The ideal customer is someone who purchases their "Superfast unlimited downloaded-a-movie-in-only-x-minutes" package, and then uses it to just check email now and again.
Whether such a customer exists, or whether it is wise to base one's business model over the assumption you will get such customers, is another matter.
As an aside, I wonder how this works for the TV companies? As someone who pays loads of money in licence and cable fees, hardly watches TV, and instead gets the same programmes the "other" way, I ought to be their ideal customer. Instead, they'd presumably brand me a thief, and whine how I'm driving the industry to ruin...
If client side desktop computing is to survive the interface has to become more iPhony.
Today Apple have announced a new line of iPhony desktop computers, featuring no keyboard and a zero-button mouse. Outdated technologies such as Flash and Java are gone - a move which Apple hopes will promote client applications over web based ones. Other time consuming operations that have been removed include copy and paste. Thanks to Apple, client side desktop computing will be saved!
If you want depraved, imagine someone whose trifecta is taking a shit, having a blow job, whilst discussing the finer points of the morality of things that should be none of your business, with you.
When you extrapolate, you pull from what is happening today.
Even today, describing today's market as "Iphone and clones" is nonsensical.
It doesn't matter if hardcore techies think that the iPhone is "childish" or if they think it is a badge of honor to continue using their Motorola V980
Eh? I am not the one trumpeting the make of my phone at every opportunity! Let's take a look at TFS - it says "Iphone", not Motorola. That's the whole point of this thread. In fact I didn't mention my Motorola V980 at all, except to point out that even an old phone like that happily reads Slashdot, in the response to someone who evidently thought that reading Slashdot from bed was some wonderful new thing. Throwing in a Slashvertisement in the summary when it's irrelevant is fine, saying they use their Iphone to read Slashdot is fine, but if anyone dare mentions the make of their phone, they're using it as a badge of honour? The level of double standard here is astounding.
I apologise I haven't thrown out my perfectly fine phone just because Apple released one, that still doesn't do all the things my old phone does (copy/paste, Java, etc). I'll upgrade my phone every few years, and when I do, I'll get a phone that does do everything my current phone does.
The idea that only hardcore techies don't use Iphones is ludicrous - there are billions of non-Iphone phones in the world.
What matters is what the mass of ordinary consumers move towards
I entirely agree - and market sales figures shows that the "mass" is not using the Iphone. Not even close.
Apple are creating a mobile platform and eco-system that could very well remain dominant for the next couple of decades, just as MS did on the desktop.
They are creating one platform, but there are many other players, and much bigger ones such as Nokia. It's not that the Iphone's awful, I'm sure it's a perfectly average phone for the money these days, but the point is it's not the be all and end all of phones. Far from it, in fact.
previously adopted only by relatively small niche groups, such as/. readers
Bizarrely, what I see is the reverse. Mobile phones have been adopted by ordinary users for years, and it seems to be Apple fans here on Slashdot who have never got a phone until Apple released one (I guess they never thought they needed a phone, but obviously that changes if Apple release one). And now they act as if reading the Internet on a phone is some wonderful thing, completely oblivious to what most consumers have had on their phones for years. So it's an ironic situation where a niche group of geeks here on Slashdot are behind what's been previously adopted by the mainstream.
What's an "appliance"? Something that isn't as good as a handheld computer? Not exactly a convincing sales pitch...
This is especially amusing since it's the Iphone fans who often try to promote the Iphone as being some kind of "handheld computer", not merely a phone. Yet the reality is, it's those ordinary phones that have these basic features of a "handheld computer", and the Iphone is relegated to being a mere "appliance":)
which is why it doesn't suck.
It doesn't suck because it has less features? Again, an interesting argument, but if you want a phone, sorry, "appliance", without too many features, you could just pick up a cheap contract-free one for under £50.
I'm not sure how that relates to my argument? The Ipod is successful as an mp3 player, sure. It doesn't matter whether the Iphone is a superset or not - you can't claim that because the Ipod is successful/whatever, therefore the Iphone is. And even if the submitter had said Ipod Touch instead of Iphone, it's still dubious to say that Apple were the first, or are the leader, in the market of handheld games consoles, or Internet devices. Even if we assume that all Ipod Touches were sold for these purposes, you're still competing against the millions of other devices sold, from ordinary mobile phones, netbooks, and every handheld console since the gameboy.
An ironic accusation - it's not "luddite" when those people embraced technologies that did handheld gaming and Internet access years before the Iphone. Quite the opposite.
The interface is not "childish", it's good. In that, it does what you expect it to, and doesn't make me angry. It also feels more "real". Multitouch done properly is really, really nice, and no amount of elitist nerdy pouting is going to change that.
And there's not a single actual argument put there - you might as well say "Iphone rules! Nokia sucks!" It's not "childish", it's good, it does what it's supposed to, it doesn't make me angry, it "feels" more "real". It's really really really "nice", anyone who disagrees with me is just nerdy pouty! Please - let's have proper intelligent debate, and actual evidence and examples, not vague terms, assertions and childish insults. (And saying "really" a lot of times doesn't make an argument anymore convincing.)
I have, however, bought an iPod touch--which I got for reading Slashdot in bed--but have actually bought quite a few games for it.
So not actually an Iphone then. But good for you. And I have a Motorola V980 that I can use to read Slashdot from bed - your point?
Sure, there's no need for a plot in a simple shoot 'em up, but I think good storytelling is important to things such as role-playing games. No, it's not a full blown AI, but neither is a book or a movie. Surely part of the fun is using your imagination, just as we are expected to do for books.
Unless there's going to be a population boom (unlikely in western countries), I don't see how. It may happen if people lose interesting in games as they get older, but I guess the premise is here that that won't happen. Okay, 60+ gamers won't be a majority, but it's plausible to say they'll be a significant part of the market. Certainly far more so than now, where elderly people mostly don't play games, because they never grew up with them.
And unlike middle aged people, they'll have a lot more time on their hands. And unlike 14-20 year olds, they are more likely to have the money.
We've already seen a shift in games marketing already - up until the mid 1990s, games were still mainly seen as "for kids", and I noticed that with the Playstation, there was a shift in advertising towards young adults. Makes sense really: firstly kids of the 80s were now in their 20s; secondly, they had more disposable income (especially important considering the increasing costs of games production). The last thing games companies wanted then was to have the image stick that games were something only children played.
I thought entirely the same thing - can't we get through a story without an irrelevant Apple slashvertisement?
Handheld gaming was hardly invented by the Iphone, nor was Internet access in phones. Apple are long playing catch up here. And they didn't "popularise" it, either - the Iphone is no Ipod, both in terms of features and market share. To suggest that the other devices are clones is ludicrous, and insulting to those companies that worked hard to bring those devices, often long before Apple thought of doing so. As you say, the Gameboy is the obvious popular reference.
It becomes tediously circular - people freeload off the hype as you say, and by doing so, it adds to the hype.
It's also patronising to Slashdot readers: yes, I know that the average layperson has to be told "Ipod" instead of "mp3 player", "Windows" instead of "operating system", "Gameboy" instead of "handheld games console" or "Nokia" (the obvious realistic choice) instead of "mobile phone", but I think readers here are capable of knowing what the products are, without it having to be explained in terms of brandnames.
("Hey, I've got a web page you might be interested in! It's a webpage that can be read on Iphones and clones, isn't that great?")
luckily for them they had the reasonably stable Windows NT ready to go out the door.
This was hardly luck - they'd been developing NT for years, precisely because of the limitations of DOS/Win 9x. It was long their intention to switch entirely to the NT line, but they had problems with people wanting backwards compatibility with their ancient DOS applications.
It was Apple that were more in that situation - they'd shot themselves in the foot by the increasingly outdated "classic" MacOS. They floundered for years trying to modernize it, without success (Copeland). Luckily they were able to buy another OS, allowing them to ditch MacOS and use the rebranded OS they'd bought as a replacement.
(because for some reason people think its *normal* to require 1 GB to run an OS, which I don't understand).
I think it's normal for a modern OS to make full use of modern machines. Of course an OS doesn't need 1GB - I can run AmigaOS in 1MB, for example. But what market value is there in releasing OSs for small resources? Firstly, the market demand for that is low (since most computers, even netbooks, have at least 1GB these days), secondly if you have less than that, there are plenty of older OSs (from AmigaOS to Windows XP) that run fine on it. Microsoft would just be in competition with themselves.
On the other hand, they keep losing mindshare to Apple left and right.
Hardly. What evidence is there for this ludicrous claim?
Which is exactly the point he was making. They're a niche player in the mobile phone market anyway, and anyone who wants a full blown netbook isn't going to satisfy themselves with a phone.
Apple can't make it in the netbook category because they won't sell cheap hardware plain and simple.... confine MS to gamers and businesses
So MS will be "confined" to merely all Internet devices, gaming and all businesses, leaving Apple to be "king" of the remaining niche markets? I can just see MS quaking in their boots at that.
Hardcore militant atheists are just as annoying to average folk as the hardcore militant fundamentalists. One is fundamentalist re: the Bible, the other fundamentalist re: radical materialism.
Atheism is not materialism.
And what on earth is "radical" or fundamentalist atheism? When we talk about fundamentalist, we either mean people who take a book such as the Bible to be literally true, or people who fly planes into buildings and blow themselves up in the name of their faith. None of these meanings apply to any atheists.
Not sure what the rest of your post is about. If something is unprovable, there's no reason to believe in it - hence, I'm an atheist, not a theist.
Personally I'd rather judge based on what people say, rather than one of them claiming he has some kind of authority because he writes on a blog.
Oh, and:
Sorry, but I'd rather trust the guy who is one of the main Perl core hackers out there, responsible for the excellent perl security track record (1 vulnerability in two years on average) than random guys over the internet or Microsoft....and random anonymous cowards posting on a forum. So no, I don't trust you.
If this is done like their other *_s functions, then for arrays, you don't have to add an extra parameter. They provide templated versions that automatically know the size of the array, since it's known as compile time.
Passing the extra parameter is only required when the size isn't known at compile time - in which cases, your laughable "MIN(sizeof(dst), bytes_to_copy)" would fail anyway.
Apple today announced a revolutionary new upgrade for the IpHoNe. For years, people have only used phones for accessing the Internet, listening to music, taking photographs and playing games. Now Apple bring a new development to the market: the ability to communicate via voice with someone who is not even in the same room, as if by magic.
The initial version will only allow communication with other Iphone users, though rumours suggest users can get around this limitation by jail-breaking the phone, in line with Apple's "Works, Just" tradition.
Some have pointed out that a few phones have already allowed such a feature, but Apple fans have dismissed this. "Other phones may have done this before, but how many people used it?" commented such fan. "Apple were the first to integrate it properly. Thanks to this innovation, I no longer have to lug my landline around with me as well as my Iphone."
It's rather like how you can get a patent by taking an existing idea, and doing it "On the Internet" - in this case, you take something that's been done on other phones for years, do it "On the Iphone (after jailbraking it - Apple "Just Works", don't you know)", and suddenly you have a media-worthy story.
And the geek stereotype is that we all post from our mum's basement, and we've never had sex. So don't be offended if I assume you're a virgin still living at home right - don't give me that PC response, right?
Stereotypes may have some truth in them as a generalisation, but the important thing is that if you come across someone who doesn't fit the stereotype, you accept it's the stereotype that's imperfect, and not the person that is wrong.
And there's nothing "PC" about it - claiming "PC" is the call of someone who doesn't like something, but can't explain why. It's the sort of response I expect from the Daily Mail.
Whilst laptop manufacturers may try to market towards women, I'm glad we haven't got into the situation of having "men's laptops" and "women's laptops". You may think that stupid, but that's exactly what we have with every personal item that didn't appear recently: clothes, watches, glasses, handkerchiefs, umbrellas, bags, bicycles. If the laptop had orginated in the 19th Century, then you would be walking into your computer store to find it divided into two: men's laptops, and women's laptops. Imagine finding one that's perfect, only to be told "I'm sorry sir, but this is a women's laptop"? And people would justify this with the same arguments of "But these stereotypes are true... and anyone who disagrees is being PC!"
They can sell pink laptops and pink Ipods all they like - I'm just glad that with new kinds of products, we no longer insist that what one you can buy is dependent on what's between your legs.
This is actually a very relevant point - surely the Slashdot stereotype is that no one posting here has ever had a girlfriend? So if it's really true that the OP has had five girlfriends, then he proves the point that stereotypes aren't always true.
Well that's exactly the point, isn't it? We're a long way from AI being able to judge artistic merits, because doing so often isn't just a property of the image alone, but is related to what the things in the image represent.
Now having said that, it might be interesting to have some judgement that is not biased by cultural perceptions - one that treats Pulitzer and Goatse on an equal playing field, judging what they look like rather than what they represent. But it's unclear what meaning such an algorithm has - it's not comparable to what humans would think, nor is it meaningful to say it's the computer's own opinion (I mean, anyone could write an algorithm that assigns some arbitrary value based on the image data, but what use or meaning that has is another matter.)
Not necessarily, you could search for headers or file fragments that might suggest a file you are interested in. In 1999 I suffered a complete hard disk loss of data - this was before I had a CDRW, and my floppy backups were a few weeks old. I recovered important Java source code files by searching for strings of the Java class headers. I don't know how much flexibility file recovery programs offer, but this I did with a quick program I knocked up that grepped the hard disk. I was able to do this based on a quick piece of explanation from a friend - you'd think that a site that'd lost 13 years of data would have someone able to do this.
Slashdot Mirror
The ideal customer is someone who purchases their "Superfast unlimited downloaded-a-movie-in-only-x-minutes" package, and then uses it to just check email now and again.
Whether such a customer exists, or whether it is wise to base one's business model over the assumption you will get such customers, is another matter.
As an aside, I wonder how this works for the TV companies? As someone who pays loads of money in licence and cable fees, hardly watches TV, and instead gets the same programmes the "other" way, I ought to be their ideal customer. Instead, they'd presumably brand me a thief, and whine how I'm driving the industry to ruin...
If client side desktop computing is to survive the interface has to become more iPhony.
Today Apple have announced a new line of iPhony desktop computers, featuring no keyboard and a zero-button mouse. Outdated technologies such as Flash and Java are gone - a move which Apple hopes will promote client applications over web based ones. Other time consuming operations that have been removed include copy and paste. Thanks to Apple, client side desktop computing will be saved!
If you want depraved, imagine someone whose trifecta is taking a shit, having a blow job, whilst discussing the finer points of the morality of things that should be none of your business, with you.
When you extrapolate, you pull from what is happening today.
Even today, describing today's market as "Iphone and clones" is nonsensical.
It doesn't matter if hardcore techies think that the iPhone is "childish" or if they think it is a badge of honor to continue using their Motorola V980
Eh? I am not the one trumpeting the make of my phone at every opportunity! Let's take a look at TFS - it says "Iphone", not Motorola. That's the whole point of this thread. In fact I didn't mention my Motorola V980 at all, except to point out that even an old phone like that happily reads Slashdot, in the response to someone who evidently thought that reading Slashdot from bed was some wonderful new thing. Throwing in a Slashvertisement in the summary when it's irrelevant is fine, saying they use their Iphone to read Slashdot is fine, but if anyone dare mentions the make of their phone, they're using it as a badge of honour? The level of double standard here is astounding.
I apologise I haven't thrown out my perfectly fine phone just because Apple released one, that still doesn't do all the things my old phone does (copy/paste, Java, etc). I'll upgrade my phone every few years, and when I do, I'll get a phone that does do everything my current phone does.
The idea that only hardcore techies don't use Iphones is ludicrous - there are billions of non-Iphone phones in the world.
What matters is what the mass of ordinary consumers move towards
I entirely agree - and market sales figures shows that the "mass" is not using the Iphone. Not even close.
Apple are creating a mobile platform and eco-system that could very well remain dominant for the next couple of decades, just as MS did on the desktop.
They are creating one platform, but there are many other players, and much bigger ones such as Nokia. It's not that the Iphone's awful, I'm sure it's a perfectly average phone for the money these days, but the point is it's not the be all and end all of phones. Far from it, in fact.
previously adopted only by relatively small niche groups, such as /. readers
Bizarrely, what I see is the reverse. Mobile phones have been adopted by ordinary users for years, and it seems to be Apple fans here on Slashdot who have never got a phone until Apple released one (I guess they never thought they needed a phone, but obviously that changes if Apple release one). And now they act as if reading the Internet on a phone is some wonderful thing, completely oblivious to what most consumers have had on their phones for years. So it's an ironic situation where a niche group of geeks here on Slashdot are behind what's been previously adopted by the mainstream.
What's an "appliance"? Something that isn't as good as a handheld computer? Not exactly a convincing sales pitch...
This is especially amusing since it's the Iphone fans who often try to promote the Iphone as being some kind of "handheld computer", not merely a phone. Yet the reality is, it's those ordinary phones that have these basic features of a "handheld computer", and the Iphone is relegated to being a mere "appliance" :)
which is why it doesn't suck.
It doesn't suck because it has less features? Again, an interesting argument, but if you want a phone, sorry, "appliance", without too many features, you could just pick up a cheap contract-free one for under £50.
I'm not sure how that relates to my argument? The Ipod is successful as an mp3 player, sure. It doesn't matter whether the Iphone is a superset or not - you can't claim that because the Ipod is successful/whatever, therefore the Iphone is. And even if the submitter had said Ipod Touch instead of Iphone, it's still dubious to say that Apple were the first, or are the leader, in the market of handheld games consoles, or Internet devices. Even if we assume that all Ipod Touches were sold for these purposes, you're still competing against the millions of other devices sold, from ordinary mobile phones, netbooks, and every handheld console since the gameboy.
like a lot of the "Luddite" nerds
An ironic accusation - it's not "luddite" when those people embraced technologies that did handheld gaming and Internet access years before the Iphone. Quite the opposite.
The interface is not "childish", it's good. In that, it does what you expect it to, and doesn't make me angry. It also feels more "real". Multitouch done properly is really, really nice, and no amount of elitist nerdy pouting is going to change that.
And there's not a single actual argument put there - you might as well say "Iphone rules! Nokia sucks!" It's not "childish", it's good, it does what it's supposed to, it doesn't make me angry, it "feels" more "real". It's really really really "nice", anyone who disagrees with me is just nerdy pouty! Please - let's have proper intelligent debate, and actual evidence and examples, not vague terms, assertions and childish insults. (And saying "really" a lot of times doesn't make an argument anymore convincing.)
I have, however, bought an iPod touch--which I got for reading Slashdot in bed--but have actually bought quite a few games for it.
So not actually an Iphone then. But good for you. And I have a Motorola V980 that I can use to read Slashdot from bed - your point?
Games are not art
Says who?
Sure, there's no need for a plot in a simple shoot 'em up, but I think good storytelling is important to things such as role-playing games. No, it's not a full blown AI, but neither is a book or a movie. Surely part of the fun is using your imagination, just as we are expected to do for books.
Unless there's going to be a population boom (unlikely in western countries), I don't see how. It may happen if people lose interesting in games as they get older, but I guess the premise is here that that won't happen. Okay, 60+ gamers won't be a majority, but it's plausible to say they'll be a significant part of the market. Certainly far more so than now, where elderly people mostly don't play games, because they never grew up with them.
And unlike middle aged people, they'll have a lot more time on their hands. And unlike 14-20 year olds, they are more likely to have the money.
We've already seen a shift in games marketing already - up until the mid 1990s, games were still mainly seen as "for kids", and I noticed that with the Playstation, there was a shift in advertising towards young adults. Makes sense really: firstly kids of the 80s were now in their 20s; secondly, they had more disposable income (especially important considering the increasing costs of games production). The last thing games companies wanted then was to have the image stick that games were something only children played.
I thought entirely the same thing - can't we get through a story without an irrelevant Apple slashvertisement?
Handheld gaming was hardly invented by the Iphone, nor was Internet access in phones. Apple are long playing catch up here. And they didn't "popularise" it, either - the Iphone is no Ipod, both in terms of features and market share. To suggest that the other devices are clones is ludicrous, and insulting to those companies that worked hard to bring those devices, often long before Apple thought of doing so. As you say, the Gameboy is the obvious popular reference.
It becomes tediously circular - people freeload off the hype as you say, and by doing so, it adds to the hype.
It's also patronising to Slashdot readers: yes, I know that the average layperson has to be told "Ipod" instead of "mp3 player", "Windows" instead of "operating system", "Gameboy" instead of "handheld games console" or "Nokia" (the obvious realistic choice) instead of "mobile phone", but I think readers here are capable of knowing what the products are, without it having to be explained in terms of brandnames.
("Hey, I've got a web page you might be interested in! It's a webpage that can be read on Iphones and clones, isn't that great?")
luckily for them they had the reasonably stable Windows NT ready to go out the door.
This was hardly luck - they'd been developing NT for years, precisely because of the limitations of DOS/Win 9x. It was long their intention to switch entirely to the NT line, but they had problems with people wanting backwards compatibility with their ancient DOS applications.
It was Apple that were more in that situation - they'd shot themselves in the foot by the increasingly outdated "classic" MacOS. They floundered for years trying to modernize it, without success (Copeland). Luckily they were able to buy another OS, allowing them to ditch MacOS and use the rebranded OS they'd bought as a replacement.
(because for some reason people think its *normal* to require 1 GB to run an OS, which I don't understand).
I think it's normal for a modern OS to make full use of modern machines. Of course an OS doesn't need 1GB - I can run AmigaOS in 1MB, for example. But what market value is there in releasing OSs for small resources? Firstly, the market demand for that is low (since most computers, even netbooks, have at least 1GB these days), secondly if you have less than that, there are plenty of older OSs (from AmigaOS to Windows XP) that run fine on it. Microsoft would just be in competition with themselves.
On the other hand, they keep losing mindshare to Apple left and right.
Hardly. What evidence is there for this ludicrous claim?
Of course they still exist. Not commonly available but about as common as Ubuntu boxes in my local store...
What does XP bring to the 2000 user?
512MB? Amiga can do a multitasking GUI in 512 KB. Beat that, Ubuntu boy.
Which is exactly the point he was making. They're a niche player in the mobile phone market anyway, and anyone who wants a full blown netbook isn't going to satisfy themselves with a phone.
Apple can't make it in the netbook category because they won't sell cheap hardware plain and simple. ... confine MS to gamers and businesses
So MS will be "confined" to merely all Internet devices, gaming and all businesses, leaving Apple to be "king" of the remaining niche markets? I can just see MS quaking in their boots at that.
Hardcore militant atheists are just as annoying to average folk as the hardcore militant fundamentalists. One is fundamentalist re: the Bible, the other fundamentalist re: radical materialism.
Atheism is not materialism.
And what on earth is "radical" or fundamentalist atheism? When we talk about fundamentalist, we either mean people who take a book such as the Bible to be literally true, or people who fly planes into buildings and blow themselves up in the name of their faith. None of these meanings apply to any atheists.
Not sure what the rest of your post is about. If something is unprovable, there's no reason to believe in it - hence, I'm an atheist, not a theist.
Personally I'd rather judge based on what people say, rather than one of them claiming he has some kind of authority because he writes on a blog.
Oh, and:
Sorry, but I'd rather trust the guy who is one of the main Perl core hackers out there, responsible for the excellent perl security track record (1 vulnerability in two years on average) than random guys over the internet or Microsoft. ...and random anonymous cowards posting on a forum. So no, I don't trust you.
If this is done like their other *_s functions, then for arrays, you don't have to add an extra parameter. They provide templated versions that automatically know the size of the array, since it's known as compile time.
Passing the extra parameter is only required when the size isn't known at compile time - in which cases, your laughable "MIN(sizeof(dst), bytes_to_copy)" would fail anyway.
Apple today announced a revolutionary new upgrade for the IpHoNe. For years, people have only used phones for accessing the Internet, listening to music, taking photographs and playing games. Now Apple bring a new development to the market: the ability to communicate via voice with someone who is not even in the same room, as if by magic.
The initial version will only allow communication with other Iphone users, though rumours suggest users can get around this limitation by jail-breaking the phone, in line with Apple's "Works, Just" tradition.
Some have pointed out that a few phones have already allowed such a feature, but Apple fans have dismissed this. "Other phones may have done this before, but how many people used it?" commented such fan. "Apple were the first to integrate it properly. Thanks to this innovation, I no longer have to lug my landline around with me as well as my Iphone."
Because it's on the IpHoNe!
It's rather like how you can get a patent by taking an existing idea, and doing it "On the Internet" - in this case, you take something that's been done on other phones for years, do it "On the Iphone (after jailbraking it - Apple "Just Works", don't you know)", and suddenly you have a media-worthy story.
And the geek stereotype is that we all post from our mum's basement, and we've never had sex. So don't be offended if I assume you're a virgin still living at home right - don't give me that PC response, right?
Stereotypes may have some truth in them as a generalisation, but the important thing is that if you come across someone who doesn't fit the stereotype, you accept it's the stereotype that's imperfect, and not the person that is wrong.
And there's nothing "PC" about it - claiming "PC" is the call of someone who doesn't like something, but can't explain why. It's the sort of response I expect from the Daily Mail.
Whilst laptop manufacturers may try to market towards women, I'm glad we haven't got into the situation of having "men's laptops" and "women's laptops". You may think that stupid, but that's exactly what we have with every personal item that didn't appear recently: clothes, watches, glasses, handkerchiefs, umbrellas, bags, bicycles. If the laptop had orginated in the 19th Century, then you would be walking into your computer store to find it divided into two: men's laptops, and women's laptops. Imagine finding one that's perfect, only to be told "I'm sorry sir, but this is a women's laptop"? And people would justify this with the same arguments of "But these stereotypes are true ... and anyone who disagrees is being PC!"
They can sell pink laptops and pink Ipods all they like - I'm just glad that with new kinds of products, we no longer insist that what one you can buy is dependent on what's between your legs.
This is actually a very relevant point - surely the Slashdot stereotype is that no one posting here has ever had a girlfriend? So if it's really true that the OP has had five girlfriends, then he proves the point that stereotypes aren't always true.
Well that's exactly the point, isn't it? We're a long way from AI being able to judge artistic merits, because doing so often isn't just a property of the image alone, but is related to what the things in the image represent.
Now having said that, it might be interesting to have some judgement that is not biased by cultural perceptions - one that treats Pulitzer and Goatse on an equal playing field, judging what they look like rather than what they represent. But it's unclear what meaning such an algorithm has - it's not comparable to what humans would think, nor is it meaningful to say it's the computer's own opinion (I mean, anyone could write an algorithm that assigns some arbitrary value based on the image data, but what use or meaning that has is another matter.)
you need the filenames
Not necessarily, you could search for headers or file fragments that might suggest a file you are interested in. In 1999 I suffered a complete hard disk loss of data - this was before I had a CDRW, and my floppy backups were a few weeks old. I recovered important Java source code files by searching for strings of the Java class headers. I don't know how much flexibility file recovery programs offer, but this I did with a quick program I knocked up that grepped the hard disk. I was able to do this based on a quick piece of explanation from a friend - you'd think that a site that'd lost 13 years of data would have someone able to do this.