In fact I think population control, like China's 1 baby per family, will eventually become necessary... especially after oil becomes scarce and skyrockets to $1000/barrel (~$30/gallon of gasoline)..
1) Why not move the excess population off-Earth? We're already talking about space tourism as a reality... it's not that big of a step from tourism to colonization, especially 90 years from now.
2) Who says that gasoline will be a primary source of energy in 2100, let alone transportation? One would figure that by the time prices for gas rises to $10/gal (in 2010 dollars), the market itself would find a way to either create hyper-efficient engines, or folks will just replace their gas-powered cars with electric-powered ones.
The funny part is, "WE" will likely begin limiting our own population anyway. You may notice that the more prosperous a country becomes, the lower the birthrates. At least half of the countries in Europe have birthrates lower than self-replacement right now... China is already facing a looming population drop as it is - a one-child policy, an over-abundance of males, and an aging demographic. These three factors will pretty much chop the numbers down pretty harshly by 2100. Even India is showing a (albeit slowly) declining birthrate.
All in all, I suspect that world birthrates are going to come down anyway.
Rather it's the whole "it's MY content, you MUST view it MY WAY!!!" stance yet again.
There is a cure for that attitude - for the same reason that Facebook pretty much wiped MySpace off the map, or the way Google turned Yahoo! into a has-been: Keep it clean and user-friendly, keep the ads un-intrusive, or face instant death in the face of superior (cleaner, less intrusive) products.
I suspect that come next quarter, Microsoft will happily re-interpret this as a massive increase in "sales" of it's Windows 7 licenses, thereby giving its marketing department (and shill squadrons) something to crow about.
It also gives them a means to crow about how they 'cracked down' on piracy, and etc.
(to top that off, I'm sure there's a massive tax write-off in there somewhere as well).
All in all, doing this looks like the best solution for 'em.
Here - I'll provide a bit of his evidence for you: Merry Christmas (just remember that it's not on a silver platter - you're going to have to know how to use strings, and do some research yourself).
So far, Zynga has been smart enough to avoid that particular trap, but the odds of coming a bit too close may be enough to gut them financially (not from the small operators, mind, but from one of the big boys, e.g. Mattel and the like).
"Righthaven LLC is owned 50/50 by two limited liability companies. The first is Net Sortie Systems, LLC, which is owned by Las Vegas attorney Steven Gibson – the Nevada attorney who is behind all of the lawsuits filed by Righthaven. The second is SI Content Monitor LLC, which is owned by family members of investment banking billionaire Warren Stephens whose investments include Stephens Media, LLC which owns the Las Vegas Review-Journal. "
(...so they wanna sue me for reprinting that? Fuck 'em.)
So waitaminute... you'd think he made a killing off of kiting SCO stock as hard as he did. Now his house is up for foreclosure?
The only guess I can make is that the idiot over-invested in real estate... which in turn only bolsters the phrase "never attribute to malice what can be better described by stupidity". That is, maybe McBride really is that stupid (well, okay, like we needed even more proof, but still...)
House is in one hell of a nice neighborhood, though...
To be honest, this seems pretty subjective. It also misses the definition of "better" - is it "better" as in the app has better performance than a native-built app? Is it "better" as in it can have more features than a native-built app?
"Apple has said they want to be completely in control of the development environment, and anything that threatens to take away that control will not be allowed. "
Can't blame 'em in this case, at least from an objective viewpoint. The phone's reputation relies a lot on the apps' reputation. Apps that hang, or run slow, or basically sucks the battery dry in short order affects the users' perception of the phone. If that perception is destroyed by a bug in this particular app causing a raft of apps that basically suck (not in content, but performance, efficiency, etc)? For Apple, that would suck - far better to have flaws in an API, runtime, or etc that they themselves can fix in short order, than to stumble across flaws that they'd have to beg a third party to fix. It also leaves open a trap that Microsoft is stumbling on with each new version of Windows: Compatibility/Legacy issues. Given that there isn't too much capacity on a smartphone for Moore's Law to cover bloat, you can't just code your way out of a legacy issue - especially those caused by some third party build/prototyping app.
Apple's stance is pretty simple, really: If you want to build an iPhone app, learn to write code and do it your own damned self. The tools are free. The store fees are dirt cheap.
Personally, vote with your wallet. Android phones (esp. thanks to Verizon's BOGO deals and a far larger pool of manufacturers) are selling like mad right now. iPhones are still selling like mad right now. May the market determine the best model...
I also always wondered why undergraduate studies for computer science didn't make time a relevant issue. It seems as if it's one of the more complex topics and yet, we don't pay any attention to it. Last formal education I had on time (not talking about physic related, but calendar) was in primary school. There are so many time systems out there that we should pay more attention to educating programmers on it.
Time-keeping and even leap-seconds are covered as far back as the frickin' K&R*. A sibling mentioned the ancient (and for some odd reason still dreaded) calendar and timer exercises that a huge chunk of CompSci students have had to face. It's not like leap seconds are some sort of big and sudden surprise that just popped up in the last couple years (now their implementation schedule seems to be, but still...)
* My copy (2nd ed.) is at home, but I'm somewhat sure that sure someone on/. can reference one quick enough to confirm/deny/whatever...
I also always wondered why undergraduate studies for computer science didn't make time a relevant issue. It seems as if it's one of the more complex topics and yet, we don't pay any attention to it. Last formal education I had on time (not talking about physic related, but calendar) was in primary school. There are so many time systems out there that we should pay more attention to educating programmers on it.
Time-keeping and even leap-seconds are covered as far back as the frickin' K&R*. A sibling mentioned the ancient (and for some odd reason still dreaded) calendar and timer exercises that a huge chunk of CompSci students have had to face. It's not like leap seconds are some sort of big and sudden surprise that just popped up in the last couple years (now their implementation schedule seems to be, but still...)
* My copy (2nd ed.) is at home, but I'm somewhat sure that sure someone on/. can reference one quick enough to confirm/deny/whatever...
The idealized reason for education to exist (post-enlightenment) is to teach students about the larger world around them. Nothing more, nothing less.
The truth lies in the middle - a comfortable distance between that of GP's post and of parent's post... A good college education is supposed to prepare the student for the world at large, an then maybe a particular field of endeavor. This is why undergrads always have to study subjects that have zero bearing on any given industry.
The whole point is to expose freshly minted adults to the world at large and to teach them some basic general skills (associate's degree). Once that's done, THEN you start looking at something specific. You can use your passions and interests as an impetus for pursuing something specific in the latter half for a baccalaureate degree (bachelors' for those who don't know any different), or you can take that generic associates' and go forge your own way out in the world. For those who really want to push the limits of a given field (or for fields that require a shitload more study than 64 credit hours), you can pursue a masters or doctorate.
Where some of the confusion sets in? Some folks haven't figured out that you're supposed to take those advanced degrees and apply them to your career/work/passions out the rest of the world. The ostensible goal is that you, as the degree-holder, are not only an expert in that field, but are supposed to actually do something towards pushing that field a bit further and add something useful to human knowledge. Instead, the professional student type decides to milk the system.
It does not exist to create little worker cogs, nor does it exist to create professional bullshitter-cum-philosophers. The sad truth is, it's become an amorphous mass that does both.
I was alive during that time (well, technically - I was born less than 24 hours before Apollo 11 launched), and yeah, it is exciting. After the whole political bullshit from the post-Apollo years, it's good to see something actually moving forward again, even if it took folks other than NASA to do it.
I'm guessing that you've never really lived in, or even visited, a real third-world country - at least not outside of the usual tourist areas.
If you had, you'd know that the stereotypical boutique comparison you're trolling is more often than not fueled by people who either:
* have a specific (radical/fascist/Utopian/bullshit) agenda to "fix" the "problems". -or- * want attention badly - usually for monetary gain, power, and/or notoriety (see also cable news commentators, talk radio hosts, bloggers, the not-so-intelligent politicians among us, et al). -or- * desperately want to look like an iconoclastic philosopher in order to get laid at college parties.
Funny how even the cheapest netbooks can do it, and laptops at the $400 price point are now doing 1600x900 native.
There's a problem with picking one aspect and using it to claim technical superiority... while ignoring form-factor, battery life, integration, that big-arsed touch-enabled screen, etc.
Mind you, I don't have an iPad. I have an HP Mini 2200 (originally came with 'doze, but now running Ubuntu Netbook Remix - a slight improvement, IMHO). Here's the deal (on either OS for this thing):
while the battery life is okay (ab't 5-6 hours of constant use), I have the extended battery pack option - and it still doesn't come close to the iPad's standard 10-12 hours.
the trackpad is a raging pain in the ass to use, which necessitates a bluetooth mini-mouse. Do you have any idea how frickin' grating that is? Already my ultra-portable solution needs accessories just to be halfway usable.
Flash on the thing is slow and atrocious (in either OS). Play a flash game on that thing sometime, or run a flash video - it stutters, skips, and is nearly unresponsive to mouse input at times.
Turn Flash on, and you can cut the battery life by half.
Given all of this and more? Unless Adobe gets its shit together (along with the developers using it), Flash will remain a crippled, bug-ridden vehicle that actually worsens the experience. And notice how I never mentioned the intrusive advert tricks (specifically LSOs), and/or malware
AC has a point up there, especially when you consider that Microsoft doesn't sue openly, but instead makes all of its threats quietly (see also Novell's little pact, as well as various little or unpopular distros making similar pacts...) There's also the TomTom case. Microsoft wasn't exactly a Boy Scout whipping around that FAT32 patent like they had.
SCO was a copyright case, but in Microsoft's eyes, IP is IP (Ballmer has a nasty habit of not making distinctions in that particular realm either). Also, while in a similar post you go on and on about how one doesn't "inadvertently" infringe copyright, you missed something. Fact is, SCO posted (IIRC) as their one and only public 'encrypted evidence' snippet... a piece of BSD-licensed code that drifted into SysV's reference codebase even before the whole AT&T vs. Berkeley fights (I know, I know - Early Pleistocene and stuff). BUT - the point stands: anyone who has taken even a cursory glance at the whole BSD vs. SysV legal wars (and more importantly, their outcomes) knows better than to say something like "you don't infringe copyright inadvertently". Sheesh.
But anyway - while they're not as noisy about it (given their record of losing so many of such cases, little wonder why), Microsoft does do more than the usual amount of backroom intimidations and back-alley shakedowns in this whole "intellectual property" circus.
(I hate babysitting databases... makes the brain go all squiggly at 2 in the morning. At least now I can stop wondering if they found a fossilized CD player next to the bones...)
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In fact I think population control, like China's 1 baby per family, will eventually become necessary... especially after oil becomes scarce and skyrockets to $1000/barrel (~$30/gallon of gasoline)..
1) Why not move the excess population off-Earth? We're already talking about space tourism as a reality... it's not that big of a step from tourism to colonization, especially 90 years from now.
2) Who says that gasoline will be a primary source of energy in 2100, let alone transportation? One would figure that by the time prices for gas rises to $10/gal (in 2010 dollars), the market itself would find a way to either create hyper-efficient engines, or folks will just replace their gas-powered cars with electric-powered ones.
The funny part is, "WE" will likely begin limiting our own population anyway. You may notice that the more prosperous a country becomes, the lower the birthrates. At least half of the countries in Europe have birthrates lower than self-replacement right now... China is already facing a looming population drop as it is - a one-child policy, an over-abundance of males, and an aging demographic. These three factors will pretty much chop the numbers down pretty harshly by 2100. Even India is showing a (albeit slowly) declining birthrate.
All in all, I suspect that world birthrates are going to come down anyway.
Rather it's the whole "it's MY content, you MUST view it MY WAY!!! " stance yet again.
There is a cure for that attitude - for the same reason that Facebook pretty much wiped MySpace off the map, or the way Google turned Yahoo! into a has-been: Keep it clean and user-friendly, keep the ads un-intrusive, or face instant death in the face of superior (cleaner, less intrusive) products.
I suspect that come next quarter, Microsoft will happily re-interpret this as a massive increase in "sales" of it's Windows 7 licenses, thereby giving its marketing department (and shill squadrons) something to crow about.
It also gives them a means to crow about how they 'cracked down' on piracy, and etc.
(to top that off, I'm sure there's a massive tax write-off in there somewhere as well).
All in all, doing this looks like the best solution for 'em.
Here - I'll provide a bit of his evidence for you: Merry Christmas (just remember that it's not on a silver platter - you're going to have to know how to use strings, and do some research yourself).
A short top-o-the-head list:
etc etc... and remember that Apple, Novell (pre-Linux), et al share a lot of the guilt.
Nearly all of those proprietary apps are themselves clones.
...and make sure the name is nowhere close to the original's name. See also The game formerly known as Scrabulous
So far, Zynga has been smart enough to avoid that particular trap, but the odds of coming a bit too close may be enough to gut them financially (not from the small operators, mind, but from one of the big boys, e.g. Mattel and the like).
Start Here:
"Righthaven LLC is owned 50/50 by two limited liability companies. The first is Net Sortie Systems, LLC, which is owned by Las Vegas attorney Steven Gibson – the Nevada attorney who is behind all of the lawsuits filed by Righthaven. The second is SI Content Monitor LLC, which is owned by family members of investment banking billionaire Warren Stephens whose investments include Stephens Media, LLC which owns the Las Vegas Review-Journal. "
(...so they wanna sue me for reprinting that? Fuck 'em.)
...they'll likely require you to keep both hands on the rail, where the bailiff can see them. :(
Perhaps Microsoft shows one face to the nations in question ("we lurve FOSS"), but their usual face to the rest of the planet ("lunix suX0rz!").
It's not like a corporation that big can't present opposing personalities, each suited to the markets they're trying to take on.
So waitaminute... you'd think he made a killing off of kiting SCO stock as hard as he did. Now his house is up for foreclosure?
The only guess I can make is that the idiot over-invested in real estate... which in turn only bolsters the phrase "never attribute to malice what can be better described by stupidity". That is, maybe McBride really is that stupid (well, okay, like we needed even more proof, but still...)
House is in one hell of a nice neighborhood, though...
"...this allows you to make better apps faster."
To be honest, this seems pretty subjective. It also misses the definition of "better" - is it "better" as in the app has better performance than a native-built app? Is it "better" as in it can have more features than a native-built app?
"Apple has said they want to be completely in control of the development environment, and anything that threatens to take away that control will not be allowed. "
Can't blame 'em in this case, at least from an objective viewpoint. The phone's reputation relies a lot on the apps' reputation. Apps that hang, or run slow, or basically sucks the battery dry in short order affects the users' perception of the phone. If that perception is destroyed by a bug in this particular app causing a raft of apps that basically suck (not in content, but performance, efficiency, etc)? For Apple, that would suck - far better to have flaws in an API, runtime, or etc that they themselves can fix in short order, than to stumble across flaws that they'd have to beg a third party to fix. It also leaves open a trap that Microsoft is stumbling on with each new version of Windows: Compatibility/Legacy issues. Given that there isn't too much capacity on a smartphone for Moore's Law to cover bloat, you can't just code your way out of a legacy issue - especially those caused by some third party build/prototyping app.
Apple's stance is pretty simple, really: If you want to build an iPhone app, learn to write code and do it your own damned self. The tools are free. The store fees are dirt cheap.
Personally, vote with your wallet. Android phones (esp. thanks to Verizon's BOGO deals and a far larger pool of manufacturers) are selling like mad right now. iPhones are still selling like mad right now. May the market determine the best model...
Portland Oregon is very white. Atlanta isn't, there was that change.
Not our fault, honest. The sun shines up here for like, 12 hours a year, all of it on a random day in August... and that's it.
(BTW - it's gray, not white. And pay no attention to those who appear to have tans... that's actually rust.)
I also always wondered why undergraduate studies for computer science didn't make time a relevant issue. It seems as if it's one of the more complex topics and yet, we don't pay any attention to it. Last formal education I had on time (not talking about physic related, but calendar) was in primary school. There are so many time systems out there that we should pay more attention to educating programmers on it.
Time-keeping and even leap-seconds are covered as far back as the frickin' K&R*. A sibling mentioned the ancient (and for some odd reason still dreaded) calendar and timer exercises that a huge chunk of CompSci students have had to face. It's not like leap seconds are some sort of big and sudden surprise that just popped up in the last couple years (now their implementation schedule seems to be, but still...)
* My copy (2nd ed.) is at home, but I'm somewhat sure that sure someone on /. can reference one quick enough to confirm/deny/whatever...
I also always wondered why undergraduate studies for computer science didn't make time a relevant issue. It seems as if it's one of the more complex topics and yet, we don't pay any attention to it. Last formal education I had on time (not talking about physic related, but calendar) was in primary school. There are so many time systems out there that we should pay more attention to educating programmers on it.
Time-keeping and even leap-seconds are covered as far back as the frickin' K&R*. A sibling mentioned the ancient (and for some odd reason still dreaded) calendar and timer exercises that a huge chunk of CompSci students have had to face. It's not like leap seconds are some sort of big and sudden surprise that just popped up in the last couple years (now their implementation schedule seems to be, but still...)
* My copy (2nd ed.) is at home, but I'm somewhat sure that sure someone on /. can reference one quick enough to confirm/deny/whatever...
The idealized reason for education to exist (post-enlightenment) is to teach students about the larger world around them. Nothing more, nothing less.
The truth lies in the middle - a comfortable distance between that of GP's post and of parent's post... A good college education is supposed to prepare the student for the world at large, an then maybe a particular field of endeavor. This is why undergrads always have to study subjects that have zero bearing on any given industry.
The whole point is to expose freshly minted adults to the world at large and to teach them some basic general skills (associate's degree). Once that's done, THEN you start looking at something specific. You can use your passions and interests as an impetus for pursuing something specific in the latter half for a baccalaureate degree (bachelors' for those who don't know any different), or you can take that generic associates' and go forge your own way out in the world. For those who really want to push the limits of a given field (or for fields that require a shitload more study than 64 credit hours), you can pursue a masters or doctorate.
Where some of the confusion sets in? Some folks haven't figured out that you're supposed to take those advanced degrees and apply them to your career/work/passions out the rest of the world. The ostensible goal is that you, as the degree-holder, are not only an expert in that field, but are supposed to actually do something towards pushing that field a bit further and add something useful to human knowledge. Instead, the professional student type decides to milk the system.
It does not exist to create little worker cogs, nor does it exist to create professional bullshitter-cum-philosophers. The sad truth is, it's become an amorphous mass that does both.
I was alive during that time (well, technically - I was born less than 24 hours before Apollo 11 launched), and yeah, it is exciting. After the whole political bullshit from the post-Apollo years, it's good to see something actually moving forward again, even if it took folks other than NASA to do it.
Very nice. Now, about that 'getting people up to space in the first place for less than $10k/lb' part...
Seriously though, it's good to see things coming along.
You're close - in the States, we actually generate power off of the Taco Bell grease traps...
Much the same may be said of the United States.
I'm guessing that you've never really lived in, or even visited, a real third-world country - at least not outside of the usual tourist areas.
If you had, you'd know that the stereotypical boutique comparison you're trolling is more often than not fueled by people who either:
* have a specific (radical/fascist/Utopian/bullshit) agenda to "fix" the "problems".
-or-
* want attention badly - usually for monetary gain, power, and/or notoriety (see also cable news commentators, talk radio hosts, bloggers, the not-so-intelligent politicians among us, et al).
-or-
* desperately want to look like an iconoclastic philosopher in order to get laid at college parties.
Phillip K. Dick should be required reading for all kids.
Followed very closely by Robert Heinlein (I specifically recommend this one, followed by this one.)
...what if I, in return, promise to pay the ISP "up to" $45/mo for their service?
Oh, that's right - they'd cut me off. :/
Funny how even the cheapest netbooks can do it, and laptops at the $400 price point are now doing 1600x900 native.
There's a problem with picking one aspect and using it to claim technical superiority... while ignoring form-factor, battery life, integration, that big-arsed touch-enabled screen, etc.
Mind you, I don't have an iPad. I have an HP Mini 2200 (originally came with 'doze, but now running Ubuntu Netbook Remix - a slight improvement, IMHO).
Here's the deal (on either OS for this thing):
Given all of this and more? Unless Adobe gets its shit together (along with the developers using it), Flash will remain a crippled, bug-ridden vehicle that actually worsens the experience. And notice how I never mentioned the intrusive advert tricks (specifically LSOs), and/or malware
AC has a point up there, especially when you consider that Microsoft doesn't sue openly, but instead makes all of its threats quietly (see also Novell's little pact, as well as various little or unpopular distros making similar pacts...) There's also the TomTom case. Microsoft wasn't exactly a Boy Scout whipping around that FAT32 patent like they had.
SCO was a copyright case, but in Microsoft's eyes, IP is IP (Ballmer has a nasty habit of not making distinctions in that particular realm either). Also, while in a similar post you go on and on about how one doesn't "inadvertently" infringe copyright, you missed something. Fact is, SCO posted (IIRC) as their one and only public 'encrypted evidence' snippet... a piece of BSD-licensed code that drifted into SysV's reference codebase even before the whole AT&T vs. Berkeley fights (I know, I know - Early Pleistocene and stuff). BUT - the point stands: anyone who has taken even a cursory glance at the whole BSD vs. SysV legal wars (and more importantly, their outcomes) knows better than to say something like "you don't infringe copyright inadvertently". Sheesh.
But anyway - while they're not as noisy about it (given their record of losing so many of such cases, little wonder why), Microsoft does do more than the usual amount of backroom intimidations and back-alley shakedowns in this whole "intellectual property" circus.
Oh, wait... wrong Tool.
(I hate babysitting databases... makes the brain go all squiggly at 2 in the morning. At least now I can stop wondering if they found a fossilized CD player next to the bones...)