To be fair, they're counting mobile operating systems as part of the pie. The fact that I access Wikipedia on an Android phone or my iPad doesn't mean I don't use Windows most of the time. Windows has been losing market share, to be sure, but even Apple wasn't able to capitalize on Vista. Now with Windows 7, Windows is in a pretty good position.
Also, those numbers don't add up to 100%. The 2009 stats add to 97% while the 2011 stats add to 95%. Is this simply the "other" category? I find it hard to believe there are many more OSs out there to make up that difference (there would need to be over 500 OSs with less than.0009% visitors each in the other category).
So? Dune Messiah takes place 12 years after Dune. Does that Dune is missing chapters? Mass Effect 3 will be completely playable without playing the DLC, and even the entirety of Mass Effect 2.
I know quite a few people who won't buy a Gen 1 Apple product device because of their tendency to be half baked. To say that Apple products are brilliant from the start is just revisionist. People tend to gloss over their shortcomings because they look good and are trendy. For example:
OSX 10.0: Slow, unstable, no DVD playback, no CD burning, poor support with printers and other peripheral hardware
Original iPod: firewire only, no Windows support
Original iPhone: No 3rd party applications, no video recording, no MMS, no 3G, no multitasking, no copy/paste
Full of textbooks that you bought for $200, most likely won't use again, and would sell, but the bookstore will only give you $10.
Beyond the physical books in the library, a University Library can get you pretty much any book in the world you desire within a couple days. Further, you have access to the digital libraries of almost every journal and periodical out there, depending on your University's subscriptions.
I think the fact that I'm taking Cisco/Unix/C++ classes should negate that class
You're taking a class in "Cisco"? What exactly are you studying that requires a class like this?
Not to mention these kids are building businesses in fields like biotech, robotics, and aerospace. They're probably all bright and have an interest/aptitude in these areas, but I doubt any of them are experts (except maybe the kid with 3 degrees and practically a PhD). So who do they actually hire to implement their grand ideas and overcome the technical challenges? People who went to school to study these fields in depth, who are going to demand more than $100k for a year of work.
The two groups of people are not equivalent in ambition or intelligence, which is what Thiel is counting on.
No, that's what he ensured in his group. He got applications from 400 of the most talented and motivated students from all over the world, and took the best of those. He's starting with a range of people, some who already have degrees, some who already have businesses, some who have had all the opportunities in the world and are already doing great. One of the kids already wrote an autobiography!
So he's starting with this self selected pool of geniuses, giving them $100 grand, mentorship, and probably all the space and resources they need, and in two years the shocker is going to be that these kids were successful? But what does this prove about education? What does this say to someone who hasn't had a lot of opportunities and is deciding whether or not to go to college?
I mean, some of these kids already have degrees. One of them I read attended classes at a university since he was 10. Or how about this one:
"Andrew Hsu started doing research in a pathology lab when he was 10. By the time he was 12, he had matriculated at the University of Washington. Soon after, he graduated with honors degrees in neurobiology, biochemistry, and chemistry. He was a 19-year-old 4th-year neuroscience Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University when he left early this year to pursue his start-up, Airy Labs."
So this kid is under 20, but he already had 3 Bachelor's degrees and was a year from finishing a Ph.D. These kids are all smart and highly motivated, and it seems they're going to receive a significant amount of mentorship through this fellowship.
But just considering the failure rate of new startups, how would the Thiel Foundation look if 18/20 of their proteges are out of business in a year? My guess is the Foundation will be injecting money and talent into these ventures to avoid such a PR disaster.
In Windows Vista and 7 at least there is a visual indicator for a long press that aids in discoverability. When you touch the screen, a progress bar starts circling your finger. I've found people discover the long press on their own, since they wait to see what happens when the circle completes. It's hard to describe, so here's a link showing it. In the video the delay between when the screen is touched and when the progress bar stars is a little longer than the default.
Sorry I implied that it's written on the contract but I guess I didn't make this clear. We address the possibility for delays and the various causes, and there's a big section on delays in the contract. If you're dropping 30-50 grand on something, you should probably read every single letter on the contract, and if you're unsure of anything you shouldn't sign it. But you'd be surprised how many people just nod through the consultation when we tell them "If we hit rock in your yard while excavating, that's going to push things back +x days." Then when we break dirt and hit rock and tell them it's going to take +x more days they throw a fit.
Either way this is tangential to the fact that even if we make right by these customers, when they fly off the handle and post things online, they can't remove them. Even if they can add a correction to their initial post, our name is still on a site called "ripoffreports.com" and listed on the first page of Google results, so people might not even read the redaction before writing us off.
Sorry I did not make it clear, but our time tables and sources for delays are all spelled out in advance in the initial consultation by the sales staff, by the project manager, but the construction manager, and on the contract itself.
What sometimes happens, especially in April and May, is rain delays will add Weeks to the timetable. Last month it rained more than.1in on 17 days. This is made clear to customers that in the rainy season, delays of two weeks are not uncommon. I think what's more common is customers not making clear their expectations. For some reason, some customers just nod when we go over the possibility for delays as if it would never happen to them, but when they actually occur they are outraged!
Anyway, this is all wildly off topic, but it all goes back to how the customers react. Like I mentioned, this company has been in business for 30 years. In the 70s, when a problem like this occurred, we would do our best to make it right. Sometimes it takes a couple days of back and forth to get things settled (customer makes an unreasonable demand "I want this pool in the ground by tomorrow or I'm suing!" but eventually we find common ground). The difference these days is that when the customer is in rage mode, they fly online and rant to every outlet they can. Then when we settle things out with them and they are reasonably satisfied, those rants remain in place and even they can't delete them on some sites. Then because these sites have more legitimacy to Google than our own homepage, they appear first in search rankings. This kind of thing just didn't happen back in the day.
Did your company explain all these things to your customers
Yes, of course, this is all spelled out in advance, and we have enough people who do anticipate these delays. The company has been in business for 30 years, so we have enough experience dealing with customer expectations. Still there are situations where a confluence of unavoidable delays (weather, bedrock, government) and unreasonable customers come together to create a bad situation all around.
As we all know there are two sides to every story, but when the customer goes on his rant online, there's only one side being told. We run a responsible and honest organization, with a majority of very happy customers, but a search on the internet would not reflect that. Most often these customers, who fly off the handle and rant online, never even give us the chance to set things right. When we actually do get the chance, more often than not we turn them around and they end up happy, but their negative rant remains.
I kind of understand where these Dentists are coming from. I used to work at a pool construction company that was heavily impacted by unwarranted negative reviews online.
Pool owners are the worst; they're usually well off, used to getting their way, and generally don't understand how construction time tables work. They usually start thinking of a pool in March, or April, and want it done and open for Memorial Day or the 4th of July. They usually don't understand we have more than one customer who all also want their pool done on the same timeframe. Further, they don't understand we can't work in bad weather, which means time tables tend to slip in the rainy season.
So inevitably, people get delayed and it's the end of the world for them because they won't have their pool open for their all important Memorial Day BBQ. So they fly online and rant and rave about how awful our business is, because they couldn't read their contract. And of course, if you type our name into Google, the first three results that come up are from ripoffreports.com or a similar site.
What's worse is these stay online forever. We've made most all of our customers happy in the end, and they've told us they would take down or redact the negative reviews, but even they can't. So because they flew off the handle despite our goodwill efforts, we're the ones that have to suffer.
So, while I feel like the Doctor's approach isn't the most tactful, I understand where he's coming form.
It's great that Apple is defending the devs. It's nice to see a patent troll get beat down, but it's not much of a victory when they already got their money for this completely obvious and bogus patent.
Here's a list of their patents. They keep calling these "inventions" and the guy listed on the patents (Dan Abelow) is called a "prolific inventor" but after reading the patents he just seems like an opportunist who managed to get a couple blatantly obvious ideas through the patent system.
So you're telling me the AMD Radeon HD 6770M listed on the iMac's tech specs is in fact not at 6770M but a 6770? Is this an error on Apple's site? Where are these benchmarks you speak of? This was one of the things that stopped me from getting an iMac, but if you're right it changes my mind.
I think it depends on what you want to do. Matlab is great for reading and working with log files. It's also great if your tasks can be vectorized; your code will be fast and require very few statements.
However, if your project requires iteration, it's going to be slow as hell in Matlab.
The biggest complaints I have about Matlab (besides the cost) are the way it handles memory management, and the way it handles pointers. I can't tell you the amount of times I've had Matlab tell me there wasn't enough memory available on my 8GB machine, because I ran out of what it had allocated for me. As far as pointers go.... well there is no such thing. Things can get very complicated because of this. It seems that many Matlab programmers consider using global variables a common practice because of this, which makes maintaining code an absolute hell.
But over all, we use Matlab because of how fast it is to code something up compared to C, especially for our work (robotics) which is very Linear Algebra oriented. These days, computers are fast enough that proper Matlab cide is a viable alternative to C in terms of performance, and for the things that really need to be fast there's always MEX.
these aren't in any way comparable to a machined lump of aluminium with the ventilation holes hidden in the screen hinge.
Because of this very design decision (as few vents as possible and hide the ones we're forced to have), I find some Macbook Pros to be uncomfortable to use on my lap because they get so hot.
Also, while you deride plastic casing, I find Macbook Pros to be exceedingly fragile; one wrong bump and the pristine aluminum casing in marred. Dell Latitudes and HP Elitebooks (Dell's and HP's business-class laptops) are very well made and can take a lot of abuse.
What do you mean by "real"? Do you mean discrete as opposed to shared? This is true. But the cards in iMacs are still the mobile versions of desktop cards. i.e. you're not getting the Radeon HD 6770, you're getting the Radeon HD 6770M.
Companies need to stop saying they want to see a CS degree for jobs that focus on networking, information systems engineering, computer hardware help desk support, systems administration, CTO / CIO positions, etc. The two just don't match up.
This is the biggest problem with CS departments as I see it, and for some reason it seems to be unique to them. Why don't automotive body shops ask for a BS in Mechanical Engineering? Yet companies continually require a CS degree for work that is only tangentially related to CS in the same way Electrical Engineering is only tangentially related to what an Electrician does.
This was most apparent to me a couple weeks ago at a lunch with the advisory board at my University. On the board was a CEO of a local company who likes to hire CS grads from my university. His position was that the CS department should move away from developing in UNIX and start teaching courses about.NET and Windows development (since that's what his company does), and he was tired of training students to do this once he hired them. He basically wants the CS department to be an employee factory for him! This is CLEARLY the role for a vocational training school.
And the worst part is the University cannot ignore his point because the very first thing parents ask when the visit is "What are the employment statistics and average salary for graduates?" I see it every week when tours come into my lab, without fail, that's all they want to know. Luckily our graduates are proficient enough that they find jobs without explicit training in.NET, but if that ever changes I expect we'll see a course for it in the future.
So it takes a special gifted individual to become a programmer, but any old schmuck can be a doctor because it's just a matter of memorization? I know this might be silly, but I'm honestly wondering if you know what a doctor does.
I haven't used Calculus or Physics since college. What a waste of time that could have been spent helping me learn to write... robots
Speaking as a Robotics Ph.D. candidate with a B.S. in Physics.... you're full of it. I use physics and calculus all the time in my work. Ever heard of a Jacobian, the thing we use to linearize nonlinear equations for an EKF? How exactly do you derive equations of motions without physics and calculus? It's just beyond me how you could ever do anything beyond trivial hobbyist stuff without these two important disciplines.
Slashdot Mirror
To be fair, they're counting mobile operating systems as part of the pie. The fact that I access Wikipedia on an Android phone or my iPad doesn't mean I don't use Windows most of the time. Windows has been losing market share, to be sure, but even Apple wasn't able to capitalize on Vista. Now with Windows 7, Windows is in a pretty good position.
Also, those numbers don't add up to 100%. The 2009 stats add to 97% while the 2011 stats add to 95%. Is this simply the "other" category? I find it hard to believe there are many more OSs out there to make up that difference (there would need to be over 500 OSs with less than .0009% visitors each in the other category).
So? Dune Messiah takes place 12 years after Dune. Does that Dune is missing chapters? Mass Effect 3 will be completely playable without playing the DLC, and even the entirety of Mass Effect 2.
I know quite a few people who won't buy a Gen 1 Apple product device because of their tendency to be half baked. To say that Apple products are brilliant from the start is just revisionist. People tend to gloss over their shortcomings because they look good and are trendy. For example:
But you'll never catch me!
How is he running the company into the ground when they produce record profits (almost) every year
Full of textbooks that you bought for $200, most likely won't use again, and would sell, but the bookstore will only give you $10.
Beyond the physical books in the library, a University Library can get you pretty much any book in the world you desire within a couple days. Further, you have access to the digital libraries of almost every journal and periodical out there, depending on your University's subscriptions.
I think the fact that I'm taking Cisco/Unix/C++ classes should negate that class
You're taking a class in "Cisco"? What exactly are you studying that requires a class like this?
Not to mention these kids are building businesses in fields like biotech, robotics, and aerospace. They're probably all bright and have an interest/aptitude in these areas, but I doubt any of them are experts (except maybe the kid with 3 degrees and practically a PhD). So who do they actually hire to implement their grand ideas and overcome the technical challenges? People who went to school to study these fields in depth, who are going to demand more than $100k for a year of work.
The two groups of people are not equivalent in ambition or intelligence, which is what Thiel is counting on.
No, that's what he ensured in his group. He got applications from 400 of the most talented and motivated students from all over the world, and took the best of those. He's starting with a range of people, some who already have degrees, some who already have businesses, some who have had all the opportunities in the world and are already doing great. One of the kids already wrote an autobiography!
So he's starting with this self selected pool of geniuses, giving them $100 grand, mentorship, and probably all the space and resources they need, and in two years the shocker is going to be that these kids were successful? But what does this prove about education? What does this say to someone who hasn't had a lot of opportunities and is deciding whether or not to go to college?
I mean, some of these kids already have degrees. One of them I read attended classes at a university since he was 10. Or how about this one:
"Andrew Hsu started doing research in a pathology lab when he was 10. By the time he was 12, he had matriculated at the University of Washington. Soon after, he graduated with honors degrees in neurobiology, biochemistry, and chemistry. He was a 19-year-old 4th-year neuroscience Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University when he left early this year to pursue his start-up, Airy Labs."
So this kid is under 20, but he already had 3 Bachelor's degrees and was a year from finishing a Ph.D. These kids are all smart and highly motivated, and it seems they're going to receive a significant amount of mentorship through this fellowship.
But just considering the failure rate of new startups, how would the Thiel Foundation look if 18/20 of their proteges are out of business in a year? My guess is the Foundation will be injecting money and talent into these ventures to avoid such a PR disaster.
In Windows Vista and 7 at least there is a visual indicator for a long press that aids in discoverability. When you touch the screen, a progress bar starts circling your finger. I've found people discover the long press on their own, since they wait to see what happens when the circle completes. It's hard to describe, so here's a link showing it. In the video the delay between when the screen is touched and when the progress bar stars is a little longer than the default.
Sorry I implied that it's written on the contract but I guess I didn't make this clear. We address the possibility for delays and the various causes, and there's a big section on delays in the contract. If you're dropping 30-50 grand on something, you should probably read every single letter on the contract, and if you're unsure of anything you shouldn't sign it. But you'd be surprised how many people just nod through the consultation when we tell them "If we hit rock in your yard while excavating, that's going to push things back +x days." Then when we break dirt and hit rock and tell them it's going to take +x more days they throw a fit.
Either way this is tangential to the fact that even if we make right by these customers, when they fly off the handle and post things online, they can't remove them. Even if they can add a correction to their initial post, our name is still on a site called "ripoffreports.com" and listed on the first page of Google results, so people might not even read the redaction before writing us off.
Sorry I did not make it clear, but our time tables and sources for delays are all spelled out in advance in the initial consultation by the sales staff, by the project manager, but the construction manager, and on the contract itself.
What sometimes happens, especially in April and May, is rain delays will add Weeks to the timetable. Last month it rained more than .1in on 17 days. This is made clear to customers that in the rainy season, delays of two weeks are not uncommon. I think what's more common is customers not making clear their expectations. For some reason, some customers just nod when we go over the possibility for delays as if it would never happen to them, but when they actually occur they are outraged!
Anyway, this is all wildly off topic, but it all goes back to how the customers react. Like I mentioned, this company has been in business for 30 years. In the 70s, when a problem like this occurred, we would do our best to make it right. Sometimes it takes a couple days of back and forth to get things settled (customer makes an unreasonable demand "I want this pool in the ground by tomorrow or I'm suing!" but eventually we find common ground). The difference these days is that when the customer is in rage mode, they fly online and rant to every outlet they can. Then when we settle things out with them and they are reasonably satisfied, those rants remain in place and even they can't delete them on some sites. Then because these sites have more legitimacy to Google than our own homepage, they appear first in search rankings. This kind of thing just didn't happen back in the day.
Did your company explain all these things to your customers
Yes, of course, this is all spelled out in advance, and we have enough people who do anticipate these delays. The company has been in business for 30 years, so we have enough experience dealing with customer expectations. Still there are situations where a confluence of unavoidable delays (weather, bedrock, government) and unreasonable customers come together to create a bad situation all around.
As we all know there are two sides to every story, but when the customer goes on his rant online, there's only one side being told. We run a responsible and honest organization, with a majority of very happy customers, but a search on the internet would not reflect that. Most often these customers, who fly off the handle and rant online, never even give us the chance to set things right. When we actually do get the chance, more often than not we turn them around and they end up happy, but their negative rant remains.
I kind of understand where these Dentists are coming from. I used to work at a pool construction company that was heavily impacted by unwarranted negative reviews online.
Pool owners are the worst; they're usually well off, used to getting their way, and generally don't understand how construction time tables work. They usually start thinking of a pool in March, or April, and want it done and open for Memorial Day or the 4th of July. They usually don't understand we have more than one customer who all also want their pool done on the same timeframe. Further, they don't understand we can't work in bad weather, which means time tables tend to slip in the rainy season.
So inevitably, people get delayed and it's the end of the world for them because they won't have their pool open for their all important Memorial Day BBQ. So they fly online and rant and rave about how awful our business is, because they couldn't read their contract. And of course, if you type our name into Google, the first three results that come up are from ripoffreports.com or a similar site.
What's worse is these stay online forever. We've made most all of our customers happy in the end, and they've told us they would take down or redact the negative reviews, but even they can't. So because they flew off the handle despite our goodwill efforts, we're the ones that have to suffer.
So, while I feel like the Doctor's approach isn't the most tactful, I understand where he's coming form.
I see a fish carcass being sodomized. Am I missing it?
It's great that Apple is defending the devs. It's nice to see a patent troll get beat down, but it's not much of a victory when they already got their money for this completely obvious and bogus patent.
Here's a list of their patents. They keep calling these "inventions" and the guy listed on the patents (Dan Abelow) is called a "prolific inventor" but after reading the patents he just seems like an opportunist who managed to get a couple blatantly obvious ideas through the patent system.
I remember reading about a guy who got so fed up with it he beveled the edge with a file. Here he is: http://onemansblog.com/2010/03/11/video-rant-taking-the-sharp-edge-off-the-macbook-pro/
So you're telling me the AMD Radeon HD 6770M listed on the iMac's tech specs is in fact not at 6770M but a 6770? Is this an error on Apple's site? Where are these benchmarks you speak of? This was one of the things that stopped me from getting an iMac, but if you're right it changes my mind.
I think it depends on what you want to do. Matlab is great for reading and working with log files. It's also great if your tasks can be vectorized; your code will be fast and require very few statements.
However, if your project requires iteration, it's going to be slow as hell in Matlab.
The biggest complaints I have about Matlab (besides the cost) are the way it handles memory management, and the way it handles pointers. I can't tell you the amount of times I've had Matlab tell me there wasn't enough memory available on my 8GB machine, because I ran out of what it had allocated for me. As far as pointers go.... well there is no such thing. Things can get very complicated because of this. It seems that many Matlab programmers consider using global variables a common practice because of this, which makes maintaining code an absolute hell.
But over all, we use Matlab because of how fast it is to code something up compared to C, especially for our work (robotics) which is very Linear Algebra oriented. These days, computers are fast enough that proper Matlab cide is a viable alternative to C in terms of performance, and for the things that really need to be fast there's always MEX.
these aren't in any way comparable to a machined lump of aluminium with the ventilation holes hidden in the screen hinge.
Because of this very design decision (as few vents as possible and hide the ones we're forced to have), I find some Macbook Pros to be uncomfortable to use on my lap because they get so hot.
Also, while you deride plastic casing, I find Macbook Pros to be exceedingly fragile; one wrong bump and the pristine aluminum casing in marred. Dell Latitudes and HP Elitebooks (Dell's and HP's business-class laptops) are very well made and can take a lot of abuse.
with a real graphics card
What do you mean by "real"? Do you mean discrete as opposed to shared? This is true. But the cards in iMacs are still the mobile versions of desktop cards. i.e. you're not getting the Radeon HD 6770, you're getting the Radeon HD 6770M.
Companies need to stop saying they want to see a CS degree for jobs that focus on networking, information systems engineering, computer hardware help desk support, systems administration, CTO / CIO positions, etc. The two just don't match up.
This is the biggest problem with CS departments as I see it, and for some reason it seems to be unique to them. Why don't automotive body shops ask for a BS in Mechanical Engineering? Yet companies continually require a CS degree for work that is only tangentially related to CS in the same way Electrical Engineering is only tangentially related to what an Electrician does.
This was most apparent to me a couple weeks ago at a lunch with the advisory board at my University. On the board was a CEO of a local company who likes to hire CS grads from my university. His position was that the CS department should move away from developing in UNIX and start teaching courses about .NET and Windows development (since that's what his company does), and he was tired of training students to do this once he hired them. He basically wants the CS department to be an employee factory for him! This is CLEARLY the role for a vocational training school.
And the worst part is the University cannot ignore his point because the very first thing parents ask when the visit is "What are the employment statistics and average salary for graduates?" I see it every week when tours come into my lab, without fail, that's all they want to know. Luckily our graduates are proficient enough that they find jobs without explicit training in .NET, but if that ever changes I expect we'll see a course for it in the future.
So it takes a special gifted individual to become a programmer, but any old schmuck can be a doctor because it's just a matter of memorization? I know this might be silly, but I'm honestly wondering if you know what a doctor does.
I haven't used Calculus or Physics since college. What a waste of time that could have been spent helping me learn to write ... robots
Speaking as a Robotics Ph.D. candidate with a B.S. in Physics.... you're full of it. I use physics and calculus all the time in my work. Ever heard of a Jacobian, the thing we use to linearize nonlinear equations for an EKF? How exactly do you derive equations of motions without physics and calculus? It's just beyond me how you could ever do anything beyond trivial hobbyist stuff without these two important disciplines.
Just like anyone who drives there car without performing any maintenance would be incompetent.
Just like anyone who uses 'there' instead of 'their' is incompetent at the English language?