I don't see anything wrong with it, it's nothing more than a modernized tribal system.
Right. In the meantime, a long time ago in fact, the rest of us came out of the caves, rubbed our eyes against the sunlight, and formed this thing we call "modern society." It has lots of cool stuff, like actual doctors and hospitals in place of "the women and the elderly," and plumbing instead of digging wells. People get to choose what they want to eat instead of getting a ladle of slop from "the chow hall," too, and they even get their own remote controls for the TVs in their own homes. Even better, men (and even women, too, believe it or not) get to choose what they want to do for a living instead of toiling in "the community industry." Over the years, most of us have grown so complacent that we call this "a standard of living," and few of us envy the leech-bitten peasants hunched over in rice paddies in the third world -- fools that we are.
Anybody know what this means for Adobe's AIR platform?
Adobe says AIR will continue to be supported, both on the desktop and mobile platforms. AIR apps on smartphones really aren't that bad; it was Flash in mobile browsers that always sucked. The question is whether it's really worth doing cross-platform development in Flash vs. either porting a native app or going with something else (such as Unity).
Don't forget that currently Edge outputs code that's only supported on WebKit browsers (so no Firefox or IE). Some of it might look right, but a lot of it probably won't. If I remember right, I wasn't able to get anything to show up in IE9.
You may not be aware that the Prefect was a British Ford car, and we never really had 'em in the States. (They apparently sold a few, but not many. More in Canada.) Thus, most American HHGTTG fans had to have that joke explained to them. "Oh, it's a type of car? OK." But we've never seen one and we don't intuitively know what type of car it might be. I always assumed it was some kind of big boat, like a Ford Galaxie. (I know now that it's not. Thanks, Internet!)
Or the safe money. Not every investment needs to be a double-or-nothing crap shoot. I'm sure a lot of people who invest in MSFT also invest in AAPL or GOOG, but for different reasons. I'm sure there are even lots of people who use a Mac daily but still have money in MSFT; it's really all between them and their financial advisers, and has little to do with Windows vs. Mac OS X.
MSFT is a poor choice just because other companies have performed better? That's a little rash. There are plenty of other companies that have performed a lot worse, and holding a diversified portfolio is always a good idea. (You may remember a time when AAPL's chart was not so stellar.) Also, as other people have noted, MSFT pays dividends, which may not be "growth" but are definitely returns on the investment. Neither GOOG nor AAPL pays dividends -- in fact, both seem quite adamant about not paying them -- so you better hope those growth rates hold.
That's the intent, but as a practical matter, driver code-signing excludes ancient drivers that were written poorly to begin with. Modern drivers written to modern Microsoft guidance are far less likely to cause problems than older drivers for older hardware that haven't been updated in a decade or more.
Right, and here's where the laptop makers really screwed the pooch, because for years I had been paying a premium for small and light laptops with screens under 14", and now everybody expects all that and a $300 price tag, too.
The reason netbooks got it so badly is because most people are NOT better served by them.
So what's a netbook? Netbooks were sold as a category, but they really weren't any different than what had come before. Atom processor instead of Core processor, check -- so they have lousy performance. Otherwise all the components were exactly the same as a laptop. It was never much of a stretch to just drop the Atom and build a regular laptop with cheap build quality (which is pretty much what you see in Best Buy now).
Most people want a portable device to read, watch videos, browse the web, play games and perhaps write an occasional email or Facebook post. A tablet does all of those better except perhaps writing.
Boy, here I really disagree. I have an Android tablet and I rarely pull it out for anything. Most Web sites are still designed for a pointing device rather than a touch UI. Anything that requires typing, from word processing to Facebook to Slashdot, works better on a device with a keyboard. Tablets work great for Angry Birds, but otherwise I'm just not sure what they're good for.
There are 100 times as many white teenagers plastered to their monitor messing around with their computer as there are black teenagers. Since successful tech entrepreneurs tend to be the kids who spent thousands of hours in front of their computer when they were kids, and the kids spending thousands of hours in front of their computer are almost all white (or asian), then of course almost all the tech entrepreneurs will be white.
Even if this were true (and you have absolutely no evidence to back any of it up), is it not possible that fewer black teenagers spend their time in front of computers because black teenagers are more likely to be economically disadvantaged due to the legacy of racism in American society, and thus they either don't have computers or they don't have the luxury of sitting around in front of them all day?
No, you haven't thought it out. You seem to be saying that if the United States legalizes drugs and Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland are allowed to devote huge plains to growing coca plants instead of corn that it'll be some kind of net positive for the world. That's a joke. For one thing, you can't grow coca in Kansas. The climate isn't right. What will happen is American agrobusiness will have a free license to wage wholesale war on the poor in Central America in the name of supplying rich Americans with coke.
The real problem here is economic disparity. Drug cartels sell a product that people buy for reasons that go far beyond supply and demand. Their workforce does very dangerous work for almost no money. Why? Because they're poor. People are willing to do a whole lot if they don't see any future on the horizon one way or the other.
Nope. The existing drug shops will just start selling things in addition to alcohol.
Please. "The existing drug shops"? No offense, but have you ever been to a bar in your life? Have you ever used drugs? Have you even graduated high school?
There is a big, big difference between having a margarita at happy hour and tying off, shooting up, and nodding out in the middle of a crowded bar.
There is a big, big difference between trying to maintain security at a bar and trying to maintain security at a business where everybody is coked to the gills by 7pm, and you're selling the coke.
Much as you would like to paint anybody who likes to have a good time with the same brush, it ain't all the same. My brain is doing somersaults just trying to imagine what it would take to insure a business that serves PCP over the counter.
The won't go down the street to the crack dealers, they'll just sell opiates at a known and guaranteed quality to people with no fear of legal reprisal.
Your naivete is showing again. Crack and opiates? Not quite the same thing.
Pretty much. Keep in mind that legal sellers will have a much lower price and the police to back them up.
Seriously. Seriously? My mind boggles. You're talking about an industry that doesn't think twice about murdering police and leaving their heads on sticks to teach a lesson, and you're saying that the people who compete with the current industry leaders are going to just... take their business? Like it was handed to them? "Hi yes, we are the government of Mexico, and as of now I grant you the right to eliminate the drug cartels. Go forth... and profit!!"
What gives you the idea that destroying the traffickers' market is "favoring" them? Keep in mind that legitimate business will quickly eat these cartels alive.
Seriously? So when crack is legalized, you're going to just walk down the street and tell the crack dealers on the corner, "Sorry, fellas! Looks like me and my legitimate business will be taking over from here on out!" Then you'll smile, wave, and walk back to your office to plan your new crack business?
You don't seem to understand that the actual moving of drugs from place to place is the least of the crime worries in Mexico right now.
Legalize and regulate drugs. Put the cartels out of business.
Drugs are regulated now. They're illegal.
You're proposing making them only partially illegal, or that only certain transactions, methods, processes, etc. should be illegal. Do you really think a cartel that's willing to commit mass murder to protect its business interests is going to say, "OK finally, they're throwing us a few bones. Let's fly straight from now on"?
Just what kind of regulatory framework do you propose to construct around these legalized drugs? Do you think a health inspector is going to be immune from beheading? Or a tax collector? Or a district attorney?
When you're dealing with people this utterly lawless, how do you think rewriting the laws to favor the traffickers is going to improve conditions on the streets of Mexico?
Are they addressing the outstanding bugs that came with the new features in version 8? I think there should be a few rounds of point releases to tighten up the code with any major new feature roll-out.
Example: I'm not sure my Twitter searches are coming up with the right results.
My laptop (Core 2 Duo T7500 w/2 gigs of ram, XP SP3 32, with craptastic GeForce 8600M underclocked chip) is actually faster for text editing and general usage than my desktop (i7 920 w/12 gigs of ram, Win 7 64bit, now with a GeForce 470 GTX).
I hear people say things like this but it does not jibe with any of my experience, and even intuitively it makes no sense. I'd be scouring that i7 system for malware with a fine-toothed comb. Or maybe you have lousy RAM or a bad motherboard, I don't know. I haven't had a computer that doesn't perform adequately for "text editing and general usage" in years, and that includes a single-core Atom netbook with integrated graphics.
But I've still seen it bluescreen. Or redscreen. Sure it may be bad drivers, but the fact they can *still* cause problems is not a good thing.
Not me. Never. And if you have, I suspect you're talking about the x86 version with someone's ancient drivers. It's only true that they *still* cause problems if you *still* keep trying to jam those drivers in where they don't belong. You can't do it on the x64 version, which requires code-signed drivers, and is the version that ships with pretty much all new hardware these days.
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No, you're just implying that there will be somebody willing to play your game with you. When it sounds simply awful.
I don't see anything wrong with it, it's nothing more than a modernized tribal system.
Right. In the meantime, a long time ago in fact, the rest of us came out of the caves, rubbed our eyes against the sunlight, and formed this thing we call "modern society." It has lots of cool stuff, like actual doctors and hospitals in place of "the women and the elderly," and plumbing instead of digging wells. People get to choose what they want to eat instead of getting a ladle of slop from "the chow hall," too, and they even get their own remote controls for the TVs in their own homes. Even better, men (and even women, too, believe it or not) get to choose what they want to do for a living instead of toiling in "the community industry." Over the years, most of us have grown so complacent that we call this "a standard of living," and few of us envy the leech-bitten peasants hunched over in rice paddies in the third world -- fools that we are.
Anybody know what this means for Adobe's AIR platform?
Adobe says AIR will continue to be supported, both on the desktop and mobile platforms. AIR apps on smartphones really aren't that bad; it was Flash in mobile browsers that always sucked. The question is whether it's really worth doing cross-platform development in Flash vs. either porting a native app or going with something else (such as Unity).
Don't forget that currently Edge outputs code that's only supported on WebKit browsers (so no Firefox or IE). Some of it might look right, but a lot of it probably won't. If I remember right, I wasn't able to get anything to show up in IE9.
You may not be aware that the Prefect was a British Ford car, and we never really had 'em in the States. (They apparently sold a few, but not many. More in Canada.) Thus, most American HHGTTG fans had to have that joke explained to them. "Oh, it's a type of car? OK." But we've never seen one and we don't intuitively know what type of car it might be. I always assumed it was some kind of big boat, like a Ford Galaxie. (I know now that it's not. Thanks, Internet!)
Only the dumb money is left.
Or the safe money. Not every investment needs to be a double-or-nothing crap shoot. I'm sure a lot of people who invest in MSFT also invest in AAPL or GOOG, but for different reasons. I'm sure there are even lots of people who use a Mac daily but still have money in MSFT; it's really all between them and their financial advisers, and has little to do with Windows vs. Mac OS X.
As many other people have mentioned, Microsoft does pay a quarterly dividend, currently annualized at about 3 percent.
MSFT is a poor choice just because other companies have performed better? That's a little rash. There are plenty of other companies that have performed a lot worse, and holding a diversified portfolio is always a good idea. (You may remember a time when AAPL's chart was not so stellar.) Also, as other people have noted, MSFT pays dividends, which may not be "growth" but are definitely returns on the investment. Neither GOOG nor AAPL pays dividends -- in fact, both seem quite adamant about not paying them -- so you better hope those growth rates hold.
In ye olden days of 5 digit /. UIDs, that was "Ford Prefect" from HHGTTG.
And in ye olden dayes of 4 digit /. UIDs, it was the captain of your local Praetorian guard unit.
Sounds horrible. Seriously.
That's the intent, but as a practical matter, driver code-signing excludes ancient drivers that were written poorly to begin with. Modern drivers written to modern Microsoft guidance are far less likely to cause problems than older drivers for older hardware that haven't been updated in a decade or more.
Small
Right, and here's where the laptop makers really screwed the pooch, because for years I had been paying a premium for small and light laptops with screens under 14", and now everybody expects all that and a $300 price tag, too.
The reason netbooks got it so badly is because most people are NOT better served by them.
So what's a netbook? Netbooks were sold as a category, but they really weren't any different than what had come before. Atom processor instead of Core processor, check -- so they have lousy performance. Otherwise all the components were exactly the same as a laptop. It was never much of a stretch to just drop the Atom and build a regular laptop with cheap build quality (which is pretty much what you see in Best Buy now).
Most people want a portable device to read, watch videos, browse the web, play games and perhaps write an occasional email or Facebook post. A tablet does all of those better except perhaps writing.
Boy, here I really disagree. I have an Android tablet and I rarely pull it out for anything. Most Web sites are still designed for a pointing device rather than a touch UI. Anything that requires typing, from word processing to Facebook to Slashdot, works better on a device with a keyboard. Tablets work great for Angry Birds, but otherwise I'm just not sure what they're good for.
There are 100 times as many white teenagers plastered to their monitor messing around with their computer as there are black teenagers. Since successful tech entrepreneurs tend to be the kids who spent thousands of hours in front of their computer when they were kids, and the kids spending thousands of hours in front of their computer are almost all white (or asian), then of course almost all the tech entrepreneurs will be white.
Even if this were true (and you have absolutely no evidence to back any of it up), is it not possible that fewer black teenagers spend their time in front of computers because black teenagers are more likely to be economically disadvantaged due to the legacy of racism in American society, and thus they either don't have computers or they don't have the luxury of sitting around in front of them all day?
No, you haven't thought it out. You seem to be saying that if the United States legalizes drugs and Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland are allowed to devote huge plains to growing coca plants instead of corn that it'll be some kind of net positive for the world. That's a joke. For one thing, you can't grow coca in Kansas. The climate isn't right. What will happen is American agrobusiness will have a free license to wage wholesale war on the poor in Central America in the name of supplying rich Americans with coke.
The real problem here is economic disparity. Drug cartels sell a product that people buy for reasons that go far beyond supply and demand. Their workforce does very dangerous work for almost no money. Why? Because they're poor. People are willing to do a whole lot if they don't see any future on the horizon one way or the other.
Nope. The existing drug shops will just start selling things in addition to alcohol.
Please. "The existing drug shops"? No offense, but have you ever been to a bar in your life? Have you ever used drugs? Have you even graduated high school?
There is a big, big difference between having a margarita at happy hour and tying off, shooting up, and nodding out in the middle of a crowded bar.
There is a big, big difference between trying to maintain security at a bar and trying to maintain security at a business where everybody is coked to the gills by 7pm, and you're selling the coke.
Much as you would like to paint anybody who likes to have a good time with the same brush, it ain't all the same. My brain is doing somersaults just trying to imagine what it would take to insure a business that serves PCP over the counter.
The won't go down the street to the crack dealers, they'll just sell opiates at a known and guaranteed quality to people with no fear of legal reprisal.
Your naivete is showing again. Crack and opiates? Not quite the same thing.
Pretty much. Keep in mind that legal sellers will have a much lower price and the police to back them up.
Seriously. Seriously? My mind boggles. You're talking about an industry that doesn't think twice about murdering police and leaving their heads on sticks to teach a lesson, and you're saying that the people who compete with the current industry leaders are going to just... take their business? Like it was handed to them? "Hi yes, we are the government of Mexico, and as of now I grant you the right to eliminate the drug cartels. Go forth... and profit!!"
What gives you the idea that destroying the traffickers' market is "favoring" them? Keep in mind that legitimate business will quickly eat these cartels alive.
Seriously? So when crack is legalized, you're going to just walk down the street and tell the crack dealers on the corner, "Sorry, fellas! Looks like me and my legitimate business will be taking over from here on out!" Then you'll smile, wave, and walk back to your office to plan your new crack business?
You don't seem to understand that the actual moving of drugs from place to place is the least of the crime worries in Mexico right now.
Legalize and regulate drugs. Put the cartels out of business.
Drugs are regulated now. They're illegal.
You're proposing making them only partially illegal, or that only certain transactions, methods, processes, etc. should be illegal. Do you really think a cartel that's willing to commit mass murder to protect its business interests is going to say, "OK finally, they're throwing us a few bones. Let's fly straight from now on"?
Just what kind of regulatory framework do you propose to construct around these legalized drugs? Do you think a health inspector is going to be immune from beheading? Or a tax collector? Or a district attorney?
When you're dealing with people this utterly lawless, how do you think rewriting the laws to favor the traffickers is going to improve conditions on the streets of Mexico?
How many times can you "boost" Javascript performance?
Infinite times. See: Zeno's paradoxes.
Are they addressing the outstanding bugs that came with the new features in version 8? I think there should be a few rounds of point releases to tighten up the code with any major new feature roll-out.
Example: I'm not sure my Twitter searches are coming up with the right results.
My laptop (Core 2 Duo T7500 w/2 gigs of ram, XP SP3 32, with craptastic GeForce 8600M underclocked chip) is actually faster for text editing and general usage than my desktop (i7 920 w/12 gigs of ram, Win 7 64bit, now with a GeForce 470 GTX).
I hear people say things like this but it does not jibe with any of my experience, and even intuitively it makes no sense. I'd be scouring that i7 system for malware with a fine-toothed comb. Or maybe you have lousy RAM or a bad motherboard, I don't know. I haven't had a computer that doesn't perform adequately for "text editing and general usage" in years, and that includes a single-core Atom netbook with integrated graphics.
But I've still seen it bluescreen. Or redscreen. Sure it may be bad drivers, but the fact they can *still* cause problems is not a good thing.
Not me. Never. And if you have, I suspect you're talking about the x86 version with someone's ancient drivers. It's only true that they *still* cause problems if you *still* keep trying to jam those drivers in where they don't belong. You can't do it on the x64 version, which requires code-signed drivers, and is the version that ships with pretty much all new hardware these days.
Windows 7 is solid? Can someone explain to me why my GDI apps are like eight times slower than under Windows XP on the exact same hardware?
Because GDI was deprecated in XP, it's not hardware accelerated as of Vista, and you're supposed to be using Direct2D?
Thanks for posting that! I always liked Gassée and was wondering what he'd got up to.