Correct, at least as far as it can be. Carroll has Humpty Dumpty give an explanation:
"And then 'mome raths'?" said Alice. "If I'm not giving you too much trouble."
"Well a 'rath' is a sort of green pig, but 'mome' I'm not certain about. I think it's sort for 'from home'--meaning that they'd lost their way, you know."
"And what does 'outgrabe' mean?"
"Well, 'outgribing' is something between bellowing an whistling, with a kind of sneeze in the middle: however, you'll hear it done, maybe--down in the wood yonder--and when you've once heard it, you'll be quite content. Who's been repeating all that hard stuff to you?"
"I read it in a book", said Alice.
Then again Carroll contradicts Humpty Dumpty's interpretation in other explanations he gave elsewhere (though AFIAK this particular line wasn't part of that other explanation).
Yes I do, but I wasn't responding to the article, I was responding to the writeup of the article.
No you weren't because the write-up mentioned the relevant points: "lower-cost ethanol" and "fuel cell technology that can use impure hydrogen"
You were issuing a knee-jerk response that didn't take into account what even the write-up mentioned.
You are right about everything you said. Had you read the article you would have noticed they were about reducing exactly the problems you mention.
The point of the first article was that you can create Hydrogen from Ethanol (Corn) instead of petrol, natural gas or water. The process is 1) inexpensive 2) More efficient conversion of ethanol to energy than bi-diesel and 3) the ethanol used doesn't need as much processing as that in bio-diesel.
The second article was about getting the ethanol itself from more of the plant and thus more efficiently. It's about a commercially viable way to make ethanol from cellulose rather than only from the grain. That means you can make ethanol from much of the plant, perhaps the entire plant, perhaps from other plants - rather than just from the grain (you know that little tiny seed).
Now, these types of articles are always overblown & ignore significant problems. Most of the time nothing much comes from it. You're right to be skeptical - But when someone says "We've solved problem X to process Y!" you can't just ignore what they just said and say "we can't use process Y because of problem X"
A huge percentage of the corn the US grows isn't fit for human consumption and is just used to feed cattle. We wouldn't be putting a "big dent" in the world food supply.
In case it comes up in any future discussion. Beef is a food.
The cube was a definite miss. Sadly it could have been a big hit, it was a great idea, a great machine. They just got the price point wrong (WAY wrong). It was a headless iMac and should have been priced that way, if it had been it would have been a huge hit.
There was a big stink a few years back over Apple's licensing fees. When it first developed the tech it sold an unlimited royalty free license for $7,500 later as it gained traction they switched to $1.00 per port (for companies that hadn't taken advantage of the flat fee) - the sh*t hit the fan and there was much griping over charging a licensing fee for an open IEEE standard (despite that being allowed by the IEEE). Apple then had some licensing fee on just using the trademark "FireWire" but when everyone just started using "IEEE 1394" or "iLink" (sony's marketspeak for it) Apple backed down on that too. So now both the tech itself and the trademark are free licenses from Apple. There is some kind of patent pool between all the companies that had patents used for IEEE 1394 but I'm not sure if it's just patent cross-licensing or if there is some kind of licensing fee for Firewire that Apple may get some (significantly less than $1.00/port) slice of.
Are you saying that whatever party has been elected to hold the offices that control the County aparatus, appoints all the ballot design commissioners?
In short - yes. Longer answer follows: The design procedure may vary from county to county. But in any county the dominant party will dominate the process of designing the ballot. The infamous "butterfly" ballot was designed by one person - county elections supervisor Theresa LaPore (D). I'm sure there was a procedure for the other party to "sign off" on the design, but the design was originated by a Democrat and signed off by Republicans in that case. The Democratic strongholds that were the epicenter of the dispute would have similar partisan dynamics. It certainly wasn't a case of dastardly Republicans figuring out how to
manipulate some flaw in the system and the poor ignorant Democrats having the wool pulled over their eyes. If there was a single spot that was more likely to result in hanging or "pregnant" chad that just happened to go to Gore it would be inadvertent and only effect one or by chance two counties.
Really? And what methods were those?
Those methods included: not counting hanging or pregnant chad, counting hanging but not pregnant chad, counting both hanging and pregnant chad. Counting "overvotes" and not counting "overvotes". Counting by each standard in only the four counties that Gore wanted, and counting by each different standard in every county in the state.
How many of those recounts were done bearing in mind Dr Jones work?
The ones which counted "pregnant" and hanging chad would bear in mind Dr. Jones' work. Unless Dr. Jones is suggesting that pulling the lever for Gore would leave *no* mark at all and that all blank ballots should be counted for Gore. If that is his contention I think I can bet which lever he pulled;)
From CNN's study -
If Gore had gotten his four cherry-picked counties he would have lost by 225 votes, If all counties were recounted using the stricter standards that most counties were using Gore would have lost by 493 votes. Only if the entire state had bee recounted using the most liberal standard Gore would have won by 42 votes. If you include spoiled ballots that had two votes for president (which is always invalidated) but where one was a write in for the same candidate that had been punched Gore would have won by less than 200 votes.
All of these margins of victory under different standards one way or the other out of a total vote of 5.96 million votes which is less than.0001% well within the margin of error when dealing with even a perfect system being used by imperfect humans. It is also well below the margin of fraud - usually not a big problem but it DOES exist and it does tend to be a bit more prevalent with big city political machines (which are all Democratic) than in the suburbs (which are Republican). I'm quite sure if it had gone the other way we would hear as much whining from Republicans finding ineligible felons, aliens, the recently deceased and family pets casting votes. We would probably also hear a lot more about the effect of the winner being called 15 - 20 minutes before polls had closed in the Republican dominated panhandle this certainly cost Bush some significant (given the margins we are talking about) number of votes.
If I were an American I would be really embarrassed by the dubious election practices that were exposed to World scrutiny during your last Presidential election.
You would only be embarrassed if you weren't applying any though to it. It looks bad, yes in some ways it *is* bad. But the appearance is much worse than the reality. Think about it - we are talking about a swing of less than 800 votes out of ~6 million, that is less than.0001% of the vote - the fact that that small a number is in dispute is actually pretty remarkable. I do
Actually that's not quite true. The big paper companies do have large forests that they try to manage but they cut trees much faster then they are being replenished. This is why there is relentless pressure to log the national forests. If the harvest from private acreage was sustainable they would never need to log the national forests.
Actually that's not quite true. My understanding is that the big paper companies are doing fine with their private holdings. The pressure to log the national forests is coming from small, growing companies that don't have the vast existing holdings of the big guys.
If you were paying attention during the followup to the election you might have noticed that the Republicans were not defending the ballot design. Instead they merely pointed out that the Democrats signed off on it too
A minor point but If you were paying attention you might have noticed that the ballot in question was NOT designed by "partisan amateurs, one from each party" but by partisan amateurs from ONE party. The counties in question were all Democratic strongholds and the officials that designed & approved the ballot were all Democrats. There was no "outsmarting" by Republicans, aside from perhaps doing a more competent job in those counties where they were the ones in charge.
Every independent recount using every method of dealing with pregnant/hanging chad have almost always come back with victories for Bush. The only recounts that have given Gore any chance were statewide recounts of all counties with the most expansive standard for counting unclear ballots. Either Democrats across the state, with different ballots and a wide variety of voting systems are *still* more likely to screw up than Republicans OR (more likely) news organizations which have a bias for *controversy* had a tendency to be a little kinder to Gore than to Bush when making judgment calls and that this bias only tipped the scale when given the largest number of ballots and the broadest scope for judgment calls by the counters.
Simply put the margin of victory was within the margin of error. Even within the margin of error of a significantly better system. The margin of victory was also well within the margin of election fraud - over zealous activists voting multiple times, voting for other people, aliens managing to vote, the occasional dead person, or family pet that by some miracle manages to "vote". It was also within the margin of legitimate voters that were intimidated or invalidated due to perfectly legitimate attempts to stem such fraud. This is not to say there is a lot of fraud (though Miami is notorious for it) or that efforts to stem fraud are too rigorous and doing more harm than good - but that the margin of victory was so small that the "real" winner is probably unknowable.
$61million in profits can barely drive R&D for a company like Dell or Gateway.
Profits are what you have AFTER you pay for everything, INCLUDING research & development. The R&D is somewhere in the 2.01 Billion, the $61 Million is what was left over and sent out to stockholders.
Dell is a behemoth but Apple is doing MUCH better than Gateway which had less than half the revenue (around $800 million) and a LOSS (that would be the opposite of a "profit" ) of around.14 a share (as opposed to Apples PROFIT of 16/share) and not including another $200 - $300 million of additional expenses due to restructuring they are pushing off until next quarter. And the sad thing was, for them this was GOOD NEWS! They expected to do worse!
so I searched for Alan Smithee on IMDB and I get that name for directors of some of the greatest movies ever made, several are on the IMDB's top 250 list.
No, the IMDB page is saying those directors, with their most famous movies in parenthesis so you'll know who they are, are sometimes AKA "Alan Smithee". So for instance John Frankenheimer directed "12 Angry Men" and was credited as such. He ALSO directed a 1987 TV movie "Riviera" under the name Alan Smithee - meaning that "Riviera" sucked, he hated it and didn't want his name associated with it.
Explain to me why photoshop, illustrator and the like are better on the mac?
Colorsync. to quote creativepro.com
Color management in Windows is "bolted on to satisfy a small part of their user base," said color consultant and creativepro contributing editor Bruce Fraser. "Applications that use color management [under Windows] ignore the OS. They do it all themselves."
Also because the onsite freelance gig you just got is going to have you sitting in front of a mac. OR because every freelancer you hire will struggle on an unfamiliar platform if you sit them in front of a PC. Because every quark file you get will come with mac formatted type 1 fonts, sure you can convert them with a utility but it's one more hassle.
Oddly enough in this little corner of the world software availability is better on the mac. Sure the big software packages are also available on windows. There are even plenty of windows only packages but they tend to be strictly amateur, or at best "prosumer" but those little utilities geared towards professionals tend to be mac first or mac only. Windows has come a long way since Adobe was Mac only but software geared towards designers, photographers et al still tend to come out for the mac first. Apple is certainly pushing this along with their own efforts (FInalCut Pro, DVD Studio Pro etc. and soon ImageCore and VideoCore)
Gates saw Microsoft which was a little nothing company that sold BASIC to hobbyists eclipse IBM . He knows it wasn't because he was smarter or better but because of IBM's complacency and M$'s dumb luck and a bit of aggressiveness. He learned that business giants are not as invulnerable as they look. Now that he is the giant he is afraid that the same thing can happen to him. So he he sees threats in every tiny start-up, he is afraid that he is going to miss The Next Big Thing(TM) and be knocked on his ass by two guys in their garage. (which almost really happened with Netscape) So he will either co-opt or crush those little start-ups when they start to look promising. But he's still afraid, he's still looking over his shoulder because somewhere, out there, there is a guy coding in his basement, filing a patent, tinkering in his garage on some seed of Microsofts ruin.
On top of that threat from beneath there is also the threat from his big business peers. IBM, Apple, Sun, Oracle, etc. - they all want to knock Microsoft down. Combined they account for even more intellectual and financial capital. He's on top now and they *HAVE* to work with him but they resent it. If M$ teeters it's disgruntled allies will seek to knock him down. Some of them with a great deal of pleasure.
We see Microsoft on top but Gates sees it as being on top in the same way a rodeo rider is on top of the horse.
Sure it could. RFID readers can be printed onto contact paper, which can line the hold of the plane. I don't know that they would bother on a plane since they probably don't need to know *exactly* where it is, only that it is in fact in there. But in other situations like a retail store or warehouse RFID tags let them know *exactly* where something is: "Yes Ma'am, we do have one of those items left, someone misplaced it and it's on the end-cap by register 3, third shelf down, near the back."
Please will people stop repeating this. Apple is not a hardware company. Apple is not a software company. Apple is a solutions company
Fair enough but the whole point of the software side of the "Solution" is to sell the hardware side. They had ~ $1.5 Billion in revenues from hardware sales in Q2 of this year and only $213 in Software, actually not even that since Software is bundled together with "Other" which I'm assuming includes everything from AppleCare warranty sales, sales of 3rd party products through Apple Stores and website, Music from iTunes,.mac fees etc. etc. etc.
Given those numbers I'm perfectly happy describing them as a "hardware company" even if their hook to sell that hardware is that it is part of a total hardware/software/services solution. A more balanced "solutions" company might sacrifice some hardware sales to bolster it's more profitable software sales or may sacrifice hardware sales to get into the growing services sector of the industry. Apple will never do this because by the numbers they ARE a hardware company. They will never risk their $1.2 Billion in Mac sales even if by doing so they could double their (under) $213 million in software no matter how high the profit margins on that $213. Apple may be a solutions company but where it counts (the bottom line) they are a hardware company and will act like one.
Stuart Cheshire, the guy that first proposed Zeroconf and started the ZeroConf group did so as an Apple employee on Apple's dime. I think it's fair to say that it is an Apple technology that they opened up as a standard from the very beginning. This announcement is just that Apple is opening up it's own in-house implementation of an open standard that also started in their labs.
Rendezvous is *not* an Apple invention. It's Apple's name for "zero-conf," and Apple never claimed to have invented it. Apple just made it popular.
Actually, they sort of did. Zeroconf was initially developed by Stuart Cheshire who is an Apple employee with the job title of "Wizard Without Portfolio".
No, you are wrong... or more correctly only partly right. Rendezvous is Apple marketing-speak for zeroconf which involves, to quote the zeroconf website:
Allocate addresses without a DHCP server.
Translate between names and IP addresses without a DNS server.
Find services, like printers, without a directory server.
Allocate IP Multicast addresses without a MADCAP server.
You are quite accurately describing point 3 whereas the parent was describing points 1,2 and 4. But ALL FOUR are rendezvous/zeroconf.
"Insightful" my ass. "Delusional" would be the better adjective. Releasing an OS for Intel would never happen not because Jobs was paid off but because Apple is now, and always has been, a hardware company. A company that makes ~4 billion a year in hardware revenues is not going to abandon that in favor of the few hundred million they make in software.
Apple was "paid off" but the payoff was to drop a lawsuit not to drop development of "rhapsody for Intel" and/or "rhapsody for Windows" which had already been abandoned.
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Yes I do, but I wasn't responding to the article, I was responding to the writeup of the article. No you weren't because the write-up mentioned the relevant points: "lower-cost ethanol" and "fuel cell technology that can use impure hydrogen" You were issuing a knee-jerk response that didn't take into account what even the write-up mentioned.
Doesn't anybody read the articles?
You are right about everything you said. Had you read the article you would have noticed they were about reducing exactly the problems you mention.
The point of the first article was that you can create Hydrogen from Ethanol (Corn) instead of petrol, natural gas or water. The process is 1) inexpensive 2) More efficient conversion of ethanol to energy than bi-diesel and 3) the ethanol used doesn't need as much processing as that in bio-diesel.
The second article was about getting the ethanol itself from more of the plant and thus more efficiently. It's about a commercially viable way to make ethanol from cellulose rather than only from the grain. That means you can make ethanol from much of the plant, perhaps the entire plant, perhaps from other plants - rather than just from the grain (you know that little tiny seed).
Now, these types of articles are always overblown & ignore significant problems. Most of the time nothing much comes from it. You're right to be skeptical - But when someone says "We've solved problem X to process Y!" you can't just ignore what they just said and say "we can't use process Y because of problem X"
A huge percentage of the corn the US grows isn't fit for human consumption and is just used to feed cattle. We wouldn't be putting a "big dent" in the world food supply.
In case it comes up in any future discussion. Beef is a food.
It may be off topic... but from the bottom of my heart. Thank you!
The jibjab masacree"
we'll just forget about the Cube
The cube was a definite miss. Sadly it could have been a big hit, it was a great idea, a great machine. They just got the price point wrong (WAY wrong). It was a headless iMac and should have been priced that way, if it had been it would have been a huge hit.
There was a big stink a few years back over Apple's licensing fees. When it first developed the tech it sold an unlimited royalty free license for $7,500 later as it gained traction they switched to $1.00 per port (for companies that hadn't taken advantage of the flat fee) - the sh*t hit the fan and there was much griping over charging a licensing fee for an open IEEE standard (despite that being allowed by the IEEE). Apple then had some licensing fee on just using the trademark "FireWire" but when everyone just started using "IEEE 1394" or "iLink" (sony's marketspeak for it) Apple backed down on that too. So now both the tech itself and the trademark are free licenses from Apple. There is some kind of patent pool between all the companies that had patents used for IEEE 1394 but I'm not sure if it's just patent cross-licensing or if there is some kind of licensing fee for Firewire that Apple may get some (significantly less than $1.00/port) slice of.
Are you saying that whatever party has been elected to hold the offices that control the County aparatus, appoints all the ballot design commissioners?
;)
.0001% well within the margin of error when dealing with even a perfect system being used by imperfect humans. It is also well below the margin of fraud - usually not a big problem but it DOES exist and it does tend to be a bit more prevalent with big city political machines (which are all Democratic) than in the suburbs (which are Republican). I'm quite sure if it had gone the other way we would hear as much whining from Republicans finding ineligible felons, aliens, the recently deceased and family pets casting votes. We would probably also hear a lot more about the effect of the winner being called 15 - 20 minutes before polls had closed in the Republican dominated panhandle this certainly cost Bush some significant (given the margins we are talking about) number of votes.
.0001% of the vote - the fact that that small a number is in dispute is actually pretty remarkable. I do
In short - yes. Longer answer follows: The design procedure may vary from county to county. But in any county the dominant party will dominate the process of designing the ballot. The infamous "butterfly" ballot was designed by one person - county elections supervisor Theresa LaPore (D). I'm sure there was a procedure for the other party to "sign off" on the design, but the design was originated by a Democrat and signed off by Republicans in that case. The Democratic strongholds that were the epicenter of the dispute would have similar partisan dynamics. It certainly wasn't a case of dastardly Republicans figuring out how to manipulate some flaw in the system and the poor ignorant Democrats having the wool pulled over their eyes. If there was a single spot that was more likely to result in hanging or "pregnant" chad that just happened to go to Gore it would be inadvertent and only effect one or by chance two counties.
Really? And what methods were those?
Those methods included: not counting hanging or pregnant chad, counting hanging but not pregnant chad, counting both hanging and pregnant chad. Counting "overvotes" and not counting "overvotes". Counting by each standard in only the four counties that Gore wanted, and counting by each different standard in every county in the state.
How many of those recounts were done bearing in mind Dr Jones work?
The ones which counted "pregnant" and hanging chad would bear in mind Dr. Jones' work. Unless Dr. Jones is suggesting that pulling the lever for Gore would leave *no* mark at all and that all blank ballots should be counted for Gore. If that is his contention I think I can bet which lever he pulled
From CNN's study - If Gore had gotten his four cherry-picked counties he would have lost by 225 votes, If all counties were recounted using the stricter standards that most counties were using Gore would have lost by 493 votes. Only if the entire state had bee recounted using the most liberal standard Gore would have won by 42 votes. If you include spoiled ballots that had two votes for president (which is always invalidated) but where one was a write in for the same candidate that had been punched Gore would have won by less than 200 votes.
All of these margins of victory under different standards one way or the other out of a total vote of 5.96 million votes which is less than
If I were an American I would be really embarrassed by the dubious election practices that were exposed to World scrutiny during your last Presidential election.
You would only be embarrassed if you weren't applying any though to it. It looks bad, yes in some ways it *is* bad. But the appearance is much worse than the reality. Think about it - we are talking about a swing of less than 800 votes out of ~6 million, that is less than
Actually that's not quite true. The big paper companies do have large forests that they try to manage but they cut trees much faster then they are being replenished. This is why there is relentless pressure to log the national forests. If the harvest from private acreage was sustainable they would never need to log the national forests.
Actually that's not quite true. My understanding is that the big paper companies are doing fine with their private holdings. The pressure to log the national forests is coming from small, growing companies that don't have the vast existing holdings of the big guys.
If you were paying attention during the followup to the election you might have noticed that the Republicans were not defending the ballot design. Instead they merely pointed out that the Democrats signed off on it too
A minor point but If you were paying attention you might have noticed that the ballot in question was NOT designed by "partisan amateurs, one from each party" but by partisan amateurs from ONE party. The counties in question were all Democratic strongholds and the officials that designed & approved the ballot were all Democrats. There was no "outsmarting" by Republicans, aside from perhaps doing a more competent job in those counties where they were the ones in charge.
Every independent recount using every method of dealing with pregnant/hanging chad have almost always come back with victories for Bush. The only recounts that have given Gore any chance were statewide recounts of all counties with the most expansive standard for counting unclear ballots. Either Democrats across the state, with different ballots and a wide variety of voting systems are *still* more likely to screw up than Republicans OR (more likely) news organizations which have a bias for *controversy* had a tendency to be a little kinder to Gore than to Bush when making judgment calls and that this bias only tipped the scale when given the largest number of ballots and the broadest scope for judgment calls by the counters.
Simply put the margin of victory was within the margin of error. Even within the margin of error of a significantly better system. The margin of victory was also well within the margin of election fraud - over zealous activists voting multiple times, voting for other people, aliens managing to vote, the occasional dead person, or family pet that by some miracle manages to "vote". It was also within the margin of legitimate voters that were intimidated or invalidated due to perfectly legitimate attempts to stem such fraud. This is not to say there is a lot of fraud (though Miami is notorious for it) or that efforts to stem fraud are too rigorous and doing more harm than good - but that the margin of victory was so small that the "real" winner is probably unknowable.
Bottled water is unregulated. In some cases it *is* in fact just tap water. But, it's in a bottle, so it's worth $2.00.
$61million in profits can barely drive R&D for a company like Dell or Gateway.
.14 a share (as opposed to Apples PROFIT of 16/share) and not including another $200 - $300 million of additional expenses due to restructuring they are pushing off until next quarter. And the sad thing was, for them this was GOOD NEWS! They expected to do worse!
Profits are what you have AFTER you pay for everything, INCLUDING research & development. The R&D is somewhere in the 2.01 Billion, the $61 Million is what was left over and sent out to stockholders.
Dell is a behemoth but Apple is doing MUCH better than Gateway which had less than half the revenue (around $800 million) and a LOSS (that would be the opposite of a "profit" ) of around
Hey, I'm looking forward to be able to type "grep socks".
You got modded "funny" but really that *is* the point.
If you're going to steal music, be honest about it at least.
heh heh - that made me laugh.
Oops, I meant "The Manchurian Candidate" not "12 Angry Men" - I clicked the wrong link on the IMDB.
so I searched for Alan Smithee on IMDB and I get that name for directors of some of the greatest movies ever made, several are on the IMDB's top 250 list.
No, the IMDB page is saying those directors, with their most famous movies in parenthesis so you'll know who they are, are sometimes AKA "Alan Smithee". So for instance John Frankenheimer directed "12 Angry Men" and was credited as such. He ALSO directed a 1987 TV movie "Riviera" under the name Alan Smithee - meaning that "Riviera" sucked, he hated it and didn't want his name associated with it.
Colorsync. to quote creativepro.com Also because the onsite freelance gig you just got is going to have you sitting in front of a mac. OR because every freelancer you hire will struggle on an unfamiliar platform if you sit them in front of a PC. Because every quark file you get will come with mac formatted type 1 fonts, sure you can convert them with a utility but it's one more hassle.
Oddly enough in this little corner of the world software availability is better on the mac. Sure the big software packages are also available on windows. There are even plenty of windows only packages but they tend to be strictly amateur, or at best "prosumer" but those little utilities geared towards professionals tend to be mac first or mac only. Windows has come a long way since Adobe was Mac only but software geared towards designers, photographers et al still tend to come out for the mac first. Apple is certainly pushing this along with their own efforts (FInalCut Pro, DVD Studio Pro etc. and soon ImageCore and VideoCore)
Gates saw Microsoft which was a little nothing company that sold BASIC to hobbyists eclipse IBM . He knows it wasn't because he was smarter or better but because of IBM's complacency and M$'s dumb luck and a bit of aggressiveness. He learned that business giants are not as invulnerable as they look. Now that he is the giant he is afraid that the same thing can happen to him. So he he sees threats in every tiny start-up, he is afraid that he is going to miss The Next Big Thing(TM) and be knocked on his ass by two guys in their garage. (which almost really happened with Netscape) So he will either co-opt or crush those little start-ups when they start to look promising. But he's still afraid, he's still looking over his shoulder because somewhere, out there, there is a guy coding in his basement, filing a patent, tinkering in his garage on some seed of Microsofts ruin.
On top of that threat from beneath there is also the threat from his big business peers. IBM, Apple, Sun, Oracle, etc. - they all want to knock Microsoft down. Combined they account for even more intellectual and financial capital. He's on top now and they *HAVE* to work with him but they resent it. If M$ teeters it's disgruntled allies will seek to knock him down. Some of them with a great deal of pleasure.
We see Microsoft on top but Gates sees it as being on top in the same way a rodeo rider is on top of the horse.
Sure it could. RFID readers can be printed onto contact paper, which can line the hold of the plane. I don't know that they would bother on a plane since they probably don't need to know *exactly* where it is, only that it is in fact in there. But in other situations like a retail store or warehouse RFID tags let them know *exactly* where something is: "Yes Ma'am, we do have one of those items left, someone misplaced it and it's on the end-cap by register 3, third shelf down, near the back."
Please will people stop repeating this. Apple is not a hardware company. Apple is not a software company. Apple is a solutions company
.mac fees etc. etc. etc.
Fair enough but the whole point of the software side of the "Solution" is to sell the hardware side. They had ~ $1.5 Billion in revenues from hardware sales in Q2 of this year and only $213 in Software, actually not even that since Software is bundled together with "Other" which I'm assuming includes everything from AppleCare warranty sales, sales of 3rd party products through Apple Stores and website, Music from iTunes,
Given those numbers I'm perfectly happy describing them as a "hardware company" even if their hook to sell that hardware is that it is part of a total hardware/software/services solution. A more balanced "solutions" company might sacrifice some hardware sales to bolster it's more profitable software sales or may sacrifice hardware sales to get into the growing services sector of the industry. Apple will never do this because by the numbers they ARE a hardware company. They will never risk their $1.2 Billion in Mac sales even if by doing so they could double their (under) $213 million in software no matter how high the profit margins on that $213. Apple may be a solutions company but where it counts (the bottom line) they are a hardware company and will act like one.
Stuart Cheshire, the guy that first proposed Zeroconf and started the ZeroConf group did so as an Apple employee on Apple's dime. I think it's fair to say that it is an Apple technology that they opened up as a standard from the very beginning. This announcement is just that Apple is opening up it's own in-house implementation of an open standard that also started in their labs.
Rendezvous is *not* an Apple invention. It's Apple's name for "zero-conf," and Apple never claimed to have invented it. Apple just made it popular.
Actually, they sort of did. Zeroconf was initially developed by Stuart Cheshire who is an Apple employee with the job title of "Wizard Without Portfolio".
- Allocate addresses without a DHCP server.
- Translate between names and IP addresses without a DNS server.
- Find services, like printers, without a directory server.
- Allocate IP Multicast addresses without a MADCAP server.
You are quite accurately describing point 3 whereas the parent was describing points 1,2 and 4. But ALL FOUR are rendezvous/zeroconf."Insightful" my ass. "Delusional" would be the better adjective. Releasing an OS for Intel would never happen not because Jobs was paid off but because Apple is now, and always has been, a hardware company. A company that makes ~4 billion a year in hardware revenues is not going to abandon that in favor of the few hundred million they make in software.
Apple was "paid off" but the payoff was to drop a lawsuit not to drop development of "rhapsody for Intel" and/or "rhapsody for Windows" which had already been abandoned.