Personally, I think that's one of the iPhone's "sleeper" features that hasn't really been touted. There are by now tens of millions of iPod docking ports, docking cables, adapters, etc., around. IMHO, all phones should just pay Apple some minimal sum and standardize on the iPod port for their recharge/data cables. In the meantime, the iPhone is the only phone you can take virtually anywhere on the planet and borrow a cable from someone to recharge it. (of course, it would be nice if it could get service anywhere on the planet for reasonable money, but that's another story.)
Jesus. Perhaps you should look up the definition for the words take
Sure thing! Here's the beginning of the #1 definition for "take" in Merriam-Webster (among 28 others):
1: to get into one's hands or into one's possession, power, or control
Here's the #3 definition for "appropriate":
3: to take or make use of without authority or right
Now, please stop treating your opinion as fact. You're entitled to it, but it's just your opinion. Language is a compromise, and this seems like a reasonable one to me. "Steal" carries the correctly negative connotation for illegal file sharing, and easily fits within all definitions-- thus it seems to me a very appropriate word to use. And here's the acid test: when used that way, everyone (including you) know what is meant, whether or not you agree.
There are also many non-biological uses for the DNA structure. Scientific American (or maybe one of their offshoots) had an article about DNA computing, DNA structures, etc. I wonder if this could be more interesting from a nano-machine perspective. Self-assembling microscopic machines are fascinating (yes, yes, "whatcouldpossiblygowrong"... welcome to the 21st century).
The whole reason to document, as given by the submitter, is to make people more easily replacable. Something that is easy to replace is less valuable than something that is hard to replace
To a point. Presumably the people doing the jobs are good at what they do, and a replacement would be worse. If the only value you bring to the company is your knowledge, you're already of questionable value. Just install wikipedia where you used to sit and let people query it as your replacement.
Are you implying that it goes to a different place every time
Yes... Iconified windows don't pile up on exactly the same spot. They'll iconify to the bottom of the dock, and the transition will show people who are less amazingly awesome as you where to find it.
Are you unsatisfied with the rate of progress in medicine? I think the patenting has allowed unprecedented investment, leading to unprecedented medicinal advances.
And I don't think the third world will benefit much from the loss of these patents. Most HIV drugs are already heavily discounted in those countries. Losing the patent just means less investment in future drugs.
I assume you're with the crowd that are (mis)using Slashdot's tagging feature to make editorial comments about window transitions not being a "feature". It's kind of ironic, because some of those same people will, at times, talk about Linux's viability as a desktop operating system, where utility of transitions are immense. In fact, transitions are probably one of the more valuable HCI movements lately, and give users great feedback as to what happened to their data/windows and where they went. All the way back to the Newton's "crumpling paper" when things were thrown away, Apple has been using them to great effect. When minimizing something to the dock in MacOS X, it's an extremely good way of showing the user where they can find it later.
Considering my 6-year-old PowerPC-based Mac can do them just fine, I think keeping things "lean" for lean's sake is counterproductive. All the visual aspects should be analyzed from a consistency and return-on-performance factor, and while transitions may have been too expensive to performance at some point, nowadays they're virtually free and a great tool.
Not to mention my opinion that downloading is not stealing
You made a small mistake in your post which I corrected. In actuality, illegal downloading easily fits within Merriam-Webster's definition of stealing:
1 a: to take or appropriate without right or leave and with intent to keep or make use of wrongfully b: to take away by force or unjust means c: to take surreptitiously or without permission d: to appropriate to oneself or beyond one's proper share : make oneself the focus of
You can argue semantics all you want, but basically P2P copyrighted music downloading is violating the law in order to get something without paying for it. The appropriate response if you don't like the price or licensing model is to ignore it, not steal it.
I'm actually typing this on my Touch from which I'm reading slashdot. My advice? Use a cellphone to make calls and don't try to make it do everything... Then buy a Touch to run all the fun stuff. I'm going to hold off on jailbreaking this one until after I see the official sdk... Its a pretty useful machine as-is out of the box. Who needs an air... I own the thinnest Mac Apple makes.
Personally I don't know why people are so up in arms about apple's desire to sign all code. It doesn't necessarily mean restrictions or lack of freedom... Just lack of anonymity for the developer. I kind of wish all software was signed. If it were all signed as a matter of course malware would be pretty easy to avoid.
How does a robot win the hearts and minds of the people? Wasn't that part of the point of the original RoboCop story (besides lots of random action sequences)?
Let's take it to the next logical step: China or whomever our next big enemy is also creates a robot army. Now we send our robots and they send their robots, and the only humans on the battlefield are civilians who get killed, displaced, or starved.
I guess you haven't really been outside Newark or Camden. Most of New Jersey is agricultural or beach/coastal, and (speaking as someone who moved here 6 months ago) is surprisingly pleasant and attractive.
Not that I wouldn't want a geiger counter of my own so I can avoid those bad parts of New Jersey... talk about false-positives, I can see why they wouldn't want to give folks in the industrial areas geiger counters.
Yes, well, supply and demand, as well as perceived value, are going to keep HD DVD cheaper until it dies. I expect HD DVD player prices to plummet even further as companies sell of remaining inventory at fire-sale prices, too.
Now I do one thing until it is done. Yeah, not so thrilling. Like today: Browse Web. Finances. Dinner. Tax Return. Washing Up. Shower. Travel. Browse Web.
I would have once been munging them all together, and end up with burned food, etc.
Except that by buying HD-DVD player you get cheap upscaling DVD player that can play HD discs as a bonus.... just like you get with a Blu-Ray player, except that you get more choice for your HD discs and you'll still be able to buy them in 2 years. There are no players of either format I know of that don't do DVD upscaling.
How about a new standard for patents - that if a patent is filed when a practitioner of the art would ordinarily know the patent to be invalid, and the patent is not withdrawn between the time of filing and the time of issue, that it's a criminal offense?
I'm no lawyer, but when my company filed for my patent, I had to sign an affidavit swearing that, as far as I knew, my invention was original. Not sure if that was for the company's benefit or the USPTO, but I think the latter.
Thus it's ironic that Blu-Ray is a much more open format than HD DVD. Blu-Ray interactive media is based on the Java language, which is going open-source (although BD-J-specific JVMs aren't yet), while HD DVD is based on the Microsoft-controlled iHD standard. Blu-Ray encourages the use of MP4/AAC instead of HD DVDs Microsoft-controled VC-1 (although both formats support both, the authoring tools for each push studios in specific directions). And the PS3, the most prolific Blu-Ray player on the market by far, has "install linux" as a menu item out of the box. Sony doesn't even hold the most patents on Blu-Ray, so the IP situation is more diversified.
Anyway, I never bought a memory stick or PSP-format game, but Blu-Ray seems to be closer to Sony "getting it".
I think the only honest way to report on blu-ray is to include PS3s and accept a lower attach rate (if there is one).
I generally agree, but there might be more illuminating ways to break it down. There are PS3's that are sold packaged with movies. An 'attach rate' that counts those but not PS3s sold with game packages might be interesting. Also interesting might be the 'attach rate' counting sales of the PS3 Blu-Ray remote control, which while not required is probably a high-priority item for people who bought the PS3 largely to play media.
But in the end, I'm not sure the immediate attach rate matters much. A lower attach rate means higher opportunity, since I suspect most PS3 owners will buy at least one Blu-Ray movie just to see what all the fuss is about and the existing attach rate is less than 1.0.
And with Sony selling more PS3s per quarter than HD DVD players have ever been built (is that statistic still valid?) the sales of standalone players hardly matters anymore.
Sales of XP paid for Vista's development. At this point it's virtually free, from an accounting point of view. Contrast this to the XBox360, which is racking up replacement costs and fighting to break even-- let alone make a profit-- on an ongoing basis.
And I feel confident that Vista sales will successfully pay for the next version of Windows, as well as subsidizing XBoxes and Zunes to try to leverage the monopoly to take over another industry.
We're not talking about being able to save a word document here. In order for the soldiers on the ground to have full situational awareness and ability to command, there is a lot of data that has to get from here to there. If you have a direct link from here to there, great. If that link goes down, but the software detects that sending it over this packet radio, then that fiber, bouncing it off the other satellite and downlinking it to the stryker will get it there, it should auto-reroute it that way. I think that's what they mean by "self-healing". Kind of like the original internet was designed-- on steroids... imagine if it had incorporated routing information for every FIDOnet, HAM radio, telephone, and carrier pigeon in the country.
I'm baffled by your response. My example of a geostationary satellite is one example where someone tried to patent an idea and the patent was rejected on the grounds that Arthur C. Clarke had fully described the invention in a previous story. The pre-granting discussion/prior art system I was referring to is http://www.peertopatent.org/, which is being done in cooperation with the USPTO and seems to so far be doing a reasonably good job.
Anything that lowers the value of the patent (ie. limiting the buyers' rights) will mean less money for the inventor on the original sale.
A higher standard for obviousness, use of science fiction as prior art (as in the geostationary satellite), and a better pre-granting discussion process (which is already being experimented with) is really all the system needs.
Vista has a whole heck of a lot more users than MacOS X and linux. I think it's easy to say that yes, Vista's security is much better than the stinking pile of crap that was XP's security, too.
But counting the number of vulnerabilities is misleading. How many of those vulnerabilities, if compromised, would lead to an exploit that wouldn't be caught by another layer of security? A buffer overrun in a browser allows code to execute at the privilege level of the user running the browser... how much power does that offer in each operating system? With OSes like MacOS X 10.5 putting libraries at random offsets in virtual memory, how likely is it that a buffer overrun even turns into a reliable vulnerability?
I think there's more reasons that pure obscurity why no virus exists in the wild on MacOS, and the only vulnerabilities have been trojans that require the user to explicitly download something, run it, click away the "you downloaded this from the net" warning, and type their administrator password. Yes, there were a lot of vulnerabilities in MacOS software this year-- and yet no viruses.
Yeah, MacOS System 6.0 in 1988 wasn't very buzzword compliant. But it was still incredibly productive-- depending on your task, probably moreso than Windows today for many folks.
I'm not sure what your second picture is of, but it doesn't look like a Wright flyer to me... here's a pic of the Flyer III about 2-3 years after first flight: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/5/54/Wright_Flyer_III_above.jpg/225px-Wright_Flyer_III_above.jpg . The Flyer III was the first one that had reasonable enough handling that it was really "usable" by a mere mortal, and the design didn't change that much for 5 years after that.
It was Curtiss that took the Wrights' ideas and extended them into more simple-to-manufacture designs (such as aerolons instead of warping wings), and that's when you'll start seeing planes that look a lot like a modern plane.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I think that's one of the iPhone's "sleeper" features that hasn't really been touted. There are by now tens of millions of iPod docking ports, docking cables, adapters, etc., around. IMHO, all phones should just pay Apple some minimal sum and standardize on the iPod port for their recharge/data cables. In the meantime, the iPhone is the only phone you can take virtually anywhere on the planet and borrow a cable from someone to recharge it. (of course, it would be nice if it could get service anywhere on the planet for reasonable money, but that's another story.)
Jesus. Perhaps you should look up the definition for the words take
Sure thing! Here's the beginning of the #1 definition for "take" in Merriam-Webster (among 28 others):
1: to get into one's hands or into one's possession, power, or control
Here's the #3 definition for "appropriate":
3: to take or make use of without authority or right
Now, please stop treating your opinion as fact. You're entitled to it, but it's just your opinion. Language is a compromise, and this seems like a reasonable one to me. "Steal" carries the correctly negative connotation for illegal file sharing, and easily fits within all definitions-- thus it seems to me a very appropriate word to use. And here's the acid test: when used that way, everyone (including you) know what is meant, whether or not you agree.
There are also many non-biological uses for the DNA structure. Scientific American (or maybe one of their offshoots) had an article about DNA computing, DNA structures, etc. I wonder if this could be more interesting from a nano-machine perspective. Self-assembling microscopic machines are fascinating (yes, yes, "whatcouldpossiblygowrong"... welcome to the 21st century).
The whole reason to document, as given by the submitter, is to make people more easily replacable. Something that is easy to replace is less valuable than something that is hard to replace
To a point. Presumably the people doing the jobs are good at what they do, and a replacement would be worse. If the only value you bring to the company is your knowledge, you're already of questionable value. Just install wikipedia where you used to sit and let people query it as your replacement.
Are you implying that it goes to a different place every time
Yes... Iconified windows don't pile up on exactly the same spot. They'll iconify to the bottom of the dock, and the transition will show people who are less amazingly awesome as you where to find it.
Are you unsatisfied with the rate of progress in medicine? I think the patenting has allowed unprecedented investment, leading to unprecedented medicinal advances.
And I don't think the third world will benefit much from the loss of these patents. Most HIV drugs are already heavily discounted in those countries. Losing the patent just means less investment in future drugs.
I assume you're with the crowd that are (mis)using Slashdot's tagging feature to make editorial comments about window transitions not being a "feature". It's kind of ironic, because some of those same people will, at times, talk about Linux's viability as a desktop operating system, where utility of transitions are immense. In fact, transitions are probably one of the more valuable HCI movements lately, and give users great feedback as to what happened to their data/windows and where they went. All the way back to the Newton's "crumpling paper" when things were thrown away, Apple has been using them to great effect. When minimizing something to the dock in MacOS X, it's an extremely good way of showing the user where they can find it later.
Considering my 6-year-old PowerPC-based Mac can do them just fine, I think keeping things "lean" for lean's sake is counterproductive. All the visual aspects should be analyzed from a consistency and return-on-performance factor, and while transitions may have been too expensive to performance at some point, nowadays they're virtually free and a great tool.
Not to mention my opinion that downloading is not stealing
You made a small mistake in your post which I corrected. In actuality, illegal downloading easily fits within Merriam-Webster's definition of stealing:
1 a: to take or appropriate without right or leave and with intent to keep or make use of wrongfully b: to take away by force or unjust means c: to take surreptitiously or without permission d: to appropriate to oneself or beyond one's proper share : make oneself the focus of
You can argue semantics all you want, but basically P2P copyrighted music downloading is violating the law in order to get something without paying for it. The appropriate response if you don't like the price or licensing model is to ignore it, not steal it.
I'm actually typing this on my Touch from which I'm reading slashdot. My advice? Use a cellphone to make calls and don't try to make it do everything... Then buy a Touch to run all the fun stuff. I'm going to hold off on jailbreaking this one until after I see the official sdk... Its a pretty useful machine as-is out of the box. Who needs an air... I own the thinnest Mac Apple makes.
Personally I don't know why people are so up in arms about apple's desire to sign all code. It doesn't necessarily mean restrictions or lack of freedom... Just lack of anonymity for the developer. I kind of wish all software was signed. If it were all signed as a matter of course malware would be pretty easy to avoid.
How does a robot win the hearts and minds of the people? Wasn't that part of the point of the original RoboCop story (besides lots of random action sequences)?
Let's take it to the next logical step: China or whomever our next big enemy is also creates a robot army. Now we send our robots and they send their robots, and the only humans on the battlefield are civilians who get killed, displaced, or starved.
I guess you haven't really been outside Newark or Camden. Most of New Jersey is agricultural or beach/coastal, and (speaking as someone who moved here 6 months ago) is surprisingly pleasant and attractive.
Not that I wouldn't want a geiger counter of my own so I can avoid those bad parts of New Jersey... talk about false-positives, I can see why they wouldn't want to give folks in the industrial areas geiger counters.
Yes, well, supply and demand, as well as perceived value, are going to keep HD DVD cheaper until it dies. I expect HD DVD player prices to plummet even further as companies sell of remaining inventory at fire-sale prices, too.
Now I do one thing until it is done. Yeah, not so thrilling. Like today: Browse Web. Finances. Dinner. Tax Return. Washing Up. Shower. Travel. Browse Web.
I would have once been munging them all together, and end up with burned food, etc.
Or a soaking wet, food-soaked tax return!
Except that by buying HD-DVD player you get cheap upscaling DVD player that can play HD discs as a bonus. ... just like you get with a Blu-Ray player, except that you get more choice for your HD discs and you'll still be able to buy them in 2 years. There are no players of either format I know of that don't do DVD upscaling.
How about a new standard for patents - that if a patent is filed when a practitioner of the art would ordinarily know the patent to be invalid, and the patent is not withdrawn between the time of filing and the time of issue, that it's a criminal offense?
I'm no lawyer, but when my company filed for my patent, I had to sign an affidavit swearing that, as far as I knew, my invention was original. Not sure if that was for the company's benefit or the USPTO, but I think the latter.
Thus it's ironic that Blu-Ray is a much more open format than HD DVD. Blu-Ray interactive media is based on the Java language, which is going open-source (although BD-J-specific JVMs aren't yet), while HD DVD is based on the Microsoft-controlled iHD standard. Blu-Ray encourages the use of MP4/AAC instead of HD DVDs Microsoft-controled VC-1 (although both formats support both, the authoring tools for each push studios in specific directions). And the PS3, the most prolific Blu-Ray player on the market by far, has "install linux" as a menu item out of the box. Sony doesn't even hold the most patents on Blu-Ray, so the IP situation is more diversified.
Anyway, I never bought a memory stick or PSP-format game, but Blu-Ray seems to be closer to Sony "getting it".
I think the only honest way to report on blu-ray is to include PS3s and accept a lower attach rate (if there is one).
I generally agree, but there might be more illuminating ways to break it down. There are PS3's that are sold packaged with movies. An 'attach rate' that counts those but not PS3s sold with game packages might be interesting. Also interesting might be the 'attach rate' counting sales of the PS3 Blu-Ray remote control, which while not required is probably a high-priority item for people who bought the PS3 largely to play media.
But in the end, I'm not sure the immediate attach rate matters much. A lower attach rate means higher opportunity, since I suspect most PS3 owners will buy at least one Blu-Ray movie just to see what all the fuss is about and the existing attach rate is less than 1.0.
And with Sony selling more PS3s per quarter than HD DVD players have ever been built (is that statistic still valid?) the sales of standalone players hardly matters anymore.
Sales of XP paid for Vista's development. At this point it's virtually free, from an accounting point of view. Contrast this to the XBox360, which is racking up replacement costs and fighting to break even-- let alone make a profit-- on an ongoing basis.
And I feel confident that Vista sales will successfully pay for the next version of Windows, as well as subsidizing XBoxes and Zunes to try to leverage the monopoly to take over another industry.
We're not talking about being able to save a word document here. In order for the soldiers on the ground to have full situational awareness and ability to command, there is a lot of data that has to get from here to there. If you have a direct link from here to there, great. If that link goes down, but the software detects that sending it over this packet radio, then that fiber, bouncing it off the other satellite and downlinking it to the stryker will get it there, it should auto-reroute it that way. I think that's what they mean by "self-healing". Kind of like the original internet was designed-- on steroids... imagine if it had incorporated routing information for every FIDOnet, HAM radio, telephone, and carrier pigeon in the country.
I'm baffled by your response. My example of a geostationary satellite is one example where someone tried to patent an idea and the patent was rejected on the grounds that Arthur C. Clarke had fully described the invention in a previous story. The pre-granting discussion/prior art system I was referring to is http://www.peertopatent.org/, which is being done in cooperation with the USPTO and seems to so far be doing a reasonably good job.
Anything that lowers the value of the patent (ie. limiting the buyers' rights) will mean less money for the inventor on the original sale.
A higher standard for obviousness, use of science fiction as prior art (as in the geostationary satellite), and a better pre-granting discussion process (which is already being experimented with) is really all the system needs.
Vista has a whole heck of a lot more users than MacOS X and linux. I think it's easy to say that yes, Vista's security is much better than the stinking pile of crap that was XP's security, too.
But counting the number of vulnerabilities is misleading. How many of those vulnerabilities, if compromised, would lead to an exploit that wouldn't be caught by another layer of security? A buffer overrun in a browser allows code to execute at the privilege level of the user running the browser... how much power does that offer in each operating system? With OSes like MacOS X 10.5 putting libraries at random offsets in virtual memory, how likely is it that a buffer overrun even turns into a reliable vulnerability?
I think there's more reasons that pure obscurity why no virus exists in the wild on MacOS, and the only vulnerabilities have been trojans that require the user to explicitly download something, run it, click away the "you downloaded this from the net" warning, and type their administrator password. Yes, there were a lot of vulnerabilities in MacOS software this year-- and yet no viruses.
Yeah, MacOS System 6.0 in 1988 wasn't very buzzword compliant. But it was still incredibly productive-- depending on your task, probably moreso than Windows today for many folks.
It's a simple, elegant and practical solution to this very real problem.
It's a problem, though, that only Microsoft has. Everyone else is just expected to conform to the standards.
Read here for the WebKit team's response to this and why they're not going to define or obey any such tags themselves.
I'm not sure what your second picture is of, but it doesn't look like a Wright flyer to me... here's a pic of the Flyer III about 2-3 years after first flight: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/5/54/Wright_Flyer_III_above.jpg/225px-Wright_Flyer_III_above.jpg . The Flyer III was the first one that had reasonable enough handling that it was really "usable" by a mere mortal, and the design didn't change that much for 5 years after that.
It was Curtiss that took the Wrights' ideas and extended them into more simple-to-manufacture designs (such as aerolons instead of warping wings), and that's when you'll start seeing planes that look a lot like a modern plane.