I would say that bing gave the best results to the question, in terms of presentation. I would say that google answered the question exactly, and Wolfram gave TMI.
Bing is clearly trying to be the search engine for the masses, a one stop shop for anything. In this it is being successful, and may be the future. I don't currently see the value in a one stop shop as I know where to go if I want a different information. For weather, I go to the NOAA or the weather channel. For math inform I go to mathworld. The list goes on.
I think this wolfram deal may be about getting some of the functionality google already has onto Bing. It is going to be good for Wolfram and for MS, neither of which could compete alone. In terms of unit converstion and simple maths I still prefer google. Wolfram, does, however do calculus.
As has been mentioned, it is not so much that MS patented sudo, but the GUI implementation of sudo.
My reading is the patent covers effectively what has been the Mac OS X standard security interface. if the user does not have the sufficient privilege, the OS prompts for credentials. This is a GUI implementation. I don't know if the Mac implementation provide prior art, but maybe it was implemented on the NeXT. I don't remember having to type any additional credentials after login on my cube.
I know that MS Windows XP has a primitive version of such authentication. I can log into certain resources from less privileged accounts, but I don't think I can, for instance, install or delete files from a less privileged account. I have not had to any real work in MS Vista, so maybe it is more fully implemented there.
In any case, there is likely prior art, as is the case with most software patents. It is not an obvious patent, but it is patenting a common work method, which is the problem with software patents. If I build a machine that automatically makes cookies, that should absolutely be patented. But I should not be able to patent the common process of making cookies.
Right now the Saudis probably produce the cheapest oil, maybe $10 a barrel. The middle men make a profit as long as the price between production and sell is high
Other production sources, like the shale in North America, is not profitable below $60 a barrel. This means that all oil producers, and the ancillary businesses, are going to work to keep the price below this number, as we saw over the past couple years. Above that it becomes profitable to move away from Saudi oil and develop alternative streams of energy.
To keep the price down, the Saudis are pumping oil like mad, and I have read they can double production very quickly. It is in their best interest to keep prices down as long as possible. The danger to the consumer comes when artificially deflating the cost of oil is no longer possible, or when carbon costs can no longer be externalized to the average taxpayer, many of whom do not even use large amounts of fuel. At that point oil will get very expensive. It will happen. And if we don't have alternative streams, the Saudis will get very rich indeed,and the rest of us will be left with no options.
In high school, my bio teacher wrote everything down on transparency. He then laid each on the overhead and had us copy them. No real discussions occurred during these classes. Very useful for learning vocab. It worked because we were interested in getting an education, so we took the notes home and studied them.
In college, many professors would just sit there and talk for an hour. Very little written on the board. We took notes which required us to listen, comprehend, summarize, and then write down the summary. Of course maths, physics, and engineering profs wrote on the board, but this was at such a speed that we could not actually understand anything until we reviewed the notes to the 50 homework problems due at the next class.
I strongly dislike powerpoints. I don't use them, except in situations where they are absolutely required or expected. However, I have been doing some notes with Keynote, which allows simple animation, and this has proved useful.
I do not believe that profs go faster now. If they do it is because the students have print outs prior to class. This is similar to the situation where one is supposed to read the chapter prior to class, then come in with questions. No questions, then the prof just summarizes the high points. The new benefit is that the students now have specific points they must learn, instead of the broad generalities of the book.
I think the presentation software also allows teaching to a broad audience. If a student does not know how to take notes, then college was not accessible. Now with these presentations, less prepared students have a better chance of succeeding if they are willing to prepare outside of class. They have the outline, they can research the topic. They can do better. Just like anything else it can be misused. I think it probably is often misused. But to ban it is saying that we return to the time when teachers just stood and delivered, and students did their best to keep up.
Unfortunately this is the way of the world and MS fought tooth and nail for it. It is the only way they can give away the OS to OEM and sell it to end users for hundreds of dollars. If paystar wins out, then Apple will do the same thing. Instead of selling the OS to everyone for $100, they will sell upgrades for $30, as they did with Snow Leopard, but I suspect full versions will rocket to prices comparable to MS products. This will provide no benefit to OS X users.
All this is pretty much true, and it simply reinforces the pecking order of the industry. Most technologies are developed by emerging or higher end companies that sell products at a higher margin and have larger research departments. Palm was once such a company, as is RIM. They sold or sell to people who want the latest thing. These companies create new product.
Apple is a company that takes existing technology and integrates it into products that more people can afford. Apple did this with a graphic based OS. They did not create it, but they did figure out how to package it so that many people could afford it and see a reason to buy it. Not everyone could afford it, as it still required high end hardware like a dedicated GPU, but more people could. Importantly, like higher end computers, one was not sold a just a machine, but a system that would do something. Lower end machines cut prices by not including full functionality. The iPod and the iPhone is the same thing. Sure there better machines out there, but myu iPod mini was the price and had 10X the storage of the music player I had bought just two years before. And it could hold my addresses and dates to boot.
MS, OTOH, has been the company that has taken long existing technology and repackages it, usually in an extreme proprietary format, for commodity sales. Their products have support a wide variety of hardware because they do not sell any compelling hardware. They hold an important positions because allow a structure where people can buy the absolute cheapest pieces of hardware to meet their computing needs. This often is a benefit as people often consider their time to be worth nothing. In addition, MS supplies very good tools when you need many hundreds of people to have the same machines to do simple tasks, such as IBM did with the typewriter.
The software MS provides is very good, and there it suites many people needs, but they made two mistakes, neither of which is BillG fault. First, they did not provide a compelling reason for people to remain loyal to the Office products. The big reason to upgrade is collaboration, but collaboration is not a huge market. Mostly I see people writing memos in MS Word, and I don't think collaboration helps that much. There are other authoring tasks that people do need. For instance, I do not know why office does not include an real image editing program. This is what people want. GIMP is free, so why can't MS put a GIMP like program in there. I think it is the same reason you can't get into some MS web sites with cookies turned off. One takes what MS gives, or just go away.
The second reason is that they got too cocky. MS is very good at taking existing technologies and making them available to the masses. The only issue I have with them is they do in such a way to break everyone elses product. IMHO the problems started when MS decided MS Vista was going to the OS that took MS into the big leagues. Rather than supplying an OS to the masses, a OS that did what people needed at a cost that allowed very large deployments, MS got uppity and decided that the knock off business was not good enough. Nothing demonstrated this lack of business competence than the decision to create WinFS, which ultimately lead to the demonstration of technical incompetence. Now one had done a RDFS in a commercial product, so it had to be done from scratch, something that MS is not so good at. This distracted them from doing things they were good at, and ultimately lead to a OS that did not work with the hardware. Since MS OS is expected to work with hardware, and is not judged on it's own merits, people pretty much were dissatisfied and MS had to make a Herculean effort to get a new OS out in two years.
If anything, I would say Ballmer was a very good business person, as he has saved the company from what could have been a fatal decision made by his predecessor in 2003. If can get people to buy MS Windows 7, in spite of the mess that has been made of the company from 2004-2009, he should enjoy a good reputation.
I can't help but thinking the problem with journalism, like anything else, is the overhead. Sure we all know that for most people the primary reason to have a business is to rake in the profits and have a high rise building,a chauffeured towncar, and a private plane. While there is nothing wrong with that, the question we can ask is should the government pay to support such a lifestyle, as it has done in the past.
Sure everyone says the problem is the cost of health care, and government regulation, and the excessive wages negotiated by unions. But none of this explains why AIG payed a multi hundred million dollar bonus to executives responsible for bankrupting the company(and before any says that they were not responsible, if management is not responsible, who is? The labour who everyone says is overpaid?) The fact is that management all too often overextends itself assuming that profits will accelerate and cover the additional expenses. For instance, the United way recently build a huge building in the most expensive part of the city outside of downtown at the height of the housing bubble. I am sure this was an investment, and the assumption was that it would pay for itself over time, but one wonders if the core business of the United Way is provided luxurious office space to it's staff, and what impact this has recently had on it's funds.
So the issue is often overhead. The local newspaper has a city block of prime downtown real estate. At one time this probably made sense. It is near city hall, the courthouse, and many other news making entities. Now I am not so sure. I know I would want the newspaper to decentralize and cut costs before giving it any money. Smaller cheaper office scattered through the city so it could more easily cover more news. Offices near school district offices, since parents will buy newspapers about thier kids. I know the printing press does not have to be downtown. Web services does not even have to be onsite.
And maybe none of this make sense. Maybe a lush building downtown does make the most sense. I don't know. I am not in the newspaper business, any more than I am in the finance business or the real estate business. Which is why my tax dollars should not go to directly propping up these businesses. I don't know how to manage these businesses. Evidently the people who think they do, don't, since the need a government bailout. And since we don't know how to do it, the best thing to do might be to let the firms fail, and allow new blood in that might have a better feeling for what is needed to make a go of it.
The corralary to this is that computers neither suck or don't suck at math. Computer don't really know how to do anything much. Look at the 6502, it can ADC, ASL, BRK, CMP, AND, INC, and a few other things. AFAIR, it did all of these things wonderfully. Modern processors basically have the same commands, fancied up a bit, and AFAIK, they do these commands wonderfully.
So, as always, the only things that suck at math are the people programming the computers. These people also probably suck at many other things, which is why they are essentially working for the government instead of building devices that have to compete on the free market.
But, seriously, these issues are well known, will pretty good solutions, such as scaling which is what the parent was talking about. There are other solutions such as creating a cross referenced code for certain conditions. There are books to help programmers who have not yet acquired the skill to work with number, such as the Numerical Recipies series. There is software to help programmers who do not want to or cannot learn how to work with numbers, such as IMSL library, which, if memeory serves, allows the user to include a target precision. Then there are thousands of basic introductory computer books that will helpthe novice software developer understand rounding errors and how to control them. For instance, one does not do += on floats, or use == for that matter.
So the only issue left is the resolution of the hardware. If.1 seconds is not enough, then that is the responsiblity of the people who specified the hardware. I know many clocks that accuracely increment up to 83 times per second.
In most cases I do not see a problem with spending small amounts of money to solve significant problems. But I do see a problem when people, who don't want to help other people, come begging to suck at the public teat.
Let's look at this. Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., who evidently has been at the forefront of this wealth transfer from the taxpayers to these welfare recipiants, aparently sees no problem with giving them $30,000 in free government money. However, if a bill is introudced to help the entire country with a bit of money, like the stimulus money, every GOP member thinks it is the end of the world. Helping a small special interest, hey we have to do it right away. Helping the whole country, who cares! Let them eat cake.
THis is what I was thinking and what I do. define any standard form, or any standard drawing, and then add to it. I have also kept a set of standard constructs that copy/paste/edit to get what I want.
There has also been some take of editors. I use texshop, which seems to work well, and better than anything I found on windows. Like in so many other things, emacs is overkill.
I love it, we finally will have open government. Just Google your local representatives name, and all the related email, documents, and maybe even web searches, will be there for users to browse. Transparency, accountability, and honesty. No more browsing on craigslist on taxpayers time. No more hiding behind the law.
I know that the books are in various languages. The top list has few in english. The list also seems to be at many different levels of reading.
As far as I pictures, this is not such a big issue. Glossy pictures are important in the third world especially now, because that is what kids and parents expect. They expect 4 color prints on paper. They expect Snow White to be the disney drawing. They expect binding to be neat and pages to cut. Furthermore the opportunity costs of parents creating such books are high enough that purchasing them are often a better value. Add this to the fact that the tax base is high enough to support libraries, and one has a formula to support professionally written books.
Assuming that this has to be the case is limited at best. For younger ages, reading to the child is important, and reading does not mean reading a book. The story would be one that the parent remembers or create. This is clearly the way we learn language, by having older persons speak to us. If one wants the child to be more active, then give the child something to draw with and on. This is a much more engaging activity than looking at predrawn picture. Now, once the child starts to read, then obviously accessible reading material is important, but the need for picture books is limited. In a case like this, where text is free, and the only costs is a printer, for short books one can imagine printing a book and letting the child draw their own pictrures, as one often does in a printed book, even when one is not supposed to.
Obviously I assuming a certain level of ability. In societies where comprehension is important for functionally literacy picture books for all ages do play an important role because they develop a minimal literacy skills in students who otherwise would not have those skills by encouraging reading. However, I have seen places where just a basic decoding ability is enough, where one does not have to understand the meaning of paragraphs. In these cases I would argue things like comic books are a luxury.
What many forget is that the dock connector was not originally a USB solution, it was a firewire connector. This was because USB was so slow. My first player was a USB device and I hardly ever changed the music because it took forever to load.
Of course Apple has left the firewire world, so there is no reason to keep the fancy connector except for backward compatibility and to earn licensing fees. I assume that the later will motivate them to maintain the standard, at least for while longer. I do suspect they will supply a dock connector to micro USB connector.
On another note, phones has had USB type adapters since at least 2003. Not all of these would charge without the proprietary adaptor, so although the presence of the connector is nothing new, the ability to charge from any device is a welcome develoment.
You know what. The real problem is that marriage is not currently between a man and woman period, and I do not think there is church in the United States that holds that standard. If it were I would have no problem with limited marriage to a man and a woman. But people who get married often get married again, and then it between multiple men and multiple women. I know that the so-called believers say that divorce is ok, and divorce is forced on us by the state, and divorce is the example of what happens when the state interferes with marriage, but that is not really the case. The state never forced churches to remarry those that divorced. In particular, the state never forced the church to accept and remarry those person's who lied to g-d and got divorced just because they were bored.
So, if the state defined marriage between one man and one woman period, and did not allow for divorce, i.e. the person would still be responsible for each other, the social security would still go to the wife or husband, not mistress or gigolo, and the original children would still be first in line for the inheritance, I would be fine with that. It would honor the intention of marriage without all the complications by the hypocrite apologists.
Then we can have civil union. If some churches want to condone and encourage the sin of polygamy, which is adultery, and is condemned in several verses of the bible hebrew and christian testaments[i.e. Romans 7:1-3), then they should have that right. The state does not interfere with religion.OTOH, if some want to marry two people of the same gender, who have not been married to another prior to the marriage, at least not a living person, such a church may do so knowing there are far fewer scriptures being broken.
I don't know where you have been for the past ten years, but the time of putting beige boxes in the back rooms and praying hat they don' break down is over with. Servers are now serious business, and the aesthetics matter because it is often related to reliability, TCO, and overhead. Servers now require real-estate, which costs money, power, which costs money, and cooling, which costs money. What is more, downtime costs money. On a personal note, the server room I use follows the philosophy of 'who cares about aesthetics'. It is impossible to work, takes forever to get things fixed, and generally is pain. I can imagine how much nicer it would be just to have neat stacks of mac minis.
I think that is the issue. What if one wants a server and all one has is a telephone closet. For 1K you can put a mini in there and probably won't need to worry about power, cooling, whatever. A thousand for a server. Back in the olden days, when I was putting the first servers in a MS Windows environment, the machines cost at lest twice that much, and were unreliable. Today, a growing business could probably live for a while just adding more servers. And at that price, one could keep an extra around. You now, a redundant array of mac minis.
I am not saying that I can imagine a real case where a mini server would make sense. I am just saying that discounting things like aesthetics and design in a what is clearly meant to be SOHO server is rather silly. Not everyone has the funds to hire an MSCE to run a server, has the need for a rack solution, or the ability to set up a *nix server from scratch. In reality, I can't imagine how this would be better than outsourcing, but I can appreciate how this is one of Apples cleaver ideas. I suspect MS might be pushing their xbox server next month
This is interesting, but the fine print and real capabilities is what is going to define the machine, not whiz bang features like a redundant screen and probably extremely limited lending ability.
Here is what it will need to have. A read aloud feature similar to kindle. Even if it is limited, that will be a great help to a great many people. A full web browser. I assume that this will not be a big issue, but we are talking a real browser, with flash. The browser allows us to read newspaper without subscription. The ability to read PDF files downloaded from arbitrary sources. This is a big deal to be as I download many of my reading materials as PDF, and the ambiguous support on Kindle is the big reason why I never bought it.
It would also be nice to able to mount external volumes through webdav of the like. Again, I can't imagine that Android does not have a filesystem capable of doing this.
Which is to say i want a reader with a modern OS, so I can read from all the different sources I read on my laptop. Less and I am just buying a fancy way to read paperbacks, and paying a markup for the privilege. I think the nook does move us into a new realm of reading, but not neccesarily a bette one. If I have to pay ATT to use the network, then the Kindle is still a better value.
It also means that each phone can be tied to a particular US provider, probably with certain non-profitable features disabled and certain featured added to create specific profit centers. I see this as the PC market several years ago. No profit in the PC, so deals were cut with various software vendors to pre install products on the PC. Even customer data was sometimes sold. Same thing for the emerging DSL market on PCs. MS Windows did not have automagic connecting software, so many vendors, for instance SBC, would have the user install software that also did other unknown functions.
The cool thing about android is that it should, in theory, allow end users to get the exact phone they want. The reality it, since the end user is not really buying the phone, that the mobile service providers will continue to design they phone they need, and the collude to provide limited functionality to the United States market. We onlu have to go back to the Motorola Razr and look at the Nokia situation to see that mobile providers in the US will not provide anything that is not centered around them.
Apple is all about very limited support of hardware. There is not the level of expectation that your rock bottom priced device is going to work with Apple hardware. For instance, on Apple laptops, if the memory can be upgraded, the authorized upgrades cost up to twice as much as quality retail. I have had memory rejected on a desktop after a system update. I have had cameras that absolutely would not work with Apple hardware. Then there is the difficulty buying WiFi adaptors.
While this situation is changing, Apple has never claimed to be company that supported everything. MS has, and continues to so do. I think this was the scary thing about Vista. Here was a new OS from a company that was supposed to be about all commodity parts, and it did not run on commodity parts. In fact it appeared that MS was trying to push a model where hardware and software vendors would have to pay MS for certification. While I don't think that MS is going to this extreme at the moment, such a path was a plausible scenario a year ago. As Apple has shown, such a model can be profitable.
With the Pre, Apples motives are clear. They do not want to do technical support on a device that they have no control over, and they do want the DRM stuff on the Pre. It would be simple enough for the Pre to come with software that hooked into the standard filetypes Apple uses to sync. True, someone would have to write this software, and the DRM stuff would not work, but it would be a better solution. It is clear that Palm chose the budget solution.
Things are equally clear with the xbox. The only reason there is an issue is because people are used to using commodity hardware on MS Windows, and MS has not differentiated the product enough to avoid the confusion. I do not see this as a MS issue. There is no reason for the xbox to be open. It is really an problem of people thinking that anything MS is MS Windows. I think that MS was trying to get away from the MS Windows legacy with Vista, but it did not work. Given that failure, I am bit surprised they would try to close xbox, but would not criticize them in any other way for doing so.
Only the first two have anything to do with a phone. The rest are add on that move a phone to a multimedia device. Kids and some parents will miss many of these features, but many just wanted email and web browsing. BTW, there was only a year when the iPhone did not have mp3 ringtones. Again, a feature only a few annoying people would consider critical.
For years only few phones had good email and browsing. The iPhone was great because it did, and was also integrated, from day one, to the then emerging cloud via google and.mac. It was also integrated to iTunes, and not dependent on cell company music services. For some this is a plus, as it makes it easy to rip tracks and put it on the phone.
But you are correct. There are many phones that some thinks surpass the iPhone, and those people should absolutely buy those phones. No one says that everyone should have an iPhone. All that happens is that people complain that the iPhone does not do everything. But we live in a competitive market place and the iPhone can do it's thing, and the others can do their thing. What is to be seen is whether Verizon, with the clearly superior network in the US, can put out a better integrated product than Apple.
What also remains to be seen is if data integrity can be assured with these other services. I have never lost data because Apple servers went bust. True, I pay extra for the service, but I think that others are going to consider the data retention service as part of the monthly fees, especially if using Android or MS Windows Mobile.Both MS and Google has recently caused data loss for at least some customer. Not a very good start for their cloud computing strategy.Perhaps they don't care about data retention, since these devices are mostly considered toys, and that is why they include such critial features such as MP3 ringtones and A2DP. That will leave Blackberry and iPhone for those that just need to get work done, so we can go and play in the real world.
Almost anything is lethal in large doses, and many things are fatal in even small doses. Those same things are often of some benefit in very small doses. For instance, Botulinum toxin. We use small and weakened versions of virus to immunize ourselves. Most medicines can kill children who ingest a moderate overdose. A little alcohol can be antiseptic, which is why many places in the world used to drink with their food, but too much alcohol is lethal.
First, regulations are about creating an even playing field. No company can afford to be the first to not employ children, to not use cheap paints with lead in toys, to put bitter additives into antifreeze, to build an efficient electronic device. Doing any of these things puts the firm at a competitive disadvantage. Therefore, if we want to have conservative policies, policies that do not encourage poor morals and waste, we must legislate them. Liberals may complain that cannot have cars that pollute unnecessarily, but conservatives know that one does not piss on the neighbors lawn.
Second,just because one can do something does not mean it is a good idea. I could acquire land, as was done in the 80's, by encouraging banks to make large loans to farmers, call the loans in for default as soon as possible, and then sell the land to multinationals, thus destroying the family farm. We could, as the Incas reportedly did, cut down all trees tress, even the reserve trees, and end up with no other choice by to move out of the city. Experience tells us that such policies are inferior to conservation. Therefore, though at a simplistic level certain choices may seem obvious, a more rigorous analysis may lead to unintended consequences.One may argue that regulated the TV may lead to unintended consequences, like slowdown in sales of TV and loss of jobs, but we are find with those consequences. After all, we banned the sale of pot and put all those people out of work.
Third, it is easy to talk about subsidies when one lives in a state such as North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Mississippi, Alabama, or Alaska. Those states live and die on federal subsides. Those states would be cesspools if not for a big federal government transferring wealth from other sates. However, if one lives a state like California, which pays one of the highest net taxes to the federal Government, subsidies are not such a good idea.
Yes nuclear is a good idea if they can figure out how to make the entire life cycle work in the United States. Solar and Wind are also good ideas, but have to be coupled with more efficient devices since it will initially cost more to produce the electricity. The fact is that we can solve these problems without trashing out house, and pretty much keep a decent standard of living. But just rushing in with the take, borrow and spend polices of the past 10 years is not going to work.
I agree completely. The sad state of the mobile web reflects the sad state of the web overall, and it stems from the design decision to focus on context, not visualization. That is,HTML defines a context for a header, or table, or citation, but does not impose a rendering of those contexts. This, of course, is not a good thing if one is developing an application front end, which is what MS and others were interested in doing.
CSS allowed control of the visualization, but by the time it came out there were all sorts of other hacks, which developers used even in cases where visualization was not important. This meant that a web page was often fixed on a certain platform, certain display size, and certain user assumptions. This would not have been such a problem if the developers had just used HTML, and, where possible, lived with the fact that they were not going to be in control.
Exactly. The problem is that many users click on any thing that is bright and shiny. While some problems are caused without user interactions, other clearly come from users navigating towards "carefully constructed web pages". There is really no way to stop this. One CD with 'naked women version of secure linux' on it, and it would be open season for the office bank accounts.
The only real solution is to make banks liable for online bank fraud, just like credit cards are liable for credit fraud. The customer has to pay $50, the bank covers the rest. This is really the value of credit cards. You are using someone else's money, so they take the risk. Once it is your money, your are at risk even if the banks security is at fault.
For many users, the only reason to run MS Windows is that it runs the apps that support the business. The main mistake that MS made is that in enterprise wouldbuy MS Vista because they want MS Vista, and will buy whatever hardware and software is needed to support it. They soon learned the reality. Almost no one cares about the OS, just that the OS runs the mission critical apps. Therefore, when Vista did not run the mission critical apps, and the favorite hardware,Vista was a no go.
One hears a lot of good thing about vista. I have used it and it seems fine. However I don't use for anything critical because it does not work with too many things. Why would a rational business spend money on a product that does not support the profit goals? It is very difficult to make the case that Vista is so good that one should spends thousands of dollars to replace everything to support it.
Here is why MS Windows 7 might be ok: because vendors have had time to make it work. The amount of hardware tied to MS Windows is almost non existent, most uses standard interfaces. Software has been rewritten to support MS Vista, and presumable MS Windows 7. Likely all my critical applications will work with MS Windows 7, although some web based stuff may have problems with the latest IE.
All in all, MS may be doing it's job, which is to be an inexpensive OS that allows us to do work.
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Bing is clearly trying to be the search engine for the masses, a one stop shop for anything. In this it is being successful, and may be the future. I don't currently see the value in a one stop shop as I know where to go if I want a different information. For weather, I go to the NOAA or the weather channel. For math inform I go to mathworld. The list goes on.
I think this wolfram deal may be about getting some of the functionality google already has onto Bing. It is going to be good for Wolfram and for MS, neither of which could compete alone. In terms of unit converstion and simple maths I still prefer google. Wolfram, does, however do calculus.
My reading is the patent covers effectively what has been the Mac OS X standard security interface. if the user does not have the sufficient privilege, the OS prompts for credentials. This is a GUI implementation. I don't know if the Mac implementation provide prior art, but maybe it was implemented on the NeXT. I don't remember having to type any additional credentials after login on my cube.
I know that MS Windows XP has a primitive version of such authentication. I can log into certain resources from less privileged accounts, but I don't think I can, for instance, install or delete files from a less privileged account. I have not had to any real work in MS Vista, so maybe it is more fully implemented there.
In any case, there is likely prior art, as is the case with most software patents. It is not an obvious patent, but it is patenting a common work method, which is the problem with software patents. If I build a machine that automatically makes cookies, that should absolutely be patented. But I should not be able to patent the common process of making cookies.
Other production sources, like the shale in North America, is not profitable below $60 a barrel. This means that all oil producers, and the ancillary businesses, are going to work to keep the price below this number, as we saw over the past couple years. Above that it becomes profitable to move away from Saudi oil and develop alternative streams of energy.
To keep the price down, the Saudis are pumping oil like mad, and I have read they can double production very quickly. It is in their best interest to keep prices down as long as possible. The danger to the consumer comes when artificially deflating the cost of oil is no longer possible, or when carbon costs can no longer be externalized to the average taxpayer, many of whom do not even use large amounts of fuel. At that point oil will get very expensive. It will happen. And if we don't have alternative streams, the Saudis will get very rich indeed,and the rest of us will be left with no options.
In college, many professors would just sit there and talk for an hour. Very little written on the board. We took notes which required us to listen, comprehend, summarize, and then write down the summary. Of course maths, physics, and engineering profs wrote on the board, but this was at such a speed that we could not actually understand anything until we reviewed the notes to the 50 homework problems due at the next class.
I strongly dislike powerpoints. I don't use them, except in situations where they are absolutely required or expected. However, I have been doing some notes with Keynote, which allows simple animation, and this has proved useful.
I do not believe that profs go faster now. If they do it is because the students have print outs prior to class. This is similar to the situation where one is supposed to read the chapter prior to class, then come in with questions. No questions, then the prof just summarizes the high points. The new benefit is that the students now have specific points they must learn, instead of the broad generalities of the book.
I think the presentation software also allows teaching to a broad audience. If a student does not know how to take notes, then college was not accessible. Now with these presentations, less prepared students have a better chance of succeeding if they are willing to prepare outside of class. They have the outline, they can research the topic. They can do better. Just like anything else it can be misused. I think it probably is often misused. But to ban it is saying that we return to the time when teachers just stood and delivered, and students did their best to keep up.
Unfortunately this is the way of the world and MS fought tooth and nail for it. It is the only way they can give away the OS to OEM and sell it to end users for hundreds of dollars. If paystar wins out, then Apple will do the same thing. Instead of selling the OS to everyone for $100, they will sell upgrades for $30, as they did with Snow Leopard, but I suspect full versions will rocket to prices comparable to MS products. This will provide no benefit to OS X users.
Apple is a company that takes existing technology and integrates it into products that more people can afford. Apple did this with a graphic based OS. They did not create it, but they did figure out how to package it so that many people could afford it and see a reason to buy it. Not everyone could afford it, as it still required high end hardware like a dedicated GPU, but more people could. Importantly, like higher end computers, one was not sold a just a machine, but a system that would do something. Lower end machines cut prices by not including full functionality. The iPod and the iPhone is the same thing. Sure there better machines out there, but myu iPod mini was the price and had 10X the storage of the music player I had bought just two years before. And it could hold my addresses and dates to boot.
MS, OTOH, has been the company that has taken long existing technology and repackages it, usually in an extreme proprietary format, for commodity sales. Their products have support a wide variety of hardware because they do not sell any compelling hardware. They hold an important positions because allow a structure where people can buy the absolute cheapest pieces of hardware to meet their computing needs. This often is a benefit as people often consider their time to be worth nothing. In addition, MS supplies very good tools when you need many hundreds of people to have the same machines to do simple tasks, such as IBM did with the typewriter.
The software MS provides is very good, and there it suites many people needs, but they made two mistakes, neither of which is BillG fault. First, they did not provide a compelling reason for people to remain loyal to the Office products. The big reason to upgrade is collaboration, but collaboration is not a huge market. Mostly I see people writing memos in MS Word, and I don't think collaboration helps that much. There are other authoring tasks that people do need. For instance, I do not know why office does not include an real image editing program. This is what people want. GIMP is free, so why can't MS put a GIMP like program in there. I think it is the same reason you can't get into some MS web sites with cookies turned off. One takes what MS gives, or just go away.
The second reason is that they got too cocky. MS is very good at taking existing technologies and making them available to the masses. The only issue I have with them is they do in such a way to break everyone elses product. IMHO the problems started when MS decided MS Vista was going to the OS that took MS into the big leagues. Rather than supplying an OS to the masses, a OS that did what people needed at a cost that allowed very large deployments, MS got uppity and decided that the knock off business was not good enough. Nothing demonstrated this lack of business competence than the decision to create WinFS, which ultimately lead to the demonstration of technical incompetence. Now one had done a RDFS in a commercial product, so it had to be done from scratch, something that MS is not so good at. This distracted them from doing things they were good at, and ultimately lead to a OS that did not work with the hardware. Since MS OS is expected to work with hardware, and is not judged on it's own merits, people pretty much were dissatisfied and MS had to make a Herculean effort to get a new OS out in two years.
If anything, I would say Ballmer was a very good business person, as he has saved the company from what could have been a fatal decision made by his predecessor in 2003. If can get people to buy MS Windows 7, in spite of the mess that has been made of the company from 2004-2009, he should enjoy a good reputation.
Sure everyone says the problem is the cost of health care, and government regulation, and the excessive wages negotiated by unions. But none of this explains why AIG payed a multi hundred million dollar bonus to executives responsible for bankrupting the company(and before any says that they were not responsible, if management is not responsible, who is? The labour who everyone says is overpaid?) The fact is that management all too often overextends itself assuming that profits will accelerate and cover the additional expenses. For instance, the United way recently build a huge building in the most expensive part of the city outside of downtown at the height of the housing bubble. I am sure this was an investment, and the assumption was that it would pay for itself over time, but one wonders if the core business of the United Way is provided luxurious office space to it's staff, and what impact this has recently had on it's funds.
So the issue is often overhead. The local newspaper has a city block of prime downtown real estate. At one time this probably made sense. It is near city hall, the courthouse, and many other news making entities. Now I am not so sure. I know I would want the newspaper to decentralize and cut costs before giving it any money. Smaller cheaper office scattered through the city so it could more easily cover more news. Offices near school district offices, since parents will buy newspapers about thier kids. I know the printing press does not have to be downtown. Web services does not even have to be onsite.
And maybe none of this make sense. Maybe a lush building downtown does make the most sense. I don't know. I am not in the newspaper business, any more than I am in the finance business or the real estate business. Which is why my tax dollars should not go to directly propping up these businesses. I don't know how to manage these businesses. Evidently the people who think they do, don't, since the need a government bailout. And since we don't know how to do it, the best thing to do might be to let the firms fail, and allow new blood in that might have a better feeling for what is needed to make a go of it.
So, as always, the only things that suck at math are the people programming the computers. These people also probably suck at many other things, which is why they are essentially working for the government instead of building devices that have to compete on the free market.
But, seriously, these issues are well known, will pretty good solutions, such as scaling which is what the parent was talking about. There are other solutions such as creating a cross referenced code for certain conditions. There are books to help programmers who have not yet acquired the skill to work with number, such as the Numerical Recipies series. There is software to help programmers who do not want to or cannot learn how to work with numbers, such as IMSL library, which, if memeory serves, allows the user to include a target precision. Then there are thousands of basic introductory computer books that will helpthe novice software developer understand rounding errors and how to control them. For instance, one does not do += on floats, or use == for that matter.
So the only issue left is the resolution of the hardware. If .1 seconds is not enough, then that is the responsiblity of the people who specified the hardware. I know many clocks that accuracely increment up to 83 times per second.
Let's look at this. Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., who evidently has been at the forefront of this wealth transfer from the taxpayers to these welfare recipiants, aparently sees no problem with giving them $30,000 in free government money. However, if a bill is introudced to help the entire country with a bit of money, like the stimulus money, every GOP member thinks it is the end of the world. Helping a small special interest, hey we have to do it right away. Helping the whole country, who cares! Let them eat cake.
There has also been some take of editors. I use texshop, which seems to work well, and better than anything I found on windows. Like in so many other things, emacs is overkill.
I love it, we finally will have open government. Just Google your local representatives name, and all the related email, documents, and maybe even web searches, will be there for users to browse. Transparency, accountability, and honesty. No more browsing on craigslist on taxpayers time. No more hiding behind the law.
As far as I pictures, this is not such a big issue. Glossy pictures are important in the third world especially now, because that is what kids and parents expect. They expect 4 color prints on paper. They expect Snow White to be the disney drawing. They expect binding to be neat and pages to cut. Furthermore the opportunity costs of parents creating such books are high enough that purchasing them are often a better value. Add this to the fact that the tax base is high enough to support libraries, and one has a formula to support professionally written books.
Assuming that this has to be the case is limited at best. For younger ages, reading to the child is important, and reading does not mean reading a book. The story would be one that the parent remembers or create. This is clearly the way we learn language, by having older persons speak to us. If one wants the child to be more active, then give the child something to draw with and on. This is a much more engaging activity than looking at predrawn picture. Now, once the child starts to read, then obviously accessible reading material is important, but the need for picture books is limited. In a case like this, where text is free, and the only costs is a printer, for short books one can imagine printing a book and letting the child draw their own pictrures, as one often does in a printed book, even when one is not supposed to.
Obviously I assuming a certain level of ability. In societies where comprehension is important for functionally literacy picture books for all ages do play an important role because they develop a minimal literacy skills in students who otherwise would not have those skills by encouraging reading. However, I have seen places where just a basic decoding ability is enough, where one does not have to understand the meaning of paragraphs. In these cases I would argue things like comic books are a luxury.
Of course Apple has left the firewire world, so there is no reason to keep the fancy connector except for backward compatibility and to earn licensing fees. I assume that the later will motivate them to maintain the standard, at least for while longer. I do suspect they will supply a dock connector to micro USB connector.
On another note, phones has had USB type adapters since at least 2003. Not all of these would charge without the proprietary adaptor, so although the presence of the connector is nothing new, the ability to charge from any device is a welcome develoment.
So, if the state defined marriage between one man and one woman period, and did not allow for divorce, i.e. the person would still be responsible for each other, the social security would still go to the wife or husband, not mistress or gigolo, and the original children would still be first in line for the inheritance, I would be fine with that. It would honor the intention of marriage without all the complications by the hypocrite apologists.
Then we can have civil union. If some churches want to condone and encourage the sin of polygamy, which is adultery, and is condemned in several verses of the bible hebrew and christian testaments[i.e. Romans 7:1-3), then they should have that right. The state does not interfere with religion.OTOH, if some want to marry two people of the same gender, who have not been married to another prior to the marriage, at least not a living person, such a church may do so knowing there are far fewer scriptures being broken.
I think that is the issue. What if one wants a server and all one has is a telephone closet. For 1K you can put a mini in there and probably won't need to worry about power, cooling, whatever. A thousand for a server. Back in the olden days, when I was putting the first servers in a MS Windows environment, the machines cost at lest twice that much, and were unreliable. Today, a growing business could probably live for a while just adding more servers. And at that price, one could keep an extra around. You now, a redundant array of mac minis.
I am not saying that I can imagine a real case where a mini server would make sense. I am just saying that discounting things like aesthetics and design in a what is clearly meant to be SOHO server is rather silly. Not everyone has the funds to hire an MSCE to run a server, has the need for a rack solution, or the ability to set up a *nix server from scratch. In reality, I can't imagine how this would be better than outsourcing, but I can appreciate how this is one of Apples cleaver ideas. I suspect MS might be pushing their xbox server next month
Here is what it will need to have. A read aloud feature similar to kindle. Even if it is limited, that will be a great help to a great many people. A full web browser. I assume that this will not be a big issue, but we are talking a real browser, with flash. The browser allows us to read newspaper without subscription. The ability to read PDF files downloaded from arbitrary sources. This is a big deal to be as I download many of my reading materials as PDF, and the ambiguous support on Kindle is the big reason why I never bought it.
It would also be nice to able to mount external volumes through webdav of the like. Again, I can't imagine that Android does not have a filesystem capable of doing this.
Which is to say i want a reader with a modern OS, so I can read from all the different sources I read on my laptop. Less and I am just buying a fancy way to read paperbacks, and paying a markup for the privilege. I think the nook does move us into a new realm of reading, but not neccesarily a bette one. If I have to pay ATT to use the network, then the Kindle is still a better value.
The cool thing about android is that it should, in theory, allow end users to get the exact phone they want. The reality it, since the end user is not really buying the phone, that the mobile service providers will continue to design they phone they need, and the collude to provide limited functionality to the United States market. We onlu have to go back to the Motorola Razr and look at the Nokia situation to see that mobile providers in the US will not provide anything that is not centered around them.
While this situation is changing, Apple has never claimed to be company that supported everything. MS has, and continues to so do. I think this was the scary thing about Vista. Here was a new OS from a company that was supposed to be about all commodity parts, and it did not run on commodity parts. In fact it appeared that MS was trying to push a model where hardware and software vendors would have to pay MS for certification. While I don't think that MS is going to this extreme at the moment, such a path was a plausible scenario a year ago. As Apple has shown, such a model can be profitable.
With the Pre, Apples motives are clear. They do not want to do technical support on a device that they have no control over, and they do want the DRM stuff on the Pre. It would be simple enough for the Pre to come with software that hooked into the standard filetypes Apple uses to sync. True, someone would have to write this software, and the DRM stuff would not work, but it would be a better solution. It is clear that Palm chose the budget solution.
Things are equally clear with the xbox. The only reason there is an issue is because people are used to using commodity hardware on MS Windows, and MS has not differentiated the product enough to avoid the confusion. I do not see this as a MS issue. There is no reason for the xbox to be open. It is really an problem of people thinking that anything MS is MS Windows. I think that MS was trying to get away from the MS Windows legacy with Vista, but it did not work. Given that failure, I am bit surprised they would try to close xbox, but would not criticize them in any other way for doing so.
For years only few phones had good email and browsing. The iPhone was great because it did, and was also integrated, from day one, to the then emerging cloud via google and .mac. It was also integrated to iTunes, and not dependent on cell company music services. For some this is a plus, as it makes it easy to rip tracks and put it on the phone.
But you are correct. There are many phones that some thinks surpass the iPhone, and those people should absolutely buy those phones. No one says that everyone should have an iPhone. All that happens is that people complain that the iPhone does not do everything. But we live in a competitive market place and the iPhone can do it's thing, and the others can do their thing. What is to be seen is whether Verizon, with the clearly superior network in the US, can put out a better integrated product than Apple.
What also remains to be seen is if data integrity can be assured with these other services. I have never lost data because Apple servers went bust. True, I pay extra for the service, but I think that others are going to consider the data retention service as part of the monthly fees, especially if using Android or MS Windows Mobile.Both MS and Google has recently caused data loss for at least some customer. Not a very good start for their cloud computing strategy.Perhaps they don't care about data retention, since these devices are mostly considered toys, and that is why they include such critial features such as MP3 ringtones and A2DP. That will leave Blackberry and iPhone for those that just need to get work done, so we can go and play in the real world.
Almost anything is lethal in large doses, and many things are fatal in even small doses. Those same things are often of some benefit in very small doses. For instance, Botulinum toxin. We use small and weakened versions of virus to immunize ourselves. Most medicines can kill children who ingest a moderate overdose. A little alcohol can be antiseptic, which is why many places in the world used to drink with their food, but too much alcohol is lethal.
Second,just because one can do something does not mean it is a good idea. I could acquire land, as was done in the 80's, by encouraging banks to make large loans to farmers, call the loans in for default as soon as possible, and then sell the land to multinationals, thus destroying the family farm. We could, as the Incas reportedly did, cut down all trees tress, even the reserve trees, and end up with no other choice by to move out of the city. Experience tells us that such policies are inferior to conservation. Therefore, though at a simplistic level certain choices may seem obvious, a more rigorous analysis may lead to unintended consequences.One may argue that regulated the TV may lead to unintended consequences, like slowdown in sales of TV and loss of jobs, but we are find with those consequences. After all, we banned the sale of pot and put all those people out of work.
Third, it is easy to talk about subsidies when one lives in a state such as North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Mississippi, Alabama, or Alaska. Those states live and die on federal subsides. Those states would be cesspools if not for a big federal government transferring wealth from other sates. However, if one lives a state like California, which pays one of the highest net taxes to the federal Government, subsidies are not such a good idea.
Yes nuclear is a good idea if they can figure out how to make the entire life cycle work in the United States. Solar and Wind are also good ideas, but have to be coupled with more efficient devices since it will initially cost more to produce the electricity. The fact is that we can solve these problems without trashing out house, and pretty much keep a decent standard of living. But just rushing in with the take, borrow and spend polices of the past 10 years is not going to work.
CSS allowed control of the visualization, but by the time it came out there were all sorts of other hacks, which developers used even in cases where visualization was not important. This meant that a web page was often fixed on a certain platform, certain display size, and certain user assumptions. This would not have been such a problem if the developers had just used HTML, and, where possible, lived with the fact that they were not going to be in control.
The only real solution is to make banks liable for online bank fraud, just like credit cards are liable for credit fraud. The customer has to pay $50, the bank covers the rest. This is really the value of credit cards. You are using someone else's money, so they take the risk. Once it is your money, your are at risk even if the banks security is at fault.
One hears a lot of good thing about vista. I have used it and it seems fine. However I don't use for anything critical because it does not work with too many things. Why would a rational business spend money on a product that does not support the profit goals? It is very difficult to make the case that Vista is so good that one should spends thousands of dollars to replace everything to support it.
Here is why MS Windows 7 might be ok: because vendors have had time to make it work. The amount of hardware tied to MS Windows is almost non existent, most uses standard interfaces. Software has been rewritten to support MS Vista, and presumable MS Windows 7. Likely all my critical applications will work with MS Windows 7, although some web based stuff may have problems with the latest IE.
All in all, MS may be doing it's job, which is to be an inexpensive OS that allows us to do work.