If we're getting flushed down the paradigm then cutting expenses is even more important. Robot telecommuters can help.
Of course, manufacturing can also be roboticised too. In fact, you know, that already happens so often it's old hat. Manufacturing led the way, it's the "information economy" that's playing catch up.
If you honestly think that an API built up from the horrible Win32 environment, completely alien to UNIX, and controlled by Microsoft, is preferable to an API that's based on UNIX, controlled by Apple, and which *also* has an open source implementation (GPL, even) that's actually native on UNIX... we're just coming from such different views of open systems and open source that we're never going to communicate.
But a factor that works against this with a device like the iPod is the large number of files that the user must go through. One of the reasons for the iPod's scroll wheel is to allow the user to quickly move through a large number of files to get to the specific song, something that would be more difficult to do using button-based controls.
While I was trying to get used to the click wheel (before giving up and giving it to my daughter) I figured out that the real problem is that scrolling through a long list of titles is a really bad way to find anything. The click wheel makes 'blind' use difficult without really solving the problem. So I hardly ever selected a specific song, and almost always left the thing randomly playing one of a small set of playlists I'd set up on iTunes. And I couldn't use it one-handed without looking at the screen. I'm MUCH happier with a button based iPod shuffle.
Tufte would be horrified. That graph would show the intended information better as a line graph or as a scaled percentage graph, since the results other than "approve" are effectively random, and only approve (without comments) matters.
the truth is that MS Office is still the best office suite available today.
This is really only true because an "office suite" is an artificial category created by Microsoft to leverage off their good products (like Excel) to move their bad ones (like Word).
I tried downloading the file and got a message that it couldn't install a download control.
Well, yeh, I don't use Internet Explorer for browsing the web precisely because I don't want sites installing ActiveX controls on me.
No, I'm not going to fire up IE for Fileplanet, even if I do trust them to download a program from them and install it, unl;ess they can vouch for all of their advertisers and anyone else who can inject HTML into their pages. Not just for the sake of running a bleeding game.
2. Readings are Not Averaged Correctly: When the software takes a series of readings, it first averages the first two readings. Then, it averages the third reading with the average just computed. Then the fourth reading is averaged with the new average, and so on. There is no comment or note detailing a reason for this calculation, which would cause the first reading to have more weight than successive readings. Nonetheless, the comments say that the values should be averaged, and they are not.
This is a rolling average, a standard technique for filtering out fluctuations in data. You see variations on rolling averages used in situations from stock market graphs to real-time control systems, and anyone competent to be auditing any control or data gathering software should be familiar with it.
In addition, the summary is incorrect: this technique makes the *latest* reading have more weight than other readings, not the *first*.
If this is typical of the auditing company's results, I would take their comments with a grain of salt.
Palm's problem is that they lost the plot years ago. The original Palm OS design allowed for all kinds of cool capabilities that require far greater resources in a more general purpose OS... consider that palm's search function gave you the same kind of capabilities as a modern "desktop search" program... on an 8 MHz 68000!
Instead of building on their strengths they panicked and let Microsoft move the goalposts, then went "wait a second, PalmOS isn't a multitasking laptop replacement, we gotta replace it or we're h0sed!" and ran off in every direction at once to try and replace something that didn't need replacing.
They should have continued to develop the Palm OS 4 platform and follow the Dragonball down to cheaper and cheaper hardware, ensuring a continual influx of new customers who bought a $100... $80... $50... $30... entry-level Palm instead of a $200 Pocket PC because, well, that's what the mass market can afford. They owned that market, and gave it up.
If they'd done that they wouldn't be trying to come up with a way to get people to buy into their latest high margin gimmick.
IANAL, but unless there's some Ohio state law that says you don't have to, it really is illegal to not show your license upon request to a police officer.
It's not even a legal requirement to *have* a driver's license or state ID, so how can it be a requirement to show one?
You're required to have a valid state ID to get certain state services, but this is the first I've heard that you're required to have one at all times. Can you provide a cite?
Well, personally, I'm glad some people are willing to be the designated dick and stand guard against the gradual erosion of our rights.
It's always easier to just go to the back of the bus, and it's always easier to wait until you're actually being forced into the showers before objecting.
Just as the "goodness" of different licenses depends on your goals, so when the FSF boasts about the GPL they can always fall back on that too, and I'm happy to let them.
The point is that Apple has a long-standing pattern of misrepresenting their products. They are doing that against their commercial competitors just as they are doing it against open source.
The FSF has a long history of misrepresenting the GPL. They are doing that against other open source communities just like they are doing it against commercial companies.
It means what it says: that Apple is hurting FOSS, not that they are opposed to it.
Don't be silly.
1. You still haven't demonstrated that Apple is hurting FOSS.
2. You stated that Apple's INTENT was to hurt FOSS. You haven't demonstrated that either.
3. RMS's embrace and extend tactics in GCC led to the collapse of competing open source C compiler projects. That *has* hurt FOSS.
I'm glad you realize that splitting from the community is one indicator of companies abusing open source,
Um, you do know that Apple has been returning their work on all of these back to the community, right? In the case of Webkit they've even put their tree in a public repository. If that's "splitting from the community" then there are no Linux distributions that haven't "split from the community".
and Apple has several big examples of that, including Mach, gcc, Objective-C, and WebKit.
I suspect you're mixing up things that happened at NeXT for the first three, and Webkit's a split *within* the community.
I'm not aware of any unsubstantiated claims by the FSF about the performance or usability of GNU software
Oh, they've come up with all kinds of unsubstantiated claims about stuff they care about. About licenses, about Linux (remember RMS's flames on that subject, back before the HuRD collapsed?). More recently we have Moglen insinuating that Microsoft was violating the GPL3 (if you didn't read carefully - and that caught a few people here on Slashdot). They don't care so much about performance or usability, but it's the boasting and misdirection that matters... not the topic.
Now, please give some examples of open source software released by Apple that is actually being used by a large user population not on Macintosh platforms.
There's packages for mDNSresponder for just about every Linux distro. That's Apple's open sourced Bonjour.
People are starting to look at using launchd to speed up booting on Linux. Again, you can get packages for it for just about any linux distro.
Without Apple's work on Webkit the only KHTML-based browser outside Linux would still be the anemic KMelion on Windows. I've wished for a good browser on Windows for some time, and neither IE nor Firefox give me good security vibes... both use inherently leaky sandboxes that (in different ways) blur the border between the browser and the content.
Now there are two Webkit browsers on Windows (Swift and Safari), and Nokia's using it on their own phones and has released their mobile browser extensions under a BSD license... which means an open source browser has a chance of pushing back against Opera. One Linux port for mobile Linux devices is called Origyn.
Yes, it's a fork of KHTML, but given the way KHTML languished outside KDE (I'm sure you never tried to use KMelion) before Apple took the reins that's not necessarily a bad thing. There's been plenty of open source forks that turned out to be just what a project needed in the past... look at the history of X11.
Touchscreen seems nice at first, but after a bit of thought, it adds flashiness, but takes away from usability. I like the physical controls that allow me to use my ipod without having to look at it
Unfortunately that doesn't mean that Apple won't go that way. The iPod lost me because I can't use it without looking at it... I tried, but the UI just didn't become instinctive enough for me, and I ended up giving my iPod to my daughter and getting an iPod shuffle.
Slashdot Mirror
If we're getting flushed down the paradigm then cutting expenses is even more important. Robot telecommuters can help.
Of course, manufacturing can also be roboticised too. In fact, you know, that already happens so often it's old hat. Manufacturing led the way, it's the "information economy" that's playing catch up.
Once again, a bare touch screen on a tablet for $300 was what everyone wanted.
Is it? The bloody thing isn't even available yet, and you're saying that? Isn't that jumping the gun a bit?
It's an iPhone without the Phone. This is the iPhone's equivalent of the Treo 90. Remember the Treo 90? If you do, you're a rarity.
We'll see. They're hedging their bets with this one, keeping the iPod Classic alive and differentiated by the hard disk.
If you honestly think that an API built up from the horrible Win32 environment, completely alien to UNIX, and controlled by Microsoft, is preferable to an API that's based on UNIX, controlled by Apple, and which *also* has an open source implementation (GPL, even) that's actually native on UNIX... we're just coming from such different views of open systems and open source that we're never going to communicate.
But a factor that works against this with a device like the iPod is the large number of files that the user must go through. One of the reasons for the iPod's scroll wheel is to allow the user to quickly move through a large number of files to get to the specific song, something that would be more difficult to do using button-based controls.
While I was trying to get used to the click wheel (before giving up and giving it to my daughter) I figured out that the real problem is that scrolling through a long list of titles is a really bad way to find anything. The click wheel makes 'blind' use difficult without really solving the problem. So I hardly ever selected a specific song, and almost always left the thing randomly playing one of a small set of playlists I'd set up on iTunes. And I couldn't use it one-handed without looking at the screen. I'm MUCH happier with a button based iPod shuffle.
Tufte would be horrified. That graph would show the intended information better as a line graph or as a scaled percentage graph, since the results other than "approve" are effectively random, and only approve (without comments) matters.
. png
A quick cut at a better graph at http://www.scarydevil.com/~peter/images/cip-graph
Created in Excel, the only part of Microsoft Office that I haven't found a satisfactory replacement for.
Good spreadsheet programs are something that the open source community has neglected, really. But that's only half of the problem.
We need good standalone programs, and good standards for documents. The whole "Office Suite" path has been a dead end.
I got a 403 from that link.
the truth is that MS Office is still the best office suite available today.
This is really only true because an "office suite" is an artificial category created by Microsoft to leverage off their good products (like Excel) to move their bad ones (like Word).
Beige.
We didn't paint the kids rooms specific colors until they were ready to tell us what colors they wanted.
My daughter (as it turned out) decided she wanted pink. Picked a color that looked good on the swatch from the store.
Boy, did it look a lot pinker when the whole wall was covered with it.
That was the pinkest damn room.
Stick to beige, that's my advice.
I tried downloading the file and got a message that it couldn't install a download control.
Well, yeh, I don't use Internet Explorer for browsing the web precisely because I don't want sites installing ActiveX controls on me.
No, I'm not going to fire up IE for Fileplanet, even if I do trust them to download a program from them and install it, unl;ess they can vouch for all of their advertisers and anyone else who can inject HTML into their pages. Not just for the sake of running a bleeding game.
This is a rolling average, a standard technique for filtering out fluctuations in data. You see variations on rolling averages used in situations from stock market graphs to real-time control systems, and anyone competent to be auditing any control or data gathering software should be familiar with it.
In addition, the summary is incorrect: this technique makes the *latest* reading have more weight than other readings, not the *first*.
If this is typical of the auditing company's results, I would take their comments with a grain of salt.
(yes, Linux is a trademark)
In turn, they MUST filter trademark names (at least to some sensible extent).
Why?
Oh, I agree, Microsoft has every right to be stupid. That doesn't change the fact that this is a really really stupid thing for Microsoft to do.
Funny. (mod parent +1 plzthx)
Palm's problem is that they lost the plot years ago. The original Palm OS design allowed for all kinds of cool capabilities that require far greater resources in a more general purpose OS... consider that palm's search function gave you the same kind of capabilities as a modern "desktop search" program... on an 8 MHz 68000!
Instead of building on their strengths they panicked and let Microsoft move the goalposts, then went "wait a second, PalmOS isn't a multitasking laptop replacement, we gotta replace it or we're h0sed!" and ran off in every direction at once to try and replace something that didn't need replacing.
They should have continued to develop the Palm OS 4 platform and follow the Dragonball down to cheaper and cheaper hardware, ensuring a continual influx of new customers who bought a $100... $80... $50... $30... entry-level Palm instead of a $200 Pocket PC because, well, that's what the mass market can afford. They owned that market, and gave it up.
If they'd done that they wouldn't be trying to come up with a way to get people to buy into their latest high margin gimmick.
And what would happen if you had a lot of people not coming to office because of this..
We'd save a lot more energy spent commuting.
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExper ience/Conceptual/OSXHIGuidelines/XHIGCharGreatSoft ware/chapter_4_section_3.html
The word "usability" doesn't appear on that page.
Apple misrepresents UNIX and Linux as not being ready for the desktop
Bullshit. Apple is selling the most popular desktop UNIX out there.
If Apple and all their FOSS "contributions" disappeared suddenly, Linux distributions would go on working the way they always have
And Microsoft would have 99% of the desktop market instead of 90% and falling.
You're fighting your friends and giving comfort to your enemies. And you don't see a problem with that.
Usability is an established term with an established scientific and engineering discipline behind it; go look it up.
...
The dictionary war is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
Apple's advertising doesn't say "OH HAI, OUR USABILITY ROCK! U FAIL AT USABILITY!"
Apple's advertising is famous for saying things like "That's not fair. People LIKE using the Macintosh."
That's not the "usability" you're talking about. That's all subjective as hell.
Perhaps you didn't notice, but Apple and NeXT merged
Perhaps you didn't notice,
Oh to hell with it. I already covered this. I already brought up the major changes between the Apple that was then and the Apple that is now.
If you can't keep track, then go reread the bloody thread before replying.
I'll wait.
They designed the things to last 90 days, remember.
I suspect that it would cost a bit more for Intel to produce 60nm gratings using their 45nm process than using this "low tech" approach.
IANAL, but unless there's some Ohio state law that says you don't have to, it really is illegal to not show your license upon request to a police officer.
It's not even a legal requirement to *have* a driver's license or state ID, so how can it be a requirement to show one?
You're required to have a valid state ID to get certain state services, but this is the first I've heard that you're required to have one at all times. Can you provide a cite?
Well, personally, I'm glad some people are willing to be the designated dick and stand guard against the gradual erosion of our rights.
It's always easier to just go to the back of the bus, and it's always easier to wait until you're actually being forced into the showers before objecting.
Usability is not a subjective experience
It sure as hell is.
Just as the "goodness" of different licenses depends on your goals, so when the FSF boasts about the GPL they can always fall back on that too, and I'm happy to let them.
The point is that Apple has a long-standing pattern of misrepresenting their products. They are doing that against their commercial competitors just as they are doing it against open source.
The FSF has a long history of misrepresenting the GPL. They are doing that against other open source communities just like they are doing it against commercial companies.
It means what it says: that Apple is hurting FOSS, not that they are opposed to it.
Don't be silly.
1. You still haven't demonstrated that Apple is hurting FOSS.
2. You stated that Apple's INTENT was to hurt FOSS. You haven't demonstrated that either.
3. RMS's embrace and extend tactics in GCC led to the collapse of competing open source C compiler projects. That *has* hurt FOSS.
I'm glad you realize that splitting from the community is one indicator of companies abusing open source,
Um, you do know that Apple has been returning their work on all of these back to the community, right? In the case of Webkit they've even put their tree in a public repository. If that's "splitting from the community" then there are no Linux distributions that haven't "split from the community".
and Apple has several big examples of that, including Mach, gcc, Objective-C, and WebKit.
I suspect you're mixing up things that happened at NeXT for the first three, and Webkit's a split *within* the community.
I'm not aware of any unsubstantiated claims by the FSF about the performance or usability of GNU software
Oh, they've come up with all kinds of unsubstantiated claims about stuff they care about. About licenses, about Linux (remember RMS's flames on that subject, back before the HuRD collapsed?). More recently we have Moglen insinuating that Microsoft was violating the GPL3 (if you didn't read carefully - and that caught a few people here on Slashdot). They don't care so much about performance or usability, but it's the boasting and misdirection that matters... not the topic.
Now, please give some examples of open source software released by Apple that is actually being used by a large user population not on Macintosh platforms.
There's packages for mDNSresponder for just about every Linux distro. That's Apple's open sourced Bonjour.
People are starting to look at using launchd to speed up booting on Linux. Again, you can get packages for it for just about any linux distro.
Without Apple's work on Webkit the only KHTML-based browser outside Linux would still be the anemic KMelion on Windows. I've wished for a good browser on Windows for some time, and neither IE nor Firefox give me good security vibes... both use inherently leaky sandboxes that (in different ways) blur the border between the browser and the content.
Now there are two Webkit browsers on Windows (Swift and Safari), and Nokia's using it on their own phones and has released their mobile browser extensions under a BSD license... which means an open source browser has a chance of pushing back against Opera. One Linux port for mobile Linux devices is called Origyn.
Yes, it's a fork of KHTML, but given the way KHTML languished outside KDE (I'm sure you never tried to use KMelion) before Apple took the reins that's not necessarily a bad thing. There's been plenty of open source forks that turned out to be just what a project needed in the past... look at the history of X11.
I wonder how they'll feel when someone else reverse engineers their product (the un-locking software) and gives it away for free?
You honestly think they don't know that's going to happen?
Touchscreen seems nice at first, but after a bit of thought, it adds flashiness, but takes away from usability. I like the physical controls that allow me to use my ipod without having to look at it
Unfortunately that doesn't mean that Apple won't go that way. The iPod lost me because I can't use it without looking at it... I tried, but the UI just didn't become instinctive enough for me, and I ended up giving my iPod to my daughter and getting an iPod shuffle.