Why is that? Moving from OS9 to OSX was a major leap. I know it was far easier, since they control the hardware platform, but it has been done before.
Well, not knowing much details about the innards of OS9/OSX -- was this truly a "rewrite" of the OS as the you initially said? ("Microsoft has the capital to develop a new operating system from the ground up.")
Was the transition from OS9 to OSX a "ground up" change? Or was it a swap of the kernel for a more modern one?
My first thought is that trying to build a new OS from "the ground up" isn't going to be an easy task. Unfortunately, Microsoft is hobbled by the need to be backwards compatible. Didn't Apple just more or less say "out with the old, in with the new"?
Microsoft has the capital to develop a new operating system from the ground up.
Have you even been involved in rewriting software from scratch? Usually you end up missing a whole bunch of use cases, introducing new errors, and completely not getting old ones. It just never seems to work the way people hope it will, and it ends up costing way more than you thought.
I fear that if MS tried to write an OS from scratch, it would likely be a big step backwards, do less than what we're accustomed to now, and take years of incremental improvements to get back to where we are now. I don't see what you propose as being either viable or possible.
but what Apple did by porting OSX for Intel in parallel says volumes about their company
Or, it speaks to how well their kernel was designed as to have the hardware-specific stuff nicely abstracted -- I honestly don't know which. At the very least, it demonstrates that they were willing to undertake the work.
* Obtain a copy of Terrorism: Preparing for the Unexpected from your local Red Cross.
* Develop a personal disaster plan and disaster supply kit using that brochure
* Examine volunteer opportunities in your community; choose and agency to volunteer with and receive initial training
* Take a Red Cross CPR/AED and first aid course
So, even under the best of all possible conditions, you should get getting pamphlets which will teach you to be paranoid and vigilant about hypothetical things for which there is no apparent risk.
So, there simply is expected to be a level of mostly contained background panic even at the best of times.
Obsolete because we will always be at Orange Alert
Yes, this is the problem.
The last time flew into Denver from Canada, they kept saying over the loudspeaker in the airport that we were at Threat Level Orange. I assumed this was something new and that I should brace for even worse security.
When I asked my US counterparts what was up, they basically said the same thing... they've been at Threat Level Orange (it sounds much more official with the caps) for most of the last decade, and that they've stopped listening to it -- pretty much the whole country. In fact, they joked about it because it had ceased to be meaningful in any way. It seems to have become a perpetual state from which nobody will ever be moved. I fear, as you say, they would never allow us to go back to normal, because they'd have to give up their new-found control.
We have always been at war with Oceana (or is that us? I get so confused).
From my side, please continue to walk around talking shit about ancient religions having anything pertinent to say on physical cosmology.
I wasn't saying that you could use ancient Hindu or Buddhist cosmology to say anything predictive about modern scientific cosmology. Merely that they had arrived at that conclusion 4000+ years ago -- either through observations or lucky guess.
and random internet nerds with a hard-on for anything from the ancient East
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Be a smug pecker-head all you like... while Western society was rooting about in the muck during the dark ages where we intentionally forgot everything we ever knew, the rest of the world was going about their business.
When we though the universe revolved around the Earth, most of the rest of them had a pretty good idea about things like retrograde and orbits and a vast universe -- that counts for more to me than an imaginary friend who custom tailored a universe for us and is a moral puritan.
But, hey, feel free to continue to be an ass, that's your right.
Professors Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok (the later now the head of the Perimieter Instititute here in Waterloo, Ontario and a former student of Hawking) have postulated this theory as well
This is also what is described in Hindu and Buddhist cosmology -- the universe itself being cyclic in nature, going through an endless series of destruction and creation; not to mention vast and full of other planets and the like, not some unique playground made just for us by "God".
Of course, "modern" science has more or less ridiculed this for the last couple of hundred years. As I recall, they also have astronomical references in some of their texts which place them being several thousand years ahead of where we think civilization evolved.
It always amuses me to watch "advanced" Western science catch up with what some of the Eastern systems have known since before the rest of us were doing much more than rooting about in the muck. Some days, it seems like it takes us hundreds of years to "re-learn" what some of the ancient civilizations knew thousands of years ago.
You basically write/draw with your finger... depending on how far zoomed in you are determines the effective "font size" of your writing. Say, everything from an 8 point font to a 100 point font or somesuch. You can have multiple 'notebooks', and each notebook can have multiple sheets. But, it's vector based and has several different pens which can be set to different width, color, opacity, etc.
There is no OCR abilities so it won't turn it into text for you, but if you want the results like writing into a notebook and you have an iPad, I've found it to be a damned handy app. I won't replace my actual notebooks, but in terms of being able to email a quick diagram or something, it's pretty good.
My handwriting is just as bad in the app as it is in the real world, which means it's working pretty well.:-P
They are both toys, I highly doubt you're "working" on either.
Have many people replaced their main work machine entirely with an iPad or similar tablet? Not likely.
Can you actually do work with them? Absolutely. I've used mine to read huge (~ 1000 page) PDF documents away from my desk, and I've also responded to work emails from an airport using wifi. I've also used some mind-mapping type apps to collect my notes for some projects, and documents I put into my dropbox folder are available to me. I've got a reader for wikipedia which keeps everything it reads offline, so I have a bunch of tech references (and a bunch of other stuff) cached for offline access. Heck, I've got a webex client, remote desktop, telnet, some javadocs...
I'll even give you "toy", but I prefer "portable entertainment system and light internet appliance"... on two business trips now I've brought my iPad. Which, in addition to allowing me to read my email in airports and hotel lobbies, also gives me games, movies, books, and loads of other things when when I'm stuck in airplanes or in my hotel room. Heck, I can sit in the hotel bar after work with a martini and read google news, check in with the wife via email, and check my calendar *and* checkout nearby restaurants with UrbanSpoon. Sure, I could do that with my laptop, but it's far less convenient (and, my work laptop has wifi disabled as a security measure, so I'd actually need to be plugged into both wire and power to do it).
For the most part, I'm not hearing people claim to have chucked their laptop/desktop in favor of a tablet. That doesn't mean that the things people do with it don't have value to them. Trust me, on a one week business trip... my iPad is as important to me as my laptop is -- it actually gets more use than the laptop. It lets me cover about 85% of the things I'd use my laptop for, and a bunch of things that I wouldn't want to use my laptop for. (I've tried watching movies on a laptop in a hotel room, and it sucked. Something I can hold like a book and sit in a comfy chair or lay in the bed is awfully nice.)
Trust me, the utility of an iPad is far more than my ability to "work". I'm not going to use it to compile code, run a web server, or generate SQL queries with it. But, I place a high value on the things it does allow me to do, and the way in which I can do them. That fact that it's small and lightweight, has a huge battery life, and will connect to anywhere with free wifi makes it far more convenient than a laptop. Given the size and weight, there are just certain contexts where I'd just as soon have both my iPad and my laptop -- I will use the iPad more, but if I *really* need to dig out the big gun, it's there.
You do know that the EPUK.org article was an april fool's joke, right? Still, so close to reality...
*laugh* OK, no I hadn't realized that. Thanks for showing me to be an idiot... mostly it was the first several links which resulted from the google search for "london photography police" and I hadn't realized that one was a joke.
God knows there were enough other appalling stories that it was easy to miss that one.
That's probably where people got the notion that you may require a permit in London.:-P
I'm not defending overzealous police, but let's not suggest that there is some sort of licencing legislation on the cards.
Well, in fairness, the link I put in my previous post lists a "voluntary" scheme of "registered photographers" wearing bright safety vests with an RFID which is to be scanned by the CCTVs.
You can excuse someone for believing that is a legally mandated license requirement. Hell, it basically says so:
Most amateur photographers will need a £95/year PSICO-BASIC tag. This will permit casual photography in locations where security allows.
And
Tourists will be issued with a special time-limited form of tag embedded in a ‘Welcome to London’ badge, that allows photography at popular venues such as Madame Tussaud’s and the House of Commons.
sure as hell sounds like you're moving to a full permit system.
The tone of the article more or less says that only people with these badges wouldn't get harassed. Now, this was in April of 2008, but I'd would basically say there is enough confusing information out there that someone would believe that you truly did need a permit.
Really? Not noticed this, and I'd have thought that I would, what with living there and everything.
But, surely you're aware of many of the high-profile things that have happened in London with police and photographers? They certainly talked about a permit system for "registered" photographers. (Now, that appears to be within a narrow area, but...)
After registration, which can take up to 28 days, photographers wanting to photograph on the street will have to again attend either Charing Cross police station to be issued with a thin fluorescent waistcoat fitted with an RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tag which is to be worn over other clothing.
Seriously, you may live there, and maybe this goes under-reported for you... but google for "london photography police".
There have been several Slashdot stories over the last few years covering this kind of stuff. He's hardly pulling claims out of his backside. London police have been well documented telling people they can't photograph in public spaces when that is patently false.
If you aren't aware of the myriad ways in which the London Police have gone completely batshit crazy with photographers.... well, you haven't been paying attention to the news. Do a google search for "london photography police", and read.
There are loads of documented cases of some cop or another deciding they have a law on their side which allows them to do almost anything to photographers. And, in fairness to London, I'm sure this isn't the only place this happens.
The citation for what the GP suggests is bloody easy to find.
I have a (sadly, no longer working) Nikon D1X that is exactly what a professional camera looks like; big body, takes all Nikon lenses, but only shoots 5mp. Compact cameras can shoot up to 14mp, last time I looked.
Well, you can easily buy DSLRs up into the 16 megapixel range. The fact that you bought one when they didn't have anywhere near the resolution of film doesn't indicate a problem with DSLRs, it makes you an early adopter who got stung.
Guess I'll just use my old fashioned SLR and scan the developed photos. SLR is superior anyways, but that's another story
I've barely used my film SLR since I bought my digital SLR. As far as I know, my DSLR does far more than my film SLR (Nikon D80 vs Nikon F75). In fact, I will likely trade it in soon to get myself a new lens for my DSLR.
I can take hundreds of photos for little cost, and keep them all or strip out the few that came out blurry because I was in a rush. I can do auto-exposure bracketing to be sure to actually get the picture I need when I won't have a chance to take it again -- let's face it, grandma isn't going to re-cut the cake because your shot didn't work out..
I suspect that it is only in very limited ways that a film-SLR is "better" than a DSLR. If most pros have changed to digital, then I doubt it even more.
At this point, I think a DSLR is as good as a film SLR, and for many people, probably even "better" when you factor in the niceties. My use of film has dropped to essentially zero.
Does Kuwait have a booming tourism industry or something? I don't understand why they'd do this.
Seriously, between idiots saying I can't take photos on or near their property, and police believing they have the right to seize or delete my photos, a lot of countries seem increasingly hostile to the notion of photography.
Slashdot Mirror
And, if that happens, there is literally nothing to suggest that they would land on a Microsoft platform.
It would be bordering on suicide for Microsoft to lose backwards compatibility -- because people could be swayed to end up someplace else.
Exactly ... I mean, you can see the ad campaigns already ... "Well, if you're already switching operating systems ....".
Well, not knowing much details about the innards of OS9/OSX -- was this truly a "rewrite" of the OS as the you initially said? ("Microsoft has the capital to develop a new operating system from the ground up.")
Was the transition from OS9 to OSX a "ground up" change? Or was it a swap of the kernel for a more modern one?
My first thought is that trying to build a new OS from "the ground up" isn't going to be an easy task. Unfortunately, Microsoft is hobbled by the need to be backwards compatible. Didn't Apple just more or less say "out with the old, in with the new"?
Have you even been involved in rewriting software from scratch? Usually you end up missing a whole bunch of use cases, introducing new errors, and completely not getting old ones. It just never seems to work the way people hope it will, and it ends up costing way more than you thought.
I fear that if MS tried to write an OS from scratch, it would likely be a big step backwards, do less than what we're accustomed to now, and take years of incremental improvements to get back to where we are now. I don't see what you propose as being either viable or possible.
Or, it speaks to how well their kernel was designed as to have the hardware-specific stuff nicely abstracted -- I honestly don't know which. At the very least, it demonstrates that they were willing to undertake the work.
No, it's better. It's like browsing that goes all the way to 11. Much of the suck just magically disappears.
Ummm .... in Soviet Russia ... er ... ummm ... WTF?
God, I hope this isn't what we all have to look forward to. Why do I feel an urge to go down a bottle of vodka all of a sudden?
That's actually fairly interesting. Assuming it's 100% legit, under condition green:
So, even under the best of all possible conditions, you should get getting pamphlets which will teach you to be paranoid and vigilant about hypothetical things for which there is no apparent risk.
So, there simply is expected to be a level of mostly contained background panic even at the best of times.
Wow. Just F'ing wow!!
As am I. Green is the hypothetical color we'll never see again -- think September 10, 2001.
And apparently nobody remembers what a lime even looks like. ;-)
Yes, this is the problem.
The last time flew into Denver from Canada, they kept saying over the loudspeaker in the airport that we were at Threat Level Orange. I assumed this was something new and that I should brace for even worse security.
When I asked my US counterparts what was up, they basically said the same thing ... they've been at Threat Level Orange (it sounds much more official with the caps) for most of the last decade, and that they've stopped listening to it -- pretty much the whole country. In fact, they joked about it because it had ceased to be meaningful in any way. It seems to have become a perpetual state from which nobody will ever be moved. I fear, as you say, they would never allow us to go back to normal, because they'd have to give up their new-found control.
We have always been at war with Oceana (or is that us? I get so confused).
I'd assumed we'd covered that already. ;-)
Cheers
Well then, we're in agreement. :-P
I wasn't saying that you could use ancient Hindu or Buddhist cosmology to say anything predictive about modern scientific cosmology. Merely that they had arrived at that conclusion 4000+ years ago -- either through observations or lucky guess.
Oh yeah, baby ... noodles, pottery, writing, navigation, iron, running water. Talk dirty to me. ;-)
Cheers
Be a smug pecker-head all you like ... while Western society was rooting about in the muck during the dark ages where we intentionally forgot everything we ever knew, the rest of the world was going about their business.
When we though the universe revolved around the Earth, most of the rest of them had a pretty good idea about things like retrograde and orbits and a vast universe -- that counts for more to me than an imaginary friend who custom tailored a universe for us and is a moral puritan.
But, hey, feel free to continue to be an ass, that's your right.
This is also what is described in Hindu and Buddhist cosmology -- the universe itself being cyclic in nature, going through an endless series of destruction and creation; not to mention vast and full of other planets and the like, not some unique playground made just for us by "God".
Of course, "modern" science has more or less ridiculed this for the last couple of hundred years. As I recall, they also have astronomical references in some of their texts which place them being several thousand years ahead of where we think civilization evolved.
It always amuses me to watch "advanced" Western science catch up with what some of the Eastern systems have known since before the rest of us were doing much more than rooting about in the muck. Some days, it seems like it takes us hundreds of years to "re-learn" what some of the ancient civilizations knew thousands of years ago.
Maybe not with a stylus, but I have an app called neu.notes. (here, here, here).
You basically write/draw with your finger ... depending on how far zoomed in you are determines the effective "font size" of your writing. Say, everything from an 8 point font to a 100 point font or somesuch. You can have multiple 'notebooks', and each notebook can have multiple sheets. But, it's vector based and has several different pens which can be set to different width, color, opacity, etc.
There is no OCR abilities so it won't turn it into text for you, but if you want the results like writing into a notebook and you have an iPad, I've found it to be a damned handy app. I won't replace my actual notebooks, but in terms of being able to email a quick diagram or something, it's pretty good.
My handwriting is just as bad in the app as it is in the real world, which means it's working pretty well. :-P
Have many people replaced their main work machine entirely with an iPad or similar tablet? Not likely.
Can you actually do work with them? Absolutely. I've used mine to read huge (~ 1000 page) PDF documents away from my desk, and I've also responded to work emails from an airport using wifi. I've also used some mind-mapping type apps to collect my notes for some projects, and documents I put into my dropbox folder are available to me. I've got a reader for wikipedia which keeps everything it reads offline, so I have a bunch of tech references (and a bunch of other stuff) cached for offline access. Heck, I've got a webex client, remote desktop, telnet, some javadocs ...
I'll even give you "toy", but I prefer "portable entertainment system and light internet appliance" ... on two business trips now I've brought my iPad. Which, in addition to allowing me to read my email in airports and hotel lobbies, also gives me games, movies, books, and loads of other things when when I'm stuck in airplanes or in my hotel room. Heck, I can sit in the hotel bar after work with a martini and read google news, check in with the wife via email, and check my calendar *and* checkout nearby restaurants with UrbanSpoon. Sure, I could do that with my laptop, but it's far less convenient (and, my work laptop has wifi disabled as a security measure, so I'd actually need to be plugged into both wire and power to do it).
For the most part, I'm not hearing people claim to have chucked their laptop/desktop in favor of a tablet. That doesn't mean that the things people do with it don't have value to them. Trust me, on a one week business trip ... my iPad is as important to me as my laptop is -- it actually gets more use than the laptop. It lets me cover about 85% of the things I'd use my laptop for, and a bunch of things that I wouldn't want to use my laptop for. (I've tried watching movies on a laptop in a hotel room, and it sucked. Something I can hold like a book and sit in a comfy chair or lay in the bed is awfully nice.)
Trust me, the utility of an iPad is far more than my ability to "work". I'm not going to use it to compile code, run a web server, or generate SQL queries with it. But, I place a high value on the things it does allow me to do, and the way in which I can do them. That fact that it's small and lightweight, has a huge battery life, and will connect to anywhere with free wifi makes it far more convenient than a laptop. Given the size and weight, there are just certain contexts where I'd just as soon have both my iPad and my laptop -- I will use the iPad more, but if I *really* need to dig out the big gun, it's there.
This is "The Hill" -- you know, as is Capitol Hill. It's not some phantom source.
This is a search for Napolitano on that site.
This would appear to be where she says the usage could be widened to trains and metros.
*laugh* OK, no I hadn't realized that. Thanks for showing me to be an idiot ... mostly it was the first several links which resulted from the google search for "london photography police" and I hadn't realized that one was a joke.
God knows there were enough other appalling stories that it was easy to miss that one.
That's probably where people got the notion that you may require a permit in London. :-P
Well, in fairness, the link I put in my previous post lists a "voluntary" scheme of "registered photographers" wearing bright safety vests with an RFID which is to be scanned by the CCTVs.
You can excuse someone for believing that is a legally mandated license requirement. Hell, it basically says so:
And
sure as hell sounds like you're moving to a full permit system.
The tone of the article more or less says that only people with these badges wouldn't get harassed. Now, this was in April of 2008, but I'd would basically say there is enough confusing information out there that someone would believe that you truly did need a permit.
But, surely you're aware of many of the high-profile things that have happened in London with police and photographers? They certainly talked about a permit system for "registered" photographers. (Now, that appears to be within a narrow area, but ...)
Seriously, you may live there, and maybe this goes under-reported for you ... but google for "london photography police".
There have been several Slashdot stories over the last few years covering this kind of stuff. He's hardly pulling claims out of his backside. London police have been well documented telling people they can't photograph in public spaces when that is patently false.
Well, they issued new guidelines, relaxed restrictions on "registered photographers", stopped using section 43 and 44 of the Terrorism act, had a 'snitch campaign', hassle people with commercial permits, and even push people down stairs.
If you aren't aware of the myriad ways in which the London Police have gone completely batshit crazy with photographers .... well, you haven't been paying attention to the news. Do a google search for "london photography police", and read.
There are loads of documented cases of some cop or another deciding they have a law on their side which allows them to do almost anything to photographers. And, in fairness to London, I'm sure this isn't the only place this happens.
The citation for what the GP suggests is bloody easy to find.
Well, you can easily buy DSLRs up into the 16 megapixel range. The fact that you bought one when they didn't have anywhere near the resolution of film doesn't indicate a problem with DSLRs, it makes you an early adopter who got stung.
I've barely used my film SLR since I bought my digital SLR. As far as I know, my DSLR does far more than my film SLR (Nikon D80 vs Nikon F75). In fact, I will likely trade it in soon to get myself a new lens for my DSLR.
I can take hundreds of photos for little cost, and keep them all or strip out the few that came out blurry because I was in a rush. I can do auto-exposure bracketing to be sure to actually get the picture I need when I won't have a chance to take it again -- let's face it, grandma isn't going to re-cut the cake because your shot didn't work out..
I suspect that it is only in very limited ways that a film-SLR is "better" than a DSLR. If most pros have changed to digital, then I doubt it even more.
At this point, I think a DSLR is as good as a film SLR, and for many people, probably even "better" when you factor in the niceties. My use of film has dropped to essentially zero.
Does Kuwait have a booming tourism industry or something? I don't understand why they'd do this.
Seriously, between idiots saying I can't take photos on or near their property, and police believing they have the right to seize or delete my photos, a lot of countries seem increasingly hostile to the notion of photography.
WTF?
No, I think it means that the TSA agents have access to your privates.
Oh, I think according to LOL-cat grammar rules, you nailed it ... "Cat Are Intelligent", and, yes, "you can has cheezeburger".