I have yet to see a project where more than a handful of objects from older code would provide any benefit at all, and even those that did required subclassing them to add and/or modify over half of their existing functionality.
Have you never used a decent class library? Writing reusable classes requires a much more careful approach to design and implementation than writing classes for one time use, and most people can't afford to spend that kind of time. The power of reusability lies in the fact that I can go out and buy a library of useful classes and feel pretty good that the code therein has already been well tested, usually at much lower cost and higher quality than I could produce myself.
Whether it's building a user interface with PowerPlant, Cocoa, or MFC, or manipulating data with STL, the amount of code that I reuse far exceeds the amount that I write myself.
Perhaps depending on a company over which you have little control makes for a lousy business plan. Relying on Google to bring you customers isn't very different from sending out 250,000 e-mails (or snail mails) with the expectation that two or three per thousand might become customers.
If you instead offer a quality product or service and charge a decent price and do whatever else it might take to make your customers happy, you won't really care where your business is ranked by Google. Furthermore, if you please your customers and maintain a web site that's half useful, your Google rank will probably end up being pretty high.
Does it really less skill to assemble a car engine than to make a Java servlet that processes customer transactions?
Depends on how many you're making. Assembling an engine out of iron ore without a blueprint is surely more difficult. Bolting the head onto 200 engines each day as they pass by on their way to meet up with transmissions probably does require less skill (though I'd guess any of us would consider it harder work).
The very nature of software development is that you're always doing something different from what you've done before. It may not be "new," but if it were exactly the same then you'd just find the one you did before and copy it.
Is it possible to "SPAM back" someone by the means of/. effect?
I suppose you'd also favor chopping off someone's hand when they steal something?
An eye for an eye is not sound policy. We've got various laws against using your computer to create a nuisance for others, and they apply to us all, not just to spammers. I don't think I'd cry if any or all of the top ten spammers happened to be hit by a truck, but that doesn't mean I condone intentionally running them down.
This guy is finally getting at least some of what he deserves, which is a trial potentially followed by punishment under the law. If you can contribute evidence to support the charges against him, or bring new charges, then go for it. Otherwise, leave it be.
Re:What I think will be interesting is...
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Google v. Microsoft
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Well, what I think is interesting is the fact that Microsoft hasn't yet gotten into soft drinks. Several other companies are making big bucks selling sugar water... seems like an easy business model to copy, requires zero imagination, and a perfect fit for Microsoft's MO.
Agree entirely. I know a doc who got there by non-traditional means myself.
It is considerably harder in medicine, due to guild behavior, but I'm sure we'll see that develop in compsci over time as well
It comes and goes. You've got the guys in white lab coats that used to operate and control access to mainframes. You've got the certification programs from Novell, Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle, etc.
I wonder if you're assuming MDs are divinity when they're not.
Not at all. I'm asserting that software whatever-the-hell's are not divinity.
Truly, the barriers to entry in the fields of computer science and software development are much, much lower than they are in medicine.
And to bring this around to the original point, there's nothing insulting about a question along the lines of "Hey, I'd like to get into computer science... how should I start?"
Given the huge role that technology plays these days in medicine, I'd think that you might do very well to combine your interests in medicine and computer science. For one thing, it'd be a hell of a lot more interesting than tossing medicine altogether and becoming a database administrator or a mid-level systems analyst or whatever. No, you ought to learn enough computer science so that you can talk the talk and walk the walk, and then get involved in developing hardware and/or software that docs can really use to improve health care.
Radiology is perhaps the most obvious field where computers let docs see and do things that they never could before. I'd guess it's also probably the field where you'll find other docs with an interest in computers. You might do well to hang around with some of those folks and see where things are heading, and how they got started. But there are plenty of other fields as well... microbiology, chemistry, pharmacology, hospital IT systems, medical imaging, etc.
If you decide that a degree will really help you, then when the time comes you might consider taking a sabbatical from medicine and pursuing that degree full time. Or perhaps you'd do well to find a position at a university hospital where you could study CS as an employment perq.
Oh, please, get off your high horse. Medicine and computer science are apples and oranges in terms of the training required to enter the field. Extensive hands-on professional training is obviously needed to become a medical doctor, largely because every single case involves someone's health and well being. You have to do a fair amount of work to pick up a Ph.D in computer science, too, but the original poster is not necessarily interested in getting a Ph.D. Instead, he/she is simply interested in learning more on his/her own with an eye toward someday entering the field. What's wrong with that?
Furthermore, anyone who succeeds in medical school has probably taken at least some advanced math courses and has obviously developed pretty advanced analytical skills, not to mention excellent study habits.
Remember, software engineers may be engineers in the let's-find-the-most-efficient-solution sense, but they're not Engineers in the you-must-pass-a-civil-exam-and-become-licensed-so- that-we'll-know-who-to-blame-when-the-bridge-falls -down sense.
I wonder if you're confusing "insulting" with "threatening."
He should take his own advice and put two spaces after periods.
Not. Putting two spaces after a period makes sense if you're typing on a typewriter, or even on a word processor using a monospaced font. For the last twenty years, however, mainstream computers have been available with bitmapped displays which in turn facilitated the use of proportionally spaced typefaces. When using proportional spacing, there's absolutely no need to type two spaces after a period.
Pick up the nearest book or magazine and take a look inside. Is the space between a period and the first letter of the next sentence twice the width of the one between two words? No? I didn't think so.
Now, whether you put two spaces after a period or not is to some degree a matter of dogma. But given that it's never done in the world of typesetting and publishing, and that the notion developed to deal with lousy output coming from typewriters, I'd say tradition is on the side of not doing it. It looks silly and isn't any more readable, and I can't think of any other good reason to do it. That you learned to do it in junior high school typing class and can't get your fingers to stop is not a valid reason.
Tell me, does the Patent and Trademark Office ever deny a patent application?
It really doesn't surprise me at all that Microsoft is pulling this kind of shit. It has shown itself repeatedly to be absolutely ruthless in pursuit of power and money.
The real problem, IMO, is the Patent and Trademark Office and its propensity to grant all manner of patent applications, from the blatantly obvious to the outstandingly stupid. I'm sure that part of the problem is a lack of funding and an insufficient number of patent officials.
I'd like to see our next president reform our patent policy. We need a much more strict standard for patent approval, and the PTO should be able to fine applicants who file applications for trivial or obvious "inventions," the size of the fine being linked to the applicant's market capitalization. Raising the bar for patent approval and discouraging trivial applications should reduce the number of applications that the PTO has to process, thus making it possible for patent officials to take a serious and critical look at each application.
Reducing the number of patents granted would surely offend businesses, but in the long run I think it would work to their benefit as they would spend a lot less money on patent-related litigation. The only businesses that would truly suffer are the ones that make patent litigation their main business model, such as SCO.
It crosses the line into deception when the announcer says things that are intended to deceive the listeners. Referring to the weather, the announcer says "When do we get a break?" so that listeners will think that he's there in Boston. And it's downright lying when he says "it's 5 degrees outside," because it's NOT five degrees outside, it's 50. Indeed, the ONLY reason to say those things is to tell the listeners that he's in Boston.
"...The main thing is that his information does not deceive the public."
Oh, but it DOES deceive the public. Do most of the listeners believe that LaPierre is in Boston? If yes, then by definition they've been deceived. You can make all the excuses for it that you want. You can tell yourself that it doesn't really matter that you lie to the audience. But that doesn't change the fact that you're a lying liar.
What cost is he referring to here: "less expensive than the idemnification scheme"? What's the deal?
Well, if the end user chooses not to take SCO's deal, SCO effectively loses out on $699 (or whatever). So from SCO's perspective, Novell or IBM indemnification programs are more expensive than SCO licensing.
I know, the logic is flawed. But remember who we're dealing with here.
now just think what figuring out how to feed the astronaughts on a Jupitor trip with out packing the ship full of food would mean to world hunger
Learning to grow corn in a zero-g environment doesn't tell us much about how to distribute more effectively the food that we already produce. World hunger is not caused by an inability to grow enough food. It's caused by not getting food we have to people that need it. There's no such distribution problem on a space vehicle that might be all of a few hundred feet long.
So tell us, just what would figuring out how to feed the astronauts mean to world hunger? As far as I can see, it only means $17B that won't be spent on food distribution.
Too bad I just had to have the iBook G4 the second it was released!
What's the problem? If you've got to have the latest and greatest, then be willing to pay for an occasional upgrade. In this case, the upgrade fee is a mere $49, and that seems like a pretty good deal for GarageBand alone.
I can't help but think of the scene in Point of No Return where Harvey Keitel as Victor the Cleaner dispatches at least one person by stuffing him into a toilet and pouring in a few quarts of some strong chemcial.
Apple supports a very small select group of software and hardware.
Truly, you've got it backward. Apple supports plenty of players. The manufacturers of some of those players and many others, on the other hand, don't support Apple. The upshot is that you can't do as much with those players as you can with a player that supports AAC and FairPlay.
You can still use iTunes with your Rio or whatever, to play MP3's that you've ripped from your own CD collection. You just can't use it to play music you've purchased from the iTunes Music Store.
This is all pretty understandable, as those manufacturers had to take a guess at which way the online music market would go. It looks like they might have got it wrong this time, but as soon as it's clear that that's the case, they'll jump to build AAC/FairPlay compatible devices. You can be sure that Creative Labs and the rest are not going to stand around looking stupid for too long while Apple and HP eat their lunch.
What's all this? I thought Microsoft's official position was that Windows is about innovation. Maybe Mr. Fester didn't get that memo. Or perhaps Microsoft is planning once again to prove itself incapable of innovating its way out of a paper bag.
It's probably a lot easier than it sounds, or at least easier than Microsoft would admit.
Apple has historically provided OS-level support for Hebrew and other non-Roman languages. I can imagine that a word processor like Word might do its own text input and rendering for the document view, but the rest of Word and indeed the rest of Office should be able to take advantage easily of the support that Apple offers. This was certainly true for MacOS 8 and 9, and this page and my own experience lead me to believe that OS X's support for other languages is even better than it was in those older systems.
I suspect that MS is simply dragging its feet on implementing Hebrew in Office for Macintosh because a) it's more work for them and b) the alternative is Windows.
From Univac to the Connection Machine, computers have always had lights that show what they're doing. I'd love to see a PowerPC or Pentium processor built with this tech and a little window on the chip package so you could look inside and see what the chip is doing! Cheesy, I know, but it'd be a fun and retro nod to our computing heritage. I'm not sure where you'd put the heat sink, though...
Think of the improvements in the efficiency of electronics that would need to be made in order to make a moon base feasible
It seems to me that we've been doing a pretty good job advancing the state of the art in electronics even without planning a trip to Mars. Given all the problems associated with energy from fossil fuels, I think we've got all the incentive we need to continue rapid improvement in terms of reducing power consumption.
If the goal is to take advantage of technologies we'd need to develop in order to go to Mars, we could save a lot of time and money by simply developing those technologies. Sure, you can't always forsee the ways a technology might be repurposed for use here on Earth (Velcro, Tang, whatever), we could certainly identify difficult problems here on Earth that need solutions and focus on those.
And that leads us to another point. Sending a manned mission to Mars, or several such missions, will not only consume a lot of money, but also a lot of political and research effort. Do we really want our President and Congress to spend countless hours overseeing what by all accounts will be a huge national effort just because 'it would be really cool', when they could be spending that time finding ways to our reliance on foreign oil, creating jobs, and solving other important problems here at home?
Fair enough, but I never said we shouldn't spend money on space exploration. What I said, or at least strongly implied, is that we shouldn't spend $20 billion on a program to send a very small number of humans to Mars.
I agree that we should continue to spend money on space research and exploration, and that we should do that at the same time that we also spend money to solve some of the problems I listed. Frankly, I think the probes we've sent to land on Mars are a great idea and a very appropriate mode of research.
Sending a human to Mars, however, is really just not a very cost effective thing to do. Aside from say things like "Wow! It's really red here!" there's not so much a human can do that a machine operated remotely by a bunch of humans can't. And there are lots of things that a machine can do that a human can't, like travel light, survive relatively hard impacts, operate in an unbreathable atmosphere, etc.
Perhaps more importantly for the future of space exploration, robotic missions can fail miserably without necessarily impacting other missions or our overall space exploration budget much. Three or four frozen corpses floating around space or crashing into Mars at enormous cost, on the other hand, would be political poison for NASA.
The ideology behind this is "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need"
No, the ideology behind what I said is that I'd like for my children and yours to have sufficient clean water to drink, air to breath, and food to eat. I'd like not to be a part of the generation remembered for having done more damage to the environment and burdened our children with more debt than any other.
The post to which I responded said something along the lines of "Mars is the only way forward for humanity as a whole," and my response therefore catalogs just a few of the important problems which humanity currently faces. A burning need to set human foot on the red planet is, surprisingly, not one of them.
Going to Mars and taming space is the only way forward for humanity as a whole.
Humanity as a whole has problems a lot more serious and significant than finding new sources for iron oxide and colonizing a planet that lacks a breathable atmosphere. We'd be much better off, for example, pushing hard to find ways to make sure that the atmosphere of the planet we currently inhabit remains breathable.
Despite the fact that more than half of Earth is covered in water, we're currently unable to provide enough clean water for our population to drink.
Good news! We now have the technology to manipulate the climate of an entire planet! Bad news: we can only move it in one direction.
Future space travellers will be happy to learn that Earth can produce more food than its population requires, but they may be dismayed to realize that we haven't yet figured out how to distribute it to the Earthlings that need it, let alone a Martian colony.
Would humanity as a whole be better off sending a man to do a robot's work on Mars, or spending an additional $20 billion on reducing AIDS, TB, SARS, etc?
Would Americans be better off sending a man to Mars, or spending money to provide drugs for those that need them, and getting those who abuse drugs to stop?
Honestly, I think space exploration is a great thing, and something to which we should aspire. Spending a few $billion to do it makes sense. And yeah, it'd be a really, really cool thing to be able to visit Mars in person, even if 6 billion of us have to do it vicariously through a lucky two or three astronauts. But if you think that this is the most important thing we should be doing, or even that it's just very important, I think you should take a long look at the world around you.
Let me tell you what's really going on with this proposal. Through a series of tax cuts and spending increases, the current administration is doggedly pursuing a "starve the beast" strategy that will ultimately require a huge decrease in the size of the federal government, and a corresponding increase in the power of the states. Which, essentially, is what Republicans have been trying to accomplish for years. The more money the Bush administration commits us to spending over the next decade or two, the greater the pressure to reduce spending in other areas such as Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, education, and social services. And the cherry on top is that Bush gets to announce popular new spending programs to dupes like you who'll eat it up.
So yeah, by all means write to your representatives. But first think long and hard about what you want to tell them.
It will allow dozens or hundreds of people to inflict home made tunes, packed with beats right out of a shopping mall organist, on unsuspecting friends and neighbours.
That's exactly what people said about desktop publishing when Apple introduced the LaserWriter. "Oh no! Now the unwashed masses will be able to litter the world with bad typography." And frankly, it was true to some degree, and still is. On the flip side, the unwashed masses also took up the challenge and learned a little something about typography, and tools got better and easier to use, and the result is that documents of all stripes look a hell of a lot better today than they did before 1986 or so.
GarageBand will make making music accessible to a great many more people. That will surely result in some truly bad tunes, but it may also get a lot more people interested in making good music. And for the musicians out there, it'll be a great resource for practicing, playing, communicating, and even (gasp) recording on the cheap.
I've got a copy of Apple's 10-Q SEC filing for the three month period ending June 28, 2003 here in front of me. During that period, according to page 29, Apple shipped 190,000 iBooks.
According to the current frong page of "Black Cider", 1209 people have signed up for their alleged class action law suit. Presumably, most of those people are legitimately having serious hardware problems with an iBook that they bought during the last year.
Assuming that iPod sales don't vary wildly by season (and their 9-month number, 509,000, shows that this is a valid assumption), then we can guess that Apple shipped somewhere in the neighborhood of
4 * 190,000 = 760,000
iBooks in the last year. If you ask me, a failure rate of
1209 / 760,000 = 0.0000827
or 0.00827% speaks pretty darn well for Apple hardware reliability.
Yes, surely there are plenty of people out there having problems who haven't even heard of this law suit. By the same token, there are surely plenty of problems that Apple has resolved amicably. Therefore, the number above isn't really a failure rate, but instead the rate of seriously disgruntled iBook consumers.
If I were considering a major purchase and the salesperson supplied numbers showing me that there was a 99.99% chance that I'd be happy with the product, I think I'd reach for my credit card.
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I have yet to see a project where more than a handful of objects from older code would provide any benefit at all, and even those that did required subclassing them to add and/or modify over half of their existing functionality.
Have you never used a decent class library? Writing reusable classes requires a much more careful approach to design and implementation than writing classes for one time use, and most people can't afford to spend that kind of time. The power of reusability lies in the fact that I can go out and buy a library of useful classes and feel pretty good that the code therein has already been well tested, usually at much lower cost and higher quality than I could produce myself.
Whether it's building a user interface with PowerPlant, Cocoa, or MFC, or manipulating data with STL, the amount of code that I reuse far exceeds the amount that I write myself.
Perhaps depending on a company over which you have little control makes for a lousy business plan. Relying on Google to bring you customers isn't very different from sending out 250,000 e-mails (or snail mails) with the expectation that two or three per thousand might become customers.
If you instead offer a quality product or service and charge a decent price and do whatever else it might take to make your customers happy, you won't really care where your business is ranked by Google. Furthermore, if you please your customers and maintain a web site that's half useful, your Google rank will probably end up being pretty high.
Does it really less skill to assemble a car engine than to make a Java servlet that processes customer transactions?
Depends on how many you're making. Assembling an engine out of iron ore without a blueprint is surely more difficult. Bolting the head onto 200 engines each day as they pass by on their way to meet up with transmissions probably does require less skill (though I'd guess any of us would consider it harder work).
The very nature of software development is that you're always doing something different from what you've done before. It may not be "new," but if it were exactly the same then you'd just find the one you did before and copy it.
Is it possible to "SPAM back" someone by the means of /. effect?
I suppose you'd also favor chopping off someone's hand when they steal something?
An eye for an eye is not sound policy. We've got various laws against using your computer to create a nuisance for others, and they apply to us all, not just to spammers. I don't think I'd cry if any or all of the top ten spammers happened to be hit by a truck, but that doesn't mean I condone intentionally running them down.
This guy is finally getting at least some of what he deserves, which is a trial potentially followed by punishment under the law. If you can contribute evidence to support the charges against him, or bring new charges, then go for it. Otherwise, leave it be.
Well, what I think is interesting is the fact that Microsoft hasn't yet gotten into soft drinks. Several other companies are making big bucks selling sugar water... seems like an easy business model to copy, requires zero imagination, and a perfect fit for Microsoft's MO.
Agree entirely. I know a doc who got there by non-traditional means myself.
It is considerably harder in medicine, due to guild behavior, but I'm sure we'll see that develop in compsci over time as well
It comes and goes. You've got the guys in white lab coats that used to operate and control access to mainframes. You've got the certification programs from Novell, Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle, etc.
I wonder if you're assuming MDs are divinity when they're not.
Not at all. I'm asserting that software whatever-the-hell's are not divinity.
Truly, the barriers to entry in the fields of computer science and software development are much, much lower than they are in medicine.
And to bring this around to the original point, there's nothing insulting about a question along the lines of "Hey, I'd like to get into computer science... how should I start?"
Given the huge role that technology plays these days in medicine, I'd think that you might do very well to combine your interests in medicine and computer science. For one thing, it'd be a hell of a lot more interesting than tossing medicine altogether and becoming a database administrator or a mid-level systems analyst or whatever. No, you ought to learn enough computer science so that you can talk the talk and walk the walk, and then get involved in developing hardware and/or software that docs can really use to improve health care.
Radiology is perhaps the most obvious field where computers let docs see and do things that they never could before. I'd guess it's also probably the field where you'll find other docs with an interest in computers. You might do well to hang around with some of those folks and see where things are heading, and how they got started. But there are plenty of other fields as well... microbiology, chemistry, pharmacology, hospital IT systems, medical imaging, etc.
If you decide that a degree will really help you, then when the time comes you might consider taking a sabbatical from medicine and pursuing that degree full time. Or perhaps you'd do well to find a position at a university hospital where you could study CS as an employment perq.
Oh, please, get off your high horse. Medicine and computer science are apples and oranges in terms of the training required to enter the field. Extensive hands-on professional training is obviously needed to become a medical doctor, largely because every single case involves someone's health and well being. You have to do a fair amount of work to pick up a Ph.D in computer science, too, but the original poster is not necessarily interested in getting a Ph.D. Instead, he/she is simply interested in learning more on his/her own with an eye toward someday entering the field. What's wrong with that?
- that-we'll-know-who-to-blame-when-the-bridge-falls -down sense.
Furthermore, anyone who succeeds in medical school has probably taken at least some advanced math courses and has obviously developed pretty advanced analytical skills, not to mention excellent study habits.
Remember, software engineers may be engineers in the let's-find-the-most-efficient-solution sense, but they're not Engineers in the you-must-pass-a-civil-exam-and-become-licensed-so
I wonder if you're confusing "insulting" with "threatening."
He should take his own advice and put two spaces after periods.
Not. Putting two spaces after a period makes sense if you're typing on a typewriter, or even on a word processor using a monospaced font. For the last twenty years, however, mainstream computers have been available with bitmapped displays which in turn facilitated the use of proportionally spaced typefaces. When using proportional spacing, there's absolutely no need to type two spaces after a period.
Pick up the nearest book or magazine and take a look inside. Is the space between a period and the first letter of the next sentence twice the width of the one between two words? No? I didn't think so.
Now, whether you put two spaces after a period or not is to some degree a matter of dogma. But given that it's never done in the world of typesetting and publishing, and that the notion developed to deal with lousy output coming from typewriters, I'd say tradition is on the side of not doing it. It looks silly and isn't any more readable, and I can't think of any other good reason to do it. That you learned to do it in junior high school typing class and can't get your fingers to stop is not a valid reason.
Tell me, does the Patent and Trademark Office ever deny a patent application?
It really doesn't surprise me at all that Microsoft is pulling this kind of shit. It has shown itself repeatedly to be absolutely ruthless in pursuit of power and money.
The real problem, IMO, is the Patent and Trademark Office and its propensity to grant all manner of patent applications, from the blatantly obvious to the outstandingly stupid. I'm sure that part of the problem is a lack of funding and an insufficient number of patent officials.
I'd like to see our next president reform our patent policy. We need a much more strict standard for patent approval, and the PTO should be able to fine applicants who file applications for trivial or obvious "inventions," the size of the fine being linked to the applicant's market capitalization. Raising the bar for patent approval and discouraging trivial applications should reduce the number of applications that the PTO has to process, thus making it possible for patent officials to take a serious and critical look at each application.
Reducing the number of patents granted would surely offend businesses, but in the long run I think it would work to their benefit as they would spend a lot less money on patent-related litigation. The only businesses that would truly suffer are the ones that make patent litigation their main business model, such as SCO.
when does it cross the line into deception?
It crosses the line into deception when the announcer says things that are intended to deceive the listeners. Referring to the weather, the announcer says "When do we get a break?" so that listeners will think that he's there in Boston. And it's downright lying when he says "it's 5 degrees outside," because it's NOT five degrees outside, it's 50. Indeed, the ONLY reason to say those things is to tell the listeners that he's in Boston.
"...The main thing is that his information does not deceive the public."
Oh, but it DOES deceive the public. Do most of the listeners believe that LaPierre is in Boston? If yes, then by definition they've been deceived. You can make all the excuses for it that you want. You can tell yourself that it doesn't really matter that you lie to the audience. But that doesn't change the fact that you're a lying liar.
What cost is he referring to here: "less expensive than the idemnification scheme"? What's the deal?
Well, if the end user chooses not to take SCO's deal, SCO effectively loses out on $699 (or whatever). So from SCO's perspective, Novell or IBM indemnification programs are more expensive than SCO licensing.
I know, the logic is flawed. But remember who we're dealing with here.
now just think what figuring out how to feed the astronaughts on a Jupitor trip with out packing the ship full of food would mean to world hunger
Learning to grow corn in a zero-g environment doesn't tell us much about how to distribute more effectively the food that we already produce. World hunger is not caused by an inability to grow enough food. It's caused by not getting food we have to people that need it. There's no such distribution problem on a space vehicle that might be all of a few hundred feet long.
So tell us, just what would figuring out how to feed the astronauts mean to world hunger? As far as I can see, it only means $17B that won't be spent on food distribution.
Too bad I just had to have the iBook G4 the second it was released!
What's the problem? If you've got to have the latest and greatest, then be willing to pay for an occasional upgrade. In this case, the upgrade fee is a mere $49, and that seems like a pretty good deal for GarageBand alone.
I can't help but think of the scene in Point of No Return where Harvey Keitel as Victor the Cleaner dispatches at least one person by stuffing him into a toilet and pouring in a few quarts of some strong chemcial.
Apple supports a very small select group of software and hardware.
Truly, you've got it backward. Apple supports plenty of players. The manufacturers of some of those players and many others, on the other hand, don't support Apple. The upshot is that you can't do as much with those players as you can with a player that supports AAC and FairPlay.
You can still use iTunes with your Rio or whatever, to play MP3's that you've ripped from your own CD collection. You just can't use it to play music you've purchased from the iTunes Music Store.
This is all pretty understandable, as those manufacturers had to take a guess at which way the online music market would go. It looks like they might have got it wrong this time, but as soon as it's clear that that's the case, they'll jump to build AAC/FairPlay compatible devices. You can be sure that Creative Labs and the rest are not going to stand around looking stupid for too long while Apple and HP eat their lunch.
"Windows is about choice..."
What's all this? I thought Microsoft's official position was that Windows is about innovation. Maybe Mr. Fester didn't get that memo. Or perhaps Microsoft is planning once again to prove itself incapable of innovating its way out of a paper bag.
It's not as easy as it sounds.
It's probably a lot easier than it sounds, or at least easier than Microsoft would admit.
Apple has historically provided OS-level support for Hebrew and other non-Roman languages. I can imagine that a word processor like Word might do its own text input and rendering for the document view, but the rest of Word and indeed the rest of Office should be able to take advantage easily of the support that Apple offers. This was certainly true for MacOS 8 and 9, and this page and my own experience lead me to believe that OS X's support for other languages is even better than it was in those older systems.
I suspect that MS is simply dragging its feet on implementing Hebrew in Office for Macintosh because a) it's more work for them and b) the alternative is Windows.
From Univac to the Connection Machine, computers have always had lights that show what they're doing. I'd love to see a PowerPC or Pentium processor built with this tech and a little window on the chip package so you could look inside and see what the chip is doing! Cheesy, I know, but it'd be a fun and retro nod to our computing heritage. I'm not sure where you'd put the heat sink, though...
Think of the improvements in the efficiency of electronics that would need to be made in order to make a moon base feasible
It seems to me that we've been doing a pretty good job advancing the state of the art in electronics even without planning a trip to Mars. Given all the problems associated with energy from fossil fuels, I think we've got all the incentive we need to continue rapid improvement in terms of reducing power consumption.
If the goal is to take advantage of technologies we'd need to develop in order to go to Mars, we could save a lot of time and money by simply developing those technologies. Sure, you can't always forsee the ways a technology might be repurposed for use here on Earth (Velcro, Tang, whatever), we could certainly identify difficult problems here on Earth that need solutions and focus on those.
And that leads us to another point. Sending a manned mission to Mars, or several such missions, will not only consume a lot of money, but also a lot of political and research effort. Do we really want our President and Congress to spend countless hours overseeing what by all accounts will be a huge national effort just because 'it would be really cool', when they could be spending that time finding ways to our reliance on foreign oil, creating jobs, and solving other important problems here at home?
Fair enough, but I never said we shouldn't spend money on space exploration. What I said, or at least strongly implied, is that we shouldn't spend $20 billion on a program to send a very small number of humans to Mars.
I agree that we should continue to spend money on space research and exploration, and that we should do that at the same time that we also spend money to solve some of the problems I listed. Frankly, I think the probes we've sent to land on Mars are a great idea and a very appropriate mode of research.
Sending a human to Mars, however, is really just not a very cost effective thing to do. Aside from say things like "Wow! It's really red here!" there's not so much a human can do that a machine operated remotely by a bunch of humans can't. And there are lots of things that a machine can do that a human can't, like travel light, survive relatively hard impacts, operate in an unbreathable atmosphere, etc.
Perhaps more importantly for the future of space exploration, robotic missions can fail miserably without necessarily impacting other missions or our overall space exploration budget much. Three or four frozen corpses floating around space or crashing into Mars at enormous cost, on the other hand, would be political poison for NASA.
The ideology behind this is
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need"
No, the ideology behind what I said is that I'd like for my children and yours to have sufficient clean water to drink, air to breath, and food to eat. I'd like not to be a part of the generation remembered for having done more damage to the environment and burdened our children with more debt than any other.
The post to which I responded said something along the lines of "Mars is the only way forward for humanity as a whole," and my response therefore catalogs just a few of the important problems which humanity currently faces. A burning need to set human foot on the red planet is, surprisingly, not one of them.
Going to Mars and taming space is the only way forward for humanity as a whole.
Humanity as a whole has problems a lot more serious and significant than finding new sources for iron oxide and colonizing a planet that lacks a breathable atmosphere. We'd be much better off, for example, pushing hard to find ways to make sure that the atmosphere of the planet we currently inhabit remains breathable.
Despite the fact that more than half of Earth is covered in water, we're currently unable to provide enough clean water for our population to drink.
Good news! We now have the technology to manipulate the climate of an entire planet! Bad news: we can only move it in one direction.
Future space travellers will be happy to learn that Earth can produce more food than its population requires, but they may be dismayed to realize that we haven't yet figured out how to distribute it to the Earthlings that need it, let alone a Martian colony.
Would humanity as a whole be better off sending a man to do a robot's work on Mars, or spending an additional $20 billion on reducing AIDS, TB, SARS, etc?
Would Americans be better off sending a man to Mars, or spending money to provide drugs for those that need them, and getting those who abuse drugs to stop?
Honestly, I think space exploration is a great thing, and something to which we should aspire. Spending a few $billion to do it makes sense. And yeah, it'd be a really, really cool thing to be able to visit Mars in person, even if 6 billion of us have to do it vicariously through a lucky two or three astronauts. But if you think that this is the most important thing we should be doing, or even that it's just very important, I think you should take a long look at the world around you.
Let me tell you what's really going on with this proposal. Through a series of tax cuts and spending increases, the current administration is doggedly pursuing a "starve the beast" strategy that will ultimately require a huge decrease in the size of the federal government, and a corresponding increase in the power of the states. Which, essentially, is what Republicans have been trying to accomplish for years. The more money the Bush administration commits us to spending over the next decade or two, the greater the pressure to reduce spending in other areas such as Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, education, and social services. And the cherry on top is that Bush gets to announce popular new spending programs to dupes like you who'll eat it up.
So yeah, by all means write to your representatives. But first think long and hard about what you want to tell them.
It will allow dozens or hundreds of people to inflict home made tunes, packed with beats right out of a shopping mall organist, on unsuspecting friends and neighbours.
That's exactly what people said about desktop publishing when Apple introduced the LaserWriter. "Oh no! Now the unwashed masses will be able to litter the world with bad typography." And frankly, it was true to some degree, and still is. On the flip side, the unwashed masses also took up the challenge and learned a little something about typography, and tools got better and easier to use, and the result is that documents of all stripes look a hell of a lot better today than they did before 1986 or so.
GarageBand will make making music accessible to a great many more people. That will surely result in some truly bad tunes, but it may also get a lot more people interested in making good music. And for the musicians out there, it'll be a great resource for practicing, playing, communicating, and even (gasp) recording on the cheap.
In other words, don't be an elitist prick.
I've got a copy of Apple's 10-Q SEC filing for the three month period ending June 28, 2003 here in front of me. During that period, according to page 29, Apple shipped 190,000 iBooks.
According to the current frong page of "Black Cider", 1209 people have signed up for their alleged class action law suit. Presumably, most of those people are legitimately having serious hardware problems with an iBook that they bought during the last year.
Assuming that iPod sales don't vary wildly by season (and their 9-month number, 509,000, shows that this is a valid assumption), then we can guess that Apple shipped somewhere in the neighborhood of
4 * 190,000 = 760,000
iBooks in the last year. If you ask me, a failure rate of
1209 / 760,000 = 0.0000827
or 0.00827% speaks pretty darn well for Apple hardware reliability.
Yes, surely there are plenty of people out there having problems who haven't even heard of this law suit. By the same token, there are surely plenty of problems that Apple has resolved amicably. Therefore, the number above isn't really a failure rate, but instead the rate of seriously disgruntled iBook consumers.
If I were considering a major purchase and the salesperson supplied numbers showing me that there was a 99.99% chance that I'd be happy with the product, I think I'd reach for my credit card.