You're comparing a mobile platform OS/market to a desktop/laptop OS/market. Apple uses a controlled approach to their mobile OS, but an open approach to their desktop OS, much more open then Microsoft's.
They do now. But that can change. Do you think for a moment that if the 'closed system' route makes billions of dollars for Apple, that they won't consider migrating iOs into the desktop space? Why wouldn't they, if it sells? After all, who really needs OSX except developers running XCode? So maybe they'll split the new Mac into a 'consumer' iOs model and a much more expensive 'pro' model. And then maybe the pro model gets more and more expensive, and then maybe you need a developer contract to get one...
Fight for freedom. Defend it. Don't sit idly by and expect Apple to understand what's important. They might not agree. Make them realise it.
If you don't like the iPad/iPhone contracts, then don't use the products. These are luxury items, they're not comparable to a platform that governments and businesses depend on.
That's a very short-sighted position. As long as Apple remains a luxury, yes, they're less of a threat to freedom than if they become a de-facto standard. But the IT industry teaches one hard lesson: things can change, and rapidly. Today's underdog can become tomorrow's tyrant. If Apple aren't called on their fascist tendencies now, while we still can, don't count on them staying a safe second-runner forever.
If you dislike Apple's restraints, all you have to do is switch platforms.
And you can keep using all your existing data and third-party apps, of course? Your data isn't held hostage in any way?
Oh wait, no, you can't.
Do you remember the 1980s? How bad vendor incompatibility and lock-in was then? The Web and open standards, even SMTP email, didn't just happen - there was a serious push to make it happen, and many, many old-school software and 'information utility' companies like Compuserve fought that tooth and nail.
Apple circa 2010 with their App Store is taking us backwards in time to that bad world. We should not be going quietly. Rage against the dying of the light. Stand up for freedom and cross-platform data portability. Fight them on the desktops, fight them on the server, fight them on the GUI. Don't give up the dream of an open world. It's more important than mere ease of use.
(Apple does some things good - in fact until the iPhone, they were pretty open-standards compliant. HTML5 isn't a bad thing either, as long as there's a free video codec. But restricting language VMs is insane, and they need to be opposed on it.)
I'm running Ubuntu on my Acer netbook which I bought last year. True funny story: I specifically tried to buy a Linux model but nobody at the retail level would sell one to me - apparently they only came with XP. So my Linux gets counted as an install of XP.
Mistrusted with good reason indeed. Such as, say, specifically the **entire run up to war in Iraq**.
Yes, exactly. 2002-2003 was basically when I switched to Google News and specialist news aggregators, like www.antiwar.com, and found that they were doing a much better job of collating all the published stories which did surface in legitimate 'old' media, but didn't make it up to the front page of the big official newsmakers - NYT, The Times, Washington Post, etc. It was painfully obvious how the Big News editorial departments were blocking and filtering all stories which didn't fit the official government-media spin. They couldn't kill all the stories but they could bury them. But Google News, RSS, and a little ferreting could easily dig them out.
So I switched off TV news at that point as less than useless, and resolved to do my news searching myself. Because I as a random uninformed citizen could do a better job, apparently, than the top news editor of the New York Times.
One thing I find bizarre, now, after several years of Wikipedia - is how news reports hardly ever give citations. They'll just report a story, but give you no links to follow to go check out the facts yourself. Wikipedia on the other hand, on every page will have a whole set of offsite links, and Google is nothing but a collection of links to various primary and secondary sources.
Why don't I trust 'traditional' media? This. Because they have a culture of not even bothering to give the semblance of citing sources. Just a byline and I'm supposed to take that as gospel.
That's fine if it really is an original story and there aren't any other quotable sources. But for most AP wire copy, it's just a very poor standard of journalism, and it assumes a level of ignorance and lack of online awareness in their readership which is simply not true any more. When a free volunteer open-access project can cite every paragraph, that's just not good enough.
Agreed, but it will have to use the modern misgivings about the future. Logans run about a future where resources were limited and therefore lives had to be limited. We do not believe that anymore.
You've not been following Peak Oil, then? Or Peak Everything? The Long Emergency? The 80s and 90s were an anomaly - I think we're now heading back quickly to the 1970s sensibility of energy and resource crises.
What has changed is the end of the 'youth revolution' with the aging of the Boomer generation. Logan's Run was a response to three things: the 'never trust anyone over 30' hedonistic youth culture of the 60s, Vietnam (and particularly an active draft and national-service mentality), and the dawn of environmentalism and the Limits to Growth / Population Bomb scare.
The go-go 80s and 90s nonetheless, the population bomb and resource squeeze is still with us - it just got swept under the carpet. But the 60s rockers and radicals are now retirees, so the mass appeal of dying young has faded a bit.
on the Space Shuttle, every single screw is a unique size so that every screw only fits exactly where it's supposed to go
So there are thousands of unique, specialised, irreplacable tools without any one of which, no mission-critical life support systemscan be serviced? That seems like a bit of a design problem.
I can see lots of different screw sizes happening by accident, because the different subsystem integrators didn't talk to each other - but as a feature?
As an investor, if I am not seeing a plan for a positive return on capitol, then I won't invest.
The US Capitol is a bit of a dodgy investment these days - senators just won't stay bought. I would recommend diversifying into state capitols or even the judiciary.
Ahhh, the apologists always seem to lay in hiding, waiting, waiting, ready to spring their tired "it's not theft, it's copyright infringement" retort. Why is there always some shill who has to "correct" the record, as if it matters? Is copyright infringement somehow not as bad as theft?
You're asking a technical site why being correct matters?
'Theft' implies a misleading physical analogy which leads to all manner of mistaken beliefs which simply do not apply and make clear thinking and discussion at the legal and political level difficult.
Only deduction provides a valid inference. But humans default to using abduction and learn induction and deduction only slowly through formal training.
The thing is, deduction is only valid if you already know the rule to 100% certainty.
But in real life, we never actually get to know the rules - so we can never actually deduce anything. We always have to invent the rules ourselves after the fact, and never quite know if they're correct.
For example, we might call Newton's First Law a 'law', but it's not something programmed into our minds from which we deduce facts: it's an assumption we've reverse-engineered from long observation. It might actually only be an approximation or special case of a deeper law, even harder to induce.
So given that we can't actually apply logically correct deduction, isn't abduction not only cheaper but a better approximation of reality?
I see this kind of thing all the time with my students. They misread something, and if I comment on it, no matter how nicely, the shut down because they don't like to be wrong because they think it makes them seem stupid.
That seems a perfectly understandable reaction to me, given that modern education seems to be very much not about learning at all, but a mostly zero-sum competition for the social power and status conferred by 'getting a good grade in your class' - and later, 'getting published in the right journals' . High school students have spent over ten years of their life being judged by teachers and their peers and evaluated on their conformity to external norms. It's a factory-military processing model intended to turn out bulk standardised product regardless of the input. They're somehow expected to come out of that as self-motivated creative adults who view failure as an opportunity?
And even in the tertiary academic environment, if you expose your lack of knowledge to your peers, you put your social standing - maybe your whole future life's academic reputation - at huge risk. Why in that world should anyone admit their mistakes? Or even want to learn? The point is to survive long enough to repay your student debts and start earning money, not to expand your horizons - that's for navel-gazing hippies with too much time and not enough focus.
Otoh, I seriously I hope I'm wrong in that evaluation of modern education.
Would you declare war on murderers and have heli's shooting people that may have guns w/ out provocation? Of course not, that would be retarded nd only make the problem worse!.
But - but it's what Batman would do! Tim Burton's Batman at least.
Frost: "Are you really saying that Batman can do something retarded?" Wayne: "I'm saying that when Batman does something, it's not retarded!"
This is fine, until someone else puts a permanent base there. Then they will have the high ground; literally. The gravity well on the moon is so much less than earth, that kinetic weapons will work so much better from it. Hence, it is a strategic imperitive that someone will utilise the moon for a weapons platform at some stage.
Not entirely sure that that's right - Rocketpunk Manifesto goes into some detail on possible space warfare tactics and I think came to the conclusion that the 'high ground' in orbital space is probably actually LEO. But I admit to being very hazy on these things.
Beyond that... there are minerals an energy resources out there.
There's minerals, yes. But unless you can eat aluminium, magnesium, titanium or nickel-iron - or have a really big zero-g rocket to build (in which case what is it going into space to get?) - how much is their absolute worth on the scale of human life-support? A really big rock or lots of electrical cable is still not much compared with some soybeans, water and oxygen. Unless you're building a space society for robots, in which case see our current space exploration plan.
What is the purpose of mining the solar system? Is it to attempt to sustain exponential population growth and resource usage for Earth citizens? Then I can see a few problems with that. One, even the solar system's resources are finite and an exponential growth curve will max them out in a few hundred years. No problem you say, we have a galaxy? Nope, two, speed of light limitations mean we're going to hit the solar system's limit long before we can hope to get even to Alpha Centauri, and getting there will mean learning to live inside very small cans with very small finite resource limits. Heck, even getting to Mars will mean that. So even empowering exponential growth will eventually mean learning to live with zero-growth. Why not short-circuit that learning curve and start to learn to rock zero-growth right now, while the cost of failing is much cheaper?
Three: are you really sure you want to mine space? What happens when you run out? What about aesthetic considerations? How much of the Moon are you willing to convert to space widgets? 50% seems too high, nobody wants to live under a romantic skeletal Death Star II . 10%? 1%?
Whatever fraction you pick, eventually some mining company is going to complain it's an arbitrary political limit and start pressing for more. Then what?
tl;dr: Stuff runs out, getting space stuff is hard, getting it back is harder, so we really are at a steep wall and it's probably smarter to stop running rather than hope we can learn to fly before we hit.
I've argued quite a bit, if nations of Earth were to stop wasting their resources on crap they are now, we could have a significant space presence, with a strong step towards deep space exploration.
But what exactly is in deep space for us to explore which robots can't?
There are no Vulcans or Klingons. There's vacuum and vacuum and vacuum and vacuum and vacuum and vacuum and tiny specks of rock and...?
That's true, I guess. Pinyin is a wonderful thing. But you need to at least make sure that you don't make assumptions about firstname/surname order, and allow for a separate 'preferred English name' which is different from the Pinyin Chinese first name, since many Chinese people that I know have one of those.
But assuming the worst and trying to design a system that'll allow people's names to be Chinese characters when you don't do business in China, have presence in China, or ever ever plan to? That's ridiculous.
Or sell in New Zealand, or Australia, or anywhere else in the Pacific, or deal with immigrants, or be used by anyone who has a Chinese name?
Software is NOT designed to be perfect and cover every case.
Then it's designed to fail, and probably also has security holes, and should not be deployed. At the very least it will be a block to compatibility, at worst it will become a botnet.
Software in the Internet age NEEDS to be 100% correct because it has a potential lifetime of infinity years and 6 billion and counting potential users. If you're building a system 'to throw away' as the XP people suggest, you're also building one to be rooted unless you DO throw it away before the. And if you ever put it or any references to it on the Web, you're going to leave permanent identifiers to your system scattered all over the planet even after you throw it away - so if you're designing it to be thrown away, you're designing to leave a trail of broken data and angry users in your wake.
Moon to the earth? It's called a GRAVITY WELL. Give things a kick, they come down on their own; all you need is enough casing to survive reentry.
I think the phrase you're looking for is not 'gravity well' but 'aerobraking'. If I understand Newton correctly, it costs exactly as much delta-v to go 'down' a well as to go 'up'. But if you happen to have a planet with atmosphere at the bottom of the well, you can cheat away some of the downwell cost by doing a highly elliptical transfer and then using friction from that nice thick atmosphere to get really hot and use that to get slow enough to fall below suborbital speed - otherwise you'd spin around, loop back out on your ellipse and just sit there going ping, pong, ping, pong across the solar system like a tetherball.
Mac OS is like Doctor Who - it got rebooted at 10, but then there's the Eccleston era, the Tenant/Piper era, the... Matt Smith is Snow Leopard, I guess is what I'm saying.
Slashdot Mirror
You're comparing a mobile platform OS/market to a desktop/laptop OS/market. Apple uses a controlled approach to their mobile OS, but an open approach to their desktop OS, much more open then Microsoft's.
They do now. But that can change. Do you think for a moment that if the 'closed system' route makes billions of dollars for Apple, that they won't consider migrating iOs into the desktop space? Why wouldn't they, if it sells? After all, who really needs OSX except developers running XCode? So maybe they'll split the new Mac into a 'consumer' iOs model and a much more expensive 'pro' model. And then maybe the pro model gets more and more expensive, and then maybe you need a developer contract to get one...
Fight for freedom. Defend it. Don't sit idly by and expect Apple to understand what's important. They might not agree. Make them realise it.
If you don't like the iPad/iPhone contracts, then don't use the products. These are luxury items, they're not comparable to a platform that governments and businesses depend on.
That's a very short-sighted position. As long as Apple remains a luxury, yes, they're less of a threat to freedom than if they become a de-facto standard. But the IT industry teaches one hard lesson: things can change, and rapidly. Today's underdog can become tomorrow's tyrant. If Apple aren't called on their fascist tendencies now, while we still can, don't count on them staying a safe second-runner forever.
If you dislike Apple's restraints, all you have to do is switch platforms.
And you can keep using all your existing data and third-party apps, of course? Your data isn't held hostage in any way?
Oh wait, no, you can't.
Do you remember the 1980s? How bad vendor incompatibility and lock-in was then? The Web and open standards, even SMTP email, didn't just happen - there was a serious push to make it happen, and many, many old-school software and 'information utility' companies like Compuserve fought that tooth and nail.
Apple circa 2010 with their App Store is taking us backwards in time to that bad world. We should not be going quietly. Rage against the dying of the light. Stand up for freedom and cross-platform data portability. Fight them on the desktops, fight them on the server, fight them on the GUI. Don't give up the dream of an open world. It's more important than mere ease of use.
(Apple does some things good - in fact until the iPhone, they were pretty open-standards compliant. HTML5 isn't a bad thing either, as long as there's a free video codec. But restricting language VMs is insane, and they need to be opposed on it.)
I'm running Ubuntu on my Acer netbook which I bought last year. True funny story: I specifically tried to buy a Linux model but nobody at the retail level would sell one to me - apparently they only came with XP. So my Linux gets counted as an install of XP.
Ok it's not that funny actually.
Mistrusted with good reason indeed. Such as, say, specifically the **entire run up to war in Iraq**.
Yes, exactly. 2002-2003 was basically when I switched to Google News and specialist news aggregators, like www.antiwar.com, and found that they were doing a much better job of collating all the published stories which did surface in legitimate 'old' media, but didn't make it up to the front page of the big official newsmakers - NYT, The Times, Washington Post, etc. It was painfully obvious how the Big News editorial departments were blocking and filtering all stories which didn't fit the official government-media spin. They couldn't kill all the stories but they could bury them. But Google News, RSS, and a little ferreting could easily dig them out.
So I switched off TV news at that point as less than useless, and resolved to do my news searching myself. Because I as a random uninformed citizen could do a better job, apparently, than the top news editor of the New York Times.
And that's scary.
One thing I find bizarre, now, after several years of Wikipedia - is how news reports hardly ever give citations. They'll just report a story, but give you no links to follow to go check out the facts yourself. Wikipedia on the other hand, on every page will have a whole set of offsite links, and Google is nothing but a collection of links to various primary and secondary sources.
Why don't I trust 'traditional' media? This. Because they have a culture of not even bothering to give the semblance of citing sources. Just a byline and I'm supposed to take that as gospel.
That's fine if it really is an original story and there aren't any other quotable sources. But for most AP wire copy, it's just a very poor standard of journalism, and it assumes a level of ignorance and lack of online awareness in their readership which is simply not true any more. When a free volunteer open-access project can cite every paragraph, that's just not good enough.
Agreed, but it will have to use the modern misgivings about the future. Logans run about a future where resources were limited and therefore lives had to be limited. We do not believe that anymore.
You've not been following Peak Oil, then? Or Peak Everything? The Long Emergency? The 80s and 90s were an anomaly - I think we're now heading back quickly to the 1970s sensibility of energy and resource crises.
What has changed is the end of the 'youth revolution' with the aging of the Boomer generation. Logan's Run was a response to three things: the 'never trust anyone over 30' hedonistic youth culture of the 60s, Vietnam (and particularly an active draft and national-service mentality), and the dawn of environmentalism and the Limits to Growth / Population Bomb scare.
The go-go 80s and 90s nonetheless, the population bomb and resource squeeze is still with us - it just got swept under the carpet. But the 60s rockers and radicals are now retirees, so the mass appeal of dying young has faded a bit.
on the Space Shuttle, every single screw is a unique size so that every screw only fits exactly where it's supposed to go
So there are thousands of unique, specialised, irreplacable tools without any one of which, no mission-critical life support systemscan be serviced? That seems like a bit of a design problem.
I can see lots of different screw sizes happening by accident, because the different subsystem integrators didn't talk to each other - but as a feature?
As an investor, if I am not seeing a plan for a positive return on capitol, then I won't invest.
The US Capitol is a bit of a dodgy investment these days - senators just won't stay bought. I would recommend diversifying into state capitols or even the judiciary.
Ahhh, the apologists always seem to lay in hiding, waiting, waiting, ready to spring their tired "it's not theft, it's copyright infringement" retort. Why is there always some shill who has to "correct" the record, as if it matters? Is copyright infringement somehow not as bad as theft?
You're asking a technical site why being correct matters?
'Theft' implies a misleading physical analogy which leads to all manner of mistaken beliefs which simply do not apply and make clear thinking and discussion at the legal and political level difficult.
Only deduction provides a valid inference. But humans default to using abduction and learn induction and deduction only slowly through formal training.
The thing is, deduction is only valid if you already know the rule to 100% certainty.
But in real life, we never actually get to know the rules - so we can never actually deduce anything. We always have to invent the rules ourselves after the fact, and never quite know if they're correct.
For example, we might call Newton's First Law a 'law', but it's not something programmed into our minds from which we deduce facts: it's an assumption we've reverse-engineered from long observation. It might actually only be an approximation or special case of a deeper law, even harder to induce.
So given that we can't actually apply logically correct deduction, isn't abduction not only cheaper but a better approximation of reality?
I see this kind of thing all the time with my students. They misread something, and if I comment on it, no matter how nicely, the shut down because they don't like to be wrong because they think it makes them seem stupid.
That seems a perfectly understandable reaction to me, given that modern education seems to be very much not about learning at all, but a mostly zero-sum competition for the social power and status conferred by 'getting a good grade in your class' - and later, 'getting published in the right journals' . High school students have spent over ten years of their life being judged by teachers and their peers and evaluated on their conformity to external norms. It's a factory-military processing model intended to turn out bulk standardised product regardless of the input. They're somehow expected to come out of that as self-motivated creative adults who view failure as an opportunity?
And even in the tertiary academic environment, if you expose your lack of knowledge to your peers, you put your social standing - maybe your whole future life's academic reputation - at huge risk. Why in that world should anyone admit their mistakes? Or even want to learn? The point is to survive long enough to repay your student debts and start earning money, not to expand your horizons - that's for navel-gazing hippies with too much time and not enough focus.
Otoh, I seriously I hope I'm wrong in that evaluation of modern education.
So Twitter is basically the All Thing from Dan Simmons' Hyperion novels?
I hear Vuvuzela is going to be the next Twitter...
There's a bit of irony in reporting vulnerabilities in malware - can I get a CVE for that?
I nominate 'There's a CVE for that!' as the new 'There's an app for that'.
Would you declare war on murderers and have heli's shooting people that may have guns w/ out provocation? Of course not, that would be retarded nd only make the problem worse!.
But - but it's what Batman would do! Tim Burton's Batman at least.
Frost: "Are you really saying that Batman can do something retarded?"
Wayne: "I'm saying that when Batman does something, it's not retarded!"
This is fine, until someone else puts a permanent base there. Then they will have the high ground; literally. The gravity well on the moon is so much less than earth, that kinetic weapons will work so much better from it. Hence, it is a strategic imperitive that someone will utilise the moon for a weapons platform at some stage.
Not entirely sure that that's right - Rocketpunk Manifesto goes into some detail on possible space warfare tactics and I think came to the conclusion that the 'high ground' in orbital space is probably actually LEO. But I admit to being very hazy on these things.
Beyond that... there are minerals an energy resources out there.
There's minerals, yes. But unless you can eat aluminium, magnesium, titanium or nickel-iron - or have a really big zero-g rocket to build (in which case what is it going into space to get?) - how much is their absolute worth on the scale of human life-support? A really big rock or lots of electrical cable is still not much compared with some soybeans, water and oxygen. Unless you're building a space society for robots, in which case see our current space exploration plan.
What is the purpose of mining the solar system? Is it to attempt to sustain exponential population growth and resource usage for Earth citizens? Then I can see a few problems with that. One, even the solar system's resources are finite and an exponential growth curve will max them out in a few hundred years. No problem you say, we have a galaxy? Nope, two, speed of light limitations mean we're going to hit the solar system's limit long before we can hope to get even to Alpha Centauri, and getting there will mean learning to live inside very small cans with very small finite resource limits. Heck, even getting to Mars will mean that. So even empowering exponential growth will eventually mean learning to live with zero-growth. Why not short-circuit that learning curve and start to learn to rock zero-growth right now, while the cost of failing is much cheaper?
Three: are you really sure you want to mine space? What happens when you run out? What about aesthetic considerations? How much of the Moon are you willing to convert to space widgets? 50% seems too high, nobody wants to live under a romantic skeletal Death Star II . 10%? 1%?
Whatever fraction you pick, eventually some mining company is going to complain it's an arbitrary political limit and start pressing for more. Then what?
tl;dr: Stuff runs out, getting space stuff is hard, getting it back is harder, so we really are at a steep wall and it's probably smarter to stop running rather than hope we can learn to fly before we hit.
I've argued quite a bit, if nations of Earth were to stop wasting their resources on crap they are now, we could have a significant space presence, with a strong step towards deep space exploration.
But what exactly is in deep space for us to explore which robots can't?
There are no Vulcans or Klingons. There's vacuum and vacuum and vacuum and vacuum and vacuum and vacuum and tiny specks of rock and...?
That's true, I guess. Pinyin is a wonderful thing. But you need to at least make sure that you don't make assumptions about firstname/surname order, and allow for a separate 'preferred English name' which is different from the Pinyin Chinese first name, since many Chinese people that I know have one of those.
Edit: 'unless you do throw it away before the bad guys find it.'
Which is our current approach to patching, and is failing, hard. mmm, zero-days.
But assuming the worst and trying to design a system that'll allow people's names to be Chinese characters when you don't do business in China, have presence in China, or ever ever plan to? That's ridiculous.
Or sell in New Zealand, or Australia, or anywhere else in the Pacific, or deal with immigrants, or be used by anyone who has a Chinese name?
This is the Internet now. Welcome to it.
Software is NOT designed to be perfect and cover every case.
Then it's designed to fail, and probably also has security holes, and should not be deployed. At the very least it will be a block to compatibility, at worst it will become a botnet.
Software in the Internet age NEEDS to be 100% correct because it has a potential lifetime of infinity years and 6 billion and counting potential users. If you're building a system 'to throw away' as the XP people suggest, you're also building one to be rooted unless you DO throw it away before the. And if you ever put it or any references to it on the Web, you're going to leave permanent identifiers to your system scattered all over the planet even after you throw it away - so if you're designing it to be thrown away, you're designing to leave a trail of broken data and angry users in your wake.
Is that really what you want to do?
Moon to the earth? It's called a GRAVITY WELL. Give things a kick, they come down on their own; all you need is enough casing to survive reentry.
I think the phrase you're looking for is not 'gravity well' but 'aerobraking'. If I understand Newton correctly, it costs exactly as much delta-v to go 'down' a well as to go 'up'. But if you happen to have a planet with atmosphere at the bottom of the well, you can cheat away some of the downwell cost by doing a highly elliptical transfer and then using friction from that nice thick atmosphere to get really hot and use that to get slow enough to fall below suborbital speed - otherwise you'd spin around, loop back out on your ellipse and just sit there going ping, pong, ping, pong across the solar system like a tetherball.
Iif I understand correctly, that is.
Mac OS is like Doctor Who - it got rebooted at 10, but then there's the Eccleston era, the Tenant/Piper era, the... Matt Smith is Snow Leopard, I guess is what I'm saying.