Perhaps the expense of the team is so much it would be un-ethical to waste the money (passing the cost onto everyone who has insurance).
The value of a human life (in these low probability of trouble situations) is 5-10 million (determined by the choices people make trading safety for savings on a daily basis). If there has not been a death yet (implied by the summery), why should we be spending so much money on the hypothetical. The amount we spend now is obviously proving to be pretty effective, how many times should we multiply it for that tiny bit extra?
If there is 0% chance of an accident being avoided, and this system kicks in an eighth or a quarter second before the in-attentive driver it is good thing.
Examples of the system being no better than a human fail the test, I simply was trying to point out that it should in no circumstances apply breaks when it will stop you before where the impact would occur. In this much it is very unlikely to increase rear-end collisions.
I personally would be in constant fear of a malfunction in the sensor locking up my brakes on a highway, but not of it slamming breaks when I could have avoided things and getting me rear-ended.
After-all, if I could not navigate around when the alarm went off, there really is no other choice.
I really like XP for a lot of things (the printing a folder full of images for example), but god was it annoying at first (and still).
the redone control panel still causes me trouble when I am trying to help a friend for the first time (I generally, switch to "classic" view and it is no longer a problem then), also I still can't wrap my head around network browsing in the new (Vista actually does this better), I have tons of "network places" on my laptop that would involve breaking and entering to have a chance at accessing again, and every time I want to browse a new network, I need to open network places, browse the workgroup/computers near me, and then group a level to the entire network. Then I can see other workgroups, it still causes me anger every time, and I still don't know how to do it quicker (I'm sure the removing dead links would be little effort though).
He's damn lucky he didn't roll the thing, or kill anyone.
The anyone he would have killed would have been you, outside of your car in a low visibility situation.
I understand the desire to be a good Samaritan and clear the road for others who are not cautious. unfortunately, no good comes from putting ourself at risk in such a situation, since you are simultaneously putting others at the risk of killing you, when if everyone remained in cars it was far more likely to lead to injury and no death.
There are people with flares paid to clean up the road, and if you die doing their job inadequately equipped I pay the price in higher insurance premiums, so please be more thoughtful.
If it stops you 4 inches from an accident you are almost certainly better off. I personally can't do this (stop within for inches of my target at high speeds), but I bet a computer can.
In that situation if the person behind you had a following distance too, then you are safe (you used distance * 1 to stop, they get distance * 2 to do the same), if they didn't have the distance, as long as your car stops real close to the accident you are avoiding, the difference is minor.
The neat thing about this system, is that if there is an accident ahead in a situation where you can't dodge it (aided by a warning if you are stupid), then it should be safer than you applying the breaks yourself. Since it should be able to, without fail, stop you as close to the accident/stopped driver as possible, without hitting it.
If warning doesn't let avoid collision, then stopping right at the obstruction would always be the safest course of action, this car should be able to do that better than you.
Do you really want to spend so much time in Single drive fails the system mode though?
I like the idea, but it would be much smarter to do it with something with something like the Linux RAID 10, and 3 lives drive with 3 copies of data.
This will speed you up, especially during the frequent recover modes. Always protect you from at least one drive failure (often times 2). You will only need one extra drive (12.5% of disk cost, if 8-9 isn't too much, 9 or 10 certainly isn't).
What I do at work (without too much storage by todays standards) is have 2 500 GiB drives mirrored using a RAID 10 "far" copy (in tests it wrote barely slower (probably because writing can allow for near perfect caching), but read nearly as fast as a stripe).
I do nightly snapshots to a 1 TiB external drive. I have these backups shared read only, so people can browse by date and do their own data recovery.
With our work flow, 1 TiB is more than enough to save snapshots for a month. This lets me switch drives on a monthly basis. I also never delete the first of the month out of the snapshots, though I doubt it will ever be worth the effort to search for an old revision of a file.
FWIW, I use pdumpfs for the snapshots, it's not the best, but damn is it easy. Other options wither wanted a GUI (flyback, TimeVault), wanted too much setup in cron (glasstree, Dirvish), or didn't allow for a browsable result (rdiff-backup).
Here is a post: http://georgecoghill.com/blog/2008/05/06/indesign-cs3-mac-osx-105-leopard-the-good-the-bad-the-not-too-shabby/
I am also having weird focusing issues with InDesign (It will not refofus, and must be forced quite to get focus back, its document recovery has prevented any data loss, but this happens 2-3 times a day), which I assume are related to hiding it and failing.
Running in Rosetta fixed a printing issue, but it hardly feels appropriate to buy a new computer for $3000 and have to emulate the one that is getting replaced to run your application that is quite new.
The issue seamed to be a driver issue that could be fixed by manually overwriting some files from earlier versions of OSX, I can't remember the specifics, but I think it started on point release 10.5.3 even, so a bigfix patch broke compatibility. It truly is a pain in the ass, with things moving so fast it is impossible to get apps all optimized for the same version of Mac OS, and has been since OS X was released.
Of course, it is still better than having to use Vista, which does so many things I really like, but as a whole feels awful to use (it reminds me of KDE4 in that respect)
No, the "free" phone is paid in the fact that they can count on your income for the next 12-24 months. This allows them to do forecasting, and plan network growth because they know there will not be a massive outflow if a fly-by-night organization offers plans at unsustainably low rates.
You can see the value of this in that carriers often offer lower rates for contracts, even with the "free" phone. This is because the contract provides value to the carrier.
Look at European phone and SMS rates compared to the US. The rates are the same or lower in the US, AND the phones are subsidized.
Also, look at the price of "pay-as-you-go"phones. It is brutal expensive.
I happily pay my $67/month for 1500 minutes (I frequently use over 1000), 500 texts, and unlimited internet. I think you would be hard pressed to find a lower price with or without a subsidized phone (I got $200 off).
To get the plan (with or without phone) I needed to do a contract, otherwise it would have been 1000 minutes.
Can't you at the very least pay a small fee and get POP access?
It's not like in the dial-up days when such a thing cost you $20/month (continue your service, or lose account).
The fact that I get POP3, IMAP, and Forwarding free is very compelling, and the type of thing that leads me to not even want to switch services, even though those features make it very easy to.
All this criticism for picking Chrome or Firefox as a replacement, but I bet it has something to do with the fact that IE7 would replace IE6, while Firefox/chrome will sit next to it.
It really doen't seem like a terrible thing to continue to have IE6 installed alongside FF or Chrome. I would then whitelist the sites IE6 can go to at the proxy, with a warning that for security reasons IE6 is only for site where its usage is required, and all other browsing should be done using something else.
Now upgrading to IE7 would force a much more difficult upgrade path.
I think that as long as it is a viable alternative there is no anti-trust issues.
And as long as MS continues to play as nicely as they are we are in the situation.
There is a (weak) case that trying to strong-arm games into being Vista only, they are doing something bad, but in general, as long as Office is available for OSX, or the format is clearly documented, there is no anti-trust.
If MS chose to make thing intentionally difficult to inter-operate, and then pushed their new special versions on people (making it so that people could no longer work with Apple users), this would be an abuse of their monopoly position (in business software at the very least).
If they successfully pulled off as anti-consumer an action of that, it would go part-way to proving they are still a monopoly IMHO.
But if it is a free service you: 1) send out the email and set your account to forward to your new address. Warn people when they send to old address. 2) when emails to old account slow down to a trickle, put up vacation responder and stop checking it entirly. 3) a year or so later, when you can be sure any password recovery, ect. things you need are changed over, stop logging in monthly, so it can expire.
It's a pain to change addresses, but from one free service to another it's not so bad. It is real bad if your address is attached to your ISP subscription though.
The great thing about the OSX line is that a lot of programs that still don't run correctly on 10.5 (CS3). Apple has fessed up to the fault, but many point releases later, it is still not fixed.
I think there needs to be a happy medium between what Apple and MS does, and it needs to be supported by application vendors (so Linux doesn't count).
I remember thinking how I missed the crazy drivers from the Philly area of PA
Is that stop in the middle of the road and visit their friend, even if there is a parking spot?
Even if they blocked an empty spot, for the sake of stopping in the middle of the road?
I lived in Philly for 3 years, and they are the worse city drivers I've had the privilege to drive with, but the stopping in the middle of narrow streets to run into a friends house is the most annoying part of what they do (though once I got over parking people in like that, it was kind of freeing).
Have you really ever noticed facts like that to quell the complaints of insecure parents?
I hear fascism described as hyper capitalism, with government interfering in personal life, for the sake of the companies, at their request, with the express purpose of allowing the government to rob from the people.
This belief is generally paired with a belief that government is out to get them, but only big government can fix our ills. And people are incapable of voting for anyone, except those that spend the most money, this is why the government serves only the big companies.
If I provide a translation of my software, and it means something different than what I think, generally *I* am the one on the hook, not the licensee.
Now, if I said it was the GPL I may be commiting a trademark infringement or some such, but people receiving the code could use it with the license as I wrote it, if there was a dispute, they could resolve it in the license i received.
If the FSF did the translating themself, they could use the any version clause to make it a valid distribution option.
The worse case is that a bug is introduced in another language, and people use those terms to keep things closed. This would be similar to a person not authorized to give a discount at a store giving you one. Since you in good faith believed it was on the up-and-up, and they represented the store.
Every song I looked for that I couldn't find an iTunes+ for, was unavailable through the other services. These leads me to believe it is a record company problem, not Apple (though the 1.40 instead of.90 USD is Apple), but perhaps worth it for re-download service, and a track-record of not closing their store.
There is no Burn to CD, re-rip option for other things they sell though, also lacking is a DRM free alternative.
I can't think of a single electronics retailer that doesn't sell things with DRM, and Apple's current practices are very similar to Steam (I think Steam makes multiple computers/using a friends easier).
The AOL rejection is weird, because they purchased Netscape, but it made sense. They already had their users hearing murmuring that AOL was not the internet, the last thing they wanted was to have their users not be able to visit online-banks.
If AOL had embraced Gecko, I wonder where they would be. They would have been seen as a force of good for internet standardization, and it probably would be the thing they do that makes them the most money right now. Considering they made their millions selling internet adds back in the day, you would think they could see the potential.
The choice of Apple to ignore gecko, and instead start from a very primitive engine and build on it is quite interesting. They clearly saw shortcomings in Gecko that they thought they could avoid, and felt that re-creating the wheel was an expense well spent (KHTML was pretty poor back then, with terrible DHTML support, and rendering differences to the extreme, in fact, until Safari 3, webkit was like stepping back 3-5 years and using Gecko).
The fact that developers are in general using webkit now when faced with the choice (many OSS browsers are switching even) is very telling too. It wasn't just Apple that saw shortcomings.
Nokia had a mobile browser they were working on using Gecko, but I bet the purchase of Trolltech will alter that choice to a point.
That pretty much leaves Sugar, and Firefox. Of course, the fact that Firefox has all those great extensions is a strong point in its favor, with the web developer tool bar being awesome, but hardly relevant to most people.
Practical C programming lists in their "optimization" chapter that hardware is often the most cost effective optimization. It even gives an example of a couple of thousand on a new machine cut execution time in half instantly with no effort. The programmers then did some optimizations, but it was the easy stuff, not hard core.
The ridiculous price of the iPod touch, and the fact that my music collection is large enough to not fit on a 16GB player put the iPod classic as the only practical option for me. Especially if I wanted some files on my player.
It really didn't occur to me that most people wanting over 16GB would want it for movies.
Also surprising to me is that it is so many people that want it for movie they spend an extra $100 for an Archos. When your product is $100 more that the competing Apple, I just assumed it wasn't really a competing product.
Slashdot Mirror
I just went there, and that was the easiest sign-up I have ever done.
With no need for email verification. I just signed in, then clicked a link to edit my info.
Passport may work better, but this was still really smooth.
I used my gmail account.
Perhaps the expense of the team is so much it would be un-ethical to waste the money (passing the cost onto everyone who has insurance).
The value of a human life (in these low probability of trouble situations) is 5-10 million (determined by the choices people make trading safety for savings on a daily basis). If there has not been a death yet (implied by the summery), why should we be spending so much money on the hypothetical. The amount we spend now is obviously proving to be pretty effective, how many times should we multiply it for that tiny bit extra?
If there is 0% chance of an accident being avoided, and this system kicks in an eighth or a quarter second before the in-attentive driver it is good thing.
Examples of the system being no better than a human fail the test, I simply was trying to point out that it should in no circumstances apply breaks when it will stop you before where the impact would occur. In this much it is very unlikely to increase rear-end collisions.
I personally would be in constant fear of a malfunction in the sensor locking up my brakes on a highway, but not of it slamming breaks when I could have avoided things and getting me rear-ended.
After-all, if I could not navigate around when the alarm went off, there really is no other choice.
Funny, I feel the same way about Windows XP.
I really like XP for a lot of things (the printing a folder full of images for example), but god was it annoying at first (and still).
the redone control panel still causes me trouble when I am trying to help a friend for the first time (I generally, switch to "classic" view and it is no longer a problem then), also I still can't wrap my head around network browsing in the new (Vista actually does this better), I have tons of "network places" on my laptop that would involve breaking and entering to have a chance at accessing again, and every time I want to browse a new network, I need to open network places, browse the workgroup/computers near me, and then group a level to the entire network. Then I can see other workgroups, it still causes me anger every time, and I still don't know how to do it quicker (I'm sure the removing dead links would be little effort though).
He's damn lucky he didn't roll the thing, or kill anyone.
The anyone he would have killed would have been you, outside of your car in a low visibility situation.
I understand the desire to be a good Samaritan and clear the road for others who are not cautious. unfortunately, no good comes from putting ourself at risk in such a situation, since you are simultaneously putting others at the risk of killing you, when if everyone remained in cars it was far more likely to lead to injury and no death.
There are people with flares paid to clean up the road, and if you die doing their job inadequately equipped I pay the price in higher insurance premiums, so please be more thoughtful.
How is that even relevant to this system?
It depends how good the system is.
If it stops you 4 inches from an accident you are almost certainly better off. I personally can't do this (stop within for inches of my target at high speeds), but I bet a computer can.
In that situation if the person behind you had a following distance too, then you are safe (you used distance * 1 to stop, they get distance * 2 to do the same), if they didn't have the distance, as long as your car stops real close to the accident you are avoiding, the difference is minor.
The neat thing about this system, is that if there is an accident ahead in a situation where you can't dodge it (aided by a warning if you are stupid), then it should be safer than you applying the breaks yourself. Since it should be able to, without fail, stop you as close to the accident/stopped driver as possible, without hitting it.
If warning doesn't let avoid collision, then stopping right at the obstruction would always be the safest course of action, this car should be able to do that better than you.
Do you really want to spend so much time in Single drive fails the system mode though?
I like the idea, but it would be much smarter to do it with something with something like the Linux RAID 10, and 3 lives drive with 3 copies of data.
This will speed you up, especially during the frequent recover modes. Always protect you from at least one drive failure (often times 2). You will only need one extra drive (12.5% of disk cost, if 8-9 isn't too much, 9 or 10 certainly isn't).
What I do at work (without too much storage by todays standards) is have 2 500 GiB drives mirrored using a RAID 10 "far" copy (in tests it wrote barely slower (probably because writing can allow for near perfect caching), but read nearly as fast as a stripe).
I do nightly snapshots to a 1 TiB external drive. I have these backups shared read only, so people can browse by date and do their own data recovery.
With our work flow, 1 TiB is more than enough to save snapshots for a month. This lets me switch drives on a monthly basis. I also never delete the first of the month out of the snapshots, though I doubt it will ever be worth the effort to search for an old revision of a file.
FWIW, I use pdumpfs for the snapshots, it's not the best, but damn is it easy. Other options wither wanted a GUI (flyback, TimeVault), wanted too much setup in cron (glasstree, Dirvish), or didn't allow for a browsable result (rdiff-backup).
YMMV
Great, so a new company can get their property and hope to profiteer from it.
We can start it all over again.
InDesign
Here is a post:
http://georgecoghill.com/blog/2008/05/06/indesign-cs3-mac-osx-105-leopard-the-good-the-bad-the-not-too-shabby/
I am also having weird focusing issues with InDesign (It will not refofus, and must be forced quite to get focus back, its document recovery has prevented any data loss, but this happens 2-3 times a day), which I assume are related to hiding it and failing.
Running in Rosetta fixed a printing issue, but it hardly feels appropriate to buy a new computer for $3000 and have to emulate the one that is getting replaced to run your application that is quite new.
The issue seamed to be a driver issue that could be fixed by manually overwriting some files from earlier versions of OSX, I can't remember the specifics, but I think it started on point release 10.5.3 even, so a bigfix patch broke compatibility. It truly is a pain in the ass, with things moving so fast it is impossible to get apps all optimized for the same version of Mac OS, and has been since OS X was released.
Of course, it is still better than having to use Vista, which does so many things I really like, but as a whole feels awful to use (it reminds me of KDE4 in that respect)
No, the "free" phone is paid in the fact that they can count on your income for the next 12-24 months. This allows them to do forecasting, and plan network growth because they know there will not be a massive outflow if a fly-by-night organization offers plans at unsustainably low rates.
You can see the value of this in that carriers often offer lower rates for contracts, even with the "free" phone. This is because the contract provides value to the carrier.
Look at European phone and SMS rates compared to the US. The rates are the same or lower in the US, AND the phones are subsidized.
Also, look at the price of "pay-as-you-go"phones. It is brutal expensive.
I happily pay my $67/month for 1500 minutes (I frequently use over 1000), 500 texts, and unlimited internet. I think you would be hard pressed to find a lower price with or without a subsidized phone (I got $200 off).
To get the plan (with or without phone) I needed to do a contract, otherwise it would have been 1000 minutes.
Why not just buy an unlocked phone at full price?
Can't you at the very least pay a small fee and get POP access?
It's not like in the dial-up days when such a thing cost you $20/month (continue your service, or lose account).
The fact that I get POP3, IMAP, and Forwarding free is very compelling, and the type of thing that leads me to not even want to switch services, even though those features make it very easy to.
All this criticism for picking Chrome or Firefox as a replacement, but I bet it has something to do with the fact that IE7 would replace IE6, while Firefox/chrome will sit next to it.
It really doen't seem like a terrible thing to continue to have IE6 installed alongside FF or Chrome. I would then whitelist the sites IE6 can go to at the proxy, with a warning that for security reasons IE6 is only for site where its usage is required, and all other browsing should be done using something else.
Now upgrading to IE7 would force a much more difficult upgrade path.
Perhaps the grandparent was referring to versions after 2.0?
http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html
I think that as long as it is a viable alternative there is no anti-trust issues.
And as long as MS continues to play as nicely as they are we are in the situation.
There is a (weak) case that trying to strong-arm games into being Vista only, they are doing something bad, but in general, as long as Office is available for OSX, or the format is clearly documented, there is no anti-trust.
If MS chose to make thing intentionally difficult to inter-operate, and then pushed their new special versions on people (making it so that people could no longer work with Apple users), this would be an abuse of their monopoly position (in business software at the very least).
If they successfully pulled off as anti-consumer an action of that, it would go part-way to proving they are still a monopoly IMHO.
Agreed.
But if it is a free service you:
1) send out the email and set your account to forward to your new address. Warn people when they send to old address.
2) when emails to old account slow down to a trickle, put up vacation responder and stop checking it entirly.
3) a year or so later, when you can be sure any password recovery, ect. things you need are changed over, stop logging in monthly, so it can expire.
It's a pain to change addresses, but from one free service to another it's not so bad. It is real bad if your address is attached to your ISP subscription though.
The great thing about the OSX line is that a lot of programs that still don't run correctly on 10.5 (CS3). Apple has fessed up to the fault, but many point releases later, it is still not fixed.
I think there needs to be a happy medium between what Apple and MS does, and it needs to be supported by application vendors (so Linux doesn't count).
I remember thinking how I missed the crazy drivers from the Philly area of PA
Is that stop in the middle of the road and visit their friend, even if there is a parking spot?
Even if they blocked an empty spot, for the sake of stopping in the middle of the road?
I lived in Philly for 3 years, and they are the worse city drivers I've had the privilege to drive with, but the stopping in the middle of narrow streets to run into a friends house is the most annoying part of what they do (though once I got over parking people in like that, it was kind of freeing).
Have you really ever noticed facts like that to quell the complaints of insecure parents?
I hear fascism described as hyper capitalism, with government interfering in personal life, for the sake of the companies, at their request, with the express purpose of allowing the government to rob from the people.
This belief is generally paired with a belief that government is out to get them, but only big government can fix our ills. And people are incapable of voting for anyone, except those that spend the most money, this is why the government serves only the big companies.
If I provide a translation of my software, and it means something different than what I think, generally *I* am the one on the hook, not the licensee.
Now, if I said it was the GPL I may be commiting a trademark infringement or some such, but people receiving the code could use it with the license as I wrote it, if there was a dispute, they could resolve it in the license i received.
If the FSF did the translating themself, they could use the any version clause to make it a valid distribution option.
The worse case is that a bug is introduced in another language, and people use those terms to keep things closed. This would be similar to a person not authorized to give a discount at a store giving you one. Since you in good faith believed it was on the up-and-up, and they represented the store.
Every song I looked for that I couldn't find an iTunes+ for, was unavailable through the other services. These leads me to believe it is a record company problem, not Apple (though the 1.40 instead of .90 USD is Apple), but perhaps worth it for re-download service, and a track-record of not closing their store.
There is no Burn to CD, re-rip option for other things they sell though, also lacking is a DRM free alternative.
I can't think of a single electronics retailer that doesn't sell things with DRM, and Apple's current practices are very similar to Steam (I think Steam makes multiple computers/using a friends easier).
The AOL rejection is weird, because they purchased Netscape, but it made sense. They already had their users hearing murmuring that AOL was not the internet, the last thing they wanted was to have their users not be able to visit online-banks.
If AOL had embraced Gecko, I wonder where they would be. They would have been seen as a force of good for internet standardization, and it probably would be the thing they do that makes them the most money right now. Considering they made their millions selling internet adds back in the day, you would think they could see the potential.
The choice of Apple to ignore gecko, and instead start from a very primitive engine and build on it is quite interesting. They clearly saw shortcomings in Gecko that they thought they could avoid, and felt that re-creating the wheel was an expense well spent (KHTML was pretty poor back then, with terrible DHTML support, and rendering differences to the extreme, in fact, until Safari 3, webkit was like stepping back 3-5 years and using Gecko).
The fact that developers are in general using webkit now when faced with the choice (many OSS browsers are switching even) is very telling too. It wasn't just Apple that saw shortcomings.
Nokia had a mobile browser they were working on using Gecko, but I bet the purchase of Trolltech will alter that choice to a point.
That pretty much leaves Sugar, and Firefox. Of course, the fact that Firefox has all those great extensions is a strong point in its favor, with the web developer tool bar being awesome, but hardly relevant to most people.
Practical C programming lists in their "optimization" chapter that hardware is often the most cost effective optimization. It even gives an example of a couple of thousand on a new machine cut execution time in half instantly with no effort. The programmers then did some optimizations, but it was the easy stuff, not hard core.
The book is old now, and the anecdote older.
Interesting, my geek tunnel vision led me astray.
The ridiculous price of the iPod touch, and the fact that my music collection is large enough to not fit on a 16GB player put the iPod classic as the only practical option for me. Especially if I wanted some files on my player.
It really didn't occur to me that most people wanting over 16GB would want it for movies.
Also surprising to me is that it is so many people that want it for movie they spend an extra $100 for an Archos. When your product is $100 more that the competing Apple, I just assumed it wasn't really a competing product.