Hey take this guy seriously. He can identify a white bigot just by reading!
Well, in all fairness, most of Slashdot's readership is white (but I can't find a slashdot poll to confirm that). So we can apply my analysis to your comment as well. But, I'm not going to confirm or deny your assumption about my race, just for fun. All I'll say is that I'm not an illegal immigrant (by the definition of the US government).
Respond if you want, I won't read it as I refuse to waste any more time with a bigot.
I'm going to respond anyway, but only to show other readers that I'm not the bigot ("a person obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices"). I don't expect you to read this.
For the record, I have no problem with people immigrating to the United States from Mexico or anywhere else. I think our immigration laws need to be seriously rethought. I have serious problems with how we do deportations of illegal immigrants. (I have friends caught up in some really stupid deportation proceedings, actually.) I think that racial profiling of any race is immoral. I think it's a shame how many more black people than white people are in prison. I don't think illegal immigrants steal jobs. (On the contrary, I find most Americans to be so entitled and stuck up that they wouldn't take the sort of jobs that immigrants are forced into because of their illegal status. Chew on that for a bit.)
Now, let's look at the sentence that you completely misinterpreted (though I can see why now) and let me explain what I meant by it:
The problem isn't whether you can find potential illegal immigrants by sight, it's that doing so is illegal.
I did not intend to say that there is a problem with the legality of racial profiling. Quite the opposite, in fact. The problem is that the only way to enforce portions of the Arizona law is through racial profiling, which is illegal. If racial profiling were legal, the Arizona law would undoubtedly be effective in finding (and eventually deporting) illegal immigrants, but this would still be immoral for several reasons.
So, let me rephrase my statement to make it clear:
Unlike what you seem to think, it's very possible to identify potential illegal immigrants by sight with a decent degree of probability. This in itself is not a problem, however. It's when you use this fact to perform racial profiling (like the Arizona law would imply) that things become immoral.
Actually, there's a decent chance he was right, if you're just looking at statistics.
Depending on the source, about 17% of the hispanics in the US are illegal immigrants. I would suspect that the percentage is higher in Dallas (but I don't have numbers on hand to back that up). Compare that number to.3% of whites being illegal immigrants. If you give him a little leeway and include the children of illegal immigrants born in the US (and therefore not illegal immigrants technically), the percentage goes up even further.
Racial profiling may be illegal, but it otherwise wouldn't be a bad place to start if you wanted to find illegal immigrants.
Add on top of that other revealing factors (neighborhood, language, dress, etc), and the odds of being able to pick out an illegal immigrant go up as well. I wouldn't be surprised if you could train someone to "identify an illegal immigrant just by looking at them" with over 50% accuracy.
The problem isn't whether you can find potential illegal immigrants by sight, it's that doing so is illegal.
I'm not sure I agree with that blogger on some points. USB 3 is only about 2 or 3 mm wider than Lightning. And if they can put a Lightning controller on the SoC, they can do the same for USB. Do other phones even have an external USB controller? I doubt it. Even Arduinos have inboard controllers.
There are good reasons for not using USB, but I doubt space is really one of them.
To me, at least, it's a matter of getting along and playing nicely. It's a matter of how Apple treats me as their customer and as a potential customer of their partners.
Moving beyond the 30-pin dock is a good thing. It outlived its usefulness, and making a change is a necessary evil. Let's take all of that as a given.
So, Apple has three choices here:
1) Do what all other major manufacturers have done and move to micro USB. Add on MHL for video. This has the huge advantage of being standard and inexpensive, but maybe it lacks a feature that Apple wants (a cynic would point to royalties and vendor lock-in as Apple's most desired feature, but a more fair viewpoint would be features that make accessories easier to make). Micro USB is certainly not the best, but it works quite well for other phone and tablets. If you want to be fancy, move to USB 3.0.
2) Work with other industry partners to establish a new standard. Actually work with Samsung, Motorola, LG, and HTC for once. This shows that Apple can actually play nice in the field of electronics and has the interests of the consumer in mind. This would (eventually) rid the world of micro USB and it's problems while still giving Apple the features it might want. Accessories are less expensive and work with all devices. Everybody wins! Well, except maybe for Apple since it doesn't have control over the connector anymore.
3) Develop your own proprietary connection. Still has to be compatible with micro USB chargers. Screws over loyal customers by making their accessories obsolete unless they pay for expensive adapters, which might not even work anyway. Makes all accessories more expensive due to royalties on the new connector (rumor is $4 to $10 per connector or 10% of accessory price, whichever is greater). Makes all accessories more expensive since you can't take advantage of economies of scale. And so on and so on. But at least we get a reversible connector now, right?
Basically, Apple could have gone with something standard. Or they could have been a partner in the industry and worked to develop a new standard that makes everyone happy. If you're going to change connectors anyway, why not do the right thing? Instead, they show disdain for their own customers and future potential customers.
And this is what they do as they lose market share? Well, I'm sure not going to switch to an iPhone because of Lightning, but I might never buy an Apple device again because of it. I don't like how they're treating me as a potential customer, and I really, really like having a standard charger in every room of the house. (If other electronics manufacturers started using Lightning, my tune might change a bit. Let's be realistic, though... that will never happen.)
Lightning definitely has advantages over micro USB. And one big disadvantage: it's proprietary. Most manufacturers, thankfully, have to go with something standard, but Apple has the clout to ignore standards to their own (and, arguably, their customers') benefit.
To me, its not the change that's the problem, it's the change to yet another proprietary connector. If you're going to inconvenence your customers, at least do the right thing and go to something standard. "But it's reversible!" isn't good enough excuse.
I was shocked they didn't update the Shuffle to use Lightning. Seemed like a perfect match to me. The real benefit isn't the thinness, but the smaller width. The Shuffle would be compatible with docks if they put this connector on.
Time for a conspiracy theory! Apple is the only company out there that I know of that uses the exception. Could it be that the exception was made explicitly for them? Did they "buy" the exception somehow?
The micro USB 3 connector is capable of 30V, 1.5A (45W). It's just that the specification limits to 5V 900mA. There's nothing that prevents a manufacturer from making a 10W USB 3 charger, as long as the device stays within limits otherwise.
Mormons don't just go out and buy MREs (well, usually). Instead, the advice is to buy more of the nonparishable food that you normally buy. Then, once you have a year's worth, you just rotate through that food.
The advantage to stocking up on food in this way against unemployment is that you can leverage buying in bulk. I know a Mormon family that has a two year supply. Once a year they buy a year's worth of food at extreme discounts. (So, in reality, they have a 1.5-year supply on average).
Also, Mormons are big proponents of that rainy day fund. Get out of debit and build a modest reserve. Pretty solid advice, I'd say: if you're out of a job, you'll need more than just food, after all.
You're right. The names of functions, variables, classes, etc. can serve as part of the "why." But, that's that's not enough. For a one-line function, sure. But imagine if you used a fixed-point library to hold the value instead of a double, and that withdrawing money from an account requires interesting authorization. And then how do you handle overdrawing an account? Etc. etc. etc.
No matter how complicated and descriptive you make the variable and function names, at some point this system breaks down.
Some languages have additional features that make it easier to go beyond the "how." Contract programming comes to mind. Maybe one day a language will come out where self-documenting code will be a reality. But for now, the features aren't there, and it's the job of the comments to tell us why the code does what it does.
Code, by definition, tells the computer how to do something, but not why. The computer doesn't care why it's adding two numbers together, it just obeys.
Likewise, self-documenting code will only ever tell the programmer how the computer does something, but will never tell the programmer why. That's the job of the comments.
The problem is that most people focus on "how comments," instead of "why comments." They spend their time on the function comment block, describing even the most mundane function in detail (but never actually saying when to use the function or how the algorithm works). Or they spend their time on the comment block at the start of the file (doing the job of your version control software). (The occasional "signpost" comment is a good idea, of course, as is documenting the API. Some "how comments" are still very useful.)
Exactly. People that claim that the SD slot takes space from the battery or adds thickness make me cringe. The Razr is very clear evidence to the contrary.
An SD slot doesn't compromise the design nearly as much as you're suggesting.
A micro SD card has a volume of about 165 mm^3. The iPhone4 battery has a volume of about 11,890 mm^3. That's right... using that space for the battery will improve your battery life by about 1 or 2 percent, and that's only if you can manage to use that entire volume for battery space instead, which is highly unlikely. (Yes, I know I only included the card and not the slot, but I also assumed the battery was rectangular, which it isn't. 1 or 2 percent is in the noise.)
Apple "get away" with the lack of an SD card slot because most normal people don't actually care.
Maybe they would care if they realized Apple charges them $100 for an extra 16GB, which I can pick up from Newegg for $10. People care when it hits their pocketbooks.
Considering that many network diagrams use a cloud to represent the internet, whatever definition TFA uses could be right in a way. But, the term has come to mean something else in recent years... although the definition is still a bit nebulous (pun intended).
What bothers me is that Citrix commissioned the survey. I would think that they, of all people, would understand what "The Cloud" has come to mean (hint: not "The Internet").
And that is precisely why we need to do away with the electoral college system. The victor should be decided by who gets the most votes, just like every other election in the country.
No other election in this country is decided on a national level like you're proposing. Senators are decided by who gets the most votes for a single state. Representatives are decided by who gets the most votes for a district. What office is elected by a majority of the entire population of the United States?
On the other hand, the overall control of Congress is decided by similar mathematics to the electoral college (though the bicameral system throws this off). In that respect, the Electoral College fits very well into our election scheme.
That said... I think the EC made sense at the time it was thought up, but the system's been modified and gamed so much that now it's a very strange entity that the electorate doesn't understand and doesn't work as originally intended. Direct popular election might be the way to go, but there's other systems out there as well.
In the end, it won't make much difference changing to a "normal" voting process as the victors have also received the most total votes, but it would do away with this nonsense of concentrating on a few select states (PA, OH and FL for instance) and force the candidates to go after every vote. This doesn't mean there won't still be pockets for either candidate(s) in states, but we won't have to hear about winning a state. You're winning the vote.
No, concentrating on a few select locations will absolutely still happen... but it won't be the same states as before. It probably won't even be whole states. You're forgetting the impact of advertising markets.
You see, candidates only have so much money to go around. They have to spend their money and energy where it will make the most difference. So places where their $1M TV ad will reach more voters (especially if those voters are undecided or likely to swing) will get more focus by the campaigns.
My theory is that campaigns will have to broaden their reach in some ways, and tighten their focus in others. Spend a little money and time everywhere, but spend a lot where it matters.
However, most users are not qualified to speak about nuances of user experiences nor technical specifications. Most Slashdotters aren't qualified, honestly. Brand image plays a huge part of what a consumer perceives to be a good product.
Slashdot Mirror
So assuming you are yourself white...
Hey take this guy seriously. He can identify a white bigot just by reading!
Well, in all fairness, most of Slashdot's readership is white (but I can't find a slashdot poll to confirm that). So we can apply my analysis to your comment as well. But, I'm not going to confirm or deny your assumption about my race, just for fun. All I'll say is that I'm not an illegal immigrant (by the definition of the US government).
Respond if you want, I won't read it as I refuse to waste any more time with a bigot.
I'm going to respond anyway, but only to show other readers that I'm not the bigot ("a person obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices"). I don't expect you to read this.
For the record, I have no problem with people immigrating to the United States from Mexico or anywhere else.
I think our immigration laws need to be seriously rethought.
I have serious problems with how we do deportations of illegal immigrants. (I have friends caught up in some really stupid deportation proceedings, actually.)
I think that racial profiling of any race is immoral.
I think it's a shame how many more black people than white people are in prison.
I don't think illegal immigrants steal jobs. (On the contrary, I find most Americans to be so entitled and stuck up that they wouldn't take the sort of jobs that immigrants are forced into because of their illegal status. Chew on that for a bit.)
Now, let's look at the sentence that you completely misinterpreted (though I can see why now) and let me explain what I meant by it:
The problem isn't whether you can find potential illegal immigrants by sight, it's that doing so is illegal.
I did not intend to say that there is a problem with the legality of racial profiling. Quite the opposite, in fact. The problem is that the only way to enforce portions of the Arizona law is through racial profiling, which is illegal. If racial profiling were legal, the Arizona law would undoubtedly be effective in finding (and eventually deporting) illegal immigrants, but this would still be immoral for several reasons.
So, let me rephrase my statement to make it clear:
Unlike what you seem to think, it's very possible to identify potential illegal immigrants by sight with a decent degree of probability. This in itself is not a problem, however. It's when you use this fact to perform racial profiling (like the Arizona law would imply) that things become immoral.
Actually, there's a decent chance he was right, if you're just looking at statistics.
Depending on the source, about 17% of the hispanics in the US are illegal immigrants. I would suspect that the percentage is higher in Dallas (but I don't have numbers on hand to back that up). Compare that number to .3% of whites being illegal immigrants. If you give him a little leeway and include the children of illegal immigrants born in the US (and therefore not illegal immigrants technically), the percentage goes up even further.
Racial profiling may be illegal, but it otherwise wouldn't be a bad place to start if you wanted to find illegal immigrants.
Add on top of that other revealing factors (neighborhood, language, dress, etc), and the odds of being able to pick out an illegal immigrant go up as well. I wouldn't be surprised if you could train someone to "identify an illegal immigrant just by looking at them" with over 50% accuracy.
The problem isn't whether you can find potential illegal immigrants by sight, it's that doing so is illegal.
Whoosh. While you're being pedantic, you might want to point out the misuse of "begs the question."
I'm not sure I agree with that blogger on some points. USB 3 is only about 2 or 3 mm wider than Lightning. And if they can put a Lightning controller on the SoC, they can do the same for USB. Do other phones even have an external USB controller? I doubt it. Even Arduinos have inboard controllers.
There are good reasons for not using USB, but I doubt space is really one of them.
To me, at least, it's a matter of getting along and playing nicely. It's a matter of how Apple treats me as their customer and as a potential customer of their partners.
Moving beyond the 30-pin dock is a good thing. It outlived its usefulness, and making a change is a necessary evil. Let's take all of that as a given.
So, Apple has three choices here:
1) Do what all other major manufacturers have done and move to micro USB. Add on MHL for video. This has the huge advantage of being standard and inexpensive, but maybe it lacks a feature that Apple wants (a cynic would point to royalties and vendor lock-in as Apple's most desired feature, but a more fair viewpoint would be features that make accessories easier to make). Micro USB is certainly not the best, but it works quite well for other phone and tablets. If you want to be fancy, move to USB 3.0.
2) Work with other industry partners to establish a new standard. Actually work with Samsung, Motorola, LG, and HTC for once. This shows that Apple can actually play nice in the field of electronics and has the interests of the consumer in mind. This would (eventually) rid the world of micro USB and it's problems while still giving Apple the features it might want. Accessories are less expensive and work with all devices. Everybody wins! Well, except maybe for Apple since it doesn't have control over the connector anymore.
3) Develop your own proprietary connection. Still has to be compatible with micro USB chargers. Screws over loyal customers by making their accessories obsolete unless they pay for expensive adapters, which might not even work anyway. Makes all accessories more expensive due to royalties on the new connector (rumor is $4 to $10 per connector or 10% of accessory price, whichever is greater). Makes all accessories more expensive since you can't take advantage of economies of scale. And so on and so on. But at least we get a reversible connector now, right?
Basically, Apple could have gone with something standard. Or they could have been a partner in the industry and worked to develop a new standard that makes everyone happy. If you're going to change connectors anyway, why not do the right thing? Instead, they show disdain for their own customers and future potential customers.
And this is what they do as they lose market share? Well, I'm sure not going to switch to an iPhone because of Lightning, but I might never buy an Apple device again because of it. I don't like how they're treating me as a potential customer, and I really, really like having a standard charger in every room of the house. (If other electronics manufacturers started using Lightning, my tune might change a bit. Let's be realistic, though ... that will never happen.)
There's one very good business case for pentalobe screws: make it so that only shops that pay a royalty can legally repair an iDevice.
Fortunately, its possible to get pentalobe drivers anyway.
That link is a summary of anouer summary of another summary, and is quite simply stupid and incorrect.
Instead, look at the source link: http://brockerhoff.net/blog/2012/09/13/boom-2/
and a follow-up post: http://brockerhoff.net/blog/2012/09/18/boom-a-follow-up/
Lightning definitely has advantages over micro USB. And one big disadvantage: it's proprietary. Most manufacturers, thankfully, have to go with something standard, but Apple has the clout to ignore standards to their own (and, arguably, their customers') benefit.
The spirit of the agreement is to reduce waste by not making not making accessories (specifically, chargers) obsolete when you buy a new phone.
Now tell me, will the amount of electronic waste be increased or reduced by introducing a new dock connector on the iPhone 5?
To me, its not the change that's the problem, it's the change to yet another proprietary connector. If you're going to inconvenence your customers, at least do the right thing and go to something standard. "But it's reversible!" isn't good enough excuse.
I was shocked they didn't update the Shuffle to use Lightning. Seemed like a perfect match to me. The real benefit isn't the thinness, but the smaller width. The Shuffle would be compatible with docks if they put this connector on.
Time for a conspiracy theory! Apple is the only company out there that I know of that uses the exception. Could it be that the exception was made explicitly for them? Did they "buy" the exception somehow?
The micro USB 3 connector is capable of 30V, 1.5A (45W). It's just that the specification limits to 5V 900mA. There's nothing that prevents a manufacturer from making a 10W USB 3 charger, as long as the device stays within limits otherwise.
At the very least, they've violated the spirit of the agreement, even if not the letter.
Mormons don't just go out and buy MREs (well, usually). Instead, the advice is to buy more of the nonparishable food that you normally buy. Then, once you have a year's worth, you just rotate through that food.
The advantage to stocking up on food in this way against unemployment is that you can leverage buying in bulk. I know a Mormon family that has a two year supply. Once a year they buy a year's worth of food at extreme discounts. (So, in reality, they have a 1.5-year supply on average).
Also, Mormons are big proponents of that rainy day fund. Get out of debit and build a modest reserve. Pretty solid advice, I'd say: if you're out of a job, you'll need more than just food, after all.
You're right. The names of functions, variables, classes, etc. can serve as part of the "why." But, that's that's not enough. For a one-line function, sure. But imagine if you used a fixed-point library to hold the value instead of a double, and that withdrawing money from an account requires interesting authorization. And then how do you handle overdrawing an account? Etc. etc. etc.
No matter how complicated and descriptive you make the variable and function names, at some point this system breaks down.
Some languages have additional features that make it easier to go beyond the "how." Contract programming comes to mind. Maybe one day a language will come out where self-documenting code will be a reality. But for now, the features aren't there, and it's the job of the comments to tell us why the code does what it does.
Code, by definition, tells the computer how to do something, but not why. The computer doesn't care why it's adding two numbers together, it just obeys.
Likewise, self-documenting code will only ever tell the programmer how the computer does something, but will never tell the programmer why. That's the job of the comments.
The problem is that most people focus on "how comments," instead of "why comments." They spend their time on the function comment block, describing even the most mundane function in detail (but never actually saying when to use the function or how the algorithm works). Or they spend their time on the comment block at the start of the file (doing the job of your version control software). (The occasional "signpost" comment is a good idea, of course, as is documenting the API. Some "how comments" are still very useful.)
Still beats the royalties Apple charges to use its connector.
Exactly. People that claim that the SD slot takes space from the battery or adds thickness make me cringe. The Razr is very clear evidence to the contrary.
Also, Bezos says it's 2 months with the light turned on. Which is quite simply amazing, and much more than what B&N advertises.
An SD slot doesn't compromise the design nearly as much as you're suggesting.
A micro SD card has a volume of about 165 mm^3. The iPhone4 battery has a volume of about 11,890 mm^3. That's right ... using that space for the battery will improve your battery life by about 1 or 2 percent, and that's only if you can manage to use that entire volume for battery space instead, which is highly unlikely. (Yes, I know I only included the card and not the slot, but I also assumed the battery was rectangular, which it isn't. 1 or 2 percent is in the noise.)
Apple "get away" with the lack of an SD card slot because most normal people don't actually care.
Maybe they would care if they realized Apple charges them $100 for an extra 16GB, which I can pick up from Newegg for $10. People care when it hits their pocketbooks.
Reminds me of the first time I picked up a Droid Razr: "Wow, that's thin! I bet it doesn't have an SD slot, though..."
There will always be a place for bubblesort. It actually works quite well for very small lists or on lists that are somewhat sorted already.
Likewise, there will always be a place for brick-and-morter stores.
So I agree ... we need to let the B&M compete where they work best, and let online stores compete where they work best.
Considering that many network diagrams use a cloud to represent the internet, whatever definition TFA uses could be right in a way. But, the term has come to mean something else in recent years ... although the definition is still a bit nebulous (pun intended).
What bothers me is that Citrix commissioned the survey. I would think that they, of all people, would understand what "The Cloud" has come to mean (hint: not "The Internet").
And that is precisely why we need to do away with the electoral college system. The victor should be decided by who gets the most votes, just like every other election in the country.
No other election in this country is decided on a national level like you're proposing. Senators are decided by who gets the most votes for a single state. Representatives are decided by who gets the most votes for a district. What office is elected by a majority of the entire population of the United States?
On the other hand, the overall control of Congress is decided by similar mathematics to the electoral college (though the bicameral system throws this off). In that respect, the Electoral College fits very well into our election scheme.
That said ... I think the EC made sense at the time it was thought up, but the system's been modified and gamed so much that now it's a very strange entity that the electorate doesn't understand and doesn't work as originally intended. Direct popular election might be the way to go, but there's other systems out there as well.
In the end, it won't make much difference changing to a "normal" voting process as the victors have also received the most total votes, but it would do away with this nonsense of concentrating on a few select states (PA, OH and FL for instance) and force the candidates to go after every vote. This doesn't mean there won't still be pockets for either candidate(s) in states, but we won't have to hear about winning a state. You're winning the vote.
No, concentrating on a few select locations will absolutely still happen ... but it won't be the same states as before. It probably won't even be whole states. You're forgetting the impact of advertising markets.
You see, candidates only have so much money to go around. They have to spend their money and energy where it will make the most difference. So places where their $1M TV ad will reach more voters (especially if those voters are undecided or likely to swing) will get more focus by the campaigns.
My theory is that campaigns will have to broaden their reach in some ways, and tighten their focus in others. Spend a little money and time everywhere, but spend a lot where it matters.
Correction: user perception is king.
However, most users are not qualified to speak about nuances of user experiences nor technical specifications. Most Slashdotters aren't qualified, honestly. Brand image plays a huge part of what a consumer perceives to be a good product.