I don't think you're obviously correct. You may turn out to be correct, but there is a lot to be said for heterogeneous processors on a single die.
Some thoughts: 1. A very-low power, slow core tied to a super heavy-duty number cruncher on the same die that use the same instruction set. One could imagine an OS shutting off the big core when all it has to do is blink the cursor to save power, but firing it back up when you click "Compute". Done right, it seems like this could give you a laptop with a day or more of typical battery power. 2. GPUs and CPUs are fundamentally different beasts, and many of the slowdowns are due to either shuffling textures between RAM and GPU, or coordinating CPU and GPU. nVidia is taking the tack of moving more computation to the GPU (physics, etc). It may be equally valid to move the GPU onto the CPU die so the CPU can do the collision/hit detection and the GPU the rendering with very fast coordination. 3. SIMD instructions have been grafted onto MIMD processors ever since the original MMX, and before that DSPs lived on the motherboards of some Macs and NeXT workstations. They're really two fundamentally different kinds of computing, and I'm not ready to say that it wouldn't make sense to separate them out into separate cores. 4. Some embedded CPUs can already run Java bytecode natively as well as some other ABI like ARM. I could imagine a world where some of the dynamic natures of modern languages is combined with hardware support to give us some pretty powerful little machines.
From the introduction of the Athlon by AMD (the first really "modern" x86 CPU that finally eliminated most of the CISC disadvantages), though on-die memory controllers and dragging Intel kicking and screaming into the 64-bit world, right up until AMD's lack of a solid response to Core, I'd say AMD led Intel's thinking. Now they're the followers again.
Yes, but MacOS X's quality comes at a price. If Apple were to price MacOS X such that they could develop it profitably without the hardware revenue, you'd be paying hundreds of dollars a copy at least. The profit margins on the hardware offset the software development costs. If Linux had access to billions of dollars of hardware profits they could probably do some pretty snazzy things as well.
So if Apple sold MacOS X at a loss people would flock to it, but that's unsustainable. But if they sold it at cost I doubt they'd get many buyers. Therefore I disagree with you that MacOS X market share would be higher if Apple decoupled the OS from the hardware.
What will be interesting is to see if it would really be cheaper for Dell to sell Linux (you postulate $50 per machine). Could they really charge less for Linux? They probably get some revenue from software makers for the crap they pre-load on their systems which they'd probably have to forgo on Linux. They also need to have trained phone support folks, which means developing a new training program for them. It seems that while the licensing costs are zero, there are other significant costs to OEMing Linux.
Dell's current experiments should give them some data on the additional costs and the lost bundling revenue, so things should get interesting over the next year or so.
They may have done so. They almost certainly aren't compatible with the much less popular GPLv3, but I don't think many people are losing sleep over that one. Most folks use GPLv2, which they could definitely stay compatible with.
The thing isn't even being released for two months, so it's all just speculation at this point.
If the orbit of asteroid can be changed significantly by simply letting it collide with such a small object as a satellite, it would be very easy to counteract an asteroid collission threat.
It is relatively easy to counteract an asteroid collision threat... given enough time. In this example, hitting a satellite during one close pass could deflect it enough to cause significant deviation 7 years later. It's made especially easy in this case because the asteroid has two close approaches, so the energy required to put the diversion mass in front of it the first time is much less.
Re:Skill and not language used?
on
The Return of Ada
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Not at all. Most of the time spent between project kickoff and software delivery is NOT spent actually typing the code. If you program in a language that makes it harder to write bugs, easier to find bugs, easier to express algorithms, easier to read other people's code, and easier to do automated testing and verification you'll save huge amounts of time even if coding takes several times as long.
Interestingly, that's one of the arguments in support of Java. Hardcore C or C++ hackers find it cumbersomely verbose, but it's pretty easy to read any Java coder's source code from anywhere in the world and debug it with relatively little time spent in the code archeology phase. That is, for those bugs that make it past the relatively extensive automated checks that are possible because of the straightforward syntax.
That's the Windows style of dialog box. If it was a Mac, it would say "Would you like to fire the gun? [Fire][Cancel]". For apps that follow Apple's style guidelines, the command wording goes in the button, not "yes/no".
I don't know what Linux's style guidelines say on this matter. I suspect the phrase "Linux style guidelines" are already causing some snickers.
It's scary how lazy some of the web developers are. For years Yahoo used a system where their login system had the URL to go to once login succeeded urlencoded in the URL. It would have been exceedingly easy to duplicate the login page with a "Username/Password was typed incorrectly. Please try again." Then send people to the authentication page with your page as the follow-on one.
URLs should only be able to contain sanitized field values to search on that the server composes into actual SQL, URLs, etc.
In a world where companies can buy FDA approval and news organizations take corporate and government propaganda and air it verbatim, Wikipedia looks pretty good by comparison. But if articles like this encourage folks to have a generally higher level of distrust for all sources of information, that's a good thing, too.
The biggest problem with the situation is that the over-reactive parents are making the scientists defensive, and it becomes impossible to objectively discuss the evidence without appearing to "cave in".
Autism rates over time do not match vaccination rates over time, nor do they match vaccination rates across national boundaries, nor do they match national Thimerosal usage rates. However, that does NOT mean that a vaccine didn't trigger a particular case of autism. It could very well be that the child would have had autism triggered the first time they had a significant immune response and/or fever for anything, and the vaccine happened to be the culprit in that case. If they hadn't been vaccinated, their first serious cold, rotavirus, or whatnot would have been the trigger. If that hypothesis is correct, vaccine rates wouldn't track autism rates at all (since the kids who would have gotten autism would still get it) but from the parents point of view many vaccinations would trigger autism.
Thus, the problem is that I think scientists are afraid to risk their career tracking down some of these links that really could help children. Perhaps there is a potential drug for at-risk children that prevents their immune system-- if that is what triggers autism-- from doing the Bad Thing it does to these children. We'll probably never know, because who wants to research it now?
Vaccines are already largely unprofitable (contrary to most accusations from parents). They're usually administered 1-3 times in a person's life, carry a high risk of lawsuit, and have to be pretty cheap to get anyone to use it. That's why so few manufacturers make it, and why the government has to artificially inflate the market in order to get enough flu vaccines and such.
In any case, I'd love to see the hyperbole settle down and not have every court case where some child got a sky-high fever from a vaccine that caused brain damage be labeled as some sort of admission... these people need to just settle down, vaccinate for the "big ones" only if that's what they want, and get on with life as best they can.
But this article says that if you register and host your site with NetSol, they can redirect ALL 404 errors to their spam, even for an active domain. That goes way beyond "dead subdomains".
OS X is essentially BSD... Now, obviously MacOS X uses a different graphics layer......and kernel, and driver model, and launcher, and binary format... MacOS X certainly has a big chunk of BSD in it, but it's a different beast than your typical BSD distro. Also, MacOS X is well-documented to have somewhat bad kernel performance on several micro-benchmarks, and Apple is well-documented as not caring, and only benchmarking and optimizing user experience metrics. So comparing them directly is interesting technically but not that helpful from a product point of view.
But the point that the analyst made that Apple benefits from having a very close codebase between the iPhone and the desktop, I think, is very valid. Microsoft not only has a completely different OS for their phones, but my understanding is that even the XBox 360 is based on a fork of NT that hasn't resynced in the better part of a decade. (While the AppleTV is, again, more or less vanilla MacOS X pared down.)
I don't know if that supports the analyst's point that Windows is "collapsing". If there were any serious alternative for businesses he might have a point. But there are no drop-in replacements for Windows in the enterprise and few are willing to risk the investment to do what it takes to integrate linux or MacOS X into critical workflows.
Btw North and South Dakota have the cheapest real estate (land AND housing) prices in the entire US last I checked. Now I bet people are gonna get a pretty good return on investment!
Not sure what you mean by this... oil certainly hasn't helped Alaska's real estate prices. If you're implying that the owners of the surface land also have some rights over the oil underneath, well, the Beverly Hillbillies scenario has little basis in fact. The government has reserved the right to sell the resources under the land separately from the land itself for a long time. You're rarely buying oil or mineral rights to the land when you buy a house with some land.
1. If you actually went in to ANY consumer electronics store in 1995 and told them you wanted to buy a DVD player that looked good on your existing coax-only television, they'd have told you that it's not possible. They may have been wrong, but I did quite a bit of research to dig up that information back in the early 90's (I had a second-generation DVD player that I had until I got my PS3). Without being very careful, it was very easy to trigger Macrovision in which case the picture would get brighter/darker and keep pulsing like that. You could still watch the picture, but it was annoying.
Claiming that DVDs were compatible with all the old televisions around at the time they were released is just simply wrong.
2. I think you're either intentionally or accidentally mis-interpreting what I said. I was discussing future-proofing. If you can buy a next-generation game system that's fully BD Live compliant now (PS3) for about the same as a DVD player+its competition (XBox360), why wouldn't you? Would you seriously buy a standalone DVD player today, even if you didn't have an HD TV?
3. I wasn't trying to show that iPods are equivalent purchases to Blu-Ray players, simply that the amount of money for which Blu-Ray players now sell falls within many, many folks' idea of what's acceptable to pay for consumer electronics, and even something that plays personal media. I didn't say anything about exact comparison of features or the reason people buy things-- just that the amount of money it costs is in the right ballpark for mass consumption.
So yes, they'll have to make choices on what they buy. A lot of people want game systems, especially around Christmas, and the PS3 is a pretty obvious choice for a very future-proof system. And once you have a PS3, even without an HDTV you might be very tempted to pay a small premium for Blu-Ray discs so when you DO get the HDTV you won't have to re-buy anything.
I'm signing up for a block. Who knows what I'll do with it. But at no cost, what do I really have to lose?
All the available blocks are now taken in their pre-release test. Much like Apple's iPhone developer program, they're now putting folks on the waiting list but you can download the SDK in the meantime.
I think your facts are a little off. 1. "Not to mention that DVD looked good on virtually any TV (even older legacy sets)"
DVD looks like crap on any television with coax inputs (a significant portion of them when DVD first came out) because of Macrovision copy protection. Running the DVD player through a VHS machine to get coax outputs triggered the copy protection, and DVD players did not have coax natively.
2. "Blu-ray players will (for most people) require the purchase of a new, potentially very expensive, HDTV."
Actually Blu-Ray will work just fine on older televisions, although it won't look any better than DVD. But if the prices do come down it would be silly to buy a DVD when you could future-proof your collection with a Blu-Ray disc instead.
3. "By the time DVD reached that kind of market share, the prices on players had dropped to the sub-$200 range and disc prices had dropped to the average $20 range."
Firstly, it's not really comparable because DVD players could not play VHS, so you were making a pretty big jump back then. All Blu-Ray players can play DVDs, so if you're buying a new player you might want to future-proof the hardware, as well. But even so, with inflation you can't compare exact dollar figures. If folks are willing to spend hundreds of dollars on iPods, it doesn't seem unreasonable they'd spend something similar to play the latest disc media.
I took is in 1990 and at the time it was probably the hardest test I'd ever taken. But I got a 5 and I think I learned quite a bit from it. But my HIgh School had already dropped it from their curriculum, so the group of us who wanted to do it got together and did it Independent Study. Of the original dozen folks, 4 were still in the class at the end. Two of us got 5's, and two got 1's. The High School decided that was evidence the independent study didn't work, and the next year's students didn't even have that option available. After that point the only computer-based learning available was either basic Microsoft Office types of stuff or the CAD/CAM, plotters and one manufacturing robotic arm in shop class. Needless to say, shop class became surprisingly popular among geeky kids in 1991.
Bender: And I think I saw a 2! Fry: Don't worry, there's no such thing as 2.
There's a lot of different ways to use the extra value. If you treat it as "unknown", or the logical equivalent of NaN, then you can do NOT, AND, and OR with 0's and 1's, then use 2 as an exception case that can propagate.
Microsoft has done it before. Win16 ran in WindowsNT in a compatibility box. I suspect that's exactly what they'll do with Win32 in Windows 7. It actually makes a lot of sense to me.
iTunes is the only thing standing between the consumer and the record labels desire to charge $2.99 per track. The illusion of competition evaporates when you realize that all the popular music is owned by a couple of companies. They have the monopoly. If iTunes "stranglehold" on distribution is broken, it will become the consumer against the record labels directly, without Apple to stand in the way. That's why other sites are able to offer such deals-- the record labels are intentionally trying to break Apple's control of distribution not out of altruism but because they think that it will lead to increased profits (ie. higher prices) down the line.
Good news to hear! I have a Series 2 non-HD TiVo without cablecard support, so I guess I'd have to upgrade. I avoided doing so because when I initially checked FiOS TV didn't support CableCard at all.
The thing I find funny is that you're laughing at the original poster, but he's more accurate than you. Apple may turn the "novelty" knob up to 11 sometimes, but that doesn't get in the way of the fact that their products are actually honestly more usable than the competitors. They add features carefully in a controlled way, and market based on simplicity and usefulness instead of features-per-dollar.
And vendor lock-in can definitely benefit the simplicity argument I just made. If your goal is simplicity, the fewer cooks at the pot the better.
Poo-pooing the idea without careful consideration is ill-advised.
You're ignoring that software is already protected via copyright.
No I'm not. That's a completely separate issue. The source code is protected via copyright, and rightly so-- source code can be very creative.
However, that's completely beside my point: software is a machine. Once you admit that, it's obvious that it should also be patentable. Yes, it's a machine made of copyrighted text. Blueprints can be copyrighted and the device they describe can be patented. Software is no different.
I have 20 down, 5 up internet; flat-rate domestic phone service; and basic tv (with a dozen or so HD channels) for $105/mo. It's extremely reliable and fast. The HD channels appear better than Comcast but still overcompressed on some channels. The telephone is no better or worse than anyone else-- it's just there.
The biggest downside is that the television is not TiVo compatible. That alone has me considering switching back to Comcast for television, but they can pry my FiOS internet service out of my cold, dead fingers.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think you're obviously correct. You may turn out to be correct, but there is a lot to be said for heterogeneous processors on a single die.
Some thoughts:
1. A very-low power, slow core tied to a super heavy-duty number cruncher on the same die that use the same instruction set. One could imagine an OS shutting off the big core when all it has to do is blink the cursor to save power, but firing it back up when you click "Compute". Done right, it seems like this could give you a laptop with a day or more of typical battery power.
2. GPUs and CPUs are fundamentally different beasts, and many of the slowdowns are due to either shuffling textures between RAM and GPU, or coordinating CPU and GPU. nVidia is taking the tack of moving more computation to the GPU (physics, etc). It may be equally valid to move the GPU onto the CPU die so the CPU can do the collision/hit detection and the GPU the rendering with very fast coordination.
3. SIMD instructions have been grafted onto MIMD processors ever since the original MMX, and before that DSPs lived on the motherboards of some Macs and NeXT workstations. They're really two fundamentally different kinds of computing, and I'm not ready to say that it wouldn't make sense to separate them out into separate cores.
4. Some embedded CPUs can already run Java bytecode natively as well as some other ABI like ARM. I could imagine a world where some of the dynamic natures of modern languages is combined with hardware support to give us some pretty powerful little machines.
From the introduction of the Athlon by AMD (the first really "modern" x86 CPU that finally eliminated most of the CISC disadvantages), though on-die memory controllers and dragging Intel kicking and screaming into the 64-bit world, right up until AMD's lack of a solid response to Core, I'd say AMD led Intel's thinking. Now they're the followers again.
Yes, but MacOS X's quality comes at a price. If Apple were to price MacOS X such that they could develop it profitably without the hardware revenue, you'd be paying hundreds of dollars a copy at least. The profit margins on the hardware offset the software development costs. If Linux had access to billions of dollars of hardware profits they could probably do some pretty snazzy things as well.
So if Apple sold MacOS X at a loss people would flock to it, but that's unsustainable. But if they sold it at cost I doubt they'd get many buyers. Therefore I disagree with you that MacOS X market share would be higher if Apple decoupled the OS from the hardware.
What will be interesting is to see if it would really be cheaper for Dell to sell Linux (you postulate $50 per machine). Could they really charge less for Linux? They probably get some revenue from software makers for the crap they pre-load on their systems which they'd probably have to forgo on Linux. They also need to have trained phone support folks, which means developing a new training program for them. It seems that while the licensing costs are zero, there are other significant costs to OEMing Linux.
Dell's current experiments should give them some data on the additional costs and the lost bundling revenue, so things should get interesting over the next year or so.
"but they have done so"
They may have done so. They almost certainly aren't compatible with the much less popular GPLv3, but I don't think many people are losing sleep over that one. Most folks use GPLv2, which they could definitely stay compatible with.
The thing isn't even being released for two months, so it's all just speculation at this point.
If the orbit of asteroid can be changed significantly by simply letting it collide with such a small object as a satellite, it would be very easy to counteract an asteroid collission threat.
It is relatively easy to counteract an asteroid collision threat... given enough time. In this example, hitting a satellite during one close pass could deflect it enough to cause significant deviation 7 years later. It's made especially easy in this case because the asteroid has two close approaches, so the energy required to put the diversion mass in front of it the first time is much less.
Not at all. Most of the time spent between project kickoff and software delivery is NOT spent actually typing the code. If you program in a language that makes it harder to write bugs, easier to find bugs, easier to express algorithms, easier to read other people's code, and easier to do automated testing and verification you'll save huge amounts of time even if coding takes several times as long.
Interestingly, that's one of the arguments in support of Java. Hardcore C or C++ hackers find it cumbersomely verbose, but it's pretty easy to read any Java coder's source code from anywhere in the world and debug it with relatively little time spent in the code archeology phase. That is, for those bugs that make it past the relatively extensive automated checks that are possible because of the straightforward syntax.
That's the Windows style of dialog box. If it was a Mac, it would say "Would you like to fire the gun? [Fire][Cancel]". For apps that follow Apple's style guidelines, the command wording goes in the button, not "yes/no".
I don't know what Linux's style guidelines say on this matter. I suspect the phrase "Linux style guidelines" are already causing some snickers.
ObXKCDComic
It's scary how lazy some of the web developers are. For years Yahoo used a system where their login system had the URL to go to once login succeeded urlencoded in the URL. It would have been exceedingly easy to duplicate the login page with a "Username/Password was typed incorrectly. Please try again." Then send people to the authentication page with your page as the follow-on one.
URLs should only be able to contain sanitized field values to search on that the server composes into actual SQL, URLs, etc.
In a world where companies can buy FDA approval and news organizations take corporate and government propaganda and air it verbatim, Wikipedia looks pretty good by comparison. But if articles like this encourage folks to have a generally higher level of distrust for all sources of information, that's a good thing, too.
The biggest problem with the situation is that the over-reactive parents are making the scientists defensive, and it becomes impossible to objectively discuss the evidence without appearing to "cave in".
Autism rates over time do not match vaccination rates over time, nor do they match vaccination rates across national boundaries, nor do they match national Thimerosal usage rates. However, that does NOT mean that a vaccine didn't trigger a particular case of autism. It could very well be that the child would have had autism triggered the first time they had a significant immune response and/or fever for anything, and the vaccine happened to be the culprit in that case. If they hadn't been vaccinated, their first serious cold, rotavirus, or whatnot would have been the trigger. If that hypothesis is correct, vaccine rates wouldn't track autism rates at all (since the kids who would have gotten autism would still get it) but from the parents point of view many vaccinations would trigger autism.
Thus, the problem is that I think scientists are afraid to risk their career tracking down some of these links that really could help children. Perhaps there is a potential drug for at-risk children that prevents their immune system-- if that is what triggers autism-- from doing the Bad Thing it does to these children. We'll probably never know, because who wants to research it now?
Vaccines are already largely unprofitable (contrary to most accusations from parents). They're usually administered 1-3 times in a person's life, carry a high risk of lawsuit, and have to be pretty cheap to get anyone to use it. That's why so few manufacturers make it, and why the government has to artificially inflate the market in order to get enough flu vaccines and such.
In any case, I'd love to see the hyperbole settle down and not have every court case where some child got a sky-high fever from a vaccine that caused brain damage be labeled as some sort of admission... these people need to just settle down, vaccinate for the "big ones" only if that's what they want, and get on with life as best they can.
But this article says that if you register and host your site with NetSol, they can redirect ALL 404 errors to their spam, even for an active domain. That goes way beyond "dead subdomains".
OS X is essentially BSD ... Now, obviously MacOS X uses a different graphics layer... ...and kernel, and driver model, and launcher, and binary format... MacOS X certainly has a big chunk of BSD in it, but it's a different beast than your typical BSD distro. Also, MacOS X is well-documented to have somewhat bad kernel performance on several micro-benchmarks, and Apple is well-documented as not caring, and only benchmarking and optimizing user experience metrics. So comparing them directly is interesting technically but not that helpful from a product point of view.
But the point that the analyst made that Apple benefits from having a very close codebase between the iPhone and the desktop, I think, is very valid. Microsoft not only has a completely different OS for their phones, but my understanding is that even the XBox 360 is based on a fork of NT that hasn't resynced in the better part of a decade. (While the AppleTV is, again, more or less vanilla MacOS X pared down.)
I don't know if that supports the analyst's point that Windows is "collapsing". If there were any serious alternative for businesses he might have a point. But there are no drop-in replacements for Windows in the enterprise and few are willing to risk the investment to do what it takes to integrate linux or MacOS X into critical workflows.
Btw North and South Dakota have the cheapest real estate (land AND housing) prices in the entire US last I checked. Now I bet people are gonna get a pretty good return on investment!
Not sure what you mean by this... oil certainly hasn't helped Alaska's real estate prices. If you're implying that the owners of the surface land also have some rights over the oil underneath, well, the Beverly Hillbillies scenario has little basis in fact. The government has reserved the right to sell the resources under the land separately from the land itself for a long time. You're rarely buying oil or mineral rights to the land when you buy a house with some land.
1. If you actually went in to ANY consumer electronics store in 1995 and told them you wanted to buy a DVD player that looked good on your existing coax-only television, they'd have told you that it's not possible. They may have been wrong, but I did quite a bit of research to dig up that information back in the early 90's (I had a second-generation DVD player that I had until I got my PS3). Without being very careful, it was very easy to trigger Macrovision in which case the picture would get brighter/darker and keep pulsing like that. You could still watch the picture, but it was annoying.
Claiming that DVDs were compatible with all the old televisions around at the time they were released is just simply wrong.
2. I think you're either intentionally or accidentally mis-interpreting what I said. I was discussing future-proofing. If you can buy a next-generation game system that's fully BD Live compliant now (PS3) for about the same as a DVD player+its competition (XBox360), why wouldn't you? Would you seriously buy a standalone DVD player today, even if you didn't have an HD TV?
3. I wasn't trying to show that iPods are equivalent purchases to Blu-Ray players, simply that the amount of money for which Blu-Ray players now sell falls within many, many folks' idea of what's acceptable to pay for consumer electronics, and even something that plays personal media. I didn't say anything about exact comparison of features or the reason people buy things-- just that the amount of money it costs is in the right ballpark for mass consumption.
So yes, they'll have to make choices on what they buy. A lot of people want game systems, especially around Christmas, and the PS3 is a pretty obvious choice for a very future-proof system. And once you have a PS3, even without an HDTV you might be very tempted to pay a small premium for Blu-Ray discs so when you DO get the HDTV you won't have to re-buy anything.
I'm signing up for a block. Who knows what I'll do with it. But at no cost, what do I really have to lose?
All the available blocks are now taken in their pre-release test. Much like Apple's iPhone developer program, they're now putting folks on the waiting list but you can download the SDK in the meantime.
I think your facts are a little off.
1. "Not to mention that DVD looked good on virtually any TV (even older legacy sets)"
DVD looks like crap on any television with coax inputs (a significant portion of them when DVD first came out) because of Macrovision copy protection. Running the DVD player through a VHS machine to get coax outputs triggered the copy protection, and DVD players did not have coax natively.
2. "Blu-ray players will (for most people) require the purchase of a new, potentially very expensive, HDTV."
Actually Blu-Ray will work just fine on older televisions, although it won't look any better than DVD. But if the prices do come down it would be silly to buy a DVD when you could future-proof your collection with a Blu-Ray disc instead.
3. "By the time DVD reached that kind of market share, the prices on players had dropped to the sub-$200 range and disc prices had dropped to the average $20 range."
Firstly, it's not really comparable because DVD players could not play VHS, so you were making a pretty big jump back then. All Blu-Ray players can play DVDs, so if you're buying a new player you might want to future-proof the hardware, as well. But even so, with inflation you can't compare exact dollar figures. If folks are willing to spend hundreds of dollars on iPods, it doesn't seem unreasonable they'd spend something similar to play the latest disc media.
I took is in 1990 and at the time it was probably the hardest test I'd ever taken. But I got a 5 and I think I learned quite a bit from it. But my HIgh School had already dropped it from their curriculum, so the group of us who wanted to do it got together and did it Independent Study. Of the original dozen folks, 4 were still in the class at the end. Two of us got 5's, and two got 1's. The High School decided that was evidence the independent study didn't work, and the next year's students didn't even have that option available. After that point the only computer-based learning available was either basic Microsoft Office types of stuff or the CAD/CAM, plotters and one manufacturing robotic arm in shop class. Needless to say, shop class became surprisingly popular among geeky kids in 1991.
Bender: And I think I saw a 2!
Fry: Don't worry, there's no such thing as 2.
There's a lot of different ways to use the extra value. If you treat it as "unknown", or the logical equivalent of NaN, then you can do NOT, AND, and OR with 0's and 1's, then use 2 as an exception case that can propagate.
Microsoft has done it before. Win16 ran in WindowsNT in a compatibility box. I suspect that's exactly what they'll do with Win32 in Windows 7. It actually makes a lot of sense to me.
iTunes is the only thing standing between the consumer and the record labels desire to charge $2.99 per track. The illusion of competition evaporates when you realize that all the popular music is owned by a couple of companies. They have the monopoly. If iTunes "stranglehold" on distribution is broken, it will become the consumer against the record labels directly, without Apple to stand in the way. That's why other sites are able to offer such deals-- the record labels are intentionally trying to break Apple's control of distribution not out of altruism but because they think that it will lead to increased profits (ie. higher prices) down the line.
Good news to hear! I have a Series 2 non-HD TiVo without cablecard support, so I guess I'd have to upgrade. I avoided doing so because when I initially checked FiOS TV didn't support CableCard at all.
The thing I find funny is that you're laughing at the original poster, but he's more accurate than you. Apple may turn the "novelty" knob up to 11 sometimes, but that doesn't get in the way of the fact that their products are actually honestly more usable than the competitors. They add features carefully in a controlled way, and market based on simplicity and usefulness instead of features-per-dollar.
And vendor lock-in can definitely benefit the simplicity argument I just made. If your goal is simplicity, the fewer cooks at the pot the better.
Poo-pooing the idea without careful consideration is ill-advised.
You're ignoring that software is already protected via copyright.
No I'm not. That's a completely separate issue. The source code is protected via copyright, and rightly so-- source code can be very creative.
However, that's completely beside my point: software is a machine. Once you admit that, it's obvious that it should also be patentable. Yes, it's a machine made of copyrighted text. Blueprints can be copyrighted and the device they describe can be patented. Software is no different.
I have 20 down, 5 up internet; flat-rate domestic phone service; and basic tv (with a dozen or so HD channels) for $105/mo. It's extremely reliable and fast. The HD channels appear better than Comcast but still overcompressed on some channels. The telephone is no better or worse than anyone else-- it's just there.
The biggest downside is that the television is not TiVo compatible. That alone has me considering switching back to Comcast for television, but they can pry my FiOS internet service out of my cold, dead fingers.