I'm trying to determine whether to put any credence in what you posted, and to that end I have to ask: have you actually tried developing for the iPhone, or is all your experience with previous-generation touch screens?
No, that would violate the fourth amendment against unreasonable search. However, searching people getting on a vehicle that can fly through the sky to any point in the country and carries a ton of volatile explosives doesn't seem all that unreasonable. In this case I don't think the slope is very slippery.
If you write any Mac software, you're using DTrace when you're using Apple's performance monitoring tools. It's pretty darn sweet to be able to remotely DTrace an app running on an iPhone from a PowerBook to look for performance bottlenecks or memory allocation issues (grumble lack of Java grumble).
They've sped up the front end so it feels like you're getting more done, but in terms of real productivity it's no better than Vista.
Near as I can tell, no one has actually measured "real productivity", which correlates neither with teh snappy interface or with OS benchmarks in general.
I was thinking the same thing about MacOS. You get a full UNIX plus the benefits (zfs, dtrace) mentioned in the summary on top of an excellent platform with probably the best app support of any UNIX.
I'm not sure that's a valuable analysis. The company could hire a group to come in and install desktops at every desk with the latest Office software, networking, servers, and even training to use them. Then they pack up and go home. The office hums along great for a little while but as the technology breaks down, reaches capacity, etc., things gets increasingly worse.
What you're trying to do is measure the cost of the "things gets increasingly worse" vs. the cost of having an on-site IT expert maintaining things.
For that, you need to start looking into failure scenarios and risk assessment. That's a complex piece of accounting, and it's not a job for an IT worker to be asked to do. If you're making the IT worker spend time to justify their job financially, you're not being a very efficient company.
The only thing I'd caution is that sucking out genes that allow something to eat cellulose and having it somehow released to the wild could be very detrimental to the environment and industry. Cellulose is intentionally hard to break down for exactly the reasons that plants don't really want random organisms attacking them there. If we go and engineer microbes that can eat away at stalks, leaves, tree trunks, grasses, etc., we should be really careful about how it's applied.
A lot of people are just not buying content - even though they would like to buy content - because they know that money spent that way is wasted and they don't want to throw their money away again.
At the risk of my karma, I'm going to mention that no one I know seems to fall into your generalization of people not buying Blu-Ray discs or players because of DRM. The most commonly cited reason for discs is lack of ubiquitous players (in cars, portable players, friends houses, etc) and the most common reason cited for players is the expense of a Blu-Ray mechanism. In fact, breaking the DRM makes Blu-Ray riskier for investors and therefore likely will increase costs (higher risk means higher cost) in the short term.
All in all, because Blu-Ray is 10x the bandwidth of any online "HD" movie source (and I use that term loosely for online offerings) and because online DRM is so much worse, I don't see it going away. Instead I see it likely to win over DVD-- DRM or not-- but not until manufacturing costs ramp down due to better technologies and economies of scale.
Consider this. Is a DRM-free H.264/AAC mp4 file more convenient, or is a DRM-laden disc that you can play in your car, computer, PS3, portable system, or friend's house by carrying around a 16 gram disc? I suspect for geeks it's the former, but for most consumers it's the latter, and it's really just about making players ubiquitous. The odd player out is, of course, the iPod. It's the one thing that is both ubiquitous and doesn't favor the disc. If the Blu-Ray consortium came to some agreement with Apple there it would go a long way towards gaining acceptance.
Actually, almost all the cars in the world these days have factory options for iPod/iPhone rechargers. Almost none have options for USB chargers.
Considering the ubiquity of iPod connectors in planes, computers, clock radios, cars, etc., I wish the Chinese had chosen it instead of mini USB. If you have a mini USB phone, about the only thing you can use to charge it is a computer, and that's not very convenient.
No, he's not Muslim, but his attending a rather radical black theology church with a rather strange pastor combined with other "interesting" seeming Muslim-sympathetic beliefs or actions do seem to point to a non-full disclosure of his beliefs, etc.
Um, you haven't read his book, have you? The first one, titled "Dreams from my Father", describes in detail how he was referred to Rev. Wright's church and what it meant to him, and described his transition from being Christian only in name to acquiring a belief system. The second one, "The Audacity of Hope", was named after the name of the first sermon he heard at Rev Wright's church and discusses the progression of his thinking and approach to government and belief. He may be accused of a lot of things, but lack of full disclosure CAN NOT be one of them. His entire life is, quite literally, an open book available for all to read.
Obama is the type of person who can freely discuss ideas with a great variety of people without adopting them. He especially values differing opinions, which I like as something that will help prevent any "failures of imagination" in his administration. Rev. Wright to him was a focal point for many disparate beliefs and influences, and despite some incendiary language helped him see many issues more clearly. In other words, Rev Wright was more of a lens than the source of light for Obama (at least that's my impression from his books).
I think this is why McCain has rightly shied away from challenging Obama's beliefs. Because they actually are one of Obama's strengths, especially compared to McCain's own.
Yeah, but "At what point does this start to make a difference in the market place?"
The answer to that question, at least for performance, is "never". I'm going to go out on a limb and posit that improving alternative desktop operating system performance benchmarks will virtually never sway desktop operating system purchase decisions.
The only thing that would get people to change is if, somehow, what they currently have is no longer good enough AND the natural upgrade path from what they have now (either released or to be released within the next year) is ALSO not/not going to be good enough. However, since the industry is basically a "mature" industry, you'll find that most folks have made things work and are getting along more or less okay. Change is scarier than promised improvements are enticing, and that's the way it will stay until something shakes up the market.
So it would take some sort of virus that permanently destroys all XP and Vista machines but not Linux, or some new must-have technology that for some reason can't be made to work on Windows within a year or two, or some sort of patent, innovation, or other breakthrough that is protected such that Microsoft is not allowed to bring it to Windows AND becomes a necessity. I'm not optimistic.
Perhaps the original poster feels that Virginia will do a better job of reporting results than Ohio or Florida, or perhaps Obama has a larger lead in Virginia than he does in Ohio or Florida.
Neither... merely that Virginia's polls close an hour before Florida and two hours before Ohio. By the time Florida's polls close, the entire state's results could be irrelevant.
Obama can win without Ohio or Florida, but McCain needs Ohio, Florida, AND Virginia if the current polls are anywhere close to accurate.
And as for the baby sitter... Virginia's polls close at 7pm, and if/when Obama takes that state, the election is basically over, so you probably won't have to pay her/him much overtime this year.
I'm glad someone made the point. It really is irrelevant how fast the OS performs microbenchmarks. What matters is how fast the user gets things done. If you spend all day encoding MP3s so be it. But for a lot of people, a kernel that's half as fast but makes some complex things simple is the way to go.
Anyway, that's Apple's philosophy, and why you see Apple not caring so much about kernel benchmarks. That being said, every version of MacOS X has been faster than the last one the same hardware despite adding new functionality. One can argue that that just shows how Godawful slow 10.0 was, but all the releases have been very usable and made the user very productive.
Time Machine is a GUI and an API on top of an rsnapshot and an indexing utility. I don't see how rsnapshot lets you search back through time for the last time a given record has changed then pull a single record out of the address book database and restore it to the present. That is enabled by the indexing, by the backup mechanism, and by the API. It looks like rsnapshot is one component of a Time Machine-like capability. It's easy, though, to point to little parts and assume the whole, but really, no other OS currently has the equivalent of either Time Machine or Spotlight.
Next I suppose you're going to say that rsync is the same thing as Time Machine, when in reality while they may be in vaguely the same arena of functionality, they are orders of magnitude different in utility. Instant searches of both local and remotely accessible drives tied to various easy filtering and categorization functions makes Spotlight a game-changer. Just like always on, incremental, and back-through-time searches and intra-file record retrieval (ie. 1 address book entry, photo, song, etc) make Time Machine a game-changer.
It gets even WORSE! Can you believe that some people are distributing BLANK registration forms that let you enter ANY NAME YOU WANT in the "Name" field??1!one! Let's throw out the entire democratic system because it can't possibly be perfect!
To clarify the summary-- the registration forms (not the actual registration) were sent to the goldfish because the owner had lied about a name on phone records previously, entering the goldfish's name. The goldfish was not registered, and probably could not have come up with the ID (the form required a driver's license # or last-four SSN that matched the name) if it tried.
Since ZFS was mainly designed for systems that will use redundant configurations, it may have sense there, but desktops are not never going to do such things.
From what I understand, Macs are the most likely systems to get ZFS as a standard mainstream desktop file system. And MacOS these days highly encourages all users to have an external or network-accessible backup drive where deltas get backed up once an hour or so and are extremely easy to restore from. If ZFS found a problem, recovering the bad data from online backup shouldn't be rocket science.
Since I don't have any Flamebait moderator points, I'll reply. No one I know who's bought a Mac has bought it for that reason. They've all bought it because it makes them more productive. The biggest frustration is that there's such a limited set of hardware choices since there's effectively only one hardware manufacturer making Macs. That being said, Apple hits a pretty good cross-section of the market, so unless you're playing games all day or spend all your time in specific Windows-only vertical apps, it's usually a pretty good buy. (The purchase price of a computer is a miniscule fraction of the equation if you value your time at all.)
There are some very real capabilities being taken away without Firewire. I've actually heard lack of target disk mode (where a laptop essentially becomes an external Firewire hard disk for another computer) cited much more often than lack of camera connectivity.
So you think most companies have better IT departments than Google? I agree that using a free beta software to run mission-critical software is probably unwise, but there are other providers that offer way more uptime than probably most internal IT departments could manage. Pair Networks, etc. It will cost money, though.
Unlike the poster is insinuating, Apple has not only made no attempt to hide the "kill switch", Steve Jobs has publicly discussed it in media interviews.
Look, Google Android is pretty much just like the iPhone except that Google is better at marketing to the Slashdot crowd. The idea that a marketing company would somehow be a trusted source of anything is beyond me, but statements like "Google please do not become Apple" are missing the point. Becoming Apple is *exactly* Google's entire purpose for having Android in the first place.
Fine, argue the semantics of a "medical procedure", but you obviously know what I meant. A rape kit is not intended to improve the health or cure a problem in the patient, nor is it medically necessary for the patient. Its only purpose is to gather evidence, which is a process which is clearly the responsibility of the state. Since you asked for specifics, the state pays for fingerprints, DNA testing, autopsies, crime scene photos, interviewing witnesses, and collecting related personal belongings when investigating felonies. Why is a rape kit some special case?
And I'm sorry you had to hide behind the "too stupid" argument, as it drastically weakens your case.
Not wanting to start anything but I'm just curious who should be paying for the rape exams if not the people who are actually using them?
Okay, so... The state is using them, so the state should pay for them. It is criminal evidence, not a medical procedure. We don't make murder victim's estates pay for gathering murder evidence, either. It's in the general good to prosecute criminals, and it's been accepted that evidence gathering is the responsibility of the police and paid for by the state. Why rape should be any different is beyond me.
True, but as usual it's not a simple decision. If the computer detects that the plane is in a situation in which it could compromise structural integrity or otherwise endanger the safety of the flight, a little time in zero G and a few bruised knees would be pretty reasonable.
For example, the current generation of both Boeing and Airbus aircraft will not, I believe, allow the pilot to stall the aircraft (go so slow as to cause the wings to not have lift and the plane start to fly like bricks do). If the aircraft detected a sudden drop in airspeed that persisted for too long to be an internal glitch, I believe the aircraft will dive and increase thrust to avoid the stall. That may even be what happened here. Similarly, most modern aircraft I believe won't let you go above the speed at which the plane would break apart.
Whether the human is in or out of the loop in various actions is a tough question. In general, these features appear to be significantly increasing aircraft safety.
It's important to note that in a modern aircraft, there is a closed loop between the navigation system and the control system. Almost the entire flight is flown by the autopilot based on GPS and other navigational aids. While most planes still have backup pressure-based altitude instruments, GPS is even used for altitude calculation.
So I suspect it's not that the wireless is interfering with the fly-by-wire control mechanism, but making the navigation system think that the altitude is significantly off. Assuming that is, in fact, the cause.
(I can confirm that on small aircraft wireless devices that produce a lot of interference can muck with electronic instruments, but I hadn't heard about it seriously affecting a large aircraft's systems before.)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm trying to determine whether to put any credence in what you posted, and to that end I have to ask: have you actually tried developing for the iPhone, or is all your experience with previous-generation touch screens?
No, that would violate the fourth amendment against unreasonable search. However, searching people getting on a vehicle that can fly through the sky to any point in the country and carries a ton of volatile explosives doesn't seem all that unreasonable. In this case I don't think the slope is very slippery.
I have yet to fire up DTrace (work gave me a Mac)
If you write any Mac software, you're using DTrace when you're using Apple's performance monitoring tools. It's pretty darn sweet to be able to remotely DTrace an app running on an iPhone from a PowerBook to look for performance bottlenecks or memory allocation issues (grumble lack of Java grumble).
I take more issue with this:
They've sped up the front end so it feels like you're getting more done, but in terms of real productivity it's no better than Vista.
Near as I can tell, no one has actually measured "real productivity", which correlates neither with teh snappy interface or with OS benchmarks in general.
I was thinking the same thing about MacOS. You get a full UNIX plus the benefits (zfs, dtrace) mentioned in the summary on top of an excellent platform with probably the best app support of any UNIX.
I'm not sure that's a valuable analysis. The company could hire a group to come in and install desktops at every desk with the latest Office software, networking, servers, and even training to use them. Then they pack up and go home. The office hums along great for a little while but as the technology breaks down, reaches capacity, etc., things gets increasingly worse.
What you're trying to do is measure the cost of the "things gets increasingly worse" vs. the cost of having an on-site IT expert maintaining things.
For that, you need to start looking into failure scenarios and risk assessment. That's a complex piece of accounting, and it's not a job for an IT worker to be asked to do. If you're making the IT worker spend time to justify their job financially, you're not being a very efficient company.
The only thing I'd caution is that sucking out genes that allow something to eat cellulose and having it somehow released to the wild could be very detrimental to the environment and industry. Cellulose is intentionally hard to break down for exactly the reasons that plants don't really want random organisms attacking them there. If we go and engineer microbes that can eat away at stalks, leaves, tree trunks, grasses, etc., we should be really careful about how it's applied.
A lot of people are just not buying content - even though they would like to buy content - because they know that money spent that way is wasted and they don't want to throw their money away again.
At the risk of my karma, I'm going to mention that no one I know seems to fall into your generalization of people not buying Blu-Ray discs or players because of DRM. The most commonly cited reason for discs is lack of ubiquitous players (in cars, portable players, friends houses, etc) and the most common reason cited for players is the expense of a Blu-Ray mechanism. In fact, breaking the DRM makes Blu-Ray riskier for investors and therefore likely will increase costs (higher risk means higher cost) in the short term.
All in all, because Blu-Ray is 10x the bandwidth of any online "HD" movie source (and I use that term loosely for online offerings) and because online DRM is so much worse, I don't see it going away. Instead I see it likely to win over DVD-- DRM or not-- but not until manufacturing costs ramp down due to better technologies and economies of scale.
Consider this. Is a DRM-free H.264/AAC mp4 file more convenient, or is a DRM-laden disc that you can play in your car, computer, PS3, portable system, or friend's house by carrying around a 16 gram disc? I suspect for geeks it's the former, but for most consumers it's the latter, and it's really just about making players ubiquitous. The odd player out is, of course, the iPod. It's the one thing that is both ubiquitous and doesn't favor the disc. If the Blu-Ray consortium came to some agreement with Apple there it would go a long way towards gaining acceptance.
Actually, almost all the cars in the world these days have factory options for iPod/iPhone rechargers. Almost none have options for USB chargers.
Considering the ubiquity of iPod connectors in planes, computers, clock radios, cars, etc., I wish the Chinese had chosen it instead of mini USB. If you have a mini USB phone, about the only thing you can use to charge it is a computer, and that's not very convenient.
No, he's not Muslim, but his attending a rather radical black theology church with a rather strange pastor combined with other "interesting" seeming Muslim-sympathetic beliefs or actions do seem to point to a non-full disclosure of his beliefs, etc.
Um, you haven't read his book, have you? The first one, titled "Dreams from my Father", describes in detail how he was referred to Rev. Wright's church and what it meant to him, and described his transition from being Christian only in name to acquiring a belief system. The second one, "The Audacity of Hope", was named after the name of the first sermon he heard at Rev Wright's church and discusses the progression of his thinking and approach to government and belief. He may be accused of a lot of things, but lack of full disclosure CAN NOT be one of them. His entire life is, quite literally, an open book available for all to read.
Obama is the type of person who can freely discuss ideas with a great variety of people without adopting them. He especially values differing opinions, which I like as something that will help prevent any "failures of imagination" in his administration. Rev. Wright to him was a focal point for many disparate beliefs and influences, and despite some incendiary language helped him see many issues more clearly. In other words, Rev Wright was more of a lens than the source of light for Obama (at least that's my impression from his books).
I think this is why McCain has rightly shied away from challenging Obama's beliefs. Because they actually are one of Obama's strengths, especially compared to McCain's own.
Yeah, but "At what point does this start to make a difference in the market place?"
The answer to that question, at least for performance, is "never". I'm going to go out on a limb and posit that improving alternative desktop operating system performance benchmarks will virtually never sway desktop operating system purchase decisions.
The only thing that would get people to change is if, somehow, what they currently have is no longer good enough AND the natural upgrade path from what they have now (either released or to be released within the next year) is ALSO not/not going to be good enough. However, since the industry is basically a "mature" industry, you'll find that most folks have made things work and are getting along more or less okay. Change is scarier than promised improvements are enticing, and that's the way it will stay until something shakes up the market.
So it would take some sort of virus that permanently destroys all XP and Vista machines but not Linux, or some new must-have technology that for some reason can't be made to work on Windows within a year or two, or some sort of patent, innovation, or other breakthrough that is protected such that Microsoft is not allowed to bring it to Windows AND becomes a necessity. I'm not optimistic.
Perhaps the original poster feels that Virginia will do a better job of reporting results than Ohio or Florida, or perhaps Obama has a larger lead in Virginia than he does in Ohio or Florida.
Neither... merely that Virginia's polls close an hour before Florida and two hours before Ohio. By the time Florida's polls close, the entire state's results could be irrelevant.
Obama can win without Ohio or Florida, but McCain needs Ohio, Florida, AND Virginia if the current polls are anywhere close to accurate.
And as for the baby sitter... Virginia's polls close at 7pm, and if/when Obama takes that state, the election is basically over, so you probably won't have to pay her/him much overtime this year.
I'm glad someone made the point. It really is irrelevant how fast the OS performs microbenchmarks. What matters is how fast the user gets things done. If you spend all day encoding MP3s so be it. But for a lot of people, a kernel that's half as fast but makes some complex things simple is the way to go.
Anyway, that's Apple's philosophy, and why you see Apple not caring so much about kernel benchmarks. That being said, every version of MacOS X has been faster than the last one the same hardware despite adding new functionality. One can argue that that just shows how Godawful slow 10.0 was, but all the releases have been very usable and made the user very productive.
Time Machine is a GUI and an API on top of an rsnapshot and an indexing utility. I don't see how rsnapshot lets you search back through time for the last time a given record has changed then pull a single record out of the address book database and restore it to the present. That is enabled by the indexing, by the backup mechanism, and by the API. It looks like rsnapshot is one component of a Time Machine-like capability. It's easy, though, to point to little parts and assume the whole, but really, no other OS currently has the equivalent of either Time Machine or Spotlight.
Next I suppose you're going to say that rsync is the same thing as Time Machine, when in reality while they may be in vaguely the same arena of functionality, they are orders of magnitude different in utility. Instant searches of both local and remotely accessible drives tied to various easy filtering and categorization functions makes Spotlight a game-changer. Just like always on, incremental, and back-through-time searches and intra-file record retrieval (ie. 1 address book entry, photo, song, etc) make Time Machine a game-changer.
It gets even WORSE! Can you believe that some people are distributing BLANK registration forms that let you enter ANY NAME YOU WANT in the "Name" field??1!one! Let's throw out the entire democratic system because it can't possibly be perfect!
To clarify the summary-- the registration forms (not the actual registration) were sent to the goldfish because the owner had lied about a name on phone records previously, entering the goldfish's name. The goldfish was not registered, and probably could not have come up with the ID (the form required a driver's license # or last-four SSN that matched the name) if it tried.
Why am I not worried?
Since ZFS was mainly designed for systems that will use redundant configurations, it may have sense there, but desktops are not never going to do such things.
From what I understand, Macs are the most likely systems to get ZFS as a standard mainstream desktop file system. And MacOS these days highly encourages all users to have an external or network-accessible backup drive where deltas get backed up once an hour or so and are extremely easy to restore from. If ZFS found a problem, recovering the bad data from online backup shouldn't be rocket science.
Since I don't have any Flamebait moderator points, I'll reply. No one I know who's bought a Mac has bought it for that reason. They've all bought it because it makes them more productive. The biggest frustration is that there's such a limited set of hardware choices since there's effectively only one hardware manufacturer making Macs. That being said, Apple hits a pretty good cross-section of the market, so unless you're playing games all day or spend all your time in specific Windows-only vertical apps, it's usually a pretty good buy. (The purchase price of a computer is a miniscule fraction of the equation if you value your time at all.)
There are some very real capabilities being taken away without Firewire. I've actually heard lack of target disk mode (where a laptop essentially becomes an external Firewire hard disk for another computer) cited much more often than lack of camera connectivity.
So you think most companies have better IT departments than Google? I agree that using a free beta software to run mission-critical software is probably unwise, but there are other providers that offer way more uptime than probably most internal IT departments could manage. Pair Networks, etc. It will cost money, though.
Unlike the poster is insinuating, Apple has not only made no attempt to hide the "kill switch", Steve Jobs has publicly discussed it in media interviews.
Look, Google Android is pretty much just like the iPhone except that Google is better at marketing to the Slashdot crowd. The idea that a marketing company would somehow be a trusted source of anything is beyond me, but statements like "Google please do not become Apple" are missing the point. Becoming Apple is *exactly* Google's entire purpose for having Android in the first place.
Fine, argue the semantics of a "medical procedure", but you obviously know what I meant. A rape kit is not intended to improve the health or cure a problem in the patient, nor is it medically necessary for the patient. Its only purpose is to gather evidence, which is a process which is clearly the responsibility of the state. Since you asked for specifics, the state pays for fingerprints, DNA testing, autopsies, crime scene photos, interviewing witnesses, and collecting related personal belongings when investigating felonies. Why is a rape kit some special case?
And I'm sorry you had to hide behind the "too stupid" argument, as it drastically weakens your case.
Not wanting to start anything but I'm just curious who should be paying for the rape exams if not the people who are actually using them?
Okay, so... The state is using them, so the state should pay for them. It is criminal evidence, not a medical procedure. We don't make murder victim's estates pay for gathering murder evidence, either. It's in the general good to prosecute criminals, and it's been accepted that evidence gathering is the responsibility of the police and paid for by the state. Why rape should be any different is beyond me.
True, but as usual it's not a simple decision. If the computer detects that the plane is in a situation in which it could compromise structural integrity or otherwise endanger the safety of the flight, a little time in zero G and a few bruised knees would be pretty reasonable.
For example, the current generation of both Boeing and Airbus aircraft will not, I believe, allow the pilot to stall the aircraft (go so slow as to cause the wings to not have lift and the plane start to fly like bricks do). If the aircraft detected a sudden drop in airspeed that persisted for too long to be an internal glitch, I believe the aircraft will dive and increase thrust to avoid the stall. That may even be what happened here. Similarly, most modern aircraft I believe won't let you go above the speed at which the plane would break apart.
Whether the human is in or out of the loop in various actions is a tough question. In general, these features appear to be significantly increasing aircraft safety.
It's important to note that in a modern aircraft, there is a closed loop between the navigation system and the control system. Almost the entire flight is flown by the autopilot based on GPS and other navigational aids. While most planes still have backup pressure-based altitude instruments, GPS is even used for altitude calculation.
So I suspect it's not that the wireless is interfering with the fly-by-wire control mechanism, but making the navigation system think that the altitude is significantly off. Assuming that is, in fact, the cause.
(I can confirm that on small aircraft wireless devices that produce a lot of interference can muck with electronic instruments, but I hadn't heard about it seriously affecting a large aircraft's systems before.)