"Your point being what, that Apple knows how to plan ahead and design their architecture for longevity, extensibility and reuse, while Microsoft's stuff is so crappy that they have to throw it all out every few years and start over?"
Apple is the same company that took ten years and several totally abortive attempts to develop a replacement for their original MacOS [1]. Once they failed at that one too many times, they said to hell with it, bought their next generation OS and released it in the form of a product that couldn't run any existing MacOS software, except through emulation. While their technical staff was busy screwing this up, their business staff managed to handle the clone issue in the worst way possible: they waited umpteen years too long, licenced a couple vendors (including their primary parts supplier), and pulled the rug out from under them when they realized they were getting undercut. Thus leaving their licencees and anybody that invested in them holding the bag.
These guys are occasionally brilliant and Mac OS X is nice product (I know, because I own a Mac), but it's a miracle they're still in business at all.
1] It's worth pointing out that Microsoft's next generation OS (Windows NT) was released in 1993, 7 or 8 years before OSX 10.0. They developod this, despite the fact that they fell out with their partner (IBM and OS/2 NT) and had to maintain two kernels (NT and 9x). Both kernels ended up running both 16 and 32-bit software. Windows isn't without its share of problems, but Microsoft has classically done a far better job of delivering product than Apple has.
With respect to throwing stuff out, even Longhorn retains the existing USER/GDI graphics layer. Avalon is a replacement, but it's the first replacement of the USER.DLL/GDI.DLL API in 20 years (and it's based on DirectX stuff, so it's not totally a replacement even now).
"In the mid term elections Karl Rove said that he has to paint Bush as some sort of American savior, A strong leader."
Which seems like a good strategy for someone trying to get Bush re-elected.
"He only appears to be a better choice because the media whether so-called mainstream or right wing paints him that way."
I keep hearing this again and again: that I believe what I believe thanks to media bias (The implication being that nobody could believe that Bush was a good choice had they done the research and came to their own conclusion.) Frankly, I resent it: I spent a lot of time, read a great deal, thought a lot about the issues, and came to the conclusion that Bush is the better man for the job.
"Making allies is a better idea,"
Ceding our government over to those allies is a bad idea.
"in case you only watch FOX News,"
I've only watched Fox News about 15 or 20 minutes this election cycle... I can't really stand to watch much more.
"most of the enitre world was against the Iraq War"
Agreed.
"-a pretty strong statement. "
And relevant, why?
"The United States will not attack North Korea because they can defend themselves and the threat of nuclear war is very serious,"
Which seems like a good reason to me not to go after NK.
"same goes for Iran."
Ditto.
"Recently China had something to say about this preemptive war bullshit and you really dont want to piss off the Chinese-not only is their armed forces bigger but they have nukes too."
Same song, second verse, a little bit louder and a whole lot worse.
Frankly, I'd xrather the Chinese believe we're willing to take them on than have them believe we'll fold to international opinion. All the international kudos in the world will mean jack shit if we've earned them by compromising our ability to deal with the Chinese on a equal basis.
"People really need to look at alternative sources of information to really make informed decisions. "
People do. Just don't expect them all to come to the same conclusion as yourself.
"You'll certainly regret it after your company is transferred to India"
Neither Bush nor Kerry have effective plans to keep jobs from moving overseas. Even if they did, such a plan would hurt the economy by raising the relative cost of labor for American companies and making their products less competitive.
Offshoring is a structural change in the economy, just like the shift away from Agriculture in the first half ot the 20th century and the shift away from manufacturing in the second.
"and have to take a crappy job to pay for your debts."
I've already switched job roles to protect myself against offshoring related issues. My new job is better than my last.
"You do know that the US economy has been dying since Bush and his mafia has been in place, right ?"
Yes, because Bush snapped his fingers and sent the economy into a tailspin the day he went into office.
"Masochists like you shouldn't be given the right to vote."
If you really believe that, go to a country where there is no universal right to vote among citizens of age.
"And I'm sure you take an interest in what motivates this power and what it's likely to do next."
Sure, I think a lot of the world is motivated by a desire to see America to well to the extent it can help them, but not let it get too powerful that it's unchecked. This goes back a long time, historically speaking. I think another common motivation among some nations is that America's success as a Democratic free market economy repudiates more centrally controlled and authoritarian systems of government.
Maybe that's too cynical, but if I was in another country, that's probably pretty close to what I'd be thinking. It also seems to explain current events pretty well.
"However they are a very specific and isolated terrorist group with the very specific aim of killing as many Americans or members of other Western Democracies as they can."
I think it's realistic to assume that they have a great deal of government support from governments interested in doing what they can to check American power but not able to do so publicly.
"I have nothing against the USA doing everything it can to bring Bin Laden to justice and support them 100% in that aim and I think you should be engaged in a "War On Bin Laden"."
I agree, but I'd broaden it to include Al Qaida and its supporters. (I think the wholesale invasion of Iraq was misguided.)
"Unfortunately you and alot of other people believe in this neverending boogieman called "terrorism" that the Bush Administration has used in its propaganda to wage a continuous war."
A war with two primary fronts, Iraq and Afghanistan, that's lasted for two years is hardly a continuous war.
"When the republicans get into office they plunge the country into a huge deficit which eventually leads to a recession."
Prior to FDR's election government spending as a percentage of GDP was stable in the 5-10% range. Policies started by FDR to counteract the great depression started government spending, adjusted for inflation, linearly upwards (even if you ignore war years).
FDR is the origin of the modern entitlement society. Even JFK thought his policies placed too little emphasis on personal responsibility.
"We are at war with terrorists, we have always been at war with terrorists. War is double plus good. "
Would you believe I just read 1984 in preparation for the election? I thought it might provide some interesting historical perspective on what some folks have been saying about the war on terror...
"Tell me, do you beleive Hussein was responsible for 9/11?"
No. I also don't believe he was an immediate danger to the U.S.
"Do you feel safer now that nearly our entire military and intelligence apparatus are pre-occupied with Iraq, while we ignore North Korea and Iran?"
Not really, but you have to start somewhere unless you're going to limit yourself to making vague promises about international respect and cooperation.
If voting for a candidate meant "I support all his/her positions", then nobody could legitimately vote for anybody (if they think for themselves). My belief is that Bush is a better choice than the alternatives, not that Bush is some kind of American savior.
"The US at the moment has the power and global influence to dictate aspects of our own lives so it's probably not surprising that we interested about the outcome."
Well, it's not like we're the only big economy, the only country in the G8 summit or the only veto on the security council. There are countries all over the world that have _incredible_ direct power over US lives. Just as one example, look at the effect on the US of the OPEC oil embargo in the 70's.
"I would say that point 1 ( We are at War ) is the main thing us Europeans would like to address,"
The EU countries have collectively addressed the point quite adequately, stated their opinion, and either joined us in our effort or haven't. While I _strongly_ believe that we ought to keep looking for ways to compromise and work together, it's wholely unreasonable for outside powers to expect all of our decisions to coincide with their views. (FWIW, I do personally think invading Iraq was misguided and a mistake)
"you are not at war. There is no global terrorist enemy,"
Maybe this discussion should stop right here, since we're pretty clearly on different pages. I have no idea where you get the idea that there's no 'global terrorist enemy'. Does it hinge on the word global? The word terrorist? I was at the WTC site yesterday, and I _assure_ you, even if it's not global or terrorist, we do have some kind of enemy hell bent on killing Americans (at least).
In my mind, that has to be taken seriously.
"I really hope that whoever is in power on Wednesday"
That'd be Bush... power transfers (or not) in January 2005.
"If we're not careful managing the world opinion of our country, the oil market could change from using the dollar to using the euro. [dawn.com] That could be devastating to our currency, because we are (unfortunately) very oil dependant. "
That might just give us the incentive to get off our ass and either switch to something else or develop more local sources of oil. Neither of those will happen unless they become more cost effective than the status quo.
"1) We are at war. 2) World opinion of the US is at an all time low. 3) At least one Supreme Court justice will be replaced in the next 4 years. 4) The world is watching these elections."
I don't really understand the rationale behind points 2 and 4. I agree that it's important to have respect for foreign powers, but we shouldn't let that respect for foreigh powers dominate our own policy decisions. (Hopefully, most of the time, they'll coincide, but that's far from guaranteed.)
Turing the argument around, do you honestly think that any other country (particularly European countries) really gives a damn what Americans think about their leadership choices?
It took me a while to get there, but I believe pretty strongly that Bush is the right choice for America.
Maybe it's the incumbancy thing, but to me, Bush just has a lot more credibility on issues surrounding defense and the economy. I don't buy into Kerry's "magic" ability to get foreign powers involved in Iraq, and his tax/budget policies seem even worse than Bush's.
"The world votes Kerry to ensure that mr. Bush doesn't do more irrepairable damage to the world than he has already done. What do you think will happen to the respect that other nations have for the US, when Bush is re-elected. "
It'll likely be the same thing it's always been: we're a useful ally, an essential trade partner, and a country that shouldn't become much more dominant than it already is.
The simple fact of the matter is that countries act in their own interest. Period. Oftentimes that corresponds with global interests, but when push comes to shove, local interests win.
"How do you think groups like Al Qaeda will react when Bush is re-elected. "
Probably the same way they reacted in 1993, when they attacked the WTC for the first time and Clinton was in office. Anti-US Terrorism extends far beyond the presidency and is fundamentally an attack on US values and global dominance.
I'm all for world cooperation, but who cares who the rest of the world would elect? Since it's not their country and they wouldn't be goverened by anybody they elected, they have totally different incentives for their vote.
As an American, my responsibility is to pick the person that I feel best represents my country and our collective interests to the world, not to pick the person that I feel best represents the world. No true patriot would cede the right to self rule in the manner suggested by these "global elections"
I like the idea, but it's too expensive considering that it's not a phone, the display is as small as it is, there's no PDA capability, and there's no way to change any of this by installing software.
This is yet another example of Apple/Jobs introducing an expensive, closed, ultimately ascetic, but very well designed piece of hardware.
"1.2GHz iBook... coming in at $899 (education),... eMacs and iMac G5s coming in at $599 and $1099 (education),... I fail to see how people continue to say Macs are too expensive"
You'd have much more credibility if you quoted normal pricing rather than educational. I know education is (was?) a big part of Apple's market, but the vast majority of folks are paying the normal prices.
XAML is really an XML serialization mechanism for objects in the Avalon hierarchy rather than a particular set of XML tags in and of itself. The mapping between a XAML file and the Avalon objects that end up getting created when read in is very close.
"Depth of field is more related to total magnification and "size of hole in lens" than image sensor, not totally the same as what you say:)"
Yeah, I know about the math inolved, I just wanted to keep it brief for the sake of clarity. The point is the same: given a fixed composition and camera position, a smaller imaging sensor will have to have a shorter focal length lense and larger depth of field.
"The composition is much easier, image is bigger, brighter etc. and easier to work with. Boy do I feel sorry for Nikon..."
Yeah, they're getting left in the dust lately. Too bad too, since I've always been a Nikon fan.
"Having a 35mm CMOS has nothing to do with the image quality."
This is wrong
There are two reasons a full frame imaging sensor can lead to better picture quality. First, the larger CCD is more sensitive to light. That means that to get a given effective ISO rating, a larger CCD needs to use less gain before the ADC stage than a smaller CCD would use. Higher gain=higher noise, which is why cameras like the Sony F828 shoot much noiser pictures at higher ISO's than entry level DSLRs like the Digital Rebel and D70 at the same ISO.
The second reason that larger CCD's are useful has to do with the effective focal length issue you discuss. Like you say, to get the same field of view, the smaller the imaging sensors your camera uses the shorter the focal length of the lens has to be. The problem is that as you shorten focal length, the depth of field of the lens gets wider. This means that stopped open, you're going to be less able to throw the background out of focus on a camera with a smaller sensor than you would with a larger imaging sensor and consequently longer focal length lens. While this might be good for landscape photography, it's not going to do much for your portraits, where you want the background to be blurry to avoid taking away from the subject of the picture.
On the bright side, lenses for smaller sensors do tend to be cheaper to make.
"They were worth the money back then, but now it's a bit silly paying $80+ for something with a Z80 CPU and a display that's half the resolution of a low-end Palm."
The problem is this: most folks aren't paying for the CPU and the display, they're paying for a calculator.
"TI's margins must be sky high by now."
So what't the incentive for them to switch to a faster CPU? They'd either eat into their per-unit margins or have to raise the sale cost (which would lower overal revenue and profitability).
The only reason they'd do this is if 1) thier sales are being eroded by some competitor getting traction in the market with a better hardware platform or 2) they thought they could offer some compelling new value with the new hardware that would convince customers the extra cost was worthwhile. Either of these cases goes to maintaining or eventually improving sales/revenue. Without that, there's just no reason for them to give away profit or sales.
"have the impression that HP, Casio and TI are stuck in a time-gap with their graphing calcs. "
Part of it is cost. Most of the calculator market is in high-school level education, and there's no way that parents or schools are going to pay extra for a display that doesn't add any pedagoical value.
That said, HP sort of is in a time-gap. Back in the mid 80's, after the renowned HP41 series, HP launched an ambitions design effort to design a platform for their next generation calculators. This resulted in the RPL programming environment and the Saturn microprocessor family that underpinned pretty much everything HP did from the 28C onwards.
To give you an idea of what the Saturn chip is like, it's primarily a 4-bit chip: the ALU works with 4-bit quantities and the memory is 4-bit addressable with a 20-bit bus (512Kbytes of address space, in other words). It also has a few special features for the calcualtor market: the registers are 64-bits wide with pre-defined fields for parts of floating point numbers, and the chip can be placed in an optional BCD mode to optimize decimal calculations. The RPL programming environment, developed over 20 years is quite closely tied to this chip and mostly written in Saturn assembly code. Porting it would be a quite expensive undertaking, particularly to ensure the high numeric reliability standards HP calculators are known for.
So, keeping this in mind, it's understandable that HP's latest calculator, the 49G+ switched to an ARM microprocessor, but retained much of the existing firmware running under a Saturn emulator written for the ARM. While it's possible to call into ARM code from Saturn machine code, I don't know if they could easily extend the RPL environment to easily support things like higher resolution displays or color.
Re:Those stats don't really mean much though
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"that the leader of the US has such an influence on the remainder of the world that it would be appropriate, in the representative democratic sense, for the remainder of the world to have some say on the choice of the American leader.
There's merit to that argument."
No there's not. The U.S.' representative government represents U.S. citizens. Imagine that.
I can't even begin to imagine the hell other countries would raise if we requested some kind of voting rights in countries on the UN Security Council or in the G8 economic summit.
Hey Jean-Pierre, U.S. citizens should have a say in the next French election...:-)
Re:Those stats don't really mean much though
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Mock World Vote
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"No, that's what you have focused on, perhaps becuase that what the news outlets you view focus on."
Could it also be that _every_ Democrat I've spoken with has emphasized that they'd vote for anybody but Bush. That's been the theme this entire election cycle, back to before the first primary.
"Have you ever heard him speak, almost always he goes over a number of issues, and in fact took great pains not to even mention Bush in the Democratic Convention."
Which I did watch (along with the GOP convention).
"Do some research, go to Kerry's Website [johnkerry.com] and find out what he stands for,"
I have found out what he stands for: a bunch of bad ideas, equally as bad as Bushies'.
"rather than waiting for it to be spoon feed to you by some poster on a tech forum. "
While it might be easier for you to believe that I don't have a validly formed and researched opinion, I assure you that if I was waiting to here it from "some poster on a tech forum", I wouldn't be posting my opinion, I'd be reading it.
For what it's worth, I was really hoping Kerry would at least scare the hell out of Bush this cycle. Bush, despite his 2000 campaign, has turned out extreme enough (likely thanks to his staff) he needs to be counterbalanced.
Slashdot Mirror
"Your point being what, that Apple knows how to plan ahead and design their architecture for longevity, extensibility and reuse, while Microsoft's stuff is so crappy that they have to throw it all out every few years and start over?"
Apple is the same company that took ten years and several totally abortive attempts to develop a replacement for their original MacOS [1]. Once they failed at that one too many times, they said to hell with it, bought their next generation OS and released it in the form of a product that couldn't run any existing MacOS software, except through emulation. While their technical staff was busy screwing this up, their business staff managed to handle the clone issue in the worst way possible: they waited umpteen years too long, licenced a couple vendors (including their primary parts supplier), and pulled the rug out from under them when they realized they were getting undercut. Thus leaving their licencees and anybody that invested in them holding the bag.
These guys are occasionally brilliant and Mac OS X is nice product (I know, because I own a Mac), but it's a miracle they're still in business at all. 1] It's worth pointing out that Microsoft's next generation OS (Windows NT) was released in 1993, 7 or 8 years before OSX 10.0. They developod this, despite the fact that they fell out with their partner (IBM and OS/2 NT) and had to maintain two kernels (NT and 9x). Both kernels ended up running both 16 and 32-bit software. Windows isn't without its share of problems, but Microsoft has classically done a far better job of delivering product than Apple has.
With respect to throwing stuff out, even Longhorn retains the existing USER/GDI graphics layer. Avalon is a replacement, but it's the first replacement of the USER.DLL/GDI.DLL API in 20 years (and it's based on DirectX stuff, so it's not totally a replacement even now).
After we got our dog Maxie, and lived with him for a few weeks, I renamed our network MaxiesMadhouse. Six months later, it still fits.
"I'm sure future historians will mark this day as the offical turning point of the fall and decline of the American empire. "
That honor could also easily go to FDR's new deal. Even without WW2, FDR is the most transformational president the nation's ever had.
"In the mid term elections Karl Rove said that he has to paint Bush as some sort of American savior, A strong leader."
Which seems like a good strategy for someone trying to get Bush re-elected.
"He only appears to be a better choice because the media whether so-called mainstream or right wing paints him that way."
I keep hearing this again and again: that I believe what I believe thanks to media bias (The implication being that nobody could believe that Bush was a good choice had they done the research and came to their own conclusion.) Frankly, I resent it: I spent a lot of time, read a great deal, thought a lot about the issues, and came to the conclusion that Bush is the better man for the job.
"Making allies is a better idea,"
Ceding our government over to those allies is a bad idea.
"in case you only watch FOX News,"
I've only watched Fox News about 15 or 20 minutes this election cycle... I can't really stand to watch much more.
"most of the enitre world was against the Iraq War"
Agreed.
"-a pretty strong statement. "
And relevant, why?
"The United States will not attack North Korea because they can defend themselves and the threat of nuclear war is very serious,"
Which seems like a good reason to me not to go after NK.
"same goes for Iran."
Ditto.
"Recently China had something to say about this preemptive war bullshit and you really dont want to piss off the Chinese-not only is their armed forces bigger but they have nukes too."
Same song, second verse, a little bit louder and a whole lot worse.
Frankly, I'd xrather the Chinese believe we're willing to take them on than have them believe we'll fold to international opinion. All the international kudos in the world will mean jack shit if we've earned them by compromising our ability to deal with the Chinese on a equal basis.
"People really need to look at alternative sources of information to really make informed decisions. "
People do. Just don't expect them all to come to the same conclusion as yourself.
"You'll certainly regret it after your company is transferred to India"
Neither Bush nor Kerry have effective plans to keep jobs from moving overseas. Even if they did, such a plan would hurt the economy by raising the relative cost of labor for American companies and making their products less competitive.
Offshoring is a structural change in the economy, just like the shift away from Agriculture in the first half ot the 20th century and the shift away from manufacturing in the second.
"and have to take a crappy job to pay for your debts."
I've already switched job roles to protect myself against offshoring related issues. My new job is better than my last.
"You do know that the US economy has been dying since Bush and his mafia has been in place, right ?"
Yes, because Bush snapped his fingers and sent the economy into a tailspin the day he went into office.
"Masochists like you shouldn't be given the right to vote."
If you really believe that, go to a country where there is no universal right to vote among citizens of age.
"And I'm sure you take an interest in what motivates this power and what it's likely to do next."
Sure, I think a lot of the world is motivated by a desire to see America to well to the extent it can help them, but not let it get too powerful that it's unchecked. This goes back a long time, historically speaking. I think another common motivation among some nations is that America's success as a Democratic free market economy repudiates more centrally controlled and authoritarian systems of government.
Maybe that's too cynical, but if I was in another country, that's probably pretty close to what I'd be thinking. It also seems to explain current events pretty well.
"However they are a very specific and isolated terrorist group with the very specific aim of killing as many Americans or members of other Western Democracies as they can."
I think it's realistic to assume that they have a great deal of government support from governments interested in doing what they can to check American power but not able to do so publicly.
"I have nothing against the USA doing everything it can to bring Bin Laden to justice and support them 100% in that aim and I think you should be engaged in a "War On Bin Laden"."
I agree, but I'd broaden it to include Al Qaida and its supporters. (I think the wholesale invasion of Iraq was misguided.)
"Unfortunately you and alot of other people believe in this neverending boogieman called "terrorism" that the Bush Administration has used in its propaganda to wage a continuous war."
A war with two primary fronts, Iraq and Afghanistan, that's lasted for two years is hardly a continuous war.
"When the republicans get into office they plunge the country into a huge deficit which eventually leads to a recession."
Prior to FDR's election government spending as a percentage of GDP was stable in the 5-10% range. Policies started by FDR to counteract the great depression started government spending, adjusted for inflation, linearly upwards (even if you ignore war years).
FDR is the origin of the modern entitlement society. Even JFK thought his policies placed too little emphasis on personal responsibility.
"If people from other companies don't respect us then will they continue to buy our products?"
If we make competitive products at good prices, then probably yes.
"We are at war with terrorists, we have always been at war with terrorists. War is double plus good. "
Would you believe I just read 1984 in preparation for the election? I thought it might provide some interesting historical perspective on what some folks have been saying about the war on terror...
"Tell me, do you beleive Hussein was responsible for 9/11?"
No. I also don't believe he was an immediate danger to the U.S.
"Do you feel safer now that nearly our entire military and intelligence apparatus are pre-occupied with Iraq, while we ignore North Korea and Iran?"
Not really, but you have to start somewhere unless you're going to limit yourself to making vague promises about international respect and cooperation.
If voting for a candidate meant "I support all his/her positions", then nobody could legitimately vote for anybody (if they think for themselves). My belief is that Bush is a better choice than the alternatives, not that Bush is some kind of American savior.
"The US at the moment has the power and global influence to dictate aspects of our own lives so it's probably not surprising that we interested about the outcome."
Well, it's not like we're the only big economy, the only country in the G8 summit or the only veto on the security council. There are countries all over the world that have _incredible_ direct power over US lives. Just as one example, look at the effect on the US of the OPEC oil embargo in the 70's.
"I would say that point 1 ( We are at War ) is the main thing us Europeans would like to address,"
The EU countries have collectively addressed the point quite adequately, stated their opinion, and either joined us in our effort or haven't. While I _strongly_ believe that we ought to keep looking for ways to compromise and work together, it's wholely unreasonable for outside powers to expect all of our decisions to coincide with their views. (FWIW, I do personally think invading Iraq was misguided and a mistake)
"you are not at war. There is no global terrorist enemy,"
Maybe this discussion should stop right here, since we're pretty clearly on different pages. I have no idea where you get the idea that there's no 'global terrorist enemy'. Does it hinge on the word global? The word terrorist? I was at the WTC site yesterday, and I _assure_ you, even if it's not global or terrorist, we do have some kind of enemy hell bent on killing Americans (at least).
In my mind, that has to be taken seriously.
"I really hope that whoever is in power on Wednesday"
That'd be Bush... power transfers (or not) in January 2005.
"If we're not careful managing the world opinion of our country, the oil market could change from using the dollar to using the euro. [dawn.com] That could be devastating to our currency, because we are (unfortunately) very oil dependant. "
That might just give us the incentive to get off our ass and either switch to something else or develop more local sources of oil. Neither of those will happen unless they become more cost effective than the status quo.
"1) We are at war.
2) World opinion of the US is at an all time low.
3) At least one Supreme Court justice will be replaced in the next 4 years.
4) The world is watching these elections."
I don't really understand the rationale behind points 2 and 4. I agree that it's important to have respect for foreign powers, but we shouldn't let that respect for foreigh powers dominate our own policy decisions. (Hopefully, most of the time, they'll coincide, but that's far from guaranteed.)
Turing the argument around, do you honestly think that any other country (particularly European countries) really gives a damn what Americans think about their leadership choices?
It took me a while to get there, but I believe pretty strongly that Bush is the right choice for America.
Maybe it's the incumbancy thing, but to me, Bush just has a lot more credibility on issues surrounding defense and the economy. I don't buy into Kerry's "magic" ability to get foreign powers involved in Iraq, and his tax/budget policies seem even worse than Bush's.
"The world votes Kerry to ensure that mr. Bush doesn't do more irrepairable damage to the world than he has already done. What do you think will happen to the respect that other nations have for the US, when Bush is re-elected. "
It'll likely be the same thing it's always been: we're a useful ally, an essential trade partner, and a country that shouldn't become much more dominant than it already is.
The simple fact of the matter is that countries act in their own interest. Period. Oftentimes that corresponds with global interests, but when push comes to shove, local interests win.
"How do you think groups like Al Qaeda will react when Bush is re-elected. "
Probably the same way they reacted in 1993, when they attacked the WTC for the first time and Clinton was in office. Anti-US Terrorism extends far beyond the presidency and is fundamentally an attack on US values and global dominance.
I'm all for world cooperation, but who cares who the rest of the world would elect? Since it's not their country and they wouldn't be goverened by anybody they elected, they have totally different incentives for their vote.
As an American, my responsibility is to pick the person that I feel best represents my country and our collective interests to the world, not to pick the person that I feel best represents the world. No true patriot would cede the right to self rule in the manner suggested by these "global elections"
I like the idea, but it's too expensive considering that it's not a phone, the display is as small as it is, there's no PDA capability, and there's no way to change any of this by installing software. This is yet another example of Apple/Jobs introducing an expensive, closed, ultimately ascetic, but very well designed piece of hardware.
"1.2GHz iBook ... coming in at $899 (education), ... eMacs and iMac G5s coming in at $599 and $1099 (education), ... I fail to see how people continue to say Macs are too expensive"
You'd have much more credibility if you quoted normal pricing rather than educational. I know education is (was?) a big part of Apple's market, but the vast majority of folks are paying the normal prices.
XAML is really an XML serialization mechanism for objects in the Avalon hierarchy rather than a particular set of XML tags in and of itself. The mapping between a XAML file and the Avalon objects that end up getting created when read in is very close.
"Depth of field is more related to total magnification and "size of hole in lens" than image sensor, not totally the same as what you say :)"
..."
Yeah, I know about the math inolved, I just wanted to keep it brief for the sake of clarity. The point is the same: given a fixed composition and camera position, a smaller imaging sensor will have to have a shorter focal length lense and larger depth of field.
"The composition is much easier, image is bigger, brighter etc. and easier to work with. Boy do I feel sorry for Nikon
Yeah, they're getting left in the dust lately. Too bad too, since I've always been a Nikon fan.
"Having a 35mm CMOS has nothing to do with the image quality."
This is wrong
There are two reasons a full frame imaging sensor can lead to better picture quality. First, the larger CCD is more sensitive to light. That means that to get a given effective ISO rating, a larger CCD needs to use less gain before the ADC stage than a smaller CCD would use. Higher gain=higher noise, which is why cameras like the Sony F828 shoot much noiser pictures at higher ISO's than entry level DSLRs like the Digital Rebel and D70 at the same ISO.
The second reason that larger CCD's are useful has to do with the effective focal length issue you discuss. Like you say, to get the same field of view, the smaller the imaging sensors your camera uses the shorter the focal length of the lens has to be. The problem is that as you shorten focal length, the depth of field of the lens gets wider. This means that stopped open, you're going to be less able to throw the background out of focus on a camera with a smaller sensor than you would with a larger imaging sensor and consequently longer focal length lens. While this might be good for landscape photography, it's not going to do much for your portraits, where you want the background to be blurry to avoid taking away from the subject of the picture.
On the bright side, lenses for smaller sensors do tend to be cheaper to make.
"They were worth the money back then, but now it's a bit silly paying $80+ for something with a Z80 CPU and a display that's half the resolution of a low-end Palm."
The problem is this: most folks aren't paying for the CPU and the display, they're paying for a calculator.
"TI's margins must be sky high by now."
So what't the incentive for them to switch to a faster CPU? They'd either eat into their per-unit margins or have to raise the sale cost (which would lower overal revenue and profitability).
The only reason they'd do this is if 1) thier sales are being eroded by some competitor getting traction in the market with a better hardware platform or 2) they thought they could offer some compelling new value with the new hardware that would convince customers the extra cost was worthwhile. Either of these cases goes to maintaining or eventually improving sales/revenue. Without that, there's just no reason for them to give away profit or sales.
"have the impression that HP, Casio and TI are stuck in a time-gap with their graphing calcs. "
Part of it is cost. Most of the calculator market is in high-school level education, and there's no way that parents or schools are going to pay extra for a display that doesn't add any pedagoical value.
That said, HP sort of is in a time-gap. Back in the mid 80's, after the renowned HP41 series, HP launched an ambitions design effort to design a platform for their next generation calculators. This resulted in the RPL programming environment and the Saturn microprocessor family that underpinned pretty much everything HP did from the 28C onwards.
To give you an idea of what the Saturn chip is like, it's primarily a 4-bit chip: the ALU works with 4-bit quantities and the memory is 4-bit addressable with a 20-bit bus (512Kbytes of address space, in other words). It also has a few special features for the calcualtor market: the registers are 64-bits wide with pre-defined fields for parts of floating point numbers, and the chip can be placed in an optional BCD mode to optimize decimal calculations. The RPL programming environment, developed over 20 years is quite closely tied to this chip and mostly written in Saturn assembly code. Porting it would be a quite expensive undertaking, particularly to ensure the high numeric reliability standards HP calculators are known for.
So, keeping this in mind, it's understandable that HP's latest calculator, the 49G+ switched to an ARM microprocessor, but retained much of the existing firmware running under a Saturn emulator written for the ARM. While it's possible to call into ARM code from Saturn machine code, I don't know if they could easily extend the RPL environment to easily support things like higher resolution displays or color.
"that the leader of the US has such an influence on the remainder of the world that it would be appropriate, in the representative democratic sense, for the remainder of the world to have some say on the choice of the American leader.
:-)
There's merit to that argument."
No there's not. The U.S.' representative government represents U.S. citizens. Imagine that.
I can't even begin to imagine the hell other countries would raise if we requested some kind of voting rights in countries on the UN Security Council or in the G8 economic summit.
Hey Jean-Pierre, U.S. citizens should have a say in the next French election...
"No, that's what you have focused on, perhaps becuase that what the news outlets you view focus on."
Could it also be that _every_ Democrat I've spoken with has emphasized that they'd vote for anybody but Bush. That's been the theme this entire election cycle, back to before the first primary.
"Have you ever heard him speak, almost always he goes over a number of issues, and in fact took great pains not to even mention Bush in the Democratic Convention."
Which I did watch (along with the GOP convention).
"Do some research, go to Kerry's Website [johnkerry.com] and find out what he stands for,"
I have found out what he stands for: a bunch of bad ideas, equally as bad as Bushies'.
"rather than waiting for it to be spoon feed to you by some poster on a tech forum. "
While it might be easier for you to believe that I don't have a validly formed and researched opinion, I assure you that if I was waiting to here it from "some poster on a tech forum", I wouldn't be posting my opinion, I'd be reading it.
For what it's worth, I was really hoping Kerry would at least scare the hell out of Bush this cycle. Bush, despite his 2000 campaign, has turned out extreme enough (likely thanks to his staff) he needs to be counterbalanced.