There is a marked difference in how psychiatry and psychology see mental illnesses, epistemologically speaking. This leads to how each area decides to best handle and offer potential solutions to the client's problem. It also shapes and defines the training curriculum for both areas, whereby psychiatry spends much more time on the psychopharmacological and biological perspectives than studying psychotherapy interventions. That does not mean there aren't psychiatrists who do not employ some form of psychotherapy, but they are not as common as you think.
There's a base assumption at play here that makes the addressing the issue at hand much more murkier than it should be.
Psychiatry sees all mental health problems as, in root, organic in nature. In other words, there is a chemical imbalance, a brain trauma, or a genetic component that creates the symptoms. These mental health issues can be seen as "cured" through medical regimes, but, many other illnesses, considered under remission, since a chemical imbalance caused by a genetic component cannot be "cured". The DSM (V is the latest incarnation) uses symptomatic observations as base criteria - not necessarily biological markers, but medical therapy is based on biomarkers (for example, a regulation in serotonin uptake). While this is a gross oversimplification of the matter, it paints a general picture of what happens with the organic position of mental illnesses. In a very simple word, psychiatry views mental illnesses as a nature problem.
Psychology, on the other hand, does not see all "mental illnesses" (as defined in the DSM) as organic in nature. As swillden mentioned, psychotherapy (of which there are many intervention methods) assist in managing the situation. Much of it takes root in mindfulness - not only in a social perspective, but also a reframing and re-internalization of current and past events. Others might take a family based approach, not only in dealing with the specific issues the primary client is dealing with, but also how their immediate social structure responds to their condition. CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) *might* go a step further and integrate neuroscience to determine if there is a biological component to their client's condition (but this tendency is still far and few between, considering the cost, the protocols required, and the length of time). Depending of the epistemological perspective of psychology, psychologists don't "cure", because the client isn't sick, they are maladjusted (through previous rationalizations or emotional internalizations of events and situations). Using a similar oversimplification, psychology sees many mental illnesses (note: not all) as a nurture problem (a learning/behavioral problem that has both an individual and social/cultural component).
There is a grey point in between these two, apparently competing points of view, which come up often in these discussions. What happens with schizophrenia? Or with a catatonic patient? A medical regime may assist in managing the symptoms, but without some measure of psychotherapy, the person will have a much harder time dealing with their inner situation. I doubt that something like psychoanalysis (or tools from psychodynamics) will work well, but perhaps a cognitive behavioral intervention might have a better success rate. Or even some of the tools from the Humanistic school of thought can help.
Android has 80% of the market because it's on everything. It's a reduced cost alternative for handset manufacturers that no longer have to develop and maintain their own OS (or pay for someone else's OS and wrap an interface around it). In "emerging markets", it's on phones that are practically given away with even pre-paid SIMs. Those lower end markets have very few options that the regional operators carry, and they make up a considerable chunk of that 80%. So let's not confuse ease of implementation for the handset manufacturer and/or carrier to that of consumer choice.
What Intel and AMD don't tell you, however, is that while they shrink die size and increase performance (and increase performance != increase in GHz), they turn around and tell system manufacturers that the TPD is lower. For example, the 5300 Xeon family from Intel topped out at a 120w for most bins (there were a few 150w pieces at the end) and their thermal design was 60c. The 5400 Xeon family might use 120w top bin, 80w on the average bins - however, they lowered the TPD to 55c, meaning the system makers had to turn around and invest in different cooling strategies - meaning part of that savings in CPU draw came back as cooling costs for fans or specialized heatsinks (like the vapor-chamber heatsinks on certain blades, where this game is much more important).
Gut feeling: even though you might see a 20% - 25% drop in power draw from one family to the next, you real gain is probably more in the 10% - 15%. No numbers to back this up, just my gut feeling from doing consulting with a large number of clients.
Of course, those numbers are assuming you're running the system at it's top speed, there are tools out there that allow you simulate SpeedStep (to put it in words) on server CPUs, which lack that. If you adopt a power regulator like that, which can dial down the GHz rating on a server CPU by varying it's voltage, for all the servers that run applications that are seldom used after hours, you'll save a buttload (yes, that's a technical term) of cash in power costs, you'll be able to dial down your A/C at night as well, and be more green.
Personally, I was a fan of Compaq's m300. It was a subnotebook, about 12 inches with a MEU (media expansion unit) that doubled as a docking station. The last gen I used was a 500MHz with 1GB of RAM. The 9cell (i think it was 9-cell) battery would give me about 6 or so hours on full brightness. The MEU (which is the size of the notebook and just as thick - so instead of a 1" thick machine, you'd have one about 2.5") you could put a CD-ROM/DVD-ROM and an extra multibay battery - giving you another 2 hours or so.
I used one from 2001 to about 2004 as my primary machine, had no issues and the entire laptop was a magnesium alloy, so it could take a beating if need be.
You can still get them on ebay for under 200 bucks
apple is not just a hardware company. i don't think jobs has said that in the last 4 years of keynotes and analyst calls i've been listening to. apple's strategy is clear: they're a media distribution channel that sells a "complete" (complete here is a relative term) ecosystem to enjoy that media. media is not only purchased from them, but also created by you and others. that media may or may not have a cost. obviously, the media that does have a cost and comes from apple helps their bottom line, but that is in addition to the ecosystem and could be considered gravy. the company's strategy is to maintain that ecosystem within a reasonable support cost for them. their demographics are pretty much clear as well. if you don't fall within those demographics, you have an entire industry to choose from - hardware-wise, software-wise, operating system-wise, gadget-wise. if you are, then you evaluate the pro's and con's of their decision of how they have decided to maintain that ecosystem - and if it works for you, you go out and buy from apple whatever you're looking at.
while the official SDK is limited and apple is the gatekeeper, they do not have all the keys. we're speculating that Installer.app will not work with the 2.0 firmware. we don't know if it will. if it does, then you have two SDKs to code to. the official SDK, using wrappers instead of the direct APIs with the advantage that you can charge for the application (remuneration is important to some software developers) or you can choose to use the unofficial SDK and use the Installer.app/PXL distribution method and rely on donations for renumeration, if you're into that type of thing. based on that decision is what your development platform will be. you can either use a mac with the official SDK or not if you're using the unofficial SDK.
i own an iphone. i own 3 macs and an xserve, however, that does not mean that i agree with everything that apple does. it's a choice. the iphone, in my opinion, is better than the last two motorola phones i've had. blackberry's are not an option, since my company will not open any new accounts with RIM, so the iphone does what i need it to do. it's good enough. are there better phones out there? perhaps and most likely, depending on the need of each user. but when you design a product, you look at your target market and decide if the feature set is "good enough" or "superior" to what that target demographic will use/need/require. once you have that balance, you take the risk and see how the product performs.
I love OSS as much as the next guy, but I have - to date - no idea what the problem (other than annoyances, like the UAC) is with Vista. I have a mac, a linux box (with ubuntu) and the vista box, this last one just for games. it's a Q6400, 4GB of RAM, and a nvidia 8800GTS, home rolled, running vista x64. i run: fallout 2, stalker, world of warcraft, dawn of war, dawn of war: winter assault, dawn of war: burning crusade, unreal tournament 3, unreal tournament 2004, quake 3 arena, tabula rasa, hellgate:london , civilization 4 and civilization 4 beyond the sword, oblivion, bioshock, defcon, call of duty 2 and call of duty 4 deus ex, and deus ex: invisible war. none of these games have presented a real problem on the platform - they're all about as rock solid as can be. the only times civ 4: BTS has crashed has been due to buggy mods - not to an OS problem. i really can't complain about vista x64 as a gaming box - i'm sure i could probably get a bit more of performance out of XP, but it wouldn't address all 4GB, which has been important in a few occasions.
To be historically accurate, as you put it, with what historians believe, you'd have to discriminate everyone but white male homosexuals. There is strong evidence in his plays, especially Hamlet, to name one clear example, of his alleged sexual preference.
in that sense would you be discriminating based on race or sexual orientation? it can be argued that you are - as much as you can argue that you are simply following historical facts and evidence of who shakespeare was. it's a question of perception.
a possible interpretation of what you'd be required to say, based in this hypothetical case, would be to reject the candidate based on other merits. for example, you may use the excuse that the candidate does not portray the role as you, as director, envision. this would be unverifiable in any case, but you must be tactful about how you reject the potential actor. if you come out and say: no, you can't have the lead role of william shakespeare because you're black and not gay - that would be a blatant case of discrimination.
However, this is a very specific example and one that cannot be generalized to the rest of the industries. discrimination based on race in almost any industry is not only illegal, but also bigotry. potential employees who posses similar skill sets and are competent to execute the job they are being hired for, should be considered without regard to race, gender, marital status, creed, sexual orientation or political preference. your concern as employer is production output and their history of employment. what they do with their private lives, unless it impacts their production, places other employees or other resources of the company at stake, or severely damages the reputation of the company, are completely not of your concern, as employer.
RPG, by definition, is a well-thought out story-line. Remember the paper-and-pencil days of D&D or Shadowrun? What made those games fun? The story line presented by the GM/DM, especially when it was a home grown epic. A poster above mentioned Oblivion - which is an art form unto itself, but the game is daunting to most. RPG players look for replayability depending on class, how much you can alter your character, etc.
At least from people i know, FPS players look for an entirely different set of features, from how hard is it, to whether they have to worry about creating a character at all. An FPS is dull if it's just the same thing all over again, and watered down. They look for a reflex challenge, and buy kit to match how fast they can move a mouse or how fast they can click.
Hybrid between both, shouldn't but are, a compromise. Unfortunately, Bioshock has several watered down features that an RPG player expected, and it's not as tough as most FPS players would prefer.
I might agree that hugs won't solve everything - diplomacy should *always* be an option. There's a sig here by someone that says: you have 4 boxes to preserve freedom: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. 'nuff said.
As far as the examples that you state - yes, they are the side where they were sovereign countries beforehand that were invaded, but let's not forget: St. Thomas, St. Croix, Guam, Puerto Rico, to name a few. American Samoa is still part of the US, regardless if it has it's own constitution.
However, I do not believe that is what "empire building" means, in any real sense, today. taking over territories is an expensive ordeal - not only in military costs, if not also in the psychological/productive cost of the territory in question. if you're really talking about empire building as in the 1800's frame of mind, then you want that population to start producing for you ASAP (may it be finished goods or "soft" goods). and you better freaking hope that the productive output of the conquered territory is greater than the military cost of taking it over.
At this point, I would say that empire building has a lot more to do with the idea of neo-imperialism, and taking over through an economic norm than through the barrel of a gun. once you have a foreign state dependent on you for finished and soft goods, you effectively have a large enough influence to "dictate" local policies in your favour. or do you think the CAFTA-DR agreement is not a good example of this?
Guys, watch out with these comments. I don't bash Google, they're an excellent company, with great innovation, but did any of you read Cringely's Pupit about this? In case you didn't go here: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20051117. html. I don't want to cast a dark light on this, but just WHAT IF Cringely's right? If you are to become a data mover, what's your best bet? Develop applications that become ubiquitous, host the content of those updates (in the case of Google Updater), maps (in the case of Google Earth), and their freakin' cache and voilá, you've got a business set up in content delivery and hosting.
Think about this seriously, I know I'm already waaaay off topic, but think about for a second. You know there's no money in pushing access to people. Google knows this. Internet access is almost a god-given right. A lot of people, including myself, require internet access - we can't live without it, but we're not willing to be gouged for it. So Google's vision is probably what? Free access, or extremely cheap access (which extremely cheap means basically universal access). OK, no money there. There's no money for THEM in backend switching, but there is money in hosting content. there is money in outsourcing other companies servers to their own infrastucture, as long as it meets with their standards. there is money in content delivery.
At the end, Google may do no evil - in our eyes because it won't censor content without letting us know. because Google gives basically universal access to the universal internet, but at the end it's a company, and it's going to look for the dollar. i at least appreciate that they won't necessarily pull the dollar from my pocket, but they will somewhere.
Oh, yeah, and just mod me down for what you think is bashing Google. I'm not, i'm simply looking at it from a realistic point of view - after drinking the kool-aid for a while.
At the end of the day, the CEO of a company is the top salesperson of that company. They're not necessarily pushing a product, but their pushing their version or vision of the future that the company is taking. Jobs does an excellent job at that - with or without the reality distortion field. I would actually say that a "reality distortion field" is necessary for any salesperson. You want the customer to believe in you, and one of the easiest ways of doing that is using ethos. Appeal to emotion - it gets you a lot further than using logos or pathos, for the gran mayority of people.
Couple the appeal to emotion, an apparent genuine enthusiasim for the company, a good speech writer (using NLP, if necessary to change tempo, tone of voice and speed to keep the audience keen), and good ad-lib, and you've got them sold on whatever it is at first sight. Of course, to keep this going, you also need products that reflect that vision. Whatever your opinion may be of the performance/ease of use/or some other technical criteria of the macs may be, they are some of the coolest or well designed products out there in the industry for consumers/pro-consumers today. The products reflect whatever Jobs is saying, the image is sold along with the product and it becomes a cultural icon. Many other companies have pulled this off in the past in other industries - i would venture to say that IBM has sold a similar concept of "coolness" in the corporate world (different criteria, such as stability, servicibility, or whatever you want to call it) with their adverts - something that other companies have yet to do in that same segment.
Think about it this way: in what other industries does the product reflect the feeling or image that the company is trying to push? I would say the Mini Cooper is probably a close example. I think Sony has pulled off the idea pretty well in the past, specially with the Walkman in the late 80s/early 90s.
As a spanish speaker, yes I agree that the grandparent's teacher was on crack, but that's not the exact translation in the rest of Latin America. Actually, "bluyins" (as far as the pronounciation goes) is pretty correct. The word is an english word that, by far at least in Central America, Mexico and most of South America that I know of, simply try to localise the word by it's pronounciation, not the literal translation.
Now, this is too good to pass up for comment. I'm not going to repeat what I said in my post in my weblog but I am going to generally agree with the parent.
When rights, privledges and/or freedoms are being stripped away, you must do something. While I may disagree that the Ammo Box is the best recourse, it very well might be one we have to use, if we wait too long. The problem we face in general is if we start using exclusively the Soap Box, without any general support, we'll go the way of the dinosaur - they'll find something to discredit the person who's raising their voice. Any change is in the hands of the masses, and it's a question of mobilising a large enough group of people to actually make a change. I know it's going to be a tad incorrect (heh, a lot of things happened to get where we are today), but look at the civil right's movement. It took a lot more than a simple Soap Box, but at the end, the public triumphed.
Well, I'm not sure that a lot of customers where really worried about power consumption when they were looking for 100k+ TPMs boxens - in an almost distaster tolerant cluster. At least none of the customers i ever ran into. most of them seemed more worried that they could get those features for the least amount of cash - not power consumption.
though, of course, YMMV, depending in the market you're dealing with.
Actually, from all the reports I've seen, OpenVMS maintains binary compatibility across all three platforms. Even though hp won't support it, a VAX/Alpha/Itanic mixed cluster is possible, just that each one has to have their own SYSTEM disk (like most lixed clusters). The idea was that the binary can be pulled over to Itanic without a problem and still maintain compatibility.
Or so it was said at hp world a couple of months back.
heh, yea Costa Rica doesn't have internet taxes, but you forget then you have to pay shipping and duties and any other additional import tax. Just to give you an idea - you have to tack on an additional 2.5% duties for any computer component - and if you ship it via a courier, you pay quite a dime for their service. You can also use PO BOXes in Miami (or some other location, but usually they're in Miami) that ships direct to Costa Rica, though you have a weight limit - and going over that is expensive.
Heh, I guess though, with the cost of living there being lower - then you have to spend a little to save a little.
I don't want to sound like a disrespectful bastard here, but you've really got to question a diagnosis of ADD. Granted, there are people who genuinely have it - I'm not going to question that, but one of the things that shows it might be a "fad" for a lot of people is the rate of people being diagnosed with it.
I went for years to different pyschologists, in different areas of expertise, becuase I couldn't focus on a certain topic for long periods of time. I would jump from subject to subject to subject. I would learn a little and move on. I wasn't spectacular in school or in the university (average A/B student, more a B student than an A), but I learned various subjects and was able to coorelate them. I haven't changed in my professional world. I'll work on something for a couple of hours and then jump to something for 5 minutes, go to something else and then go back to what I was doing. Same thing happens with me with/.. After a few 50 posts and reading the article, I can't even focus enough to post a meaningful comment.
But none of this means I have ADD. After 8 years of therapy, with psychologists, psychiatrists, neuro-therapists, it results that I have a higher synaptic activity than the normal person. Not meaning I'm smarter, but I'm able to absorb information quicker than most and able to correlate the information better. One of the psychologists made me write out a mental map of how I store information in my head so I could recognize how I stored data and be able to exploit that.
It may not be the poster's case, nor everyone, but it can be a possibility. Just like any other life-altering disease, it's a good idea to go to a specialist and quite possibly two or three.
Give the guys some credit,eh? The SciFi channel isn't a move production studio nor does it make the millions that Universal or whatever makes. They're at least making an effort to actually adapt decent SciFi for mass consumption. How many people do you know has *even* read Dune or, for that matter, Children of Dune? I've read both of them, watched both versions of Dune, and each has their strengths and weaknesses. If we're going to nitpick, I'll say this:: the casting on the SciFi miniseries was much better done and the dialogue was much better. It did miss some of the scenes that are in the book and adapted others (for example, the hunter-seeker scene in Arrakeen). The Lynch version I think touched upon the mystic of the entire thing much better than the SciFi, but the SciFi version made a better emphasis on the political nature of it all. Neither are true to the book anyway.
Hopefully, Children of Dune (which is the destruction of Paul's dream and Aila's nightmare) will be done in the same spirit and I can understand the pitfalls of smaller studios - at the end, it's how much money do you have to burn for the production?
It's actually marketering. According to IDC's figures last year, HP has the number one spot with something like 43% (8% or so of that came from the Compaq/HP merger) and Sun at something like 38%. Their market share might of increased over the course of Q4Y02 with the pervasiveness of the Vxxx line. We'll have to wait like another month to see the offical numbers from IDC.
I wonder with this new annoucement what Sun's future is. I used to work on Sun equipment for a long time, until I got converted over to Tru64. Each has it's strengths and weaknesses, but I always found Solaris much simpler, YMMV.
If they're recognizing the fact that they need to expand into the market with Intel-based solutions (as much as we can personally hate them, they're not a bad platform - the problem is the OS that runs on it right now), it would be interesting to see if they make the effort to port to Itanium.
I know most of you might hate the idea of the Itanic, but it rumours are true, and that the 2005/5006 version of the Itanic is mostly based on Alpha, then we'll have a good OS running on excellent hardware - what could be better?
Hmmm.. it seems as if this merger is not only to knock out operational expenses, if not also another competitor in three arenas. HP was losing to Compaq in the PC segment, and also the intel standard servers. Both Compaq and HP have had a hard time getting a real large install base for thier UNIX line. Compaq just licensed out the Alpha processor technology to Intel. So which OS will be the first to drop? HPUX or Tru64 and OpenVMS?
I would place my bet on HPUX. HP has too much 32-bit baggage to carry over into the new Itanium UNIX standard (even though IBM will not be joining that party) and Tru64 has no 32-bit baggage to carry over since it was 64-bit to begin with. Tru64 (or the AlphaServers for that matter) were finally being accepted in the market as powerful and versatile alternative to AIX/HPUX/Solaris. I would personally want to see Tru64 go on, but we'll see.
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There is a marked difference in how psychiatry and psychology see mental illnesses, epistemologically speaking. This leads to how each area decides to best handle and offer potential solutions to the client's problem. It also shapes and defines the training curriculum for both areas, whereby psychiatry spends much more time on the psychopharmacological and biological perspectives than studying psychotherapy interventions. That does not mean there aren't psychiatrists who do not employ some form of psychotherapy, but they are not as common as you think.
There's a base assumption at play here that makes the addressing the issue at hand much more murkier than it should be.
Psychiatry sees all mental health problems as, in root, organic in nature. In other words, there is a chemical imbalance, a brain trauma, or a genetic component that creates the symptoms. These mental health issues can be seen as "cured" through medical regimes, but, many other illnesses, considered under remission, since a chemical imbalance caused by a genetic component cannot be "cured". The DSM (V is the latest incarnation) uses symptomatic observations as base criteria - not necessarily biological markers, but medical therapy is based on biomarkers (for example, a regulation in serotonin uptake). While this is a gross oversimplification of the matter, it paints a general picture of what happens with the organic position of mental illnesses. In a very simple word, psychiatry views mental illnesses as a nature problem.
Psychology, on the other hand, does not see all "mental illnesses" (as defined in the DSM) as organic in nature. As swillden mentioned, psychotherapy (of which there are many intervention methods) assist in managing the situation. Much of it takes root in mindfulness - not only in a social perspective, but also a reframing and re-internalization of current and past events. Others might take a family based approach, not only in dealing with the specific issues the primary client is dealing with, but also how their immediate social structure responds to their condition. CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) *might* go a step further and integrate neuroscience to determine if there is a biological component to their client's condition (but this tendency is still far and few between, considering the cost, the protocols required, and the length of time). Depending of the epistemological perspective of psychology, psychologists don't "cure", because the client isn't sick, they are maladjusted (through previous rationalizations or emotional internalizations of events and situations). Using a similar oversimplification, psychology sees many mental illnesses (note: not all) as a nurture problem (a learning/behavioral problem that has both an individual and social/cultural component).
There is a grey point in between these two, apparently competing points of view, which come up often in these discussions. What happens with schizophrenia? Or with a catatonic patient? A medical regime may assist in managing the symptoms, but without some measure of psychotherapy, the person will have a much harder time dealing with their inner situation. I doubt that something like psychoanalysis (or tools from psychodynamics) will work well, but perhaps a cognitive behavioral intervention might have a better success rate. Or even some of the tools from the Humanistic school of thought can help.
Android has 80% of the market because it's on everything. It's a reduced cost alternative for handset manufacturers that no longer have to develop and maintain their own OS (or pay for someone else's OS and wrap an interface around it). In "emerging markets", it's on phones that are practically given away with even pre-paid SIMs. Those lower end markets have very few options that the regional operators carry, and they make up a considerable chunk of that 80%. So let's not confuse ease of implementation for the handset manufacturer and/or carrier to that of consumer choice.
What Intel and AMD don't tell you, however, is that while they shrink die size and increase performance (and increase performance != increase in GHz), they turn around and tell system manufacturers that the TPD is lower. For example, the 5300 Xeon family from Intel topped out at a 120w for most bins (there were a few 150w pieces at the end) and their thermal design was 60c. The 5400 Xeon family might use 120w top bin, 80w on the average bins - however, they lowered the TPD to 55c, meaning the system makers had to turn around and invest in different cooling strategies - meaning part of that savings in CPU draw came back as cooling costs for fans or specialized heatsinks (like the vapor-chamber heatsinks on certain blades, where this game is much more important).
Gut feeling: even though you might see a 20% - 25% drop in power draw from one family to the next, you real gain is probably more in the 10% - 15%. No numbers to back this up, just my gut feeling from doing consulting with a large number of clients.
Of course, those numbers are assuming you're running the system at it's top speed, there are tools out there that allow you simulate SpeedStep (to put it in words) on server CPUs, which lack that. If you adopt a power regulator like that, which can dial down the GHz rating on a server CPU by varying it's voltage, for all the servers that run applications that are seldom used after hours, you'll save a buttload (yes, that's a technical term) of cash in power costs, you'll be able to dial down your A/C at night as well, and be more green.
Personally, I was a fan of Compaq's m300. It was a subnotebook, about 12 inches with a MEU (media expansion unit) that doubled as a docking station. The last gen I used was a 500MHz with 1GB of RAM. The 9cell (i think it was 9-cell) battery would give me about 6 or so hours on full brightness. The MEU (which is the size of the notebook and just as thick - so instead of a 1" thick machine, you'd have one about 2.5") you could put a CD-ROM/DVD-ROM and an extra multibay battery - giving you another 2 hours or so.
I used one from 2001 to about 2004 as my primary machine, had no issues and the entire laptop was a magnesium alloy, so it could take a beating if need be.
You can still get them on ebay for under 200 bucks
apple is not just a hardware company. i don't think jobs has said that in the last 4 years of keynotes and analyst calls i've been listening to. apple's strategy is clear: they're a media distribution channel that sells a "complete" (complete here is a relative term) ecosystem to enjoy that media. media is not only purchased from them, but also created by you and others. that media may or may not have a cost. obviously, the media that does have a cost and comes from apple helps their bottom line, but that is in addition to the ecosystem and could be considered gravy. the company's strategy is to maintain that ecosystem within a reasonable support cost for them. their demographics are pretty much clear as well. if you don't fall within those demographics, you have an entire industry to choose from - hardware-wise, software-wise, operating system-wise, gadget-wise. if you are, then you evaluate the pro's and con's of their decision of how they have decided to maintain that ecosystem - and if it works for you, you go out and buy from apple whatever you're looking at.
while the official SDK is limited and apple is the gatekeeper, they do not have all the keys. we're speculating that Installer.app will not work with the 2.0 firmware. we don't know if it will. if it does, then you have two SDKs to code to. the official SDK, using wrappers instead of the direct APIs with the advantage that you can charge for the application (remuneration is important to some software developers) or you can choose to use the unofficial SDK and use the Installer.app/PXL distribution method and rely on donations for renumeration, if you're into that type of thing. based on that decision is what your development platform will be. you can either use a mac with the official SDK or not if you're using the unofficial SDK.
i own an iphone. i own 3 macs and an xserve, however, that does not mean that i agree with everything that apple does. it's a choice. the iphone, in my opinion, is better than the last two motorola phones i've had. blackberry's are not an option, since my company will not open any new accounts with RIM, so the iphone does what i need it to do. it's good enough. are there better phones out there? perhaps and most likely, depending on the need of each user. but when you design a product, you look at your target market and decide if the feature set is "good enough" or "superior" to what that target demographic will use/need/require. once you have that balance, you take the risk and see how the product performs.
I love OSS as much as the next guy, but I have - to date - no idea what the problem (other than annoyances, like the UAC) is with Vista. I have a mac, a linux box (with ubuntu) and the vista box, this last one just for games. it's a Q6400, 4GB of RAM, and a nvidia 8800GTS, home rolled, running vista x64. i run: fallout 2, stalker, world of warcraft, dawn of war, dawn of war: winter assault, dawn of war: burning crusade, unreal tournament 3, unreal tournament 2004, quake 3 arena, tabula rasa, hellgate:london , civilization 4 and civilization 4 beyond the sword, oblivion, bioshock, defcon, call of duty 2 and call of duty 4 deus ex, and deus ex: invisible war. none of these games have presented a real problem on the platform - they're all about as rock solid as can be. the only times civ 4: BTS has crashed has been due to buggy mods - not to an OS problem. i really can't complain about vista x64 as a gaming box - i'm sure i could probably get a bit more of performance out of XP, but it wouldn't address all 4GB, which has been important in a few occasions.
To be historically accurate, as you put it, with what historians believe, you'd have to discriminate everyone but white male homosexuals. There is strong evidence in his plays, especially Hamlet, to name one clear example, of his alleged sexual preference.
in that sense would you be discriminating based on race or sexual orientation? it can be argued that you are - as much as you can argue that you are simply following historical facts and evidence of who shakespeare was. it's a question of perception.
a possible interpretation of what you'd be required to say, based in this hypothetical case, would be to reject the candidate based on other merits. for example, you may use the excuse that the candidate does not portray the role as you, as director, envision. this would be unverifiable in any case, but you must be tactful about how you reject the potential actor. if you come out and say: no, you can't have the lead role of william shakespeare because you're black and not gay - that would be a blatant case of discrimination.
However, this is a very specific example and one that cannot be generalized to the rest of the industries. discrimination based on race in almost any industry is not only illegal, but also bigotry. potential employees who posses similar skill sets and are competent to execute the job they are being hired for, should be considered without regard to race, gender, marital status, creed, sexual orientation or political preference. your concern as employer is production output and their history of employment. what they do with their private lives, unless it impacts their production, places other employees or other resources of the company at stake, or severely damages the reputation of the company, are completely not of your concern, as employer.
RPG players accept it. FPS players might not.
RPG, by definition, is a well-thought out story-line. Remember the paper-and-pencil days of D&D or Shadowrun? What made those games fun? The story line presented by the GM/DM, especially when it was a home grown epic. A poster above mentioned Oblivion - which is an art form unto itself, but the game is daunting to most. RPG players look for replayability depending on class, how much you can alter your character, etc.
At least from people i know, FPS players look for an entirely different set of features, from how hard is it, to whether they have to worry about creating a character at all. An FPS is dull if it's just the same thing all over again, and watered down. They look for a reflex challenge, and buy kit to match how fast they can move a mouse or how fast they can click.
Hybrid between both, shouldn't but are, a compromise. Unfortunately, Bioshock has several watered down features that an RPG player expected, and it's not as tough as most FPS players would prefer.
I might agree that hugs won't solve everything - diplomacy should *always* be an option. There's a sig here by someone that says: you have 4 boxes to preserve freedom: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. 'nuff said.
As far as the examples that you state - yes, they are the side where they were sovereign countries beforehand that were invaded, but let's not forget: St. Thomas, St. Croix, Guam, Puerto Rico, to name a few. American Samoa is still part of the US, regardless if it has it's own constitution.
However, I do not believe that is what "empire building" means, in any real sense, today. taking over territories is an expensive ordeal - not only in military costs, if not also in the psychological/productive cost of the territory in question. if you're really talking about empire building as in the 1800's frame of mind, then you want that population to start producing for you ASAP (may it be finished goods or "soft" goods). and you better freaking hope that the productive output of the conquered territory is greater than the military cost of taking it over.
At this point, I would say that empire building has a lot more to do with the idea of neo-imperialism, and taking over through an economic norm than through the barrel of a gun. once you have a foreign state dependent on you for finished and soft goods, you effectively have a large enough influence to "dictate" local policies in your favour. or do you think the CAFTA-DR agreement is not a good example of this?
Guys, watch out with these comments. I don't bash Google, they're an excellent company, with great innovation, but did any of you read Cringely's Pupit about this? In case you didn't go here: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20051117. html. I don't want to cast a dark light on this, but just WHAT IF Cringely's right? If you are to become a data mover, what's your best bet? Develop applications that become ubiquitous, host the content of those updates (in the case of Google Updater), maps (in the case of Google Earth), and their freakin' cache and voilá, you've got a business set up in content delivery and hosting.
Think about this seriously, I know I'm already waaaay off topic, but think about for a second. You know there's no money in pushing access to people. Google knows this. Internet access is almost a god-given right. A lot of people, including myself, require internet access - we can't live without it, but we're not willing to be gouged for it. So Google's vision is probably what? Free access, or extremely cheap access (which extremely cheap means basically universal access). OK, no money there. There's no money for THEM in backend switching, but there is money in hosting content. there is money in outsourcing other companies servers to their own infrastucture, as long as it meets with their standards. there is money in content delivery.
At the end, Google may do no evil - in our eyes because it won't censor content without letting us know. because Google gives basically universal access to the universal internet, but at the end it's a company, and it's going to look for the dollar. i at least appreciate that they won't necessarily pull the dollar from my pocket, but they will somewhere.
Oh, yeah, and just mod me down for what you think is bashing Google. I'm not, i'm simply looking at it from a realistic point of view - after drinking the kool-aid for a while.
At the end of the day, the CEO of a company is the top salesperson of that company. They're not necessarily pushing a product, but their pushing their version or vision of the future that the company is taking. Jobs does an excellent job at that - with or without the reality distortion field. I would actually say that a "reality distortion field" is necessary for any salesperson. You want the customer to believe in you, and one of the easiest ways of doing that is using ethos. Appeal to emotion - it gets you a lot further than using logos or pathos, for the gran mayority of people.
Couple the appeal to emotion, an apparent genuine enthusiasim for the company, a good speech writer (using NLP, if necessary to change tempo, tone of voice and speed to keep the audience keen), and good ad-lib, and you've got them sold on whatever it is at first sight. Of course, to keep this going, you also need products that reflect that vision. Whatever your opinion may be of the performance/ease of use/or some other technical criteria of the macs may be, they are some of the coolest or well designed products out there in the industry for consumers/pro-consumers today. The products reflect whatever Jobs is saying, the image is sold along with the product and it becomes a cultural icon. Many other companies have pulled this off in the past in other industries - i would venture to say that IBM has sold a similar concept of "coolness" in the corporate world (different criteria, such as stability, servicibility, or whatever you want to call it) with their adverts - something that other companies have yet to do in that same segment.
Think about it this way: in what other industries does the product reflect the feeling or image that the company is trying to push? I would say the Mini Cooper is probably a close example. I think Sony has pulled off the idea pretty well in the past, specially with the Walkman in the late 80s/early 90s.
As a spanish speaker, yes I agree that the grandparent's teacher was on crack, but that's not the exact translation in the rest of Latin America. Actually, "bluyins" (as far as the pronounciation goes) is pretty correct. The word is an english word that, by far at least in Central America, Mexico and most of South America that I know of, simply try to localise the word by it's pronounciation, not the literal translation.
Now, this is too good to pass up for comment. I'm not going to repeat what I said in my post in my weblog but I am going to generally agree with the parent. When rights, privledges and/or freedoms are being stripped away, you must do something. While I may disagree that the Ammo Box is the best recourse, it very well might be one we have to use, if we wait too long. The problem we face in general is if we start using exclusively the Soap Box, without any general support, we'll go the way of the dinosaur - they'll find something to discredit the person who's raising their voice. Any change is in the hands of the masses, and it's a question of mobilising a large enough group of people to actually make a change. I know it's going to be a tad incorrect (heh, a lot of things happened to get where we are today), but look at the civil right's movement. It took a lot more than a simple Soap Box, but at the end, the public triumphed.
alright, now i'm going off to my corner and hang in shame for all time. i didn't catch that went i wrote it. blame it on the antihistamines.
Well, I'm not sure that a lot of customers where really worried about power consumption when they were looking for 100k+ TPMs boxens - in an almost distaster tolerant cluster. At least none of the customers i ever ran into. most of them seemed more worried that they could get those features for the least amount of cash - not power consumption.
though, of course, YMMV, depending in the market you're dealing with.
Actually, from all the reports I've seen, OpenVMS maintains binary compatibility across all three platforms. Even though hp won't support it, a VAX/Alpha/Itanic mixed cluster is possible, just that each one has to have their own SYSTEM disk (like most lixed clusters). The idea was that the binary can be pulled over to Itanic without a problem and still maintain compatibility.
Or so it was said at hp world a couple of months back.
heh, yea Costa Rica doesn't have internet taxes, but you forget then you have to pay shipping and duties and any other additional import tax. Just to give you an idea - you have to tack on an additional 2.5% duties for any computer component - and if you ship it via a courier, you pay quite a dime for their service. You can also use PO BOXes in Miami (or some other location, but usually they're in Miami) that ships direct to Costa Rica, though you have a weight limit - and going over that is expensive.
Heh, I guess though, with the cost of living there being lower - then you have to spend a little to save a little.
hp doesn't certify Linux on what exactly? PCs?
Before you bash hp for not certifying your Presario/Pavillion with Linux, maybe you should check out their web pages on Linux certified solutions.
You can start here and here for your desktops and here for your HA support.
Maybe you missed out on the whole multi-os strategy they've been pushing lately?
I don't want to sound like a disrespectful bastard here, but you've really got to question a diagnosis of ADD. Granted, there are people who genuinely have it - I'm not going to question that, but one of the things that shows it might be a "fad" for a lot of people is the rate of people being diagnosed with it.
/.. After a few 50 posts and reading the article, I can't even focus enough to post a meaningful comment.
I went for years to different pyschologists, in different areas of expertise, becuase I couldn't focus on a certain topic for long periods of time. I would jump from subject to subject to subject. I would learn a little and move on. I wasn't spectacular in school or in the university (average A/B student, more a B student than an A), but I learned various subjects and was able to coorelate them.
I haven't changed in my professional world. I'll work on something for a couple of hours and then jump to something for 5 minutes, go to something else and then go back to what I was doing.
Same thing happens with me with
But none of this means I have ADD. After 8 years of therapy, with psychologists, psychiatrists, neuro-therapists, it results that I have a higher synaptic activity than the normal person. Not meaning I'm smarter, but I'm able to absorb information quicker than most and able to correlate the information better.
One of the psychologists made me write out a mental map of how I store information in my head so I could recognize how I stored data and be able to exploit that.
It may not be the poster's case, nor everyone, but it can be a possibility. Just like any other life-altering disease, it's a good idea to go to a specialist and quite possibly two or three.
Cheers!
Give the guys some credit,eh? The SciFi channel isn't a move production studio nor does it make the millions that Universal or whatever makes. They're at least making an effort to actually adapt decent SciFi for mass consumption. :: the casting on the SciFi miniseries was much better done and the dialogue was much better. It did miss some of the scenes that are in the book and adapted others (for example, the hunter-seeker scene in Arrakeen). The Lynch version I think touched upon the mystic of the entire thing much better than the SciFi, but the SciFi version made a better emphasis on the political nature of it all.
How many people do you know has *even* read Dune or, for that matter, Children of Dune? I've read both of them, watched both versions of Dune, and each has their strengths and weaknesses.
If we're going to nitpick, I'll say this
Neither are true to the book anyway.
Hopefully, Children of Dune (which is the destruction of Paul's dream and Aila's nightmare) will be done in the same spirit and I can understand the pitfalls of smaller studios - at the end, it's how much money do you have to burn for the production?
Cheers...
It's actually marketering. According to IDC's figures last year, HP has the number one spot with something like 43% (8% or so of that came from the Compaq/HP merger) and Sun at something like 38%. Their market share might of increased over the course of Q4Y02 with the pervasiveness of the Vxxx line. We'll have to wait like another month to see the offical numbers from IDC.
I wonder with this new annoucement what Sun's future is. I used to work on Sun equipment for a long time, until I got converted over to Tru64. Each has it's strengths and weaknesses, but I always found Solaris much simpler, YMMV.
If they're recognizing the fact that they need to expand into the market with Intel-based solutions (as much as we can personally hate them, they're not a bad platform - the problem is the OS that runs on it right now), it would be interesting to see if they make the effort to port to Itanium.
I know most of you might hate the idea of the Itanic, but it rumours are true, and that the 2005/5006 version of the Itanic is mostly based on Alpha, then we'll have a good OS running on excellent hardware - what could be better?
Hmmm.. it seems as if this merger is not only to knock out operational expenses, if not also another competitor in three arenas. HP was losing to Compaq in the PC segment, and also the intel standard servers. Both Compaq and HP have had a hard time getting a real large install base for thier UNIX line. Compaq just licensed out the Alpha processor technology to Intel. So which OS will be the first to drop? HPUX or Tru64 and OpenVMS?
I would place my bet on HPUX. HP has too much 32-bit baggage to carry over into the new Itanium UNIX standard (even though IBM will not be joining that party) and Tru64 has no 32-bit baggage to carry over since it was 64-bit to begin with. Tru64 (or the AlphaServers for that matter) were finally being accepted in the market as powerful and versatile alternative to AIX/HPUX/Solaris. I would personally want to see Tru64 go on, but we'll see.
Cheers,
Justarius
- There are some that call me . . . . . . Tim.