If you borrow money from the US government, they *will* pay it back. No question of that. The worst case possibility is that a major economic disaster will leave the government with no option but to issue new currency to pay debt, in which case they will pay it back but heavily devalued due to inflation.
That's what we do. Disable the account immediatly for security reasons, and the make sure the procedure to have it reenabled has far more red tape than it really needs. It takes at least a few hours, maybe a day, to talk to the required inaccessible people.
Collective moral responsibility. It's at the heart of many religious views of morality. Everything is everyone's business, for it is the duty of all to police society. This is why they are always poking their nose into other people's business so much. In their view, it is not enough merely to keep their own minds free of ungodly influence: It is their duty to protect their entire culture from such influence.
Edison himself wasn't a great inventor. He was a great businessman and head-of-R&D. Pioneer of inventing as a business - not as just a couple of lone experts, but a whole department of underlings systematically tackling potentially profitable issues with pooled resources. He dabbled, yes, but most of the actual inventing was done by his employees.
Think smaller. Airtight seals on holes a few centimeters wide, through which wettened tools (Or tools with hydrophilic coatings) could pass without breaking the seal. Handy indeed for laboratory environments when you might want to poke your instruments at a sample while keeping it within an inert atmosphere or protecting it from dust or microbial contamination.
The researchers are mostly Japanese, and clearly english isn't their first language. The website is readable, but gramatically incorrect. I'm sure that they'll get the final article checked properly, but this is just a little public demonstration so a few minor errors from a second-language speaker are forgivable.
The Church of Scientology started using this method years ago. It's worked exactly as well as any other means to prevent the dissemination of secrets on the internet.
The no-school argument actually makes some sense. If a kid is going to die in a year, school really serves no purpose. Why not make it optional, and at least let him enjoy the time he has left more? It isn't as if he needs to study for a career.
Firstly, because it's different. Not better, just different... and different without better seems a lot like change for change's sake. There are already clear conventions for how desktop interfaces work, and unity defies them for no apparent benefit. Secondly, it feels awkward even once you are used to it. Searching takes time, and personally I find it awkward even just launching a terminal because of that second-or-two wait.
The old Gnome style worked. It worked well. Unity feels like just a gimmick.
If the user wishes to use a battery-intensive program, then that should be up to them to decide. They'll learn quickly enough. What if they decide to carry one of those battery-powered USB ports as a solution?
The PC I picked for comparison didn't come with a monitor. Nor does the Mac Mini. Thus a fair comparison. To compare an iMac fairly, I'd have to compare it with a PC which intigrated all components into a monitor of equal resolution - and that would be hard to find. One thing I really do like about Apple is their continuing dedication to high-resolution displays at a time when every other PC manufacturer seems to think nine hundred vertical pixels is good enough.
I called it 'entry level' because it's the cheapest computer that Apple sell.
Ok, let's try something else. How about something which owes nothing to Apple manufacturing like, say, a hard drive. One drive is much like another, really. Interchangeable, so long as the numbers match. So, how much does Apple charge for one of their drives with an Apple sticker on?
http://store.apple.com/uk/product/MC730ZM/A?n=internal&fnode=MTY1NDA0Nw&s=topSellers £254, for a 7200 2TB 3.5". How much for a 7200 2TB 3.5" at ebuyer? http://www.ebuyer.com/319641-barracuda-2tb-sata-3-5in-7200rpm-64mb-6gb-s-in-st2000dm001 £89.99.
Those are perfectly equivilent, interchangeable parts. There is no way the one purchased from Apple is any better than the one purchased from Ebuyer. And yet the Apple one is more than double the cost! How do you explain this? Apple don't even make the drive - it's just a perfectly ordinary PC component with a new sticker on it. The only possible way they could be charging so much is by screwing their customers over. I suspect this may be less about just making more profit than it is about trying not to cheapen their brand though.
That's really the foundation of China's booming manufacturing industry. As national business models go, it works very well. It does mean exploitation and pollution, but some people in the Chinese government must have decided that the economic benefits are worth it. They were probably right - without the forign investment in industry and the economic strength from exports, they might still be just another third-world country getting by on rice-farming and memories of the glory days when they could claim to be the greatest civilisation in the world.
I work at a school. Think lots of computers at a desk, all in a row. Every time we ban someone from internet access due to gaming/porn, we find out within a couple of days that they are back on using stolen credentials. Half the time they aren't even stolen, their friends hand over passwords willingly, but there is no way we can prove that.
I've had one almost-die, but that was due to spilling tea on it. I did discover that those Apple keyboards (at least the wireless ones) are really very hard to repair. Those keycaps do not come off without a fight.
But it takes a year to learn what to do if anything goes wrong in even the slightest way. I've ended up as the family tech-support - I long ago lost count of how many times I have been summoned because 'the internet is down' only to discover Mother had knocked the wireless on/off button or put the browser into offline mode, and we went through a Week of Hell when some wannabe hacker tried to break into her email account and triggered gmail's automatic lockout.
Because it greatly reduces the utility of the device. If Apple controls the whitelist, there are things that Apple won't let you do because it would be incompatible with maximising their profits. For example, they do not permit emulators in the app store. They also do not permit anything that duplicates a function already present in iOS, which is clearly bad for competition. If you want a voice interface, it's Siri or nothing.
I am strangely reminded of the one-wire bus used for low-power sensing.
The one-wire bus uses three wires.
Why the name? Well, one is supposed to be optional power, but in practice you won't get more than one sensor on the bus without it. And the other is ground which, I assume, doesn't count for some reason.
Let me see. The mac pro isn't a fair one to look at, being a high-end professional workstation, so how about something consumer. Say, the Mac Mini. that's £529 for an i5 dual-core 2.3GHz, 2GB ram, 500GB HD and Intel HD graphics. That's their entry-level desktop computer. Now, if I go to ebuyer... they don't actually have anything with only 2GB ram, so I'll have to get a 4GB system. But for £512 - slightly *less* than a mac mini - I can get an HP with 4GB ram, 500GB HD and a *quad* core 3.0GHz processor. It's twice the ram, more than twice the processor performance, and lower-cost. I could do even better, but then I'd have to go for a machine without a well-known brand, which wouldn't be fair. The only downside is that it's a bit larger, midi-tower, but the slightly larger size doesn't outweigh that the Mac Mini is more expensive than a PC with twice the processing speed and memory. So, whatever you may say about the quality of Apple hardware in their defense, it still remains substantially more expensive than the competition.
I'd compare the iMac, but not many PCs come built into the monitor.
Having used some, I must admit it is good-quality hardware. Just not such good quality that it's worth twice the cost of a similar-spec PC. I've only got a macbook because they were the only manufacturer left that use a decently high-resolution screen. A few others used to (Dell, I recall) but they no longer offer WUXGA+, and I wanted the vertical pixels.
The Time Lords blew a few stars up too, as it was the only way to generate the extreme high-energy conditions needed for their early experiments in temporal manipulation. The team responsible for the research was sensible enough to conduct their experiments far from anywhere inhabited, though perhaps they should have destroyed their doomsday machine when they were finished with it rather than just leave it lying around for the Daleks to steal.
One day we will find life around another star. But it will be microbial, and the population of mankind will let out a collective grumble and say it doesn't count.
A more serious problem is getting people to admit their own ignorance. Look at climate change, for example. Climatology is a very complicated field, just like most fields. It's hard enough for specialists, who spend their careers studying, to understand. Does the average layperson have any idea what is meant by a monte carlo model, or the implications of microclimate variation in dendrochronology, or methods for compensating for the urban heat island effect in weather monitoring, or the absorbtion spectra of atmospheric gasses? No. And yet many, maybe most of those laypeople are able to skim a couple of magazine articles or a political speech on the subject and gain confidence that they have evaluated the evidence and are just as qualified to pass judgement as any expert ever could be. So the real problem is getting people to admit their own ignorance, and that is no easy task. It goes against human nature.
Slashdot Mirror
If you borrow money from the US government, they *will* pay it back. No question of that. The worst case possibility is that a major economic disaster will leave the government with no option but to issue new currency to pay debt, in which case they will pay it back but heavily devalued due to inflation.
That's what we do. Disable the account immediatly for security reasons, and the make sure the procedure to have it reenabled has far more red tape than it really needs. It takes at least a few hours, maybe a day, to talk to the required inaccessible people.
That conflict could be summed up as 'assholes vs douchebags.' I'm not sure which is which.
Collective moral responsibility. It's at the heart of many religious views of morality. Everything is everyone's business, for it is the duty of all to police society. This is why they are always poking their nose into other people's business so much. In their view, it is not enough merely to keep their own minds free of ungodly influence: It is their duty to protect their entire culture from such influence.
Edison himself wasn't a great inventor. He was a great businessman and head-of-R&D. Pioneer of inventing as a business - not as just a couple of lone experts, but a whole department of underlings systematically tackling potentially profitable issues with pooled resources. He dabbled, yes, but most of the actual inventing was done by his employees.
Think smaller. Airtight seals on holes a few centimeters wide, through which wettened tools (Or tools with hydrophilic coatings) could pass without breaking the seal. Handy indeed for laboratory environments when you might want to poke your instruments at a sample while keeping it within an inert atmosphere or protecting it from dust or microbial contamination.
The researchers are mostly Japanese, and clearly english isn't their first language. The website is readable, but gramatically incorrect. I'm sure that they'll get the final article checked properly, but this is just a little public demonstration so a few minor errors from a second-language speaker are forgivable.
The Church of Scientology started using this method years ago. It's worked exactly as well as any other means to prevent the dissemination of secrets on the internet.
The no-school argument actually makes some sense. If a kid is going to die in a year, school really serves no purpose. Why not make it optional, and at least let him enjoy the time he has left more? It isn't as if he needs to study for a career.
Firstly, because it's different. Not better, just different... and different without better seems a lot like change for change's sake. There are already clear conventions for how desktop interfaces work, and unity defies them for no apparent benefit. Secondly, it feels awkward even once you are used to it. Searching takes time, and personally I find it awkward even just launching a terminal because of that second-or-two wait.
The old Gnome style worked. It worked well. Unity feels like just a gimmick.
I used to. Pre-Unity. Now I use Xubuntu.
If the user wishes to use a battery-intensive program, then that should be up to them to decide. They'll learn quickly enough. What if they decide to carry one of those battery-powered USB ports as a solution?
The PC I picked for comparison didn't come with a monitor. Nor does the Mac Mini. Thus a fair comparison. To compare an iMac fairly, I'd have to compare it with a PC which intigrated all components into a monitor of equal resolution - and that would be hard to find. One thing I really do like about Apple is their continuing dedication to high-resolution displays at a time when every other PC manufacturer seems to think nine hundred vertical pixels is good enough.
I called it 'entry level' because it's the cheapest computer that Apple sell.
Ok, let's try something else. How about something which owes nothing to Apple manufacturing like, say, a hard drive. One drive is much like another, really. Interchangeable, so long as the numbers match. So, how much does Apple charge for one of their drives with an Apple sticker on?
http://store.apple.com/uk/product/MC730ZM/A?n=internal&fnode=MTY1NDA0Nw&s=topSellers
£254, for a 7200 2TB 3.5". How much for a 7200 2TB 3.5" at ebuyer?
http://www.ebuyer.com/319641-barracuda-2tb-sata-3-5in-7200rpm-64mb-6gb-s-in-st2000dm001
£89.99.
Those are perfectly equivilent, interchangeable parts. There is no way the one purchased from Apple is any better than the one purchased from Ebuyer. And yet the Apple one is more than double the cost! How do you explain this? Apple don't even make the drive - it's just a perfectly ordinary PC component with a new sticker on it. The only possible way they could be charging so much is by screwing their customers over. I suspect this may be less about just making more profit than it is about trying not to cheapen their brand though.
That's really the foundation of China's booming manufacturing industry. As national business models go, it works very well. It does mean exploitation and pollution, but some people in the Chinese government must have decided that the economic benefits are worth it. They were probably right - without the forign investment in industry and the economic strength from exports, they might still be just another third-world country getting by on rice-farming and memories of the glory days when they could claim to be the greatest civilisation in the world.
I work at a school. Think lots of computers at a desk, all in a row. Every time we ban someone from internet access due to gaming/porn, we find out within a couple of days that they are back on using stolen credentials. Half the time they aren't even stolen, their friends hand over passwords willingly, but there is no way we can prove that.
I've had one almost-die, but that was due to spilling tea on it. I did discover that those Apple keyboards (at least the wireless ones) are really very hard to repair. Those keycaps do not come off without a fight.
But it takes a year to learn what to do if anything goes wrong in even the slightest way. I've ended up as the family tech-support - I long ago lost count of how many times I have been summoned because 'the internet is down' only to discover Mother had knocked the wireless on/off button or put the browser into offline mode, and we went through a Week of Hell when some wannabe hacker tried to break into her email account and triggered gmail's automatic lockout.
Because it greatly reduces the utility of the device. If Apple controls the whitelist, there are things that Apple won't let you do because it would be incompatible with maximising their profits. For example, they do not permit emulators in the app store. They also do not permit anything that duplicates a function already present in iOS, which is clearly bad for competition. If you want a voice interface, it's Siri or nothing.
I am strangely reminded of the one-wire bus used for low-power sensing.
The one-wire bus uses three wires.
Why the name? Well, one is supposed to be optional power, but in practice you won't get more than one sensor on the bus without it. And the other is ground which, I assume, doesn't count for some reason.
Let me see. The mac pro isn't a fair one to look at, being a high-end professional workstation, so how about something consumer. Say, the Mac Mini. that's £529 for an i5 dual-core 2.3GHz, 2GB ram, 500GB HD and Intel HD graphics. That's their entry-level desktop computer. Now, if I go to ebuyer... they don't actually have anything with only 2GB ram, so I'll have to get a 4GB system. But for £512 - slightly *less* than a mac mini - I can get an HP with 4GB ram, 500GB HD and a *quad* core 3.0GHz processor. It's twice the ram, more than twice the processor performance, and lower-cost. I could do even better, but then I'd have to go for a machine without a well-known brand, which wouldn't be fair. The only downside is that it's a bit larger, midi-tower, but the slightly larger size doesn't outweigh that the Mac Mini is more expensive than a PC with twice the processing speed and memory. So, whatever you may say about the quality of Apple hardware in their defense, it still remains substantially more expensive than the competition.
I'd compare the iMac, but not many PCs come built into the monitor.
Having used some, I must admit it is good-quality hardware. Just not such good quality that it's worth twice the cost of a similar-spec PC. I've only got a macbook because they were the only manufacturer left that use a decently high-resolution screen. A few others used to (Dell, I recall) but they no longer offer WUXGA+, and I wanted the vertical pixels.
The Time Lords blew a few stars up too, as it was the only way to generate the extreme high-energy conditions needed for their early experiments in temporal manipulation. The team responsible for the research was sensible enough to conduct their experiments far from anywhere inhabited, though perhaps they should have destroyed their doomsday machine when they were finished with it rather than just leave it lying around for the Daleks to steal.
One day we will find life around another star. But it will be microbial, and the population of mankind will let out a collective grumble and say it doesn't count.
A more serious problem is getting people to admit their own ignorance. Look at climate change, for example. Climatology is a very complicated field, just like most fields. It's hard enough for specialists, who spend their careers studying, to understand. Does the average layperson have any idea what is meant by a monte carlo model, or the implications of microclimate variation in dendrochronology, or methods for compensating for the urban heat island effect in weather monitoring, or the absorbtion spectra of atmospheric gasses? No. And yet many, maybe most of those laypeople are able to skim a couple of magazine articles or a political speech on the subject and gain confidence that they have evaluated the evidence and are just as qualified to pass judgement as any expert ever could be. So the real problem is getting people to admit their own ignorance, and that is no easy task. It goes against human nature.