Icahn is an idiot if he believes that a) Yahoo and MS can merge peacefully, and b) Yahoo brings anything other than a brand to MS.
He doesn't believe any of that.
At least, I won't believe he believes it until he promises to buy and hold a large amount of stock in Microsoft for a decade or so, should they buy Yahoo.
What I think he believes is that he can either (a) be an arbitrageur on Yahoo for fun and 60-70% profit or (b) get Yahoo to pay him to go away.
I think the thing though that bugs me is that I am a umpc (not sub notebook) fan and have a wibrain b1h that is a good 1/4 of the size of a macbook air and a asus r1 that is about 1/2 the size and the wibrain outperforms the air and the asus is close to comparable- also for the price of both of those units plus I could get another laptop and an eee and still meet the price of the air. when you look at the design of the air as well when it is gutted the majority of the unit is a giant battery cell that spans the unit and is not replacable without taking the machine apart- all to make it "thin"-
It's perfectly legitimate to compare these other products on price and features that might be important to you. The other products have merits (though the wibrain, like any handheld, is really not the same market at all).
all of this along with the lack of peripheral functionality all you are paying for is fashion and brand
Again, same mistakes. Are there *really* no other differentiating points other than the shape/case design? And is fashion really the only reason for the shape/case design?
just take a look at the macbook air- extremely good example of fashion over function -- slow cpu, little ram, no peripherals- but it fits in an envelope....
Nearly a quintessential example of how this kind of analysis goes wrong.
It's correct for a limited space of consideration -- if CPU speed, RAM amount, inclusion of certain peripherals are the highest and overidding priorities in choosing a portable, then the MacBook Air is not the right product for you.
The problem really comes, though, when you're unable to see beyond the reduction of the product to those specs. *Especially* if the only other thing you're able to apprehend is the appearance. A lot of Apple critics who don't get it yet are in this boat. They see the specs , realize there's something with better (or more) specs that are important to them out there -- and then conclude that because *their* priorities dictate going with that decision, there is no other valid set of priorities.
Here's a question: what other benefits besides "stylishness" might the shape/construction/weight of the MacBook Air yield for its owner? Hint: the demonstration that it not only fits but slides nicely into and out of an envelop is only an illustration, and the concept I'm getting it is, in fact, very functional.
Here's another important question: are the concepts of "aesthetics" and "design" limited appearance? What other considerations might be important?
And finally: is a product simply the sum of the specs of its components, or can there be something more?
it is another in a long line of "apple products are better because hey look nicer" arguments that has no basis in technical comparisons
While is true that Apple products often look nicer and that's worth something to many people, it is neither true that the sum of their merits are tied up in their appearance nor that a good technical comparison is reducible to size/speed of components.
So -- here's a question: can you bypass this issue entirely by basically having a virtualized server on a grid of machines?
Then there isn't a single machine to steal. You'd have to go all David-Bowman-on-HAL, pulling everything out to actually steal the server.
And if you were on a particularly sizable piece of Iron, it might be harder to carry the thing off.:)
Physical security is still important, but it's interesting to see that entire machines might benefit from the same kind of security bits in general do -- if you want them to be persistent, you spread them across as much hardware as possible.
OK, seriously. Someone who makes a clueless -- and somewhat incisive -- comment like "Apple is a fasion company" gets modded up, and pointing out (if subtly) the very real difference between:
(a) the fact that Apple's products are currently fasionable (b) the idea that their product priorities are like Saks
and that gets modded down?
I understand that it's also very fashionable to complain about "apple fanboism" on slashdot these days, and if I were trolling I could make some exceptionally pointed comments about some common problems with that stripe of criticism. But in particular, I think it's pretty clear the anti-Apple sentiment has about the same hold in any groupthink that's present.
Where's the open source mobile platform that will run on top of third-party hardware?
I think about this every time I look at the OpenMoko and Qtopia stuff. I don't think that producing hardware designs is a bad thing per se, but I don't understand why there hasn't been more effort at rolling out distro for mobiles hobbyists could install on existing phones they might have lying around.
I understand there are Linux-based phones. But think about where FOSS computing might be if Linux and BSD had to wait for custom-designed hardware, or for a manufacturer to build a PC around that product. There'd have been nowhere near the growth.
There needs to be mobile FOSS for more-or-less commodity hardware if there's really going to be a part for it to play in the growth in the mobile market.
"the Sun software apparently looked eerily like the Apple iPhone's software; in fact, the platform Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz showed off is already being dubbed "jPhone" based on the striking resemblance to Apple's goods.... Scott McNealy alluded to the copying of Apple's modus operandi by wearing a black t-shirt..."
It doesn't surprise me when I see Apple-Sun coherence or imitation. Schwartz's roots are in NeXTStep/Cocoa development. I'm actually surprised there isn't more with Schwartz at the helm.
The Lexicon authors may well be within their rights to have produced that work, but not for reasons that are based in the rather tortured screed he's offering up.
So... one can find parallels between many good stories. Does that automatically erode all intellectual property claims? Does it even directly relate to the specific claims in the Rowling suit? Hardly.
So... Card has publicly admitted on at least one occasion where he's borrowed from someone else. And he also tells people in his books when a character is gay! Look how much of a better person he is than Rowling!
And this dig is pure malice:
" The difference between us is that I actually make enough money from Ender's Game to be content, without having to try to punish other people whose creativity might have been inspired by something I wrote."
Yeah, Orson. That quote just *oozes* personal security with what you've done.
Ask yourself this: after reading the piece, which do you have a clearer understanding of:
(1) Copyright and other intellectual property law (2) Which particulars Rowling is invoking and where her case goes wrong (3) How disgusted Orson Scott Card is with Rowling
I'm seeing a lot of #3 and not very much of #1 or #2.
If the suit lowers the dignity of Rowling, Card seems perfectly ready to sacrifice his own by basically marshalling the resources of his talents.... to call Rowling a poopyhead.
I seriously believe that one of the reasons throwing money at the problem hasn't been working is that people who are implementing these things aren't the best possible candidates.
It's a specific case of a larger problem: when it comes to hiring (whether a consultant or employee), "it take one to know one." If you don't have a good eye for quality industrial design, how will you be able to pick out a good industrial designer? If you don't really know something about information security, how will you recognize a competent individual or company?
The fallback alternatives aren't great. Reputation is trusting someone else (or groups of other people) to solve the problem... but this reduces back to the original problem (how will you know whether their estimation of someone's ability is reliable if you don't know what it takes to make that estimation accurately?). Certification is essentially institutionalized reputation. Resumes are trusting someone to distill their own reputation. And these are the *better* alternatives to simply swallowing marketing.:)
This extends into the realm of "best practices" -- which best practices? How do you know which ones are right for your organization? If you know them only by reputation, you won't understand the principles behind them and will likely apply them incorrectly.
A good chunk of industry has a major problem with both of these. I don't know how to solve it per se, but I'm glad to see the technical discipline of Info Security looking beyond the technical issues to the organizational and human ones. This kind of issue is what they're going to have to come to grips with if any progress is to be made on IT problems.
I think what's likely is that Schneier realized that availability of good crypto isn't the only link in the security chain, and it's probably been a while since it was a candidate for weakest link.
Hence the discussion about how security as a field is reaching out to other disciplines -- organizational behavior and sociology and economics are essential because you're looking at the problem of why business organizations don't do well at security, and it isn't just a technical matter.
The iPhones retarded lack of Adobe Flash and Sun Java support makes its web browsing experience, for me at least, abysmal.
What kind of sites are your browsing that require *Java* these days? If the bulk of your daily visits is to sites with scientific visualizations, I can buy this, but most of the web has been Java free since the applet craze of the late 90s passed.
At any rate, yes, if bulk of your web browsing requires Flash or Java, then, yes, the iPhone is certainly not how you should be doing it. There's a large enough chunk of the web that doesn't need it that the iPhone remains a great browsing tool for most people.
Until the iPhone can hold a candle to one of these [dynamism.com] running Xubuntu ( Ubuntu + Xfce ) , then I will just consider it a toy, with its one redeeming feature being multi-touch integrated with a great UI.
Also, it's a phone. And 1/3-1/2 the price.
Don't get me wrong -- I think the UX series are pretty cool, and I think they're also the right product for a lot of Slashdotters who don't like the iPhone because it's not the ultimate open palmtop computing environment they've always wanted.
However, it's not a phone. EVDO + SIP is close, but it's not really quite ready based on my tests anyway (and it's a TOS violation for some carriers).
The iPhone is a successful product for its target audience because it's a pretty good phone, plus an iPod, plus part of the small set of mobile phones that have web browsing experiences that don't suck. The extra computing stuff, closed as it may be, is reall icing on the cake.
I know why Jobs cares. He is every bit as much a wannabe monopolist as is Gates. He loves total control and complete product lock down.
The idea that Jobs is obsessed with product control is quite credible. Market control? The only way to make that stick is to define Apple products as their own market (and thereby make product control == market control). The reality is there's no market segment -- no general class of devices or software -- in which Apple has ever been able to exert the kind of pressure Microsoft has with Windows. Not even digital music retailing or music players.
Freeman Dyson and Murray Gell-Mann aren't exactly chopped liver either, and they could more or less be put in the same pantheon of Titans including Wheeler and Feynman (even though I think there's arguments to be made that Wheeler and Feynman were just a little extra special).
Hawking... I don't know. I can't deny he's been a good interface between the field and its popular discussion, or that he's been a good cosmologist, but it's hard for me to see him in the same way these figures who basically invented large swaths of modern physics.
You're in business selling a service that's so popular you cannot meet all the demand that exists for it.
And you're asking how you're going to pay for building out to be able to provide more?
(1) Raise your prices. Use the extra revenue to pay for buildout. Sell more service. Profit.
(2) Get investment. Use it for buildout. Sell more service. Return profit to investors.
I understand that the peering agreements make things more complicated, but the basic issue is that people on the ends of the network have demands for the services, and it really seems like there's fairly transparent economic solutions to that problem without trying to do anything particularly complicated like having ISPs shake down content providers who don't have points of origin on their networks.
In short: bill the people you provide service to. Don't try billing the people you don't provide service to.
Apple users aren't (necessarily) stupid. They just have completely different expectations. When Mac people buy something they expect it to make them cool. Any other functionality is just icing on the cake.
Knee-jerk Apple critics (KJACs) aren't necessarily stupid. They just have completely different expectations. When they make up stories about "Mac people," they expect them to either not be present, or to respond in a manner that would make an inert gas envious to wild speculation about why they purchase and use products KJACs exhibit chronic misunderstandings about.
CS instructors at the high school level will have much broader latitude in what they teach. You could go a vocational route (say, Rails), or a different theoretical route (say, The Little Schemer).
I also think it's possible that the contents of AB need to both go into A. It's been a long time since I took them both (1989), so things may be different, but my recollection is that the contents of A alone really weren't much beyond pragmatic familiarity with basic imperative programming, the kind of stuff that your basic "Teach Yourself X in Some Ridiculously Short Period of Time" book can actually teach you.
That said, if what they're doing has the effect of dropping the study of data structures and algorithms from the high school curriculum -- if dropping B really means there will be less CS in the classroom -- then this is a really poor move.
Communitarianism: Communism Lite! Now with fewer corpses!
I'm actually dipping my toe into doing some research on awareness and perception of communitarianism as a political philosophy, and I'm curious about how you were made aware of it, what sources have subsequently informed your understanding of it, and what led you to the apparent conclusion in your sig.
This is not a value judgment on your conclusion at all, by the way. I'm simply having some trouble discovering a sample of people who are even familiar with the term and I really need to (a) engage more of them and (b) get some ideas of how I might start going about constructing the right sample population.
Email's in the profile if you're interested. But spam filters being what they are, you may want to reply to this message instead, or let me know via reply here when you've sent email.
This would have allowed Adobe to start working on a 64-bit version anytime in the last 5 years.
To some extent, this is true of OS X, too -- if Adobe had started in on a Cocoa port anytime in the last five years, 64 bit support wouldn't be the issue it appears to be becoming now. I agree Apple plays a part in the problem, given that they said they'd offer full 64 bit support in Carbon, but it's also been clear for a long while now that long-term, Cocoa was the future.
I'm also a little puzzled. If I read correctly, it's only an issue for the UI -- partial 64 bit support, possibly including RAM addressing, will still be available for Carbon. Performance gains are really most likely to come there, so it's not clear to me exactly what the trouble here is.
The Left say the media is to Right. The Right say the media is to Left.
One of the things I've always found interesting about this state of affairs is that even for a perfectly balanced media, you'd expect precisely this result.
Consider a theoretical population that normally distributed along a political spectrum "Left" to "Right."
Consider a "Media" that has the perfect ability to balance right in the middle.
When you sample enough people from this population, you'll get about half that say it's too far left, half that say it's too far right.
I completely agree. People act as if shading the truth is the major problem in America, and while I think it *is* a problem, I also think that there are deeper ones, including those you mentioned.
I also think a lot of people don't understand something very important: the difference between *bias* and *agenda*. There's a good illustration from a few years ago during the Bush-Kerry race. Someone noticed that in a certain time period, Bush articles apparently came up more than Kerry articles on Google News. If I recall correctly, Google acknowledged it was possible that might happen, but it was a side-effect rather than anything intentionally programmed into the algorithm. There were also some ready other explanations: as the then-POTUS, there was certainly more reason for him to be covered in the news. Sometimes, certain imbalances come up for reasons that aren't planned and have nothing to do with any particular agenda.
On the other hand, a bit earlier, there were the issues with top search listings from MSN's search on the term "linux." Radically different, than most other searches and including reports that were critical of it from a TCO and capabilities standpoint. Bias, or agenda?
Bias is inevitable, as long as you have any kind of social identity and normative values. You can minimize it and adopt (as some of your normative values) a commitment to examine other perspectives, and thereby escape the worst effects, but you can't eliminate it entirely. But if you can escape its worst effects, it may not matter so much.
Agenda, on the other hand, is about interests in outcomes that are much more difficult to check.
Bias is acceptable in a news/media source, especially when the audience understands it. Agenda isn't, with some potential exceptions for those transparently and completely coherent with the mission of the source.
Slashdot Mirror
Icahn is an idiot if he believes that a) Yahoo and MS can merge peacefully, and b) Yahoo brings anything other than a brand to MS.
He doesn't believe any of that.
At least, I won't believe he believes it until he promises to buy and hold a large amount of stock in Microsoft for a decade or so, should they buy Yahoo.
What I think he believes is that he can either (a) be an arbitrageur on Yahoo for fun and 60-70% profit or (b) get Yahoo to pay him to go away.
Well, this fits two patterns with the previous movies:
(1) Odd numbers good, even numbers bad
(2) PG good, PG-13 bad
So I suppose now the question is -- how does Crystal Skull compare with the Temple of Doom?
We're good up through here:
I think the thing though that bugs me is that I am a umpc (not sub notebook) fan and have a wibrain b1h that is a good 1/4 of the size of a macbook air and a asus r1 that is about 1/2 the size and the wibrain outperforms the air and the asus is close to comparable- also for the price of both of those units plus I could get another laptop and an eee and still meet the price of the air. when you look at the design of the air as well when it is gutted the majority of the unit is a giant battery cell that spans the unit and is not replacable without taking the machine apart- all to make it "thin"-
It's perfectly legitimate to compare these other products on price and features that might be important to you. The other products have merits (though the wibrain, like any handheld, is really not the same market at all).
all of this along with the lack of peripheral functionality all you are paying for is fashion and brand
Again, same mistakes. Are there *really* no other differentiating points other than the shape/case design? And is fashion really the only reason for the shape/case design?
just take a look at the macbook air- extremely good example of fashion over function -- slow cpu, little ram, no peripherals- but it fits in an envelope....
Nearly a quintessential example of how this kind of analysis goes wrong.
It's correct for a limited space of consideration -- if CPU speed, RAM amount, inclusion of certain peripherals are the highest and overidding priorities in choosing a portable, then the MacBook Air is not the right product for you.
The problem really comes, though, when you're unable to see beyond the reduction of the product to those specs. *Especially* if the only other thing you're able to apprehend is the appearance. A lot of Apple critics who don't get it yet are in this boat. They see the specs , realize there's something with better (or more) specs that are important to them out there -- and then conclude that because *their* priorities dictate going with that decision, there is no other valid set of priorities.
Here's a question: what other benefits besides "stylishness" might the shape/construction/weight of the MacBook Air yield for its owner? Hint: the demonstration that it not only fits but slides nicely into and out of an envelop is only an illustration, and the concept I'm getting it is, in fact, very functional.
Here's another important question: are the concepts of "aesthetics" and "design" limited appearance? What other considerations might be important?
And finally: is a product simply the sum of the specs of its components, or can there be something more?
it is another in a long line of "apple products are better because hey look nicer" arguments that has no basis in technical comparisons
While is true that Apple products often look nicer and that's worth something to many people, it is neither true that the sum of their merits are tied up in their appearance nor that a good technical comparison is reducible to size/speed of components.
So -- here's a question: can you bypass this issue entirely by basically having a virtualized server on a grid of machines?
:)
Then there isn't a single machine to steal. You'd have to go all David-Bowman-on-HAL, pulling everything out to actually steal the server.
And if you were on a particularly sizable piece of Iron, it might be harder to carry the thing off.
Physical security is still important, but it's interesting to see that entire machines might benefit from the same kind of security bits in general do -- if you want them to be persistent, you spread them across as much hardware as possible.
OK, seriously. Someone who makes a clueless -- and somewhat incisive -- comment like "Apple is a fasion company" gets modded up, and pointing out (if subtly) the very real difference between:
(a) the fact that Apple's products are currently fasionable
(b) the idea that their product priorities are like Saks
and that gets modded down?
I understand that it's also very fashionable to complain about "apple fanboism" on slashdot these days, and if I were trolling I could make some exceptionally pointed comments about some common problems with that stripe of criticism. But in particular, I think it's pretty clear the anti-Apple sentiment has about the same hold in any groupthink that's present.
They're in different industries. Microsoft is a software company. Apple is a fashion company..
Are you sure you didn't confuse fashion and fashionable?
Where's the open source mobile platform that will run on top of third-party hardware?
I think about this every time I look at the OpenMoko and Qtopia stuff. I don't think that producing hardware designs is a bad thing per se, but I don't understand why there hasn't been more effort at rolling out distro for mobiles hobbyists could install on existing phones they might have lying around.
I understand there are Linux-based phones. But think about where FOSS computing might be if Linux and BSD had to wait for custom-designed hardware, or for a manufacturer to build a PC around that product. There'd have been nowhere near the growth.
There needs to be mobile FOSS for more-or-less commodity hardware if there's really going to be a part for it to play in the growth in the mobile market.
"the Sun software apparently looked eerily like the Apple iPhone's software; in fact, the platform Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz showed off is already being dubbed "jPhone" based on the striking resemblance to Apple's goods.... Scott McNealy alluded to the copying of Apple's modus operandi by wearing a black t-shirt..."
It doesn't surprise me when I see Apple-Sun coherence or imitation. Schwartz's roots are in NeXTStep/Cocoa development. I'm actually surprised there isn't more with Schwartz at the helm.
Where are my mod points when I *need* them? :)
Because he's really not that great at commentary.
The Lexicon authors may well be within their rights to have produced that work, but not for reasons that are based in the rather tortured screed he's offering up.
So... one can find parallels between many good stories. Does that automatically erode all intellectual property claims? Does it even directly relate to the specific claims in the Rowling suit? Hardly.
So... Card has publicly admitted on at least one occasion where he's borrowed from someone else. And he also tells people in his books when a character is gay! Look how much of a better person he is than Rowling!
And this dig is pure malice:
" The difference between us is that I actually make enough money from Ender's Game to be content, without having to try to punish other people whose creativity might have been inspired by something I wrote."
Yeah, Orson. That quote just *oozes* personal security with what you've done.
Ask yourself this: after reading the piece, which do you have a clearer understanding of:
(1) Copyright and other intellectual property law
(2) Which particulars Rowling is invoking and where her case goes wrong
(3) How disgusted Orson Scott Card is with Rowling
I'm seeing a lot of #3 and not very much of #1 or #2.
If the suit lowers the dignity of Rowling, Card seems perfectly ready to sacrifice his own by basically marshalling the resources of his talents.... to call Rowling a poopyhead.
I seriously believe that one of the reasons throwing money at the problem hasn't been working is that people who are implementing these things aren't the best possible candidates.
:)
It's a specific case of a larger problem: when it comes to hiring (whether a consultant or employee), "it take one to know one." If you don't have a good eye for quality industrial design, how will you be able to pick out a good industrial designer? If you don't really know something about information security, how will you recognize a competent individual or company?
The fallback alternatives aren't great. Reputation is trusting someone else (or groups of other people) to solve the problem... but this reduces back to the original problem (how will you know whether their estimation of someone's ability is reliable if you don't know what it takes to make that estimation accurately?). Certification is essentially institutionalized reputation. Resumes are trusting someone to distill their own reputation. And these are the *better* alternatives to simply swallowing marketing.
This extends into the realm of "best practices" -- which best practices? How do you know which ones are right for your organization? If you know them only by reputation, you won't understand the principles behind them and will likely apply them incorrectly.
A good chunk of industry has a major problem with both of these. I don't know how to solve it per se, but I'm glad to see the technical discipline of Info Security looking beyond the technical issues to the organizational and human ones. This kind of issue is what they're going to have to come to grips with if any progress is to be made on IT problems.
I think what's likely is that Schneier realized that availability of good crypto isn't the only link in the security chain, and it's probably been a while since it was a candidate for weakest link.
Hence the discussion about how security as a field is reaching out to other disciplines -- organizational behavior and sociology and economics are essential because you're looking at the problem of why business organizations don't do well at security, and it isn't just a technical matter.
The iPhones retarded lack of Adobe Flash and Sun Java support makes its web browsing experience, for me at least, abysmal.
What kind of sites are your browsing that require *Java* these days? If the bulk of your daily visits is to sites with scientific visualizations, I can buy this, but most of the web has been Java free since the applet craze of the late 90s passed.
At any rate, yes, if bulk of your web browsing requires Flash or Java, then, yes, the iPhone is certainly not how you should be doing it. There's a large enough chunk of the web that doesn't need it that the iPhone remains a great browsing tool for most people.
Until the iPhone can hold a candle to one of these [dynamism.com] running Xubuntu ( Ubuntu + Xfce ) , then I will just consider it a toy, with its one redeeming feature being multi-touch integrated with a great UI.
Also, it's a phone. And 1/3-1/2 the price.
Don't get me wrong -- I think the UX series are pretty cool, and I think they're also the right product for a lot of Slashdotters who don't like the iPhone because it's not the ultimate open palmtop computing environment they've always wanted.
However, it's not a phone. EVDO + SIP is close, but it's not really quite ready based on my tests anyway (and it's a TOS violation for some carriers).
The iPhone is a successful product for its target audience because it's a pretty good phone, plus an iPod, plus part of the small set of mobile phones that have web browsing experiences that don't suck. The extra computing stuff, closed as it may be, is reall icing on the cake.
I know why Jobs cares. He is every bit as much a wannabe monopolist as is Gates. He loves total control and complete product lock down.
The idea that Jobs is obsessed with product control is quite credible. Market control? The only way to make that stick is to define Apple products as their own market (and thereby make product control == market control). The reality is there's no market segment -- no general class of devices or software -- in which Apple has ever been able to exert the kind of pressure Microsoft has with Windows. Not even digital music retailing or music players.
Freeman Dyson and Murray Gell-Mann aren't exactly chopped liver either, and they could more or less be put in the same pantheon of Titans including Wheeler and Feynman (even though I think there's arguments to be made that Wheeler and Feynman were just a little extra special).
Hawking... I don't know. I can't deny he's been a good interface between the field and its popular discussion, or that he's been a good cosmologist, but it's hard for me to see him in the same way these figures who basically invented large swaths of modern physics.
You're in business selling a service that's so popular you cannot meet all the demand that exists for it.
And you're asking how you're going to pay for building out to be able to provide more?
(1) Raise your prices. Use the extra revenue to pay for buildout. Sell more service. Profit.
(2) Get investment. Use it for buildout. Sell more service. Return profit to investors.
I understand that the peering agreements make things more complicated, but the basic issue is that people on the ends of the network have demands for the services, and it really seems like there's fairly transparent economic solutions to that problem without trying to do anything particularly complicated like having ISPs shake down content providers who don't have points of origin on their networks.
In short: bill the people you provide service to. Don't try billing the people you don't provide service to.
Apple users aren't (necessarily) stupid. They just have completely different expectations. When Mac people buy something they expect it to make them cool. Any other functionality is just icing on the cake.
Knee-jerk Apple critics (KJACs) aren't necessarily stupid. They just have completely different expectations. When they make up stories about "Mac people," they expect them to either not be present, or to respond in a manner that would make an inert gas envious to wild speculation about why they purchase and use products KJACs exhibit chronic misunderstandings about.
You may think you are a Christian, but you are clearly a heretic who preaches that some of your Bible's most clearly laid out laws can be ignored.
However, you sir, appear to be displaying the behavior we've come to expect from Christians! Congratulations on showing up your brother!
CS instructors at the high school level will have much broader latitude in what they teach. You could go a vocational route (say, Rails), or a different theoretical route (say, The Little Schemer).
I also think it's possible that the contents of AB need to both go into A. It's been a long time since I took them both (1989), so things may be different, but my recollection is that the contents of A alone really weren't much beyond pragmatic familiarity with basic imperative programming, the kind of stuff that your basic "Teach Yourself X in Some Ridiculously Short Period of Time" book can actually teach you.
That said, if what they're doing has the effect of dropping the study of data structures and algorithms from the high school curriculum -- if dropping B really means there will be less CS in the classroom -- then this is a really poor move.
the other extreme outcome (Apple's trademark rights eroded) might also cause some positive reactions and make potential future actors more cautious.
So I think it's likely we'll see an alloyed settlement. That's what's likely to benefit the lawyers, anway (and both parties, I suppose).
Communitarianism: Communism Lite! Now with fewer corpses!
I'm actually dipping my toe into doing some research on awareness and perception of communitarianism as a political philosophy, and I'm curious about how you were made aware of it, what sources have subsequently informed your understanding of it, and what led you to the apparent conclusion in your sig.
This is not a value judgment on your conclusion at all, by the way. I'm simply having some trouble discovering a sample of people who are even familiar with the term and I really need to (a) engage more of them and (b) get some ideas of how I might start going about constructing the right sample population.
Email's in the profile if you're interested. But spam filters being what they are, you may want to reply to this message instead, or let me know via reply here when you've sent email.
This would have allowed Adobe to start working on a 64-bit version anytime in the last 5 years.
To some extent, this is true of OS X, too -- if Adobe had started in on a Cocoa port anytime in the last five years, 64 bit support wouldn't be the issue it appears to be becoming now. I agree Apple plays a part in the problem, given that they said they'd offer full 64 bit support in Carbon, but it's also been clear for a long while now that long-term, Cocoa was the future.
I'm also a little puzzled. If I read correctly, it's only an issue for the UI -- partial 64 bit support, possibly including RAM addressing, will still be available for Carbon. Performance gains are really most likely to come there, so it's not clear to me exactly what the trouble here is.
The Left say the media is to Right.
The Right say the media is to Left.
One of the things I've always found interesting about this state of affairs is that even for a perfectly balanced media, you'd expect precisely this result.
Consider a theoretical population that normally distributed along a political spectrum "Left" to "Right."
Consider a "Media" that has the perfect ability to balance right in the middle.
When you sample enough people from this population, you'll get about half that say it's too far left, half that say it's too far right.
I completely agree. People act as if shading the truth is the major problem in America, and while I think it *is* a problem, I also think that there are deeper ones, including those you mentioned.
I also think a lot of people don't understand something very important: the difference between *bias* and *agenda*. There's a good illustration from a few years ago during the Bush-Kerry race. Someone noticed that in a certain time period, Bush articles apparently came up more than Kerry articles on Google News. If I recall correctly, Google acknowledged it was possible that might happen, but it was a side-effect rather than anything intentionally programmed into the algorithm. There were also some ready other explanations: as the then-POTUS, there was certainly more reason for him to be covered in the news. Sometimes, certain imbalances come up for reasons that aren't planned and have nothing to do with any particular agenda.
On the other hand, a bit earlier, there were the issues with top search listings from MSN's search on the term "linux." Radically different, than most other searches and including reports that were critical of it from a TCO and capabilities standpoint. Bias, or agenda?
Bias is inevitable, as long as you have any kind of social identity and normative values. You can minimize it and adopt (as some of your normative values) a commitment to examine other perspectives, and thereby escape the worst effects, but you can't eliminate it entirely. But if you can escape its worst effects, it may not matter so much.
Agenda, on the other hand, is about interests in outcomes that are much more difficult to check.
Bias is acceptable in a news/media source, especially when the audience understands it. Agenda isn't, with some potential exceptions for those transparently and completely coherent with the mission of the source.