If you're a great programmer already, why even bother with the CS degree? Why not take a completely different degree?
Some of the best programmers I know have degrees in things OTHER than CS. The best physics programmers aren't guys that understand CS the best, they're the guys that understand physics and math the best.
A CS degree will teach you how to be a programmer that's good at programming things to do with computing science. To a certain extent, unless you're actually interested in computing science itself, as a field, it's not worth your time. Do you want to understand computational complexity of search algorithms so you can develop your own? Get a CS degree. Do you want to come up with new algorithms for network communication? Get a CS degree. Do you want to be a programmer that understands how to program? You're done.
I would actually recommend doing a degree that gives you ONLY the extra stuff. Do an Arts degree of some kind. Find an interest. Expand your mind. You've already got the other stuff done; the piece of paper isn't going to make you any better at it. And if you want a degree because it affects your hireability, almost any degree will help you get your foot in the door.
I wanted to specialise in CS when I was in University, but I was a slacker student that's bad at writing exams. I did a lot of CS classes—all the classes that are required for a CS degree, in fact—but because I was forced to do a general science degree, I ended up with a minor in 'Earth and Atmospheric Sciences'. I've taken classes in Geology, Astronomy, Invertebrate Palaeontology, general Meteorology, Atmospheric fluid and thermodynamics, and Mass Extinction. I'm more of a scientist now than I ever could have been otherwise. It seemed like a bummer and a semi-failure back then, but now I appreciate it in so many different ways. I work in games, but I feel like I have options and avenues that wouldn't be open to other programmers. If nothing else, I understand that those options and avenues MUST EXIST.
You're already a programmer. You can keep doing that, and nobody will think any less of you, I assure you. If it were me, I'd take the opportunity and go be a scholar and a scientist, though.
"A lot"? Try "all". The USA has the HIGHEST per capita costs for healthcare, period.
The tragedy of their system is that if they switched to something like Single Payer Insurance like here in Canada, they could EASILY cover the costs of providing healthcare to everyone. They'd probably even save money.
Remember, the Single Payer option just means there's no BS surrounding the payment or haggling for the price. There's no overhead lost to reams of paperwork from dozens of different insurance companies all trying to get out of paying for procedures. There's actually lots of competition in the Canadian market for procedures that are considered 'non-essential' (dentistry, laser eye surgery, etc.)
The Canada Health Act is available online and is quite short and easy to understand. Our system is based on a document that's substantially less than 50 pages long and works pretty damn well. That US health care reform package was thousands, as I recall.
I made an effort a few years ago to switch to metric in my personal life. I find it a lot more relatable than the imperial system, now that I've worked with it a bit.
I'm about 78kg on a good day. 1kg is 1L of water. I could say that I weigh about the same as 39 2L bottles of pop. I can sort of visualise that in my head. 175lbs is the approximate imperial measure, and I have NO IDEA of how that compares unless I compare it to other people.
Similarly, I'm about 190cm tall. Visually, I can pick out something that's about a metre long. I'm a couple of those.
More relevantly, most buildings are built with imperial measures. Go to a cut shop in Canada and try asking for a length of wood cut to a certain number of centimetres. I did that, and the guy discovered for the first time that the saw actually had metric measurements on the back that he'd never seen, since he's always cut the wood to a number of feet and inches.
I'm Canadian. I met a guy from Texas that told me about how liberating it was to go to a hospital in his state that REFUSED to take ANY insurance. You basically had a menu of items, and you paid, up front, for the treatment or test. They left you alone, and you could think about it.
It seemed bizarre that this would be the BETTER option, but his claim was that with his health insurance, it was literally impossible to know at any given time whether or not a procedure would be covered fully, partly or not at all. And because health providers that deal with insurance companies inflate the price to make money as best they can, and insurance companies are in the business of NOT PAYING so they can make a profit, there's a very real chance that you'll accidentally step into a treatment that not only costs you personally, but costs more than if you'd been able to go and get it for the REAL cost as provided by someone that doesn't deal with insurance companies.
The system is backwards, opaque, and DANGEROUS. These are people's lives we're talking about. American life expectancies are stagnant or dropping while other 1st-world countries are pulling away. As a Canadian, my life expectancy is actually markedly higher than my American counterpart.
The paperwork is LITERALLY killing you. Can you imagine? Paperwork, a leading cause of sickness and death in the USA.
It's worth pointing out that it hasn't ALWAYS been true. It's more true of modern, western societies. If you look into the history of both homosexuality and monogamy, the trend towards cruelty started just a couple thousand years ago.
'Spartanizing' was a word Athenians used to describe the practice of having sex with boys. Contrary to the movie 300, Spartans were the ones likely to be in homosexual relationships. (In fact, I've read that Spartans were encouraged to partner with one of the other troops; people that love one another will fight fiercely for each other.)
Leaving aside the morality of having sex with children (I think it's wrong; clearly the Romans thought differently) there was a clearly a different opinion when it came to having sex with those of the same gender. You see that sort of theme pop up in various early histories.
I'm not gonna say it was a panacea, but I think that it's been worse over the last couple thousand years, with the advent of Christian moralities. Slowly, we're managing to put that to rest, and hopefully we won't find too many new groups to persecute in their place.:/
(P.S. I'm no historian, I'm just piecing bits of random readings that I've done together.)
Someone mod this up. The end-of-life of the Lotus Elise was known when the Roadster was first being built, and this end-of-life for the Roadster has been planned all along. What a crock of a summary.
I'm not going to argue about OS X's adherence or non-adherence to these principles, but there's a real question of whether those principles are worth adhering to in a general case.
The original UNIX systems were written for extraordinarily limited hardware by today's standards. 'Small is beautiful' wasn't just an empty mantra, it was the key to functioning well at all. You wanted user editable flat text files because there was a chance that you'd have to (as an administrator) edit them over a very slow link, or on a 80 character wide screen that wouldn't be able to support anything more complicated. Small, lightweight programs that do one thing well were great because you could chain them together to do one big thing properly. But it's not necessarily more efficient to do it that way, it's just better to do it that way when you've got no resources to spare, no cycles to waste, and no memory to hold anything more monolithic at a time. Sure, you could pipe a text file through sort then through grep then through sed then through something else, or now, you could just open it up and do what you want. In real time.
As for tailoring the user environment, studies in HCI have shown that people often make decisions that are counter to their productivity, even though they subjectively report an improvement in comfort and/or productivity. Users actually don't always know what's best. That's why users aren't called on to customize things like the swap algorithm or how the multitasking subsystem choses what process is swapped out. And—let's be real here—tailoring the environment on a UNIX system of the sort you're talking about amounts to being able to set your paths, alias commands to different commands (or commands with arguments), and chose which shell you're going to use. 'You can have any colour you want as long as it's black,' isn't just for Model Ts and OS X; the limited number of ways that you can customize your shell mean that leveraging all of them doesn't make for THAT much of a different environment.
The command line is a very powerful tool for some things. It's a great way to tell the system exactly what you want done in a very direct way. But it's hard to lay in a specification for a group of objects that isn't in some way contiguous or textually groupable; that's why we use mice and GUIs at all.
The UNIX philosophy had (and still has, in certain circumstances) its place, and now systems like iOS—which has a touch interface as its primary interface method; the diametric opposite of old UNIX systems—also have a place.
I know you don't explicitly claim that OS X is a bad thing to have around, but I think it's important to realize and point out that design principles that once made a lot of sense may no longer be useful to adhere to in as many circumstances. If you're still in an environment with limited resources and slow connectivity, UNIX systems will continue to work very well for you.
Never liked it; is 4.0 gonna be any better?
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Firefox 4 Released!
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I've NEVER liked Firefox. I've used a lot of different browsers over the years. About 6 different versions of Opera, several versions of Safari, a handful of Chrome. All of them have been better than Firefox in some way. IE was more compatible than FF, Opera was faster and had more interesting, innovative features. That speed-dial feature? It was in Opera first. Tabs, too.
Safari was great for a while. Excellent rendering engine, highly compatible, nice layout, SIMPLE. Chrome did it one or two or three better, and generally has a better interface and more speed than anything else.
Firefox was good for a time because it was the LEAST BAD option. It was never the BEST option, as near as I can reckon. I try it on and off, just to see if it's gotten any better or is worth switching to, and it NEVER IS. The plugins have never interested me, since the better browsers always seem to have functionality built in that FF needs to plugin. The stuff that isn't good enough to be built into the browser, by and large, doesn't need to exist at all.:/
Is 4.0 going to be better? Can I compare it to Chrome and objectively find reasons that it's worth the (admittedly minimal) effort of re-importing my bookmarks? Or is it more of the same mediocrity that I've come to expect?
Don't get a Kobo. I have one, and two Sony eReaders. The Sonys are better in every measurable aspect except price. But you get what you pay for. I admit, the touch-screen PRS-600 is much worse on batteries than the 300 and the Kobo both, but I'd take that 300 any day of the week.
Buy books from the Kobo store, though. Better prices than any other store I've seen, and way more available titles (especially in Canada, where Amazon doesn't sell some titles for no readily discernable reason).
A friend told me about a programme she saw on apples (the fruit, not the products of the tech company). Perfectly good apples—PERFECTLY good—were thrown away because they didn't fit in those cardboard display things that they put in supermarkets. They weren't turned into apple juice, or apple sauce, or plowed back under for fertilizer, they were literally tossed into a dumpster to rot.
Our attitude towards food as a disposable, waste-able resource needs to end first. We need to remember that this stuff may grow on trees, but it's possible to waste it all the same. We need to stop eating food just because we can, and eat it because we love it. Factory farming has provided us with a huge abundance of cheap meat that tastes like nothing, and as a byproduct, we also get astounding amounts of waste and animal cruelty.
I'm no vegan (or vegetarian, even!) but the more appreciation you have for your food, where it comes from, the people that need to make it, and the animals that die to feed you, the less you eat and the more you savour what you have. It's actually possible for us to be healthier AND happier at the same time, reduce waste and bycatch, AND feed more people.
Admittedly, the one flaw here is that factory farms produce a lot of CHEAP food. Maybe we'd have to pay more. But maybe we'd cut out the stuff that isn't worth paying for and buy more of the stuff that is. Actually, what we'll probably do is claim that we have a right to eat shitty, cheap food and try and make someone else solve the problem.
If people post on Facebook, they're making their lives public. You may as well complain that when you took out that front-page ad about what's in your pants, EVERYONE read it and knew about it. Private information freely discussed in public is PUBLIC information. If you don't want people to hear about it, don't post it all over the friggin' internet.
It's not Facebook's fault that people reveal stupid details. That's what they want to do. And if your friends in REAL LIFE are revealing gossip about you, that's YOUR FRIENDS that are the problem.
Apple is almost certainly making money on every iPad sold even without apps.
They've got economies of scale working for them, though. They can order parts in such enormous quantities that it's impossible for other manufacturers to keep up.
But on the Android side, there's virtually no development cost for the OS (to the manufacturer); Apple subsidizes all of iOS's development themselves.
Samsung can subsidize their hardware cost because a considerable number of the components that they themselves manufacture are going into their product. Apple doesn't have THAT advantage.
Lastly, whether you love Apple or you hate them, they currently have more experience at making this stuff properly than anyone else. Everyone's been playing catchup since the first iPhone. They've got a lot of talent on board.
This would only be true if their performance was the same. I would consider 256MB to now be insufficient to lead to an exceptional user experience. When the first iPad was released, it WASN'T running the same OS.
Sufficient at the time of release will not mean sufficient further down the road, necessarily. I appreciate the 512MB in my iPhone, but at the time my iPhone 3G was released, the 256MB in IT was sufficient.
What constitutes ample and sufficient obviously changes over time. I don't presume to say that 512MB will be considered either next year. It might, but I can easily see that not being the case.
I don't think you know what 'keep using' means, since I only used it once.:) (I know what it's a reference to, you're just using it wrong.;)
Anyway, ample in this case IS synonymous with 'sufficient'. It's sufficient for all tasks. There is plenty left over when you use an application. The system can swap between apps and tabs in the browser without any issue. 1GB is also ample, but it is also more than is strictly required. 512MB is sufficient for useful, fast, pleasant operation, and the only way for that to be true is if the quantity is 'ample'.
If they had stuck with 256MB, the amount would not be sufficient, and also would not be ample. If they had put 4GB of memory in it, the amount would have been sufficient, ample and wasted.
Ample here means sufficient. It seems to get the job done, and gets it done better (by all accounts) than the Samsung, despite it being half as much.
Having more RAM in and of itself isn't useful if you're not going to use it. Apple gets to save money on the memory AND beat the performance of the Samsung? That's just clever.
I don't have an iPad of any sort yet, but putting good cameras in it seems a waste of time to me. I've got an iPhone 4 that I'm far more likely to take pictures on (who wants to hold up a whole freakin' tablet to take a picture?) and a Sony cybershot that I'm MUCH more likely to take travelling with me to take movies and pictures with.
Samsung is wasting time and money spec-padding. And that dual-core graphics and CPU don't seem to be helping them any in head-to-head comparisons.
Apple has just designed a better tablet at a better price that people are willing to buy. Don't blame Apple for doing it the smart way, blame Samsung for not paying attention to what will actually perform best and attract customers.
While you'd expect Android device manufacturers to be slightly ahead of the game because they're on arbitrary release cycles (unlike Apple's apparent 1-year cycle), they can't keep up with Apple on price because of Apple's ability to design the device, pre-order a huge number of the parts, and use the economy of scale to their advantage. I'd suspect that the lag time for an Android device to match the iPad is anywhere from 3 - 9 months. Not only do they have to catch up on the design aspect (mostly; obviously they don't have to be exactly the same), but they might have to wait for component prices to drop enough to make it worth their while. There's only so much loss-leading they can do without completely sabotaging themselves at the moment. It'd be different if they'd hit the market first, but Apple's not ceding that ground easily.
Having lossly compressed audio at hand might be plenty good enough, but it's not future proof. The data has had to be compressed because of unavailable media. It's a physical fact that those high end AAC's can't surpass CD quality (Because they are lossy). CD itself is getting old too, so the reference point is not really correct anymore.
This is only necessarily true if the AAC is ripped FROM a CD. If the AAC is taken directly from the recording source (which seems more likely these days), then it may very well exceed the CDs quality, because as you say, the CD itself is lossy. The question is which compression is LESS lossy. So, in fact, buying CDs may be the best way to get worse sounding music if you're going to rip it to listen to it. One more reason to abandon the format.
You could try voting for a candidate based on their individual merits, rather than the party platform they represent. Moreover, you could attempt to hold that candidate to their non-party specific promises and encourage them to break with whatever party they associate with (if they do at all) whenever it runs counter to yours/the community's interests.
There's no party worth voting for, but that doesn't mean there aren't candidates worth voting for.
iOS doesn't only ship on iPhones. It also ships on iPod Touches and iPads. Android phone sales are above iPhone sales, to be sure, but the iOS ecosystem is bigger than that. Android has virtually no penetration in market segments that don't involve phones.
But what's interesting about that? What does that signify? If Microsoft can't make more money (or can barely make more money, I suppose) than Apple with that many installed users, what's the significance?
In terms of our pseudo-free market world economy, an installed OS is only as important as the company's ability to leverage it for monetization. Whether that means making money on it when they first sell it, or making money off of it through ad revenue and future sales and licensing, it's about the money that can be made, not just winning the numbers game for the sake of winning the numbers game.
The point is that historically, you could claim that Apple was releasing products that were overpriced and anyone coming into the market simply had to make a decent product and undercut Apple and they would win. But NOW, it looks like Apple actually released at a pricepoint that's hard to beat if you want a quality tablet. The iPad costs what it costs because that's what it costs to make something good.
The guy doesn't WANT to buy a crappy tablet. He's not trying to. He's saying that the fight is going to have to be over something other than price, since Apple got that exactly right this time.
You know how many calls I make on my iPhone every month? Almost none. I hate talking on the phone. I have the cheapest possible 'phone' plan I can get with this thing. Even 500MB of data is enough for me; since the connectivity is more about being able to access a few sites than streaming movies or whatever.
I have an iPhone instead of an iPod touch because I want a net-connected computer that I can fit in my pocket. I use the GPS basically every day while I'm riding, I track my calories, email, etc.
A dumbphone is the worst possible solution for me because it ONLY DOES THE THING THAT I HATE.
Evolution is a scientific fact as much as gravity is a scientific fact.
'Theory' in this context merely means that we don't fully understand the process by which it occurs. We KNOW gravity works. If you can show me that it doesn't, I'll eat my shoe. But we still have a 'Theory of Gravity'. We don't know how gravity works. It's simple.
Evolution does make predictions AND is falsifiable. Obviously, we can't see millions of years of evolution happen any time we want; we cannot make a prediction about how a specific animal we see will evolve in a million years, but we CAN make predictions based on fossil evidence, and finding other fossils will show whether the predictions were right or wrong. We can also do it using tools to measure genetic drift, etc., etc. It happens all the time. It works quite well.
Evolution at a small scale even happens rapidly enough that we can see it happen in a petri dish. What do you think antibiotic resistant bacteria are? They're evolved bacteria.
This process works quite well in other fields, too. Astrophysics and cosmology make predictions that are hard to immediately verify without working with humungous amounts of energy, or a couple planets to smash together. Still, there are falsifiable claims based on the universe that we observe around us. We think the Earth's moon is there because a Mars-sized bolide collided with our planet relatively early in its formation, and blasted a moon-sized chunk off, while the Earth absorbed the rest. This nicely explains why we always see the same side of the moon pointing towards us (it's day is 28 days long, as is its orbit), why it's as far away as it is and why it's getting further away, and all that stuff.
You clearly don't have a grounding in science, and I'm not going to call you names for it. But this is what we should be teaching kids in school. That you make statements like this is proof to me that kids aren't getting the educations that they need. I don't think you're stupid, I just think someone didn't give you the facts that you needed.
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If you're a great programmer already, why even bother with the CS degree? Why not take a completely different degree?
Some of the best programmers I know have degrees in things OTHER than CS. The best physics programmers aren't guys that understand CS the best, they're the guys that understand physics and math the best.
A CS degree will teach you how to be a programmer that's good at programming things to do with computing science. To a certain extent, unless you're actually interested in computing science itself, as a field, it's not worth your time. Do you want to understand computational complexity of search algorithms so you can develop your own? Get a CS degree. Do you want to come up with new algorithms for network communication? Get a CS degree. Do you want to be a programmer that understands how to program? You're done.
I would actually recommend doing a degree that gives you ONLY the extra stuff. Do an Arts degree of some kind. Find an interest. Expand your mind. You've already got the other stuff done; the piece of paper isn't going to make you any better at it. And if you want a degree because it affects your hireability, almost any degree will help you get your foot in the door.
I wanted to specialise in CS when I was in University, but I was a slacker student that's bad at writing exams. I did a lot of CS classes—all the classes that are required for a CS degree, in fact—but because I was forced to do a general science degree, I ended up with a minor in 'Earth and Atmospheric Sciences'. I've taken classes in Geology, Astronomy, Invertebrate Palaeontology, general Meteorology, Atmospheric fluid and thermodynamics, and Mass Extinction. I'm more of a scientist now than I ever could have been otherwise. It seemed like a bummer and a semi-failure back then, but now I appreciate it in so many different ways. I work in games, but I feel like I have options and avenues that wouldn't be open to other programmers. If nothing else, I understand that those options and avenues MUST EXIST.
You're already a programmer. You can keep doing that, and nobody will think any less of you, I assure you. If it were me, I'd take the opportunity and go be a scholar and a scientist, though.
"A lot"? Try "all". The USA has the HIGHEST per capita costs for healthcare, period.
The tragedy of their system is that if they switched to something like Single Payer Insurance like here in Canada, they could EASILY cover the costs of providing healthcare to everyone. They'd probably even save money.
Remember, the Single Payer option just means there's no BS surrounding the payment or haggling for the price. There's no overhead lost to reams of paperwork from dozens of different insurance companies all trying to get out of paying for procedures. There's actually lots of competition in the Canadian market for procedures that are considered 'non-essential' (dentistry, laser eye surgery, etc.)
The Canada Health Act is available online and is quite short and easy to understand. Our system is based on a document that's substantially less than 50 pages long and works pretty damn well. That US health care reform package was thousands, as I recall.
I made an effort a few years ago to switch to metric in my personal life. I find it a lot more relatable than the imperial system, now that I've worked with it a bit.
I'm about 78kg on a good day. 1kg is 1L of water. I could say that I weigh about the same as 39 2L bottles of pop. I can sort of visualise that in my head. 175lbs is the approximate imperial measure, and I have NO IDEA of how that compares unless I compare it to other people.
Similarly, I'm about 190cm tall. Visually, I can pick out something that's about a metre long. I'm a couple of those.
More relevantly, most buildings are built with imperial measures. Go to a cut shop in Canada and try asking for a length of wood cut to a certain number of centimetres. I did that, and the guy discovered for the first time that the saw actually had metric measurements on the back that he'd never seen, since he's always cut the wood to a number of feet and inches.
I'm Canadian. I met a guy from Texas that told me about how liberating it was to go to a hospital in his state that REFUSED to take ANY insurance. You basically had a menu of items, and you paid, up front, for the treatment or test. They left you alone, and you could think about it.
It seemed bizarre that this would be the BETTER option, but his claim was that with his health insurance, it was literally impossible to know at any given time whether or not a procedure would be covered fully, partly or not at all. And because health providers that deal with insurance companies inflate the price to make money as best they can, and insurance companies are in the business of NOT PAYING so they can make a profit, there's a very real chance that you'll accidentally step into a treatment that not only costs you personally, but costs more than if you'd been able to go and get it for the REAL cost as provided by someone that doesn't deal with insurance companies.
The system is backwards, opaque, and DANGEROUS. These are people's lives we're talking about. American life expectancies are stagnant or dropping while other 1st-world countries are pulling away. As a Canadian, my life expectancy is actually markedly higher than my American counterpart.
The paperwork is LITERALLY killing you. Can you imagine? Paperwork, a leading cause of sickness and death in the USA.
It's worth pointing out that it hasn't ALWAYS been true. It's more true of modern, western societies. If you look into the history of both homosexuality and monogamy, the trend towards cruelty started just a couple thousand years ago.
'Spartanizing' was a word Athenians used to describe the practice of having sex with boys. Contrary to the movie 300, Spartans were the ones likely to be in homosexual relationships. (In fact, I've read that Spartans were encouraged to partner with one of the other troops; people that love one another will fight fiercely for each other.)
Leaving aside the morality of having sex with children (I think it's wrong; clearly the Romans thought differently) there was a clearly a different opinion when it came to having sex with those of the same gender. You see that sort of theme pop up in various early histories.
I'm not gonna say it was a panacea, but I think that it's been worse over the last couple thousand years, with the advent of Christian moralities. Slowly, we're managing to put that to rest, and hopefully we won't find too many new groups to persecute in their place. :/
(P.S. I'm no historian, I'm just piecing bits of random readings that I've done together.)
Someone mod this up. The end-of-life of the Lotus Elise was known when the Roadster was first being built, and this end-of-life for the Roadster has been planned all along. What a crock of a summary.
I'm not going to argue about OS X's adherence or non-adherence to these principles, but there's a real question of whether those principles are worth adhering to in a general case.
The original UNIX systems were written for extraordinarily limited hardware by today's standards. 'Small is beautiful' wasn't just an empty mantra, it was the key to functioning well at all. You wanted user editable flat text files because there was a chance that you'd have to (as an administrator) edit them over a very slow link, or on a 80 character wide screen that wouldn't be able to support anything more complicated. Small, lightweight programs that do one thing well were great because you could chain them together to do one big thing properly. But it's not necessarily more efficient to do it that way, it's just better to do it that way when you've got no resources to spare, no cycles to waste, and no memory to hold anything more monolithic at a time. Sure, you could pipe a text file through sort then through grep then through sed then through something else, or now, you could just open it up and do what you want. In real time.
As for tailoring the user environment, studies in HCI have shown that people often make decisions that are counter to their productivity, even though they subjectively report an improvement in comfort and/or productivity. Users actually don't always know what's best. That's why users aren't called on to customize things like the swap algorithm or how the multitasking subsystem choses what process is swapped out. And—let's be real here—tailoring the environment on a UNIX system of the sort you're talking about amounts to being able to set your paths, alias commands to different commands (or commands with arguments), and chose which shell you're going to use. 'You can have any colour you want as long as it's black,' isn't just for Model Ts and OS X; the limited number of ways that you can customize your shell mean that leveraging all of them doesn't make for THAT much of a different environment.
The command line is a very powerful tool for some things. It's a great way to tell the system exactly what you want done in a very direct way. But it's hard to lay in a specification for a group of objects that isn't in some way contiguous or textually groupable; that's why we use mice and GUIs at all.
The UNIX philosophy had (and still has, in certain circumstances) its place, and now systems like iOS—which has a touch interface as its primary interface method; the diametric opposite of old UNIX systems—also have a place.
I know you don't explicitly claim that OS X is a bad thing to have around, but I think it's important to realize and point out that design principles that once made a lot of sense may no longer be useful to adhere to in as many circumstances. If you're still in an environment with limited resources and slow connectivity, UNIX systems will continue to work very well for you.
I've NEVER liked Firefox. I've used a lot of different browsers over the years. About 6 different versions of Opera, several versions of Safari, a handful of Chrome. All of them have been better than Firefox in some way. IE was more compatible than FF, Opera was faster and had more interesting, innovative features. That speed-dial feature? It was in Opera first. Tabs, too.
Safari was great for a while. Excellent rendering engine, highly compatible, nice layout, SIMPLE. Chrome did it one or two or three better, and generally has a better interface and more speed than anything else.
Firefox was good for a time because it was the LEAST BAD option. It was never the BEST option, as near as I can reckon. I try it on and off, just to see if it's gotten any better or is worth switching to, and it NEVER IS. The plugins have never interested me, since the better browsers always seem to have functionality built in that FF needs to plugin. The stuff that isn't good enough to be built into the browser, by and large, doesn't need to exist at all. :/
Is 4.0 going to be better? Can I compare it to Chrome and objectively find reasons that it's worth the (admittedly minimal) effort of re-importing my bookmarks? Or is it more of the same mediocrity that I've come to expect?
Don't get a Kobo. I have one, and two Sony eReaders. The Sonys are better in every measurable aspect except price. But you get what you pay for. I admit, the touch-screen PRS-600 is much worse on batteries than the 300 and the Kobo both, but I'd take that 300 any day of the week.
Buy books from the Kobo store, though. Better prices than any other store I've seen, and way more available titles (especially in Canada, where Amazon doesn't sell some titles for no readily discernable reason).
A friend told me about a programme she saw on apples (the fruit, not the products of the tech company). Perfectly good apples—PERFECTLY good—were thrown away because they didn't fit in those cardboard display things that they put in supermarkets. They weren't turned into apple juice, or apple sauce, or plowed back under for fertilizer, they were literally tossed into a dumpster to rot.
Our attitude towards food as a disposable, waste-able resource needs to end first. We need to remember that this stuff may grow on trees, but it's possible to waste it all the same. We need to stop eating food just because we can, and eat it because we love it. Factory farming has provided us with a huge abundance of cheap meat that tastes like nothing, and as a byproduct, we also get astounding amounts of waste and animal cruelty.
I'm no vegan (or vegetarian, even!) but the more appreciation you have for your food, where it comes from, the people that need to make it, and the animals that die to feed you, the less you eat and the more you savour what you have. It's actually possible for us to be healthier AND happier at the same time, reduce waste and bycatch, AND feed more people.
Admittedly, the one flaw here is that factory farms produce a lot of CHEAP food. Maybe we'd have to pay more. But maybe we'd cut out the stuff that isn't worth paying for and buy more of the stuff that is. Actually, what we'll probably do is claim that we have a right to eat shitty, cheap food and try and make someone else solve the problem.
This makes no sense.
If people post on Facebook, they're making their lives public. You may as well complain that when you took out that front-page ad about what's in your pants, EVERYONE read it and knew about it. Private information freely discussed in public is PUBLIC information. If you don't want people to hear about it, don't post it all over the friggin' internet.
It's not Facebook's fault that people reveal stupid details. That's what they want to do. And if your friends in REAL LIFE are revealing gossip about you, that's YOUR FRIENDS that are the problem.
Apple is almost certainly making money on every iPad sold even without apps.
They've got economies of scale working for them, though. They can order parts in such enormous quantities that it's impossible for other manufacturers to keep up.
But on the Android side, there's virtually no development cost for the OS (to the manufacturer); Apple subsidizes all of iOS's development themselves.
Samsung can subsidize their hardware cost because a considerable number of the components that they themselves manufacture are going into their product. Apple doesn't have THAT advantage.
Lastly, whether you love Apple or you hate them, they currently have more experience at making this stuff properly than anyone else. Everyone's been playing catchup since the first iPhone. They've got a lot of talent on board.
This would only be true if their performance was the same. I would consider 256MB to now be insufficient to lead to an exceptional user experience. When the first iPad was released, it WASN'T running the same OS.
Sufficient at the time of release will not mean sufficient further down the road, necessarily. I appreciate the 512MB in my iPhone, but at the time my iPhone 3G was released, the 256MB in IT was sufficient.
What constitutes ample and sufficient obviously changes over time. I don't presume to say that 512MB will be considered either next year. It might, but I can easily see that not being the case.
I don't think you know what 'keep using' means, since I only used it once. :) ;)
(I know what it's a reference to, you're just using it wrong.
Anyway, ample in this case IS synonymous with 'sufficient'. It's sufficient for all tasks. There is plenty left over when you use an application. The system can swap between apps and tabs in the browser without any issue. 1GB is also ample, but it is also more than is strictly required. 512MB is sufficient for useful, fast, pleasant operation, and the only way for that to be true is if the quantity is 'ample'.
If they had stuck with 256MB, the amount would not be sufficient, and also would not be ample. If they had put 4GB of memory in it, the amount would have been sufficient, ample and wasted.
Ample here means sufficient. It seems to get the job done, and gets it done better (by all accounts) than the Samsung, despite it being half as much.
Having more RAM in and of itself isn't useful if you're not going to use it. Apple gets to save money on the memory AND beat the performance of the Samsung? That's just clever.
I don't have an iPad of any sort yet, but putting good cameras in it seems a waste of time to me. I've got an iPhone 4 that I'm far more likely to take pictures on (who wants to hold up a whole freakin' tablet to take a picture?) and a Sony cybershot that I'm MUCH more likely to take travelling with me to take movies and pictures with.
Samsung is wasting time and money spec-padding. And that dual-core graphics and CPU don't seem to be helping them any in head-to-head comparisons.
Apple has just designed a better tablet at a better price that people are willing to buy. Don't blame Apple for doing it the smart way, blame Samsung for not paying attention to what will actually perform best and attract customers.
While you'd expect Android device manufacturers to be slightly ahead of the game because they're on arbitrary release cycles (unlike Apple's apparent 1-year cycle), they can't keep up with Apple on price because of Apple's ability to design the device, pre-order a huge number of the parts, and use the economy of scale to their advantage. I'd suspect that the lag time for an Android device to match the iPad is anywhere from 3 - 9 months. Not only do they have to catch up on the design aspect (mostly; obviously they don't have to be exactly the same), but they might have to wait for component prices to drop enough to make it worth their while. There's only so much loss-leading they can do without completely sabotaging themselves at the moment. It'd be different if they'd hit the market first, but Apple's not ceding that ground easily.
Having lossly compressed audio at hand might be plenty good enough, but it's not future proof. The data has had to be compressed because of unavailable media. It's a physical fact that those high end AAC's can't surpass CD quality (Because they are lossy). CD itself is getting old too, so the reference point is not really correct anymore.
This is only necessarily true if the AAC is ripped FROM a CD. If the AAC is taken directly from the recording source (which seems more likely these days), then it may very well exceed the CDs quality, because as you say, the CD itself is lossy. The question is which compression is LESS lossy. So, in fact, buying CDs may be the best way to get worse sounding music if you're going to rip it to listen to it. One more reason to abandon the format.
You could try voting for a candidate based on their individual merits, rather than the party platform they represent. Moreover, you could attempt to hold that candidate to their non-party specific promises and encourage them to break with whatever party they associate with (if they do at all) whenever it runs counter to yours/the community's interests.
There's no party worth voting for, but that doesn't mean there aren't candidates worth voting for.
I forgot to mention this in my last post:
iOS may not have the biggest absolute market share, but iPhones certainly command the bulk of the phone industry profit:
http://www.macrumors.com/2011/01/31/apple-rakes-in-over-half-of-mobile-phone-industrys-fourth-quarter-profits/
iOS doesn't only ship on iPhones. It also ships on iPod Touches and iPads. Android phone sales are above iPhone sales, to be sure, but the iOS ecosystem is bigger than that. Android has virtually no penetration in market segments that don't involve phones.
But what's interesting about that? What does that signify? If Microsoft can't make more money (or can barely make more money, I suppose) than Apple with that many installed users, what's the significance?
In terms of our pseudo-free market world economy, an installed OS is only as important as the company's ability to leverage it for monetization. Whether that means making money on it when they first sell it, or making money off of it through ad revenue and future sales and licensing, it's about the money that can be made, not just winning the numbers game for the sake of winning the numbers game.
You're looking only at smartphones, not iOS sales. Remember, iOS ships on iPod touch devices and iPads, neither of which are counted as phones.
Man alive, did you even read the original post?
The point is that historically, you could claim that Apple was releasing products that were overpriced and anyone coming into the market simply had to make a decent product and undercut Apple and they would win. But NOW, it looks like Apple actually released at a pricepoint that's hard to beat if you want a quality tablet. The iPad costs what it costs because that's what it costs to make something good.
The guy doesn't WANT to buy a crappy tablet. He's not trying to. He's saying that the fight is going to have to be over something other than price, since Apple got that exactly right this time.
You know how many calls I make on my iPhone every month? Almost none. I hate talking on the phone. I have the cheapest possible 'phone' plan I can get with this thing. Even 500MB of data is enough for me; since the connectivity is more about being able to access a few sites than streaming movies or whatever.
I have an iPhone instead of an iPod touch because I want a net-connected computer that I can fit in my pocket. I use the GPS basically every day while I'm riding, I track my calories, email, etc.
A dumbphone is the worst possible solution for me because it ONLY DOES THE THING THAT I HATE.
Evolution is a scientific fact as much as gravity is a scientific fact.
'Theory' in this context merely means that we don't fully understand the process by which it occurs. We KNOW gravity works. If you can show me that it doesn't, I'll eat my shoe. But we still have a 'Theory of Gravity'. We don't know how gravity works. It's simple.
Evolution does make predictions AND is falsifiable. Obviously, we can't see millions of years of evolution happen any time we want; we cannot make a prediction about how a specific animal we see will evolve in a million years, but we CAN make predictions based on fossil evidence, and finding other fossils will show whether the predictions were right or wrong. We can also do it using tools to measure genetic drift, etc., etc. It happens all the time. It works quite well.
Evolution at a small scale even happens rapidly enough that we can see it happen in a petri dish. What do you think antibiotic resistant bacteria are? They're evolved bacteria.
This process works quite well in other fields, too. Astrophysics and cosmology make predictions that are hard to immediately verify without working with humungous amounts of energy, or a couple planets to smash together. Still, there are falsifiable claims based on the universe that we observe around us. We think the Earth's moon is there because a Mars-sized bolide collided with our planet relatively early in its formation, and blasted a moon-sized chunk off, while the Earth absorbed the rest. This nicely explains why we always see the same side of the moon pointing towards us (it's day is 28 days long, as is its orbit), why it's as far away as it is and why it's getting further away, and all that stuff.
You clearly don't have a grounding in science, and I'm not going to call you names for it. But this is what we should be teaching kids in school. That you make statements like this is proof to me that kids aren't getting the educations that they need. I don't think you're stupid, I just think someone didn't give you the facts that you needed.