Add to that list, the ability to record your calls to a removable 2GB flash memory card. When this becomes ubiquitous then all those customer service reps and salespeople you speak with over cell phones might stop being such pathological liars when speaking to you over the phone becuae you can then play their own words right back to them.
The treo will do this, with the $20 CallRec program. The windows mobile based phones can generally do this as well, some even have the software built-in. I've even seen apps (on windows mobile) to replay these recorded conversations to the person you're calling to, so you can prove to them over the phone what SOB's they are.
I think they sell the jazzy camera/music phones with lots of features because they are getting money on all of them. Want pictures? - they have them, and they will charge you to send them anywhere. Music and ringtones - same thing. The phones cost more at the front end (though more than they cost to make? I don't know) but they include the possibility of making more money with the services.
You're confusing handset makers with providers. In my country phone companies are forbidden from tying the phone to the service, and phones generally compete on their merits, instead of on what provider is backing them.
There's no conspiracy here, those features aren't in phones for simple but sufficient reasons. From the thread originating post:
Detailed call history: It would be too complex to use, so phone makers place a simpler call history in there because Joe Random will actually be able to use it, and 99 percent of people will be perfectly satisfied with it.
Solar charging: Isn't in there because battery technology (especially lithium ion) doesn't support that method of charging (constant slow charge, instead of sporadic fast charge).
Fingerprint scanners: Aren't on phones because they're expensive and useless without infrastructure to support them. These will be launched as separate devices before they will get integrated into phones.
Intuitive dial: Requires GPS to tie it to location, which most phones don't have.
You should try this with a book - after all, who the heck is the author to decide that Chapter 7 comes immediately before Chapter 8?
I know people who read the ending of books first because they get irritated when books keep them in the dark too long about the plot. I think they're missing out, but if they make the choice to miss out, who am I to tell them they can't make that choice?
If music should only be enjoyed as the artist intended, all of us need high-end hi-fi systems that cost thousands of dollars. And just forget about using that ipod, unless you've hooked it up via the cradle's line out to a pair of studio headphones and listening to lossless encoded music.
Artists just do not deserve a say in how I listen to my paid-for music. I often choose to listen to the whole album, but only because it's my personal choice, not because some elitist musician got on his high horse.
I look forward to the day when web developers won't have to develop multiple versions for multiple browsers.
To be honest, my dayjob is coding web applications, and I only have a single codebase. No different pages for different browsers needed. I don't even think I've used the voice-family hack anywhere. Ofcourse, god help you if you decide to use a quirks mode doctype.
Of course, if there were automatic furniture building machines that could copy the furniture in a few minutes, betcha you'd find people arguing that nobody will make any new furniture unless this rampant carpentry piracy is prevented, and that carpenters deserve monopoly rights to protect them from competition.
Your example doesn't hold with mass production. Mass production has a large up-front design investment, which is repaid with every mass-produced copy sold. This holds for chairs as well. If matter scanner/printers became cheap enough that you could duplicate a chair for not much more than the material cost, I can assure you that Ikea would go out of business. Why buy a genuine Ikea chair when you can get a perfectly capable replica for a fraction of the price?
I fully expect to see this revolution happen within my lifetime. Matter printers will change the entire value proposition of the market. Software is on the vanguard of this movement. By making the value of a copy worthless (because almost no production costs are involved), you must assign value to the idea and its initial realization, instead of to the copy. Ideas no longer remain free, but become something that must be paid for in full, or people can't earn a living wage.
The problem is that Flash doesn't actually *do* anything useful (there is a weak argument for video) but decreases accessibility and usability.
You don't know flash then.
First of all, the majority of ajax apps have lousy accessibility. Flash at least offers an accessibility api so that if you want you can design your app so it will work with a screen reader. Ajax offers no such thing. Both platforms allow you to build an accessible app, and both require a considerable amount of effort, so neither has the advantage.
Secondly, flash offers vector graphics and bitmap editing facilities. No such facilities exist in ajax (cross-browser), aside from extremely costly server round-trips. Anything that deals with rich media generally requires flash to be done sensibly).
Examples of things that are perfectly feasible in flash, but impossible with ajax: - building a paint shop pro like bitmap editing app (admittedly, you're restricted to bitmaps of 2880x2880 if you want advanced effects, like emboss and so on) - building a web-based streaming mp3 player (like for a radio station) - building a vector graphics editing application (SVG+JS doesn't cut it due to nearly non-existant cross-browser support, I've tried) - building an IM app with voice and video support - building any app that needs exact control over printing, without a server round-trip to generate a PDF. Even if round-tripping for PDF is possible, generating it may not be. For example, afaik there are no free PDF PHP libraries that deal adequately with unicode text (while flash has complete unicode support built-in).
Third, there is no requirement to build the entire web app in flash. I use it just for the parts that can't be done in ajax, and only those parts. This increases usability, instead of decreasing it.
Don't blame the tool for its use. Flash is powerful, and that power can be used for ill as well as good. I'm a professional web developer, and I'm of the opinion that any web developer who refuses to learn the ins and outs of flash and what it can do for him, is not worthy of the title.
The fundamental problem with Flash is the same as it ever was. You have a presentation format that wraps up presentation, scripting and content into one binary bundle that couples everything together so tightly it's impossible to decompose. You might as well stick a Powerpoint presentation on the web. Virtually all of Flash's other problems that people complain about are merely symptoms of this one underlying design flaw.
Yes, and when you put text in png banner images, you can't copy/paste that text, so png is evil!
This is not an actual flash limitation. Nothing forces you to build your entire app in flash. It's quite feasible to build only those parts in flash that can't be done in ajax, and build the rest in ajax, using the javascript-to-flash gateway to communicate between the two. Flash is just another tool in the sensible web developer's belt. I use it whenever there's something that can't be done with PHP/HTML/JS/CSS, and generally build a drop-in component that I can integrate in my web apps, using a javascript API.
I kind of feel bad for Cyc/OpenCyc... they've put so many years into this project, but using web-based games to collect and verify this common-sense data is much faster than using a few paid experts and can give much more data.
Cyc actually does use web games to vet their ontology and assertions. It remains to be seen whether web games can construct an ontology of the quality of cyc's. Too many clever people have proclaimed too many BS assertions about their AI projects to take anything but practical results seriously.
Re:Flash as an application development platform
on
The Future of Flash
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· Score: 1
Sorry, it's part of a larger commercial product, and it's not a generic viewer (its meant to view and edit building floorplans). For example, it only supports quadratic arcs in the SVG format, because that's all that flash supports natively (the non-quadratic arcs, circles and ellipses get converted server-side to quadratic arcs).
I don't know what you did, but that does not jive with my experience. I haven't seen any windows system yet that the flash installer failed on. And yes, you can copy around the plugin dll (I've done so). I even have a portable firefox installation on a USB key with the flash player, so I don't have to install flash on the local system. I haven't tried this as a restricted user though.
A few remarks: - Flash 8 is the latest release, flash player 9 is available, but there is no flash authoring environment for it yet (there is a flex environment, but that's a different product). - Flash 7 is available on linux and for most web apps it is just as capable as flash 8. My company sells flash apps, and we currently target flash player 7. Believe me when I tell you it is nothing to sneeze at. - Macromedia chose to skip the flash 8 player for linux because they're moving their entire player codebase to gcc, so they can build players for all platforms, and didn't want to get sidetracked while doing that. They'll be releasing the flash 9 player for linux in time with the authoring environment.
Re:Flash as an application development platform
on
The Future of Flash
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
That's exactly what SVG is supposed to be for -- and it has the distinct advantage over flash in that it can be integrated with that "HTML/DHTML/AJAX/whatever" stuff you mention.
You seem to be mistaken about what SVG and flash are for. I've built a web-based CAD app before, and ended up implementing a combination of the two. Comparing SVG to flash is like comparing HTML to PHP. Flash is good for run-time manipulation of vector graphics, but it is lousy at vector graphics exchange (since you can't edit an swf). SVG excels at vector graphics exchange, but the cross-browser support for run-time manipulation is virtually non-existant. I ended up building an SVG editor in flash, which is a sensible combination when you look at the strengths of each.
Anyway, I know a lot of people here hate flash, so as an ajax and flash developer, let me be burst a few bubbles:
Flash is an amazingly capable web app development platform. It is a lot more easy to develop complex web apps in than ajax (regardless of your choice of ajax toolchain). Some things are just not feasible with any alternative (like exact control over printing without forcing a costly round-trip to the server to generate a PDF). It is not an accident that yahoo's new maps and google finance are built in flash.
There is an open source toolchain for flash development (built around eclipse, swfmill and the open source mtasc actionscript compiler). Currently only the player is not open sourced, and that could be easily reimplemented since the swf format is fully documented.
Flash integrates well with HTML/JS/PHP/... There is a javascript to flash bridge, and so you can build a web app that is a mixture of flash and javascript. My CAD app has a HTML-based toolbar, and a flash content area. Interacting with PHP is a matter of either using the built-in XML classes, or using the AMFPHP framework, which lets you transmit wholly-formed objects between flash and PHP without having to do any parsing in between.
Flash is at least as easy (or difficult) to build accessible apps in as AJAX, since AJAX has all the same downsides of flash when it comes to accessibility, and unlike flash it doesn't have an accessibility API to make up for it.
There are frameworks out there for building desktop apps with flash. It's straightforward to build a web app and a desktop app that share the same codebase.
If there is some kind of Linux at the bottom of it - great, but running Linux is not much of a selling point if the UI is junk.
Bingo. For a phone the primary factor is usability. If the phone doesn't do what you want, when you want, in a way your grandma could figure out, it often ends up being a really expensive paperweight.
The way I see it a linux phone will succeed when it has two things: a consistent and easy to use UI that works just fine out of the box (no tweaking necessary), and strong affordable third-party application support, with those third-party apps having the same easy to use style of UI as the built-in stuff. For that to happen you need a dictatorship. Cooperative projects can't deliver that. And since OSS is all about cooperation, I sincerely doubt that if a linux phone succeeds it will have an OSS user interface.
this system could possibly yield better voter turnout...
It doesn't really matter how many voters turn out. As long as the system doesn't allow for proportional representation you'll still have a two-party system which still limits voter choice. Voting for any other party would still be "throwing away your vote", and the existing plutocracy (democrats and republicans) would remain in power.
When was the last time you went to a website that said "This site only viewable in Fire Fox" ?
Ironically enough not as long ago as one that said "this site only viewable in internet explorer". I haven't seen a site in ages that only worked in IE. My company makes intranet applications for large corporations and multinationals and we build on firefox and make it compatible with IE.
I'm sure there are intranet apps left that require IE, but any regular website requiring it at this point can and should be shunned.
But firefox is inferrior in the one place that counts: support. Furthermore, nothing prevented consumers from getting any other browser by choice, they merely did not choose.
What support? Have you ever heard of anyone who called microsoft support because they had a problem with IE? I haven't. If you call your ISP, they'll help you just as well (or poorly) regardless of whether you're running IE or firefox.
How about being able to install a program just by visiting a website, or get updates for said program? I'm not just talking about malware here - lots of legit programs like Flash, Java, and Yahoo Messenger can be installed the same way in Windows using IE. I know this behavior makes people like here cringe, but some people are used to it.
So, you genuinely think it's a good idea for websites you visit to install software without asking you about it first? Are you really going to argue in favor of this?
How about being hassled for a password when you try to install a program or change a system setting or Mac OS, while Windows just lets you do it? Yes, I know there is a good reason for this, but try explaining it to the Joe Averages out there, in particular the ones that don't share their computer with people they don't trust.
The majority of mac apps (including browsers and IM programs) can be installed simply by dragging the icon from the window that opens after the download completes to the applications folder (or anywhere on your hard drive basically), no password required. This is even easier than windows. Removing it is a matter of dragging the icon from the applications folder to the trash.
Those apps that require changing aspects of your operating system, like installing stuff that loads on boot, do require that you enter your password first, which only makes sense. I definitely want to be asked when some application decides it wants to mess with my OS.
The system settings users are likely to want to change, desktop backgrounds, screen savers, network configuration, don't require a password.
Besides, from what I understand Vista has the same kind of user behavior, only less friendly (more clicks, more prompts). The "root by default" model is one of the dominant reasons why spyware and viruses have had so much success.
I'm curious. What do you need the radeon for? Macs still aren't gaming rigs unless you're dualbooting to windows, and at that point, why bother buying a mac?
Since that is what he predicted originally it doesn't seem like he has anything new to say. (except perhaps to add more buzzwords into the fray)
Even 4 years ago these kinds of predictions were not visionary at all. Everyone could see the mobile lifestyle approaching. It was visionary when Neal Stephenson wrote about it in Snow Crash a decade before this guy did.
If we simply stay or go.. we lose.. the question is is there any graceful ways at all to exit this ultimate example of a bad idea.
The UN is only too glad to send a peacekeeping force to Iraq to take over, but only if they actually get to take over. The US was only willing to allow a peacekeeping force if they kept control over the oil and reconstruction contracts. If america wanted out of Iraq without it falling into chaos and being blamed on them, they could.
Don't forget economies of scale, which are the reason that completely free markets over time become monopolies or cartels (because it is most profitable to all market players to let the market evolve into such a model).
Anyway, this "unregulated market is best for all" theory bugs me, because there is not a single example of it from the real world that speaks in favor of it (by which I mean a totally unregulated market that is stable and leads to prosperity for the agents involved in that market). I mean, if you favor something that has been shown to work somewhat (like communism), that I can respect, even if I may disagree (like with communism), but to favor something with zero real world backing? That's just crazy talk.
It already IS a Christian-run state, by the simple fact that Christians are the overwhelming majority in the US.
Self-confessed christians. Since few of them seem to act by any set of morals which you could conceive to be in corcondance with what is now generally accepted as the teachings of christ. For example, you can't have record poverty, do nothing about it, and still claim to be a christian without looking a might silly.
Still, it's true that a person can not be elected to congress unless they publicly claim to be a christian (unless someone knows of a non-christian congressman), so, yeah, by any sensible metric america is a christian-run state.
God is not malleable, the bible is not malleable, Christ's teachings are not malleable, they are there to read and to live by.
First of all, God may not be malleable, but your idea of him definitely is. Secondly, the bible is man-made (anyone having studied its history is forced to conclude this), so a valid opinion is that it is not the whole and accurate word of God, but rather a human perversion of God's message. There are many conflicting documents of christ's teachings, and once you start doubting the bible's accuracy and completeness, it's only a small step to doubting what was and wasn't a part of christ's teachings.
So, yeah, depending on where your beliefs lie, you can be a christian (someone who beliefs that christ was the son of God and sent to save us) and have completely different beliefs than what current bible canon dictates they should be.
Javascript has a concept known as closures (basically function objects), which when created inherit the scope they were created in, in the form of the scope chain. This scope chain can keep pointing to variables long after a naive reading of the code would seem to conclude nothing is pointing to them (by all references to them having explicitly be set to null). This in turn causes memory leaks. This is not a bug, but is behavior that is mandated by the ECMAScript standards, which firefox tries to aspire to.
I've run into this problem myself in an actionscript (flash) application, where I initially blamed flash for my memory bloat, until I learned that it was my own weak understanding of closures that was the cause.
Since firefox extensions are written in javascript, I expect that a lot of them have memory leaks in the form of ill-designed closures, which would cause the firefox process to bloat, even though the firefox developers are not at fault.
Patch files are definitely not derivative works. Minix came under a "no derivative works" license, but there was a lively patch community, with support from Tanenbaum.
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Add to that list, the ability to record your calls to a removable 2GB flash memory card. When this becomes ubiquitous then all those customer service reps and salespeople you speak with over cell phones might stop being such pathological liars when speaking to you over the phone becuae you can then play their own words right back to them.
The treo will do this, with the $20 CallRec program. The windows mobile based phones can generally do this as well, some even have the software built-in. I've even seen apps (on windows mobile) to replay these recorded conversations to the person you're calling to, so you can prove to them over the phone what SOB's they are.
You're confusing handset makers with providers. In my country phone companies are forbidden from tying the phone to the service, and phones generally compete on their merits, instead of on what provider is backing them.
There's no conspiracy here, those features aren't in phones for simple but sufficient reasons. From the thread originating post:
You should try this with a book - after all, who the heck is the author to decide that Chapter 7 comes immediately before Chapter 8?
I know people who read the ending of books first because they get irritated when books keep them in the dark too long about the plot. I think they're missing out, but if they make the choice to miss out, who am I to tell them they can't make that choice?
If music should only be enjoyed as the artist intended, all of us need high-end hi-fi systems that cost thousands of dollars. And just forget about using that ipod, unless you've hooked it up via the cradle's line out to a pair of studio headphones and listening to lossless encoded music.
Artists just do not deserve a say in how I listen to my paid-for music. I often choose to listen to the whole album, but only because it's my personal choice, not because some elitist musician got on his high horse.
I look forward to the day when web developers won't have to develop multiple versions for multiple browsers.
To be honest, my dayjob is coding web applications, and I only have a single codebase. No different pages for different browsers needed. I don't even think I've used the voice-family hack anywhere. Ofcourse, god help you if you decide to use a quirks mode doctype.
Of course, if there were automatic furniture building machines that could copy the furniture in a few minutes, betcha you'd find people arguing that nobody will make any new furniture unless this rampant carpentry piracy is prevented, and that carpenters deserve monopoly rights to protect them from competition.
Your example doesn't hold with mass production. Mass production has a large up-front design investment, which is repaid with every mass-produced copy sold. This holds for chairs as well. If matter scanner/printers became cheap enough that you could duplicate a chair for not much more than the material cost, I can assure you that Ikea would go out of business. Why buy a genuine Ikea chair when you can get a perfectly capable replica for a fraction of the price?
I fully expect to see this revolution happen within my lifetime. Matter printers will change the entire value proposition of the market. Software is on the vanguard of this movement. By making the value of a copy worthless (because almost no production costs are involved), you must assign value to the idea and its initial realization, instead of to the copy. Ideas no longer remain free, but become something that must be paid for in full, or people can't earn a living wage.
The problem is that Flash doesn't actually *do* anything useful (there is a weak argument for video) but decreases accessibility and usability.
You don't know flash then.
First of all, the majority of ajax apps have lousy accessibility. Flash at least offers an accessibility api so that if you want you can design your app so it will work with a screen reader. Ajax offers no such thing. Both platforms allow you to build an accessible app, and both require a considerable amount of effort, so neither has the advantage.
Secondly, flash offers vector graphics and bitmap editing facilities. No such facilities exist in ajax (cross-browser), aside from extremely costly server round-trips. Anything that deals with rich media generally requires flash to be done sensibly).
Examples of things that are perfectly feasible in flash, but impossible with ajax:
- building a paint shop pro like bitmap editing app (admittedly, you're restricted to bitmaps of 2880x2880 if you want advanced effects, like emboss and so on)
- building a web-based streaming mp3 player (like for a radio station)
- building a vector graphics editing application (SVG+JS doesn't cut it due to nearly non-existant cross-browser support, I've tried)
- building an IM app with voice and video support
- building any app that needs exact control over printing, without a server round-trip to generate a PDF. Even if round-tripping for PDF is possible, generating it may not be. For example, afaik there are no free PDF PHP libraries that deal adequately with unicode text (while flash has complete unicode support built-in).
Third, there is no requirement to build the entire web app in flash. I use it just for the parts that can't be done in ajax, and only those parts. This increases usability, instead of decreasing it.
Don't blame the tool for its use. Flash is powerful, and that power can be used for ill as well as good. I'm a professional web developer, and I'm of the opinion that any web developer who refuses to learn the ins and outs of flash and what it can do for him, is not worthy of the title.
The fundamental problem with Flash is the same as it ever was. You have a presentation format that wraps up presentation, scripting and content into one binary bundle that couples everything together so tightly it's impossible to decompose. You might as well stick a Powerpoint presentation on the web. Virtually all of Flash's other problems that people complain about are merely symptoms of this one underlying design flaw.
Yes, and when you put text in png banner images, you can't copy/paste that text, so png is evil!
This is not an actual flash limitation. Nothing forces you to build your entire app in flash. It's quite feasible to build only those parts in flash that can't be done in ajax, and build the rest in ajax, using the javascript-to-flash gateway to communicate between the two. Flash is just another tool in the sensible web developer's belt. I use it whenever there's something that can't be done with PHP/HTML/JS/CSS, and generally build a drop-in component that I can integrate in my web apps, using a javascript API.
I kind of feel bad for Cyc/OpenCyc... they've put so many years into this project, but using web-based games to collect and verify this common-sense data is much faster than using a few paid experts and can give much more data.
Cyc actually does use web games to vet their ontology and assertions. It remains to be seen whether web games can construct an ontology of the quality of cyc's. Too many clever people have proclaimed too many BS assertions about their AI projects to take anything but practical results seriously.
Sorry, it's part of a larger commercial product, and it's not a generic viewer (its meant to view and edit building floorplans). For example, it only supports quadratic arcs in the SVG format, because that's all that flash supports natively (the non-quadratic arcs, circles and ellipses get converted server-side to quadratic arcs).
I don't know what you did, but that does not jive with my experience. I haven't seen any windows system yet that the flash installer failed on. And yes, you can copy around the plugin dll (I've done so). I even have a portable firefox installation on a USB key with the flash player, so I don't have to install flash on the local system. I haven't tried this as a restricted user though.
A few remarks:
- Flash 8 is the latest release, flash player 9 is available, but there is no flash authoring environment for it yet (there is a flex environment, but that's a different product).
- Flash 7 is available on linux and for most web apps it is just as capable as flash 8. My company sells flash apps, and we currently target flash player 7. Believe me when I tell you it is nothing to sneeze at.
- Macromedia chose to skip the flash 8 player for linux because they're moving their entire player codebase to gcc, so they can build players for all platforms, and didn't want to get sidetracked while doing that. They'll be releasing the flash 9 player for linux in time with the authoring environment.
You seem to be mistaken about what SVG and flash are for. I've built a web-based CAD app before, and ended up implementing a combination of the two. Comparing SVG to flash is like comparing HTML to PHP. Flash is good for run-time manipulation of vector graphics, but it is lousy at vector graphics exchange (since you can't edit an swf). SVG excels at vector graphics exchange, but the cross-browser support for run-time manipulation is virtually non-existant. I ended up building an SVG editor in flash, which is a sensible combination when you look at the strengths of each.
Anyway, I know a lot of people here hate flash, so as an ajax and flash developer, let me be burst a few bubbles:
If there is some kind of Linux at the bottom of it - great, but running Linux is not much of a selling point if the UI is junk.
Bingo. For a phone the primary factor is usability. If the phone doesn't do what you want, when you want, in a way your grandma could figure out, it often ends up being a really expensive paperweight.
The way I see it a linux phone will succeed when it has two things: a consistent and easy to use UI that works just fine out of the box (no tweaking necessary), and strong affordable third-party application support, with those third-party apps having the same easy to use style of UI as the built-in stuff. For that to happen you need a dictatorship. Cooperative projects can't deliver that. And since OSS is all about cooperation, I sincerely doubt that if a linux phone succeeds it will have an OSS user interface.
this system could possibly yield better voter turnout...
It doesn't really matter how many voters turn out. As long as the system doesn't allow for proportional representation you'll still have a two-party system which still limits voter choice. Voting for any other party would still be "throwing away your vote", and the existing plutocracy (democrats and republicans) would remain in power.
When was the last time you went to a website that said "This site only viewable in Fire Fox" ?
Ironically enough not as long ago as one that said "this site only viewable in internet explorer". I haven't seen a site in ages that only worked in IE. My company makes intranet applications for large corporations and multinationals and we build on firefox and make it compatible with IE.
I'm sure there are intranet apps left that require IE, but any regular website requiring it at this point can and should be shunned.
But firefox is inferrior in the one place that counts: support. Furthermore, nothing prevented consumers from getting any other browser by choice, they merely did not choose.
What support? Have you ever heard of anyone who called microsoft support because they had a problem with IE? I haven't. If you call your ISP, they'll help you just as well (or poorly) regardless of whether you're running IE or firefox.
How about being able to install a program just by visiting a website, or get updates for said program? I'm not just talking about malware here - lots of legit programs like Flash, Java, and Yahoo Messenger can be installed the same way in Windows using IE. I know this behavior makes people like here cringe, but some people are used to it.
So, you genuinely think it's a good idea for websites you visit to install software without asking you about it first? Are you really going to argue in favor of this?
How about being hassled for a password when you try to install a program or change a system setting or Mac OS, while Windows just lets you do it? Yes, I know there is a good reason for this, but try explaining it to the Joe Averages out there, in particular the ones that don't share their computer with people they don't trust.
The majority of mac apps (including browsers and IM programs) can be installed simply by dragging the icon from the window that opens after the download completes to the applications folder (or anywhere on your hard drive basically), no password required. This is even easier than windows. Removing it is a matter of dragging the icon from the applications folder to the trash.
Those apps that require changing aspects of your operating system, like installing stuff that loads on boot, do require that you enter your password first, which only makes sense. I definitely want to be asked when some application decides it wants to mess with my OS.
The system settings users are likely to want to change, desktop backgrounds, screen savers, network configuration, don't require a password.
Besides, from what I understand Vista has the same kind of user behavior, only less friendly (more clicks, more prompts). The "root by default" model is one of the dominant reasons why spyware and viruses have had so much success.
I'm curious. What do you need the radeon for? Macs still aren't gaming rigs unless you're dualbooting to windows, and at that point, why bother buying a mac?
Since that is what he predicted originally it doesn't seem like he has anything new to say. (except perhaps to add more buzzwords into the fray)
Even 4 years ago these kinds of predictions were not visionary at all. Everyone could see the mobile lifestyle approaching. It was visionary when Neal Stephenson wrote about it in Snow Crash a decade before this guy did.
If we simply stay or go.. we lose.. the question is is there any graceful ways at all to exit this ultimate example of a bad idea.
The UN is only too glad to send a peacekeeping force to Iraq to take over, but only if they actually get to take over. The US was only willing to allow a peacekeeping force if they kept control over the oil and reconstruction contracts. If america wanted out of Iraq without it falling into chaos and being blamed on them, they could.
Don't forget economies of scale, which are the reason that completely free markets over time become monopolies or cartels (because it is most profitable to all market players to let the market evolve into such a model).
Anyway, this "unregulated market is best for all" theory bugs me, because there is not a single example of it from the real world that speaks in favor of it (by which I mean a totally unregulated market that is stable and leads to prosperity for the agents involved in that market). I mean, if you favor something that has been shown to work somewhat (like communism), that I can respect, even if I may disagree (like with communism), but to favor something with zero real world backing? That's just crazy talk.
It already IS a Christian-run state, by the simple fact that Christians are the overwhelming majority in the US.
Self-confessed christians. Since few of them seem to act by any set of morals which you could conceive to be in corcondance with what is now generally accepted as the teachings of christ. For example, you can't have record poverty, do nothing about it, and still claim to be a christian without looking a might silly.
Still, it's true that a person can not be elected to congress unless they publicly claim to be a christian (unless someone knows of a non-christian congressman), so, yeah, by any sensible metric america is a christian-run state.
God is not malleable, the bible is not malleable, Christ's teachings are not malleable, they are there to read and to live by.
First of all, God may not be malleable, but your idea of him definitely is. Secondly, the bible is man-made (anyone having studied its history is forced to conclude this), so a valid opinion is that it is not the whole and accurate word of God, but rather a human perversion of God's message. There are many conflicting documents of christ's teachings, and once you start doubting the bible's accuracy and completeness, it's only a small step to doubting what was and wasn't a part of christ's teachings.
So, yeah, depending on where your beliefs lie, you can be a christian (someone who beliefs that christ was the son of God and sent to save us) and have completely different beliefs than what current bible canon dictates they should be.
Javascript has a concept known as closures (basically function objects), which when created inherit the scope they were created in, in the form of the scope chain. This scope chain can keep pointing to variables long after a naive reading of the code would seem to conclude nothing is pointing to them (by all references to them having explicitly be set to null). This in turn causes memory leaks. This is not a bug, but is behavior that is mandated by the ECMAScript standards, which firefox tries to aspire to.
I've run into this problem myself in an actionscript (flash) application, where I initially blamed flash for my memory bloat, until I learned that it was my own weak understanding of closures that was the cause.
Since firefox extensions are written in javascript, I expect that a lot of them have memory leaks in the form of ill-designed closures, which would cause the firefox process to bloat, even though the firefox developers are not at fault.
Patch files are definitely not derivative works. Minix came under a "no derivative works" license, but there was a lively patch community, with support from Tanenbaum.