The human mind is not a special and unique snowflake.
It may be a computer -- in fact, it certainly *is* in the original sense of the word. However, even if classical computation is all it does, it's still a pretty special and unique computer relative to state-of-the-art human invented technology.
You are a computer. I am a computer. You are a computer.
Check your program for looping errors.;)
Certainly, the brain does classical computation. Whether that's all it does, however, is speculation. And in any case, a modern electronic computer is not a particularly apt metaphor.
We operate according to the same laws of physics that govern that boiler over in the corner.
I don't think anyone -- not even people on the edge like Penrose -- argues otherwise. There is, however, some discussion over what comprises said laws of physics, and hopefully will continue to be until we really do approach a more useful approximation of having Everything Figured Out(TM).
"Lonely people back in town. I saw it in the supermarket and at the Laundromat and when we checked out from the motel. These pickup campers through the redwoods, full of lonely retired people looking at trees on their way to look at the ocean. You catch it in the first fraction of a glance from a new face...that searching look...then it's gone.
We see much more of this loneliness now. It's paradoxical that where people are the most closely crowded, in the big coastal cities in the East and West, the loneliness is the greatest. Back where people were so spread out in western Oregon and Idaho and Montana and the Dakotas you'd think the loneliness would have been greater, but we didn't see it so much.
The explanation, I suppose, is that the physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance, and in Montana and Idaho the physical distances are big but the psychic distances between people are small, and here it's reversed.
It's the primary America we're in. It hit the night before last in Prineville Junction and it's been with us ever since. There's this primary America of freeways and jet flights and TV and movie spectaculars. And people caught up in this primary America seem to go through huge portions of their lives without much consciousness of what's immediately around them. The media have convinced them that what's right around them is unimportant. And that's why they're lonely. You see it in their faces. First the little flicker of searching, and then when they look at you, you're just a kind of an object. You don't count. You're not what they're looking for. You're not on TV.
But in the secondary America we've been through, of back roads, and Chinaman's ditches, and Appaloosa horses, and sweeping mountain ranges, and meditative thoughts, and kids with pinecones and bumblebees and open sky above us mile after mile after mile, all through that, what was real, what was around us dominated. And so there wasn't much feeling of loneliness. That's the way it must have been a hundred or two hundred years ago. Hardly any people and hardly any loneliness. I'm undoubtedly over-generalizing, but if the proper qualifications were introduced it would be true..."
There *are* vehicles that get priority over other traffic. In fact, they chain groups of cars getting this priority together for maximum efficiency, and they put in lots of seats so many people can ride in each car.
Unfortunately, the way they solved the prioritization issue means that they only run on fixed routes throughout the city. However, there's a lot of these routes, and so most locations have one within ready walking distance. Scheduled pickup and dropoff times are usually pretty frequent. You should check it out.
Outside of the small intersection of people who have genuine artistic/design talent and genuine coding abilities, "web designer" is a pretty unfortunate misnomer... almost as unfortunate as the idea that Dreamweaver is a design tool. Web design is really several skillsets that are rarely found in the same person. But it leads people who don't know the inside of either web development or graphic design particularly well to expect both from people who are generally much stronger with one than the other.
Translating arbitrary designs from Adobe Illustrator into HTML / CSS is pretty much what got me by for a few years following the dot com bust, and then became a decent job (and no, it's not like I couldn't have been doing anything else: during the boom, I'd done plenty of software development in C, Java, and Perl).
Is that time over? The trend I notice is that there's no shortage of challenges in getting HTML / CSS which displays reasonably well across the proliferating number of active versions of Internet Explorer, standards-ish based browsers which aren't quite all the same, and the proliferating # of mobile devices. I've been out of that loop for about a year and a half and it already seems like some of my knowledge is out of date.
If you add to that the fact that more people are drinking the CSS positioning kool-aid and also sortof discovering actual criteria for good markup, I'd say the days where you can make a living off of it are far from over.
Someone needs to write a bot to post a response every time someone blames the financial crisis on the CRA or in some other way largely on the GSE's.
"Federal Reserve Board data shows that:
* More than 84 percent of the subprime mortgages in 2006 were issued by private lending institutions. * Private firms made nearly 83 percent of the subprime loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers that year. * Only one of the top 25 subprime lenders in 2006 was directly subject to the housing law that's being lambasted by conservative critics."
If the developers of a site choose to use Flash 10, then you and they have the same problem that would pop up if they'd chosen to write a standards-based site with E4X or other standardized ECMAScript additions, despite the fact that Javascript has wide penetration: a versioning issue, not a fundamental compatibility problem with the entire technology.
Heck, it's probably a milder problem. There are few desktops running Flash 9 that couldn't easily upgrade to Flash 10, and few people have any reason not to other than contrariness. Upgrading your ECMAScript engine without changing/upgrading your brower is going to be a whole lot more involved...
By some accounts, that's larger than the number of clients surveyed that both support Javascript and have it fully enabled, and beats Java's penetration.
That's the data. As for anecdotes, it sucks that for whatever reason it's not working with whichever browser you've chosen, and I have an antipathy of Internet Explorer as high as anybody's (probably higher), so I agree you shouldn't have to use it. But to offer my own anecdote, I've had zero problems getting Flash to work with Firefox or Safari on Windows or on the Mac. Heck, it's working with Firefox under Ubuntu Studio 8.10 on one PC at home...
It's a proprietary format entirely controlled by one company
It's also well-documented and has third-party and even open source tools for content creation, as well as an open source project or two aiming at playing.
has reached ubiquitous status by being the only viable solution for several problems for far too long.
Yep. That's the niche part.
And as for being proven, you've obviously never tried to watch Flash videos on 64-bit Linux.
Perhaps I should say "proven around 99% of desktop environments in use." If they haven't put resources into 64-bit Linux yet, that's certainly frustrating, but one can hardly blame them for failing to put their full punch behind what's probably not even half of the entire Linux market yet.
Only now do they have an alpha version of a native x86_64 player and it's been in alpha since late last year. How terrible can their code possibly be if it takes this long to recompile it for 64 bits?
They are far from the only piece of software that has trouble making the 64 bit jump. This last weekend I tried building Google's v8 engine on 64 bit BSD and Linux machines before discovering that it's pretty much hopeless for the near term, and this is a piece of "next generation" work that's largely been conceived and built in the last few years.
You're making the false assertion here that this is between Flash and Silverlight. Playing videos and drawing vector graphics are things that should be done in the browser and which have technologies on the way that will allow just that, so that one company no longer has absolute control over who can do those things. By apologizing for Adobe and their ineptitude in making Flash a true cross-platform technology you harm that effort.
I'm not apologizing for anything (although I might point again that as frustrating as it may be to 64 bit Linux users, Adobe's failure to penetrate that particular segment of the market is a mighty weak metric of how cross-platform they are). I'm pointing out that Flash has been readily filling a niche which hasn't been otherwise filled effectively for the last 10 years. This fact and my pointing it out has certainly done far, far less to hold up progress on the web than some of the w3c's navel-gazing. When the open technologies mature enough to compete across a wide segment, I'll be using them and singing their praises. And even until then, if I can get a job done with them with a few hacks and some extra sweat, I'll probably do it. Doesn't mean Flash isn't the right tool sometimes in the meanwhile.
As industry devils go, Flash has fairly low levels of evil. It's proven, it fills a niche, it works, and while it's not wide open, it's not exactly locked shut either.
And technically, adding soldiers to Afghanistan is the exact opposite of "bringing our troops home"
You are aware that throughout his campaign, he was fairly consistent about the idea that we should be escalating in Afghanistan and Pakistan, right?
He didn't campaign on the idea that aren't wars we should be fighting, nor on the idea all troops should be home. He *did* focus against the Iraq war, which, as he'd been saying since 2002, he thought was a problematic conflict to begin with.
There were rumors of a similar acquisition but the other way around -- Sun was looking at buying Apple -- a decade ago. This was 'round the time McNealy had said something like "Apple's best hope is to become the world's best Java thin client manufacturer."
An Apple-Sun merger really doesn't make a lot of sense. They do really different things. Schwartz's time in the NeXTStep development world, though, makes me think it's not completely impossible...
And this shift will require managers to look beyond résumés 'choked with acronyms and lists of technologies' to find those who 'can understand, influence, and guide development efforts, rather than simply taking dictation.'
I think an equal question is where they're going to find more managers who aren't the habit of seeing coders as black boxes into which their decisions go in and desired code comes out.
People like to talk about the archetype of the "techie" who is, of course, good with technology but doesn't understand much else. I suppose I've met people who embody this, but generally, my experience is a little different: I frequently meet programmers who are three dimensional people who may be good at writing, music, presentation... even sales. So I wonder sometimes where this persistent stereotype of the "techie" comes from.
Mind you, this happens the other direction as well: I see programmers who are convinced the "soft skills" of other professionals are easy to pick up and practice and they could be doing any job in the company.
There's nothing especially unique about MacOS that lets that happen.
I wouldn't say there is. It is, however, an example of a meaningful reason someone might see a Unix subsystem as a feature.
(I *would* say that the MacOS *is* unique in combining a Unix subsystem with a first-class commercial desktop platform, which is particularly interesting if you're doing enough work on the client/design side of web development that apps from Adobe and others are useful.)
On every other system used by our teams, it's been trivial to get things to run, but every Mac user has had to jump through flaming hoops to get where those that use Windows or Linux get to in under an hour.
Not my experience, but then again, I've been able to largely avoid Java since the late 90s, so....
I think that the Web developers who use it use it because that's the system they're comfortable with
..or the management of the company that's rewarded by the shareholders when you discuss your silly little proposition to actually add value to AT&T's services.
Adding pipes requires investing money. Invested money is money that can't be returned to the shareholders and more particularly can't be used to support positive evaluations of short-term management performance. So why, exactly, would anyone in charge of making decisions at AT&T feel any need whatsoever to invest in more bandwidth?
And that's just if we're thinking about normal business types here -- remember, telecom execs are an entirely different breed, largely unschooled in things entreprenurial, innovative, or competitive, but rather making money via rentierism from monopolies (de facto or official). We'd be lucky if someday there's a "damn the torpedoes we're going with 5 blades and an aloe strip" kind of response.
I think if we're ever going to have ubiquitous and affordable wireless data service, it's going to have to come from an enterprise whose roots are more silicon valley and less telecom. We'll see.
Of all the bits of OS X that are actually interesting and of value to users, "it's a UNIX" is a long, long, long way down the list
Depends on what you mean by "users." Web developers love it: you can be running a near-perfect approximation of your production server right on your laptop and have commercial desktop apps like Adobe's (and even IE via virtualization) all on the same machine. And I've met other hacker types who value the shell and BSD-like subsystem plus other features of the OS.
if a news organization cannot survive in the market it doesn't deserve to exist.
Given that you were mistakenly leaving NPR out of that statement when you made it, I'm assuming what you mean is that the news organizations a market-focused society deserves are Murdoch outlets.
We don't need another NPR-style organization. News is not Sesame St. for adults.
Sesame Street for adults? Since that sounds like a cheap insult, I'll take it as a sign that you're unfamiliar with NPR. Or Sesame Street, for that matter, given that it's a pretty high-quality program.
But, yeah, back to news. Perhaps you're unaware that the market (via the listener contribution model) overwhelmingly supports NPR, and public funding provides less than 2% of their operating costs. Perhaps you're unaware that people trust NPR and other non-commercial alternatives more than other "market" media. There are even studies which indicate its listeners tend to be better informed. There are also readily observable contrasts in the educational value of the programming and particularly the editorializing... see, for example, CNBC vs just about any episode of the Planet Money podcast.
I'd say that far from "not needing another NPR," we could actually use a lot more of it.
Mormon colony ships are heading for Alpha Centauri while the rest of us are still trying to get a decent electric car.
This is more or less the plot of the original Battlestar Galactica.
(Except they're trying to come TO earth, but they can't, because they don't have the production budget, and they have to keep re-using the clips where they shoot Cylons down.)
It was shot down because the governor feared the studios would stop labeling their games altogether if they could be held liable for what label they slap on the box. This wasn't a victory for free speech or at least a step in the right direction.
Um... what exactly would victory have looked like? Other than Jack Thompson's public shaming, disbarment, or exile...
Labeling is speech. In some cases, it's compelled speech, in other cases it's more or less cooperative, but it's a solution that's pretty coherent with important principles behind the idea of free speech, such as information's valuae to a free to society and faith in a marketplace of ideas. Huntsman realized that turning the dial up on the compulsions associated with the ratings would (a) probably NOT be compatible with the legal framework of the country AND (b) would chill labeling speech.
Now, if you view labeling as hostile speech and onerous, that's another argument altogether, but it's more or less orthogonal to ideas of freedom of speech or artistic expression.
do things the smart way instead of the wasteful way, we start screaming at them?
Because to some people (and I could find direct quotes from some other net discussions I've participated in) believe that the ultimate measure of well-being in a society is complete economic freedom.
And complete economic freedom has to mean being able to use your resources frugally or to waste them, and it has to mean you can justify an arbitrary choice with the defense of personal "utility."
And even though its proponents are smart enough to recognize that at least on a philosophical level, they can't defend use/abuse of property that involves incurring costs to others, on a practical level it's nearly inevitable that such costs will creep into the system, unless you have a very vigilant, organized, and broadly empowered interests acting against it.
This isn't to say that economic freedom should be arbitrary constrained, certainly not any more than it should be arbitrarily indulged (and probably less). The problem is that (a) some people prefer their conceptions of social organization quite black and white, which doesn't allow for subtle resolutions of tension between the two poles, and (b) "arbitrary" tends to be a somewhat subjective judgment.
"Summers was deservedly castigated, but not for the right reasons. He claimed to be giving a comprehensive list of reasons why there weren't more women reaching the top jobs in the sciences. Yet Summers, an economist, left one out: Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States.
Pursuing science as a career seems so irrational that one wonders why any young American would do it. Yet we do find some young Americans starting out in the sciences and they are mostly men. When the Larry Summers story first broke, I wrote in my Weblog:
A lot more men than women choose to do seemingly irrational things such as become petty criminals, fly homebuilt helicopters, play video games, and keep tropical fish as pets (98 percent of the attendees at the American Cichlid Association convention that I last attended were male). Should we be surprised that it is mostly men who spend 10 years banging their heads against an equation-filled blackboard in hopes of landing a $35,000/year post-doc job?
Having been both a student and teacher at MIT, my personal explanation for men going into science is the following:
1. young men strive to achieve high status among their peer group 2. men tend to lack perspective and are unable to step back and ask the question "is this peer group worth impressing?"
Consider Albert Q. Mathnerd, a math undergrad at MIT ("Course 18" we call it). He works hard and beats his chest to demonstrate that he is the best math nerd at MIT. This is important to Albert because most of his friends are math majors and the rest of his friends are in wimpier departments, impressed that Albert has even taken on such demanding classes. Albert never reflects on the fact that the guy who was the best math undergrad at MIT 20 years ago is now an entry-level public school teacher in Nebraska, having failed to get tenure at a 2nd tier university. When Albert goes to graduate school to get his PhD, his choice will have the same logical foundation as John Hinckley's attempt to impress Jodie Foster by shooting Ronald Reagan.
It is the guys with the poorest social skills who are least likely to talk to adults and find out what the salary and working conditions are like in different occupations. It is mostly guys with rather poor social skills whom one meets in the university science halls.
What about women? Don't they want to impress their peers? Yes, but they are more discriminating about choosing those peers. I've taught a fair number of women students in electrical engineering and computer science classes over the years. I can give you a list of the ones who had the best heads on their shoulders and were the most thoughtful about planning out the rest of their lives. Their names are on files in my 'medical school recommendations' directory."
"Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States. This article explores [a] possible explanation for the dearth of women in science: They found better jobs."
Their goal is lock-in. A standards-based engine would negate that.
Honestly, I've agreed with you up until now. Spending resources to play catch-up with what Webkit and Gecko have been able to do for years doesn't make any sense at all... unless your goal is to depart from those implementations.
However, I've wondered if someday, the resource logic wouldn't occur to Microsoft, or the trident codebase wouldn't become such a problem that it'd become stronger. They don't need to have their own rendering engine to embrace and extend. Using webkit or gecko would mean that they could lose any advantage they might have by people coding websites to IE, but they don't need that to try and get Silverlight out there or even keep the world using Active X. And rich / active components are probably about the only hope they have of being able to get any kind of lock on the web again.
Slashdot Mirror
The human mind is not a special and unique snowflake.
It may be a computer -- in fact, it certainly *is* in the original sense of the word. However, even if classical computation is all it does, it's still a pretty special and unique computer relative to state-of-the-art human invented technology.
You are a computer. I am a computer. You are a computer.
Check your program for looping errors. ;)
Certainly, the brain does classical computation. Whether that's all it does, however, is speculation. And in any case, a modern electronic computer is not a particularly apt metaphor.
We operate according to the same laws of physics that govern that boiler over in the corner.
I don't think anyone -- not even people on the edge like Penrose -- argues otherwise. There is, however, some discussion over what comprises said laws of physics, and hopefully will continue to be until we really do approach a more useful approximation of having Everything Figured Out(TM).
"Lonely people back in town. I saw it in the supermarket and at the Laundromat and when we checked out from the motel. These pickup campers through the redwoods, full of lonely retired people looking at trees on their way to look at the ocean. You catch it in the first fraction of a glance from a new face...that searching look...then it's gone.
We see much more of this loneliness now. It's paradoxical that where people are the most closely crowded, in the big coastal cities in the East and West, the loneliness is the greatest. Back where people were so spread out in western Oregon and Idaho and Montana and the Dakotas you'd think the loneliness would have been greater, but we didn't see it so much.
The explanation, I suppose, is that the physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance, and in Montana and Idaho the physical distances are big but the psychic distances between people are small, and here it's reversed.
It's the primary America we're in. It hit the night before last in Prineville Junction and it's been with us ever since. There's this primary America of freeways and jet flights and TV and movie spectaculars. And people caught up in this primary America seem to go through huge portions of their lives without much consciousness of what's immediately around them. The media have convinced them that what's right around them is unimportant. And that's why they're lonely. You see it in their faces. First the little flicker of searching, and then when they look at you, you're just a kind of an object. You don't count. You're not what they're looking for. You're not on TV.
But in the secondary America we've been through, of back roads, and Chinaman's ditches, and Appaloosa horses, and sweeping mountain ranges, and meditative thoughts, and kids with pinecones and bumblebees and open sky above us mile after mile after mile, all through that, what was real, what was around us dominated. And so there wasn't much feeling of loneliness. That's the way it must have been a hundred or two hundred years ago. Hardly any people and hardly any loneliness. I'm undoubtedly over-generalizing, but if the proper qualifications were introduced it would be true..."
There *are* vehicles that get priority over other traffic. In fact, they chain groups of cars getting this priority together for maximum efficiency, and they put in lots of seats so many people can ride in each car.
Unfortunately, the way they solved the prioritization issue means that they only run on fixed routes throughout the city. However, there's a lot of these routes, and so most locations have one within ready walking distance. Scheduled pickup and dropoff times are usually pretty frequent. You should check it out.
... for crazy in Utah politics, and this wouldn't be the first time he's operated on a grudge (albeit a political one rather than a personal one).
Outside of the small intersection of people who have genuine artistic/design talent and genuine coding abilities, "web designer" is a pretty unfortunate misnomer... almost as unfortunate as the idea that Dreamweaver is a design tool. Web design is really several skillsets that are rarely found in the same person. But it leads people who don't know the inside of either web development or graphic design particularly well to expect both from people who are generally much stronger with one than the other.
Translating arbitrary designs from Adobe Illustrator into HTML / CSS is pretty much what got me by for a few years following the dot com bust, and then became a decent job (and no, it's not like I couldn't have been doing anything else: during the boom, I'd done plenty of software development in C, Java, and Perl).
Is that time over? The trend I notice is that there's no shortage of challenges in getting HTML / CSS which displays reasonably well across the proliferating number of active versions of Internet Explorer, standards-ish based browsers which aren't quite all the same, and the proliferating # of mobile devices. I've been out of that loop for about a year and a half and it already seems like some of my knowledge is out of date.
If you add to that the fact that more people are drinking the CSS positioning kool-aid and also sortof discovering actual criteria for good markup, I'd say the days where you can make a living off of it are far from over.
Someone needs to write a bot to post a response every time someone blames the financial crisis on the CRA or in some other way largely on the GSE's.
"Federal Reserve Board data shows that:
* More than 84 percent of the subprime mortgages in 2006 were issued by private lending institutions.
* Private firms made nearly 83 percent of the subprime loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers that year.
* Only one of the top 25 subprime lenders in 2006 was directly subject to the housing law that's being lambasted by conservative critics."
- http://www.mcclatchydc.com/251/story/53802.html
Here's a few other links:
http://www.ptmortgage.com/blog/2008/10/01/pointing-fingers-was-it-cra-and-minority-lending-that-caused-the-mortgage-mess/
http://debatebothsides.com/showthread.php?t=73500
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=did_liberals_cause_the_subprime_crisis
http://www.frbsf.org/news/speeches/2008/0331.html
There is also a summary at Wikipedia.
Those statistics work against you...
For small values of "Flash."
If the developers of a site choose to use Flash 10, then you and they have the same problem that would pop up if they'd chosen to write a standards-based site with E4X or other standardized ECMAScript additions, despite the fact that Javascript has wide penetration: a versioning issue, not a fundamental compatibility problem with the entire technology.
Heck, it's probably a milder problem. There are few desktops running Flash 9 that couldn't easily upgrade to Flash 10, and few people have any reason not to other than contrariness. Upgrading your ECMAScript engine without changing/upgrading your brower is going to be a whole lot more involved...
...For small values of "works."
99+% of desktops disagree:
http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/version_penetration.html
By some accounts, that's larger than the number of clients surveyed that both support Javascript and have it fully enabled, and beats Java's penetration.
That's the data. As for anecdotes, it sucks that for whatever reason it's not working with whichever browser you've chosen, and I have an antipathy of Internet Explorer as high as anybody's (probably higher), so I agree you shouldn't have to use it. But to offer my own anecdote, I've had zero problems getting Flash to work with Firefox or Safari on Windows or on the Mac. Heck, it's working with Firefox under Ubuntu Studio 8.10 on one PC at home...
It's a proprietary format entirely controlled by one company
It's also well-documented and has third-party and even open source tools for content creation, as well as an open source project or two aiming at playing.
has reached ubiquitous status by being the only viable solution for several problems for far too long.
Yep. That's the niche part.
And as for being proven, you've obviously never tried to watch Flash videos on 64-bit Linux.
Perhaps I should say "proven around 99% of desktop environments in use." If they haven't put resources into 64-bit Linux yet, that's certainly frustrating, but one can hardly blame them for failing to put their full punch behind what's probably not even half of the entire Linux market yet.
Only now do they have an alpha version of a native x86_64 player and it's been in alpha since late last year. How terrible can their code possibly be if it takes this long to recompile it for 64 bits?
They are far from the only piece of software that has trouble making the 64 bit jump. This last weekend I tried building Google's v8 engine on 64 bit BSD and Linux machines before discovering that it's pretty much hopeless for the near term, and this is a piece of "next generation" work that's largely been conceived and built in the last few years.
You're making the false assertion here that this is between Flash and Silverlight. Playing videos and drawing vector graphics are things that should be done in the browser and which have technologies on the way that will allow just that, so that one company no longer has absolute control over who can do those things. By apologizing for Adobe and their ineptitude in making Flash a true cross-platform technology you harm that effort.
I'm not apologizing for anything (although I might point again that as frustrating as it may be to 64 bit Linux users, Adobe's failure to penetrate that particular segment of the market is a mighty weak metric of how cross-platform they are). I'm pointing out that Flash has been readily filling a niche which hasn't been otherwise filled effectively for the last 10 years. This fact and my pointing it out has certainly done far, far less to hold up progress on the web than some of the w3c's navel-gazing. When the open technologies mature enough to compete across a wide segment, I'll be using them and singing their praises. And even until then, if I can get a job done with them with a few hacks and some extra sweat, I'll probably do it. Doesn't mean Flash isn't the right tool sometimes in the meanwhile.
... as they say.
As industry devils go, Flash has fairly low levels of evil. It's proven, it fills a niche, it works, and while it's not wide open, it's not exactly locked shut either.
And technically, adding soldiers to Afghanistan is the exact opposite of "bringing our troops home"
You are aware that throughout his campaign, he was fairly consistent about the idea that we should be escalating in Afghanistan and Pakistan, right?
He didn't campaign on the idea that aren't wars we should be fighting, nor on the idea all troops should be home. He *did* focus against the Iraq war, which, as he'd been saying since 2002, he thought was a problematic conflict to begin with.
There were rumors of a similar acquisition but the other way around -- Sun was looking at buying Apple -- a decade ago. This was 'round the time McNealy had said something like "Apple's best hope is to become the world's best Java thin client manufacturer."
How do you like them Apples, Scott? :)
An Apple-Sun merger really doesn't make a lot of sense. They do really different things. Schwartz's time in the NeXTStep development world, though, makes me think it's not completely impossible...
And this shift will require managers to look beyond résumés 'choked with acronyms and lists of technologies' to find those who 'can understand, influence, and guide development efforts, rather than simply taking dictation.'
I think an equal question is where they're going to find more managers who aren't the habit of seeing coders as black boxes into which their decisions go in and desired code comes out.
People like to talk about the archetype of the "techie" who is, of course, good with technology but doesn't understand much else. I suppose I've met people who embody this, but generally, my experience is a little different: I frequently meet programmers who are three dimensional people who may be good at writing, music, presentation... even sales. So I wonder sometimes where this persistent stereotype of the "techie" comes from.
Mind you, this happens the other direction as well: I see programmers who are convinced the "soft skills" of other professionals are easy to pick up and practice and they could be doing any job in the company.
There's nothing especially unique about MacOS that lets that happen.
I wouldn't say there is. It is, however, an example of a meaningful reason someone might see a Unix subsystem as a feature.
(I *would* say that the MacOS *is* unique in combining a Unix subsystem with a first-class commercial desktop platform, which is particularly interesting if you're doing enough work on the client/design side of web development that apps from Adobe and others are useful.)
On every other system used by our teams, it's been trivial to get things to run, but every Mac user has had to jump through flaming hoops to get where those that use Windows or Linux get to in under an hour.
Not my experience, but then again, I've been able to largely avoid Java since the late 90s, so....
I think that the Web developers who use it use it because that's the system they're comfortable with
Probably generally true.
..or the management of the company that's rewarded by the shareholders when you discuss your silly little proposition to actually add value to AT&T's services.
Adding pipes requires investing money. Invested money is money that can't be returned to the shareholders and more particularly can't be used to support positive evaluations of short-term management performance. So why, exactly, would anyone in charge of making decisions at AT&T feel any need whatsoever to invest in more bandwidth?
And that's just if we're thinking about normal business types here -- remember, telecom execs are an entirely different breed, largely unschooled in things entreprenurial, innovative, or competitive, but rather making money via rentierism from monopolies (de facto or official). We'd be lucky if someday there's a "damn the torpedoes we're going with 5 blades and an aloe strip" kind of response.
I think if we're ever going to have ubiquitous and affordable wireless data service, it's going to have to come from an enterprise whose roots are more silicon valley and less telecom. We'll see.
Of all the bits of OS X that are actually interesting and of value to users, "it's a UNIX" is a long, long, long way down the list
Depends on what you mean by "users." Web developers love it: you can be running a near-perfect approximation of your production server right on your laptop and have commercial desktop apps like Adobe's (and even IE via virtualization) all on the same machine. And I've met other hacker types who value the shell and BSD-like subsystem plus other features of the OS.
Speaking of BS...
if a news organization cannot survive in the market it doesn't deserve to exist.
Given that you were mistakenly leaving NPR out of that statement when you made it, I'm assuming what you mean is that the news organizations a market-focused society deserves are Murdoch outlets.
We don't need another NPR-style organization. News is not Sesame St. for adults.
Sesame Street for adults? Since that sounds like a cheap insult, I'll take it as a sign that you're unfamiliar with NPR. Or Sesame Street, for that matter, given that it's a pretty high-quality program.
But, yeah, back to news. Perhaps you're unaware that the market (via the listener contribution model) overwhelmingly supports NPR, and public funding provides less than 2% of their operating costs. Perhaps you're unaware that people trust NPR and other non-commercial alternatives more than other "market" media. There are even studies which indicate its listeners tend to be better informed. There are also readily observable contrasts in the educational value of the programming and particularly the editorializing... see, for example, CNBC vs just about any episode of the Planet Money podcast.
I'd say that far from "not needing another NPR," we could actually use a lot more of it.
Mormon colony ships are heading for Alpha Centauri while the rest of us are still trying to get a decent electric car.
This is more or less the plot of the original Battlestar Galactica.
(Except they're trying to come TO earth, but they can't, because they don't have the production budget, and they have to keep re-using the clips where they shoot Cylons down.)
It was shot down because the governor feared the studios would stop labeling their games altogether if they could be held liable for what label they slap on the box. This wasn't a victory for free speech or at least a step in the right direction.
Um... what exactly would victory have looked like? Other than Jack Thompson's public shaming, disbarment, or exile...
Labeling is speech. In some cases, it's compelled speech, in other cases it's more or less cooperative, but it's a solution that's pretty coherent with important principles behind the idea of free speech, such as information's valuae to a free to society and faith in a marketplace of ideas. Huntsman realized that turning the dial up on the compulsions associated with the ratings would (a) probably NOT be compatible with the legal framework of the country AND (b) would chill labeling speech.
Now, if you view labeling as hostile speech and onerous, that's another argument altogether, but it's more or less orthogonal to ideas of freedom of speech or artistic expression.
do things the smart way instead of the wasteful way, we start screaming at them?
Because to some people (and I could find direct quotes from some other net discussions I've participated in) believe that the ultimate measure of well-being in a society is complete economic freedom.
And complete economic freedom has to mean being able to use your resources frugally or to waste them, and it has to mean you can justify an arbitrary choice with the defense of personal "utility."
And even though its proponents are smart enough to recognize that at least on a philosophical level, they can't defend use/abuse of property that involves incurring costs to others, on a practical level it's nearly inevitable that such costs will creep into the system, unless you have a very vigilant, organized, and broadly empowered interests acting against it.
This isn't to say that economic freedom should be arbitrary constrained, certainly not any more than it should be arbitrarily indulged (and probably less). The problem is that (a) some people prefer their conceptions of social organization quite black and white, which doesn't allow for subtle resolutions of tension between the two poles, and (b) "arbitrary" tends to be a somewhat subjective judgment.
How exactly is Javascript missing from mobile Safari?
"Summers was deservedly castigated, but not for the right reasons. He claimed to be giving a comprehensive list of reasons why there weren't more women reaching the top jobs in the sciences. Yet Summers, an economist, left one out: Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States.
Pursuing science as a career seems so irrational that one wonders why any young American would do it. Yet we do find some young Americans starting out in the sciences and they are mostly men. When the Larry Summers story first broke, I wrote in my Weblog:
Having been both a student and teacher at MIT, my personal explanation for men going into science is the following:
1. young men strive to achieve high status among their peer group
2. men tend to lack perspective and are unable to step back and ask the question "is this peer group worth impressing?"
Consider Albert Q. Mathnerd, a math undergrad at MIT ("Course 18" we call it). He works hard and beats his chest to demonstrate that he is the best math nerd at MIT. This is important to Albert because most of his friends are math majors and the rest of his friends are in wimpier departments, impressed that Albert has even taken on such demanding classes. Albert never reflects on the fact that the guy who was the best math undergrad at MIT 20 years ago is now an entry-level public school teacher in Nebraska, having failed to get tenure at a 2nd tier university. When Albert goes to graduate school to get his PhD, his choice will have the same logical foundation as John Hinckley's attempt to impress Jodie Foster by shooting Ronald Reagan.
It is the guys with the poorest social skills who are least likely to talk to adults and find out what the salary and working conditions are like in different occupations. It is mostly guys with rather poor social skills whom one meets in the university science halls.
What about women? Don't they want to impress their peers? Yes, but they are more discriminating about choosing those peers. I've taught a fair number of women students in electrical engineering and computer science classes over the years. I can give you a list of the ones who had the best heads on their shoulders and were the most thoughtful about planning out the rest of their lives. Their names are on files in my 'medical school recommendations' directory."
— Phil Greenspun, Women in Science
"Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States. This article explores [a] possible explanation for the dearth of women in science: They found better jobs."
— Philip Greenspun Women in Science
Their goal is lock-in. A standards-based engine would negate that.
Honestly, I've agreed with you up until now. Spending resources to play catch-up with what Webkit and Gecko have been able to do for years doesn't make any sense at all... unless your goal is to depart from those implementations.
However, I've wondered if someday, the resource logic wouldn't occur to Microsoft, or the trident codebase wouldn't become such a problem that it'd become stronger. They don't need to have their own rendering engine to embrace and extend. Using webkit or gecko would mean that they could lose any advantage they might have by people coding websites to IE, but they don't need that to try and get Silverlight out there or even keep the world using Active X. And rich / active components are probably about the only hope they have of being able to get any kind of lock on the web again.