who is going to buy computers with these new ultra powerful dual core processors?
I will. I'm often running applications that take 100% CPU. Having another core around to make the system nice and responsive would be wonderful. gamers don't need dual core
Right, and when video cards that supported an accelerated transform and lighting (i.e. the GeForce) came out, they didn't need that either since current games didn't support it. You can bet the next core of games will be multi-threaded. everyday users have had plenty of power for the last 5 years
That's true, but thats been the case for several years now (as you yourself said), and Intel/AMD are still selling processors. Dual cores will make an OS seem a lot more responsive though. That alone isn't enough to convince the average user to upgrade, but multiple cores is the only place to go now that the heat dissipation problem has reached a crisis point for CPU makers.
Free speech, as far as I know, is that one is allowed to utter anything, anywhere
Not according to the Supreme Court. There are several limitations to free speech that most people consider entirely reasonable. The one everyone quotes is yelling fire in a crowded theatre. Another would be also making terroristic threats against anyone.
But getting to your issue, libel and slander have been widely recognized as non-protected speach. Why? Well, let's give an example. Say a newspaper in a town wants candidate A to win, and candidate B to lose. If libel were protected speach all the newspaper would have to do is spread insidious, hard to disprove lies about candidate B such as "Candidate B is gay and has AIDS!" That gives an awfull lot of power to anyone with the power to spread lies.
Otherwise, who is to draw the line between lies and uninformed statements, and the line between defaming and not defaming?
A judge or jury would decide what's libel and what's not. Also, libel isn't just a lie. Libel is knowingly making statements with the intent to defame someone else. As another poster pointed out this can include making statements without evidence. While the newspaper above may not know that candidate B is straight and doesn't have AIDS (so they don't know for a fact what they're saying is a lie) the lack of any evidence would make it libel.
Looking at some of the comments on that site, I can see why CSUSA thinks they have a case. Most of the worst posts have now been deleted, but the parents were in there accusing teachers of all kinds of horrible crimes, as well as CSUSA of condoning them.
I read through some of that website, the worst post I saw was something about stealing pizza. I didn't see anything approaching libel. If CSUSA takes Reigelman to court and successfully proves that the parents were falsely defaming CSUSA on that website, then it is an open and shut case of libel, which is against the law.
The proper approach would be to subpoena the forum owner for the names of the libelous parents. Then sue those parents for libel. The vast majority of the posts on this site are nowhere near libelous, so the school has no right to shut down the entire site.
This clearly sounds like it's just a threatening action designed to silence people rather than merely stopping libel. If it were about libel they'd being going after individuals, not trying to shut down the site.
Where did I say they were mututually exclusive? For the most part they're different missions though. Sending humans into space is so expensive that it takes money and resources away from pursuing the actual science. It is doubtful that full scientific potential of any space mission can be fulfilled without a human component.
More resources always increase the scientific potential of any mission. More money, more time, more talented engineers, whatever. The key is of course getting the most scientific potential out of the resources you have. Currently this means sending probes, and not people.
Remember the day when an entire manned space flight going without a hitch was barely considered newsworthy?
Yah, I also remember a day when ALL of Nasas resources were dedicated to one single mission, rather than a 100-200. You just think it might be a bit easier to accomplish one single goal while dedicating all your resources to it than it is to work on 100 things at the same time? We spent billions upon billions of dollars for a guy to play golf on the moon and get some rocks back. That's great, and we learned a lot but in terms of science it was peanuts compared to the science we get from all the missions being worked on now. Since then, we've had blurry telescopes, lost probes, crash landings, re-entry burn-ups, space station fires, metric conversion errors, and a plethora of other humiliating failures.
True. We've also had wonderfull sucesses. We fixed the "blury telescope" in orbit, and have upgraded it several times since. We've STILL got two robots wandering around Mars far after they were designed to operate. We had a probe land on a moon of Saturn, had another probe land on an asteriod, and have another set to crash into a comet. We've got another probe set to orbit mercury for the first time ever. Oh, and we've got a small armada of probes set to be sent to mars over the next few years. Compared to the "glory days" where we also had massive failures like rockets exploding, I think we're doing damn well. As far as past failures, if you want something with that's a bit safer, try something a bit more easy like designing ashtrays. No, our highwater mark for the last ten years is a solar-powered toy car which rolled around for a few days on the surface of Mars
Quite a manipulative way to put it. The rovers have produced an enourmous amount of information on the geology of Mars in the more than a year they've been active. We never would have gotten the evidence for liquid water on Mars we have without being able to move around the surface.
But you seem to be more upset that we're not doing "glamorous" things like going to the moon, or producing pretty pictures of Saturn. If all you care about is sexy space stuff, I'd suggest one of the fine eye-candy sci-fi movies hollywood puts out. Nasa is in the business of science, and partially in the business of manned exploration. Creating "Star Trek" isn't in that mission.
You seem to keep thinking this is about rights, or what you expect to happen. Ethics isn't about rights or expectations of behavior, it's about right and wrong. Just because HP is a huge corp and you never expect them to act ethically doesn't make it right for them to act unethically.
HP putting up a public forum comes with the expectation that it's on the up-and-up. It isn't represented as being a select "letter to the editor." Hell, even letters to the editor have dissent for the newspaper in them. In your eyes would it also be perfectly OK for HP to create fake entries from fake customers, on the theory that they can do whatever they want with their website? They are a big super-corp after all, so you'd expect them to do such a thing, right? Obviously that would be wrong, and it has nothing to do with who owns the server or expecting corporations to act unethically.
Do I expect HP to actually be honest and not pick out posts it doesn't like? Well no, big corporations rarely care about ethics and morality. But I still think it's unethical to do so and I'll hold HP or any other company to the flame every time. Why do you think HP changed it's position? Because they look like a bunch of assholes for removing dissent.
Ah yes. The "they're completely within their rights, so it's OK" argument. "Jackassses" as you call them are completely within their rights, so I guess that's OK too.
Try to imagine a world where even though something is legal, it's not ethical. If I were married I'd be completely within my rights to have sex with another unmarried woman (Adultery is only illegal for women in Minnesota). That doesn't make it right, however. Try to expand your definitions of right and wrong beyond a legal/illegal one.
He didn't swear, call anyone names, made no personal attacks, etc. He's simply expressing his displeasure at the poor customer support he's received. I really don't see how much nicer, but honest he could have been. How do you expect people to express dissent? Or do you perhaps think a company blog should just be full of yes men who love the product?
If HP doesn't want people to say negative things about the company, don't let anyone post any comments at all. It's as simple as that.
It's just a topic title, not the word of law. While not really a "right", it's certainly in the same genre of discussion. Try not to be so literal.
While HP can certainly do what they want with their server, the whole "customer service" aspect of the site goes down the tubes as soon as they start censoring legitimate claims. Why is it whenever someone or some company has a legal right to something, people start acting like the right to do something also means they haven't done anything wrong? The law and ethics are two very different things.
In general I think HP makes good products, though sometimes has questionable business practices with regard to 3rd party ink cartridges in their printers. Given this, I think HP shouldn't have much to fear as far as posts about product quality goes.
Unless you are illegally in this country (and if you are, hint: you're here ILLEGALLY) this doesn't matter to you.
Hardly. This is a great way for the feds to limit access to whatever they see fit. The bill has a provision that allows the gestapo.. err. department of homeland security to determine the information requirements on all ID. That could mean fingerprints, DNA, etc all without any elected official having any say. Or maybe you have to have proof that you're not a "threat to the government", whatever that definition is today. That could mean any member of some unpopular protest group (tree huggers, anti-abortionists, anti-globalization, whatever) could be denied ID. Don't try to tell me this will only be used for illegal aliens. Do you think the government will find sonething out about you they don't already know?
Yes, possibly. Like requirements to have my fingerprints, or DNA on file. Are you afraid you'll be watched somehow in a way you already aren't being watched?
Sure. National databases of every activity I've done, then data-mining of the records to spy on people matching a certain profile. "Sir, because you make so many trips to Canada, we think you're a terrorist and have searched your home". Are you afraid it violates your rights? Which ones?
Privacy for one. It's also not democratic to have a single, unelected official being able to determine the requirements for such an ID card.
You're not trolling, you just have no idea what you're talking about.
No, it's not. As I mentioned, the Pentium 4 has SSE2 instructions, which means it can do four double precision floating point instructions per clock. The AMD Athlon can do only two operations per clock
SSE2 instructions have limited uses. They can't do "two instructions per clock" as you say, it means they can do one instruction to multiple data segments. This helps in very specific instances, and is nowhere near having a 2:1 advantage.
Yes, I know, clock speed isn't the only factor to be considered, yadda, yadda. But, as I mentioned, the limiting factor in CPUs today is either floating point performance or I/O. ... The fact remains that, in personal computers, only floating point intensive tasks really stress the CPU.
FP and I/O performance are important, but they aren't the limiting factor. Many applications don't even touch the FP unit. As far as "only floating point intensive tasks really stress the CPU", I'll try to remember that when I'm running a database application, compiling a program, compressing/uncompressing a file, running a webserver, etc. I guess so, I have a Compaq nx9005 notebook with an Athlon 2200+ and a desktop with an ASUS mobo and P4 2.4 GHz CPU.
Apples, Oranges. Almost any notebook is going to be slower than an equiv clocked desktop. When designing a notebook space and power consumption are much more important than squeezing every last bit of performance out of a chipset.
Technically speaking if we had enough infomation nothing would be considered random.
That might be true, except for the heisenburg uncertainty principle. In short it says you can never determine both the exact position of a particle and its momentum. The essential problem is that measurement of either of these properties disturbs the thing you're trying to measure in an unpredictable way.
The end result is that you can never have enough information. Randomness isn't a lack of understanding, it's a fundamental part of the universe.
Not necessarily a book, but you might go into an Apple store just to see if they have anything interesting.
With slightly less interesting low cost stuff to buy, slightly less people will come into the store, spend less time at the store, or come back again. Apple especially wants people to come into the store, see the new latest hottest Mac, and get the idea into their head that they want it. Later that might add up to a purchase.
And considering that the publisher claims it's actually quite a positive portrayal of Jobs, are you sure that's not the whole point of this?
I don't think Steve Jobs is that clever. This is exactly consistent with his past behaviour. He often gets pissed off at some company and swears off their product for a while. I believe he did the same thing with Motorola when they wouldn't play ball with him (though obviously this is more personal and has nothing to do with business).
the only question would be whether they gained more than they lost by pissing off Apple.
Apple only has about 100 stores, and they don't sell primarily books. As far as retailers of Dummies books go, I'd bet Apple stores are a drop in the bucket. The only reason Apple has the books is to sell more computers. Dummies books being absent from Apple stores will hurt Apple more than it ever would hurt Wiley.
Well, if they feel the books paints Jobs in such a negative light that it might turn people away from Apple, then they would be upholding their obligation to their shareholders.
Let's assume for just a minute that somehow a book about how Steve Jobs is a hothead and often a dickhead reduces the sales of apple. (A fact widely known by anyone who cares to know anything about the subject). This isn't some widely held secret being published.
Now, how does Apple removing ALL the very successfull books from the publisher from it's store shelves help Apple? By doing so Apple has only given more and more publicity to this biography. That means more an more people will buy it, and less and less people will (assuming your theory) buy Apple products.
No, the best thing to do for Apple was to shut the hell up about the whole thing and lie low. Make no public statements about it, keep selling the Dummies books, etc. This is clearly a case of Steve Jobs acting like a spoiled child. Someone said something about him he didn't like, and now he's trying get some petty revenge (and in the process hurting Apple through lost sales, lost foot traffic in Apple stores, etc). Grow up Steve Jobs.
All those people going into the Apple store are immediately going to see Jobs' picture on the front and think he's a con artist. Doesn't exactly mesh with the honest Apple brand no matter what the pages say.
You missed it. Apple didn't just ban the unauthorized biography of Steve Jobs they banned the entire series of dummies books made by the same publisher. This biography was never going to appear in Apple stores since obviously Apple doesn't carry biographies in its stores, only computer help books.
As far as Jobs is concerned, he goofed on this one. His actions only prove he's an impulsive hothead (not that there's not a dozen other things he's done publically to prove that). The biography just got a huge amount of free publicity it normally wouldn't have. I certainly never would have heard about it, and now maybe I'll buy a copy when it comes out. The dummies books are so popular that the Apple Store will look incomplete without them. People will ask about them, then go to Barnes And Noble on the other side of the mall to buy one. My prediction is they'll re-appear quietly in 6-12 months.
So the president needs to have people that support his administration at every level of governement, no matter how non-partisan it is? Your comparisons to Powell and the Pope are ridiculous. Is Bush so paranoid and partisan that he believes that the inter-operability of networks is a neo-con issue?
I thought Bush was a uniter, not a divider. If he can't even let a few people who didn't support him into something as esoteric as radio communications, then this man doesn't understand what it means to be a leader at all.
Parkinson's Disease, an inherited genetic condition
While there's some genetic risk factors, it's not know what causes parkinsons disease. According to wikipedia having a parent with Parkinsons increases your lifetime risk of getting it from 2% to 6%.
Because there's not enough open source software to meet the needs of everyone. Either the open source software hasn't reached the feature level of the top-dog closed source program (postgreSQL vs Oracle or Gimp vs Photoshop), or the market for a program is such a niche that no one has written anything for it yet, and likely never will. There's also the legacy app situation. People get used to using a piece of sofware and would expect to use it on this new "linux" thing.
There's also this thing called games. Maybe you don't want to play games, but a hell of a lot of people do. Modern day high end games just can't be created by open source teams. There's just FAR to much effort involved. (And no, using a closed-source engine with closed-source tools like Counter-Strike doesn't count). If you don't have gamers on-board, that's a major hit against your platform.
First, any business running Linux is reasonably going to be using only one of 3 distros: Fedora/RedHat, Debian, or SuSE.
That's actually 4 distributions, with multiple versions of each distribution. Supporting all of them with all the various potential support problems with varying library support would be a nightmare, even with _only_ 4 different linux distributions.
Third, the availability of closed-source software for Linux is not a requirement for its success in business or even for home end users.
I suppose it's not a requirement per se, but it sure as hell helps. Closed source software is going to exist, and people are going to want to install it. Large businesses want to run Oracle for instance. PostgreSQL is great, but it's not Oracle. Open source software is no more going to kill off closed source software than the internet is going to kill off printed media.
Why would anyone want to have binary compatibility ?
Because not everyone wants to be an open source software company. If linux is ever going to be used by a business, a regular end user, etc it has to be able to support closed-source programs. That means binary compatibility so a software maker doesn't have to support 15 different compiles of the same piece of software for each distribution.
most of the troubles faced by windows users such as virus, worms and much everything else lies in the various binary incompatibilities, mis-interactions, and otherwise obscurities
No, viruses and worms are caused by foolish users, insecure applications, poorly maintained computers, etc. It has NOTHING to do with binary compatibility/incompatibility.
I think you've missed the point. What Dijkstra was trying to point out is that the question itself isn't an interesting one. In the analogy we know what a submarine does exactly. Is that swimming? Who cares? It doesn't give us any more information or insight into anything. In both cases it comes down to defining what we mean by swimming, or thinking. If that's the case, why ask the question? Maybe those questions are interesting to a dictionary writer, or linguist, but it's irrelevant to a computer scientist.
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who is going to buy computers with these new ultra powerful dual core processors?
I will. I'm often running applications that take 100% CPU. Having another core around to make the system nice and responsive would be wonderful.
gamers don't need dual core
Right, and when video cards that supported an accelerated transform and lighting (i.e. the GeForce) came out, they didn't need that either since current games didn't support it. You can bet the next core of games will be multi-threaded.
everyday users have had plenty of power for the last 5 years
That's true, but thats been the case for several years now (as you yourself said), and Intel/AMD are still selling processors. Dual cores will make an OS seem a lot more responsive though. That alone isn't enough to convince the average user to upgrade, but multiple cores is the only place to go now that the heat dissipation problem has reached a crisis point for CPU makers.
Free speech, as far as I know, is that one is allowed to utter anything, anywhere
Not according to the Supreme Court. There are several limitations to free speech that most people consider entirely reasonable. The one everyone quotes is yelling fire in a crowded theatre. Another would be also making terroristic threats against anyone.
But getting to your issue, libel and slander have been widely recognized as non-protected speach. Why? Well, let's give an example. Say a newspaper in a town wants candidate A to win, and candidate B to lose. If libel were protected speach all the newspaper would have to do is spread insidious, hard to disprove lies about candidate B such as "Candidate B is gay and has AIDS!" That gives an awfull lot of power to anyone with the power to spread lies.
Otherwise, who is to draw the line between lies and uninformed statements, and the line between defaming and not defaming?
A judge or jury would decide what's libel and what's not. Also, libel isn't just a lie. Libel is knowingly making statements with the intent to defame someone else. As another poster pointed out this can include making statements without evidence. While the newspaper above may not know that candidate B is straight and doesn't have AIDS (so they don't know for a fact what they're saying is a lie) the lack of any evidence would make it libel.
Looking at some of the comments on that site, I can see why CSUSA thinks they have a case. Most of the worst posts have now been deleted, but the parents were in there accusing teachers of all kinds of horrible crimes, as well as CSUSA of condoning them.
I read through some of that website, the worst post I saw was something about stealing pizza. I didn't see anything approaching libel.
If CSUSA takes Reigelman to court and successfully proves that the parents were falsely defaming CSUSA on that website, then it is an open and shut case of libel, which is against the law.
The proper approach would be to subpoena the forum owner for the names of the libelous parents. Then sue those parents for libel. The vast majority of the posts on this site are nowhere near libelous, so the school has no right to shut down the entire site.
This clearly sounds like it's just a threatening action designed to silence people rather than merely stopping libel. If it were about libel they'd being going after individuals, not trying to shut down the site.
Where did I say they were mututually exclusive? For the most part they're different missions though. Sending humans into space is so expensive that it takes money and resources away from pursuing the actual science.
It is doubtful that full scientific potential of any space mission can be fulfilled without a human component.
More resources always increase the scientific potential of any mission. More money, more time, more talented engineers, whatever. The key is of course getting the most scientific potential out of the resources you have. Currently this means sending probes, and not people.
Remember the day when an entire manned space flight going without a hitch was barely considered newsworthy?
Yah, I also remember a day when ALL of Nasas resources were dedicated to one single mission, rather than a 100-200. You just think it might be a bit easier to accomplish one single goal while dedicating all your resources to it than it is to work on 100 things at the same time? We spent billions upon billions of dollars for a guy to play golf on the moon and get some rocks back. That's great, and we learned a lot but in terms of science it was peanuts compared to the science we get from all the missions being worked on now.
Since then, we've had blurry telescopes, lost probes, crash landings, re-entry burn-ups, space station fires, metric conversion errors, and a plethora of other humiliating failures.
True. We've also had wonderfull sucesses. We fixed the "blury telescope" in orbit, and have upgraded it several times since. We've STILL got two robots wandering around Mars far after they were designed to operate. We had a probe land on a moon of Saturn, had another probe land on an asteriod, and have another set to crash into a comet. We've got another probe set to orbit mercury for the first time ever. Oh, and we've got a small armada of probes set to be sent to mars over the next few years. Compared to the "glory days" where we also had massive failures like rockets exploding, I think we're doing damn well. As far as past failures, if you want something with that's a bit safer, try something a bit more easy like designing ashtrays.
No, our highwater mark for the last ten years is a solar-powered toy car which rolled around for a few days on the surface of Mars
Quite a manipulative way to put it. The rovers have produced an enourmous amount of information on the geology of Mars in the more than a year they've been active. We never would have gotten the evidence for liquid water on Mars we have without being able to move around the surface.
But you seem to be more upset that we're not doing "glamorous" things like going to the moon, or producing pretty pictures of Saturn. If all you care about is sexy space stuff, I'd suggest one of the fine eye-candy sci-fi movies hollywood puts out. Nasa is in the business of science, and partially in the business of manned exploration. Creating "Star Trek" isn't in that mission.
You seem to keep thinking this is about rights, or what you expect to happen. Ethics isn't about rights or expectations of behavior, it's about right and wrong. Just because HP is a huge corp and you never expect them to act ethically doesn't make it right for them to act unethically.
HP putting up a public forum comes with the expectation that it's on the up-and-up. It isn't represented as being a select "letter to the editor." Hell, even letters to the editor have dissent for the newspaper in them. In your eyes would it also be perfectly OK for HP to create fake entries from fake customers, on the theory that they can do whatever they want with their website? They are a big super-corp after all, so you'd expect them to do such a thing, right? Obviously that would be wrong, and it has nothing to do with who owns the server or expecting corporations to act unethically.
Do I expect HP to actually be honest and not pick out posts it doesn't like? Well no, big corporations rarely care about ethics and morality. But I still think it's unethical to do so and I'll hold HP or any other company to the flame every time. Why do you think HP changed it's position? Because they look like a bunch of assholes for removing dissent.
Dude! I'm an asshole! Of COURSE I'm going to screw your sister!
Yah, try that as a defense. It holds up about as good as your argument.
Ah yes. The "they're completely within their rights, so it's OK" argument. "Jackassses" as you call them are completely within their rights, so I guess that's OK too.
Try to imagine a world where even though something is legal, it's not ethical. If I were married I'd be completely within my rights to have sex with another unmarried woman (Adultery is only illegal for women in Minnesota). That doesn't make it right, however. Try to expand your definitions of right and wrong beyond a legal/illegal one.
He didn't swear, call anyone names, made no personal attacks, etc. He's simply expressing his displeasure at the poor customer support he's received. I really don't see how much nicer, but honest he could have been. How do you expect people to express dissent? Or do you perhaps think a company blog should just be full of yes men who love the product?
If HP doesn't want people to say negative things about the company, don't let anyone post any comments at all. It's as simple as that.
It's just a topic title, not the word of law. While not really a "right", it's certainly in the same genre of discussion. Try not to be so literal.
While HP can certainly do what they want with their server, the whole "customer service" aspect of the site goes down the tubes as soon as they start censoring legitimate claims. Why is it whenever someone or some company has a legal right to something, people start acting like the right to do something also means they haven't done anything wrong? The law and ethics are two very different things.
In general I think HP makes good products, though sometimes has questionable business practices with regard to 3rd party ink cartridges in their printers. Given this, I think HP shouldn't have much to fear as far as posts about product quality goes.
Unless you are illegally in this country (and if you are, hint: you're here ILLEGALLY) this doesn't matter to you.
Hardly. This is a great way for the feds to limit access to whatever they see fit. The bill has a provision that allows the gestapo.. err. department of homeland security to determine the information requirements on all ID. That could mean fingerprints, DNA, etc all without any elected official having any say. Or maybe you have to have proof that you're not a "threat to the government", whatever that definition is today. That could mean any member of some unpopular protest group (tree huggers, anti-abortionists, anti-globalization, whatever) could be denied ID. Don't try to tell me this will only be used for illegal aliens.
Do you think the government will find sonething out about you they don't already know?
Yes, possibly. Like requirements to have my fingerprints, or DNA on file.
Are you afraid you'll be watched somehow in a way you already aren't being watched?
Sure. National databases of every activity I've done, then data-mining of the records to spy on people matching a certain profile. "Sir, because you make so many trips to Canada, we think you're a terrorist and have searched your home".
Are you afraid it violates your rights? Which ones?
Privacy for one. It's also not democratic to have a single, unelected official being able to determine the requirements for such an ID card.
You're not trolling, you just have no idea what you're talking about.
...
No, it's not. As I mentioned, the Pentium 4 has SSE2 instructions, which means it can do four double precision floating point instructions per clock. The AMD Athlon can do only two operations per clock
SSE2 instructions have limited uses. They can't do "two instructions per clock" as you say, it means they can do one instruction to multiple data segments. This helps in very specific instances, and is nowhere near having a 2:1 advantage.
Yes, I know, clock speed isn't the only factor to be considered, yadda, yadda. But, as I mentioned, the limiting factor in CPUs today is either floating point performance or I/O.
The fact remains that, in personal computers, only floating point intensive tasks really stress the CPU.
FP and I/O performance are important, but they aren't the limiting factor. Many applications don't even touch the FP unit. As far as "only floating point intensive tasks really stress the CPU", I'll try to remember that when I'm running a database application, compiling a program, compressing/uncompressing a file, running a webserver, etc.
I guess so, I have a Compaq nx9005 notebook with an Athlon 2200+ and a desktop with an ASUS mobo and P4 2.4 GHz CPU.
Apples, Oranges. Almost any notebook is going to be slower than an equiv clocked desktop. When designing a notebook space and power consumption are much more important than squeezing every last bit of performance out of a chipset.
Technically speaking if we had enough infomation nothing would be considered random.
That might be true, except for the heisenburg uncertainty principle. In short it says you can never determine both the exact position of a particle and its momentum. The essential problem is that measurement of either of these properties disturbs the thing you're trying to measure in an unpredictable way.
The end result is that you can never have enough information. Randomness isn't a lack of understanding, it's a fundamental part of the universe.
Not necessarily a book, but you might go into an Apple store just to see if they have anything interesting.
With slightly less interesting low cost stuff to buy, slightly less people will come into the store, spend less time at the store, or come back again. Apple especially wants people to come into the store, see the new latest hottest Mac, and get the idea into their head that they want it. Later that might add up to a purchase.
And considering that the publisher claims it's actually quite a positive portrayal of Jobs, are you sure that's not the whole point of this?
I don't think Steve Jobs is that clever. This is exactly consistent with his past behaviour. He often gets pissed off at some company and swears off their product for a while. I believe he did the same thing with Motorola when they wouldn't play ball with him (though obviously this is more personal and has nothing to do with business).
the only question would be whether they gained more than they lost by pissing off Apple.
Apple only has about 100 stores, and they don't sell primarily books. As far as retailers of Dummies books go, I'd bet Apple stores are a drop in the bucket. The only reason Apple has the books is to sell more computers. Dummies books being absent from Apple stores will hurt Apple more than it ever would hurt Wiley.
Well, if they feel the books paints Jobs in such a negative light that it might turn people away from Apple, then they would be upholding their obligation to their shareholders.
Let's assume for just a minute that somehow a book about how Steve Jobs is a hothead and often a dickhead reduces the sales of apple. (A fact widely known by anyone who cares to know anything about the subject). This isn't some widely held secret being published.
Now, how does Apple removing ALL the very successfull books from the publisher from it's store shelves help Apple? By doing so Apple has only given more and more publicity to this biography. That means more an more people will buy it, and less and less people will (assuming your theory) buy Apple products.
No, the best thing to do for Apple was to shut the hell up about the whole thing and lie low. Make no public statements about it, keep selling the Dummies books, etc. This is clearly a case of Steve Jobs acting like a spoiled child. Someone said something about him he didn't like, and now he's trying get some petty revenge (and in the process hurting Apple through lost sales, lost foot traffic in Apple stores, etc). Grow up Steve Jobs.
All those people going into the Apple store are immediately going to see Jobs' picture on the front and think he's a con artist. Doesn't exactly mesh with the honest Apple brand no matter what the pages say.
You missed it. Apple didn't just ban the unauthorized biography of Steve Jobs they banned the entire series of dummies books made by the same publisher. This biography was never going to appear in Apple stores since obviously Apple doesn't carry biographies in its stores, only computer help books.
As far as Jobs is concerned, he goofed on this one. His actions only prove he's an impulsive hothead (not that there's not a dozen other things he's done publically to prove that). The biography just got a huge amount of free publicity it normally wouldn't have. I certainly never would have heard about it, and now maybe I'll buy a copy when it comes out. The dummies books are so popular that the Apple Store will look incomplete without them. People will ask about them, then go to Barnes And Noble on the other side of the mall to buy one. My prediction is they'll re-appear quietly in 6-12 months.
So the president needs to have people that support his administration at every level of governement, no matter how non-partisan it is? Your comparisons to Powell and the Pope are ridiculous. Is Bush so paranoid and partisan that he believes that the inter-operability of networks is a neo-con issue?
I thought Bush was a uniter, not a divider. If he can't even let a few people who didn't support him into something as esoteric as radio communications, then this man doesn't understand what it means to be a leader at all.
Parkinson's Disease, an inherited genetic condition
While there's some genetic risk factors, it's not know what causes parkinsons disease. According to wikipedia having a parent with Parkinsons increases your lifetime risk of getting it from 2% to 6%.
Because there's not enough open source software to meet the needs of everyone. Either the open source software hasn't reached the feature level of the top-dog closed source program (postgreSQL vs Oracle or Gimp vs Photoshop), or the market for a program is such a niche that no one has written anything for it yet, and likely never will. There's also the legacy app situation. People get used to using a piece of sofware and would expect to use it on this new "linux" thing.
There's also this thing called games. Maybe you don't want to play games, but a hell of a lot of people do. Modern day high end games just can't be created by open source teams. There's just FAR to much effort involved. (And no, using a closed-source engine with closed-source tools like Counter-Strike doesn't count). If you don't have gamers on-board, that's a major hit against your platform.
First, any business running Linux is reasonably going to be using only one of 3 distros: Fedora/RedHat, Debian, or SuSE.
That's actually 4 distributions, with multiple versions of each distribution. Supporting all of them with all the various potential support problems with varying library support would be a nightmare, even with _only_ 4 different linux distributions.
Third, the availability of closed-source software for Linux is not a requirement for its success in business or even for home end users.
I suppose it's not a requirement per se, but it sure as hell helps. Closed source software is going to exist, and people are going to want to install it. Large businesses want to run Oracle for instance. PostgreSQL is great, but it's not Oracle. Open source software is no more going to kill off closed source software than the internet is going to kill off printed media.
Why would anyone want to have binary compatibility ?
Because not everyone wants to be an open source software company. If linux is ever going to be used by a business, a regular end user, etc it has to be able to support closed-source programs. That means binary compatibility so a software maker doesn't have to support 15 different compiles of the same piece of software for each distribution.
most of the troubles faced by windows users such as virus, worms and much everything else lies in the various binary incompatibilities, mis-interactions, and otherwise obscurities
No, viruses and worms are caused by foolish users, insecure applications, poorly maintained computers, etc. It has NOTHING to do with binary compatibility/incompatibility.
I think you've missed the point. What Dijkstra was trying to point out is that the question itself isn't an interesting one. In the analogy we know what a submarine does exactly. Is that swimming? Who cares? It doesn't give us any more information or insight into anything. In both cases it comes down to defining what we mean by swimming, or thinking. If that's the case, why ask the question? Maybe those questions are interesting to a dictionary writer, or linguist, but it's irrelevant to a computer scientist.
I misread the summary. It's still ridiculous.