Why not? Data structures married to methods which operate on them, information hiding, data abstraction, encapsulation, modularity, inheritance, polymorphism.... if you can do all these things, why get hung up on whether this is focused around defining classes or deriving from other objects and functions?
Go ahead and show me is-a, has-a, and as-a inheritance in Javascript.
Maybe if you explain the class-based analogue (it's not apparent what you mean by "has-a," and near as I can tell "is-a" and "as-a" are the same thing in a language where you can apply duck-typing). Bonus if you can point out a type of problem without classes.
All that means, though, is that the Droid is not a good choice for a phone if you want to draw on it. I am still able to use the on-screen keyboard just fine and even in a web browser I never have problems tapping a link no matter how far I am zoomed out. This is definitely not a deal-breaker for me
So, in other words, you've figured out which features are important to you, which are less important to you, and a lack in a feature that isn't important to you.... doesn't make the product worth less over to you.
That's a pretty smart point of view.
Might even be why you're the kind of person who owns a Droid, unlike those stupid iPhone sheeple blinded by Apple's shiny marketing into buying a phone that has a locked-down app store and no tethering or hardware keyboard.
not understanding a topic that even you are unwilling to acknowledge mastery of.
Personally, I think that little acknowledgment increases his credibility quite a bit. It suggests to me that he's actually spent some real time coming to grips not just with glossy overview you get in a high school or college course but with some of the devilish subtleties of actually using the stuff.
The funny thing about knowledge... the more it grows, the bigger you realize the frontier is. So, how good of a heuristic is apparent confidence?
People who rely on employment to make money rightfully fear an increased and talented labor pool leading to more competition in the labor market. People who rely on talented and affordable labor to make money rightfully fear a decreased and talent-drained labor pool, leading to scarcity in the labor market.
Some people don't do it for the money. You can't buy them. Ever.
I don't know. I mean, I know what you're talking about: I've turned down a well-paying job with equity that would have set me up pretty good because I felt there was something more important than the money.
But here's the thing: at a certain level, once people offer you enough money (the mark starts somewhere around a million bucks) they're not just offering you money anymore, they're offering you freedom to do whatever you'd like to with your time. If the top 20 Postgres devs would rather do nothing else than work on Postgres, then you're right, this wouldn't happen. But if enough of them have other interests, then it's entirely possible someone could buy their non-participation -- with the ability to spend all the time they like on something else.
The really funny thing to me is that they act like this tablet is something new and amazing.
You didn't read the article, did you? The author demonstrates a familiarity with at least some past tablet efforts, and in fact references an article on recent Windows efforts at the end.
Heck, it looks like you didn't read the summary, where it's noted tablets already exist and what the author speculates Apple might do to improve them.
"technology" journalists that know little about journalism, less about technology
The technology journalist who wrote this article appears to both know more and to have thought more closely about tablets than you do...
After observing a few decades anticompetitive behavior, punctuated with six years during which they utterly and completely neglected Internet Explorer -- the world's primary window to the web -- two things seem pretty apparent to me:
1) Despite all their talk about developers, developers, developers, when they can get away with it, they care about developers not one bit. If they did, some minimal effort towards fixing some of the more egregious problems with IE might have been made, instead of pushing the problems out onto the backs of hundreds of thousands of web authors who had to figure out how to circumvent bugs and irregularities.
2) It's quite likely they'd like pull an embrace-extend-extinguish with the web as whole if they can pull it off. And if they get critical mass for RIAs with Silverlight, they might even be able to pull it off. I don't care how good Silverlight is -- and I've been impressed with some things -- I'm not at all interested in that future.
I am not willing to pay $5 a month for a 100 meg line to the Internet and have 50% of my paycheck taken away.
Speaking of fallacies...
Throw in some examples if you have any
I do. I think if you actually take a moment to think about it (and, I suppose, if you're someone who genuinely thinks about and pays attention to these issues) you'll be able to think of it too. I'll give you a hint. It's a TLA.
However, if you're simply yet another amrchair austrian-schooler who has nothing to add to any economic discussion other than a repetition of your favored catechism.... yeah, you probably won't be able to think of it.
This is barely even marginally coherent, let alone insightful. "the iphone dev team will be"... what?
a "computer" where you can run only applications personally approved by Him.
That's an interesting theory, but it runs a bit counter to the fact that every computer he's ever been part of the design/production of has had third party applications he didn't approve.
if you jailbreak this baby then he sends the Apple stormtroopers to shoot you.
Dovetails right in with the latest Apple rumor I heard -- they've contracted with a Chinese company to provide 100,000 private troops. Some sources say they're amassing near Macau now.
only reason people paid for physical news media is that it was cheap.
Um, no. People paid for physical news media because it had value to them and it was pretty much the only large-scale way of distributing information until about 20 years ago.
the kindle is a success because i can read the news for free online, not books.
The Kindle may be useful to you for that reason. That's fine, but if there's a most-frequently-made mistake commentators here on Slashdot tend to make when evaluating products, it's evaluating them by personal priorities alone (and, for bonus points, assuming any other priority set is irrational: no wireless, less space than a nomad == lame, right?). Remember, there's a whole world of other people out there. Some of whom care more about the convenience the Kindle offers than concerns about DRM. The Kindle's a success because some people like it for any number of reasons.
And because it enables one of the world's largest retailers/distributors to move to a model that favors their profitability.
with little purpose other than to brick jailbroken phones, you mean.
To be a bit pedantic, there simply never has been an update that bricked a phone.
But even allowing a little latitude for the word "brick" -- which updates didn't do anything other than interfere with the functioning of jailbroken phones?
yes. Many people just don't know this about Apple. In the mid to late 80's Apple was well known for being extremely obtuse about low level programming information and tools for the Mac. Not only did they refuse to give out development tools for free, but they also refused to allow others to have enough information to develop their own.. at any price.
I just want to run a quick sanity check here: do you actually know what Apple's toolsuite was called back then? Also, can you name, say, three different third-party Mac development tools circa 1989? Without consulting Google or Wikipedia? I'm gonna guess based on your claims that the answer is no, because I could name three third party dev environments of the top of my head (MacASM, Lightspeed/Think C, Macintosh Common Lisp) and possibly point you to a circa 1980s manual for most pieces of information you're looking for.
Expensive, maybe, certainly not free, and generally not a joy to develop for (well, MCL was cool), but they gave developers -- even third parties producing dev tools -- plenty to work with.
For one thing, before people started gratuitously applying the word "bricking" to iPhones, that used to mean an action that rendered a device useless beyond repair, which I've never seen happen to an iPhone. As messed up as it may get, you can almost always get back to a known working state.
For another -- unsurprisingly, updates that expect a given phone state are often unkind to phones in a modified state. Failing to test for and accommodate a hacked phone state is a bit inconvenient, but if it seems like a "crackdown" to you, I don't know what to tell you.
All they do is take a pre-existing product, add gloss and make it look nice and the sheep come pouring in. What a stupid time we live in, Idiocracy is not far away.
So in other words, if you don't understand what people find compelling about Apple's products, it's because everyone else who does is an idiot. Clearly, they've been deceived by marketing or distracted by gloss -- if they just really understood things, the way you do, nobody would buy, right?
Really? Everyone was already downloading and listening to MP3s
Everyone? 10 years ago? Not a chance in hell. Maybe in certain segments of the population, but not a majority; probably not even double-digit percentages.
Yeah, I was certainly listening to mp3s while the CEO seat at Apple was still warm from Gil Amelio's butt, and I used Napster, AudioGalaxy, mp3.com, emusic, and ripped CDs and played around with various mp3 hardware players. But I was a vanishing minority in my circle of acquaintances. Even most people I knew with big mp3 collections didn't have a hardware player they took everywhere... until somewhere around the time iPod hit its stride. You can argue that this was just good marketing, or it was just the time when cost, size, and capacity hit a magic point point of broad appeal, or you can argue that Apple did some real work which got the devices to that point and putting together a platform for distribution and management. But in any case, mp3 players weren't wide-market devices until the iPod was.
But more to the point... I was also a vanishing minority among people who got music online in that I paid for it. Occasionally. Generally, I didn't pay for most of it, in no small part because nobody was selling what I wanted. The iTunes music store was the first place where you were likely to be able to easily find and purchase a wide variety of popular music. It's no exaggeration to say that Apple basically created and defined the mainstream online music marketplace.
And if you set the wayback machine for around 2001, it's not really clear that they had any particular advantage over other potential players... it could have easily been media focused entities like Napster or Real, or it could have been Microsoft with their tech market power, or it could have been supreme retailers Amazon or Wal-Mart. Or maybe even Creative or Diamond or somebody else who was first to market with hardware. All of these people would have apparently had some advantage over a niche computer maker with no successful previous forays into the relevant markets (and in fact, legal agreements to stay out of music).
Maybe somebody else would have done it if they hadn't. Or maybe we'd still be grabbing our stuff from the latest whack-a-mole p2p network or buying from Russian sites or insisting loudly that we prefer generally superior indie music so we're totally content with the limited section of eiomusic.com. But Apple's the one that did it, and in the process, they've positioned themselves to be part of shaping mobile computing and communications in general.
5. An affordable, low price-point that even Apple's harshest critics cannot bring themselves to complain about
Oh, that's where you're wrong. Unless the price point is under $50.
The way this works is that the Apple critic picks some set of features that phone X has had for months if not years. If the iPhone doesn't have all of those features at the market price for phone X or less, it's time to start talking about the deceit of shiny design and how Apple is actually a fashion company.
Given that the Nokia 6820 had features 1-4 (plus tethering and additional bluetooth magic) and now goes for under $50, Apple's harshest critics will only be happy with that price point.
Were you around for the debate on social security privatization? If you listened to them back then you'd have thought that the GOP was aiming to put America's seniors into concentration camps.
Can you point to or even recollect any instances of that kind of hyperbolic concern?
Genuine question, I'd like to get a bead on this if I can, as it's probably a comparable question to the health care reform issues.
Not to say that some of the rhetoric wasn't impressive on its own. The speech on race that he gave in response to the Reverend Wright controversy showed some pretty strong insights.
It's not because people knew or particularly cared about his policy plans
Maybe you didn't. Personally, I got on board precisely because I thought some policy positions like the one above demonstrated some insights I didn't see elsewhere, or at least that he spent some time talking to the right people.
I'm perfectly willing to believe that a lot if not most people vote on rhetoric and symbolism -- what a candidate means to them, how it fits into whatever political narrative they've internalized. That's almost certainly true no matter which election or candidates we're talking about. But that's a really different statement from yours, which appears to be that there was no policy substance to the Obama campaign, and I don't think that statement is particularly defensible.
Because barring some economic revolution (likely only presaged by the discovery of insanely cheap inexhaustible low-impact energy source), the costs of keeping people in a state of suspended animation are going to be an agonizing issue. The space for keeping people alone could to be an issue, let alone the costs of attentive and professional maintenance techs and medical staff, and of course, refrigeration. I think at a minimum we're talking about Manhattan apartment prices and possible continual hospital stay prices.
So... after you've decided it's OK to "kill" someone by freezing them, you have to decide: can you afford it? Is it worth it? How much life do they have left even assuming in 20 years there's a cure for cancer? How are they going to feel if in 20 years they wake up and their children are their biological age -- or potentially dead, along with most of their contemporary friends are dead? But on the other hand, how are you going to feel about letting a loved one go when the prospect of magical medical advances just 20-30 years out are in front of you? How would you live it down if you didn't?
And that's just the micro issues. How does economics change when people can sometimes sleep and let an investment compound and compound -- and wake up and suddenly consume? Ever longer chronological periods of life alternating between consumption and maintenance for a steadily increasing population?
Heck, what happens when the rich can afford this but the poor can't? An oligarchy of long-lived who can profit handsomely from certificates of deposit, let alone better investments?
I remember reading papers on this during my AI classes in the mid 90's.
And I was writing software to use genetic algorithms to generate and/or harmonize melodies in 95/96. And I'm still impressed.
For one thing, even if the general idea isn't totally new, most of the world never gets off their butt and actually does *anything*.
The other thing is that even when the general idea is fairly straightforward, getting an implementation that not only works but sounds pleasant can be non-trivial. It's often not as simple as throwing a machine learning technique or grammar or what have you at the problem -- you'll either end up arbitrarily constraining the output (which is fine -- that can be an art) or you'll have to work at some level of sophistication. Either way, getting to the point where you have listenable output can be something worthy of respect.
Most music itself recycles ideas that've been around since Montverdi, but some of it's still pretty impressive, and hey, even the stuff that sucks... well, the people writing it are at least not frittering away their lives watching TV.
All I care is that it isn't Javascript. Javascript should have died in 1996. Javascript helps no one.
Helps me. Nice multi-paradigm functional-OO-imperative language mix wrapped up in familiar syntax. The various DOMs have kindof sucked, and there's a few gotchas (you have to know your scoping rules, that the number type is IEEE 754 double precision, why non K&R bracing style will bite you, plus some misc other things), but overall, I find a lot to recommend it.
Do you have specific gripes, or just general bad vibes?
Slashdot Mirror
A car HAS A carburetor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Has-a
Has class-based OO education gotten so crazy that we end up doing this with class hierarchies rather than simple composition?
but that's not OO.
Why not? Data structures married to methods which operate on them, information hiding, data abstraction, encapsulation, modularity, inheritance, polymorphism.... if you can do all these things, why get hung up on whether this is focused around defining classes or deriving from other objects and functions?
Go ahead and show me is-a, has-a, and as-a inheritance in Javascript.
Maybe if you explain the class-based analogue (it's not apparent what you mean by "has-a," and near as I can tell "is-a" and "as-a" are the same thing in a language where you can apply duck-typing). Bonus if you can point out a type of problem without classes.
All that means, though, is that the Droid is not a good choice for a phone if you want to draw on it. I am still able to use the on-screen keyboard just fine and even in a web browser I never have problems tapping a link no matter how far I am zoomed out. This is definitely not a deal-breaker for me
So, in other words, you've figured out which features are important to you, which are less important to you, and a lack in a feature that isn't important to you.... doesn't make the product worth less over to you.
That's a pretty smart point of view.
Might even be why you're the kind of person who owns a Droid, unlike those stupid iPhone sheeple blinded by Apple's shiny marketing into buying a phone that has a locked-down app store and no tethering or hardware keyboard.
not understanding a topic that even you are unwilling to acknowledge mastery of.
Personally, I think that little acknowledgment increases his credibility quite a bit. It suggests to me that he's actually spent some real time coming to grips not just with glossy overview you get in a high school or college course but with some of the devilish subtleties of actually using the stuff.
The funny thing about knowledge... the more it grows, the bigger you realize the frontier is. So, how good of a heuristic is apparent confidence?
People who rely on employment to make money rightfully fear an increased and talented labor pool leading to more competition in the labor market. People who rely on talented and affordable labor to make money rightfully fear a decreased and talent-drained labor pool, leading to scarcity in the labor market.
Some people don't do it for the money. You can't buy them. Ever.
I don't know. I mean, I know what you're talking about: I've turned down a well-paying job with equity that would have set me up pretty good because I felt there was something more important than the money.
But here's the thing: at a certain level, once people offer you enough money (the mark starts somewhere around a million bucks) they're not just offering you money anymore, they're offering you freedom to do whatever you'd like to with your time. If the top 20 Postgres devs would rather do nothing else than work on Postgres, then you're right, this wouldn't happen. But if enough of them have other interests, then it's entirely possible someone could buy their non-participation -- with the ability to spend all the time they like on something else.
The really funny thing to me is that they act like this tablet is something new and amazing.
You didn't read the article, did you? The author demonstrates a familiarity with at least some past tablet efforts, and in fact references an article on recent Windows efforts at the end.
Heck, it looks like you didn't read the summary, where it's noted tablets already exist and what the author speculates Apple might do to improve them.
"technology" journalists that know little about journalism, less about technology
The technology journalist who wrote this article appears to both know more and to have thought more closely about tablets than you do...
Everybody sing along now...
Do you hate Silverlight because it's Microsoft
It's reason enough.
After observing a few decades anticompetitive behavior, punctuated with six years during which they utterly and completely neglected Internet Explorer -- the world's primary window to the web -- two things seem pretty apparent to me:
1) Despite all their talk about developers, developers, developers, when they can get away with it, they care about developers not one bit. If they did, some minimal effort towards fixing some of the more egregious problems with IE might have been made, instead of pushing the problems out onto the backs of hundreds of thousands of web authors who had to figure out how to circumvent bugs and irregularities.
2) It's quite likely they'd like pull an embrace-extend-extinguish with the web as whole if they can pull it off. And if they get critical mass for RIAs with Silverlight, they might even be able to pull it off. I don't care how good Silverlight is -- and I've been impressed with some things -- I'm not at all interested in that future.
Why do people use jQuery? To hide all the browser dependent JavaScript issues.
DOM issues / feature APIs, you mean.
Not the same thing by a long shot.
I am not willing to pay $5 a month for a 100 meg line to the Internet and have 50% of my paycheck taken away.
Speaking of fallacies...
Throw in some examples if you have any
I do. I think if you actually take a moment to think about it (and, I suppose, if you're someone who genuinely thinks about and pays attention to these issues) you'll be able to think of it too. I'll give you a hint. It's a TLA.
However, if you're simply yet another amrchair austrian-schooler who has nothing to add to any economic discussion other than a repetition of your favored catechism.... yeah, you probably won't be able to think of it.
This is barely even marginally coherent, let alone insightful. "the iphone dev team will be"... what?
a "computer" where you can run only applications personally approved by Him.
That's an interesting theory, but it runs a bit counter to the fact that every computer he's ever been part of the design/production of has had third party applications he didn't approve.
if you jailbreak this baby then he sends the Apple stormtroopers to shoot you.
Dovetails right in with the latest Apple rumor I heard -- they've contracted with a Chinese company to provide 100,000 private troops. Some sources say they're amassing near Macau now.
only reason people paid for physical news media is that it was cheap.
Um, no. People paid for physical news media because it had value to them and it was pretty much the only large-scale way of distributing information until about 20 years ago.
the kindle is a success because i can read the news for free online, not books.
The Kindle may be useful to you for that reason. That's fine, but if there's a most-frequently-made mistake commentators here on Slashdot tend to make when evaluating products, it's evaluating them by personal priorities alone (and, for bonus points, assuming any other priority set is irrational: no wireless, less space than a nomad == lame, right?). Remember, there's a whole world of other people out there. Some of whom care more about the convenience the Kindle offers than concerns about DRM. The Kindle's a success because some people like it for any number of reasons.
And because it enables one of the world's largest retailers/distributors to move to a model that favors their profitability.
with little purpose other than to brick jailbroken phones, you mean.
To be a bit pedantic, there simply never has been an update that bricked a phone.
But even allowing a little latitude for the word "brick" -- which updates didn't do anything other than interfere with the functioning of jailbroken phones?
yes. Many people just don't know this about Apple. In the mid to late 80's Apple was well known for being extremely obtuse about low level programming information and tools for the Mac. Not only did they refuse to give out development tools for free, but they also refused to allow others to have enough information to develop their own .. at any price.
I just want to run a quick sanity check here: do you actually know what Apple's toolsuite was called back then? Also, can you name, say, three different third-party Mac development tools circa 1989? Without consulting Google or Wikipedia? I'm gonna guess based on your claims that the answer is no, because I could name three third party dev environments of the top of my head (MacASM, Lightspeed/Think C, Macintosh Common Lisp) and possibly point you to a circa 1980s manual for most pieces of information you're looking for.
Expensive, maybe, certainly not free, and generally not a joy to develop for (well, MCL was cool), but they gave developers -- even third parties producing dev tools -- plenty to work with.
You mean besides bricking jailbroken phones?
For one thing, before people started gratuitously applying the word "bricking" to iPhones, that used to mean an action that rendered a device useless beyond repair, which I've never seen happen to an iPhone. As messed up as it may get, you can almost always get back to a known working state.
For another -- unsurprisingly, updates that expect a given phone state are often unkind to phones in a modified state. Failing to test for and accommodate a hacked phone state is a bit inconvenient, but if it seems like a "crackdown" to you, I don't know what to tell you.
All they do is take a pre-existing product, add gloss and make it look nice and the sheep come pouring in. What a stupid time we live in, Idiocracy is not far away.
So in other words, if you don't understand what people find compelling about Apple's products, it's because everyone else who does is an idiot. Clearly, they've been deceived by marketing or distracted by gloss -- if they just really understood things, the way you do, nobody would buy, right?
Practicality over aesthetics I say.
As if this were a dichotomy.
Really? Everyone was already downloading and listening to MP3s
Everyone? 10 years ago? Not a chance in hell. Maybe in certain segments of the population, but not a majority; probably not even double-digit percentages.
Yeah, I was certainly listening to mp3s while the CEO seat at Apple was still warm from Gil Amelio's butt, and I used Napster, AudioGalaxy, mp3.com, emusic, and ripped CDs and played around with various mp3 hardware players. But I was a vanishing minority in my circle of acquaintances. Even most people I knew with big mp3 collections didn't have a hardware player they took everywhere... until somewhere around the time iPod hit its stride. You can argue that this was just good marketing, or it was just the time when cost, size, and capacity hit a magic point point of broad appeal, or you can argue that Apple did some real work which got the devices to that point and putting together a platform for distribution and management. But in any case, mp3 players weren't wide-market devices until the iPod was.
But more to the point... I was also a vanishing minority among people who got music online in that I paid for it. Occasionally. Generally, I didn't pay for most of it, in no small part because nobody was selling what I wanted. The iTunes music store was the first place where you were likely to be able to easily find and purchase a wide variety of popular music. It's no exaggeration to say that Apple basically created and defined the mainstream online music marketplace.
And if you set the wayback machine for around 2001, it's not really clear that they had any particular advantage over other potential players... it could have easily been media focused entities like Napster or Real, or it could have been Microsoft with their tech market power, or it could have been supreme retailers Amazon or Wal-Mart. Or maybe even Creative or Diamond or somebody else who was first to market with hardware. All of these people would have apparently had some advantage over a niche computer maker with no successful previous forays into the relevant markets (and in fact, legal agreements to stay out of music).
Maybe somebody else would have done it if they hadn't. Or maybe we'd still be grabbing our stuff from the latest whack-a-mole p2p network or buying from Russian sites or insisting loudly that we prefer generally superior indie music so we're totally content with the limited section of eiomusic.com. But Apple's the one that did it, and in the process, they've positioned themselves to be part of shaping mobile computing and communications in general.
5. An affordable, low price-point that even Apple's harshest critics cannot bring themselves to complain about
Oh, that's where you're wrong. Unless the price point is under $50.
The way this works is that the Apple critic picks some set of features that phone X has had for months if not years. If the iPhone doesn't have all of those features at the market price for phone X or less, it's time to start talking about the deceit of shiny design and how Apple is actually a fashion company.
Given that the Nokia 6820 had features 1-4 (plus tethering and additional bluetooth magic) and now goes for under $50, Apple's harshest critics will only be happy with that price point.
See subject.
Plus, it makes one of those INAs (is not a/acronyms) we all know and love.
Also INA is a TLA.
Pretty neat, A?
Were you around for the debate on social security privatization? If you listened to them back then you'd have thought that the GOP was aiming to put America's seniors into concentration camps.
Can you point to or even recollect any instances of that kind of hyperbolic concern?
Genuine question, I'd like to get a bead on this if I can, as it's probably a comparable question to the health care reform issues.
Rhetoric was not just part of Obama's campaign. Rhetoric was his entire campaign...
Really? All rhetoric? No policy? Not, say, on Net Neutrality?
Not to say that some of the rhetoric wasn't impressive on its own. The speech on race that he gave in response to the Reverend Wright controversy showed some pretty strong insights.
It's not because people knew or particularly cared about his policy plans
Maybe you didn't. Personally, I got on board precisely because I thought some policy positions like the one above demonstrated some insights I didn't see elsewhere, or at least that he spent some time talking to the right people.
I'm perfectly willing to believe that a lot if not most people vote on rhetoric and symbolism -- what a candidate means to them, how it fits into whatever political narrative they've internalized. That's almost certainly true no matter which election or candidates we're talking about. But that's a really different statement from yours, which appears to be that there was no policy substance to the Obama campaign, and I don't think that statement is particularly defensible.
Because barring some economic revolution (likely only presaged by the discovery of insanely cheap inexhaustible low-impact energy source), the costs of keeping people in a state of suspended animation are going to be an agonizing issue. The space for keeping people alone could to be an issue, let alone the costs of attentive and professional maintenance techs and medical staff, and of course, refrigeration. I think at a minimum we're talking about Manhattan apartment prices and possible continual hospital stay prices.
So... after you've decided it's OK to "kill" someone by freezing them, you have to decide: can you afford it? Is it worth it? How much life do they have left even assuming in 20 years there's a cure for cancer? How are they going to feel if in 20 years they wake up and their children are their biological age -- or potentially dead, along with most of their contemporary friends are dead? But on the other hand, how are you going to feel about letting a loved one go when the prospect of magical medical advances just 20-30 years out are in front of you? How would you live it down if you didn't?
And that's just the micro issues. How does economics change when people can sometimes sleep and let an investment compound and compound -- and wake up and suddenly consume? Ever longer chronological periods of life alternating between consumption and maintenance for a steadily increasing population?
Heck, what happens when the rich can afford this but the poor can't? An oligarchy of long-lived who can profit handsomely from certificates of deposit, let alone better investments?
I remember reading papers on this during my AI classes in the mid 90's.
And I was writing software to use genetic algorithms to generate and/or harmonize melodies in 95/96. And I'm still impressed.
For one thing, even if the general idea isn't totally new, most of the world never gets off their butt and actually does *anything*.
The other thing is that even when the general idea is fairly straightforward, getting an implementation that not only works but sounds pleasant can be non-trivial. It's often not as simple as throwing a machine learning technique or grammar or what have you at the problem -- you'll either end up arbitrarily constraining the output (which is fine -- that can be an art) or you'll have to work at some level of sophistication. Either way, getting to the point where you have listenable output can be something worthy of respect.
Most music itself recycles ideas that've been around since Montverdi, but some of it's still pretty impressive, and hey, even the stuff that sucks... well, the people writing it are at least not frittering away their lives watching TV.
All I care is that it isn't Javascript. Javascript should have died in 1996. Javascript helps no one.
Helps me. Nice multi-paradigm functional-OO-imperative language mix wrapped up in familiar syntax. The various DOMs have kindof sucked, and there's a few gotchas (you have to know your scoping rules, that the number type is IEEE 754 double precision, why non K&R bracing style will bite you, plus some misc other things), but overall, I find a lot to recommend it.
Do you have specific gripes, or just general bad vibes?
Dude are you serious?
No.