Before he handed over the money, though, he took out his soroban (Japanese abacus, slightly different bead layout, but same idea) and checked the math of the computer on it. Then he handed us our money.
that's interesting. Gotta wonder what specific incidents, if any, were behind that.
I travelled around Asia in the late 80s (while living in Indonesia) and in many, many places vendors used an abacus to calculate retail sale totals.
Pretty damn close. "commodity" PCs are essentially indistinguishable... except by price. You buy the cheap one. "premium" PCs add features, special hardware, support, etc. Macs are not commodity PCs by any stretch of the imagination.
3. Stock Exchange. any unprocessed or partially processed good, as grain, fruits, and vegetables, or precious metals.
Price is the the primary differentiator of these goods. Bananas are pretty much just bananas, until the Organic label is attached, in which case they become premium.
I think the most important question is what would mass adoption of solar power due to our power grid. Non-solar generated electricity would go through the roof, for starters - causing the adoption rate to increase - again causing rates on non-solar energy to increase - until at some point the power companies wouldn't be able to afford to operate their grids anymore.
It's an interesting thought, although I have to admit it reminds me of that guy in college who didn't want to work out because he didn't want to look like a huge, gross bodybuilder... as if he was in any danger of that. I think such a level of solar adoption would take so long and require so much work that the entire landscape of our construction infrastructure, politics, zoning, state-to-state regulations, etc., will be so entirely changed that we can't predict what the actual problems will be. So: not to worry.
To be clear, this paper deliberately concerns
itself with the commodity computer market,
where products are aimed at the mass market.
We consider the Mac to be a premium, niche
product, like a Bang and Olufsen television,
which is difficult to justify in the business world
outside of the publishing sector. We therefore
do not think that the Mac, despite claims of its
superiority, provides a meaningful competitive
threat to Microsoft.
Note that word "commodity", confusing geeks world wide. It means distinguished only by price.
Congratulations for so whole-heartedly buying into Apple's marketing, but he was going for the biggest possible profit, not a desire to make the perfect cell phone. There's easy to imagine improvements, that would have added cost but made the iPhone better - GSM or an unlocked OS are obvious ones. The super-expensive Nokias have a lot of options that the iPhone doesn't.
Best isn't all about features because a product is a balance and a set of trade-offs. I was simply quoting Steve when I said he would be happy with 1% of the market and that he was trying to make the best phone he could. I'm sure the super-expensive Nokias have features the iPhone doesn't but I also have no doubt that the success of the iPhone will spur Apple to add features at the high end and also introduce a less expensive version (which has already been rumored). A $1000 iPhone would certainly be a whole lot less great no matter what features it had.
Did anyone suggest that the iPhone would be anything but a high-end, high-priced gadget? Has Apple ever sold to the lowest common denominator? have they ever competed on price?
Steve didn't say: let's make a phone that we can sell to 120 million people. He said : let's make the best phone we possibly can and I'll be happy if we get 1% of the market.
I mostly just want more memory... my CD collection is at about 30GB right now. Put 32GB of flash in there and we have a deal.
Do you? I've found I don't want all my music with me all the time. I have an old iPod for the car with lots of playlists for driving. I put the music I know I'm going to listen to today or this week on my iPhone for that rare case when I actually listen to music from it. While it would be nice to have everything everywhere all the time, in reality I go through phases; I don't want a random selection from thousands of albums, so playlists work for me. Besides, there is some music which I want to have but which I rarely ever want to listen to - especially not on an iPod. Like, for instance, holiday music, or kids music, or nostalgia-driven (but crappy) music from the past. Most of that stuff can stay on my hard drive at home. And I still have stuff in the basement on cassette tape that, while I'm not ready to part with it, I'm not yet willing to buy it again or even rip it. And I don't even have a tape player anymore. what's with that?
heh, so for those interested in the enslavement/elimination of the human race, we hardly need ultra intelligent computers to do that. Only religion...
perhaps the AIs would find our sectarian conflicts funny, but have actual wars over interface specifications and compatibility.
Given the nature of the game, it could be that AA would help in dehumanizing the enemy if the other side is seen as a video game opponent.
This could be; I also think video games of this type dehumanize the players themselves as well. Or at least, warps your notion of the finality of your own death. we don't get extra lives or a second chance.
Right. The chief problem is that innovation has to be seen, so you need the space and the freedom to actually do new things. Talking about innovation convinces nobody but those with an innovative or visionary personality already. Others have said it better, but innovation usually happens best in the form of a new upstart enterprise, rather than within an existing structure, so innovation needs lots of startups. I actually wish corporations could more easily be structured like a movie production, where you orient around a specific project and bring in talent for all the different departments, then disband when the project is done. Startups are a bit like that, CEO=director, VC=producer for funding agency (studio) except that they are forced to create an entity that is supposed to either live some kind of long life and pursue a market/product expansion strategy or sell and be absorbed into a larger entity.
I saw this and previous veriations on this way back in 1987 on a tech show called Beyond 2000. 20 years later and still a prototype.
I remember it. Was it not called the merlin then? I remember reading about it in some popsci rag in 1989 or so. My dad worked at a research lab in fuels and combustion in those days and his colleagues didn't believe the power to weight ratio claims for the engines. I so wanted to believe though.
So IMHO goto has exactly one proper place in programming: Graceful error escape from deep nesting.
Computers do just fine with spaghetti code. it's the humans that don't. Structured programming is one way to make it easier for people to write and understand programs, by severely limiting the kinds of software structures you are allowed to create. But I'm sure there are other, less restrictive ways waiting to be invented. I hold out hope that nested boxes isn't the be-all, end-all of programming.
One of his main points was that malleability destroys any chance of the work being art.
I guess that rules out jazz as art, along with any other music involving improvisation.
In all seriousness, in jazz, the performance is the art more than the sheet music (if there would be any) or some other abstraction of the music. For games, the performance is what the player does in the game, not what the game developer does. Playing the game is the art, like the performances of chess grandmasters that are praised, analyzed, and fill books. The same might happen for video games one day, but is it high art? Maybe, but can there ever be a Mozart of game play? I don't think the comparison makes sense; maybe a Bruce Lee of game play - the pinball wizard. Will there be a Mozart of game creation? That, I think, is also unlikely. While there is an art to creating a game, it is mostly a practical art. What chance there is for high art in a game is usually squeezed out or crushed by everything else going on.
And honestly how many of you guys use a password like YwMCU07D?
I do. I only use rememberable passwords for my essential day to day things which I am willing to change frequently. Everything else gets a long randomly generated password. At last count, I have 296 such passwords, and they are, except for a few, all at least 10 characters. stored on an encrypted disk image. So yes, hack my computer and decrypt my.dmg and you'll have them all. That's a lot less likely than me actually changing those passwords all the time though, and a lot safer than me using the same password all over the web. Passwords are a trade-off and the whole system is starting to suck in ways I never imagined when I was putting serious thought into solving the problem (in 1999).
It worries me that the physical transfer of music in tangible form is declining. The art that goes into album design and track arrangement is very important to the message that the artist is attempting to convene.
As someone who, in the old days, would spend days poring over every detail of each album I'd purchase when I gathered money together, I hear you. But I think the album is largely over except as a kind of convenience package. Just a thought - how does the fact of Dylan's ever changing versions of his songs affect the cohesiveness of the original album on which each one was recorded? To me it diminishes the album because you realize that the one originally recorded version is only a tiny slice of the continuum that is a Dylan song. The internet blows this wide open to the world outside the cult tour followers. I'd say except for purely recorded art, the artist is the source and the purveyor of the message, and the recording is simply one instance of that message. The idea of a "master" version of a song is simply an artifact of the distribution system. The internet, one would hope, enables a kind of return to the pre-mass media artistry in music, ie, performance-centric.
The similarity of these situations is that theoretically the ISP customer is asking (by agreeing to the ISP terms of service) for the adds to be inserted in the web pages, just as ClearPlay customers are asking for the bad parts to be removed.
In the clearplay case, the modified experience is not being redistributed. The users have direct control and the dvd is not modified, and one user experiences is differently than another, and normal non-clearplay dvd players show the full thing. In the ISP case the modified content/experience is being effectively redistributed or forced. Access to the content is mediated, at least, even if the actual data on disk is not changed by the ISP. But there is an inherent question we now have - is a "work" the thing, or the experience of the thing? for instance, should I be allowed to listen to the Dark Side of the Moon while watching Wizard of Oz with the sound turned off? should I be allowed to build a device that automates that sort of thing? (eg: rifftrax, sharecrow)
I understand how the president is responsible for the actions of the FCC. My question is why does this particular case fall into the "Bush is evil" category? What administration allowed "Shit" and "Fuck" to appear on the airwaves?
well.. it's just the gestalt. To me it feels like the whole Bush administration is "arbitrary and capricious" - against the constitution and the law, against actual non-hypocritical morality, against the middle class, against the poor, against the innocent people in iraq as well as our own citizens trapped in idiotic arbitrary and capricious detainment of the innocent until proven guilty, the obviously staged terror alerts, k-street,... I'm like, Yeah! strike it down! A blow for everything that stands against arbitrary and capricious behavior of all kinds. So there's no instant connection between saying fuck and the bush administration outside of my daily gut reactions. they've lost the benefit of the doubt. we've flipped the bozo bit. haven't we? Their actions don't get rational consideration anymore.
I still don't see what George Bush has to do with this discussion. You have never been able to say "Shit" or "Fuck" on the public airwaves during prime time. George Bush may not be a great president, but every discussion on Slashdot should not be viewed as an opportunity to flame him.
The president sets the tone of his administration; people do what he wants because he is the president. He appoints all the inexperienced loyal political operatives in key positions. And he fails to fire the incompetent ones and fails to hold people accountable for their mistakes. only the disloyal ones and the ones who just get fed up leave to spend more time with their families. Someone once told me that A quality people hire A people, while B quality people hire C quality people. So it seems to be.
Why are people still deeply researching this? JFK is dead, so is Princess Diana, so is Elvis; the world is still spinning and everyone else has moved on. I don't understand, why are people concerned with this?
JFK was the President of the United States, and he was murdered. That, in and of itself is significant. But we don't know why he was killed, and we are not entirely convinced of the best answers we have. We well-adjusted rational beings can't imagine something like this being done by a plain old nutter. There has got to be a rational reason.. right?
3. Hit shift-option-space to switch between keyboard types
that reminds me.. back in the Mac OS 9 days (and maybe before also) I used to use keyboard layouts to do passwords. that is, I picked a very easy to remember password by muscle memory on the QWERTY layout, but to type it I would switch to a garbled up keyboard layout . heh.
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Steve didn't say: let's make a phone that we can sell to 120 million people. He said : let's make the best phone we possibly can and I'll be happy if we get 1% of the market.
we'll get amarok on the mac soon, too.
heh, so for those interested in the enslavement/elimination of the human race, we hardly need ultra intelligent computers to do that. Only religion... perhaps the AIs would find our sectarian conflicts funny, but have actual wars over interface specifications and compatibility.
Right. The chief problem is that innovation has to be seen, so you need the space and the freedom to actually do new things. Talking about innovation convinces nobody but those with an innovative or visionary personality already. Others have said it better, but innovation usually happens best in the form of a new upstart enterprise, rather than within an existing structure, so innovation needs lots of startups. I actually wish corporations could more easily be structured like a movie production, where you orient around a specific project and bring in talent for all the different departments, then disband when the project is done. Startups are a bit like that, CEO=director, VC=producer for funding agency (studio) except that they are forced to create an entity that is supposed to either live some kind of long life and pursue a market/product expansion strategy or sell and be absorbed into a larger entity.
or install a urinal for the guy. Then everyone wins.