge) took huge delight in showing that our school version of Merchant of Venice had removed a reference to incontinence but completely missed a vulva joke. I imagine that there will be future PhD theses on early Internet memes.
Yes, I know. Word processors which handle Hebrew and Arabic allow for changing direction, but this is associated with different languages.
Look him up. He promoted some very similar ideas in a pre-computer era. Surprisingly to you perhaps, the answer is probably yes.
No. For a more exact analogy, Gates like William C Durant and Jobs like Dr-Ing Porsche. (Don't know who Durant was? That's rather the point.)
For a real world example though, the biggest medical charity in the world is possibly the Wellcome Trust. Its single biggest achievement is, in effect, preventing Venter from patenting the human genome and thus keeping almost all modern medical research open. How many people know or care who founded it?
I think Microsoft employees are above such stuff. There is plenty of cheap Indian labour to work for their PR astroturfing companies. (Note that the GPP post is not only an account specially created for the job, but the English is poor.)