The problem is that now it means both things, and every time you encounter it you have to reason out which meaning is being used. So it's currently better to not use the expression at all, and substitute "raises the question" for one meaning and "circular logic" for the other.
Evolution of language isn't a problem, but useless entropy like forgetting the meaning of an expression makes clear and effective writing more difficult. There are those of us who like to read clear and effective writing, so we wish that it were easier to do.
At $50 a copy, Apple would need to sell 35 million copies a year to match their current Mac profits.
Currently they sell something like 5 million Macs a year.
I don't see a sevenfold increase in market share as likely, especially since Microsoft can cut prices at any time. If people aren't willing to pay more for Macs, why are you so sure they'd be willing to pay more for OS X?
No, none of that money has anything to do with the iPod. Those are Mac numbers.
Apple would only stand to make the $2 billion if they sold as many copies of OS X as Microsoft does of Windows. That's completely unrealistic. If they managed to triple their market share, which is a little more realistic, they would go from making $450 million a quarter on Macs to making something like $300 million on software sales.
Perhaps you believe that 30% of PC purchasers each year really want OS X, not Windows, and buy a PC anyway instead of a Mac. If that is true, then the gambit would work. Apple would need to be very certain about that, though, before abandoning a strategy that is currently very successful.
Microsoft's Windows revenues were $3 billion last quarter; Apple's Mac revenues were $1.5 billion.
Apple doesn't break down margins by business unit, but they have a 30% margin overall so the profit on Macs is probably about $450 million. Microsoft says their Windows profit was $2.2 billion, which is a 73% margin.
So Apple, with their little 5% of the market, makes $450 million on Macs. Microsoft, with essentially the rest of the market, only makes five times as much profit.
If the numbers work out for Apple the same way they do for Microsoft, Apple as a software company would need to sell about 4 or 5 times as many copies of OSX as they do Macs now, just to maintain their current level of profitability. Not going to happen, not overnight.
The numbers just don't make sense for Apple to switch to a software company today. They may make sense in the future. In the meantime, though, the bottom line is that Apple is doing very well, and they do not need to reinvent themselves right now.
The risks of a for-profit enterprise are accepted by the investors, not the employees. The investors get the profit, so it's appropriate that they also get the risk.
Yeah, and if it DOESN'T get to outer space on the right course, then your pretty little orbiter is nothing more than a multimillion-dollar piece of useless space junk.
So it's important that your rocket goes in the right direction. This is actually very hard to do. A rocket is inherently unstable, as the thrust isn't ever perfectly aligned with the center of mass, and any errors in position tend to magnify themselves.
Ever blown up a balloon and released it? Notice how it flew every which way like crazy? Mostly NOT toward Mars?
It has nothing to do with the characters. Japanese pronunciation is composed of a relatively small number of sounds that are all essentially the same length. So whereas English can have a word like "shrine" and call it one syllable, in Japanese it would need to be broken down into something like "shu rye nee". Or consider the anime character name "Rei", which is (properly speaking) two sounds.
Actually, I should mention that Japanese does have a system of simple phonetic characters. When those characters are used each sign does indeed correspond to a single "syllable".
"Blogcast" is a colossal mistake, an own goal of epic proportions. While it does at least admit that podcasting is a distinct phenomenon from previous streaming or non-episodic audio distribution, it fails to be more descriptive than "podcast" and, perhaps more importantly, it sounds terrible.
While podcasting has roots in blogging, a podcast is not a blog. Since they do not have hyperlinks or comment sections, they often contain actual original content, and are cheapened by the comparison to blogs.
But that problem has nothing on the way the word sounds. "Blogcasting" might work if we were just talking about it on blogs, but podcasts are spoken, and it's impossible to pronounce "blogcast" properly without very nearly coughing in the middle. If you give up on proper pronunciation, it degenerates into "blahcast".
"Blogcast" looks okay in print, but since it sounds stupid, nobody will want to say it. You need a better term to defeat "podcast"; I suggest "netcast", though perhaps it's trademarked.
Yeah, but it works in a sort of pushy way. Some of us old folk (i.e. over 20 years old) will remember that during the Netscape vs. Internet Explorer days, there was a brief fascination with the idea of "push" content. So when there was new content, you wouldn't have to go get it -- it would be "pushed" right to your desktop through a "channel"!
Once "Push" was implemented, it turned out to be a "reload this Web page every 5 minutes" feature. Alas, though, the eventual simplification of the concept did not save us from years of disabling "Active Desktop" and looking at dozens of Win98 machines running an unconfigured and useless "Channel Screen Saver".
Congratulations on your successful vandalism of a resource that people were trying to use. That certainly proves your point about the resource being without value.
The purpose of Wikipedia is not to be a repository of tremendously correct facts. That's not the purpose of a regular encyclopedia, either. The purpose of an encyclopedia is to provide a competent general introduction to a wide variety of topics, and pointers to further information. At this Wikipedia excels.
Many people find Wikipedia a useful resource, so the argument that it is inherently useless is pointless. To vandalise that resource, just to prove your point, is despicable.
As smart as Spider Robinson thinks he is, using the sink as a urinal is a terrible idea. There exists, at least for me, a strong visual association between the sight of a urinal and "the urge". I don't want to feel an urge to pee every time I walk into the kitchen.
I remember that. I still want my "levitation" book back, but it's probably cursed by now, so on second thought why don't you keep it. I did appreciate the hole in the Biology class wall, though.
I didn't know you were quaffing unidentified potions, but I suppose it explains a lot.
The iPod isn't locked down. For years I ignored iTunes and loaded all my completely generic mp3s from Linux, using programs like gnupod. Always worked fine. I don't really recommend it because gnupod kind of sucks, but it is certainly possible.
The only meaning of true that makes sense in the natural world is the scientific one, that is, things that have been tested thoroughly and not yet disproven. Statements that are not testable lack the ability to improve understanding. Hence, to have a meaning for "true" without decaying into solipsism, I consider the untestable untrue.
Note that this is the natural world, and has little to do with metaphysics. For all I know, God changes the rules of mathematics at will, which would obviously not be detectable, but that's not a statement about the natural world.
Sorry to misinterpret you. I'm fine with a philosophical class mentioning everything from Zeus to phlogiston, if it serves some kind of purpose in the terms of the class. It's important to consider how people come to believe things that aren't true.
In a philosophical context, though, I think it's important to consider the people and motives surrounding any given idea. So in that philosophy class, we would consider intelligent design in the context of culture wars, and we'd find that creationists are behind it, and that their goal is to undermine science by turning it into equal-time politics.
Natural selection is not random, because whether a given organism survives is determined by the laws of the natural world.
Genetic drift and mutation may be random, but natural selection is not. The process of evolution involves randomness, but the overall phenomenon is not random.
Environmental changes may be random, but the way evolution responds to them is not, and I'm considering the evolution process in isolation here.
No; first I say that evolution is not random, and then I say that there is no science, math, or logic to support the hypothesis that the complexity of life requires a design.
I have no need to say that a random system could create a living system, but creationists need to prove that it can't, just for starters.
Intelligent Design is an invention of creationists, and its intended purpose is to seem non-religious. Evaluated as science, it is based on two fallacies.
The first fallacy is its claim that evolution is a "random" process. Evolution is not random at all, as its progress is determined by natural selection (or the selection of God, if you prefer).
From that it moves to its second fallacy, the claim that living systems are too complex to arise from a random process. However, no mathematical evaluation of the level of complexity or the amount of intelligence required is ever made. As a matter of fact, the math was done decades ago, and it turns out that evolution works.
Intelligent Design does not belong in the classroom except as an example of poor scientific reasoning.
Hyperinflation may be considered bad, but stable, reasonable inflation is seen as a good thing as it encourages investment. Modern inflation is essentially created on purpose by the government.
Oh, yeah, PS/2, brilliant. Round connector, but it only goes in one way. Fragile pins that can get shorted together and blow the motherboard. Hot-swap at your own risk. Yeah, let's go back to that, that's a great idea.
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The problem is that now it means both things, and every time you encounter it you have to reason out which meaning is being used. So it's currently better to not use the expression at all, and substitute "raises the question" for one meaning and "circular logic" for the other.
Evolution of language isn't a problem, but useless entropy like forgetting the meaning of an expression makes clear and effective writing more difficult. There are those of us who like to read clear and effective writing, so we wish that it were easier to do.
Is that the version of the Gospel where Jefferson removes any notion of Jesus performing miracles or being the son of God?
Make no mistake -- Jefferson was religious, but he was not a Southern Baptist.
At $50 a copy, Apple would need to sell 35 million copies a year to match their current Mac profits.
Currently they sell something like 5 million Macs a year.
I don't see a sevenfold increase in market share as likely, especially since Microsoft can cut prices at any time. If people aren't willing to pay more for Macs, why are you so sure they'd be willing to pay more for OS X?
No, none of that money has anything to do with the iPod. Those are Mac numbers.
Apple would only stand to make the $2 billion if they sold as many copies of OS X as Microsoft does of Windows. That's completely unrealistic. If they managed to triple their market share, which is a little more realistic, they would go from making $450 million a quarter on Macs to making something like $300 million on software sales.
Perhaps you believe that 30% of PC purchasers each year really want OS X, not Windows, and buy a PC anyway instead of a Mac. If that is true, then the gambit would work. Apple would need to be very certain about that, though, before abandoning a strategy that is currently very successful.
Microsoft's Windows revenues were $3 billion last quarter; Apple's Mac revenues were $1.5 billion.
Apple doesn't break down margins by business unit, but they have a 30% margin overall so the profit on Macs is probably about $450 million. Microsoft says their Windows profit was $2.2 billion, which is a 73% margin.
So Apple, with their little 5% of the market, makes $450 million on Macs. Microsoft, with essentially the rest of the market, only makes five times as much profit.
If the numbers work out for Apple the same way they do for Microsoft, Apple as a software company would need to sell about 4 or 5 times as many copies of OSX as they do Macs now, just to maintain their current level of profitability. Not going to happen, not overnight.
The numbers just don't make sense for Apple to switch to a software company today. They may make sense in the future. In the meantime, though, the bottom line is that Apple is doing very well, and they do not need to reinvent themselves right now.
The risks of a for-profit enterprise are accepted by the investors, not the employees. The investors get the profit, so it's appropriate that they also get the risk.
That's the theory, anyway.
I thought loosing the rocket was the whole point. What good is a rocket if you never turn it loose?
Yeah, and if it DOESN'T get to outer space on the right course, then your pretty little orbiter is nothing more than a multimillion-dollar piece of useless space junk.
So it's important that your rocket goes in the right direction. This is actually very hard to do. A rocket is inherently unstable, as the thrust isn't ever perfectly aligned with the center of mass, and any errors in position tend to magnify themselves.
Ever blown up a balloon and released it? Notice how it flew every which way like crazy? Mostly NOT toward Mars?
It has nothing to do with the characters. Japanese pronunciation is composed of a relatively small number of sounds that are all essentially the same length. So whereas English can have a word like "shrine" and call it one syllable, in Japanese it would need to be broken down into something like "shu rye nee". Or consider the anime character name "Rei", which is (properly speaking) two sounds.
Actually, I should mention that Japanese does have a system of simple phonetic characters. When those characters are used each sign does indeed correspond to a single "syllable".
"Blogcast" is a colossal mistake, an own goal of epic proportions. While it does at least admit that podcasting is a distinct phenomenon from previous streaming or non-episodic audio distribution, it fails to be more descriptive than "podcast" and, perhaps more importantly, it sounds terrible.
While podcasting has roots in blogging, a podcast is not a blog. Since they do not have hyperlinks or comment sections, they often contain actual original content, and are cheapened by the comparison to blogs.
But that problem has nothing on the way the word sounds. "Blogcasting" might work if we were just talking about it on blogs, but podcasts are spoken, and it's impossible to pronounce "blogcast" properly without very nearly coughing in the middle. If you give up on proper pronunciation, it degenerates into "blahcast".
"Blogcast" looks okay in print, but since it sounds stupid, nobody will want to say it. You need a better term to defeat "podcast"; I suggest "netcast", though perhaps it's trademarked.
Yeah, but it works in a sort of pushy way. Some of us old folk (i.e. over 20 years old) will remember that during the Netscape vs. Internet Explorer days, there was a brief fascination with the idea of "push" content. So when there was new content, you wouldn't have to go get it -- it would be "pushed" right to your desktop through a "channel"!
Once "Push" was implemented, it turned out to be a "reload this Web page every 5 minutes" feature. Alas, though, the eventual simplification of the concept did not save us from years of disabling "Active Desktop" and looking at dozens of Win98 machines running an unconfigured and useless "Channel Screen Saver".
Congratulations on your successful vandalism of a resource that people were trying to use. That certainly proves your point about the resource being without value.
The purpose of Wikipedia is not to be a repository of tremendously correct facts. That's not the purpose of a regular encyclopedia, either. The purpose of an encyclopedia is to provide a competent general introduction to a wide variety of topics, and pointers to further information. At this Wikipedia excels.
Many people find Wikipedia a useful resource, so the argument that it is inherently useless is pointless. To vandalise that resource, just to prove your point, is despicable.
As smart as Spider Robinson thinks he is, using the sink as a urinal is a terrible idea. There exists, at least for me, a strong visual association between the sight of a urinal and "the urge". I don't want to feel an urge to pee every time I walk into the kitchen.
I remember that. I still want my "levitation" book back, but it's probably cursed by now, so on second thought why don't you keep it. I did appreciate the hole in the Biology class wall, though.
I didn't know you were quaffing unidentified potions, but I suppose it explains a lot.
The iPod isn't locked down. For years I ignored iTunes and loaded all my completely generic mp3s from Linux, using programs like gnupod. Always worked fine. I don't really recommend it because gnupod kind of sucks, but it is certainly possible.
What a worthless article. If it were a Slashdot comment, it'd be moderated to -1, Overrated.
The only meaning of true that makes sense in the natural world is the scientific one, that is, things that have been tested thoroughly and not yet disproven. Statements that are not testable lack the ability to improve understanding. Hence, to have a meaning for "true" without decaying into solipsism, I consider the untestable untrue.
Note that this is the natural world, and has little to do with metaphysics. For all I know, God changes the rules of mathematics at will, which would obviously not be detectable, but that's not a statement about the natural world.
I don't know, but my guess is that they say it because those gloves are a pain in the ass.
You mean that population and quantitative genetics simply do not exist? That's quite a conspiracy theory you have.
This stuff was done in the '70s.
Sorry to misinterpret you. I'm fine with a philosophical class mentioning everything from Zeus to phlogiston, if it serves some kind of purpose in the terms of the class. It's important to consider how people come to believe things that aren't true.
In a philosophical context, though, I think it's important to consider the people and motives surrounding any given idea. So in that philosophy class, we would consider intelligent design in the context of culture wars, and we'd find that creationists are behind it, and that their goal is to undermine science by turning it into equal-time politics.
Natural selection is not random, because whether a given organism survives is determined by the laws of the natural world.
Genetic drift and mutation may be random, but natural selection is not. The process of evolution involves randomness, but the overall phenomenon is not random.
Environmental changes may be random, but the way evolution responds to them is not, and I'm considering the evolution process in isolation here.
No; first I say that evolution is not random, and then I say that there is no science, math, or logic to support the hypothesis that the complexity of life requires a design.
I have no need to say that a random system could create a living system, but creationists need to prove that it can't, just for starters.
Intelligent Design is an invention of creationists, and its intended purpose is to seem non-religious. Evaluated as science, it is based on two fallacies.
The first fallacy is its claim that evolution is a "random" process. Evolution is not random at all, as its progress is determined by natural selection (or the selection of God, if you prefer).
From that it moves to its second fallacy, the claim that living systems are too complex to arise from a random process. However, no mathematical evaluation of the level of complexity or the amount of intelligence required is ever made. As a matter of fact, the math was done decades ago, and it turns out that evolution works.
Intelligent Design does not belong in the classroom except as an example of poor scientific reasoning.
Hyperinflation may be considered bad, but stable, reasonable inflation is seen as a good thing as it encourages investment. Modern inflation is essentially created on purpose by the government.
Oh, yeah, PS/2, brilliant. Round connector, but it only goes in one way. Fragile pins that can get shorted together and blow the motherboard. Hot-swap at your own risk. Yeah, let's go back to that, that's a great idea.