In which case, you are then vulnerable to viruses (along with all the other faults that Mac users claim Windows has).
I don't understand this argument - saying Windows is crap, but then saying Macs can avoid the failings of OS X by running Windows.
Oh, if I dual booted then I'd run every kind of protection I could for the Windows partition. I'm not saying that antivirus is completely useless, just that right now it's not useful for the Mac OS.
I'd only be running Windows to shore up the one serious flaw I find in running Mac OS X, a shortage of games and some specialized software. Other than that my Windows installs lie idle.
Honestly I don't think that Windows is total crap, just that overall I like Mac OS X much better. Both operating systems have their shortcomings. If I can fix a major Mac OS X one by dual booting then I think that's a good solution, at least until more game manufacturers get on board with Mac OS X - something that has been happening lately.
That's why it's nice that all Macs made now can run both Windows and Mac OS X. There's a game only out for Windows? Boot into Windows or run Parallels under Mac OS X. You get the best of both worlds in one machine.
I agree strongly with the sentiment that Antivirus for Linux and MacOS are largely to protect against spreading windows virii
If you pass along an infected e-mail you are spreading a virus that could have stopped with you.
The NVIR virus last worked on MacOS 8, it didn't work under MacOS 9 and it certainly doesn't work under Mac OS X. Basically the last operating system it worked on was obsolete over 10 years ago. There are no current Mac OS X viruses in the wild.
In regards to spreading Windows viruses yeah I feel bad for Windows users but I won't spend my own money and processor cycles on worrying about their systems. If they want to protect their systems then they should take steps to protect themselves. They could also dump Windows and get an operating system that isn't so ridden with viruses and malware. That's their own choice and problem, not mine.
What viruses are their for OS/X? What current exploits are out for it.
There are no viruses in the wild for Mac OS X, a few people made some proof of concept viruses but they had crazy requirements and potential vulnerabilities were patched quickly. There are some user interaction based exploits but again they are pretty hard to pull off and most of them have been patched.
No sane person is saying that Mac OS X is immune to potential viruses and exploits but overall the security model of the OS is pretty solid. Yes Mac OS X is a smaller target than Windows but it's still a big enough target that if it was easy to exploit then people would already be doing it. Eventually I'm sure there will be some serious malware out for Mac OS X but right now it's a waste to run antivirus software because there is NOTHING out there that Mac OS X needs to be protected from.
Right now antivirus software for the Mac is simply a waste of money and computer cycles. Again, that may change some day but until then don't bother with antivirus for the Mac.
Here's a better article that's less inflammatory and also contains a statement directly from Apple:
"We have removed the KnowledgeBase article because it was old and inaccurate," an Apple spokesman said in an e-mailed statement. "The Mac is designed with built-in technologies that provide protection against malicious software and security threats right out of the box. However, since no system can be 100% immune from every threat, running antivirus software may offer additional protection."
Sounds a bit more reasonable than the story text posted here on Slashdot.
No, the "fact" is climate change deniers typically respond to reasoned scientific conclusions with half-assed blog postings and variants of "we don't really know anything so there likely is no problem".
And then there are the realists who say, "Yes, the climate is changing but lets make small, reasonable adjustments that make economic sense rather than stopping our economy on a dime. After all, we don't totally understand the mechanics of the climate change and we may be overreacting."
The world is a big place. The initial alarmist predictions said that we'd already have massive floods and drastic increases in temperatures. What we are actually seeing is small, incremental increases in temperature and some moderate variation in world climate. If we make the sensible changes that can be done without radically changing our economy then we've hit the sweet spot. Lets build nuclear reactors (because wind, and solar aren't extremely reliable and water is not viable in many regions) to replace the fossil fuel power plants. Lets build a hydrogen infrastructure so we can dissociate water at the nuclear power plants and run our vehicles off of it. Lets build better mass transit which will not only save energy but which will also be good for our economy.
This whole mess of government subsidies for technologies that are extremely inefficient is such a wrong direction. Ethanol is a dead-end because without the subsidies it costs a ton more than fossil fuels, it drives up the prices of food crops, it burns poorly because it is already partially-oxidized by its very nature, it destroys equipment because it is also corrosive by its nature. Solar panels create more pollution in their manufacture than they save over their entire lives. Wind power has high maintenance costs and is not reliable enough in most regions to be cost-effective. Even in the regions where wind is worth using it's still not consistent enough to supply all the demand all the time, it needs to be supplemented with nuclear or fossil fuel generators.
Scientific advances will make all of these technologies more viable but we can't rely on future discoveries to determine what we need to do now. Right now nuclear power is cheap and reliable. The only thing holding it back is the unreasonable fear of nuclear energy which makes it a mess to design and build a power plant. Lets standardize a half-dozen different designs to match different building conditions and lets make it simpler to get a nuclear plant built. Lets also get a central place to reprocess and sequester waste products. Once we get rid of the costs generated through irrational fear of nuclear power we will be a lot better off, both economically and environmentally.
I've never understood why the group that believes we didn't do it think that means we can continue being oblivious. Climate change is climate change, man-made or not. It will cause problems, and we do need to think ahead.
First of all, there is a lot of evidence that global warming might actually be a good thing. The longer summers will tend to create more areas that have longer growing seasons and are more favorable to growing crops. Global warming will also increase precipitation levels in most areas, leading to less drought overall throughout the world and also contributing to more food for the world. Warmer temperatures will lead to a reduced need for fuel used in heating and it will reduce deaths due to exposure and the stresses placed on people during cold weather.
Secondly there are the costs and benefits associated with global warming. If you look at a detailed analysis of the sacrifices that would have to be made to carry out some of the recommendations of global warming alarmists, the economic impact is quite severe. Compare that to the economic benefits of a warmer climate and you can see that maybe we should be taking a less severe stance on global warming and instead of sacrificing everything maybe we should pick and choose our battles more carefully.
Lastly, although there is evidence that supports the theory that greenhouse gasses are part of the reason for global warming it is far from a foregone conclusion. There is also evidence that solar warming and several other factors might be primary causes. Without a thorough understanding of the mechanisms of global warming it is difficult to come up with methods of reducing the warming trend. We can call for severely impacting our economy and health by curtailing industry in the hopes that it will reduce global warming or we can make sensible cuts while we learn more about the situation.
Coal-fired power-stations DO contribute to global warming.
They do? So you have irrefutable evidence that global warming is due to fossil fuel combustion products and not, say, the output of the sun?
The fact is that most of the global warming theories are based on poor evidence and conjecture. I'm not saying that all of the theories are wrong, they might tell some of the tale, but they certainly are not a foregone conclusion. I do agree that we should work to curtail pollution, it certainly won't hurt to have less emissions from power stations and the like, but we shouldn't have irrational, knee-jerk reactions to the use of fossil fuels.
Now mercury levels from coal are a lot more substantiated because they are based on real science. Mercury levels have been measured downwind from power plants and compared to areas that are not downwind from power plants. The levels have also been measured before and after power plants have come online, and also when power plants had downtime. There is a fairly clear correlation between the use of coal and mercury in the environment. That's not to say that we should immediately stop using coal, but we should invest in cleaner coal-burning technology and also look for alternatives, such as nuclear power (which is much more containable than coal).
It always amazes me to see people claiming that the iPhone costs a significant amount more than other phones, and trying to prove it by adding the phone cost and the total cost of phone+data for a two year contract.
Right, gotta compare the apples to apples (not to be coy since we are talking about the Apple iPhone...)
If someone is getting an iPhone they are most likely replacing their old cell phone. This means that the cost due to the voice plan is moot, you just look at the data portion of the plan. In this case it is $30/month for unlimited data.
My Cingular/AT&T store said $60 for 50 mbytes per month plus overage charges. My phone bills for the last 9 months prove they weren't lying. Asking intitially/subsequently got no different pricing. So you now should have the idea that my $60 cost is coming from the provider. Oh, so they have different pricing for iPhone customers? Now I'm even more disgusted with them.
They also have a tethering (lets you use your phone to connect your computer to the wireless internet) deal and that's not so good, $60 for 5 GB/month data. Maybe you had a salesperson who was a real dick and he gave you the more expensive plan without explaining there was a less expensive option.
In my case I have the Edge iPhone and I got my data plan when it was $20/month for unlimited access to the Edge network. Now it's $30/month for unlimited access to the 3G network.
Anyways, it took me all of 10 seconds of digging to find the $30 unlimited plan. Never trust the salespeople ANYWHERE, they all want the commission. I never walk into a place without first researching what I want online.
Let's use AT&T's network. Streaming data plan? $60 a month.
AT&T's unlimited data plan is $20/month for Edge and $30/month for 3G. I have no idea where you are getting $60/month from.
Honestly though, I use my iPhone as an iPod, not as a streaming audio device. All of my music is bought and I have several different playlists for different types of music. I just plug it in to my car, start up a playlist and go. Just as good as any streaming audio in my opinion.
Oh and if I want talk radio then there are tons of free podcasts on every topic, even ones that are updated several times a day. Yeah I don't get someone talking about stuff happing right that exact second but I really don't care if the stuff I'm listening to is time-shifted a bit. The only time-sensitive thing I care about in a car is traffic and Goggle maps handles that better than the radio anyways.
Read the whole thread that you're replying to. It started with: "you may be too young to realize it but most of the really useful technology we use today has come out of Space and Military research."
So yes, microwave ovens count.
And the grandparent post specifically referred to space research, not to military research:
"And you are old enough to belive that myth. (well, at lest the "space" part. Seriously, that brought very very little. not even the teflon pan."
Now I'm not agreeing with the statement that space research brought about very little technology. I know that a lot of modern technology is the result of space research. However, one thing it didn't have a hand in is microwave ovens. Microwave ovens were a direct result of military research, not space research.
Microwaves -- are these a myth? Think these were developed by a commercial entity just so they could sell you a different type of oven?
You mean the microwave technology developed during World War II for radar and communication? Just how was developed as part of the space program? I mean I know that there were refinements to the technology but I'm pretty sure those refinements would have happened even without the space program.
While theoretically it is true that the iPhone OS could be fleshed out to a full OS X install with a few extra APIs and of course the proper top graphical layer, there is still very limited hardware to implement it with. While the logistical problems I mentioned above wouldn't be important for the iPhone-powered netbook mentioned in the article, the memory issue would still be a major problem.
Obviously not every application will work well on every device due to hardware limitations. My point was simply that it's not the API or the OS that's holding you back. Assuming that an application doesn't have hardware requirements past what the device supports it won't be too tough to port that application from a Mac OS X desktop machine to a Mac OS X netbook.
Considering that Mac OS X famously runs slow as molasses on anything with less than 2 GB of RAM, you'd have a hard time finding a desktop that runs it "well" with 1 GB of RAM in the first place.
Anyone saying that Mac OS X needs at least 2 GB of RAM to run decently is flat-out wrong. Unless you're running some pretty intense memory hog applications Mac OS X runs perfectly with anything above around 640 MB. Below that it does start to creak along at points but it will actually run OK down to 256 MB if you don't do much more than word processing and web browsing (the only activities that most normal use their computer for). I don't recommend running with less than 512 MB at a minimum.
Yes, if you have 2 GB of RAM Mac OS X will happily keep everything it sees in memory which will speed load times of a lot of things but unless you're doing hard-core gaming, database, audio, or video manipulation you really won't see an incredible speed difference between 640 MB and 2 GB. Give it a try sometime, I have.
The iPhone OS is OSX because Apple "says" it is OSX, it's a real semantic BS thing. While I'm sure there's similarities, in reality the only sameness is the name. Seriously, do you think an old desktop Mac of the same power of the iPhone could actually run OSX?
Yes, I do. Mac OS X is designed to be highly modular and flexible. You might have to make some choices as to what modules to load, what services to keep active, and so on to meet the resource footprint of a slower Mac computer that has less RAM and disk space but at the core it would be the same Mac OS X that runs in an iPhone or a server.
Mac OS X will actually adjust itself to some extent to deal with a low-resource environment. If you take your desktop that runs Mac OS X well with 1 GB of RAM and you take it down to 256 MB of RAM it will still run decently. It'll keep less stuff resident in RAM and it will have to page to disk more often but it will keep running. I've run Mac OS X 10.5 on everything from a 500 MHz G4 machine with 256 MB RAM to a 3 GHz dual quad-core Xenon with 4 GB of RAM. Of course it ran quicker and more smoothly on the machine with more resources but it still ran decently on the old machine.
It's the same Mac OS across all of Apple's products because they all share the same core code. They all run off Darwin, they all use the same modified Mach microkernel, and so on. If you dig into all of the APIs you'll see differences here and there, mostly in the UI API, but even where there are differences the API mirror each other closely. It's the same operating system in far more than just semantics.
Heavily crippled. One thing is to be the full OSX, another is to have a small subset of features. Furthermore, you cannot run any program written for OSX in the iPhone. To me that's enough to say that the iPhone-OSX is not the same as OSX.
Mac OS X for the iPhone actually has a rather large subset of features that the desktop version has. The thing is that most of the features in common are under the hood and not in the UI. It's the UI that is largely different and it pretty much has to be considering the size differences of the displays and the huge differences in input methods.
As far as running programs written for the desktop version on the iPhone, it wouldn't take much effort on either Apple's or a developers end to get that to happen. The API for both targets is extremely similar, if you code using MVC as Apple recommends then you should have your code pretty much all set to work on the iPhone or the desktop, your model and most of your controller code will stay the same and most of the differences will be in the view. Make two targets with code covering the appropriate differences in the API and you should easily be able to make two versions of your app, one for the iPhone and one for the desktop. You might even be able to do it as a fat binary so one app package works on either platform but I wouldn't see the point in that.
All this is moot anyways, my point is that Mac OS X has all the technology needed to be run as a slimmed-down version which can run on a netbook. All it needs is the appropriate device drivers, a bit of tweaking to make sure everything plays nice, compile it for the new CPU (if needed), and it sould be all set. It's not like Apple is using two radically different operating systems between the desktop and the iPhone, they are simply modified versions of each other. A third target for the netbook would be pretty easy to accomplish with a versitile OS like Mac OS X.
If Apple used a CPU that had a close enough instruction set to what Mac OS X currently runs on then applications wouldn't need any work to run on a netbook like this. Of course if the CPU was different enough then the developers would have to at least recompile their code for the new CPU but that's no biggie so long as they kept to Apple's APIs.
Cellphone technology based "laptops" have existed for years, and they have a solid fan base, but they are still big cellphones, not small PCs.
Actually, the iPhone OS IS Mac OS X. All Apple did was add some hardware support and a bit of custom GUI to better support the minimal size of the screen and the mouseless interface. Mac OS X is very modular, versatile, and it has the ability to scale down or up well depending on the resources available to it. It's vastly different than just taking a cellphone OS and modifying it for a netbook, Apple would just use the regular Mac OS X and add hardware support so it could run on a netbook.
All of this looks like it's gone over the heads of the people at ZDNet. They talk about Mac OS X and the iPhone OS as if they were two completely different animals instead of both being Mac OS X. They don't seem to realize that you can have your cake and eat it too: a version of Mac OS X that runs like a laptop version and yet has a small OS "footprint" like a cellphone version. You certainly can and it wouldn't take a major reworking of anything to get the job done.
I think the point that the poster was trying to make is that the tactile feedback is your finger touching a surface.
This is one of my points. My main point is that the iPhone has inspired many other ways of providing tactile input. How about using the tilt of the device as input, making it feel like you are using a steering wheel in a racing game. Or holding the device and tilting it like one of those old put-the-ball-in-the-hole games in order to move your character through a maze. Or shaking the device at certain points in the game to do a special attack. Or using the current orientation of the device as the direction of gravity for falling objects.
All of these ideas and more are being used in the current iPhone games. Yes, it doesn't have a fixed set of buttons and that makes some kinds of games more challenging to program for the iPhone but these new input methods have opened up many more games than it holds back. Your last statement sums up the way I feel, "Sometimes in technology things change." The iPhone has opened up new types of games and that's one of its greatest strengths. The programmers who embrace these changes are going to be the ones that rake in the cash.
Graff, grab some coffee. You completely misunderstood gp's point.
I saw two points in there and I addressed one.
The first point, the one I addressed, was that you need tactile feedback to know when a button has been pressed. This is usually due to there being a trigger threshold of a certain amount of pressure to activate a button. On an iPhone there is nearly no trigger threshold due to its technologies so there is much less need for tactile feedback.
The second point, the one I did not address, is that some games need to have a d-pad or other type of button input that is separate from the display. With those kind of games you either have to simulate the effect of those buttons, for example press the side of the display that represents the direction you want to travel, or you can partition the screen into an input section with buttons and a display section. Changing the input paradigm is very viable but it does have a bit of a learning curve. Partitioning the display solves the problem perfectly except now you have no tactile feedback on a touchscreen and you can't rely on your vision since you are watching a different part of the screen for the game action.
So no, I think I properly understood his points. I feel that there are good answers to the problems he raised and I've seen quite a few great games on the iPhone that have addressed these problems and have come up with even better games as a result of the challenges.
The iPhone comes out, and suddenly everyone forgets that touch-screen devices of the exact same form factor have been around for over a decade. All of this has been hashed and rehashed. I ported Wolfenstein 3D, Quake 1 & 2, and a Gameboy emulator to Pocket PC, as well as doing extensive game development on new projects. For analog input, touchscreens are okay. However for binary input, aka fire / jump buttons, d-pad, etc, it sucks tremendously. I think you're confusing "tactile feedback" for "knowing where the virtual button is". It's not just about knowing where to hold your thumbs, but knowing that you've pressed the button hard enough to trigger it.
First of all, the iPhone uses a capacitive touchscreen. This means that next to no pressure is needed to press a virtual button so there is very little need for feedback when you press a virtual button. The iPhone's screen is also multi-touch and has a high touch resolution and it can accurately measure the size and shape of the areas pressed.
Secondly, the algorithms that the iPhone uses to measure where you pressed are very advanced. The iPhone puts all this additional data to good use and it can accurately predict where you pressed and even how hard based on the size of the pressed area (your finger spreads out more if you press harder).
All of this means that the iPhone is a ton more responsive and forgiving with input via touchscreen when compared to past touchscreen input devices. Give it a try, games on the iPhone work very well without needing much tactile feedback.
Development costs should play no part in how a price is set. I might require only $20 an hour and 40 hours to develop something that would require you $40 an hour and 80 hours to develop the same thing. Thus development costs are arbitrary. Prices should only be set based on cost of reproduction plus a reasonable markup for profit.
What about the cases where there might only be 10 consumers of a product that takes thousands of man-hours to produce? You don't think that that the development costs should be included at all? There are quite a few products out there where the development costs are significant compared to the production and distribution costs and any real business HAS to include ALL of the costs in the prices of its products.
It's a completely unreasonable position to take that a business shouldn't include all of its costs when figuring out what to charge for a product.
Now if you want to talk about the viability of that product at that price then that's a different matter entirely. Obviously in the case at hand this developer's price is more than viable since he's sold many thousands of copies at $5 each. If you want to do him one better then by all means make a similar game and sell it at a lower price. That is, after all, one of the cornerstones of a free market.
And as p2p gets easier and easier and people slowly begin to realize p2p is not morally wrong, what monetary value people place on digital downloads will, for better or worse, slowly crash to zero.
At which point people will virtually stop producing content because only hobbyists can afford to make stuff available for no cost. Professionals depend on making a decent living off the content they produce in order to be able to eat and have shelter over their heads, not to mention covering the costs of producing the content.
This is the part of P2P that is morally wrong. Apply the Categorical Imperative to the act of freely distributing content without the author's permission. If all produced content was distributed against the author's will then eventually the quality and quantity of content will dwindle. At that point both consumers and producers suffer. Consumers are not able to easily get quality content and producers are not able to use their talents in order to make a living. Wanton P2P just leads to stricter content lockdown and makes using content harder, not easier. It is therefore morally wrong to distribute by way of P2P content without the author's consent.
Why do you think we have to suffer through stuff like Macrovision, CSS, AACS, the Broadcast Flag, HDCP, and many more? All of these technologies are in reaction to people going overboard with copying content. These technologies make our goods cost more and get in the way of the ease of use of content but the content providers feel the need to protect their livelihoods from overzealous copying of their content. I'm sure that if people restricted their copying to purely personal uses then most of these technologies would never have seen the light of day but the truth is that most copying is done in order to get around paying content producers for the work they put into making the content.
Slashdot Mirror
For those who wonder WTF "growler" is, they meant "Greplaw"
Erm, you mean Groklaw right? That's where the article from the Slashdot submission is from.
Greplaw is a different, if similar, site.
In which case, you are then vulnerable to viruses (along with all the other faults that Mac users claim Windows has).
I don't understand this argument - saying Windows is crap, but then saying Macs can avoid the failings of OS X by running Windows.
Oh, if I dual booted then I'd run every kind of protection I could for the Windows partition. I'm not saying that antivirus is completely useless, just that right now it's not useful for the Mac OS.
I'd only be running Windows to shore up the one serious flaw I find in running Mac OS X, a shortage of games and some specialized software. Other than that my Windows installs lie idle.
Honestly I don't think that Windows is total crap, just that overall I like Mac OS X much better. Both operating systems have their shortcomings. If I can fix a major Mac OS X one by dual booting then I think that's a good solution, at least until more game manufacturers get on board with Mac OS X - something that has been happening lately.
..and playing games. Oh, wait.
That's why it's nice that all Macs made now can run both Windows and Mac OS X. There's a game only out for Windows? Boot into Windows or run Parallels under Mac OS X. You get the best of both worlds in one machine.
below is a link to at least one Mac virus that I could find on Wikipedia (one search, I am lazy)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NVIR_(computer_virus)
I agree strongly with the sentiment that Antivirus for Linux and MacOS are largely to protect against spreading windows virii
If you pass along an infected e-mail you are spreading a virus that could have stopped with you.
The NVIR virus last worked on MacOS 8, it didn't work under MacOS 9 and it certainly doesn't work under Mac OS X. Basically the last operating system it worked on was obsolete over 10 years ago. There are no current Mac OS X viruses in the wild.
In regards to spreading Windows viruses yeah I feel bad for Windows users but I won't spend my own money and processor cycles on worrying about their systems. If they want to protect their systems then they should take steps to protect themselves. They could also dump Windows and get an operating system that isn't so ridden with viruses and malware. That's their own choice and problem, not mine.
What viruses are their for OS/X? What current exploits are out for it.
There are no viruses in the wild for Mac OS X, a few people made some proof of concept viruses but they had crazy requirements and potential vulnerabilities were patched quickly. There are some user interaction based exploits but again they are pretty hard to pull off and most of them have been patched.
No sane person is saying that Mac OS X is immune to potential viruses and exploits but overall the security model of the OS is pretty solid. Yes Mac OS X is a smaller target than Windows but it's still a big enough target that if it was easy to exploit then people would already be doing it. Eventually I'm sure there will be some serious malware out for Mac OS X but right now it's a waste to run antivirus software because there is NOTHING out there that Mac OS X needs to be protected from.
Right now antivirus software for the Mac is simply a waste of money and computer cycles. Again, that may change some day but until then don't bother with antivirus for the Mac.
Here's a better article that's less inflammatory and also contains a statement directly from Apple:
"We have removed the KnowledgeBase article because it was old and inaccurate," an Apple spokesman said in an e-mailed statement. "The Mac is designed with built-in technologies that provide protection against malicious software and security threats right out of the box. However, since no system can be 100% immune from every threat, running antivirus software may offer additional protection."
Sounds a bit more reasonable than the story text posted here on Slashdot.
No, the "fact" is climate change deniers typically respond to reasoned scientific conclusions with half-assed blog postings and variants of "we don't really know anything so there likely is no problem".
And then there are the realists who say, "Yes, the climate is changing but lets make small, reasonable adjustments that make economic sense rather than stopping our economy on a dime. After all, we don't totally understand the mechanics of the climate change and we may be overreacting."
The world is a big place. The initial alarmist predictions said that we'd already have massive floods and drastic increases in temperatures. What we are actually seeing is small, incremental increases in temperature and some moderate variation in world climate. If we make the sensible changes that can be done without radically changing our economy then we've hit the sweet spot. Lets build nuclear reactors (because wind, and solar aren't extremely reliable and water is not viable in many regions) to replace the fossil fuel power plants. Lets build a hydrogen infrastructure so we can dissociate water at the nuclear power plants and run our vehicles off of it. Lets build better mass transit which will not only save energy but which will also be good for our economy.
This whole mess of government subsidies for technologies that are extremely inefficient is such a wrong direction. Ethanol is a dead-end because without the subsidies it costs a ton more than fossil fuels, it drives up the prices of food crops, it burns poorly because it is already partially-oxidized by its very nature, it destroys equipment because it is also corrosive by its nature. Solar panels create more pollution in their manufacture than they save over their entire lives. Wind power has high maintenance costs and is not reliable enough in most regions to be cost-effective. Even in the regions where wind is worth using it's still not consistent enough to supply all the demand all the time, it needs to be supplemented with nuclear or fossil fuel generators.
Scientific advances will make all of these technologies more viable but we can't rely on future discoveries to determine what we need to do now. Right now nuclear power is cheap and reliable. The only thing holding it back is the unreasonable fear of nuclear energy which makes it a mess to design and build a power plant. Lets standardize a half-dozen different designs to match different building conditions and lets make it simpler to get a nuclear plant built. Lets also get a central place to reprocess and sequester waste products. Once we get rid of the costs generated through irrational fear of nuclear power we will be a lot better off, both economically and environmentally.
I've never understood why the group that believes we didn't do it think that means we can continue being oblivious. Climate change is climate change, man-made or not. It will cause problems, and we do need to think ahead.
First of all, there is a lot of evidence that global warming might actually be a good thing. The longer summers will tend to create more areas that have longer growing seasons and are more favorable to growing crops. Global warming will also increase precipitation levels in most areas, leading to less drought overall throughout the world and also contributing to more food for the world. Warmer temperatures will lead to a reduced need for fuel used in heating and it will reduce deaths due to exposure and the stresses placed on people during cold weather.
Health and Amenity Effects of Global Warming
Not the End of the World as We Know It
Questions and Answers on Global Warming
Secondly there are the costs and benefits associated with global warming. If you look at a detailed analysis of the sacrifices that would have to be made to carry out some of the recommendations of global warming alarmists, the economic impact is quite severe. Compare that to the economic benefits of a warmer climate and you can see that maybe we should be taking a less severe stance on global warming and instead of sacrificing everything maybe we should pick and choose our battles more carefully.
Economics of Global Warming
Lastly, although there is evidence that supports the theory that greenhouse gasses are part of the reason for global warming it is far from a foregone conclusion. There is also evidence that solar warming and several other factors might be primary causes. Without a thorough understanding of the mechanisms of global warming it is difficult to come up with methods of reducing the warming trend. We can call for severely impacting our economy and health by curtailing industry in the hopes that it will reduce global warming or we can make sensible cuts while we learn more about the situation.
Coal-fired power-stations DO contribute to global warming.
They do? So you have irrefutable evidence that global warming is due to fossil fuel combustion products and not, say, the output of the sun?
The fact is that most of the global warming theories are based on poor evidence and conjecture. I'm not saying that all of the theories are wrong, they might tell some of the tale, but they certainly are not a foregone conclusion. I do agree that we should work to curtail pollution, it certainly won't hurt to have less emissions from power stations and the like, but we shouldn't have irrational, knee-jerk reactions to the use of fossil fuels.
Now mercury levels from coal are a lot more substantiated because they are based on real science. Mercury levels have been measured downwind from power plants and compared to areas that are not downwind from power plants. The levels have also been measured before and after power plants have come online, and also when power plants had downtime. There is a fairly clear correlation between the use of coal and mercury in the environment. That's not to say that we should immediately stop using coal, but we should invest in cleaner coal-burning technology and also look for alternatives, such as nuclear power (which is much more containable than coal).
It always amazes me to see people claiming that the iPhone costs a significant amount more than other phones, and trying to prove it by adding the phone cost and the total cost of phone+data for a two year contract.
Right, gotta compare the apples to apples (not to be coy since we are talking about the Apple iPhone...)
If someone is getting an iPhone they are most likely replacing their old cell phone. This means that the cost due to the voice plan is moot, you just look at the data portion of the plan. In this case it is $30/month for unlimited data.
Plus as a bonus it's not unlimited. They'll hassle you at 5GB.
It says here $30 for unlimited data if you get it with a regular voice plan. There is also the $60/month tethered plan that has a 5 GB/month limit but I'd never go for that, too expensive for too little.
My Cingular/AT&T store said $60 for 50 mbytes per month plus overage charges. My phone bills for the last 9 months prove they weren't lying. Asking intitially/subsequently got no different pricing. So you now should have the idea that my $60 cost is coming from the provider. Oh, so they have different pricing for iPhone customers? Now I'm even more disgusted with them.
iPhones have the same plans as every other device. AT&T says here $30 for unlimited data if you get it with a regular voice plan.
They also have a tethering (lets you use your phone to connect your computer to the wireless internet) deal and that's not so good, $60 for 5 GB/month data. Maybe you had a salesperson who was a real dick and he gave you the more expensive plan without explaining there was a less expensive option.
In my case I have the Edge iPhone and I got my data plan when it was $20/month for unlimited access to the Edge network. Now it's $30/month for unlimited access to the 3G network.
Anyways, it took me all of 10 seconds of digging to find the $30 unlimited plan. Never trust the salespeople ANYWHERE, they all want the commission. I never walk into a place without first researching what I want online.
Let's use AT&T's network. Streaming data plan? $60 a month.
AT&T's unlimited data plan is $20/month for Edge and $30/month for 3G. I have no idea where you are getting $60/month from.
Honestly though, I use my iPhone as an iPod, not as a streaming audio device. All of my music is bought and I have several different playlists for different types of music. I just plug it in to my car, start up a playlist and go. Just as good as any streaming audio in my opinion.
Oh and if I want talk radio then there are tons of free podcasts on every topic, even ones that are updated several times a day. Yeah I don't get someone talking about stuff happing right that exact second but I really don't care if the stuff I'm listening to is time-shifted a bit. The only time-sensitive thing I care about in a car is traffic and Goggle maps handles that better than the radio anyways.
Read the whole thread that you're replying to. It started with: "you may be too young to realize it but most of the really useful technology we use today has come out of Space and Military research."
So yes, microwave ovens count.
And the grandparent post specifically referred to space research, not to military research:
"And you are old enough to belive that myth. (well, at lest the "space" part. Seriously, that brought very very little. not even the teflon pan."
Now I'm not agreeing with the statement that space research brought about very little technology. I know that a lot of modern technology is the result of space research. However, one thing it didn't have a hand in is microwave ovens. Microwave ovens were a direct result of military research, not space research.
Microwaves -- are these a myth? Think these were developed by a commercial entity just so they could sell you a different type of oven?
You mean the microwave technology developed during World War II for radar and communication? Just how was developed as part of the space program? I mean I know that there were refinements to the technology but I'm pretty sure those refinements would have happened even without the space program.
While theoretically it is true that the iPhone OS could be fleshed out to a full OS X install with a few extra APIs and of course the proper top graphical layer, there is still very limited hardware to implement it with. While the logistical problems I mentioned above wouldn't be important for the iPhone-powered netbook mentioned in the article, the memory issue would still be a major problem.
Obviously not every application will work well on every device due to hardware limitations. My point was simply that it's not the API or the OS that's holding you back. Assuming that an application doesn't have hardware requirements past what the device supports it won't be too tough to port that application from a Mac OS X desktop machine to a Mac OS X netbook.
Considering that Mac OS X famously runs slow as molasses on anything with less than 2 GB of RAM, you'd have a hard time finding a desktop that runs it "well" with 1 GB of RAM in the first place.
Anyone saying that Mac OS X needs at least 2 GB of RAM to run decently is flat-out wrong. Unless you're running some pretty intense memory hog applications Mac OS X runs perfectly with anything above around 640 MB. Below that it does start to creak along at points but it will actually run OK down to 256 MB if you don't do much more than word processing and web browsing (the only activities that most normal use their computer for). I don't recommend running with less than 512 MB at a minimum.
Yes, if you have 2 GB of RAM Mac OS X will happily keep everything it sees in memory which will speed load times of a lot of things but unless you're doing hard-core gaming, database, audio, or video manipulation you really won't see an incredible speed difference between 640 MB and 2 GB. Give it a try sometime, I have.
The iPhone OS is OSX because Apple "says" it is OSX, it's a real semantic BS thing. While I'm sure there's similarities, in reality the only sameness is the name. Seriously, do you think an old desktop Mac of the same power of the iPhone could actually run OSX?
Yes, I do. Mac OS X is designed to be highly modular and flexible. You might have to make some choices as to what modules to load, what services to keep active, and so on to meet the resource footprint of a slower Mac computer that has less RAM and disk space but at the core it would be the same Mac OS X that runs in an iPhone or a server.
Mac OS X will actually adjust itself to some extent to deal with a low-resource environment. If you take your desktop that runs Mac OS X well with 1 GB of RAM and you take it down to 256 MB of RAM it will still run decently. It'll keep less stuff resident in RAM and it will have to page to disk more often but it will keep running. I've run Mac OS X 10.5 on everything from a 500 MHz G4 machine with 256 MB RAM to a 3 GHz dual quad-core Xenon with 4 GB of RAM. Of course it ran quicker and more smoothly on the machine with more resources but it still ran decently on the old machine.
It's the same Mac OS across all of Apple's products because they all share the same core code. They all run off Darwin, they all use the same modified Mach microkernel, and so on. If you dig into all of the APIs you'll see differences here and there, mostly in the UI API, but even where there are differences the API mirror each other closely. It's the same operating system in far more than just semantics.
Heavily crippled. One thing is to be the full OSX, another is to have a small subset of features. Furthermore, you cannot run any program written for OSX in the iPhone. To me that's enough to say that the iPhone-OSX is not the same as OSX.
Mac OS X for the iPhone actually has a rather large subset of features that the desktop version has. The thing is that most of the features in common are under the hood and not in the UI. It's the UI that is largely different and it pretty much has to be considering the size differences of the displays and the huge differences in input methods.
As far as running programs written for the desktop version on the iPhone, it wouldn't take much effort on either Apple's or a developers end to get that to happen. The API for both targets is extremely similar, if you code using MVC as Apple recommends then you should have your code pretty much all set to work on the iPhone or the desktop, your model and most of your controller code will stay the same and most of the differences will be in the view. Make two targets with code covering the appropriate differences in the API and you should easily be able to make two versions of your app, one for the iPhone and one for the desktop. You might even be able to do it as a fat binary so one app package works on either platform but I wouldn't see the point in that.
All this is moot anyways, my point is that Mac OS X has all the technology needed to be run as a slimmed-down version which can run on a netbook. All it needs is the appropriate device drivers, a bit of tweaking to make sure everything plays nice, compile it for the new CPU (if needed), and it sould be all set. It's not like Apple is using two radically different operating systems between the desktop and the iPhone, they are simply modified versions of each other. A third target for the netbook would be pretty easy to accomplish with a versitile OS like Mac OS X.
If Apple used a CPU that had a close enough instruction set to what Mac OS X currently runs on then applications wouldn't need any work to run on a netbook like this. Of course if the CPU was different enough then the developers would have to at least recompile their code for the new CPU but that's no biggie so long as they kept to Apple's APIs.
Cellphone technology based "laptops" have existed for years, and they have a solid fan base, but they are still big cellphones, not small PCs.
Actually, the iPhone OS IS Mac OS X. All Apple did was add some hardware support and a bit of custom GUI to better support the minimal size of the screen and the mouseless interface. Mac OS X is very modular, versatile, and it has the ability to scale down or up well depending on the resources available to it. It's vastly different than just taking a cellphone OS and modifying it for a netbook, Apple would just use the regular Mac OS X and add hardware support so it could run on a netbook.
All of this looks like it's gone over the heads of the people at ZDNet. They talk about Mac OS X and the iPhone OS as if they were two completely different animals instead of both being Mac OS X. They don't seem to realize that you can have your cake and eat it too: a version of Mac OS X that runs like a laptop version and yet has a small OS "footprint" like a cellphone version. You certainly can and it wouldn't take a major reworking of anything to get the job done.
I think the point that the poster was trying to make is that the tactile feedback is your finger touching a surface.
This is one of my points. My main point is that the iPhone has inspired many other ways of providing tactile input. How about using the tilt of the device as input, making it feel like you are using a steering wheel in a racing game. Or holding the device and tilting it like one of those old put-the-ball-in-the-hole games in order to move your character through a maze. Or shaking the device at certain points in the game to do a special attack. Or using the current orientation of the device as the direction of gravity for falling objects.
All of these ideas and more are being used in the current iPhone games. Yes, it doesn't have a fixed set of buttons and that makes some kinds of games more challenging to program for the iPhone but these new input methods have opened up many more games than it holds back. Your last statement sums up the way I feel, "Sometimes in technology things change." The iPhone has opened up new types of games and that's one of its greatest strengths. The programmers who embrace these changes are going to be the ones that rake in the cash.
Graff, grab some coffee. You completely misunderstood gp's point.
I saw two points in there and I addressed one.
The first point, the one I addressed, was that you need tactile feedback to know when a button has been pressed. This is usually due to there being a trigger threshold of a certain amount of pressure to activate a button. On an iPhone there is nearly no trigger threshold due to its technologies so there is much less need for tactile feedback.
The second point, the one I did not address, is that some games need to have a d-pad or other type of button input that is separate from the display. With those kind of games you either have to simulate the effect of those buttons, for example press the side of the display that represents the direction you want to travel, or you can partition the screen into an input section with buttons and a display section. Changing the input paradigm is very viable but it does have a bit of a learning curve. Partitioning the display solves the problem perfectly except now you have no tactile feedback on a touchscreen and you can't rely on your vision since you are watching a different part of the screen for the game action.
So no, I think I properly understood his points. I feel that there are good answers to the problems he raised and I've seen quite a few great games on the iPhone that have addressed these problems and have come up with even better games as a result of the challenges.
The iPhone comes out, and suddenly everyone forgets that touch-screen devices of the exact same form factor have been around for over a decade. All of this has been hashed and rehashed. I ported Wolfenstein 3D, Quake 1 & 2, and a Gameboy emulator to Pocket PC, as well as doing extensive game development on new projects. For analog input, touchscreens are okay. However for binary input, aka fire / jump buttons, d-pad, etc, it sucks tremendously. I think you're confusing "tactile feedback" for "knowing where the virtual button is". It's not just about knowing where to hold your thumbs, but knowing that you've pressed the button hard enough to trigger it.
First of all, the iPhone uses a capacitive touchscreen. This means that next to no pressure is needed to press a virtual button so there is very little need for feedback when you press a virtual button. The iPhone's screen is also multi-touch and has a high touch resolution and it can accurately measure the size and shape of the areas pressed.
Secondly, the algorithms that the iPhone uses to measure where you pressed are very advanced. The iPhone puts all this additional data to good use and it can accurately predict where you pressed and even how hard based on the size of the pressed area (your finger spreads out more if you press harder).
All of this means that the iPhone is a ton more responsive and forgiving with input via touchscreen when compared to past touchscreen input devices. Give it a try, games on the iPhone work very well without needing much tactile feedback.
Development costs should play no part in how a price is set. I might require only $20 an hour and 40 hours to develop something that would require you $40 an hour and 80 hours to develop the same thing. Thus development costs are arbitrary. Prices should only be set based on cost of reproduction plus a reasonable markup for profit.
What about the cases where there might only be 10 consumers of a product that takes thousands of man-hours to produce? You don't think that that the development costs should be included at all? There are quite a few products out there where the development costs are significant compared to the production and distribution costs and any real business HAS to include ALL of the costs in the prices of its products.
It's a completely unreasonable position to take that a business shouldn't include all of its costs when figuring out what to charge for a product.
Now if you want to talk about the viability of that product at that price then that's a different matter entirely. Obviously in the case at hand this developer's price is more than viable since he's sold many thousands of copies at $5 each. If you want to do him one better then by all means make a similar game and sell it at a lower price. That is, after all, one of the cornerstones of a free market.
And as p2p gets easier and easier and people slowly begin to realize p2p is not morally wrong, what monetary value people place on digital downloads will, for better or worse, slowly crash to zero.
At which point people will virtually stop producing content because only hobbyists can afford to make stuff available for no cost. Professionals depend on making a decent living off the content they produce in order to be able to eat and have shelter over their heads, not to mention covering the costs of producing the content.
This is the part of P2P that is morally wrong. Apply the Categorical Imperative to the act of freely distributing content without the author's permission. If all produced content was distributed against the author's will then eventually the quality and quantity of content will dwindle. At that point both consumers and producers suffer. Consumers are not able to easily get quality content and producers are not able to use their talents in order to make a living. Wanton P2P just leads to stricter content lockdown and makes using content harder, not easier. It is therefore morally wrong to distribute by way of P2P content without the author's consent.
Why do you think we have to suffer through stuff like Macrovision, CSS, AACS, the Broadcast Flag, HDCP, and many more? All of these technologies are in reaction to people going overboard with copying content. These technologies make our goods cost more and get in the way of the ease of use of content but the content providers feel the need to protect their livelihoods from overzealous copying of their content. I'm sure that if people restricted their copying to purely personal uses then most of these technologies would never have seen the light of day but the truth is that most copying is done in order to get around paying content producers for the work they put into making the content.