You seem pretty happy to move a yardstick but you have no idea where it is.
The yardstick is moved by others, not me. The Model T is no longer considered a passenger vehicle, but a museum piece. If you wish to contest that it is others who have moved the goalposts, then please show me any state in the US or province in Canada where it would be legal to manufacture and sell a new Model T as a passenger vehicle.
Goalposts are moved all the time. What was acceptable conduct 50 years ago - for example, a husband manhandling his wife to "calm her down" - just watch "It's a Wonderful Life" - is not any more.
The same for "acceptable wage" or "acceptable working conditions", child labour, divorce and remarriage, same-sex marriage, acceptable birth control methods, legal forms of sex, the definition of a legal marriage (it was once illegal for blacks to marry whites), what constitutes consent, legal police searches, etc. All these have been redefined over the years, and will continue to be.
In real life, unlike football, goalposts move all the time.
And if a 'car' is so clearly defined as something the Model T is not then what is this definition?
For a Model T, it's "Museum piece":-) I was actually given a ride in one "behind the scenes" at an auction. They had to move it, so "why not take it for a spin?" It definitely did NOT feel like I was in a car - more like a hay wagon with a motor tacked on.
For all those old chicklet-kbd PC juniors and TRS-80s (trash-80) and Commodores, the word you want is "Electronic Waste".
Just search for it - the move to html5+javascript means that all those "developers developers developers" who invested so much time and $$$ in using Microsoft languages and tools feel betrayed.
Remember those "2 million WP7 phones shipped"? More than half of them are still sitting on store shelves. THAT is why Microsoft won't give the number of activations.
Contrast that with Android ACTIVATIONS of more than half a million a DAY.
You can't produce new Model Ts and sell them as cars to the general public because you can't register them. They no longer meet the standards for a passenger vehicle (safety, emissions, etc), the same way that those old "Pocket PCs" don't meet the current definition of a smartphone.
Would you call a Newton an tablet computer? Technically, yes, but people would look at you weird if you did. Language and expectations change.
Read the oroginal specs from sun. The JIT didn't even exist when Java was released. Everything was interpreted at runtime, same as all pcode languages.
Tablets can have a stylus-optimized UI and still be tablets. It's only with the development of better hardware that touchscreens became practical (the touch screens on Point-of-Sale terminals for the last 15 years has ranged from pretty neat to almost unusable - this is a hardware problem).
Bytecode is not native code - it is run (interpreted) by the VM.
Dalvik instead uses its own 16-bit instruction set that works directly on local variables. The local variable is commonly picked by a 4-bit 'virtual register' field. This lowers Dalvik's instruction count and raises its interpreter speed.
JIT compilers represent a hybrid approach, with translation occurring continuously, as with interpreters, but with caching of translated code to minimize performance degradation.
...
Bytecode is not the machine code for any particular computer, and may be portable among computer architectures. The bytecode may then be interpreted by, or run on, a virtual machine
VMs are interpreters first and foremost. Any optimizations by the JIT are made by keeping a copy of the results of interpreting the code (translating the instructions to native code). Even some old BASIC interpreters did a line-by-line conversion to native instructions, then ran the results.
Even dalvik 2.2, which has a JIT, still has to run the bytecode in the VM - it can just cache a copy of the resulting platform-specific instructions for future use if the same call, with the same parameters, is made in the near future.
So dalvik DOES interpret bytecode, since that's what the dex file is.
Let me tell you one thing that Win8 will be able to do that none of the existing tables can: run desktop software. Not x86 software (note: Win32 != x86... it's an API - you can take Win32 and recompile for ARM), but desktop software
First, there are existing tablets that run Windows 7 just fine - one of my friends has one - so your first claim is false.
Now on to your second mistake - not all "desktops" are Windows. Mine is linux, others might be running OSX.
Win8? 3rd-party developers are VERY unhappy with the direction it's taken.
Einstein didn't only hang out with 8 year olds, he also hung out with some of the most intellectually advanced individuals of his generation a group which one would have a really hard time typically meeting.
That was a consequence of his job. Helping an 8-year-old with her math in return for jelly beans, was not. And since they questioned it, they weren't that smart if they couldn't see the value in it. So no, I didn't "prove your point for you", Einstein.
It's not that they can't make friends, it's that sometimes it's nice to spend time with folks that are actually interested in carrying on an intelligent conversation. And for somebody that is apparently anti-intellectual, I'm sure it would surprise you to learn that being the apex of the world around you intellectually is frequently a source of confidence problems as you never know when you're full of it because nobody is capable of calling you on it.
I am not anti-intellectual - quite the contrary. It os observation has has led me to conclude that intelligence by itself lacks any utility, and that high IQ leads to early developmental problems, as the person often uses their "precocious intelligence" as a way to handle social situations, ultimately incurring a social skills deficit.
I'm sure it would surprise you to learn that being the apex of the world around you intellectually is frequently a source of confidence problems as you never know when you're full of it because nobody is capable of calling you on it.
Even the smartest people do amazingly stupid things, and they're rarely the "apex of the world" - even their own circumscribed one. Thinking that having the highest IQ in the room makes you the "apex of the world" is not only stupidity incarnate, but a sign of someone who is rationalizing their lack of value as a person in their own eyes. That's pitiful in both senses of the word.
And people who they regard as their intellectual inferiors have working baloney detectors. To paraphrase justice Potter Stewart: "I may not be able to describe BS, but I know it when I hear it!" The problem is from people who lack the confidence to be able to take advice from someone they dismiss as being their intellectual inferior - it means admitting that someone else might be right for a change.
But back to Mensa - a truly brilliant scam if it were able to rope in all the geniuses - but more than 99% of the top 2% see it for what it, and its' members, represent - lameness incarnate.
Q.One of the following proverbs is closest in meaning to the saying, "Birds of a feather, flock together." Choose one:
Q. One of the following sentences given below means approximately the same as the proverb: "Don't count your chickens until they are hatched." Choose the one:
Two questions that depend on knowledge of a specific culture and common language idioms.
Many tests depend on "inside knowledge" of a particular culture. For example, this one at a recent job interview:
Q. Make a name out of this number with one line: 20100
One of my favourites is this one:
Q. What is this postal address (this is a true story - the letter was properly delivered - but it requires some country-specific knowledge (formatting of addresses - it's not the same all over the world) as well as knowledge of common names and various place names, so it is definitely culturally biased):
WOOD
JOHN
ENGLAND
I take it your score wasn't high enough to gain entrance.
You take it wrong.
Believe it or not, sometimes it's nice to have people available that are cognitively strong enough that they represent some challenge. It's astonishingly annoying to argue with people that lack the education and cognitive faculties to put up a decent argument.
Then make it fun (or do you lack the *ahem* education and cognitive faculties to do so???). That's what white-hat trolling is for. Fun AND educational. Troll Tuesday exists for multiple reasons. You get out of it what you put into it, including the odd insight, as well as practice in dealing with people who suffer from illogical thinking or have never challenged their basic beliefs (and may be unable to do so without help and sufficient prodding).
Albert Einstein was once asked why he, an important professor, spent so much time helping an 8-year-old girl with her math homework. He said "It's simple. I help her with her math, and she shares her jellybeans."
He obviously wasn't in it for the jellybeans - he could have simply bought as many as he wanted. He probably also learned more from observing her than she did from him. More importantly, he also was smart enough to know that there's more to a person than just what they know or how "smart" they are.
Mensa... the only intelligent thing to come out of that was the original idea of starting a group to soak people for $60 a year based on their IQ score being in the top 2%. And like someone who over-pays for anything else, they are now psychologically invested in justifying their irrational behaviour.
From an example mensa web site:
Becoming a member of Mensa can add new dimensions to your life. Making new friends and finding intellectual stimulation are givens, but what may be even more important is the feeling of belonging that grows when you are surrounded by honest-to-goodness peers --- people who are unique, yet paradoxically, are very much like you: inquisitive, fun-loving, open to new ideas and alternative viewpoints, and well-read.
Bunch of poseurs. If they're so smart, why can't they make new friends and find intellectual stimulation on their own. It sounds more like a program to help the socially retarded breed.
Or this - annotated by yours truly:
Membership Benefits
Prestige & Exclusivity - because 99% of all geniuses won't join - they're not that stupid - you're "special", cupcake;
Social & Friendship - because it's safe to be surrounded by people who are similarly lacking in social skills;
Special Interest Groups - because nobody else will laugh at your collection of Star Wars figurines;
Annual & Regional Gatherings - because we want to soak more money out of you;
Networking / International Contacts - because you're too stupid to find them yourself;
Confidence & Self-Esteem - hey - if you're so smart, why do you need to join a group of people who lack confidence and self-esteem to build up your confidence and self-esteem??? Go see a therapist. Get some counseling.
Newsletters and Magazines - because we want still more of your money;
Mensa Merchandise - because we want still more of your money;
An Edge In Career Prospects - we threw this in because we know you're so desperate to believe this one you'll never question it, dumb-ass;
Help For Gifted Children - because growing up with a parent who is so needy, any children will be "gifted" or "special" or "f*'d up" - they'll need all the help they can get to avoid shooting up the local school;
Annual Scholarships for university students - because we'll give out $1,000 every year to one student who writes a 250-word essay on their plans... it makes us look good and doesn't cost us anything, since the award is donated by someone else equally needy to see their name associated with Mensa, and it gives us a great prospect list.
That's easy, she lived to become that old because she didn't die. As noble as it is, it's doubtful that they'll find any useful information as the people who lived to be 100+ years old are just the tail end of the distribution, there's as much luck involved as anything else.
I'm not a member, nor would I likely qualify, but I don't see a problem with people joining a group based on something they all have in common. That's what most groups are, after all.
Try this on for size. "We want you to join our group of blonde, blue-eyed, fair-skinned people." I qualify, but if someone asked me that, I'd be creeped out. Are they KKK? Neo-nazis? White Supremists?
"We want you to pay $60 a year to belong to a group of people whose IQ puts them in the top 2%. Benefits include being able to meet others who belong to the same group." Like more than 99% of those who qualify, I am not that lame. Intelligence is WAY more than a culturally and economically biased test score.
Why would I want to hang out with people like me, when I can hang out with people who are different, and thus we're more interesting to each other?
IQ tests are like Mensa - more than 99% of the people qualified to join are also smart enough to realize Mensa is a scam.
The ones who bleat the hardest about how IQ is so important are the ones who are so stupid that, despite having a high IQ, they have to pay $60 a year to a club that will attest to their worth so they can feel good about themselves.
If they were really smart, they would have quoted Grouch Marx instead when someone tried to pitch it to them - "I wouldn't join any club that would have me as a member."
We don't have a year of the linux desktop not because there isn't room for a third system... it has a lot more to do with the fact that Linux sucks terribly on the desktop. Always has, always will.
Could have fooled me. It runs fine on my 17" laptop, which currently has a second 26" screen with external mouse and keyboard plugged into it.
Actually, I don't think Android is the way to go. One thing Apple got right was using c/c++/objective c, instead of managed code and a runtime. That decision alone was going to provide at least double battery life.
Dalvik doesn't infringe Oracle's patents - it just sucks cpu cycles, same as any other interpreted environment, compared to native code.
The decision to go with a runtime interpreter for Android was to gain large numbers of devs who were used to writing in java, "because c is too hard".
Tablets don't need to have touch-based software - a stylus works just fine, and that's been the basis of various handheld computing devices for two decades. They were called various things, like PDAs, remember? And they all flopped. Touch needs better hardware, more cpu, etc. than a stylus.
The iPad is currently selling like crazy, but they don't seem to have much day-to-day use. I've only seen ONE in actual use, and the person using it didn't look too comfortable trying to actually DO something with it, and I live in one of the 100 largest cities in the world.
Logically, they'd want both those with high and low intelligence, to see what the differences were. This sounds more like a breeding program (let's breed intelligent western-looking kids to be our next generation of spies) or, more likely, just another hoax.
Of course, if it IS an attempt to get western-looking donors of high intelligence for a breeding program, they'll be disappointed - most of them will look asian:-)
Android: 48%
IOS: 19%
RIM: Who cares any more? We just want to know who's going to buy them.
WebOS: Oops!
WP7: Rounding error.
Android is getting over half a million activations a day, and that number is increasing by 5.5% every month. You might consider it a bad thing, but people must like the wide choice of Android devices available if they're snapping them up in such volume.
So start producing and selling Model T's as cars. Let me know when you get one to be considered an automobile that I can walk into the DMV and plate with no restrictions.
Abraham Lincoln once said "If we call a tail a paw, how many paws does a dog have." When people said "5", he replied "Calling it a paw doesn't make it one." Those crappy phones were not smartphones.
How many people were disappointed when they found the iPad wouldnt be running Darwin? Lots.
How many people are saying they'll wait for the HP touchpad to go down to $100 - $200 and wipe down WebOS (which runs atop linux anyway) and run a distro all by itself? Check the comments in yesterdays story - they're there.
A nice big tablet display, with detachable keyboard and mouse, running a real OS directly, and not something that has been stripped down for the smaller tablet display, or imposes a "smartphone/tablet UI" on the user, or other restrictions, would have a real market. It would compete directly with notebooks, from the ultra-portable to the desktop-replacement.
Then how come so many people buy them and then they just fall out of sight?
What I described needed significant advances in hardware to actually be useable. One of my friends, who is far from being a geek (he won't even buy a cell phone) just bought a real tablet computer, complete with touchscreen, detachable keyboard and stylus, and he loves it. He would never buy an iPad or even an android-based tablet computer. He wants to be able to run "real software." Just like the majority of the population (or they wouldn't own a laptop or desktop in the first place, right?)
ctrl+insert, and shift+insert, were the original cut-n-paste. Later on, the second mapping to ctrl+c, ctrl+v were added.
Also, why teach Ctrl+F when F3 works even in linux / firefox? Seems to me that's a lot quicker. The same as pressing the spacebar to scroll down a page instead of using the mouse and scrollbar, or even pgdn (spacebar is closer to the user and larger, so more efficient).
Or did the researcher from Google not know about F3? Maybe he should have googled for it?
Do you really want to compare the earlier versions of WM (aka Pocket OC 2000) or Symbian with what we call a smartphone today? Remember those Windows "smartphones" from 10 years ago with no touchscreen, 320x240 resolution, and a really crappy web browser?
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The yardstick is moved by others, not me. The Model T is no longer considered a passenger vehicle, but a museum piece. If you wish to contest that it is others who have moved the goalposts, then please show me any state in the US or province in Canada where it would be legal to manufacture and sell a new Model T as a passenger vehicle.
Goalposts are moved all the time. What was acceptable conduct 50 years ago - for example, a husband manhandling his wife to "calm her down" - just watch "It's a Wonderful Life" - is not any more.
The same for "acceptable wage" or "acceptable working conditions", child labour, divorce and remarriage, same-sex marriage, acceptable birth control methods, legal forms of sex, the definition of a legal marriage (it was once illegal for blacks to marry whites), what constitutes consent, legal police searches, etc. All these have been redefined over the years, and will continue to be.
In real life, unlike football, goalposts move all the time.
For a Model T, it's "Museum piece" :-) I was actually given a ride in one "behind the scenes" at an auction. They had to move it, so "why not take it for a spin?" It definitely did NOT feel like I was in a car - more like a hay wagon with a motor tacked on.
For all those old chicklet-kbd PC juniors and TRS-80s (trash-80) and Commodores, the word you want is "Electronic Waste".
Just search for it - the move to html5+javascript means that all those "developers developers developers" who invested so much time and $$$ in using Microsoft languages and tools feel betrayed.
Contrast that with Android ACTIVATIONS of more than half a million a DAY.
WP7 is dead.
Would you call a Newton an tablet computer? Technically, yes, but people would look at you weird if you did. Language and expectations change.
Read the oroginal specs from sun. The JIT didn't even exist when Java was released. Everything was interpreted at runtime, same as all pcode languages.
Tablets can have a stylus-optimized UI and still be tablets. It's only with the development of better hardware that touchscreens became practical (the touch screens on Point-of-Sale terminals for the last 15 years has ranged from pretty neat to almost unusable - this is a hardware problem).
Bytecode is not native code - it is run (interpreted) by the VM.
and wrt JITs and interpreters
VMs are interpreters first and foremost. Any optimizations by the JIT are made by keeping a copy of the results of interpreting the code (translating the instructions to native code). Even some old BASIC interpreters did a line-by-line conversion to native instructions, then ran the results.
Even dalvik 2.2, which has a JIT, still has to run the bytecode in the VM - it can just cache a copy of the resulting platform-specific instructions for future use if the same call, with the same parameters, is made in the near future.
So dalvik DOES interpret bytecode, since that's what the dex file is.
First, there are existing tablets that run Windows 7 just fine - one of my friends has one - so your first claim is false.
Now on to your second mistake - not all "desktops" are Windows. Mine is linux, others might be running OSX.
Win8? 3rd-party developers are VERY unhappy with the direction it's taken.
That was a consequence of his job. Helping an 8-year-old with her math in return for jelly beans, was not. And since they questioned it, they weren't that smart if they couldn't see the value in it. So no, I didn't "prove your point for you", Einstein.
I am not anti-intellectual - quite the contrary. It os observation has has led me to conclude that intelligence by itself lacks any utility, and that high IQ leads to early developmental problems, as the person often uses their "precocious intelligence" as a way to handle social situations, ultimately incurring a social skills deficit.
Even the smartest people do amazingly stupid things, and they're rarely the "apex of the world" - even their own circumscribed one. Thinking that having the highest IQ in the room makes you the "apex of the world" is not only stupidity incarnate, but a sign of someone who is rationalizing their lack of value as a person in their own eyes. That's pitiful in both senses of the word.
And people who they regard as their intellectual inferiors have working baloney detectors. To paraphrase justice Potter Stewart: "I may not be able to describe BS, but I know it when I hear it!" The problem is from people who lack the confidence to be able to take advice from someone they dismiss as being their intellectual inferior - it means admitting that someone else might be right for a change.
But back to Mensa - a truly brilliant scam if it were able to rope in all the geniuses - but more than 99% of the top 2% see it for what it, and its' members, represent - lameness incarnate.
Sample questions that exhibit cultural bias:
Q.One of the following proverbs is closest in meaning to the saying, "Birds of a feather, flock together." Choose one:
Q. One of the following sentences given below means approximately the same as the proverb: "Don't count your chickens until they are hatched." Choose the one:
Two questions that depend on knowledge of a specific culture and common language idioms.
Many tests depend on "inside knowledge" of a particular culture. For example, this one at a recent job interview:
Q. Make a name out of this number with one line: 20100
One of my favourites is this one:
Q. What is this postal address (this is a true story - the letter was properly delivered - but it requires some country-specific knowledge (formatting of addresses - it's not the same all over the world) as well as knowledge of common names and various place names, so it is definitely culturally biased):
WOOD
JOHN
ENGLAND
You take it wrong.
Then make it fun (or do you lack the *ahem* education and cognitive faculties to do so???). That's what white-hat trolling is for. Fun AND educational. Troll Tuesday exists for multiple reasons. You get out of it what you put into it, including the odd insight, as well as practice in dealing with people who suffer from illogical thinking or have never challenged their basic beliefs (and may be unable to do so without help and sufficient prodding).
Albert Einstein was once asked why he, an important professor, spent so much time helping an 8-year-old girl with her math homework. He said "It's simple. I help her with her math, and she shares her jellybeans."
He obviously wasn't in it for the jellybeans - he could have simply bought as many as he wanted. He probably also learned more from observing her than she did from him. More importantly, he also was smart enough to know that there's more to a person than just what they know or how "smart" they are.
Mensa ... the only intelligent thing to come out of that was the original idea of starting a group to soak people for $60 a year based on their IQ score being in the top 2%. And like someone who over-pays for anything else, they are now psychologically invested in justifying their irrational behaviour.
From an example mensa web site:
Bunch of poseurs. If they're so smart, why can't they make new friends and find intellectual stimulation on their own. It sounds more like a program to help the socially retarded breed.
Or this - annotated by yours truly:
+1 Great scam!
Lazarus Long, is that you?
Try this on for size. "We want you to join our group of blonde, blue-eyed, fair-skinned people." I qualify, but if someone asked me that, I'd be creeped out. Are they KKK? Neo-nazis? White Supremists?
"We want you to pay $60 a year to belong to a group of people whose IQ puts them in the top 2%. Benefits include being able to meet others who belong to the same group." Like more than 99% of those who qualify, I am not that lame. Intelligence is WAY more than a culturally and economically biased test score.
Why would I want to hang out with people like me, when I can hang out with people who are different, and thus we're more interesting to each other?
The ones who bleat the hardest about how IQ is so important are the ones who are so stupid that, despite having a high IQ, they have to pay $60 a year to a club that will attest to their worth so they can feel good about themselves.
If they were really smart, they would have quoted Grouch Marx instead when someone tried to pitch it to them - "I wouldn't join any club that would have me as a member."
Could have fooled me. It runs fine on my 17" laptop, which currently has a second 26" screen with external mouse and keyboard plugged into it.
Dalvik doesn't infringe Oracle's patents - it just sucks cpu cycles, same as any other interpreted environment, compared to native code.
The decision to go with a runtime interpreter for Android was to gain large numbers of devs who were used to writing in java, "because c is too hard".
The iPad is currently selling like crazy, but they don't seem to have much day-to-day use. I've only seen ONE in actual use, and the person using it didn't look too comfortable trying to actually DO something with it, and I live in one of the 100 largest cities in the world.
Of course, if it IS an attempt to get western-looking donors of high intelligence for a breeding program, they'll be disappointed - most of them will look asian :-)
Here's how new sales currently break down:
Android: 48%
IOS: 19%
RIM: Who cares any more? We just want to know who's going to buy them.
WebOS: Oops!
WP7: Rounding error.
Android is getting over half a million activations a day, and that number is increasing by 5.5% every month. You might consider it a bad thing, but people must like the wide choice of Android devices available if they're snapping them up in such volume.
So start producing and selling Model T's as cars. Let me know when you get one to be considered an automobile that I can walk into the DMV and plate with no restrictions.
Abraham Lincoln once said "If we call a tail a paw, how many paws does a dog have." When people said "5", he replied "Calling it a paw doesn't make it one." Those crappy phones were not smartphones.
How many people are saying they'll wait for the HP touchpad to go down to $100 - $200 and wipe down WebOS (which runs atop linux anyway) and run a distro all by itself? Check the comments in yesterdays story - they're there.
A nice big tablet display, with detachable keyboard and mouse, running a real OS directly, and not something that has been stripped down for the smaller tablet display, or imposes a "smartphone/tablet UI" on the user, or other restrictions, would have a real market. It would compete directly with notebooks, from the ultra-portable to the desktop-replacement.
What I described needed significant advances in hardware to actually be useable. One of my friends, who is far from being a geek (he won't even buy a cell phone) just bought a real tablet computer, complete with touchscreen, detachable keyboard and stylus, and he loves it. He would never buy an iPad or even an android-based tablet computer. He wants to be able to run "real software." Just like the majority of the population (or they wouldn't own a laptop or desktop in the first place, right?)
Also, why teach Ctrl+F when F3 works even in linux / firefox? Seems to me that's a lot quicker. The same as pressing the spacebar to scroll down a page instead of using the mouse and scrollbar, or even pgdn (spacebar is closer to the user and larger, so more efficient).
Or did the researcher from Google not know about F3? Maybe he should have googled for it?
What next - calling an etch-a-sketch a tablet? :-)