they only patented it to prevent other people from doing it.
Apple patented a system/mechanism for loaning and reselling digital content, not the act of loaning or reselling digital content which is what they'd have to do to prevent others from doing it. Your are free to patent another method to do this. If Apple had patented the loaning or reselling of objects that patent would be discredited faster than you can say 'conspiracy theory'. Humans have been loaning, renting and selling each other objects since somebody invented the stone hand-axe 1.6 million years ago. It's hard to get more prior art than that.
Google can rifle through your mail, harvest your personal data and sell it in an anonymized form (or so they claim) to advertisers.
WHERE have they ever claimed that? Google don't sell data to advertisers, anonymously or not. They show adverts to people. You might not like them showing adverts to you but that is not the same as selling anonymised data.
Define personal data. When Google monitors my browsing habtis, concludes that I like to motorbikes and blondes and then includes my anonymized ID in a set of users they tell Harley Davidson are likely to respond to an ad with a blond sitting on a bike then IMHO that constitutes Google selling HD a bit of what I regard as personal data. Notably that I like motorbikes and blondes. Still, perhaps I could have phrased that statement better. Google sells access to services that use your harvested personal data to allow advertisers to draw conclusions about you personal preferences and habits. I only use g-mail for insignficant crap so they don't really get much out of rifling through my g-mail account. So g-mail is at least something that I can opt out of but g-mail is not the only way Google harvest personal data. Google track you wherever you go on the net whether you like it or not through their ads, through google-analytics, and that dumb google+ button and god knows how else. I knew this was going on but it was only after I installed Ghostery that I really began to realise just how much of it is going on. Google has become like some creepy stalker or paparazi that watches your every move and is impossible to get rid of.
A Microsoft sponsored petition had 115,000 signatures! That's probably more people than are using Windows 8.
Of course, we should double check and make sure all of those signatures belong to actual living people, and not dead people. MS has a history of fake grass roots campaigns involving dead people. You should all listen to your international corporate overlords and be outraged at being scroogled, but ignore the fact that Microsoft reserves the right to examine all of the data on your sky drive.
It shouldn't suprise us that Microsoft products are so popular among the dead. After all, Balmer is one of the most brain-dead CEO's in the tech world. They used to be such a scrappy competitive company. Then the 1990's happened.
Asking Google to stop rifling through their e-mail is a perfectly reasonalbe request, as long as the people making that request understand that they will then either have to pay a subscription fee or that they will be told by Google to go someplace else where that feature is on offer. GMail is free because Google can rifle through your mail, harvest your personal data and sell it in an anonymized form (or so they claim) to advertisers. You either get an e-mail service where you can pay for privacy or you sacrifice your privacy to get e-mail for free. You can't have your cake and eat it too. There is no such thing as free lunch, even freetards pay a price for 'free stuff' it just isn't always money. It's amazing how hard it is for some people to understand that (general observation, not accusing number6x personally).
Perhaps regulatory capture would have required that the last line of defense against a meltdown, the backup diesel generators, should not have been in the basement of a plant located in a tsunami zone?
The earthquake exceeded the design limits for the plant - if they put the generators on towers or on the tops of buildings, they may have crashed to the ground when the quake hit. There's no guarantee that moving the generators higher would have made things better. In retrospect it's not hard to come up with a design that perfectly addresses all of the issues from the last disaster, the hard part is coming up with a design that addresses all of the issues of the next, unknown disaster.
They built that plant by the sea, in a country well known for tsunami disasters and made assumptions on how big tsunamis can get and where they can happen. Building the plant farther inland on higher ground would have at least left them with only the earthquakes to worry about, not both quakes and tsunamis.
Nuclear is not any more dangerous than much of the alternatives out there so this is NOT a bad thing. It's the market providing electrical power in the most cost efficient and timely manor possible, in a country that needs cheap and abundant power to recover.
Whether or not it is dangerous depends on many things including whether you build nuclear powerplants in tsunami prone areas and on top of major earthquake faultlines... both of which the Japanes have done. With all due respect to Japan's need for cheap and abundant energy I think critics of nuclear power do have a point if Japan's neighbors have to worry about radioactive fallout everytime that country is hit by an earthquake or a tsunami. I am not trying to bash the Japanese, there are serious issues with nuclear reactors in India and with Soviet era plants in Russia and Eastern Europe just to name a few. I've also got my doubts about the state of Chinese reactors and some of the older ones in the USA and W-Europe.
The Nomad in question had a form factor modelled on a CD player. The iPod was the form factor of a pack of cigarettes. Only one of these was a pocketable device.
Apple's UI? Palm Pilot style grid of icons? Outdated home button?
Maybe you mean multitouch? Yeah, that'll work great on a 1.5" display... How will use use Apple's very poorly designed suite of gestures? The laughably-bad four-finger swipe on a watch is going to take some impressive contortions! Will it come with sandpaper so users can file-down their fingers?
I'm just going to go ahead and guess that you haven't put much thought in to how the UI will actually work, but assumed that Apple would come up with something "magical" because of their (clearly undeserved) reputation when it comes to modern UI design.
Apple (accidentally) did something that is not too far removed from an iWatch already with the 6th Gen iPod nano which spawned a multitude of watch-strap accessories. If this rumoured iWatch is a more refined version of the 6th Gen iPod with a fusion of features from the devices the GP mentioned (hoping, hoping...) it would instantly get my interest. Especially if it came with a heart rate monitor as well and integrated wirelessly with an iPhone/iPad/Mac/PC. Not every/. reader is a potato chip eating, diet coke guzzling couch-potato who sits in his parent's basement in Wyoming and hates Apple to kill time between LAN parties and Star-Trek conventions.
Say what? Exactly what was totally new about the ipod?
I suppose you could say the design of the case was new, but MP3 players were out before the iPod.
Seeing as how I was looking for an MP3 player at the time I'd say that's simple. Firstly the iPod had a proper interface, not some crappy LCD screen where you could hardly see more than the first few letters of the track name or simply no display at all just a set of buttons. Secondly it had storage space, lots and lots and lots of storage space. Competing players that were generally available where I was living at the time could hardly handle more than a few CDs. With the iPod had 5 and 10GB you could rip your entire CD collection and store it on one device that fitted in your pocket. At the time there was nothing like the iPod. The iPod did for music players what the 707 did for commercial aviation. There were many airliners before the 707 in lots of different sizes, shapes and configurations, but the 707 redefined the concept so thoroughly and so successfully that all modern airliners look bear a distinct family resemblance to the 707 to this day.
What is the difference between a driver and a cyclist? You can't hear the driver yelling "ASSHOLE!!!" every 10 seconds as he weaves his way across busy city intersections.
Clearly you've never been to Chicago.
So Chicagoans are like New Yorkers and Parisians? Really nice, until you talk to them...
It doesn't suprise me that Mac games aren't doing that well. Why buy a Mac game when you can run Windows and buy Windows games?
If you RTFA there is an update at the bottom stating that according to his 'Lifetime direct sales" data Macs, Linux and Windows were at 11, 7 and 83% respectively meaning that Mac games out did Linux games in post purchase downloads. That data contrasts with that one weeks worth of Steam sales figures and interestingly enough it wasn't mentioned in the/. summary. Nobody buys a Mac, or installs Linux for gaming. The main interest of Mac and Linux are usually not gaming. It's programming, photo processing, graphics work, word processing, CS research, general nerding around with the OS, etc... or just a desire to use something other than windows... gaming is (usually) a secondary activity for Mac/Linux and game X not being available on Mac/Linux is not the end of the world for them. Those that are really serious about gaming dual boot.
god help you ever have to swap a drive in those things
mac mini = exercise in frustration as a non repairable consumer good
u1 server, flip leaver, swap done
MacMinis are super compact consumer grade PCs and/or hobbyist servers. They are not data centre grade machines built for ease of maintenance. Anybody who uses them where you should be using rack servers is asking for an extra portion of pain, don't expect 5 minute repair times. That being said I have had two MacMinis which I used as media centres, casual gaming platform (Civilisation and StarCraft are a bit more fun on a 40+ inch screen), home server (apache, LDAP, subversion etc...). The first MacMini I bought is one of the fist Intel machines to hit the market. I upgraded it, repaired the DVD drive, replaced the HD drive twice due to HD failure (replacement drives were always well worn units from my laptop). I finally retired it after six years of service during which it was hardly ever shut off because the DVD drive was getting spotty and I wanted bluetooth audio, thunderbolt and more processing power for games. Mind you the old girl probably still has a couple of years of life left in her. My new Mini has already had a bigger hard drive installed and it's not really that hard:
For the old models: Flip it over, get the cover off using a spatula, remove the DVD drive if there even is one, disconnect audio board and and pul the antenna out of it's socket, disconnect drive thermal sensor and drive connector, replace the drive.
For the new models: Unscrew the circular bottom, remove the fan, remove antenna plate, disconnect drive and IR sensor, remove some fastener screws, pull logic board out of back of machine like a drawer, replace drive.
It's also pretty obvious that Samsung is astroturfing social web sites. After all, their marketing budget is bigger than Apple & Sony combined.
.... [Citation needed]..?
Have no idea if Samsung is bribing/. posters to astroturf, seems like a waste of money since half the people on this forum would do that for free. He was right about Samsung's ad budget though, it appears to be bigger than Apple's, HP's, Dell's, Microsoft's and Coca Cola's budgets combined: http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-samsungs-massive-marketing-budget-2012-11.
The "consumer market" is not what drives Office sales and use, it's business sales and use.
Steve Balmer said the the iPhone would fail because enterprise wanted a phone with a keyboard [its quite famous]. I don't know if its true about enterprise adopting quickoffice, but the days of enterprise influencing your purchasing habits have long gone.
Like the GP pointed out, consumers don't buy MS Office (they pirate MS Office), it's companies and organisations who pay for MS Office and who finance its development. If Open/Libre office with a price tag of $0.00 running on Windows can't topple MS Office what hope does Quick Office on Chrome OS have?
If it weren't for the MS tie-in, and it was truly an open standard, wouldn't it make more sense than trying to string together HTML and JavaScript in clever ways to accomplish the same thing?
Why is "stringing together HTML and Javascript" a bad way of doing things? Really, for these UI-type things, most development models involve you creating "things", stringing them together with "actions" and (possibly) changing the way they look with a "skin". Why is using HTML to define the things, javscript to define the actions, and CSS to describe the skin, a bad idea? Is there a different language for one of those functions that you think is more appropriate to that particular domain for some reason?
In short HTML+JS+CSS are rapidly (relatively speaking) converging on the capabilities of Flash/Silverlight - and bringing some of their historical strengths (accessibility, separation of content and style, human-readable data formats, open standards, etc) to the table as well. I mean, doesn't Flash even now use a Javascript dialect for its scripting capabilities?
I have used 'Office' apps written in HTML+Javascript as well as poor-mans Visio substitutes written in Flash and while they were useful for casual note taking they quickly reached their limits once I wanted to do a bit more like add references, automatically indexed figures and captions, figure and tables indexes, tables of content, etc. With drawing programs written in Flash it was pretty much the same story plus only begin able to export your drawings in some strange Flash format or JPG/PNG/etc. wasn't exactly condusive to portability. While I'm sure these features can be added, it still seems that no matter how hard the developers try they never seem to be able to get the user experience consistent accross different browsers. Finally, while native apps can also be buggy and badly designed from a UI perspective with these HTML+Javascrip webapps you get an addititonal category of bugs and annoyances that are down to Javascript being used to try and make something inherently stateless like HTML into a statefull event driven app. This is even the case with Google Docs which is one of the better alternatives.
I have to think that the ability to do higher G turns results in better missile avoidance capability.
Modern thrust vectored missiles with state of the art sensors will always be able to outmaneuver a fighter, even an unmanned fighter, just like a LearJet will outmaneuver an Airbus 380 or a 747. If you try to outmaneuver an SA10 you will loose. There are modern missiles who have a PK factor of 0.9 against highly agile targets. Maneuvering has its place but it won't save your bacon. You are as good as dead without first class missile launch detectors, RWR sensors, an up-to-date threat library, superior ECM and good decoys/foxers. The best defense is of course to wreck the opposition's surveillance systems and destroy their aircraft and SAMs on the ground while they are blinded but that isn't always as easy as it was in the Gulf Wars, the feasibility and costliness of that approach depends on the potency of the opposition.
This is a ridiculous supposition. Are we suppose to believe that the criminals responsible for these thefts were lured into stealing by the flashy Apple gizmos? Or that these criminals would reject crime and find honest work if only New York could rid itself of Apple products?
This is just another example of politicians passing the blame to something else. In this case it's Apple, as blaming Apple for life's ills is in vogue at the moment.
Thieves steal valuable things that are easy to fence. If you want to know what people covet most, take a look at what is being stolen. End of story.
the American and British pilots are reduced to one-way communication, from the Brits to the Yanks.
That's okay; if the grammar and vocabularly of today's 20 and 30 year old Americans are any indication, our boys need to just shut the fuck up and listen.:p
British youth aren't exactly any better. Come to think of it, it would be interesting to see a typical N-American urbanite speaking some street dialect and a cockney speaking Londoner trying to come up with a tactical plan. Headline: "Afghan based British and US aircraft bomb Faroe Islands, Pentagon/MOD reluctant to comment"
Check out the margain for Norway, they don't smoke much as much pot as the Dutch but they are "socialist", "librul" and Aquavit drinkers. There must be something in the Aquavit over there or perhaps the Norwegians have found a way to stay on the the Ballmer Peak for extended periods of time?
Slashdot Mirror
they only patented it to prevent other people from doing it.
Apple patented a system/mechanism for loaning and reselling digital content, not the act of loaning or reselling digital content which is what they'd have to do to prevent others from doing it. Your are free to patent another method to do this. If Apple had patented the loaning or reselling of objects that patent would be discredited faster than you can say 'conspiracy theory'. Humans have been loaning, renting and selling each other objects since somebody invented the stone hand-axe 1.6 million years ago. It's hard to get more prior art than that.
Hopefully, they meant a TCP/IP connection, not "Internet" connected ;-)
Whatever it is I hope it's an encrypted connection. That would put them one step ahead of the military.
Ah, Clippy--the Jar Jar Binks of software.
I thought that was Steve Ballmer?
Google can rifle through your mail, harvest your personal data and sell it in an anonymized form (or so they claim) to advertisers.
WHERE have they ever claimed that? Google don't sell data to advertisers, anonymously or not. They show adverts to people. You might not like them showing adverts to you but that is not the same as selling anonymised data.
Define personal data. When Google monitors my browsing habtis, concludes that I like to motorbikes and blondes and then includes my anonymized ID in a set of users they tell Harley Davidson are likely to respond to an ad with a blond sitting on a bike then IMHO that constitutes Google selling HD a bit of what I regard as personal data. Notably that I like motorbikes and blondes. Still, perhaps I could have phrased that statement better. Google sells access to services that use your harvested personal data to allow advertisers to draw conclusions about you personal preferences and habits. I only use g-mail for insignficant crap so they don't really get much out of rifling through my g-mail account. So g-mail is at least something that I can opt out of but g-mail is not the only way Google harvest personal data. Google track you wherever you go on the net whether you like it or not through their ads, through google-analytics, and that dumb google+ button and god knows how else. I knew this was going on but it was only after I installed Ghostery that I really began to realise just how much of it is going on. Google has become like some creepy stalker or paparazi that watches your every move and is impossible to get rid of.
A Microsoft sponsored petition had 115,000 signatures! That's probably more people than are using Windows 8.
Of course, we should double check and make sure all of those signatures belong to actual living people, and not dead people. MS has a history of fake grass roots campaigns involving dead people. You should all listen to your international corporate overlords and be outraged at being scroogled, but ignore the fact that Microsoft reserves the right to examine all of the data on your sky drive.
It shouldn't suprise us that Microsoft products are so popular among the dead. After all, Balmer is one of the most brain-dead CEO's in the tech world. They used to be such a scrappy competitive company. Then the 1990's happened.
Asking Google to stop rifling through their e-mail is a perfectly reasonalbe request, as long as the people making that request understand that they will then either have to pay a subscription fee or that they will be told by Google to go someplace else where that feature is on offer. GMail is free because Google can rifle through your mail, harvest your personal data and sell it in an anonymized form (or so they claim) to advertisers. You either get an e-mail service where you can pay for privacy or you sacrifice your privacy to get e-mail for free. You can't have your cake and eat it too. There is no such thing as free lunch, even freetards pay a price for 'free stuff' it just isn't always money. It's amazing how hard it is for some people to understand that (general observation, not accusing number6x personally).
Perhaps regulatory capture would have required that the last line of defense against a meltdown, the backup diesel generators, should not have been in the basement of a plant located in a tsunami zone?
The earthquake exceeded the design limits for the plant - if they put the generators on towers or on the tops of buildings, they may have crashed to the ground when the quake hit. There's no guarantee that moving the generators higher would have made things better. In retrospect it's not hard to come up with a design that perfectly addresses all of the issues from the last disaster, the hard part is coming up with a design that addresses all of the issues of the next, unknown disaster.
They built that plant by the sea, in a country well known for tsunami disasters and made assumptions on how big tsunamis can get and where they can happen. Building the plant farther inland on higher ground would have at least left them with only the earthquakes to worry about, not both quakes and tsunamis.
Nuclear is not any more dangerous than much of the alternatives out there so this is NOT a bad thing. It's the market providing electrical power in the most cost efficient and timely manor possible, in a country that needs cheap and abundant power to recover.
Whether or not it is dangerous depends on many things including whether you build nuclear powerplants in tsunami prone areas and on top of major earthquake faultlines... both of which the Japanes have done. With all due respect to Japan's need for cheap and abundant energy I think critics of nuclear power do have a point if Japan's neighbors have to worry about radioactive fallout everytime that country is hit by an earthquake or a tsunami. I am not trying to bash the Japanese, there are serious issues with nuclear reactors in India and with Soviet era plants in Russia and Eastern Europe just to name a few. I've also got my doubts about the state of Chinese reactors and some of the older ones in the USA and W-Europe.
The Nomad in question had a form factor modelled on a CD player. The iPod was the form factor of a pack of cigarettes. Only one of these was a pocketable device.
Yeah, you can say that again, here they are side by side... if anybody wonders why the iPod outsold the Nomad they can take a look. http://www.davindersingh.ca/images/f/2005/2005_11_10/2.jpg
Apple's UI? Palm Pilot style grid of icons? Outdated home button?
Maybe you mean multitouch? Yeah, that'll work great on a 1.5" display... How will use use Apple's very poorly designed suite of gestures? The laughably-bad four-finger swipe on a watch is going to take some impressive contortions! Will it come with sandpaper so users can file-down their fingers?
I'm just going to go ahead and guess that you haven't put much thought in to how the UI will actually work, but assumed that Apple would come up with something "magical" because of their (clearly undeserved) reputation when it comes to modern UI design.
Apple (accidentally) did something that is not too far removed from an iWatch already with the 6th Gen iPod nano which spawned a multitude of watch-strap accessories. If this rumoured iWatch is a more refined version of the 6th Gen iPod with a fusion of features from the devices the GP mentioned (hoping, hoping...) it would instantly get my interest. Especially if it came with a heart rate monitor as well and integrated wirelessly with an iPhone/iPad/Mac/PC. Not every /. reader is a potato chip eating, diet coke guzzling couch-potato who sits in his parent's basement in Wyoming and hates Apple to kill time between LAN parties and Star-Trek conventions.
Say what? Exactly what was totally new about the ipod?
I suppose you could say the design of the case was new, but MP3 players were out before the iPod.
Seeing as how I was looking for an MP3 player at the time I'd say that's simple. Firstly the iPod had a proper interface, not some crappy LCD screen where you could hardly see more than the first few letters of the track name or simply no display at all just a set of buttons. Secondly it had storage space, lots and lots and lots of storage space. Competing players that were generally available where I was living at the time could hardly handle more than a few CDs. With the iPod had 5 and 10GB you could rip your entire CD collection and store it on one device that fitted in your pocket. At the time there was nothing like the iPod. The iPod did for music players what the 707 did for commercial aviation. There were many airliners before the 707 in lots of different sizes, shapes and configurations, but the 707 redefined the concept so thoroughly and so successfully that all modern airliners look bear a distinct family resemblance to the 707 to this day.
What is the difference between a driver and a cyclist? You can't hear the driver yelling "ASSHOLE!!!" every 10 seconds as he weaves his way across busy city intersections.
Clearly you've never been to Chicago.
So Chicagoans are like New Yorkers and Parisians? Really nice, until you talk to them...
It doesn't suprise me that Mac games aren't doing that well. Why buy a Mac game when you can run Windows and buy Windows games?
If you RTFA there is an update at the bottom stating that according to his 'Lifetime direct sales" data Macs, Linux and Windows were at 11, 7 and 83% respectively meaning that Mac games out did Linux games in post purchase downloads. That data contrasts with that one weeks worth of Steam sales figures and interestingly enough it wasn't mentioned in the /. summary. Nobody buys a Mac, or installs Linux for gaming. The main interest of Mac and Linux are usually not gaming. It's programming, photo processing, graphics work, word processing, CS research, general nerding around with the OS, etc... or just a desire to use something other than windows... gaming is (usually) a secondary activity for Mac/Linux and game X not being available on Mac/Linux is not the end of the world for them. Those that are really serious about gaming dual boot.
Don't know if this is comedy or troll or what, but OSX is Unix.
You sure about that? I thought they abandoned that. Also they never certified the BDSs. They were never Unix(tm) but were certainly unix.
Mountain Lion is a certified Unix: http://blog.opengroup.org/2012/07/25/apple-registers-mac-os-x-10-8-mountain-lion-to-the-unix-03-standard/
god help you ever have to swap a drive in those things
mac mini = exercise in frustration as a non repairable consumer good u1 server, flip leaver, swap done
MacMinis are super compact consumer grade PCs and/or hobbyist servers. They are not data centre grade machines built for ease of maintenance. Anybody who uses them where you should be using rack servers is asking for an extra portion of pain, don't expect 5 minute repair times. That being said I have had two MacMinis which I used as media centres, casual gaming platform (Civilisation and StarCraft are a bit more fun on a 40+ inch screen), home server (apache, LDAP, subversion etc...). The first MacMini I bought is one of the fist Intel machines to hit the market. I upgraded it, repaired the DVD drive, replaced the HD drive twice due to HD failure (replacement drives were always well worn units from my laptop). I finally retired it after six years of service during which it was hardly ever shut off because the DVD drive was getting spotty and I wanted bluetooth audio, thunderbolt and more processing power for games. Mind you the old girl probably still has a couple of years of life left in her. My new Mini has already had a bigger hard drive installed and it's not really that hard:
For the old models: Flip it over, get the cover off using a spatula, remove the DVD drive if there even is one, disconnect audio board and and pul the antenna out of it's socket, disconnect drive thermal sensor and drive connector, replace the drive.
For the new models: Unscrew the circular bottom, remove the fan, remove antenna plate, disconnect drive and IR sensor, remove some fastener screws, pull logic board out of back of machine like a drawer, replace drive.
It's also pretty obvious that Samsung is astroturfing social web sites. After all, their marketing budget is bigger than Apple & Sony combined.
.... [Citation needed] ..?
Have no idea if Samsung is bribing /. posters to astroturf, seems like a waste of money since half the people on this forum would do that for free. He was right about Samsung's ad budget though, it appears to be bigger than Apple's, HP's, Dell's, Microsoft's and Coca Cola's budgets combined: http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-samsungs-massive-marketing-budget-2012-11.
The "consumer market" is not what drives Office sales and use, it's business sales and use.
Steve Balmer said the the iPhone would fail because enterprise wanted a phone with a keyboard [its quite famous]. I don't know if its true about enterprise adopting quickoffice, but the days of enterprise influencing your purchasing habits have long gone.
Like the GP pointed out, consumers don't buy MS Office (they pirate MS Office), it's companies and organisations who pay for MS Office and who finance its development. If Open/Libre office with a price tag of $0.00 running on Windows can't topple MS Office what hope does Quick Office on Chrome OS have?
If it weren't for the MS tie-in, and it was truly an open standard, wouldn't it make more sense than trying to string together HTML and JavaScript in clever ways to accomplish the same thing?
Why is "stringing together HTML and Javascript" a bad way of doing things? Really, for these UI-type things, most development models involve you creating "things", stringing them together with "actions" and (possibly) changing the way they look with a "skin". Why is using HTML to define the things, javscript to define the actions, and CSS to describe the skin, a bad idea? Is there a different language for one of those functions that you think is more appropriate to that particular domain for some reason?
In short HTML+JS+CSS are rapidly (relatively speaking) converging on the capabilities of Flash/Silverlight - and bringing some of their historical strengths (accessibility, separation of content and style, human-readable data formats, open standards, etc) to the table as well. I mean, doesn't Flash even now use a Javascript dialect for its scripting capabilities?
I have used 'Office' apps written in HTML+Javascript as well as poor-mans Visio substitutes written in Flash and while they were useful for casual note taking they quickly reached their limits once I wanted to do a bit more like add references, automatically indexed figures and captions, figure and tables indexes, tables of content, etc. With drawing programs written in Flash it was pretty much the same story plus only begin able to export your drawings in some strange Flash format or JPG/PNG/etc. wasn't exactly condusive to portability. While I'm sure these features can be added, it still seems that no matter how hard the developers try they never seem to be able to get the user experience consistent accross different browsers. Finally, while native apps can also be buggy and badly designed from a UI perspective with these HTML+Javascrip webapps you get an addititonal category of bugs and annoyances that are down to Javascript being used to try and make something inherently stateless like HTML into a statefull event driven app. This is even the case with Google Docs which is one of the better alternatives.
I have to think that the ability to do higher G turns results in better missile avoidance capability.
Modern thrust vectored missiles with state of the art sensors will always be able to outmaneuver a fighter, even an unmanned fighter, just like a LearJet will outmaneuver an Airbus 380 or a 747. If you try to outmaneuver an SA10 you will loose. There are modern missiles who have a PK factor of 0.9 against highly agile targets. Maneuvering has its place but it won't save your bacon. You are as good as dead without first class missile launch detectors, RWR sensors, an up-to-date threat library, superior ECM and good decoys/foxers. The best defense is of course to wreck the opposition's surveillance systems and destroy their aircraft and SAMs on the ground while they are blinded but that isn't always as easy as it was in the Gulf Wars, the feasibility and costliness of that approach depends on the potency of the opposition.
This represents the innovation we've come to expect from HP -- none at all.
What do you expect? HP is the corporate equivalent of Wally.
We believe that the only remaining eco-system is the web...
Didn't we already know this? http://xkcd.com/934/
I don't know that, but then I'm one of those dinosaurs who doesn't do everything through a browser.
This is a ridiculous supposition. Are we suppose to believe that the criminals responsible for these thefts were lured into stealing by the flashy Apple gizmos? Or that these criminals would reject crime and find honest work if only New York could rid itself of Apple products?
This is just another example of politicians passing the blame to something else. In this case it's Apple, as blaming Apple for life's ills is in vogue at the moment.
Thieves steal valuable things that are easy to fence. If you want to know what people covet most, take a look at what is being stolen. End of story.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Native_Client
Then compile and run anything you want on your ChromeBook.
Why bother? If the specs are good enough buy it for the hardware and install Fedora ... or whatever your favourite distro may be.
Wouldn't a 'premium' notebook have a real OS?
This isn't a 'premium' notebook, with Chrome OS installed it isn't even really a notebook, it's a portable $1299 thin client.
the American and British pilots are reduced to one-way communication, from the Brits to the Yanks.
That's okay; if the grammar and vocabularly of today's 20 and 30 year old Americans are any indication, our boys need to just shut the fuck up and listen. :p
British youth aren't exactly any better. Come to think of it, it would be interesting to see a typical N-American urbanite speaking some street dialect and a cockney speaking Londoner trying to come up with a tactical plan. Headline: "Afghan based British and US aircraft bomb Faroe Islands, Pentagon/MOD reluctant to comment"
By quite a margin too
Check out the margain for Norway, they don't smoke much as much pot as the Dutch but they are "socialist", "librul" and Aquavit drinkers. There must be something in the Aquavit over there or perhaps the Norwegians have found a way to stay on the the Ballmer Peak for extended periods of time?