Only if you're allowed to write an interpreter or compiler for the more powerful language in the less powerful one.
This is what has been called the "Turing Tarpit." In a formal logical sense, all turing complete languages are equivalently powerful. But that means that punching holes in a paper tape by hand is technically as powerful as a high level language. We have high level languages so that we don't have to twiddle ones and zeroes.
High level languages themselves differer in expressiveness. They can all accomplish the same tasks, but some languages make certain tasks a whole lot easier. For some language pairs, the only way to easily accomplish certain tasks in the less powerful language is to write what amounts to "an ad-hoc, informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of " the more powerful language.
As a consequence, there is no "basic" or "generic" list of programming tasks. Tasks that one has become accustomed to do in many languages are a non-issue in some other languages. "Design Patterns" in some languages don't exist in certain others because the language itself makes them unnecessary (see Google's director of search quality, and AI expert Peter Norvig's treatment of the subject especially this slide)
A site like Rosetta Code could only be useful for languages that are so similar that they essentially differ mostly in surface syntax. For languages much different than this their whole paradigms are different, and many of the tasks themselves are no longer the same.
There is no other way to protect unpopular views. The whole purpose of tenure is to allow scientists with new or minority ideas that are outside of the scientific/political/economic orthodoxy to continue to do research in spite of the fact that their work can't get wide publication. We make them prove that they are competent by meeting the extremely high standards of the tenure review process - getting tenure is no cake walk - then we give them the freedom to follow research avenues without regard to how popular that area of research is, and without fear that unconventional avenues or conclusions will cost them their job.
Part of the price we pay for this is that some people will be lazy. Academia as a whole feels that this is worth the risk because: 1. The tenure review process will screen out the overwhelming majority of the lazy people - you simply can't get tenure if you're lazy - it's too damn hard. 2. Carrying a few lazy professors is more than worth the benefit of having a faculty that is unafraid to voice the truth as they see it without fear of reprisal from administration, established researchers in their field, powerful alumni, government, etc. 3. Knowing what work will lead to something "useful" is tantamount to being able to predict the future. The idea that one can tell in advance where important breakthroughs will come from or where they will lead is a bean counter's fantasy. Therefore we have to trust that extremely competent scientists when allowed to follow their own chosen research paths without coercion will come up with important results. It's worked for us so far.
I am unique among my peers. I don't have a bunch of stuff, and live a plain life. It is something I wouldn't trade for anything. WHY? Because I am satisfied with what I have, and don't compare myself to the Jones next door.
And your uniqueness is why your solution is not a realistic one for whole national economies. You have the mental discipline to avoid what buddhists call "comparison thinking" but the overwhelming majority of people do not. TFA cites a survey showing that a majority of respondents would rather earn $100k/year while everyone else earns $80k/year than earn $110k/year while everyone else earns $200k/year. People do compare themselves to others, and maybe they are wise to do so. For many important things in life relative wealth matters. When health care resources are scarce the relatively wealthy win. Epidemic crisis? (bird flu, etc.) Who do you think is going to get a steady supply of medicine and doctor care for their kids, you or your wealthy countrymen?
With respect, the only really innovative feature of the iPhone is the multitouch screen - e.g., the pinch gesture for resizing photos. This will not be copied because it is patented, and it is hardware. It is easy to violate copyright because copyright violators are effectively invisible to law enforcement. It is much harder to violate hardware patents because hardware patent violators have to live somewhere and law enforcement can find them easily and shut them down.
If you read the interview you'll see that he also has a fairy story that predicts how Google will not be able to maintain their current practice of using cheap, custom hardware and will have to buy from big iron vendors (presumably sun of course).
It's as if he were interviewed in a sleep lab while he was having a really good dream.
Bad analogy - cash is fungible - if the bank takes your cash (by failing) insurance of various sorts will give you cash that is exactly the same. If an application/data service provider takes your company's data and sells it to a competitor it is now worth much less to you.
Data is unlike cash in that it gains value by being secret. Money doesn't become more valuable if I hide it from my competitors.
Opting into this model requires that large organizations with millions of dollars - sometimes even their whole business model - tied up in proprietary databases trust the service provider not to sell them out when an tempting offer presents itself (bad financial quarter for the service provider, lucrative offer from one of your competitors, etc.) The existence of agreements to the contrary is bad CYA thinking - when a competitor drives you out of business any such agreement with your app/data services provider at best will get you a court judgement which they may or may not be able to pay, and that only after a long court battle.
Finally, it also requires that you trust the service provider to provide adequate security - even if they don't act in bad faith, if they overlook something you lose in exactly the same way, only now it's due to industrial espionage.
actully, in anderson's perspex machine, a "trans turing" computer based on his nullity math, nullity is the halting instruction, so computation stops when a nullity is generated.
Not saying all of this is not just silliness, but that's how he defines things.
Having RTA as well as a number of papers on his site, nullity is simply a placeholder value for non-numbers - a symbol denoting "there are no real number solutions to this." He gives as a specific example, the number of seconds ago when you stopped beating your wife (in the usual formulation "when did you stop beating your wife?" asked of someone who never beat his wife).
By my reading nullity would be the union of i and 0/0, and lots of other things as well - a kind of notational grab bag. The only reason he still speaks of i in his writings is because the notation for this particular imaginary (not real) number already exists. By his definition of nullity it should subsume i as well.
I believe the reason this is a revolution in genetics is that the 98% figure for chimps and humans is now out the window. The idea, in part, is that we all vary in the number of copies of segments of our DNA - Copy Number Variants, or CNVs - and that having more or fewer copies of some nucleotide sequences result in significant phenotypic differences - for example people with more copies of one sequence might make more of a certain protein.
The result is that we may share 98% of our genes with chimps, but apart from the 2% that is just outright different, there are undoubtedly great differences in the number of copies of the sequences in the 98% that we share. The net result is that we are undoubtedly much more than 2% different from chimps.
To be even more pedantic, naive is properly spelled with a diaeresis. See the Wikipedia article.
A diaeresis causes what would otherwise be a single syllable diphthong to be read as two separate syllables (e.g., na-ive rather than rhyming with "knave" or "nave"). An umlaut is the German term for a diacritical mark which looks the same as a diaeresis, but has a completely different phonetic function. An umlaut causes the pronunciation of the vowel so marked to be shifted forward in the mouth. Unlike a diaeresis, an umlaut does not cause a vowel sound to become two separate syllables.
You bring up an interesting point. I think the best that ICANN can do is to have TLD specific conversion rules to and from Latin (an possibly other scripts). That is to say, each TLD (.es in this case) would define how it's unicode domain names would map to ascii/Latin. This way each nation could define their own domain name standard and others could enter these multi-byte characters directly or use the standard means of converting to UTF8/ascii/Latin specified by that country.
Alternatively, each individual domain name owner could specify a second ascii/Latin domain name (just as they use now) rather than relying on a TLD specific conversion standard.
In addition there's no attempt to put this in context. For example, Northern Europeans share more genes with Northeast Asian populations than Northeast Asian Populations do with Southeast Asian populations. Why? Because more human genetic material is used to encode adaptations to climate such as extreme cold (winter conditions in Europe and Northeast Asia) than is used to encode superficial things like an epicanthic eye fold. The fact that to outward apperances Northeast Asians look like Southeast Asians actually says relatively little about how closely related they are genetically.
Now to the gene in the article. It entered the H. sapiens population between 30 and 40k years ago. It is most prevalent in Europe. At that time Europe was in the grip of the last Ice Age. Wolf's Law tells us that cold climates should produce larger animals (since surface area increases more slowly than volume with increasing radius of a sphere for example, larger animals will lose body heat more slowly than smaller animals). Human beings lose 40% of their body heat through their heads. Larger heads are a great cold adaptation, which is most likely why Neanderthals had bigger average cranial capacities than modern humans.
So if this gene variant is simply an adaptation to cold climates it's no great surprise that it's less prevalent in Africa where any benefits it may confer due to larger brain size are offset by increased risk of brain damage due to heat stroke - in equatorial climates keeping the brain *cool* is the problem, not keeping it warm.
Human evolution is a complex problem in biology, genetics, geography, climate history, etc. Any change sweeping enough to have taken hold in 70% of the population would have to have conferred benefits across a huge swath of time, geography and climate. Human populations *always* interbreed. 40000 years is more than enough time for highly beneficial traits to move across whole continents several times over. The fact that it is less prevalent in Africa means that any benefits it may have either: A. don't apply in africa - for example, if it is merely an adaptation to cold, or B. are offset by *negative* consequences which are manifest in African geography, climate, etc.
The idea that genes are "beneficial" in some absolute sense is silly. They are always adaptive or maladaptive in relation to a particular environment.
1. actual greenhouse gas emissions had fallen since the 1970s. Unfortunately actual emissions have risen, not fallen, despite efforts on the part of environmentalists and some governments. The *rate of increase* may have declined, but decreasing your acceleration (the rate of increase) doesn't decrease your speed - your speed still increases, it just doesn't increase as rapidly as it did before. Greenhouse gas emissions have increased since the 1970s, not fallen. See this graph at wikipedia.
2. If the climate system responded immediately to changes in greenhouse gas emissions. Unfortunately it doesn't. If there's a significant lag, then we'll be feeling the climatic results of emissions made in the mid 20th c. only in this decade.
Greenland was named "green land" by Eric the Red in order to attract other settlers, not because it had the climate of Bermuda. It has always had a cold climate in winter and been continuously covered with a huge ass glacier since before humans ever set foot in northern europe.
The article speaks of the end of Archeology. This is just stupid. When written sources are available, the academic discipline that reconstructs a people's past is called History not Archeology. The only point the article could possibly have is that Wikipedia will become one among many historical sources. What a revelation! How does utter crap like this get posted as a Slashdot article. Wait don't answer that - I had momentarily forgotten that this is no longer a geek news site but rather a page view generator for advertisers.
Today, archaeologists are doing digs to understand how people lived only 150 years ago, making guesses based on the random bits and pieces of peoples' lives that they find In the future, that won't be necessary
Future? hell, it isn't necessary in the present since we have written records going back five thousand years in some parts of the world, and well over 150 years just about everywhere else. Hasn't this idiot heard of writing or history?
I would have to disagree strongly with this - the fact that you can look up Chewbacca, and the fact that you can look up what are essentially ads for companies, make Wikipedia a bit of a joke.
One of the most important functions of an encyclopedia is as a canon of important knowledge. When absolutely *anything* can be a Wikipedia article, then wikipedia has surrendered this important function. In other words, the free editability of Wikipedia has made it impossible for many less well informed readers to distinguish among important knowledge, advertisements, and essentially worthless trivia. There's a reason you won't find an article on Chewbacca in mainstream encyclopedia's - because this is trivia, not part of the universal canon of important human knowledge.
Information consists precisely in distinguishing signal from noise. In the case of Wikipedia the signal is important knowledge and the noise is ads and trivia. Those in control of Wikipedia either don't get this or can't (yet) enforce it.
From the paper: If, for example, one compares the US Department of Education's reported number of school-aged children diagnosed with autism in 1999-2000 with the similar figure for 2003-2004, one sees that over those four years the reported number has more than doubled.
Does anybody really think that the rates of autism really doubled in this time period. Isn't it far more likely that the rate of diagnosis simply went up. What would cause parents to become aware of this unusual condition called autism? Maybe they saw a segment about it on TV?
Isn't it simply possible that autism rates are correlated with TV watching because many americans get much of their information about the larger world by watching TV, and therefore the higher the rates of TV watching (determined in this study by looking at cable installation rates and precipitation rates - people watch more TV when it's rainy out ) mean higher rates of awareness of autism as a condition to ask your child's doctor about? So now, instead of being diagnosed as retarded, the child is diagnosed as autistic because the child's parents saw a segment about autism on cable TV on a rainy day.
Sometimes in arguments such as these the truth is not halfway between the two sides - sometimes one side is just wrong. In this case, the cross-platform side is just wrong. Why? Because the number of people who use many different applications all on one platform is a couple of orders of magnitude larger than the number of people who use the same application on more than one platform. This being the case, it is far more important for application GUIs to be consistent across applications on a single platform than it is for the GUI for any one application to be consistent *across* platforms.
In the big picture, this is why foss apps and oses still languish - foss advocates don't actually bother to count these numbers because they don't rely on large numbers of users actually *paying* for their product. Commercial software developers pay close attention to these numbers because they won't have anything to pay their mortgages and their kids' orthodontia bills with if they don't.
"Come on. The buy-burn-rip option is offensively inelegant and wasteful."
And the average lay user would give a crap about how "inelegant" this is why?
Again, you miss the point entirely. Apple's iTunes DRM is not targetted at alpha geeks but rather at the 95% of the market that simply doesn't give a crap about how "inelegant" it is to rip a CD backup of their purchased music. As far as they are concerned the process looks like this.
1. Pay Apple about $1.00 per song. 2. make a playlist of your most recently purchased music. 3. Click the giant "Burn" button 4. You now own a CD of the music you bought on line.
They simply don't care that this is inefficient, or that there is some minimal quality loss in the conversion from m4p to aiff. As far as they care they now have a CD of the music they bought on line which they can rip to mp3 or any format they like and use just as they would if they had bought a CD at a bricks and mortar store.
Nerds are not the market. Most of the time, nerds are not even the market leaders. The market leaders are cool people (notice that this is a nearly disjoint set wrt nerds) and cool people value convenience and style far above digital efficiency. The iPod and iTunes have plenty of convenience and style which is why they continue to be the market leaders.
You have this backwards: Apple makes much more money from selling iPods than it does from iTunes.
from
"But what's the chicken here and what's the egg? Is Apple selling iPods to sell music, for example, or selling music to sell iPods? It is most decidedly the latter. Based on a claimed 1.5 billion song sales at $0.99 each, Apple has made gross revenue from music sales of just under $1.5 billion since 2001. Yet in the same time period the company claims to have sold 60 million iPods, which represent (at an average $200 price) $12 BILLION, or EIGHT TIMES as much revenue."
Slashdot Mirror
... and is just as silly as it always has been. For a history of the ontological argument and it's debunking see Dawkins' _The God Delusion_.
Only if you're allowed to write an interpreter or compiler for the more powerful language in the less powerful one.
This is what has been called the "Turing Tarpit." In a formal logical sense, all turing complete languages are equivalently powerful. But that means that punching holes in a paper tape by hand is technically as powerful as a high level language. We have high level languages so that we don't have to twiddle ones and zeroes.
High level languages themselves differer in expressiveness. They can all accomplish the same tasks, but some languages make certain tasks a whole lot easier. For some language pairs, the only way to easily accomplish certain tasks in the less powerful language is to write what amounts to "an ad-hoc, informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of " the more powerful language.
As a consequence, there is no "basic" or "generic" list of programming tasks. Tasks that one has become accustomed to do in many languages are a non-issue in some other languages. "Design Patterns" in some languages don't exist in certain others because the language itself makes them unnecessary (see Google's director of search quality, and AI expert Peter Norvig's treatment of the subject especially this slide)
A site like Rosetta Code could only be useful for languages that are so similar that they essentially differ mostly in surface syntax. For languages much different than this their whole paradigms are different, and many of the tasks themselves are no longer the same.
There is no other way to protect unpopular views. The whole purpose of tenure is to allow scientists with new or minority ideas that are outside of the scientific/political/economic orthodoxy to continue to do research in spite of the fact that their work can't get wide publication. We make them prove that they are competent by meeting the extremely high standards of the tenure review process - getting tenure is no cake walk - then we give them the freedom to follow research avenues without regard to how popular that area of research is, and without fear that unconventional avenues or conclusions will cost them their job.
Part of the price we pay for this is that some people will be lazy. Academia as a whole feels that this is worth the risk because:
1. The tenure review process will screen out the overwhelming majority of the lazy people - you simply can't get tenure if you're lazy - it's too damn hard.
2. Carrying a few lazy professors is more than worth the benefit of having a faculty that is unafraid to voice the truth as they see it without fear of reprisal from administration, established researchers in their field, powerful alumni, government, etc.
3. Knowing what work will lead to something "useful" is tantamount to being able to predict the future. The idea that one can tell in advance where important breakthroughs will come from or where they will lead is a bean counter's fantasy. Therefore we have to trust that extremely competent scientists when allowed to follow their own chosen research paths without coercion will come up with important results. It's worked for us so far.
I am unique among my peers. I don't have a bunch of stuff, and live a plain life. It is something I wouldn't trade for anything. WHY? Because I am satisfied with what I have, and don't compare myself to the Jones next door.
And your uniqueness is why your solution is not a realistic one for whole national economies. You have the mental discipline to avoid what buddhists call "comparison thinking" but the overwhelming majority of people do not. TFA cites a survey showing that a majority of respondents would rather earn $100k/year while everyone else earns $80k/year than earn $110k/year while everyone else earns $200k/year. People do compare themselves to others, and maybe they are wise to do so. For many important things in life relative wealth matters. When health care resources are scarce the relatively wealthy win. Epidemic crisis? (bird flu, etc.) Who do you think is going to get a steady supply of medicine and doctor care for their kids, you or your wealthy countrymen?
With respect, the only really innovative feature of the iPhone is the multitouch screen - e.g., the pinch gesture for resizing photos. This will not be copied because it is patented, and it is hardware. It is easy to violate copyright because copyright violators are effectively invisible to law enforcement. It is much harder to violate hardware patents because hardware patent violators have to live somewhere and law enforcement can find them easily and shut them down.
Actually what he should have said is, given the current direction of the company, in the future there will be only 5 sun servers left globally.
If you read the interview you'll see that he also has a fairy story that predicts how Google will not be able to maintain their current practice of using cheap, custom hardware and will have to buy from big iron vendors (presumably sun of course).
It's as if he were interviewed in a sleep lab while he was having a really good dream.
Bad analogy - cash is fungible - if the bank takes your cash (by failing) insurance of various sorts will give you cash that is exactly the same. If an application/data service provider takes your company's data and sells it to a competitor it is now worth much less to you.
Data is unlike cash in that it gains value by being secret. Money doesn't become more valuable if I hide it from my competitors.
Opting into this model requires that large organizations with millions of dollars - sometimes even their whole business model - tied up in proprietary databases trust the service provider not to sell them out when an tempting offer presents itself (bad financial quarter for the service provider, lucrative offer from one of your competitors, etc.) The existence of agreements to the contrary is bad CYA thinking - when a competitor drives you out of business any such agreement with your app/data services provider at best will get you a court judgement which they may or may not be able to pay, and that only after a long court battle.
Finally, it also requires that you trust the service provider to provide adequate security - even if they don't act in bad faith, if they overlook something you lose in exactly the same way, only now it's due to industrial espionage.
actully, in anderson's perspex machine, a "trans turing" computer based on his nullity math, nullity is the halting instruction, so computation stops when a nullity is generated.
Not saying all of this is not just silliness, but that's how he defines things.
Having RTA as well as a number of papers on his site, nullity is simply a placeholder value for non-numbers - a symbol denoting "there are no real number solutions to this." He gives as a specific example, the number of seconds ago when you stopped beating your wife (in the usual formulation "when did you stop beating your wife?" asked of someone who never beat his wife).
By my reading nullity would be the union of i and 0/0, and lots of other things as well - a kind of notational grab bag. The only reason he still speaks of i in his writings is because the notation for this particular imaginary (not real) number already exists. By his definition of nullity it should subsume i as well.
I believe the reason this is a revolution in genetics is that the 98% figure for chimps and humans is now out the window. The idea, in part, is that we all vary in the number of copies of segments of our DNA - Copy Number Variants, or CNVs - and that having more or fewer copies of some nucleotide sequences result in significant phenotypic differences - for example people with more copies of one sequence might make more of a certain protein.
The result is that we may share 98% of our genes with chimps, but apart from the 2% that is just outright different, there are undoubtedly great differences in the number of copies of the sequences in the 98% that we share. The net result is that we are undoubtedly much more than 2% different from chimps.
To be even more pedantic, naive is properly spelled with a diaeresis. See the Wikipedia article.
A diaeresis causes what would otherwise be a single syllable diphthong to be read as two separate syllables (e.g., na-ive rather than rhyming with "knave" or "nave"). An umlaut is the German term for a diacritical mark which looks the same as a diaeresis, but has a completely different phonetic function. An umlaut causes the pronunciation of the vowel so marked to be shifted forward in the mouth. Unlike a diaeresis, an umlaut does not cause a vowel sound to become two separate syllables.
You bring up an interesting point. I think the best that ICANN can do is to have TLD specific conversion rules to and from Latin (an possibly other scripts). That is to say, each TLD (.es in this case) would define how it's unicode domain names would map to ascii/Latin. This way each nation could define their own domain name standard and others could enter these multi-byte characters directly or use the standard means of converting to UTF8/ascii/Latin specified by that country.
Alternatively, each individual domain name owner could specify a second ascii/Latin domain name (just as they use now) rather than relying on a TLD specific conversion standard.
In addition there's no attempt to put this in context. For example, Northern Europeans share more genes with Northeast Asian populations than Northeast Asian Populations do with Southeast Asian populations. Why? Because more human genetic material is used to encode adaptations to climate such as extreme cold (winter conditions in Europe and Northeast Asia) than is used to encode superficial things like an epicanthic eye fold. The fact that to outward apperances Northeast Asians look like Southeast Asians actually says relatively little about how closely related they are genetically.
Now to the gene in the article. It entered the H. sapiens population between 30 and 40k years ago. It is most prevalent in Europe. At that time Europe was in the grip of the last Ice Age. Wolf's Law tells us that cold climates should produce larger animals (since surface area increases more slowly than volume with increasing radius of a sphere for example, larger animals will lose body heat more slowly than smaller animals). Human beings lose 40% of their body heat through their heads. Larger heads are a great cold adaptation, which is most likely why Neanderthals had bigger average cranial capacities than modern humans.
So if this gene variant is simply an adaptation to cold climates it's no great surprise that it's less prevalent in Africa where any benefits it may confer due to larger brain size are offset by increased risk of brain damage due to heat stroke - in equatorial climates keeping the brain *cool* is the problem, not keeping it warm.
Human evolution is a complex problem in biology, genetics, geography, climate history, etc. Any change sweeping enough to have taken hold in 70% of the population would have to have conferred benefits across a huge swath of time, geography and climate. Human populations *always* interbreed. 40000 years is more than enough time for highly beneficial traits to move across whole continents several times over. The fact that it is less prevalent in Africa means that any benefits it may have either:
A. don't apply in africa - for example, if it is merely an adaptation to cold, or
B. are offset by *negative* consequences which are manifest in African geography, climate, etc.
The idea that genes are "beneficial" in some absolute sense is silly. They are always adaptive or maladaptive in relation to a particular environment.
That would be true if:
1. actual greenhouse gas emissions had fallen since the 1970s. Unfortunately actual emissions have risen, not fallen, despite efforts on the part of environmentalists and some governments. The *rate of increase* may have declined, but decreasing your acceleration (the rate of increase) doesn't decrease your speed - your speed still increases, it just doesn't increase as rapidly as it did before. Greenhouse gas emissions have increased since the 1970s, not fallen. See this graph at wikipedia.
2. If the climate system responded immediately to changes in greenhouse gas emissions. Unfortunately it doesn't. If there's a significant lag, then we'll be feeling the climatic results of emissions made in the mid 20th c. only in this decade.
Greenland was named "green land" by Eric the Red in order to attract other settlers, not because it had the climate of Bermuda. It has always had a cold climate in winter and been continuously covered with a huge ass glacier since before humans ever set foot in northern europe.
The article speaks of the end of Archeology. This is just stupid. When written sources are available, the academic discipline that reconstructs a people's past is called History not Archeology. The only point the article could possibly have is that Wikipedia will become one among many historical sources. What a revelation! How does utter crap like this get posted as a Slashdot article. Wait don't answer that - I had momentarily forgotten that this is no longer a geek news site but rather a page view generator for advertisers.
Today, archaeologists are doing digs to understand how people lived only 150 years ago, making guesses based on the random bits and pieces of peoples' lives that they find In the future, that won't be necessary
Future? hell, it isn't necessary in the present since we have written records going back five thousand years in some parts of the world, and well over 150 years just about everywhere else. Hasn't this idiot heard of writing or history?
I would have to disagree strongly with this - the fact that you can look up Chewbacca, and the fact that you can look up what are essentially ads for companies, make Wikipedia a bit of a joke.
One of the most important functions of an encyclopedia is as a canon of important knowledge. When absolutely *anything* can be a Wikipedia article, then wikipedia has surrendered this important function. In other words, the free editability of Wikipedia has made it impossible for many less well informed readers to distinguish among important knowledge, advertisements, and essentially worthless trivia. There's a reason you won't find an article on Chewbacca in mainstream encyclopedia's - because this is trivia, not part of the universal canon of important human knowledge.
Information consists precisely in distinguishing signal from noise. In the case of Wikipedia the signal is important knowledge and the noise is ads and trivia. Those in control of Wikipedia either don't get this or can't (yet) enforce it.
"baffoon" - is that a buffoonish baboon?
From the paper: If, for example, one compares the US Department of Education's reported number of school-aged
children diagnosed with autism in 1999-2000 with the similar figure for 2003-2004, one sees that
over those four years the reported number has more than doubled.
Does anybody really think that the rates of autism really doubled in this time period. Isn't it far more likely that the rate of diagnosis simply went up. What would cause parents to become aware of this unusual condition called autism? Maybe they saw a segment about it on TV?
Isn't it simply possible that autism rates are correlated with TV watching because many americans get much of their information about the larger world by watching TV, and therefore the higher the rates of TV watching (determined in this study by looking at cable installation rates and precipitation rates - people watch more TV when it's rainy out ) mean higher rates of awareness of autism as a condition to ask your child's doctor about? So now, instead of being diagnosed as retarded, the child is diagnosed as autistic because the child's parents saw a segment about autism on cable TV on a rainy day.
The result is lots of shovelware. That's bad.
Sometimes in arguments such as these the truth is not halfway between the two sides - sometimes one side is just wrong. In this case, the cross-platform side is just wrong. Why? Because the number of people who use many different applications all on one platform is a couple of orders of magnitude larger than the number of people who use the same application on more than one platform. This being the case, it is far more important for application GUIs to be consistent across applications on a single platform than it is for the GUI for any one application to be consistent *across* platforms.
In the big picture, this is why foss apps and oses still languish - foss advocates don't actually bother to count these numbers because they don't rely on large numbers of users actually *paying* for their product. Commercial software developers pay close attention to these numbers because they won't have anything to pay their mortgages and their kids' orthodontia bills with if they don't.
The difference between the two companies boils down to better leadership at Apple, better management at Apple, and better taste at Apple.
And according to Steve himself, it mostly boils down to better taste at Apple - see
this clip from Revenge of the Nerds.
"Come on. The buy-burn-rip option is offensively inelegant and wasteful."
And the average lay user would give a crap about how "inelegant" this is why?
Again, you miss the point entirely. Apple's iTunes DRM is not targetted at alpha geeks but rather at the 95% of the market that simply doesn't give a crap about how "inelegant" it is to rip a CD backup of their purchased music. As far as they are concerned the process looks like this.
1. Pay Apple about $1.00 per song.
2. make a playlist of your most recently purchased music.
3. Click the giant "Burn" button
4. You now own a CD of the music you bought on line.
They simply don't care that this is inefficient, or that there is some minimal quality loss in the conversion from m4p to aiff. As far as they care they now have a CD of the music they bought on line which they can rip to mp3 or any format they like and use just as they would if they had bought a CD at a bricks and mortar store.
Nerds are not the market. Most of the time, nerds are not even the market leaders. The market leaders are cool people (notice that this is a nearly disjoint set wrt nerds) and cool people value convenience and style far above digital efficiency. The iPod and iTunes have plenty of convenience and style which is why they continue to be the market leaders.
You have this backwards: Apple makes much more money from selling iPods than it does from iTunes.
from
"But what's the chicken here and what's the egg? Is Apple selling iPods to sell music, for example, or selling music to sell iPods? It is most decidedly the latter. Based on a claimed 1.5 billion song sales at $0.99 each, Apple has made gross revenue from music sales of just under $1.5 billion since 2001. Yet in the same time period the company claims to have sold 60 million iPods, which represent (at an average $200 price) $12 BILLION, or EIGHT TIMES as much revenue."