The problem is when you have talented researchers spending their time teaching instead of researching. They don't want to do it, they're not any good at it, and the students are just as well off learning from the book. Send the prof back to the lab where his valuable skills won't go to waste.
Who is forcing them to take jobs that involve teaching? Many of these people seem to regard teaching as a simplistic and tiresome chore that they have to "put up with" in order to be able to do their research. The truth is that firstly, teaching isn't a trivial task and, secondly, just because somebody has a high IQ and does brilliant research it doesn't mean that person can teach worth a damn. There is no easier way to loose the respect of a room full of students than if you expect them to learn a mountain of material to perfection but it is painfully obvious to them that you yourself are not as familiar with that material as you should be. Unfortunately too many bright researchers who are forced to teach alongside their research discover the hard way that when you have been doing sophisticated research for a long while and you haven't spent much time thinking about "basic stuff" for a while you can get rusty. So, don't get me wrong, If you gave me the task of teaching, say, geometry to a bunch of high-school kids I'd probably have to refresh my maths knowledge. I'll freely admit to being a bit rusty stuff like that after having worked as a programmer for many years but you can bet your ass I'd come to class prepared to answer any question the kids could throw at me. If you don't they'll eat you alive. People who primarily want to do research should principally not take jobs that involve teaching unless they are willing to commit the kind of time and effort to teaching that it demands. I'm sure there are plenty of research institutes and corporations that would gladly hire them and spare them the torture of having to teach.
Or the balls to use that air superiority. When used in WWII the war ended quickly.
Ending WWII was just as much due to Soviet air superiority and Soviet tank superiority as it was to US air superiority. The US didn't have tank superiority since, apart form Soviet armor, Allied armor uniformly sucked a**. A major reason the 8th air force was able to wreck the Nazi military industrial complex, and more importantly their fuel production from the air (which was easily the part of the bomber campaign that hurt the Nazi armies the most) was the fact that from 1943 onwards the Soviets managed to re-equip their forces with large numbers of modern Soviet designed fighter and bomber designs and those Soviet air forces tied down large numbers of german fighters on the eastern front. If anything defeated the Nazis it was the fact that they over-extended themselves militarily in every way.
To me it becomes less interesting when you consider that diverging species start as one. During generations when a species is bifurcating, cross-breeding must normal initially, then become less potent over successive generations until finally it is practically impossible. So the question isn't whether this happens, only how long the separation takes - how much the genomes may differ before they cannot mix.
This kind of genetic or evolutionary "seperation" can take a very long time before two related species are unable to produce viable hybrid offspring. In Dubai scientists bred a camel/llama hybrid they call a "Cama". This may seem like a weird experiment to perform but it is interesting in that it demonstrates that viable offspring resulted from crossbreeding two species with some 2-3 million years of evolutionary separation. Mind you camels and llamas have the same number of chromosomes which increases the chances of producing fertile offspring. An equal chromosomes is, however, not necessary for cross breeding to produce living offspring. Horses and donkeys can crossbreed despite having different numbers of chromosomes and an evolutionary separation estimated at 9 million years. It has always mystified me why it is that some people still claim modern humans and neanderthals were unable to produce living offspring. Once you get past all the religious and cultural baggage (and the cheesy/. jokes), from a purely scientific/genetic standpoint, there seems to be no reason why a neanderthals/modern human couple could not have had children together. Were those children fertile? If they were, did interbreeding happen on a scale to significantly influence human evolution to the point where neanderthal genetic input is still detectable in modern Europeans for example?... those are two totally different but no less interesting questions.
Presumably Oracle and Sun *themselves* could have predicted these hurdles if they'd done their homework - is it really that outlandish to expect that merging two leading (albeit in different markets!) database companies would be a worry for the regulators?........ Would the tech industry really be in a better position if they reduced their scrutiny? Or if they applied it only to certain companies....... To me it seems a bit "convenient" that, in an economy where many jobs have to be lost anyhow (and as a merger is occurring, which may also naturally lead to job losses) people are blaming job losses solely on the regulators doing their jobs and not on sharp practice, opportunism or plain lack of co-operation from large multinationals operating in a cutthroat market.
Yup... it brings back memories from the recent past when all kinds of people were whining, pissing and moaning about how evil regulators stood in the way of Wall Street in it's quest to make the world a better and wealthier place with innovative financial products and free market fundamentalist dogma. In the middle of this stirring chorus of people chanting "deregulation" in perfect harmony.... BAM.... alluvasudden we had our selves a global banking crash. Now those same people are asking: "where were the regulators?" It just goes to show that humans are funny critters with short and selective memories. IMHO Oracle is getting to be every bit as much of a problem due to their size and market dominance as Microsoft is and you could add quite a few other companies to this list of corporations that are getting way too big in various different tech markets (Apple, Google... the list goes on) without hearing any objections from me.
* Use the Linux box to connect to the Internet and create a private network with NAT with default inbound deny, connect the Windows box to the NAT network so that worms don't infect it. Run all Windows updates on the relatively secured private network. (works every time, so far)
... all you have to do is carefully drink shot after shot of Jack Daniels till you hit the Ballmer peak. After that you can use your super human coding powers to re-implement Windows XP from scratch.
I can see a similarity between the two. The question is if, when presented with the two, would I be confused into thinking that a Woolworth's branded product is an Apple product, and is it the intention of Woolworth's for this to be the case. The answer is no.
I look at the Woolworth's logo and see an apple. I do not see an Apple apple.
Yup... that and the fact that Woolworth's was smart enough to not try and tempt it's customers with a half eaten fruit.
A 13" MacBook will fulfill some but not all of the requirements listed by the OP (the major missing one being a dock) for $1,200, and it's relatively easy to virtualize and/or dual boot all three major OSes (Windows, Linux, OS X). What more is there?
BookEndz sells a line of docks for Apple laptops but they look kind of clunky to me. Thanks to the USB hub in my display and bluetooth all I have to plug into my 13" MacBook when I sit down at my desk are the power cord, the Mini DisplayPort connector and the USB root connector which takes all of five seconds so I never felt the need to shell out €€€/$$$ for a dock. What really annoys me about the new MacBook Pro line is the built in battery, 7-8 hours of wifi enabled battery life are IMHO irrelevant. I want the ability to swap batteries without having to reach for a screwdriver and if that means having to put up with squeezing only 4 hours of life out of each battery then so be it.
The only devs that Macs are good for are Mac devs?
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Best Developer's Laptop?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The only devs that Macs are good for are Mac devs.
You do realize that OS X is a certified Unix? That means that OS X shares an enormous commonality/overlap with the entire *nix software developing world including AIX, HPUX, Solaris, BSD and Linux. In fact OS X ships with a huge amount of OSS software pre-installed along with Apple's own proprietary stuff and optional developer packages that include a lot more OSS stuff. Apple also contributes to the OSS movement. Macs are also quite popular for all kinds of platform independent and web development. Apple deserves criticism like any other soulless megacorp and their computers aren't the best development machines ever conceived by the mind of man but Macs are useful for a lot more than just Mac development.
Why didn't be bring that point up in the installation/upgrade section? Microsoft can't include every possible driver on the disc, but the fact that all his hardware was working as soon as he visited Windows Update is a feather in MS's cap in my opinion. Apple only had to care about a handful of different setups, and they control them all.
Love it or hate it incidents like that are why some people don't like Windows. It wasn't a single "missing driver" incident like the one you described that annoyed me enough to abandon Windows, first for Linux and then for the Mac. It was a long and tiring sequence of such incidents happening at regular intervals (and yes, I know Windows reliability has improved since I ditched Windows 98 but I'm still not gong back to Windows). With OS X such annoyances are relatively few and far between for the reasons you pointed out. Personally I think these Desktop OS performance benchmarks/Desktop OS comparisons articles have limited relevance for most users and the flame wars that accompany them are a pile of steaming crap. Don't get me wrong, for the limited portion of computer users doing performance intensive work or PC gaming, Desktop OS performance benchmarks are very interesting. The rest of us are best served just picking the Desktop OS we like and be done with it. I could not care less whether the Desktop OS somebody else likes is Windows, Linux or OS X even if I personally wouldn't touch Windows with a 16 foot pike.
I knew she would be better off with a mac but your statement of "anybody who uses a Mac knows" makes me cringe. Bottom line: do not underestimate stupidity.
I wouldn't call it stupidity. Just because somebody isn't aware of all possible malware infection routes that doesn't make them stupid, naive is perhaps a better word for it or perhaps just unlucky. Expecting the average user to be aware of every possible way of getting his computer infected is about as realistic as expecting a non-medically educated person to be aware of all possible ways to get a disease. We all know any number of things we can do to avoid getting diseases, some of these behaviors are even hardwired into our DNA but they aren't 100% effective. How many of us are likely to go through life without ever catching a disease like, say, Influenza?
It's not just passenger load/unload time though - there's a lot more to it than that. Check out http://www.atwonline.com/channels/aircraftEquipment/article.html?articleID=1187 for more info, which basically mentions problems with wingspan. Note that according to http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v155/andzz/747-v-380.jpg the A380 wingspan is approximately 15m wider. This can cause issues with whether or not the aircraft will actually fit at the gate, or contribute to congestion problems on the ground when neighboring taxiways can't be used while an A380 rolls down an adjacent one.
These criticisms are in many ways the same as the ones we got with the 747 and this didn't stop the Jumbo. The major hubs will adapt because the economies of scale for an aircraft like the current A380 variants are simply to great and keep in mind we haven't even begun to take into account stretch variants of the A380 which will be able to take passenger counts around the 1000 mark with very little additional operating costs. Which is more efficient? Flying three Boeing 777 or Airbus A340 from New York into Heathrow or a single stretched A380? That's three crews vs one, six engines vs four, three landing slots vs one, three sets of avionics equipment to maintain vs one, lower per passenger costs, lower environmental/carbon-emission charges... the list goes on. With many airports currently being near maxed out in terms of the number of aircraft they can handle and being geographically hemmed in with little possibility of growth making the aircraft bigger is the only option unless we want to start building new and even bigger airports. In many European countries for example the prospect of building a brand new and much bigger airport near most major cities is practically impossible without ruffling a lot of feathers.
No, they're still trying to breath in and out very slowly and deliberately hoping that the A380 will fly financially. With the current economic climate, it will be a awhile before they're laughing again.
I'm sure the corporate weasels at Airbus will manage a few smug smiles at the expense of the corporate weasels at Boeing after all the detailed coverage of A380 delays by aviation/business journalists, bloggers and other "industry observers" from the other side of the pond. In the long run the A380 has every chance of being a success just like the 747 was. The 380 has operating costs that are more or less the same as a 747 but with the capability to carry a substantially greater number of passengers with a quite low per-passenger cost. There are plans now to build all-coach A380s which are projected to cut air fairs by up to 30% on some routes. Even if they manage to realize even only a third of that price cut the A380 might actually end up benefitting from the current economic climate on inter-hub hauls. It won't be the worlds most comfortable ride but for a 10% price cut I'll put up with being stuck in an 840 seat giant sardine can for a few hours.
And even funnier - search for "Why is Microsoft Windows so expensive?" and the fifth result is a slashdot article entitled: "Why is OSS Commercial Software So Expensive?"!
If you leave out the word "Microsoft" from that search the top ten list includes five criticisms of Macs being expensive, one complaint about vinyl windows being expensive, some griping about windows hosting providers, games and OSS products being expensive and finally my favorite: "Why fish is so expensive!".
Keep in mind this is Apple we're dealing with and we know how vicious they can get when someone tries to step in and actually compete on one of their platforms. My bets on a line of code in the bios that says something like (in pseudocode of course):
I won't necessarily argue with the fact that Apple can get vicious, when dealing with iPhone/iPod developers via the AppStore they can often take that extra step to being downright stupid as well. Even some of the developers who are assigned bug reports form their bug tracking software could do with some lessons in manners when dealing with customers who go out of their way to report bugs in Apple software. But BootCamp and the associated drivers were made by Apple. If the fact that Windows runs on OS X really bothered Apple that much they would have killed BootCamp long ago. Not that it would do them much good. If they killed BootCamp you would probably have half a dozen software companies and FOSS projects stepping in to provide replacements in a matter of months necessitating a followup campaign of strongly worded nastygrams from Apples legal weasels. Personally I rather doubt this will ever happen. The most likely explanation for these BootCamp performance problems is not a grand conspiracy but rather the simple fact that the Windows BootCamp drivers get a lot less attention development effort from Apple's developers than their OS X equivalents do. I doubt that if the situation was reversed, that Microsoft would be in any hurry to make sure their OS X drivers were as good and highly optimized as their Windows drivers.
What I never understood is, how come apple doesn't get into trouble for installing Safari on their comps? I use both OSX and Windows, so I'm not bashing either, just wondering how Microsoft's is a monopoly while Apple's isn't.
Apple doesn't have an overwhelming majority market share on the OS market like Microsoft has. Apple can install browsers of their own manufacture on their own operating system but even if Apple wants to, they still don't have a market share that enables them to leverage their OS to kill off all other browser manufacturers. If Microsoft was just another one of half a dozen OS manufacturers with a 10, 20, 30% market share that shipped it's Microsoft OS with it's own Microsoft browser the same would apply to them. Unfortunately Microsoft has a 90% OS market share and even though Microsoft is doing the same thing when it bundles IE with Windows as Apple does when it bundles Safari with OS X the 90% OS market share of the Microsoft Windows OS changes the rules (according to the EU). Microsoft can and has leveraged their dominant OS market share to also monopolize other software market segments they felt entitled to have all to them selves. If it took Microsoft's fancy they could kill off any competitors in any desktop software market segment they wanted to by simply offering a free (as in $0.00 price tag) competing product and bundling it with their Windows OS. What the EU is trying to do with this ballot screen is not about avenging Netscape it isn't even so much about Microsoft's attempt to dictate web standards by pwning the browser market although that is probably a factor, it is about teaching Microsoft a painful lesson about the consequences of abusing their dominant market position. Which incidentally is something the US Govt. failed miserably to do even though it is in a much stronger position to do so than the EU.
Also, they need to install a browser anyway. If you don't install a browser, then you can't get any browsers so I don't understand what was supposed to happen.
It is trivial to write a non browser based client app that displays a ballot screen and then downloads and installs the browser of your choice. Why exactly people thought that shipping Windows without a browser would be a colossal problem is not quite clear to me.
Last, how is it a monopoly when the product (ie) is non profit (afaik)?
Shipping it's browser for free is how Microsoft established it's browser monopoly in the first place. It's called "dumping" or "predatory pricing" and is a tactic frequently used by greedy mega corporations to drive smaller competitors out of business.
When you buy old cars, you're also putting money back in another American's hands, and you're keeping a useful resource (a working vehicle) from just rotting away.
Bu... but.... the car company weasels need your money _MUCH_ more than other Americans do!! How else are the big car companies going to pay off the consequences of the last few of decades worth of really lousy business decisions like colossal over investment in SUV production if not with massive injections of taxpayer money? Why, if we don't do as the industry lobbyists are saying and feed the big car companies lots of tax dollars actually intended for more socially beneficial projects, car companies might actually have to get off their ass and come up with some original ideas. Like designing and manufacturing more fuel efficient vehicles and selling them to the public _WITHOUT_ government subsidies. Oh the horror, the horror....
It's rare that developers are actually to blame for a project going pear-shaped, and when they are, management are often complicit because they knowingly hired cheap developers without experience. The developers are there to write code, it's the managers' jobs to ensure that the project succeeds.
You assume that most developers write good code, which isn't nearly always the case. I have seen projects run into major problems necessitating extensive rewrites because of fundamental mistakes in low level programming and design decisions that were taken by developers, not a bunch of weaselly managers and marketing creeps. You can completely screw up a project by taking the ad-hoc approach to designing an API or a protocol in a way that can be very expensive to fix. I agree that management (or marketing for that matter) usually makes it's contributions to such disasters as well but you can't just absolve the coders, especially the senior techies that do the design work. In the end coders must also live up to a minimal level of competence.
Naturally businesses do not want to migrate to a more expensive OS. XP works.
They all said that about Windows 2000 as well. Most of them ended up switching to XP anyway. This isn't so much about what the customer wants or needs as what Microsoft needs. What they need is to refill their coffers by fleecing their captive market with a new OS... yet again.
The morality of providing filtering technology to Iran aside, I just can't see what the States are trying to accomplish here. They try to punish companies from other countries for something that wasn't illegal at the time.
I'm guessing they are engaging in some good old fashioned: wrap them selves in a flag, stand on a soap box and yell: "We are the defenders of liberty and democracy", type demagoguery while seizing an excellent opportunity to try and improve the competitive edge of US based telco equipment manufacturers by kicking their foreign competitors in the nuts. Politicians around the world do something similar all the time. Not that Nokia and Siemens shouldn't be punished for doing this. It may have been legal at the time but it's morally questionable. Even if you look at it from a totally unemotional standpoint based on the idea that corporations have no morals this sale was stupid thing to do since from a purely monetary point of view it's probably going to cost Siemens/Nokia more money to repair the PR damage this f*ckup has done than they made money from the sale to Iran.
While I agree that anyone with a university title for computer science should at least have some basic ability in actually writing code, I think you misunderstand what computer science is all about. It is simply not intended as vocational training for programmers. Of course, a student with any sense at all would make sure he is at least employable outside academia, but the point of a computer science study is not to become a programmer.
Let's face it Programming is what the majority of computer science graduated end up doing after they get their degree. I have been handed people with fresh BS and MS degrees who seem to have zero concept of even the most fundamental aspects of software design and development.
Things like:
What is a god-class and why don't we write them?
How to break a problem up properly into objects, what functionality belongs in which object?
A complete lack of any kind of grasp of even basic design patterns.
Why should methods/functions not have 20, 30 or more arguments.
Why don't we nest ten if statements one inside the other with lots of else ifs thrown in and why don't we open an if statement line 112 and close it in line 768 (with 8-10 levels of nested If-elseif-else statements in between... of course).
These guys are excellently prepared for becoming academics but the schools they came from don't seem to be very concerned with giving them the basic skills they need to get a job outside of academia. When they don't even have a couple of proper courses about, say, web-app and web-service programming. It is almost as much effort to train some of these university graduates up as it is to pick a person off the street who is self educated in basic programming, or even has no clue of it at all and train him/her up. Another thing is that some of the more business oriented of these schools are starting to turn out grads that have been taught nothing but "industry standard" (read Microsoft) OS'es/programming languages/tools. Nobody is doing a young computer graduate any favors by teaching him/her only MS or only *nix etc. They have to have a basic grasp of both. Walk into any telecommunications company and you will quickly find out that Microsoft products are not an "industry standard", "DirectX" is not the universal de facto standard for game programming, "OpenGL" is not dying, a huge number of software gets written for other platforms than PCs and server systems, the list goes on... The best people to hire are usually complete nerds because they alone tend to have the kind of basic grasp of software development that is needed because they acquire it in their spare time. Mind you it is definitely a plus if these nerds have a degree. There is, however, a surprising number of people with computer related degrees applying for developer jobs who simply seem to have a very limited clue about how to develop software. Unfortunately comp-sci seems to have become a popular choice for people intending to become programmers. Perhaps we should split comp-sci into two paths? One for people intending to get a job in academia and one for those destined for the commercial job market?
It's a huge pity, really. We in the US are far better at being anti- or pro- state than we are at being anti- or pro- free market.
Thus, we get grotesque situations where, in order to avoid charges of "socialism"...
Most US Americans seem to have no clue at all about what socialism or for that matter communism actually is. Every time they start throwing those words around on Fox News, accusing their various political opponents of being "socialists", it makes me laugh.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is when you have talented researchers spending their time teaching instead of researching. They don't want to do it, they're not any good at it, and the students are just as well off learning from the book. Send the prof back to the lab where his valuable skills won't go to waste.
Who is forcing them to take jobs that involve teaching? Many of these people seem to regard teaching as a simplistic and tiresome chore that they have to "put up with" in order to be able to do their research. The truth is that firstly, teaching isn't a trivial task and, secondly, just because somebody has a high IQ and does brilliant research it doesn't mean that person can teach worth a damn. There is no easier way to loose the respect of a room full of students than if you expect them to learn a mountain of material to perfection but it is painfully obvious to them that you yourself are not as familiar with that material as you should be. Unfortunately too many bright researchers who are forced to teach alongside their research discover the hard way that when you have been doing sophisticated research for a long while and you haven't spent much time thinking about "basic stuff" for a while you can get rusty. So, don't get me wrong, If you gave me the task of teaching, say, geometry to a bunch of high-school kids I'd probably have to refresh my maths knowledge. I'll freely admit to being a bit rusty stuff like that after having worked as a programmer for many years but you can bet your ass I'd come to class prepared to answer any question the kids could throw at me. If you don't they'll eat you alive. People who primarily want to do research should principally not take jobs that involve teaching unless they are willing to commit the kind of time and effort to teaching that it demands. I'm sure there are plenty of research institutes and corporations that would gladly hire them and spare them the torture of having to teach.
Just my two cents.
Or the balls to use that air superiority. When used in WWII the war ended quickly.
Ending WWII was just as much due to Soviet air superiority and Soviet tank superiority as it was to US air superiority. The US didn't have tank superiority since, apart form Soviet armor, Allied armor uniformly sucked a**. A major reason the 8th air force was able to wreck the Nazi military industrial complex, and more importantly their fuel production from the air (which was easily the part of the bomber campaign that hurt the Nazi armies the most) was the fact that from 1943 onwards the Soviets managed to re-equip their forces with large numbers of modern Soviet designed fighter and bomber designs and those Soviet air forces tied down large numbers of german fighters on the eastern front. If anything defeated the Nazis it was the fact that they over-extended themselves militarily in every way.
To me it becomes less interesting when you consider that diverging species start as one. During generations when a species is bifurcating, cross-breeding must normal initially, then become less potent over successive generations until finally it is practically impossible. So the question isn't whether this happens, only how long the separation takes - how much the genomes may differ before they cannot mix.
This kind of genetic or evolutionary "seperation" can take a very long time before two related species are unable to produce viable hybrid offspring. In Dubai scientists bred a camel/llama hybrid they call a "Cama". This may seem like a weird experiment to perform but it is interesting in that it demonstrates that viable offspring resulted from crossbreeding two species with some 2-3 million years of evolutionary separation. Mind you camels and llamas have the same number of chromosomes which increases the chances of producing fertile offspring. An equal chromosomes is, however, not necessary for cross breeding to produce living offspring. Horses and donkeys can crossbreed despite having different numbers of chromosomes and an evolutionary separation estimated at 9 million years. It has always mystified me why it is that some people still claim modern humans and neanderthals were unable to produce living offspring. Once you get past all the religious and cultural baggage (and the cheesy /. jokes), from a purely scientific/genetic standpoint, there seems to be no reason why a neanderthals/modern human couple could not have had children together. Were those children fertile? If they were, did interbreeding happen on a scale to significantly influence human evolution to the point where neanderthal genetic input is still detectable in modern Europeans for example? ... those are two totally different but no less interesting questions.
Presumably Oracle and Sun *themselves* could have predicted these hurdles if they'd done their homework - is it really that outlandish to expect that merging two leading (albeit in different markets!) database companies would be a worry for the regulators? ........ Would the tech industry really be in a better position if they reduced their scrutiny? Or if they applied it only to certain companies. ...... To me it seems a bit "convenient" that, in an economy where many jobs have to be lost anyhow (and as a merger is occurring, which may also naturally lead to job losses) people are blaming job losses solely on the regulators doing their jobs and not on sharp practice, opportunism or plain lack of co-operation from large multinationals operating in a cutthroat market.
Yup... it brings back memories from the recent past when all kinds of people were whining, pissing and moaning about how evil regulators stood in the way of Wall Street in it's quest to make the world a better and wealthier place with innovative financial products and free market fundamentalist dogma. In the middle of this stirring chorus of people chanting "deregulation" in perfect harmony.... BAM.... alluvasudden we had our selves a global banking crash. Now those same people are asking: "where were the regulators?" It just goes to show that humans are funny critters with short and selective memories. IMHO Oracle is getting to be every bit as much of a problem due to their size and market dominance as Microsoft is and you could add quite a few other companies to this list of corporations that are getting way too big in various different tech markets (Apple, Google... the list goes on) without hearing any objections from me.
Has anyone had to do that since NINETEEN NINETY FOUR? Is Berners-Lee still using Mosaic or something?
Real nerds browse with telnet to port 80.... You should know that....
Strategies continued...
* Use the Linux box to connect to the Internet and create a private network with NAT with default inbound deny, connect the Windows box to the NAT network so that worms don't infect it. Run all Windows updates on the relatively secured private network. (works every time, so far)
... all you have to do is carefully drink shot after shot of Jack Daniels till you hit the Ballmer peak. After that you can use your super human coding powers to re-implement Windows XP from scratch.
I can see a similarity between the two. The question is if, when presented with the two, would I be confused into thinking that a Woolworth's branded product is an Apple product, and is it the intention of Woolworth's for this to be the case. The answer is no.
I look at the Woolworth's logo and see an apple. I do not see an Apple apple.
Yup... that and the fact that Woolworth's was smart enough to not try and tempt it's customers with a half eaten fruit.
A 13" MacBook will fulfill some but not all of the requirements listed by the OP (the major missing one being a dock) for $1,200, and it's relatively easy to virtualize and/or dual boot all three major OSes (Windows, Linux, OS X). What more is there?
BookEndz sells a line of docks for Apple laptops but they look kind of clunky to me. Thanks to the USB hub in my display and bluetooth all I have to plug into my 13" MacBook when I sit down at my desk are the power cord, the Mini DisplayPort connector and the USB root connector which takes all of five seconds so I never felt the need to shell out €€€/$$$ for a dock. What really annoys me about the new MacBook Pro line is the built in battery, 7-8 hours of wifi enabled battery life are IMHO irrelevant. I want the ability to swap batteries without having to reach for a screwdriver and if that means having to put up with squeezing only 4 hours of life out of each battery then so be it.
The only devs that Macs are good for are Mac devs.
You do realize that OS X is a certified Unix? That means that OS X shares an enormous commonality/overlap with the entire *nix software developing world including AIX, HPUX, Solaris, BSD and Linux. In fact OS X ships with a huge amount of OSS software pre-installed along with Apple's own proprietary stuff and optional developer packages that include a lot more OSS stuff. Apple also contributes to the OSS movement. Macs are also quite popular for all kinds of platform independent and web development. Apple deserves criticism like any other soulless megacorp and their computers aren't the best development machines ever conceived by the mind of man but Macs are useful for a lot more than just Mac development.
Why didn't be bring that point up in the installation/upgrade section? Microsoft can't include every possible driver on the disc, but the fact that all his hardware was working as soon as he visited Windows Update is a feather in MS's cap in my opinion. Apple only had to care about a handful of different setups, and they control them all.
Love it or hate it incidents like that are why some people don't like Windows. It wasn't a single "missing driver" incident like the one you described that annoyed me enough to abandon Windows, first for Linux and then for the Mac. It was a long and tiring sequence of such incidents happening at regular intervals (and yes, I know Windows reliability has improved since I ditched Windows 98 but I'm still not gong back to Windows). With OS X such annoyances are relatively few and far between for the reasons you pointed out. Personally I think these Desktop OS performance benchmarks/Desktop OS comparisons articles have limited relevance for most users and the flame wars that accompany them are a pile of steaming crap. Don't get me wrong, for the limited portion of computer users doing performance intensive work or PC gaming, Desktop OS performance benchmarks are very interesting. The rest of us are best served just picking the Desktop OS we like and be done with it. I could not care less whether the Desktop OS somebody else likes is Windows, Linux or OS X even if I personally wouldn't touch Windows with a 16 foot pike.
I knew she would be better off with a mac but your statement of "anybody who uses a Mac knows" makes me cringe. Bottom line: do not underestimate stupidity.
I wouldn't call it stupidity. Just because somebody isn't aware of all possible malware infection routes that doesn't make them stupid, naive is perhaps a better word for it or perhaps just unlucky. Expecting the average user to be aware of every possible way of getting his computer infected is about as realistic as expecting a non-medically educated person to be aware of all possible ways to get a disease. We all know any number of things we can do to avoid getting diseases, some of these behaviors are even hardwired into our DNA but they aren't 100% effective. How many of us are likely to go through life without ever catching a disease like, say, Influenza?
Isn't this news from yesterday?
No, you are caught in a temporal loop.
It's not just passenger load/unload time though - there's a lot more to it than that. Check out http://www.atwonline.com/channels/aircraftEquipment/article.html?articleID=1187 for more info, which basically mentions problems with wingspan. Note that according to http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v155/andzz/747-v-380.jpg the A380 wingspan is approximately 15m wider. This can cause issues with whether or not the aircraft will actually fit at the gate, or contribute to congestion problems on the ground when neighboring taxiways can't be used while an A380 rolls down an adjacent one.
These criticisms are in many ways the same as the ones we got with the 747 and this didn't stop the Jumbo. The major hubs will adapt because the economies of scale for an aircraft like the current A380 variants are simply to great and keep in mind we haven't even begun to take into account stretch variants of the A380 which will be able to take passenger counts around the 1000 mark with very little additional operating costs. Which is more efficient? Flying three Boeing 777 or Airbus A340 from New York into Heathrow or a single stretched A380? That's three crews vs one, six engines vs four, three landing slots vs one, three sets of avionics equipment to maintain vs one, lower per passenger costs, lower environmental/carbon-emission charges ... the list goes on. With many airports currently being near maxed out in terms of the number of aircraft they can handle and being geographically hemmed in with little possibility of growth making the aircraft bigger is the only option unless we want to start building new and even bigger airports. In many European countries for example the prospect of building a brand new and much bigger airport near most major cities is practically impossible without ruffling a lot of feathers.
No, they're still trying to breath in and out very slowly and deliberately hoping that the A380 will fly financially. With the current economic climate, it will be a awhile before they're laughing again.
I'm sure the corporate weasels at Airbus will manage a few smug smiles at the expense of the corporate weasels at Boeing after all the detailed coverage of A380 delays by aviation/business journalists, bloggers and other "industry observers" from the other side of the pond. In the long run the A380 has every chance of being a success just like the 747 was. The 380 has operating costs that are more or less the same as a 747 but with the capability to carry a substantially greater number of passengers with a quite low per-passenger cost. There are plans now to build all-coach A380s which are projected to cut air fairs by up to 30% on some routes. Even if they manage to realize even only a third of that price cut the A380 might actually end up benefitting from the current economic climate on inter-hub hauls. It won't be the worlds most comfortable ride but for a 10% price cut I'll put up with being stuck in an 840 seat giant sardine can for a few hours.
And even funnier - search for "Why is Microsoft Windows so expensive?" and the fifth result is a slashdot article entitled: "Why is OSS Commercial Software So Expensive?"!
If you leave out the word "Microsoft" from that search the top ten list includes five criticisms of Macs being expensive, one complaint about vinyl windows being expensive, some griping about windows hosting providers, games and OSS products being expensive and finally my favorite: "Why fish is so expensive!".
Keep in mind this is Apple we're dealing with and we know how vicious they can get when someone tries to step in and actually compete on one of their platforms. My bets on a line of code in the bios that says something like (in pseudocode of course):
I won't necessarily argue with the fact that Apple can get vicious, when dealing with iPhone/iPod developers via the AppStore they can often take that extra step to being downright stupid as well. Even some of the developers who are assigned bug reports form their bug tracking software could do with some lessons in manners when dealing with customers who go out of their way to report bugs in Apple software. But BootCamp and the associated drivers were made by Apple. If the fact that Windows runs on OS X really bothered Apple that much they would have killed BootCamp long ago. Not that it would do them much good. If they killed BootCamp you would probably have half a dozen software companies and FOSS projects stepping in to provide replacements in a matter of months necessitating a followup campaign of strongly worded nastygrams from Apples legal weasels. Personally I rather doubt this will ever happen. The most likely explanation for these BootCamp performance problems is not a grand conspiracy but rather the simple fact that the Windows BootCamp drivers get a lot less attention development effort from Apple's developers than their OS X equivalents do. I doubt that if the situation was reversed, that Microsoft would be in any hurry to make sure their OS X drivers were as good and highly optimized as their Windows drivers.
What I never understood is, how come apple doesn't get into trouble for installing Safari on their comps? I use both OSX and Windows, so I'm not bashing either, just wondering how Microsoft's is a monopoly while Apple's isn't.
Apple doesn't have an overwhelming majority market share on the OS market like Microsoft has. Apple can install browsers of their own manufacture on their own operating system but even if Apple wants to, they still don't have a market share that enables them to leverage their OS to kill off all other browser manufacturers. If Microsoft was just another one of half a dozen OS manufacturers with a 10, 20, 30% market share that shipped it's Microsoft OS with it's own Microsoft browser the same would apply to them. Unfortunately Microsoft has a 90% OS market share and even though Microsoft is doing the same thing when it bundles IE with Windows as Apple does when it bundles Safari with OS X the 90% OS market share of the Microsoft Windows OS changes the rules (according to the EU). Microsoft can and has leveraged their dominant OS market share to also monopolize other software market segments they felt entitled to have all to them selves. If it took Microsoft's fancy they could kill off any competitors in any desktop software market segment they wanted to by simply offering a free (as in $0.00 price tag) competing product and bundling it with their Windows OS. What the EU is trying to do with this ballot screen is not about avenging Netscape it isn't even so much about Microsoft's attempt to dictate web standards by pwning the browser market although that is probably a factor, it is about teaching Microsoft a painful lesson about the consequences of abusing their dominant market position. Which incidentally is something the US Govt. failed miserably to do even though it is in a much stronger position to do so than the EU.
Also, they need to install a browser anyway. If you don't install a browser, then you can't get any browsers so I don't understand what was supposed to happen.
It is trivial to write a non browser based client app that displays a ballot screen and then downloads and installs the browser of your choice. Why exactly people thought that shipping Windows without a browser would be a colossal problem is not quite clear to me.
Last, how is it a monopoly when the product (ie) is non profit (afaik)?
Shipping it's browser for free is how Microsoft established it's browser monopoly in the first place. It's called "dumping" or "predatory pricing" and is a tactic frequently used by greedy mega corporations to drive smaller competitors out of business.
When you buy old cars, you're also putting money back in another American's hands, and you're keeping a useful resource (a working vehicle) from just rotting away.
Bu... but.... the car company weasels need your money _MUCH_ more than other Americans do!! How else are the big car companies going to pay off the consequences of the last few of decades worth of really lousy business decisions like colossal over investment in SUV production if not with massive injections of taxpayer money? Why, if we don't do as the industry lobbyists are saying and feed the big car companies lots of tax dollars actually intended for more socially beneficial projects, car companies might actually have to get off their ass and come up with some original ideas. Like designing and manufacturing more fuel efficient vehicles and selling them to the public _WITHOUT_ government subsidies. Oh the horror, the horror....
It's rare that developers are actually to blame for a project going pear-shaped, and when they are, management are often complicit because they knowingly hired cheap developers without experience. The developers are there to write code, it's the managers' jobs to ensure that the project succeeds.
You assume that most developers write good code, which isn't nearly always the case. I have seen projects run into major problems necessitating extensive rewrites because of fundamental mistakes in low level programming and design decisions that were taken by developers, not a bunch of weaselly managers and marketing creeps. You can completely screw up a project by taking the ad-hoc approach to designing an API or a protocol in a way that can be very expensive to fix. I agree that management (or marketing for that matter) usually makes it's contributions to such disasters as well but you can't just absolve the coders, especially the senior techies that do the design work. In the end coders must also live up to a minimal level of competence.
Can we do away with the "XP still alive" stories?
Why? I was kind of hoping "XP is dying" would replace the "BSD is dying" joke since the latter is pretty much worn out and needs a replacement.
Naturally businesses do not want to migrate to a more expensive OS. XP works.
They all said that about Windows 2000 as well. Most of them ended up switching to XP anyway. This isn't so much about what the customer wants or needs as what Microsoft needs. What they need is to refill their coffers by fleecing their captive market with a new OS... yet again.
The morality of providing filtering technology to Iran aside, I just can't see what the States are trying to accomplish here. They try to punish companies from other countries for something that wasn't illegal at the time.
I'm guessing they are engaging in some good old fashioned: wrap them selves in a flag, stand on a soap box and yell: "We are the defenders of liberty and democracy", type demagoguery while seizing an excellent opportunity to try and improve the competitive edge of US based telco equipment manufacturers by kicking their foreign competitors in the nuts. Politicians around the world do something similar all the time. Not that Nokia and Siemens shouldn't be punished for doing this. It may have been legal at the time but it's morally questionable. Even if you look at it from a totally unemotional standpoint based on the idea that corporations have no morals this sale was stupid thing to do since from a purely monetary point of view it's probably going to cost Siemens/Nokia more money to repair the PR damage this f*ckup has done than they made money from the sale to Iran.
While I agree that anyone with a university title for computer science should at least have some basic ability in actually writing code, I think you misunderstand what computer science is all about. It is simply not intended as vocational training for programmers. Of course, a student with any sense at all would make sure he is at least employable outside academia, but the point of a computer science study is not to become a programmer.
Let's face it Programming is what the majority of computer science graduated end up doing after they get their degree. I have been handed people with fresh BS and MS degrees who seem to have zero concept of even the most fundamental aspects of software design and development.
Things like:
These guys are excellently prepared for becoming academics but the schools they came from don't seem to be very concerned with giving them the basic skills they need to get a job outside of academia. When they don't even have a couple of proper courses about, say, web-app and web-service programming. It is almost as much effort to train some of these university graduates up as it is to pick a person off the street who is self educated in basic programming, or even has no clue of it at all and train him/her up. Another thing is that some of the more business oriented of these schools are starting to turn out grads that have been taught nothing but "industry standard" (read Microsoft) OS'es/programming languages/tools. Nobody is doing a young computer graduate any favors by teaching him/her only MS or only *nix etc. They have to have a basic grasp of both. Walk into any telecommunications company and you will quickly find out that Microsoft products are not an "industry standard", "DirectX" is not the universal de facto standard for game programming, "OpenGL" is not dying, a huge number of software gets written for other platforms than PCs and server systems, the list goes on... The best people to hire are usually complete nerds because they alone tend to have the kind of basic grasp of software development that is needed because they acquire it in their spare time. Mind you it is definitely a plus if these nerds have a degree. There is, however, a surprising number of people with computer related degrees applying for developer jobs who simply seem to have a very limited clue about how to develop software. Unfortunately comp-sci seems to have become a popular choice for people intending to become programmers. Perhaps we should split comp-sci into two paths? One for people intending to get a job in academia and one for those destined for the commercial job market?
It's a huge pity, really. We in the US are far better at being anti- or pro- state than we are at being anti- or pro- free market.
Thus, we get grotesque situations where, in order to avoid charges of "socialism"...
Most US Americans seem to have no clue at all about what socialism or for that matter communism actually is. Every time they start throwing those words around on Fox News, accusing their various political opponents of being "socialists", it makes me laugh.
VI customers could just switch to emacs.
HERETIC!!