Seriously? I think it's obvious from the context. An extraterrestrial sentient being.
An absence of belief in the existence of aliens is not belief in the absence of aliens.
I don't think this point has any relevance, since "An absence of belief in the existence of aliens" cound be due to any of "ignorance", "agnosticism", or "atheism" - it does not distinguish between any of them.
So? I was merely responding to your point that "believing in non-existence requires a decision, while not believing in existence could be just ignorance" which I think is false.
However, "belief in the absence of aliens" is 'atheism'.
"Belief in the absence of god" is indeed atheism, but it doesn't go the other way: atheism isn't "belief in the absence of god." People who believe that god does not exist are atheists, but not all atheists believe that god does not exist. Many (most?) simply don't believe that god exists.
Imo, believing in non-existence requires a decision, while not believing in existence could be just ignorance.
I disagree. Consider this:
Do you believe in aliens?
If you haven't yet seen one, the obvious answer to that is "I don't know." So you don't believe in aliens, because you can't be sure that they exist. But at the same time, you obviously realize that there is a chance that aliens exist, so you also don't believe that aliens don't exist.
The obvious answer to "do you believe in aliens?" is "I don't believe that aliens exist, but I also don't believe that they don't exist."
A thoughtful decision has been made, and it's not a decision that was made out of ignorance, yet there is no belief in non-existence.
An absence of belief in the existence of aliens is not belief in the absence of aliens (or god, or fairies, or anything else).
Atheism is not an absence of belief at all since a decision has been made
These two things don't contradict each other. You can decide not to believe in god; that doesn't turn "not believing in existence" into "believing in non-existence."
The two things are different regardless of whether a decision has been made.
Also, start your own company and show what you can do,
Of course you won't be able to compete with the companies that do outsource their jobs since their prices are lower than yours.
They will be able to out-code you, but it's not like you have no advantages. For example, you can concentrate on specialized markets. If a company is big enough to outsource, you don't want to be in the same market. Target niches that aren't served by larger companies. Or write Mac software, Mac users are willing to spend money on well-designed software, and many larger companies don't care about the Mac market because it's too small.
You can out-design them. You're on your home turf. You know the language. You know the people who will use your software. The outsourcing company will write the code per the spec; you can write the code your customers actually want. Run usability test. Hire a graphics artist to make your application attractive.
There are many ways how you and two or three friends can compete with a few dozen indian programmers. Don't try to out-code them. Play to your own strengths.
You probably won't get rich, but it's certainly possible to make a good living writing code, even if you aren't living in India.
What anecdotes? I described a few existing, testable features that the iPhone has, which none of my previous phones have had.
are in contradiction to the pile of reports and complants about the Iphone.
See, now those are anecdotes. "The iPhone can connect to my Exchange system" is not an anecdote, it's an actually existing feature found in every iPhone running 2.0 or later. "The iPhone constantly drops my calls", however, is an anecdote. I'm not sure you understand the difference; I guess you just like to drown people you discuss with in jargon, hoping they would not notice.
Everything you say about your iphone I could say about my 02 XDA2.
And that's great for you. I'm not trying to take anything away from you. The difference between the iPhone and a Windows mobile phone is the user interface. If you prefer a stylus, go ahead and use a Windows mobile phone.
Apropos anecdotes, there are plenty of them of people who have huge issues with the XDA2:
I have had my O2 XDA 2 mobile phone for just over 18 months. I have not used it for the last 5 months. It is still in the repair centre! This time having the third main board replaced. From the day I purchased it, the unit has crashed repeatedly. Endless enquiries to the support hotline were of no assistance.
But as I said, as with the iPhone, these are anecdotes and not statistical data points.
You are missing the point!
That is certainly possible, but if so, you'll have to explain "the point" to me. GP said "Gotta be the most overhyped POS of the last 10 years", and I replied to that. So what was the real point, the one I missed?
If you are basing your vote solely on technological issues in a presidential election, you really need to get out more. There are much more important issues that the President should be considered about (economy, jobs, defense, etc).
A good economy and a good job market are directly related to whether technology is treated as a danger or as an opportunity.
I agree that backgorund processes are a trade-off. You get more flexibility for more performance issues and possibly a more complex user interface, if you want to allow for some way of quitting applications.
I do think, however, that background processes allow for so many interesting features they are worth the issues they cause.
Here's two ideas to get around some of these issues:
To tell the user what apps are running, show them with a blue halo in the iPhone's menu. When holding down on an icon for a few seconds, show a "quit" badge on running applications, in addition to the currently visible "delete" badge. That makes it immediately obvious which apps are running, and how to quit them
Not all of the apps I mentioned absolutely need to run in the background at all times, some could run regularly with a cron-like system. In addition to pure background apps, allow apps to install launchd-jobs. When an app tries to do this, show an alert screen to the user similar to the one shown when getting the GPS position. Have a Preference panel which shows active launchd jobs and how many resources they require on average
I don't know whether these are good ideas. Perhaps these solutions are shit. and they would have to be usability-tested. But I do think that there are reasonable ways of implementing features which allow for such applications.
Both have fancy methods of making the updates effective at next boot (Microsoft does this, I'm reasonably certain Apple does also).
Yeah, Mac OS X downloads the updates while the Mac is running, but only applies them after a reboot. Windows applies them while shutting down, I believe.
Apple's applications that come with the iPhone can run in the background and access the contents of the user's iPod
How about we focus more on functional software that helps us do useful things, rather than software that fucks around with our systems for the sake of it? (...) That's the only thing I really care about any platform, what are it's capabilities, what can it do, what DOES it do for me?
But the GP's two restrictions restrict the iPhone's capabilities.
Here's a few things useful the iPhone can't do for you, but could if it allowed background processes and access to the iTunes library:
A last.fm client which can scrobble (the official client is actually worse than the jailbroken client, thanks to Apple's restrictions)
A chat client which doesn't require you to give your name and password to a third party if you want to remain logged in
A LoJack for the iPhone (also useful if you tend to forget stuff at friends' places)
A social network-type application which automatically alerts you when you're near a friend
A music player which keeps playing your music even when you go use Safari or some other application
And a ton more. These are a few of the things the iPhone doesn't do for you as a result of Apple's restrictions. And none of them are "software that fucks around with our systems for the sake of it."
It's more than just hope, unfortunately. Apple needs competition, but from what I've seen so far, Android doesn't (yet) seem to be that competition. The UI seems disjointed, inconsistent and slow-ish, and the third-party applications I've seen so far use whatever ugly UI style the developers devised, ignoring what the main OS is doing. Worse, they are obviously made to run inside the emulator, with small buttons that can never work on a touch screen phone.
Part of the issue is probably that Android targets different types of handsets with different screens and input mechanisms, while the iPhone's OS is made for the iPhone's form factor. Part of it is probably that Android isn't finished yet. Part of it is that there's no interface guidelines, but perhaps Google will change its mind on this and produce some. So there's still hope.
But as of now, the people who are hoping are the ones who want Android to succeed, not the ones who want it to fail.
To be comparable with the jesus phone they would have to cripple the range and make it drop out regularly.
Gotta be the most overhyped POS of the last 10 years.
The iPhone is the best cell phone I've used in my entire life. I've hated using my cell phones since I first bought one. I've owned Nokias, a Treo, a few Symbian smart phones and others.
Every cell phone I've ever used sucked.
The iPhone is not perfect. It should be more open. Bluetooth should not be crippled. I want a fucking blinking LED so I can see when I got an SMS.
But it's still the best phone I've ever used, because it
Works
Is fast
Does not use superfluous eye candy like the shitty P990i which thought it would be a good idea to have menus roll into the screen, taking away half a second of my life each time I opened a fucking menu
Does not crash (except version 2.0:-)
Has a ton of well made, useful software (unlike that piece of shit from Palm with ten thousand ugly shit ass apps)
Syncs with my Mac, my PC, and our Exchange system without me having to go through hoops
Lets me connect to wifi networks without calling up a wizard which requires me to enter a shitload of information about the network - just the password if one is required
Does not require me to go through 17 steps to enter an appointment
Does not put the quick call list right below the "end call" button so I call somebody accidentally every time I want to end a call but the other person ended it half a second sooner
And a million other little and big things
In short, every other cell phone I've owned sucked due to the death of a thousand cuts. Every time I had to use it, it managed to annoy me in some little or big way. Every time I use the iPhone, I'm happy at how elegant most stuff on that phone is.
If you think it's "the most overhyped POS of the last 10 years" because it "drops out regularly" (do you actually own one? Mine has never dropped a call, but perhaps that's because Europe's cell phone networks don't suck donkey balls), you're probably missing the point.
Religion is dogmatic, science is not. Science only accepts the authority of reason and the scientific process. Religion is based on faith, science is based on questioning. They are fundamentally different. By that reasoning, religion does indeed have an inherent problem with science.
If you have a purely scientific mindset, you will eventually come to the conclusion that no religion has sufficient evidence to qualify as a probably theory.
I don't think there's even one single war in the history of mankind that has been started solely or predominantly over religion. Religion is a great way to get people to die for you. It's hardly ever a reason for actually starting a war.
I'm guessing one reason he's still at Nintendo is because he has total creative freedom and basically development control of the whole company. He's involved in most of Nintendo's project in some way, software or hardware. He can do whatever project he wants, no matter how outlandish, with all the resources he requires. Even if he were to go to Microsoft or Sony, he would never get that kind of control.
You still can't deny almost every single game [Miyamoto] comes up with stars Mario in some form or another.
Au contraire. The Nintendo fanboys are constantly complaining that Miyamoto has abandoned them because he has abandoned his old franchises such as Mario and Zelda. Miyamoto was only a producer on Galaxy, and he was barely involved in the development of New Super Mario Bros; I don't think he's made a Mario title in a decade or so.
That product is not "almost as good but not quite." It's the same old with a fresh coat of paint. That's not how you make something that can be compared to the iPhone.
Exactly. The ideas in Miyamoto's games sometimes aren't particularly inspired (collect carrots in a garden?) and often aren't really important to the core gameplay. What makes Miyamoto's games unique and universally great is the incredible polish and attention to detail, his ability to see what doesn't work and call out bad ideas, and the well thought out and extensively tested gameplay mechanics used in his games.
As always, it's not the idea, it's the execution.
I guess there could be some brand dilution if others come out before Nintendo, but then, it's Nintendo. People pay attention to them whether their ideas are new, or whether they have been done before (Kinetic Combat was before Wii Fit, Guitar Hero was before Wii Music, and so on).
If you're building a brick wall and your boss asks you to work for an extra 2 hours he probably get's an extra two hours worth or work. If he asks you to work an extra two hours everyday, and then asks you to come in on Saturday--eventually your production begins to drop. If fact, after a few weeks he may be paying you for an extra 20 or 30 hours a week while only getting 40 hours worth of production.
Yes, I was grossly simplifying. I think the correlation between time and result is more linear with manual labor than with "brain labor", but it's obviously not "twice the time results in twice the work done", either.
With manual labor, even if you're tired, you can get some amount of useful work done. With "brain labor", you actually start doing "negative work."
People are asked to work overtime when the perceived cost of hiring additional workers exceeds the overtime cost...or simply because additional workers aren't available.
I guess that is the motivation. My point is that it doesn't work, and I'm surprised that people don't realize that it doesn't work.
Slashdot Mirror
No, the obvious answer is, 'What is an alien?'
Seriously? I think it's obvious from the context. An extraterrestrial sentient being.
An absence of belief in the existence of aliens is not belief in the absence of aliens.
I don't think this point has any relevance, since "An absence of belief in the existence of aliens" cound be due to any of "ignorance", "agnosticism", or "atheism" - it does not distinguish between any of them.
So? I was merely responding to your point that "believing in non-existence requires a decision, while not believing in existence could be just ignorance" which I think is false.
However, "belief in the absence of aliens" is 'atheism'.
"Belief in the absence of god" is indeed atheism, but it doesn't go the other way: atheism isn't "belief in the absence of god." People who believe that god does not exist are atheists, but not all atheists believe that god does not exist. Many (most?) simply don't believe that god exists.
Have fun with your better things :-)
Imo, believing in non-existence requires a decision, while not believing in existence could be just ignorance.
I disagree. Consider this:
Do you believe in aliens?
If you haven't yet seen one, the obvious answer to that is "I don't know." So you don't believe in aliens, because you can't be sure that they exist. But at the same time, you obviously realize that there is a chance that aliens exist, so you also don't believe that aliens don't exist.
The obvious answer to "do you believe in aliens?" is "I don't believe that aliens exist, but I also don't believe that they don't exist."
A thoughtful decision has been made, and it's not a decision that was made out of ignorance, yet there is no belief in non-existence.
An absence of belief in the existence of aliens is not belief in the absence of aliens (or god, or fairies, or anything else).
Obviously, being able to easily search whether somebody has been to court is a privacy issue. Why am I supposed to be against anonymizing the data?
Atheism is not an absence of belief at all since a decision has been made
These two things don't contradict each other. You can decide not to believe in god; that doesn't turn "not believing in existence" into "believing in non-existence."
The two things are different regardless of whether a decision has been made.
Also, start your own company and show what you can do,
Of course you won't be able to compete with the companies that do outsource their jobs since their prices are lower than yours.
They will be able to out-code you, but it's not like you have no advantages. For example, you can concentrate on specialized markets. If a company is big enough to outsource, you don't want to be in the same market. Target niches that aren't served by larger companies. Or write Mac software, Mac users are willing to spend money on well-designed software, and many larger companies don't care about the Mac market because it's too small.
You can out-design them. You're on your home turf. You know the language. You know the people who will use your software. The outsourcing company will write the code per the spec; you can write the code your customers actually want. Run usability test. Hire a graphics artist to make your application attractive.
There are many ways how you and two or three friends can compete with a few dozen indian programmers. Don't try to out-code them. Play to your own strengths.
You probably won't get rich, but it's certainly possible to make a good living writing code, even if you aren't living in India.
There was no web in 1990 :-)
Yeh, your anecdotes
What anecdotes? I described a few existing, testable features that the iPhone has, which none of my previous phones have had.
are in contradiction to the pile of reports and complants about the Iphone.
See, now those are anecdotes. "The iPhone can connect to my Exchange system" is not an anecdote, it's an actually existing feature found in every iPhone running 2.0 or later. "The iPhone constantly drops my calls", however, is an anecdote. I'm not sure you understand the difference; I guess you just like to drown people you discuss with in jargon, hoping they would not notice.
Everything you say about your iphone I could say about my 02 XDA2.
And that's great for you. I'm not trying to take anything away from you. The difference between the iPhone and a Windows mobile phone is the user interface. If you prefer a stylus, go ahead and use a Windows mobile phone.
Apropos anecdotes, there are plenty of them of people who have huge issues with the XDA2:
I have had my O2 XDA 2 mobile phone for just over 18 months. I have not used it for the last 5 months. It is still in the repair centre! This time having the third main board replaced. From the day I purchased it, the unit has crashed repeatedly. Endless enquiries to the support hotline were of no assistance.
But as I said, as with the iPhone, these are anecdotes and not statistical data points.
You are missing the point!
That is certainly possible, but if so, you'll have to explain "the point" to me. GP said "Gotta be the most overhyped POS of the last 10 years", and I replied to that. So what was the real point, the one I missed?
Why is it not OK for a presidential candidate to admit that he doesn't know something?
Perhaps because it's his damn job to know these things? You know, elect the guy who knows what to do?
Why is it that so many Americans actually want their president to be dumb?
If you are basing your vote solely on technological issues in a presidential election, you really need to get out more. There are much more important issues that the President should be considered about (economy, jobs, defense, etc).
A good economy and a good job market are directly related to whether technology is treated as a danger or as an opportunity.
Well, McCain is older than Duke Nukem Forever's first leaked screenshot! Wait, he actually is. Damn, that's old!
I agree that backgorund processes are a trade-off. You get more flexibility for more performance issues and possibly a more complex user interface, if you want to allow for some way of quitting applications.
I do think, however, that background processes allow for so many interesting features they are worth the issues they cause.
Here's two ideas to get around some of these issues:
I don't know whether these are good ideas. Perhaps these solutions are shit. and they would have to be usability-tested. But I do think that there are reasonable ways of implementing features which allow for such applications.
Both have fancy methods of making the updates effective at next boot (Microsoft does this, I'm reasonably certain Apple does also).
Yeah, Mac OS X downloads the updates while the Mac is running, but only applies them after a reboot. Windows applies them while shutting down, I believe.
Factoring out some animation code is not innovation, sorry.
I don't think anyone claimed it was.
Really? As demonstrated by what?
I would guess GP referred to things like Core Animation.
Apple's applications that come with the iPhone can run in the background and access the contents of the user's iPod
How about we focus more on functional software that helps us do useful things, rather than software that fucks around with our systems for the sake of it? (...) That's the only thing I really care about any platform, what are it's capabilities, what can it do, what DOES it do for me?
But the GP's two restrictions restrict the iPhone's capabilities.
Here's a few things useful the iPhone can't do for you, but could if it allowed background processes and access to the iTunes library:
And a ton more. These are a few of the things the iPhone doesn't do for you as a result of Apple's restrictions. And none of them are "software that fucks around with our systems for the sake of it."
For the record, I own an iPhone.
It's more than just hope, unfortunately. Apple needs competition, but from what I've seen so far, Android doesn't (yet) seem to be that competition. The UI seems disjointed, inconsistent and slow-ish, and the third-party applications I've seen so far use whatever ugly UI style the developers devised, ignoring what the main OS is doing. Worse, they are obviously made to run inside the emulator, with small buttons that can never work on a touch screen phone.
Part of the issue is probably that Android targets different types of handsets with different screens and input mechanisms, while the iPhone's OS is made for the iPhone's form factor. Part of it is probably that Android isn't finished yet. Part of it is that there's no interface guidelines, but perhaps Google will change its mind on this and produce some. So there's still hope.
But as of now, the people who are hoping are the ones who want Android to succeed, not the ones who want it to fail.
Yeah, it has Mario's head on some stones in the jogging game. Anywhere else? That's the only one that comes to my mind right now...
To be comparable with the jesus phone they would have to cripple the range and make it drop out regularly.
Gotta be the most overhyped POS of the last 10 years.
The iPhone is the best cell phone I've used in my entire life. I've hated using my cell phones since I first bought one. I've owned Nokias, a Treo, a few Symbian smart phones and others.
Every cell phone I've ever used sucked.
The iPhone is not perfect. It should be more open. Bluetooth should not be crippled. I want a fucking blinking LED so I can see when I got an SMS.
But it's still the best phone I've ever used, because it
In short, every other cell phone I've owned sucked due to the death of a thousand cuts. Every time I had to use it, it managed to annoy me in some little or big way. Every time I use the iPhone, I'm happy at how elegant most stuff on that phone is.
If you think it's "the most overhyped POS of the last 10 years" because it "drops out regularly" (do you actually own one? Mine has never dropped a call, but perhaps that's because Europe's cell phone networks don't suck donkey balls), you're probably missing the point.
42. That's why.
Religion is dogmatic, science is not. Science only accepts the authority of reason and the scientific process. Religion is based on faith, science is based on questioning. They are fundamentally different. By that reasoning, religion does indeed have an inherent problem with science.
If you have a purely scientific mindset, you will eventually come to the conclusion that no religion has sufficient evidence to qualify as a probably theory.
I don't think there's even one single war in the history of mankind that has been started solely or predominantly over religion. Religion is a great way to get people to die for you. It's hardly ever a reason for actually starting a war.
And I say this as an atheist.
I'm guessing one reason he's still at Nintendo is because he has total creative freedom and basically development control of the whole company. He's involved in most of Nintendo's project in some way, software or hardware. He can do whatever project he wants, no matter how outlandish, with all the resources he requires. Even if he were to go to Microsoft or Sony, he would never get that kind of control.
You still can't deny almost every single game [Miyamoto] comes up with stars Mario in some form or another.
Au contraire. The Nintendo fanboys are constantly complaining that Miyamoto has abandoned them because he has abandoned his old franchises such as Mario and Zelda. Miyamoto was only a producer on Galaxy, and he was barely involved in the development of New Super Mario Bros; I don't think he's made a Mario title in a decade or so.
That product is not "almost as good but not quite." It's the same old with a fresh coat of paint. That's not how you make something that can be compared to the iPhone.
Exactly. The ideas in Miyamoto's games sometimes aren't particularly inspired (collect carrots in a garden?) and often aren't really important to the core gameplay. What makes Miyamoto's games unique and universally great is the incredible polish and attention to detail, his ability to see what doesn't work and call out bad ideas, and the well thought out and extensively tested gameplay mechanics used in his games.
As always, it's not the idea, it's the execution.
I guess there could be some brand dilution if others come out before Nintendo, but then, it's Nintendo. People pay attention to them whether their ideas are new, or whether they have been done before (Kinetic Combat was before Wii Fit, Guitar Hero was before Wii Music, and so on).
If you're building a brick wall and your boss asks you to work for an extra 2 hours he probably get's an extra two hours worth or work. If he asks you to work an extra two hours everyday, and then asks you to come in on Saturday--eventually your production begins to drop. If fact, after a few weeks he may be paying you for an extra 20 or 30 hours a week while only getting 40 hours worth of production.
Yes, I was grossly simplifying. I think the correlation between time and result is more linear with manual labor than with "brain labor", but it's obviously not "twice the time results in twice the work done", either.
With manual labor, even if you're tired, you can get some amount of useful work done. With "brain labor", you actually start doing "negative work."
People are asked to work overtime when the perceived cost of hiring additional workers exceeds the overtime cost...or simply because additional workers aren't available.
I guess that is the motivation. My point is that it doesn't work, and I'm surprised that people don't realize that it doesn't work.