Ok, I can agree with you there. However, Apple could still improve the experience greatly.
First, they could ask at the beginning of the install instead of a third of the way through. I left my machine expecting it to have finished by the time I got back, but it was hung on this silly alert.
Second, they can update the entire operating system without making you restart until it's over, but they can't update one silly application without forcing you to quit it? They somehow manage to update Safari, Mail, and every other app that comes with the OS on the fly, why not iCal?
It seems plausible to me. When your house is on fire, you're awake and active, and help is either there or on the way. You're not going to be experiencing many common accidental deaths while your house is on fire (slipping in the shower, falling while putting on pants standing up, falling while standing on a chair, etc.) and if you happen to have a heart attack or something, the ambulance is right there. As I said, I don't know how accurate that file is, but it's believable.
According to this file I keep on my web site, domestic airlines are significantly safer than bicycles on a fatalities-per-hour basis. How accurate that file is, I don't know, and if you have better figures I would love to see them.
To me, your story about the teachers' union is not so much a condemnation of bad accounting practices as it is a condemnation of idiotic, blind investment strategies. If their plan had been something more than "pile it all on the S&P 500 and hope for the best", they wouldn't have been screwed so much.
Why does everybody use airliners as a point of comparison when talking about dangerous things? You're in more danger when riding your bicycle than you are as a passenger on a commercial airliner, but I never hear anybody comparing asteroids to bicycle-related deaths.
I know. That's why I said "even when it's shared like crazy".
You're going to have a very hard time convincing me that the short-range, proven-technology wifi link is going to be more of a problem than the satellite uplink at 30,000 feet and 500mph from the middle of the ocean.
Re:Okay, I need to come out and say this..
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You're taking the experience of a single person and drawing a lot of unwarranted conclusions from it. Ever hear the phrase, "correlation does not imply causation"? Your uncle took a bunch of weird stuff. Your uncle has not died. The fact that these two things didn't happen at the same time doesn't mean a thing. This is why you need actual double-blind medical studies with control groups and the whole deal, to find out exactly what is cause and what is merely coincidence.
Re:Why not some mainstream fallacies?
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· Score: 1
The problem with not believing in God is once you get to the point where it can be proven, its too late. Therefore, the logical conclusion is to believe in God. - Pascal's Wager
The reason Pascal's Wager doesn't work is because God is a fundamentally faith-based thing. Going through the motions just because you don't want to be damned to Hell for eternity simply doesn't work. You lose either way with Pascal's Wager.
The same is not true with global warming. In this case, "going through the motions" is the whole ball of wax. If you take the probability of global warming happening multiplied by the cost of what happens if it does, and it turns out to be more than the cost of doing something about it, then you should logically do something about it even if it's not proven.
90% of a slow 11 mbps wifi link gives you 1.1mbps of real traffic. Subtract out overhead, and you can count on 700kbps of actual real wifi bandwidth. If I can get 700kbps at 30,000 feet from the middle of the Atlantic, I'll be pretty happy, even when it's shared like crazy.
Huh? Why can't you do QoS with wifi? The router is still routing all of your packets out to the internet, so it can still queue packets, drop them, whatever it wants to do. Unless people are using evil software, nobody's computer is going to be filling the air with junk if they aren't receiving the ACKs.
A 747 is over 200 feet long. If the switch is in the front of the plane (entirely possible), then the average distance to a seat will be about 100ft. If the switch is in the middle of the plane, then the average distance will be more like 50ft. That is still a hell of a lot of wire.
As far as 802.11x collision detection, even if it's really sucky, how could that possibly dominate when all of these users are being squeezed through a single, small satellite uplink? "A small fraction of 350 users" is going to be something like 10-20 users, and the various wifi protocols are obviously able to deal with that kind of situation. The limiting factor is going to be your connection, not your wifi.
I would agree with you if Apple had a monopoly in the personal MP3 player market, but they don't. Last I checked, they owned about 50% of the market, which is far from being a monopoly. When Microsoft was convicted, they owned around 95% of the desktop OS market, which is an enormously different situation both legally and morally.
Pay careful attention. Real is distributing DRM'd files which they hacked to be compatible with Apple's hardware. Apple did not disable naked, un-DRM'd MP3s or AACs, they only disabled Real's half-assed reverse engineering of their DRM scheme. Your complaint should be with Real, not with Apple.
This is not anti-reverse-engineering. That would be if Apple decided to start suing Real because they hacked their files to make them run on Apple's hardware. Instead, Apple applied a software patch to disable Real's reverse engineering, which is exactly the kind of solution one should appreciate.
I'm not sure how disabling a feature that was never supposed to work in the first place is anticompetitive. If Real wanted to, they could sell naked MP3s or AACs and the iPod would happily play them. Instead, they're trying to latch on to Apple's proprietary DRM scheme, and now they've been burned by it. This is no different than an application using undocumented APIs and then exploding because those APIs changed in the next OS revision. Microsoft's screwing of Lotus was on a totally different level.
If you don't want to see the trailers and advertising, wait until after they're done to enter the theater. Nobody forces you to show up at the exact time that's listed, especially since you know that the first twenty minutes is going to consist of trailers and ads.
In my experience, most people who are inconsiderate are doing so because they're clueless, not because they're an asshole. If you gently remind them that there are in fact other people around and that these people don't appreciate the noise, they'll most likely shut up.
PS: I would assume that the artists/Apple get more money this way since you don't get PayPal taking their cut.
Say what? You think that Target, which has to pay for a living cashier, a huge store, electricity, overhead, security, etc., is going to be less expensive than flinging a few bits down the wire? For traditional CDs, the store itself typically gets half the price. They probably won't be quite so ridiculous with a paper gift certificate, but I would be shocked if the percentage were anywhere close to what they have to pay to the credit card companies and to PayPal, much less lower.
This is a common justification used by music and software pirates as well as spammers. Just because you have no money doesn't make your advertisement any less spam. Spam isn't just restricted to e-mail. I singled you out because of your "you would too" remark, which is obviously not true.
Yes, I know how they work. The part you're missing is that there will be so little radioactive material, spread over such a wide area, that there is no danger from it. Don't start being afraid just because the magic "nuclear" word is involved.
Slashdot Mirror
That's wonderful. How do you tell the difference?
Ok, I can agree with you there. However, Apple could still improve the experience greatly.
First, they could ask at the beginning of the install instead of a third of the way through. I left my machine expecting it to have finished by the time I got back, but it was hung on this silly alert.
Second, they can update the entire operating system without making you restart until it's over, but they can't update one silly application without forcing you to quit it? They somehow manage to update Safari, Mail, and every other app that comes with the OS on the fly, why not iCal?
It seems plausible to me. When your house is on fire, you're awake and active, and help is either there or on the way. You're not going to be experiencing many common accidental deaths while your house is on fire (slipping in the shower, falling while putting on pants standing up, falling while standing on a chair, etc.) and if you happen to have a heart attack or something, the ambulance is right there. As I said, I don't know how accurate that file is, but it's believable.
According to this file I keep on my web site, domestic airlines are significantly safer than bicycles on a fatalities-per-hour basis. How accurate that file is, I don't know, and if you have better figures I would love to see them.
To me, your story about the teachers' union is not so much a condemnation of bad accounting practices as it is a condemnation of idiotic, blind investment strategies. If their plan had been something more than "pile it all on the S&P 500 and hope for the best", they wouldn't have been screwed so much.
Why does everybody use airliners as a point of comparison when talking about dangerous things? You're in more danger when riding your bicycle than you are as a passenger on a commercial airliner, but I never hear anybody comparing asteroids to bicycle-related deaths.
I know. That's why I said "even when it's shared like crazy".
You're going to have a very hard time convincing me that the short-range, proven-technology wifi link is going to be more of a problem than the satellite uplink at 30,000 feet and 500mph from the middle of the ocean.
You're taking the experience of a single person and drawing a lot of unwarranted conclusions from it. Ever hear the phrase, "correlation does not imply causation"? Your uncle took a bunch of weird stuff. Your uncle has not died. The fact that these two things didn't happen at the same time doesn't mean a thing. This is why you need actual double-blind medical studies with control groups and the whole deal, to find out exactly what is cause and what is merely coincidence.
The problem with not believing in God is once you get to the point where it can be proven, its too late. Therefore, the logical conclusion is to believe in God. - Pascal's Wager
The reason Pascal's Wager doesn't work is because God is a fundamentally faith-based thing. Going through the motions just because you don't want to be damned to Hell for eternity simply doesn't work. You lose either way with Pascal's Wager.
The same is not true with global warming. In this case, "going through the motions" is the whole ball of wax. If you take the probability of global warming happening multiplied by the cost of what happens if it does, and it turns out to be more than the cost of doing something about it, then you should logically do something about it even if it's not proven.
90% of a slow 11 mbps wifi link gives you 1.1mbps of real traffic. Subtract out overhead, and you can count on 700kbps of actual real wifi bandwidth. If I can get 700kbps at 30,000 feet from the middle of the Atlantic, I'll be pretty happy, even when it's shared like crazy.
Huh? Why can't you do QoS with wifi? The router is still routing all of your packets out to the internet, so it can still queue packets, drop them, whatever it wants to do. Unless people are using evil software, nobody's computer is going to be filling the air with junk if they aren't receiving the ACKs.
A 747 is over 200 feet long. If the switch is in the front of the plane (entirely possible), then the average distance to a seat will be about 100ft. If the switch is in the middle of the plane, then the average distance will be more like 50ft. That is still a hell of a lot of wire.
As far as 802.11x collision detection, even if it's really sucky, how could that possibly dominate when all of these users are being squeezed through a single, small satellite uplink? "A small fraction of 350 users" is going to be something like 10-20 users, and the various wifi protocols are obviously able to deal with that kind of situation. The limiting factor is going to be your connection, not your wifi.
If my company was forced to change names because of a lawsuit, I would certainly try to make it sound like it was voluntary.
Why can't the updater just quit iCal by itself? This isn't exactly rocket surgery.
Ok, genius, how exactly is 350 seats times 100 feet of cable per seat better than a single wifi router covering the entire airplane?
I would agree with you if Apple had a monopoly in the personal MP3 player market, but they don't. Last I checked, they owned about 50% of the market, which is far from being a monopoly. When Microsoft was convicted, they owned around 95% of the desktop OS market, which is an enormously different situation both legally and morally.
Pay careful attention. Real is distributing DRM'd files which they hacked to be compatible with Apple's hardware. Apple did not disable naked, un-DRM'd MP3s or AACs, they only disabled Real's half-assed reverse engineering of their DRM scheme. Your complaint should be with Real, not with Apple.
This is not anti-reverse-engineering. That would be if Apple decided to start suing Real because they hacked their files to make them run on Apple's hardware. Instead, Apple applied a software patch to disable Real's reverse engineering, which is exactly the kind of solution one should appreciate.
I'm not sure how disabling a feature that was never supposed to work in the first place is anticompetitive. If Real wanted to, they could sell naked MP3s or AACs and the iPod would happily play them. Instead, they're trying to latch on to Apple's proprietary DRM scheme, and now they've been burned by it. This is no different than an application using undocumented APIs and then exploding because those APIs changed in the next OS revision. Microsoft's screwing of Lotus was on a totally different level.
If you don't want to see the trailers and advertising, wait until after they're done to enter the theater. Nobody forces you to show up at the exact time that's listed, especially since you know that the first twenty minutes is going to consist of trailers and ads.
In my experience, most people who are inconsiderate are doing so because they're clueless, not because they're an asshole. If you gently remind them that there are in fact other people around and that these people don't appreciate the noise, they'll most likely shut up.
I don't quite understand this. Does the cell phone create a magical energy field which prevents the seatmate from telling them to shut up?
PS: I would assume that the artists/Apple get more money this way since you don't get PayPal taking their cut.
Say what? You think that Target, which has to pay for a living cashier, a huge store, electricity, overhead, security, etc., is going to be less expensive than flinging a few bits down the wire? For traditional CDs, the store itself typically gets half the price. They probably won't be quite so ridiculous with a paper gift certificate, but I would be shocked if the percentage were anywhere close to what they have to pay to the credit card companies and to PayPal, much less lower.
This is a common justification used by music and software pirates as well as spammers. Just because you have no money doesn't make your advertisement any less spam. Spam isn't just restricted to e-mail. I singled you out because of your "you would too" remark, which is obviously not true.
not to be crude, but bite me.
Same to you, buddy.
Yes, I know how they work. The part you're missing is that there will be so little radioactive material, spread over such a wide area, that there is no danger from it. Don't start being afraid just because the magic "nuclear" word is involved.