Legislation is great when you agree with it--it is a reasonable reaction to a growing public concern that needs to be addressed in a thoughtful way.
On the other hand, Legislation sucks when you disagree with it--it is an overreaching abuse of the power of the government to impose the will of a neanderthal few upon otherwise freedom loving people.
Don't matter what the legislation is, nor how it is passed or if it is the Federal government telling the States to knock it off, or if it is the States banning together to use their relative size to impose their standards upon the nation. Legislation is good when you agree with it, and it sucks when you disagree with it.
Actually, California has only banned penta-PBDEs and octa-PBDEs, but has not banned deca-PBDEs--and the ban doesn't go into effect until next year. Europe, which started the whole thing, has only banned penta-PBDEs and octa-PBDEs but not deca-PBDEs--California's legislation is modeled after Europe's. And the reason why deca-PBDEs are not banned is because the Swedish study which showed problems with PBDEs only showed problems with penta- and octa- but not with deca-PBDEs.
Washington is banning all PBDEs, including deca-PBDEs, which were not shown by the Swedish investigation as being harmful. As such, the Washington legislation goes beyond California's or Europe's.
Actually, I would expect Vista to replace Windows XP in the same way Windows XP replaced Windows 2000: eventually you won't be able to buy a new computer with anything other than Vista installed, and as the normal replacement cycle of computers runs its course, eventually everyone with a PC will be running Vista.
It was the same pattern with XP: even though XP had been out for years we were still testing (and developing!) using Win2K. It was only when a mandate came down from IT that they would only install XP that people in my group switched to XP--three years after XP had first shipped.
(Hell, I'll even switch to Vista: just as soon as I have a computer for which there are no XP drivers, probably some time in early 2010...)
Not to mention the unreliability of relying on web browser stats to determine OS market share.
No kidding. Safari in debug mode has a feature where it advertises itself as a different browser than Safari, and I find that there are a few web sites which block me out the browser advertises "Safari WebKit", but works perfectly if it advertises itself as "Windows IE".
Further, a variation of 0.3% seems within a margin of error for the ebb and flow of users visiting a block of web sites--even tens of thousands of web sites. For all we know the dip in MacOS X users visiting those web sites came from an "Apple TV" effect: MacOS X users may have been more likely watching their bright shiny new Apple TV boxes rather than surfing the web.
(I'm not saying this is what happened; I'm saying that the statistics used here are hocus-pocus at best.)
One wonders if future generations will be born used to the higher CO2 concentrations and air we think is stuffy or stale would be considered normal then?
It's unreasonable because all of these artificial boundaries are bullshit.
The boundaries that keep people from walking in your front door and eating your food from your refrigerator before changing into your clothes and walking out of your home with your laptop computer are also artificial.
Hmmm. Wonder if you think those artifical boundaries are also bullshit.
Sure the Internet is turning things on their heads. That's why legal types are still debating what to do about it. Did you think someone was going to give up a few million dollars in broadcast rights because while you think rights to your property should be protected, their property rights are bullshit?
I'm always suspictious about polls: you never know if the question asked introduced bias into the survey so that the author of the story would have something to talk about:
Apparently the headline comes from the answer to question 12 on the survey. Here is the actual text of the question:
12. Which one of the following statements come closest to your views about the origin and development of human beings? Humans developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process (or) Humans developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process (or) God created humans pretty much in the present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so?
Uh, I think this should have been followed by a question 13: "Did you understand question 12?" (yes) (no).
This was by far the longest and worst worded question in the survey.
The other fascinating thing to note is that on the detailed survey was that 13% of self-described "agnostics and athiests" answered "yes" to the idea that God created the Earth in its present form--a philosophical logical fallacy.
Tells me the numbers in the survey are at best junk.
I have a new 325i, and while I personally love the thing, I just posted elsewhere why I think it's poorly designed.
It's not the hardware that sucks, nor is it the concept--it is simply because no-one thought about creating a consistant user interface 'language' to control the system. There is no consistant way to navigate back one menu level, nor is there a consistant way to navigate to a particular feature. The visual feedback on the screen is completely different depending on which screen you are in--as if the 325i's user interface was cobbeled together by six separate teams working without any unifying user interface guidelines. (For all I know the UI was put together by six separate teams.)
It is this inconsistency which makes the iDrive suck.
Compare and contrast to the iPod, which has a consistant way to navigate through the menus. There are far more menus on the fifth generation iPod, yet it is dirt simple to figure out how to navigate because every screen works like every other screen in the menu system. Imagine how difficult it would be to use the iPod if the menus were laid out like the iDrive: if the play button for music became the select button for movies and the pause (but not play) button for TV shows, how many microseconds would people tolerate the iPod before they went out and bought a Zune?
I have a 325i with an iDrive, and I can tell you exactly what is wrong with the damned thing.
(1) Inconsistent user interface 'language'. In some submenus, selecting a submenu requires rotating the knob; in others, it requires moving the knob like a joystick. (Worse, in some screens, such as on the main navigation screen, you need both motions to select from different menus and submenus. The inconsistency extends to the language of moving back one level: do you press the menu button to pop up one level (as in the 'Info' menu) or do you push the knob forward and select the "up" arrow? Or do you rotate the knob to select the "up" arrow?
Because there is no consistant user interface, it is impossible to simply press the right button to do the task--and that requires you to actually look at the screen, divine from the layout of the screen what action (push menu key, push knob forward, rotate knob) that you need to perform, then take that action--all the time while driving 70 miles an hour down a busy freeway.
(2) Overuse of the knob electromagnetic stopper for tactile feedback causes the knob to be extremely hard to use.
The iDrive knob uses an electromagnet system to both give the knob the feel of discrete "steps" (by triggering an electromagnet briefly as you turn it, to make it feel like there are descrete steps), or to emulate a hard 'stop' when you hit the top or the bottom of a menu list. While this works fairly well for short menus, in some places (notably in the iDrive / iPod interface menus), the 'stop' electromagnet pull is not done when you hit the end of the list, but when you hit the bottom of the screen. So when you rotate the knob to the bottom of the screen, rather than just one brief click and the list scrolls up, the knob does a full stop, then a physical (electromagnetically driven) 'bump', then returns to the same orientation while the screen scrolls up one.
What this means is that if you have a list of 30 or 40 musicians, instead of just turning the knob, you wind up holding the knob as the thing flutters under your hand (hurting your wrist) as the list scrolls up.
I think BMW overused this electromagnet because they had this "wow, we are paying a few bucks for the hardware; let's overuse the feature because it's so cool" thing that many programmers get--and what could have been a subtle effect is instead used to clobber you literally in the wrist until your wrist is sore.
The iDrive user interface actually has more controls than the iPod: a knob rotates back and forth, has four different directions it can be pushed (similar to the four control buttons on the iPod), a select (push the knob down), and a 'menu' button. (I don't count the voice control button, even though it is physically part of the same cluster of buttons, as it does something completely different.) Yet even with one more button, the iDrive is much harder to use than an iPod--because whomever wrote the software didn't think about useability.
It is the dumbest thing in the world to have a $40K car where every last detail is well thought, the driving dynamics are incredible, and the whole thing is so incredibly well built--only to have a user interface that looks like a college student's freshman programming project.
There is part of me that is so annoyed with the user interface that I'm half tempted to move to Germany just so I can fix the stupid thing. Hell, they don't even have to swap out the underlying OS (Windows Automotive), even though it means the car's iDrive (and radio and nav system and...) are effectively dead for the first 30 seconds after starting the car because the OS is still booting. Just clean up the user interface, and it would make a whole world of difference. (And I even know WinCE, on which Windows Automotive is based, so it's not like I couldn't hack the damned thing myself.)
I'd say that Computer Science has been dead for quite a while based upon the quality of the code that I've seen written in the corporate world.
If more programmers had some sort of computer science background, they wouldn't be making the horrific mistakes that are being made on a daily basis. I've encountered people who are writing user interfaces who have absolutely no knowledge of the science of human-computer interfaces (and who don't understand that taking 5 seconds to respond to ON_PAINT is not acceptable), people writing server-side software who think Java's LinkedList and ArrayList objects are the same thing and who use them interchangeably without understanding the performance ramifications, and people who whack together multi-threaded applications by trial and error who think "formal method" is the instructions on how to put on a tuxido.
It shocks me the number of simple and stupid mistakes that are made in the workplace that were solved in the computer science literature literally decades before the guy was born.
I think the reason why people have such disdane for Computer Science--and why it is dead, much to our great loss--is because of the myth of the teenage ubergeek hacker. We see that myth all the time in the workplace: why hire a thirty-something with 10 years of experience and a college degree when you can hire a "clearly superior" twenty-something whose 10 years of experience started when he dropped out of high school. After all, natural talent, or so we are constantly told, is superior to a computer science degree which somehow actually saps vital energy and IQ points from the muddle-headed college student. (And sure, while a college degree doesn't guarantee that you can code, it does mean that you've been exposed to things like algorithm analysis and and formal (non-tuxido) methods.)
This active disdane for education and a belief that the uneducated geek is the superior geek--an active disdane that is even promulgated by Hollywood, for heaven's sake!--means that problems that have been solved half a century ago continue to baffle corporate software developers.
Regardless, yes, the memory has been tested; no, it did not test bad.
Nonetheless, if you have third-party RAM in the box, pull it from your Mac and see if it becomes more stable. I had some third-party RAM in my box (exact same setup as yours) and I had the same problems--even though the memory tester software claimed the sticks were fine.
It just takes one read/write failure every few seconds (something which even the best memory tester won't catch) to cause problems on the box.
Sadly the Mac G5s (especially the Duos) are extremely sensitive to RAM chips being slightly out of tolerance.
Granted it may be something else going on here--there are some third party applications which allow you to tweak the UI or tweak application (such as Unsanity's Application Enhancer tool) which can cause instability that I simply will not touch with a ten foot pole. Further, if you're running applications in the Mac classic emulator layer (OS v9.2), stability isn't exactly the emulator's strong point--I'd upgrade those applications as soon as possible to OS X versions. And my brother, who has a similar setup, had problems with some hardware card drivers (he's a musician and had some third-party cards plugged into his box) that was also causing some stability issues that were resolved by getting the latest drivers.
But the experience you're having with v10.3 is not the experience I had with the exact same hardware setup--I had no problems, only the occassional program crash (and many of those were my fault: was hacking the box), and the upgrade to v10.4 made things even better.
Hell; it's the box I'm using at home right now to do Java development with Eclipse--no problems whatsoever, though I'll admit I'm lusting after the latest Intel stuff, if only so I can run Linux in Parallels to do cross-platform testing.
I have the same box at home running OSX 10.4, and it runs just fine. 10.3 ran fine on the box as well.
Do you have any third-party RAM sticks in that box? I bought a third party RAM stick and stuck it in my box--stability of the box went to shit. Application crashes, a kernel crash or two, the occassional mystifying hang on startup--all of it caused by a RAM stick that wasn't quite in tolerance for the box. Pulled the stick--no problems.
(Of course I went and bought the cheapest RAM I could find. Teaches me a lesson...)
In a large corporate environment such as Apple or where I work, you cannot officially claim that your product works on a consumer install of a particular operating system until someone from QA goes to the store, picks up the consumer install disk (or you get the consumer install disk in the mail--the pre-release "Release Candidate" install doesn't count) and actually tests the entire product on the final release operating system--even if you have been using Vista internally for development for more than a couple of years.
There have been several times when the final release of the operating system in the consumer channel was "slip streamed" to fix last minute bugs--and while the potential of one of those last minute fixes affecting your code is low, it's not unprecedented.
So for Apple to claim that they do not officially support Vista right now just goes more to conservative QA testing than it does to sloppy programming, not having access to pre-release builds of Vista or not caring about the product.
(After all, what is the iPhone, but an iPod with phone hardware? And how quickly would it take Apple to remove the phone and put in a hard disk? Five minutes? Ten?)
With respect to "crippled C++ support" and a bad development environment--SymbianOS 9 and Carbide.c++ are relatively new. For a commercial software developer SymbianOS 9's support for exceptions is worthless if you still need to target earlier versions of SymbianOS, and converting a build process from Metrowerks Codewarrior or Visual C++ is a royal pain in the ass--which is why Symbian still sells Metrowerks Codewarrior, last I checked (about two months ago).
So while these are good trends, in a way it's too little, too late: until SymbianOS 9 captures enough of the market that we no longer have to deal with earlier versions of Symbian, we can't use exceptions. And converting our build process to Carbide, while it may make life easier, is one of those apparent high-cost zero-reward projects to management which is highly unlikely to be given a high priority by management.
But for new development--you're right. And if you're doing new development, it's far easier to get rolling on Microsoft Windows CE--whose market penetration is gaining on Symbian.
As someone who recently moved to a project which is targeting WinCE (PocketPC and SmartPhone) and Symbian (UIQ and S60), and which is considering targeting various Linux phones, I have to largely agree with the analysis in the original article about Symbian. What the author doesn't point out, however, is that there are similarly egregious design decisions in WinCE and Linux cell phones which make them also somewhat problematic platforms.
For WinCE: Extremely heavy weight applications. If you decide to use.NET for development or you decide to use a framework such as MFC or even ATL, you can easily wind up with a 1 or 2 megabyte application footprint. For a small mobile device, this may not matter in five years--but right now, that's bloody huge. Dot NET seems to be the favored environment right now, but that requires shipping the.NET engine which takes a fairly large footprint.
Windows API doesn't map well to SmartPhone use. Generally most applications are, from a WinCE perspective, "full screen" applications. The WinCE layer appears to have full support for creating framed dialogs and windows--yet on a device that is 220x180 pixels in size, do you really need or want a 32-pixel title bar?
Where this makes things really awkward is when dealing with switching applications using the 'back key' or when relaunching the currently running instance of your application. See, while the user sees just his little LCD display, what is going on under the hood is a multitude of windows layered in Z-order with the current display being the topmost window. While this doesn't generally matter, it is possible (and is a common bug, fixed by using something like.NET or MFC if you're willing to ship a fat binary) to create a circumstance where the current focus belongs to a different window than the frontmost one--leaving the user with the impression that the phone has locked up. It hasn't; you just can't see the window where your keystrokes are going.
WinCE Smartphone "smart keys" menu ill-designed. Like all other pieces of Windows, the smart keys bar at the bottom of the screen live in its own, separate window. It's not handled like the Apple menu bar at the top of the screen on System 7: a drawing region that is not a window, which obeys its own rules. Instead, the smart keys bar is its own window, with its own z-ordering, created by a new shell call which, if not managed correctly, breaks the illusion of simply being a label associated with the buttons.
Inconsistency in UI decisions between PocketPC and SmartPhone. One of my personal gripes: the UI on SmartPhone for most applications include a "cancel" button as one of the choices for dismissing dialogs--but on PocketPC, generally you only have an "OK", implied when you close the dialog by clicking in the upper-right 'close' box. It's a minor thing, but if you're writing code that targets both platforms,
The rational for a company not getting into other energy sources has as much to do with its desire to focus on its core expertise (in ExxonMobile's case, oil and energy derived from oil) as it does to do with its "evil coefficient." Any company's diversification strategy has as much to do with the company's ability to hire people and build groups within that company which has the necessary expertise and its ability to buy out other companies that provide alternate energy.
In the United States electricity (generated from coal, gas, nuclear, hydroelectric, and 2% from oil) is generally generated and transported by either municipal owned utlities (where I live, Glendale Department of Water and Power), or by companies such as Edison International, which specializes in electricity. Most of the alternate energy sources you listed above (solar and wind) generate electricity--so for ExxonMobile to get into electricity generation would be, from a corporate perspective, the same as if Edison International got into the oil drilling business.
Essentially alternate energy sources will result in either generating electricity from alternate sources (wind, solar), generating "bio-fuels"--compounds derived from plant sources which substitute for diesel or gasoline, or more exotic transportation methodologies such as hydrogen. (I call hydrogen an "exotic transportation methodology" because unlike electricity and bio-generated diesel, hydrogen will require the complete replacement of the current automobile fleet.) Electricity generators in the United States are already investing big time into alternate electric sources--after all, there is a coming shortage in generation capacity, and so the opportunity to use alternate (politically more friendly) generation techniques is easy for companies like Edison. Gas and oil companies eventually may have a future in bio-fuels, just as soon as the technology evolves to the point where it makes sense--but right now it doesn't.
So I hate to say this, but for Royal Dutch Shell and BP to get into the alternate fuel business means that either they're deciding to go head to head with electric power generators--diversifying themselves so if oil runs out they're not left high and dry--or it's more of a public relations stunt than it is a decent business decision.
Why aren't the US companies following the lead of the Europeans and trying to become world leaders in the new technologies before someone else (such as Shell or BP) beats them to it?
I hate to say this, but the business models used in the United States is far different than it is in Europe. In the United States new technologies generally are developed "bottom-up", with small companies pushing the cutting edge then selling out once the technology is mature enough to the big companies which then mass produce the technology. You see that in the computer industry: when was the last time Microsoft actually invented something that wasn't a small company M&A? And you see that in energy production: just as soon as a small biotech company invents an algae soup that converts waste food into 92 octane gasoline for a wholesale cost of about a buck a gallon, ExxonMobile or Chevron will step up to the plate, buy them out, and start spreading algae soup processing plants across the country.
But big companies in the United States are completely ill-equipped to be at the cutting edge of technology. (Again, as an example, I give you Microsoft as an example.)
In telling us to listen to the scientists you ask us to read the IPCC's 2001 summary report. But the summary report was written by politicians and bureaucrats, not by the scientists you are telling us to listen to.
Most of the summaries prepared from the scientific data gets translated into policy recommendations and political action by bureaucrats and politicians. And that's what the summary report is: a list of political recommendations and the rational for them. It's not a science paper.
Frankly on the one hand that's the way it should be: scientists and science is not answerable to the people--all they can do is point out that there is a problem that needs to be solved and the potential consequences if it isn't solved. (Though it is always worth being suspictious if the science and the potential consequences are being impartially presented.) On the other hand, one should always worry about politicians and bureaucrats--especially those who wish to expand their sphere of influence and power (which is most of 'em).
Which is why on the other hand we should always worry when politicians and bureaucrats get into the mix and especially when they attempt to use the shield of science to force one set of policy recommendations down our throats--otherwise, next you'll have bureaucrats taking away your home for their own gain and telling you "but our hands are tied: the scientists told us to."
Just earlier today I heard that Global Warming may cause greater terrorism. Now Global Warming caused the death of the dinosaurs? What next? Global Warming causes acne in young women and may trigger that loud rock 'n' roll that all those children nowadays are listening to?
I'm sorry but I think we're starting to reach a tipping point--and I'm not talking about the CO2 tipping point, either. I'm talking about the 'tipping point' where we've cryed wolf so many times in so many ways that the general public goes "oh, yeah, I guess we're screwed" as they go off and buy even bigger SUVs.
If the original author is not then the court must determine their intent from the agreement you have.
You have completely missed my point.
When two people (B & C in my previous example) goes to court to settle a dispute in a contract agreement between them, the court will only decide the specific agreement between B & C. If B comes into court with an agreement with A, the court may glance at the agreement B has with A--but if B's interpretation of the agreement matches a reasonable reading of the agreement, then B's interpretation will be taken as true--because the court is not there to settle all hypothetical disputes, but only to settle the dispute between B and C.
What this means--which is my point here, so please pay attention--is that if the author is not in court, that is because the author is not party to the dispute--and the court will assume there is no dispute between the non-present author and any party he has an agreement with. It doesn't matter the nature of the contract; it could be the GPL or the BSD license or a license drawn up on a napkin. What matters is that if the author is not there, the court is not about to go and rule in favor of the author or make modifications to the contract.
This is elementary Tort 101. If B and C are in court because B licensed C a commercial license for software B got from A via the BSD license, the court won't rule on the interpretation of the BSD license between A and B because the court is not charged to rule on an agreement with someone who is not in court.
Now if the original author A wishes to sue B in court over the BSD, it becomes a completely different matter. But A has to be in court for the court to rule on any agreements A may have made. And while I'm not saying A wouldn't prevail under this kooky theory that the clause requring copyright to be placed in the source means the source must be released to the public, I think A would have a very hard time convincing a court that was his intent--at least in a court governed by common law rules, where the court is free to determine what would be a reasonable interpretation of intent.
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Don't they call things that absorb CO2 from the air Trees...?
And couldn't we sequester CO2 from the atmosphere by converting trees into an inert substance--such as paper--then burying it into landfills?
I mean--couldn't we get a 'win/win' here by simply outlawing the recycling of paper?
Legislation is great when you agree with it--it is a reasonable reaction to a growing public concern that needs to be addressed in a thoughtful way.
On the other hand, Legislation sucks when you disagree with it--it is an overreaching abuse of the power of the government to impose the will of a neanderthal few upon otherwise freedom loving people.
Don't matter what the legislation is, nor how it is passed or if it is the Federal government telling the States to knock it off, or if it is the States banning together to use their relative size to impose their standards upon the nation. Legislation is good when you agree with it, and it sucks when you disagree with it.
Simple as that.
Actually, California has only banned penta-PBDEs and octa-PBDEs, but has not banned deca-PBDEs--and the ban doesn't go into effect until next year. Europe, which started the whole thing, has only banned penta-PBDEs and octa-PBDEs but not deca-PBDEs--California's legislation is modeled after Europe's. And the reason why deca-PBDEs are not banned is because the Swedish study which showed problems with PBDEs only showed problems with penta- and octa- but not with deca-PBDEs.
Washington is banning all PBDEs, including deca-PBDEs, which were not shown by the Swedish investigation as being harmful. As such, the Washington legislation goes beyond California's or Europe's.
Actually, I would expect Vista to replace Windows XP in the same way Windows XP replaced Windows 2000: eventually you won't be able to buy a new computer with anything other than Vista installed, and as the normal replacement cycle of computers runs its course, eventually everyone with a PC will be running Vista.
It was the same pattern with XP: even though XP had been out for years we were still testing (and developing!) using Win2K. It was only when a mandate came down from IT that they would only install XP that people in my group switched to XP--three years after XP had first shipped.
(Hell, I'll even switch to Vista: just as soon as I have a computer for which there are no XP drivers, probably some time in early 2010...)
Further, a variation of 0.3% seems within a margin of error for the ebb and flow of users visiting a block of web sites--even tens of thousands of web sites. For all we know the dip in MacOS X users visiting those web sites came from an "Apple TV" effect: MacOS X users may have been more likely watching their bright shiny new Apple TV boxes rather than surfing the web.
(I'm not saying this is what happened; I'm saying that the statistics used here are hocus-pocus at best.)
One wonders if future generations will be born used to the higher CO2 concentrations and air we think is stuffy or stale would be considered normal then?
The boundaries that keep people from walking in your front door and eating your food from your refrigerator before changing into your clothes and walking out of your home with your laptop computer are also artificial.
Hmmm. Wonder if you think those artifical boundaries are also bullshit.
Sure the Internet is turning things on their heads. That's why legal types are still debating what to do about it. Did you think someone was going to give up a few million dollars in broadcast rights because while you think rights to your property should be protected, their property rights are bullshit?
Apparently the headline comes from the answer to question 12 on the survey. Here is the actual text of the question:
Uh, I think this should have been followed by a question 13: "Did you understand question 12?" (yes) (no).
This was by far the longest and worst worded question in the survey.
The other fascinating thing to note is that on the detailed survey was that 13% of self-described "agnostics and athiests" answered "yes" to the idea that God created the Earth in its present form--a philosophical logical fallacy.
Tells me the numbers in the survey are at best junk.
I have a new 325i, and while I personally love the thing, I just posted elsewhere why I think it's poorly designed.
It's not the hardware that sucks, nor is it the concept--it is simply because no-one thought about creating a consistant user interface 'language' to control the system. There is no consistant way to navigate back one menu level, nor is there a consistant way to navigate to a particular feature. The visual feedback on the screen is completely different depending on which screen you are in--as if the 325i's user interface was cobbeled together by six separate teams working without any unifying user interface guidelines. (For all I know the UI was put together by six separate teams.)
It is this inconsistency which makes the iDrive suck.
Compare and contrast to the iPod, which has a consistant way to navigate through the menus. There are far more menus on the fifth generation iPod, yet it is dirt simple to figure out how to navigate because every screen works like every other screen in the menu system. Imagine how difficult it would be to use the iPod if the menus were laid out like the iDrive: if the play button for music became the select button for movies and the pause (but not play) button for TV shows, how many microseconds would people tolerate the iPod before they went out and bought a Zune?
I have a 325i with an iDrive, and I can tell you exactly what is wrong with the damned thing.
(1) Inconsistent user interface 'language'. In some submenus, selecting a submenu requires rotating the knob; in others, it requires moving the knob like a joystick. (Worse, in some screens, such as on the main navigation screen, you need both motions to select from different menus and submenus. The inconsistency extends to the language of moving back one level: do you press the menu button to pop up one level (as in the 'Info' menu) or do you push the knob forward and select the "up" arrow? Or do you rotate the knob to select the "up" arrow?
Because there is no consistant user interface, it is impossible to simply press the right button to do the task--and that requires you to actually look at the screen, divine from the layout of the screen what action (push menu key, push knob forward, rotate knob) that you need to perform, then take that action--all the time while driving 70 miles an hour down a busy freeway.
(2) Overuse of the knob electromagnetic stopper for tactile feedback causes the knob to be extremely hard to use.
The iDrive knob uses an electromagnet system to both give the knob the feel of discrete "steps" (by triggering an electromagnet briefly as you turn it, to make it feel like there are descrete steps), or to emulate a hard 'stop' when you hit the top or the bottom of a menu list. While this works fairly well for short menus, in some places (notably in the iDrive / iPod interface menus), the 'stop' electromagnet pull is not done when you hit the end of the list, but when you hit the bottom of the screen. So when you rotate the knob to the bottom of the screen, rather than just one brief click and the list scrolls up, the knob does a full stop, then a physical (electromagnetically driven) 'bump', then returns to the same orientation while the screen scrolls up one.
What this means is that if you have a list of 30 or 40 musicians, instead of just turning the knob, you wind up holding the knob as the thing flutters under your hand (hurting your wrist) as the list scrolls up.
I think BMW overused this electromagnet because they had this "wow, we are paying a few bucks for the hardware; let's overuse the feature because it's so cool" thing that many programmers get--and what could have been a subtle effect is instead used to clobber you literally in the wrist until your wrist is sore.
The iDrive user interface actually has more controls than the iPod: a knob rotates back and forth, has four different directions it can be pushed (similar to the four control buttons on the iPod), a select (push the knob down), and a 'menu' button. (I don't count the voice control button, even though it is physically part of the same cluster of buttons, as it does something completely different.) Yet even with one more button, the iDrive is much harder to use than an iPod--because whomever wrote the software didn't think about useability.
It is the dumbest thing in the world to have a $40K car where every last detail is well thought, the driving dynamics are incredible, and the whole thing is so incredibly well built--only to have a user interface that looks like a college student's freshman programming project.
There is part of me that is so annoyed with the user interface that I'm half tempted to move to Germany just so I can fix the stupid thing. Hell, they don't even have to swap out the underlying OS (Windows Automotive), even though it means the car's iDrive (and radio and nav system and...) are effectively dead for the first 30 seconds after starting the car because the OS is still booting. Just clean up the user interface, and it would make a whole world of difference. (And I even know WinCE, on which Windows Automotive is based, so it's not like I couldn't hack the damned thing myself.)
I'd say that Computer Science has been dead for quite a while based upon the quality of the code that I've seen written in the corporate world.
If more programmers had some sort of computer science background, they wouldn't be making the horrific mistakes that are being made on a daily basis. I've encountered people who are writing user interfaces who have absolutely no knowledge of the science of human-computer interfaces (and who don't understand that taking 5 seconds to respond to ON_PAINT is not acceptable), people writing server-side software who think Java's LinkedList and ArrayList objects are the same thing and who use them interchangeably without understanding the performance ramifications, and people who whack together multi-threaded applications by trial and error who think "formal method" is the instructions on how to put on a tuxido.
It shocks me the number of simple and stupid mistakes that are made in the workplace that were solved in the computer science literature literally decades before the guy was born.
I think the reason why people have such disdane for Computer Science--and why it is dead, much to our great loss--is because of the myth of the teenage ubergeek hacker. We see that myth all the time in the workplace: why hire a thirty-something with 10 years of experience and a college degree when you can hire a "clearly superior" twenty-something whose 10 years of experience started when he dropped out of high school. After all, natural talent, or so we are constantly told, is superior to a computer science degree which somehow actually saps vital energy and IQ points from the muddle-headed college student. (And sure, while a college degree doesn't guarantee that you can code, it does mean that you've been exposed to things like algorithm analysis and and formal (non-tuxido) methods.)
This active disdane for education and a belief that the uneducated geek is the superior geek--an active disdane that is even promulgated by Hollywood, for heaven's sake!--means that problems that have been solved half a century ago continue to baffle corporate software developers.
It just takes one read/write failure every few seconds (something which even the best memory tester won't catch) to cause problems on the box.
Sadly the Mac G5s (especially the Duos) are extremely sensitive to RAM chips being slightly out of tolerance.
Granted it may be something else going on here--there are some third party applications which allow you to tweak the UI or tweak application (such as Unsanity's Application Enhancer tool) which can cause instability that I simply will not touch with a ten foot pole. Further, if you're running applications in the Mac classic emulator layer (OS v9.2), stability isn't exactly the emulator's strong point--I'd upgrade those applications as soon as possible to OS X versions. And my brother, who has a similar setup, had problems with some hardware card drivers (he's a musician and had some third-party cards plugged into his box) that was also causing some stability issues that were resolved by getting the latest drivers.
But the experience you're having with v10.3 is not the experience I had with the exact same hardware setup--I had no problems, only the occassional program crash (and many of those were my fault: was hacking the box), and the upgrade to v10.4 made things even better.
Hell; it's the box I'm using at home right now to do Java development with Eclipse--no problems whatsoever, though I'll admit I'm lusting after the latest Intel stuff, if only so I can run Linux in Parallels to do cross-platform testing.
I concur.
I have the same box at home running OSX 10.4, and it runs just fine. 10.3 ran fine on the box as well.
Do you have any third-party RAM sticks in that box? I bought a third party RAM stick and stuck it in my box--stability of the box went to shit. Application crashes, a kernel crash or two, the occassional mystifying hang on startup--all of it caused by a RAM stick that wasn't quite in tolerance for the box. Pulled the stick--no problems.
(Of course I went and bought the cheapest RAM I could find. Teaches me a lesson...)
Uh, isn't this from the same country which ruled Apple's DRM scheme as illegal? What happened to "information wants to be free?"
Or is this just Norway sticking its middle finger up at a United States company, only to then stick it up again to the rest of the world?
In a large corporate environment such as Apple or where I work, you cannot officially claim that your product works on a consumer install of a particular operating system until someone from QA goes to the store, picks up the consumer install disk (or you get the consumer install disk in the mail--the pre-release "Release Candidate" install doesn't count) and actually tests the entire product on the final release operating system--even if you have been using Vista internally for development for more than a couple of years.
There have been several times when the final release of the operating system in the consumer channel was "slip streamed" to fix last minute bugs--and while the potential of one of those last minute fixes affecting your code is low, it's not unprecedented.
So for Apple to claim that they do not officially support Vista right now just goes more to conservative QA testing than it does to sloppy programming, not having access to pre-release builds of Vista or not caring about the product.
(After all, what is the iPhone, but an iPod with phone hardware? And how quickly would it take Apple to remove the phone and put in a hard disk? Five minutes? Ten?)
With respect to "crippled C++ support" and a bad development environment--SymbianOS 9 and Carbide.c++ are relatively new. For a commercial software developer SymbianOS 9's support for exceptions is worthless if you still need to target earlier versions of SymbianOS, and converting a build process from Metrowerks Codewarrior or Visual C++ is a royal pain in the ass--which is why Symbian still sells Metrowerks Codewarrior, last I checked (about two months ago).
.NET for development or you decide to use a framework such as MFC or even ATL, you can easily wind up with a 1 or 2 megabyte application footprint. For a small mobile device, this may not matter in five years--but right now, that's bloody huge. Dot NET seems to be the favored environment right now, but that requires shipping the .NET engine which takes a fairly large footprint.
.NET or MFC if you're willing to ship a fat binary) to create a circumstance where the current focus belongs to a different window than the frontmost one--leaving the user with the impression that the phone has locked up. It hasn't; you just can't see the window where your keystrokes are going.
So while these are good trends, in a way it's too little, too late: until SymbianOS 9 captures enough of the market that we no longer have to deal with earlier versions of Symbian, we can't use exceptions. And converting our build process to Carbide, while it may make life easier, is one of those apparent high-cost zero-reward projects to management which is highly unlikely to be given a high priority by management.
But for new development--you're right. And if you're doing new development, it's far easier to get rolling on Microsoft Windows CE--whose market penetration is gaining on Symbian.
As someone who recently moved to a project which is targeting WinCE (PocketPC and SmartPhone) and Symbian (UIQ and S60), and which is considering targeting various Linux phones, I have to largely agree with the analysis in the original article about Symbian. What the author doesn't point out, however, is that there are similarly egregious design decisions in WinCE and Linux cell phones which make them also somewhat problematic platforms.
For WinCE:
Extremely heavy weight applications. If you decide to use
Windows API doesn't map well to SmartPhone use. Generally most applications are, from a WinCE perspective, "full screen" applications. The WinCE layer appears to have full support for creating framed dialogs and windows--yet on a device that is 220x180 pixels in size, do you really need or want a 32-pixel title bar?
Where this makes things really awkward is when dealing with switching applications using the 'back key' or when relaunching the currently running instance of your application. See, while the user sees just his little LCD display, what is going on under the hood is a multitude of windows layered in Z-order with the current display being the topmost window. While this doesn't generally matter, it is possible (and is a common bug, fixed by using something like
WinCE Smartphone "smart keys" menu ill-designed. Like all other pieces of Windows, the smart keys bar at the bottom of the screen live in its own, separate window. It's not handled like the Apple menu bar at the top of the screen on System 7: a drawing region that is not a window, which obeys its own rules. Instead, the smart keys bar is its own window, with its own z-ordering, created by a new shell call which, if not managed correctly, breaks the illusion of simply being a label associated with the buttons.
Inconsistency in UI decisions between PocketPC and SmartPhone. One of my personal gripes: the UI on SmartPhone for most applications include a "cancel" button as one of the choices for dismissing dialogs--but on PocketPC, generally you only have an "OK", implied when you close the dialog by clicking in the upper-right 'close' box. It's a minor thing, but if you're writing code that targets both platforms,
In the United States electricity (generated from coal, gas, nuclear, hydroelectric, and 2% from oil) is generally generated and transported by either municipal owned utlities (where I live, Glendale Department of Water and Power), or by companies such as Edison International, which specializes in electricity. Most of the alternate energy sources you listed above (solar and wind) generate electricity--so for ExxonMobile to get into electricity generation would be, from a corporate perspective, the same as if Edison International got into the oil drilling business.
Essentially alternate energy sources will result in either generating electricity from alternate sources (wind, solar), generating "bio-fuels"--compounds derived from plant sources which substitute for diesel or gasoline, or more exotic transportation methodologies such as hydrogen. (I call hydrogen an "exotic transportation methodology" because unlike electricity and bio-generated diesel, hydrogen will require the complete replacement of the current automobile fleet.) Electricity generators in the United States are already investing big time into alternate electric sources--after all, there is a coming shortage in generation capacity, and so the opportunity to use alternate (politically more friendly) generation techniques is easy for companies like Edison. Gas and oil companies eventually may have a future in bio-fuels, just as soon as the technology evolves to the point where it makes sense--but right now it doesn't.
So I hate to say this, but for Royal Dutch Shell and BP to get into the alternate fuel business means that either they're deciding to go head to head with electric power generators--diversifying themselves so if oil runs out they're not left high and dry--or it's more of a public relations stunt than it is a decent business decision. I hate to say this, but the business models used in the United States is far different than it is in Europe. In the United States new technologies generally are developed "bottom-up", with small companies pushing the cutting edge then selling out once the technology is mature enough to the big companies which then mass produce the technology. You see that in the computer industry: when was the last time Microsoft actually invented something that wasn't a small company M&A? And you see that in energy production: just as soon as a small biotech company invents an algae soup that converts waste food into 92 octane gasoline for a wholesale cost of about a buck a gallon, ExxonMobile or Chevron will step up to the plate, buy them out, and start spreading algae soup processing plants across the country.
But big companies in the United States are completely ill-equipped to be at the cutting edge of technology. (Again, as an example, I give you Microsoft as an example.)
In telling us to listen to the scientists you ask us to read the IPCC's 2001 summary report. But the summary report was written by politicians and bureaucrats, not by the scientists you are telling us to listen to.
Most of the summaries prepared from the scientific data gets translated into policy recommendations and political action by bureaucrats and politicians. And that's what the summary report is: a list of political recommendations and the rational for them. It's not a science paper.
Frankly on the one hand that's the way it should be: scientists and science is not answerable to the people--all they can do is point out that there is a problem that needs to be solved and the potential consequences if it isn't solved. (Though it is always worth being suspictious if the science and the potential consequences are being impartially presented.) On the other hand, one should always worry about politicians and bureaucrats--especially those who wish to expand their sphere of influence and power (which is most of 'em).
Which is why on the other hand we should always worry when politicians and bureaucrats get into the mix and especially when they attempt to use the shield of science to force one set of policy recommendations down our throats--otherwise, next you'll have bureaucrats taking away your home for their own gain and telling you "but our hands are tied: the scientists told us to."
Just earlier today I heard that Global Warming may cause greater terrorism. Now Global Warming caused the death of the dinosaurs? What next? Global Warming causes acne in young women and may trigger that loud rock 'n' roll that all those children nowadays are listening to?
I'm sorry but I think we're starting to reach a tipping point--and I'm not talking about the CO2 tipping point, either. I'm talking about the 'tipping point' where we've cryed wolf so many times in so many ways that the general public goes "oh, yeah, I guess we're screwed" as they go off and buy even bigger SUVs.
It doesn't matter what Jobs did or how he did it--or what he knew and when he knew it--the press just won't give Jobs a break!
When two people (B & C in my previous example) goes to court to settle a dispute in a contract agreement between them, the court will only decide the specific agreement between B & C. If B comes into court with an agreement with A, the court may glance at the agreement B has with A--but if B's interpretation of the agreement matches a reasonable reading of the agreement, then B's interpretation will be taken as true--because the court is not there to settle all hypothetical disputes, but only to settle the dispute between B and C.
What this means--which is my point here, so please pay attention--is that if the author is not in court, that is because the author is not party to the dispute--and the court will assume there is no dispute between the non-present author and any party he has an agreement with. It doesn't matter the nature of the contract; it could be the GPL or the BSD license or a license drawn up on a napkin. What matters is that if the author is not there, the court is not about to go and rule in favor of the author or make modifications to the contract.
This is elementary Tort 101. If B and C are in court because B licensed C a commercial license for software B got from A via the BSD license, the court won't rule on the interpretation of the BSD license between A and B because the court is not charged to rule on an agreement with someone who is not in court.
Now if the original author A wishes to sue B in court over the BSD, it becomes a completely different matter. But A has to be in court for the court to rule on any agreements A may have made. And while I'm not saying A wouldn't prevail under this kooky theory that the clause requring copyright to be placed in the source means the source must be released to the public, I think A would have a very hard time convincing a court that was his intent--at least in a court governed by common law rules, where the court is free to determine what would be a reasonable interpretation of intent.