I don't think it's a problem of not "understanding" computers. Rather that the language used in a lot of cases for the certificates is so verbose, that it confuses people. Remember that when you deal with the average member of the population you're dealing with someone who reads and writes somewhere between a grade 7-10 level. That means that their grasp of language is lower, their understanding is lower, and their frustration level is lower.
This. Developers seem convinced that adding more explanation can result in a better educated user. In reality, it just guarantees that fewer people will have read the whole thing. Make informational text as short as possible, but no shorter. IMHO, that's one of the things Apple traditionally nails in their designs that Microsoft flubs. "Save your work?" is a vastly more useful message in a dialog box than something like, "you have clicked a button which is used to close this application. if you close this application without saving changes to your data, it will be lost. You might also want to keep working. Click yes to save your work, no to discard it, or click cancel to continue working."
With Certificate issues, Firefox makes me jump through so many hoops that all my focus is on getting through the hoops, rather than evaluating security. I've never understood how the 'get certificate' button is supposed to make me safer. It seems to just add more steps in an effort to force me to pay attention to the process, but IMO fails to actually provide a security benefit.
I'm an Engineer, and my logbook must be kept for 6 years after my death for legal reasons. If all goes well, that'll be in 70+ years. It is unlikely at best that anything written on a computer will be readable in that time frame.
Are you kidding? In 70 years, my cell phone's built in camera will have enough resolution to do full forensic data recovery just by taking a picture of a hard drive.
Certainly agree here. I've never understood why you would want more than this. Films run at 23.976fps, and you don't get many people complaining that the action is jittery. Most of us can't tell. I fail to see, therefore, why games should need to run at any higher frame rate -- except for issues of poor design where stuff is only calculated once per frame that may need to actually be calculated more frequently than that.
Actually, films run at 24 frames per second. 23.976 is what you get when you try and bash 24p into an NTSC time base. Pedantic, but true. And, films tend to look good at 24 fps because they have professional directors, DOP's, and cinematographers who understand the limitations of the medium, and are careful not to shoot stuff that looks terrible. When they do shoot stuff that looks terrible, the editor makes sure you never see it. With automatically driven cameras, and unpredictable action, most games would potentially look quite bad at 24 fps, even with high quality motion blur to make it 'realistic' for the frame rate.
That said, PAL has always been at 50 Hz. Lots of people prefer PAL50 to NTSC because the bandwidth is used for more image instead of higher frequency. It isn't *that* big of a tradeoff.
You can't place apps in categories, or theme the dashboard. Overall, I keep hearing how Apple's UI is the best in the world and they just do everything right. I enjoy my iPhone, don't get me wrong. But this UI leaves a lot to be desired.
Being terrible and being the best are nowhere near being mutually exclusive when it comes to phone UI's, unfortunately.
The speeck recognition people have broken their promises for several decades now. Using humans is still the only working speaker-independent way to do it.
Okay, humans never screw up their speeck recognition, but that doesn't guarantee that the speeck is correctly transcribed.
Ridiculous. Think of one of the most interesting discoveries made by the Phoenix lander -- the frozen condensate that formed on one of the landing struts. A human would have noticed that immediately and been able to analyze it in detail. Conversely, a robotic probe can do only what it's programmed to do. All we can do is stroke our beards and say "Hmm, wonder what that is?"
When you're not only expecting the unexpected, but hoping for it, you want human boots on the ground. One human mission is easily worth twenty robotic missions.
I fully support the idea of human exploration. Don't get me wrong. But, think about comparing the capacities of a robotic mission with a mass and money budget equal to what would be consumed by a manned mission, and you suddenly have a very different set of capabilities in the robotic mission. And, if the robotic mission costs 1/5 what a manned mission would, it's not clear that a manned mission worth "20 robotic missions" is such a great bargain.
IMO, the real payoff for manned missions won't really pay off until we have genuine colonies with a significant space based civillian economy. When a middle class guy can decide to move his family to Mars, and pay for the trip on an pretty average salary, then we'll finally have accomplished something big. It'll take a long, long time to get there. But, when it does, we'll have mastered what it takes to gain access to all the natural resources in the solar system, and have solved issues of cheap energy, and the whole human species will be much, much richer as a result.
I know it seems like a pretty distant, utopian dream at this point, but it's absolutely possible. It takes a lot of hard work starting ASAP, but the potential payoff is large enough to justify a manned Mars mission today.
My Palm 1000 from 1996 invalidates the claims in this patent through prior art. I seem to remember the Apple Newton being touchscreen too, but I didn't have one, so I'm not sure.
This isn't going anywhere.
Newton certainly had a touch screen. It also had gesture recognition with things like "scribble" to delete a graphical object onscreen. And, it isn't like Newton invented the touchscreen, either. (Though, it wouldn't surprise me if Apple was out in front at that point with some of the "gesture" stuff, while previous examples used menus and such for everything.)
And, from an end user standpoint, is there that much difference between a touch screen used with a stylus vs. a classic light pen?
PowerPC based Apple servers did not compete with IBM's Power Systems in any way.
Fair enough, but the question was where Apple would be now if they had stuck with IBM CPU's. Without a credible desktop CPU option, they'd have embedded and server CPU's, which means they'd probably be trying to figure out some use for big POWER chips. Possibly in some insane Mac Pro analogue, but much more likley that Apple would be trying to do something in the POWER Server market.
What's amusing to me is that people think education or health care is a proper role for the Federal Government.
One of the defining points of a free market is an educated consumer that is able to make rational, informed choices. One of the defining points of distributing education is that consumers are not yet educated. Consequently, a free market can never be an efficient model for distribution of education.
So, if fully private education is deeply irrational, you turn to the public sector. There are very real public benefits to widespread education, so this makes sense. In the United States, we have several levels of public: the State and the Federal governments. Under our current system, states are greatly underfunded, as the bulk of revenue goes to the Federal government. Also, levels of funding vary wildly from state to state. The poorest, least educated states are least able to invest in education. They would also see the greatest benefit from that investment. So, nationally it makes sense to have large investment in the poorest states, as that is where you'll see the biggest bang for your buck in terms of economic benefit per investment. Consequently, it makes sense that education should be a responsibility for the Federal government.
You can make an argument that it isn't an enumerated power of congress. Fine, go and try to get an ammendment passed granting congress that authority. In the real world, a strict congressional adherence to enumerated powers has been shat on so much over that last two centuries that nobody really cares about it. Congress has whatever authority people let it get away with. Sad but true.
Probably not in the workstation market. Possibly trying to figure out a way to credibly attack the server market by competing with their supplier of server CPU's in a very awkward way. And, presumably doing a bunch of interesting things in the embedded space beyond iPod / iPhone. I'm imagining all sorts of wacky embedded PPC chips being targeted toward in-car Apple branded entertainment systems, and set top boxes, etc. The "Macintosh" would basically be dead. IBM doesn't make a chip that is suitable for a high end desktop system. None of what was announced today it suitable for the desktop market.
Why assume that? Pharma/biotech companies give millions to electoral campaigns, and employ thousands in many voting districts. As far as I'm concerned, Congress intended to do something very similar to what you've suggested -- to remove the medical safe harbor for all but a few medical purposes.
Those few medical purposes in practice: saving the life of a congressman.
There are lots of other examples, and you DARE to say that incitement to hatred should not be a crime.
I'll dare to say that. Nobody ever wanted to ban the speech they agreed with. Nobody ever tried to ban speech that was pleasant. Nobody ever needed to codify a freedom of speech to protect pleasantries. Freedom of speech only exists to protect the speech we find hateful, terrible, and horrible. Freedom of speech only protects the speech that we want desperately to ban because the speech that nobody wants to ban never needed the protection.
Once you decide that it is okay to ban speech that you don't like, then you are giving approval for somebody else to ban speech that they don't like as soon as they get their turn in power. Even if they don't like speech that you consider vitally important to humanity.
The second you try to stop the KKK from blaming problems on niggers, you establish the basic legal framework that the next guy can try to use to outlaw talking about evolution.
Seriously, have you ever met anyone anywhere who doesn't like to laugh? It's what we laugh at that's interesting, and hardly anyone ever says what that is.
Just a heads up for everybody, incase you don't have experience with this type of person. Anybody who has really serious issues with laughter, and hates to laugh, is likely to stab you. Now, you've all gotten to find out the easy way.
For example, don't ask people what their "body type" is (abstract category) but what their height and weight are, how fast they can run or walk a mile, how many miles they run or walk each week, when was the last time they walked more than a mile, or biked more than a five miles, or swam more than 500 m, and so on. Then generate the abstract category for them: "couch potato", "morbidly obese", etc, rather than letting users define "athletic" or "slim" or "average" any way they want to (I've seen morbidly obese people, who have posted pictures of themselves, categorize themselves as "average".)
Perfectly logical, but probably not very likely to go well. If they put themselves as "average" then they'll probably also put themselves as an inaccurate weight. With no way to verify the information, you'll get some people who are pathologically honest, and others who don't have a single accurate answer. So, I'd say let people fill in that information, but probably don't rely on it for much automatic grouping and classification.
That 'free' bit is a great selling point but is probably one of the site's biggest flaws. The comment in the summary about 'a site with the least riff-raff' isn't just a silly notion. When I used OKCupid regularly, I encountered a large number of women I would classify as crazy. That's not to say the other sites manage to filter out 100% of the crazies but personal experience has shown a connection between 'Cheap' and 'Crazy,' thus a free site is going to have a higher proportion of 'riff-raff.'
A site full of women so desperate to meet people that they are happy to pay for it seems like a poor way to filter out the riff raff. Maybe a good way to filter out the unemployed, but that isn't saying much. Sure, a free site like okcupid will have plenty of crazies, but none of them is bound and determined to get their money's worth, so it is a lot more practical to meet some people, make friends, have a good time and see where it goes from there, etc.
Two years ago, my company had "No Current Plans" to move our MS Applications to their 2007 versions, but here we are, with Office/Exchange/Sharepoint all 2007.
"No Current Plans" may just mean just that... they don't have any plans. That's a far stretch from "we won't".
Huzzah! That was basically my reaction. I want to know who these crazy people are that think they have specific plans for deploying a product that doesn't even exist. I mean, it's not like MS is some wonderkompany that always delivers everything they promise. Just like any vendor, they sometimes let their mouth get ahead of their products. Consequently, anybody who has a specific timeframe for deployment of something they can't have tested and researched or anything is crazy. Or maybe those companies just buy whatever off the shelf from Best Buy and hope that whatever apps they use will run. I guess that type of model guarantees some Win7 deployments before year-end.
Is this just smoke and mirrors. From what I have read this is Linux with a custom GUI on the front end. Depending on how they market it and which distro it is built from will probably dictate how far it goes. I use the *buntu and Suse variants of Linux on a daily basis. Unless this offers any real advantage I won't move to it even it I purchase a netbook with it I would probably format and load Ubuntu on it.
Android technically uses a Linux kernel, too. But you can't really tell as an app developer that it is Linux. You are very far removed from the kernel on Android, so it could just as well have been build with almost any kernel. Mac OS X sort of uses a BSD kernel. But, Mac OS X is a different OS from FreeBSD in every way that actually matters to anybody. It presents itself as a lot more traditionally UNIX like than Android does, but that isn't saying a lot. It uses frameworks, considers Objective C to be the 1st class language for app development, and doesn't support X11 out of the box.
Until we know more about Chrome OS, we can't really be sure if this is really just another Linux distro with a new coat of paint, or if it is going to be something completely foreign that technically uses a very familiar kernel under the hood. For all Google has said about "reinventing what an OS should be," I'm expecting something that behaves more like an appliance that a full Linux distro. Think Tivo. Those are Linux boxes, too.
Really? Am I the only person that found it interesting that Lucene, the only non C/C++ implementation, gave some pretty impressive stats? I mean, it's written in Java and although it has a slower index time its search time, index size and relevancy are impressive.
Meh, look at any/. article about Java and you'll see somebody complain about the speed of Java, and a reply explaining that Java isn't particularly slow. It has some weaknesses that mean it isn't as optimal as really good C, but it also has some capacity for dynamic optimisation which can make it faster than poorly optimised C. Regardless in a DB type application, a lot of your time will be spent in vendor supplied code. Whether that is disk access supplied by the OS or some functions available as part of the language standard library. A lot of actually runs this type of app isn't particularly guaranteed to be written in the same language as the app.
Also, most of the Java code you run across in real life is crap. That's not a dig at the language itself. IMO, it's the volume of poor coders that give Java a reputation for slowness more than anything else. You probably won't find any secret double ninja techniques in Lucene as much as you will just find relatively few embarrassing fuckups.
Oops... I forgot to add that some of them even contain caffeine if you want. And your fruit juice? Those often have more calories than soda. An 8oz serving of OJ is 120 calories, so that's 15 calories per ounce, where a 150 calorie 12oz soda is only 12.5. The juice has more nutrients and is better for your nutrition, but it is NOT in any way a "lite" alternative to soda or other sugary drinks.
Excellent point! My situation is a little bit different from that of the OP because I have a pretty high metabolism, so I'm not dealing with weight issues. This is definitely an area where trying to figure out a "healthy" way to work means knowing your own body and your own needs. Heck, last month when I was working 60-65 hour weeks with almost no sleep due to a terrible flopping day/night schedule, I had so much uptime that I actually started taking in a lot more calories than usual just to keep moving. That's when I got into the burger habit that I am now transitioning out of because my schedule is finally semi-sane again.
I have been working night shift in a NOC lately, myself. Deep into my 12 hour shifts, there is almost nobody in the building, so I can do laps. I carry my blackberry which will yell if I actually have to respond to an outage. I'm never more than 30 seconds away from my desk while I do laps. It's also easy to do jumping jacks, pushups and situps while with line of sight to my desk. Add in the occasional jumping jacks, and I'm oddly enough probably getting myself in better shape since having started this schedule. Go figure.
Of course, there is also the days off. I could theretically use those for excercise. I used to be in the habit of jogging when I had a working iPod because I could listen to education audio books while I ran. Now I can be at work while I run. I think I feel silly if the only thing I'm doing is running. As much as I know it is important, I don't really feel it is an accomplishment on its own.
Also, be careful with what you eat. Quantity is obviously a concern, but quality is a huge factor as well. On this schedule, I never really have time to cook the days that I work. The result is that I eat more burgers than would be ideal since that's the most convenient thing. When I'm at work, I often microwave frozen TV dinners or cans of soup with enough sodium to preserve an elephant. I'm trying to make a point of sticking to fruit juice instead of energy drinks, making the TV dinners the 'healthy' option, and at least squeezing in enough time to eat something better than a burger on my way home from work.
too much righteous anger... the GP's p.o.v. was that the battery improvements over the years, while real, are less than spectacular. 200Wh/kg you say? Wow, that's so impressive! To put things in perspective, the light dino juice has an energy density of about 11000Wh/kg.
True, however it is much slower to recharge than modern batteries. First you have to build Jurassic Park, and then be very patient.
A big problem I have with colonizing Mars is that, unfortunately, it's really rather easy to kill everybody on a planet. What's kept people from doing that in the recent past is that we all [well, all but six people right now] live here...killing everybody doesn't do anybody any good.
But any kind of interplanetary war would be swift and devastating. At least, that's how it appears to me.
The moon, or the asteroids, might actually be more defensible.
An interplanetary war might be quite devastating, but it would be unlikely to be swift. Planetkiller lasers are very hard to make, so a 22nd century Red Scare would probably consist of bombs on rockets. Maybe antimatter instead of nuclear, or something like that. But, the opening salvo would probably take weeks to get from Mars to Earth. In all liklihood, Interplanetary warfare will leave you enemies with plenty of time to huff and puff and deploy adequate defenses. Assume the invention of FTL, and that all changes very quickly. But, nobody is sure that FTL is even possible, so it is hard to assume it will play a big role in the forseeable future.
But, I definitely see your point. If everybody lives in one city, nobody wants to flatten the city. If everybody lives on one island, nobody wants to sink the island. I think that even in the fairly distant future, MAD may prove to be an effective strategy. After all, no matter how big a bomb you land on the enemy planet, the shockwave travels at the (local) speed of sound. The amount of time it takes to circle the Earth at Mach 1 is more than enough time to decide whether or not you want to push the big shiny red button.
The essential problem with free software is that most of it is written to scratch someone's itch. Usually, the ones who start off coding to fix their problems are the developers. Over the last decade that I've used linux (and other f/oss) on my desktop, I've seen a radical shift in how the developers are influenced to do what a user wants. More so, I've seen the system favour the ones who have user focus rather than dictate from their ivory towers and yell back "sure, send me a patch & we'll talk about it". You did your bit and the others stepped on those to get where they want... and with GPL in place they didn't really step on your toes.
This is basically what I was thinking. Free Software has no obligation to conquer the market. It doesn't need to increase sales. It's an emergent community, not unlike the "gray goo" of micro machines from so many SciFi novels. If the users want something specific, they can hire somebody to do it.
In the end, it all goes back to Adam Smith's writings on Economics. The baker doesn't bake his loaves because he wants you to have a full belly. He does it because his is selfish. He just wants your money. That enlightened self interest make the world go 'round. Likewise, the KDE developer doesn't have to write code for the sake of conquering the world, or suiting users. He isn't obliged. He writes code because he wants to use a good Desktop Environment. That's what it boild down to. He's a greedy bastard. And, that's enough.
Or, for another analogy, Zombies don't have a master plan for world domination. One zombie just wants to eat your brain. That's enough to make zombies scary. He's not thinking about the brain after yours. He's not thinking about all the brains he'll eat next week. One zombie doesn't have to worry about broad strategy. Going brain by brain is the strategy, and it works.
If developers work on whatever they feel is important, Free Software eventually wins, just like the zombies. If people don't like new things, then they pay attention to old things, and work from the old version to fix things. Free Software can never get worse. Old versions never get discontinued. Free Software is an always expanding ecosystem, and it grows with every line of code that is shared with the public.
What does the US State Department have to do with an election in Iran? By all means they should use their normal channels to express their views. But for me, asking twitter to keep operating for this reason is a minor example of the way other countries have long been interfering in Iranian politics.
Meh, The US State Department talking to a US company that provides a services that some Iranians use is hardly a particularly good example of external political influences in the middle east. If anything the big story would be if somebody actually managed to persuade Twitter to keep operating.:) But seriously, when you look at things like Operation Ajax, you can see that the US just trying to make sure Iranians have a convenient way to speak for themselves is extremely hands-off, and probably a very appropriate way to avoid having unclean hands in the situation. The previous administration would have loudly and openly run their mouth about the situation, and inadvertently marginalized the reformist element in Iran by trying to support it. Trying to make sure they can speak for themselves is probably about the best thing America can do right now.
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This. Developers seem convinced that adding more explanation can result in a better educated user. In reality, it just guarantees that fewer people will have read the whole thing. Make informational text as short as possible, but no shorter. IMHO, that's one of the things Apple traditionally nails in their designs that Microsoft flubs. "Save your work?" is a vastly more useful message in a dialog box than something like, "you have clicked a button which is used to close this application. if you close this application without saving changes to your data, it will be lost. You might also want to keep working. Click yes to save your work, no to discard it, or click cancel to continue working."
With Certificate issues, Firefox makes me jump through so many hoops that all my focus is on getting through the hoops, rather than evaluating security. I've never understood how the 'get certificate' button is supposed to make me safer. It seems to just add more steps in an effort to force me to pay attention to the process, but IMO fails to actually provide a security benefit.
Are you kidding? In 70 years, my cell phone's built in camera will have enough resolution to do full forensic data recovery just by taking a picture of a hard drive.
Actually, films run at 24 frames per second. 23.976 is what you get when you try and bash 24p into an NTSC time base. Pedantic, but true. And, films tend to look good at 24 fps because they have professional directors, DOP's, and cinematographers who understand the limitations of the medium, and are careful not to shoot stuff that looks terrible. When they do shoot stuff that looks terrible, the editor makes sure you never see it. With automatically driven cameras, and unpredictable action, most games would potentially look quite bad at 24 fps, even with high quality motion blur to make it 'realistic' for the frame rate.
That said, PAL has always been at 50 Hz. Lots of people prefer PAL50 to NTSC because the bandwidth is used for more image instead of higher frequency. It isn't *that* big of a tradeoff.
Being terrible and being the best are nowhere near being mutually exclusive when it comes to phone UI's, unfortunately.
Okay, humans never screw up their speeck recognition, but that doesn't guarantee that the speeck is correctly transcribed.
I fully support the idea of human exploration. Don't get me wrong. But, think about comparing the capacities of a robotic mission with a mass and money budget equal to what would be consumed by a manned mission, and you suddenly have a very different set of capabilities in the robotic mission. And, if the robotic mission costs 1/5 what a manned mission would, it's not clear that a manned mission worth "20 robotic missions" is such a great bargain.
IMO, the real payoff for manned missions won't really pay off until we have genuine colonies with a significant space based civillian economy. When a middle class guy can decide to move his family to Mars, and pay for the trip on an pretty average salary, then we'll finally have accomplished something big. It'll take a long, long time to get there. But, when it does, we'll have mastered what it takes to gain access to all the natural resources in the solar system, and have solved issues of cheap energy, and the whole human species will be much, much richer as a result.
I know it seems like a pretty distant, utopian dream at this point, but it's absolutely possible. It takes a lot of hard work starting ASAP, but the potential payoff is large enough to justify a manned Mars mission today.
Newton certainly had a touch screen. It also had gesture recognition with things like "scribble" to delete a graphical object onscreen. And, it isn't like Newton invented the touchscreen, either. (Though, it wouldn't surprise me if Apple was out in front at that point with some of the "gesture" stuff, while previous examples used menus and such for everything.)
And, from an end user standpoint, is there that much difference between a touch screen used with a stylus vs. a classic light pen?
Fair enough, but the question was where Apple would be now if they had stuck with IBM CPU's. Without a credible desktop CPU option, they'd have embedded and server CPU's, which means they'd probably be trying to figure out some use for big POWER chips. Possibly in some insane Mac Pro analogue, but much more likley that Apple would be trying to do something in the POWER Server market.
One of the defining points of a free market is an educated consumer that is able to make rational, informed choices. One of the defining points of distributing education is that consumers are not yet educated. Consequently, a free market can never be an efficient model for distribution of education.
So, if fully private education is deeply irrational, you turn to the public sector. There are very real public benefits to widespread education, so this makes sense. In the United States, we have several levels of public: the State and the Federal governments. Under our current system, states are greatly underfunded, as the bulk of revenue goes to the Federal government. Also, levels of funding vary wildly from state to state. The poorest, least educated states are least able to invest in education. They would also see the greatest benefit from that investment. So, nationally it makes sense to have large investment in the poorest states, as that is where you'll see the biggest bang for your buck in terms of economic benefit per investment. Consequently, it makes sense that education should be a responsibility for the Federal government.
You can make an argument that it isn't an enumerated power of congress. Fine, go and try to get an ammendment passed granting congress that authority. In the real world, a strict congressional adherence to enumerated powers has been shat on so much over that last two centuries that nobody really cares about it. Congress has whatever authority people let it get away with. Sad but true.
Probably not in the workstation market. Possibly trying to figure out a way to credibly attack the server market by competing with their supplier of server CPU's in a very awkward way. And, presumably doing a bunch of interesting things in the embedded space beyond iPod / iPhone. I'm imagining all sorts of wacky embedded PPC chips being targeted toward in-car Apple branded entertainment systems, and set top boxes, etc. The "Macintosh" would basically be dead. IBM doesn't make a chip that is suitable for a high end desktop system. None of what was announced today it suitable for the desktop market.
Those few medical purposes in practice: saving the life of a congressman.
I'll dare to say that. Nobody ever wanted to ban the speech they agreed with. Nobody ever tried to ban speech that was pleasant. Nobody ever needed to codify a freedom of speech to protect pleasantries. Freedom of speech only exists to protect the speech we find hateful, terrible, and horrible. Freedom of speech only protects the speech that we want desperately to ban because the speech that nobody wants to ban never needed the protection.
Once you decide that it is okay to ban speech that you don't like, then you are giving approval for somebody else to ban speech that they don't like as soon as they get their turn in power. Even if they don't like speech that you consider vitally important to humanity.
The second you try to stop the KKK from blaming problems on niggers, you establish the basic legal framework that the next guy can try to use to outlaw talking about evolution.
Just a heads up for everybody, incase you don't have experience with this type of person. Anybody who has really serious issues with laughter, and hates to laugh, is likely to stab you. Now, you've all gotten to find out the easy way.
Perfectly logical, but probably not very likely to go well. If they put themselves as "average" then they'll probably also put themselves as an inaccurate weight. With no way to verify the information, you'll get some people who are pathologically honest, and others who don't have a single accurate answer. So, I'd say let people fill in that information, but probably don't rely on it for much automatic grouping and classification.
A site full of women so desperate to meet people that they are happy to pay for it seems like a poor way to filter out the riff raff. Maybe a good way to filter out the unemployed, but that isn't saying much. Sure, a free site like okcupid will have plenty of crazies, but none of them is bound and determined to get their money's worth, so it is a lot more practical to meet some people, make friends, have a good time and see where it goes from there, etc.
Huzzah! That was basically my reaction. I want to know who these crazy people are that think they have specific plans for deploying a product that doesn't even exist. I mean, it's not like MS is some wonderkompany that always delivers everything they promise. Just like any vendor, they sometimes let their mouth get ahead of their products. Consequently, anybody who has a specific timeframe for deployment of something they can't have tested and researched or anything is crazy. Or maybe those companies just buy whatever off the shelf from Best Buy and hope that whatever apps they use will run. I guess that type of model guarantees some Win7 deployments before year-end.
Can we at least use the toilet to take out a blonde?
Bad analogy guy has actually pulled off one I like today. It's oddly on topic if you think about it slightly too long.
Android technically uses a Linux kernel, too. But you can't really tell as an app developer that it is Linux. You are very far removed from the kernel on Android, so it could just as well have been build with almost any kernel. Mac OS X sort of uses a BSD kernel. But, Mac OS X is a different OS from FreeBSD in every way that actually matters to anybody. It presents itself as a lot more traditionally UNIX like than Android does, but that isn't saying a lot. It uses frameworks, considers Objective C to be the 1st class language for app development, and doesn't support X11 out of the box.
Until we know more about Chrome OS, we can't really be sure if this is really just another Linux distro with a new coat of paint, or if it is going to be something completely foreign that technically uses a very familiar kernel under the hood. For all Google has said about "reinventing what an OS should be," I'm expecting something that behaves more like an appliance that a full Linux distro. Think Tivo. Those are Linux boxes, too.
Meh, look at any /. article about Java and you'll see somebody complain about the speed of Java, and a reply explaining that Java isn't particularly slow. It has some weaknesses that mean it isn't as optimal as really good C, but it also has some capacity for dynamic optimisation which can make it faster than poorly optimised C. Regardless in a DB type application, a lot of your time will be spent in vendor supplied code. Whether that is disk access supplied by the OS or some functions available as part of the language standard library. A lot of actually runs this type of app isn't particularly guaranteed to be written in the same language as the app.
Also, most of the Java code you run across in real life is crap. That's not a dig at the language itself. IMO, it's the volume of poor coders that give Java a reputation for slowness more than anything else. You probably won't find any secret double ninja techniques in Lucene as much as you will just find relatively few embarrassing fuckups.
Excellent point! My situation is a little bit different from that of the OP because I have a pretty high metabolism, so I'm not dealing with weight issues. This is definitely an area where trying to figure out a "healthy" way to work means knowing your own body and your own needs. Heck, last month when I was working 60-65 hour weeks with almost no sleep due to a terrible flopping day/night schedule, I had so much uptime that I actually started taking in a lot more calories than usual just to keep moving. That's when I got into the burger habit that I am now transitioning out of because my schedule is finally semi-sane again.
I have been working night shift in a NOC lately, myself. Deep into my 12 hour shifts, there is almost nobody in the building, so I can do laps. I carry my blackberry which will yell if I actually have to respond to an outage. I'm never more than 30 seconds away from my desk while I do laps. It's also easy to do jumping jacks, pushups and situps while with line of sight to my desk. Add in the occasional jumping jacks, and I'm oddly enough probably getting myself in better shape since having started this schedule. Go figure.
Of course, there is also the days off. I could theretically use those for excercise. I used to be in the habit of jogging when I had a working iPod because I could listen to education audio books while I ran. Now I can be at work while I run. I think I feel silly if the only thing I'm doing is running. As much as I know it is important, I don't really feel it is an accomplishment on its own.
Also, be careful with what you eat. Quantity is obviously a concern, but quality is a huge factor as well. On this schedule, I never really have time to cook the days that I work. The result is that I eat more burgers than would be ideal since that's the most convenient thing. When I'm at work, I often microwave frozen TV dinners or cans of soup with enough sodium to preserve an elephant. I'm trying to make a point of sticking to fruit juice instead of energy drinks, making the TV dinners the 'healthy' option, and at least squeezing in enough time to eat something better than a burger on my way home from work.
True, however it is much slower to recharge than modern batteries. First you have to build Jurassic Park, and then be very patient.
An interplanetary war might be quite devastating, but it would be unlikely to be swift. Planetkiller lasers are very hard to make, so a 22nd century Red Scare would probably consist of bombs on rockets. Maybe antimatter instead of nuclear, or something like that. But, the opening salvo would probably take weeks to get from Mars to Earth. In all liklihood, Interplanetary warfare will leave you enemies with plenty of time to huff and puff and deploy adequate defenses. Assume the invention of FTL, and that all changes very quickly. But, nobody is sure that FTL is even possible, so it is hard to assume it will play a big role in the forseeable future.
But, I definitely see your point. If everybody lives in one city, nobody wants to flatten the city. If everybody lives on one island, nobody wants to sink the island. I think that even in the fairly distant future, MAD may prove to be an effective strategy. After all, no matter how big a bomb you land on the enemy planet, the shockwave travels at the (local) speed of sound. The amount of time it takes to circle the Earth at Mach 1 is more than enough time to decide whether or not you want to push the big shiny red button.
This is basically what I was thinking. Free Software has no obligation to conquer the market. It doesn't need to increase sales. It's an emergent community, not unlike the "gray goo" of micro machines from so many SciFi novels. If the users want something specific, they can hire somebody to do it.
In the end, it all goes back to Adam Smith's writings on Economics. The baker doesn't bake his loaves because he wants you to have a full belly. He does it because his is selfish. He just wants your money. That enlightened self interest make the world go 'round. Likewise, the KDE developer doesn't have to write code for the sake of conquering the world, or suiting users. He isn't obliged. He writes code because he wants to use a good Desktop Environment. That's what it boild down to. He's a greedy bastard. And, that's enough.
Or, for another analogy, Zombies don't have a master plan for world domination. One zombie just wants to eat your brain. That's enough to make zombies scary. He's not thinking about the brain after yours. He's not thinking about all the brains he'll eat next week. One zombie doesn't have to worry about broad strategy. Going brain by brain is the strategy, and it works.
If developers work on whatever they feel is important, Free Software eventually wins, just like the zombies. If people don't like new things, then they pay attention to old things, and work from the old version to fix things. Free Software can never get worse. Old versions never get discontinued. Free Software is an always expanding ecosystem, and it grows with every line of code that is shared with the public.
Meh, The US State Department talking to a US company that provides a services that some Iranians use is hardly a particularly good example of external political influences in the middle east. If anything the big story would be if somebody actually managed to persuade Twitter to keep operating. :) But seriously, when you look at things like Operation Ajax, you can see that the US just trying to make sure Iranians have a convenient way to speak for themselves is extremely hands-off, and probably a very appropriate way to avoid having unclean hands in the situation. The previous administration would have loudly and openly run their mouth about the situation, and inadvertently marginalized the reformist element in Iran by trying to support it. Trying to make sure they can speak for themselves is probably about the best thing America can do right now.