They've innovated in data centers - you can't operate at the scale they do (bigger than Google or Apple in terms of networking and hardware) without innovation.
They've innovated in Big Data - hundreds of millions of users, billions of relationships between the accounts. Their Social Graph implementation is a big deal. Mining said data to enable search, photo tagging/suggest (just the scale of facial recognition going on is mind boggling) and of course for advertising / segmentation purposes.
They've innovated in their app program for developers - Zynga's FarmVille for better or worse was a sensation and would not have happened without FBs developer API.
They've innovated in Single Sign On / Federated ID - FB is the biggest provider of SSO in the western world (Weibo and TaoBao may have them beat in China). Salesforce is next followed by Twitter and LinkedIn.
I'm no FB fan as a consumer but to say they haven't innovated is the height of ignorance as a technologist.
What you fail to realize is that there are now hundreds of thousands of pros who daily use a laptop in place of the workstation they had just 3 years ago.
It may look like a consumer grade Mac to you but what Apple is doing is to redefine the workstation. Consumers no longer buy desktops. They buy laptops or tablets. The desktop market has been shrinking for the last few years. Apple doesn't even make a desktop any more. The iMac and Mini are the closest you get.
So this is Apples Workstation/Desktop. It is what you make of it like anything else. I'm betting that the industry will start to follow Apples lead here though and you'll see similar offerings from HP, Sony, Samsung etc in the near future just as you see iMac type systems and AirBook "Ultrabook".
Didn't you see Back to the Future 2? You go forward and buy a few copies of the WSJ and then invest in the winners, a little bit here -a little there, nothing too suspicious. 5 years later you are incredibly wealthy and everyone thinks you just invested well.
It's not the brain alone though. It's the sum of you. There is a somatic context. Recreating that somatic context with an artificial construct may be possible but we have no real understanding of what that does to self awareness.
I'm not aware of any broad psychological studies on people before and after accidents where large parts of their body has been lost or replaced. Are those people the same or radically different? Are the known psychological changes a result of the trauma, loss of functionality in the eyes of those around them or a result of physiological impacts on brain chemistry from loss of the body parts in question.
The brain is more than the conscious frontal lobes also. What would the impact be to have no autonomous signals coming from the heart, lungs, etc. We haven't even considered simulating the hind brain or the mid brain which both control our body, receive all sensory input and translate it to signals we are consciously aware of.
It's not just the brain "doing its thing" unless by that you mean, monitoring and aggregating/filtering all stimulation from the body into self awareness. It needs a body to do that. Anything less is likely to cause the brain to shutdown into a coma. So you'd need to recreate that brain body system to have self awareness.
That's what DVRs are for and now Netflix/AppleTV/Roku. I and my family treat it as entertainment and edutainment. There are no commercials just content. It's about being inspired by a story, by a character, by the dialogue and the artistry. When the kids are older we'll go to more live events - plays, concerts, etc but there's no better place to enjoy long form storytelling than your own home with your family or friends. It's a meal and a topic of conversation after, "what did you think of the way the protagonist was portrayed? Why did the director choose that location for that piece of dialogue?"
Seems that many people don't know how to enjoy and appreciate the works of art and culture available. Kind of sad really.
So you had a very localized, very homogenous culture with little or no outside influences. I'm betting everyone in that neighborhood voted the same way, were suspicious of and openly hostile to new and different ways of thinking/living and 25% of the kids couldn't wait to get out of the small minded hellhole they lived in.
We tend to recall our childhood environment through the lens of a blissfully ignorant child's point of view. There was likely domestic abuse, alcoholism, racism, teen pregnancy and a variety of other social problems just on the other side of those "open doors" that was never talked about in front of the kids.
I zone out while reading books all the time. My mind wanders to events of the day or nascent ideas I've been pondering. I often have to skip back several pages to get back into the plot.
Oh did you mean the other kind of zoning out where you are simply not paying attention to anything else as in completely focused and engaged with a single source of stimulation?
If you can't tell I'm calling your conjecture flawed.
TV is just a source of stimulation like any other. It's no bigger waste of time than a board game, running laps, reading a fiction novel or having non-procreative sex. None of these are productive activities and all are purely escapist therapy at best.
For many people driving is a necessity. Therefore it is not seen as a privilege but as a right... "I have a job, pay on time for my car and insurance - I deserve to drive. "
If we had adequate mass transit or designed our communities for local living then it would be seen as a special privilege.
Sounds like you spend more time building your system than using it. My own experience is to buy an Apple laptop and use it for 4 years, then buy a new one, use it for 4 years (I'm about ready for a new one). I do have a NAS box for storage that is RAID 5 and I get larger drives every other year.
I'm pretty sure you've spent 10x what I spent and haven't gotten 1/10th the value out of it. What's great is that Apples OS keeps getting faster so my hardware actually does more work now than when I bought it.
A single person who can only watch Netflix in the morning and evening pays the same as a household where there are kids watching all day long and adults who still watch in the evening.
Netflix and other subscriber services should be charging by the minute instead of a flat rate or a flat rate for a set monthly allowance with tiers and a rollover plan, etc.
Let me guess. Your running Mac OS 8.5 or worse 8.6 right? Yeah, that was at the height of Scully's tenure. 7.5 was really the last great classic Mac OS (9.2 was okay but needed a fast CPU and too much RAM).
Anyways, downgrade to 7.5 and watch that baby fly. It'll feel like a whole new machine.
This was clearly an announcement of a return to the Mac. They want to sell more laptops, AppleTVs and wifi routers.
The AppleTV integration just turned your laptop or mac mini into a game system btw. That may very well be the sleeper feature of the whole announcement.
"Article II of the U.S. Constitution vests the executive power of the United States in the president and charges him with the execution of federal law, alongside the responsibility of appointing federal executive, diplomatic, regulatory, and judicial officers, and concluding treaties with foreign powers, with the advice and consent of the Senate. "
The thing about wielding power is "you're damned if you do, damned if you don't."
I voted for Obama because he is the kind of person who takes action. I voted for GWB for the same reason. I voted for Clinton for the same reason. Their respective opponents were nearly all people who would rather study the problem or do what their party tells them to do.
Presidents and executives are supposed to DO something, not preside over the nation like an administrator. That's what Congress or a Board of Directors is for.
What's so funny about this comment is that Windows is the absolute worst tool if you care about your data.
What you really mean is that there are plenty of shortsighted business people who only care about the result set they get from the data that's directly in front of them right now. In fact if it could just be sent to them in an email pre formatted to drop into a PowerPoint they'd be in heaven.
The bane of their existence is when they discover that something is missing and it can no longer be retrieved because the data was permanently transformed in their spreadsheet and they don't know how to get it back.
That is when they realize they should have stored their data somewhere useful, like a database... And then pulled out a record set for manipulation.
You get the same thing with business people who try coding but don't know what source control is... They overwrite their important macro and can't get it back.
There's nothing Power about Excel. It's an okay front end for exploring data sets. It's not a reporting solution though and it's absolutely not a good way to store data.
Amazon has way more need for delivery than Walmart (well WalMart as of today). Delivery is probably one of Amazon's biggest expense lines. Why shouldn't they get into it?
They will soon if they end up delivering groceries. They'll have trucks, drivers and people paying delivery fees. Amazon just got in the delivery business. Next up they'll start offering it to others and get a cut of that money too.
That's the real nugget here, not the old discussion about tax laws.
Use GIT and pull requests. Have a maintainer. Use GIT flow methodology. Have unit tests for all functional code. Every feature is a branch, every hot fix is a branch.
Test your branch before you request a pull by sending it through a build server. The maintainer tests it after the merge with the develop branch. If all unit tests pass and the maintainer is happy with the build output (after linting, static analysis or any other heuristics he cares about) he pushes it to a QA environment.
Now the QA team runs their suite of integration tests and files bugs. After those bugs are fixed (should be minimal) the maintainer tags it and creates a release branch. This is pushed to a staging environment. QA does a quick regression suite and then the business users pound it in designated areas or you can put it out for a community dev release (beta) for user feedback. Any bugs are filed and fixed.
Now it's ready for production. Follow your prod release process (approvals, sysadmins, etc). Now merge back to the master branch and back down to develop.
In the meanwhile another feature branch has been completed. They should have already merged back develop and tested that. Rinse and repeat.
Get a bug report from a user? Hotfix branch off of Master - pull request, merge into Master and down to any release branches and develop.
Code does not get stomped on. New code either passes tests or it doesn't go anywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
Facebook has innovated.
They've innovated in data centers - you can't operate at the scale they do (bigger than Google or Apple in terms of networking and hardware) without innovation.
They've innovated in Big Data - hundreds of millions of users, billions of relationships between the accounts. Their Social Graph implementation is a big deal. Mining said data to enable search, photo tagging/suggest (just the scale of facial recognition going on is mind boggling) and of course for advertising / segmentation purposes.
They've innovated in their app program for developers - Zynga's FarmVille for better or worse was a sensation and would not have happened without FBs developer API.
They've innovated in Single Sign On / Federated ID - FB is the biggest provider of SSO in the western world (Weibo and TaoBao may have them beat in China). Salesforce is next followed by Twitter and LinkedIn.
I'm no FB fan as a consumer but to say they haven't innovated is the height of ignorance as a technologist.
Social Graph and Scalability for large data sets. Facebook has definitely pioneered that domain (along with Google).
What you fail to realize is that there are now hundreds of thousands of pros who daily use a laptop in place of the workstation they had just 3 years ago.
It may look like a consumer grade Mac to you but what Apple is doing is to redefine the workstation. Consumers no longer buy desktops. They buy laptops or tablets. The desktop market has been shrinking for the last few years. Apple doesn't even make a desktop any more. The iMac and Mini are the closest you get.
So this is Apples Workstation/Desktop. It is what you make of it like anything else. I'm betting that the industry will start to follow Apples lead here though and you'll see similar offerings from HP, Sony, Samsung etc in the near future just as you see iMac type systems and AirBook "Ultrabook".
Didn't you see Back to the Future 2? You go forward and buy a few copies of the WSJ and then invest in the winners, a little bit here -a little there, nothing too suspicious. 5 years later you are incredibly wealthy and everyone thinks you just invested well.
It's not the brain alone though. It's the sum of you. There is a somatic context. Recreating that somatic context with an artificial construct may be possible but we have no real understanding of what that does to self awareness.
I'm not aware of any broad psychological studies on people before and after accidents where large parts of their body has been lost or replaced. Are those people the same or radically different? Are the known psychological changes a result of the trauma, loss of functionality in the eyes of those around them or a result of physiological impacts on brain chemistry from loss of the body parts in question.
The brain is more than the conscious frontal lobes also. What would the impact be to have no autonomous signals coming from the heart, lungs, etc. We haven't even considered simulating the hind brain or the mid brain which both control our body, receive all sensory input and translate it to signals we are consciously aware of.
It's not just the brain "doing its thing" unless by that you mean, monitoring and aggregating/filtering all stimulation from the body into self awareness. It needs a body to do that. Anything less is likely to cause the brain to shutdown into a coma. So you'd need to recreate that brain body system to have self awareness.
That's what DVRs are for and now Netflix/AppleTV/Roku. I and my family treat it as entertainment and edutainment. There are no commercials just content. It's about being inspired by a story, by a character, by the dialogue and the artistry. When the kids are older we'll go to more live events - plays, concerts, etc but there's no better place to enjoy long form storytelling than your own home with your family or friends. It's a meal and a topic of conversation after, "what did you think of the way the protagonist was portrayed? Why did the director choose that location for that piece of dialogue?"
Seems that many people don't know how to enjoy and appreciate the works of art and culture available. Kind of sad really.
So you had a very localized, very homogenous culture with little or no outside influences. I'm betting everyone in that neighborhood voted the same way, were suspicious of and openly hostile to new and different ways of thinking/living and 25% of the kids couldn't wait to get out of the small minded hellhole they lived in.
We tend to recall our childhood environment through the lens of a blissfully ignorant child's point of view. There was likely domestic abuse, alcoholism, racism, teen pregnancy and a variety of other social problems just on the other side of those "open doors" that was never talked about in front of the kids.
I zone out while reading books all the time. My mind wanders to events of the day or nascent ideas I've been pondering. I often have to skip back several pages to get back into the plot.
Oh did you mean the other kind of zoning out where you are simply not paying attention to anything else as in completely focused and engaged with a single source of stimulation?
If you can't tell I'm calling your conjecture flawed.
TV is just a source of stimulation like any other. It's no bigger waste of time than a board game, running laps, reading a fiction novel or having non-procreative sex. None of these are productive activities and all are purely escapist therapy at best.
For many people driving is a necessity. Therefore it is not seen as a privilege but as a right... "I have a job, pay on time for my car and insurance - I deserve to drive. "
If we had adequate mass transit or designed our communities for local living then it would be seen as a special privilege.
Sounds like you spend more time building your system than using it. My own experience is to buy an Apple laptop and use it for 4 years, then buy a new one, use it for 4 years (I'm about ready for a new one). I do have a NAS box for storage that is RAID 5 and I get larger drives every other year.
I'm pretty sure you've spent 10x what I spent and haven't gotten 1/10th the value out of it. What's great is that Apples OS keeps getting faster so my hardware actually does more work now than when I bought it.
A single person who can only watch Netflix in the morning and evening pays the same as a household where there are kids watching all day long and adults who still watch in the evening.
Netflix and other subscriber services should be charging by the minute instead of a flat rate or a flat rate for a set monthly allowance with tiers and a rollover plan, etc.
This is a unified display, not spanned or mirrored. Take two displays and treat them like one.
Let me guess. Your running Mac OS 8.5 or worse 8.6 right? Yeah, that was at the height of Scully's tenure. 7.5 was really the last great classic Mac OS (9.2 was okay but needed a fast CPU and too much RAM).
Anyways, downgrade to 7.5 and watch that baby fly. It'll feel like a whole new machine.
This was clearly an announcement of a return to the Mac. They want to sell more laptops, AppleTVs and wifi routers.
The AppleTV integration just turned your laptop or mac mini into a game system btw. That may very well be the sleeper feature of the whole announcement.
"Article II of the U.S. Constitution vests the executive power of the United States in the president and charges him with the execution of federal law, alongside the responsibility of appointing federal executive, diplomatic, regulatory, and judicial officers, and concluding treaties with foreign powers, with the advice and consent of the Senate. "
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/President_of_the_United_States
Backwards eh?
Note that Obama, nor the other Presidents enacted the laws which allow this activity. Again, look to Congress for that culpability.
Questions for you. What do you think those agencies are for? What do you think they've been doing since they were inaugurated?
Do you believe they should exist at all?
The thing about wielding power is "you're damned if you do, damned if you don't."
I voted for Obama because he is the kind of person who takes action. I voted for GWB for the same reason. I voted for Clinton for the same reason. Their respective opponents were nearly all people who would rather study the problem or do what their party tells them to do.
Presidents and executives are supposed to DO something, not preside over the nation like an administrator. That's what Congress or a Board of Directors is for.
What's so funny about this comment is that Windows is the absolute worst tool if you care about your data.
What you really mean is that there are plenty of shortsighted business people who only care about the result set they get from the data that's directly in front of them right now. In fact if it could just be sent to them in an email pre formatted to drop into a PowerPoint they'd be in heaven.
The bane of their existence is when they discover that something is missing and it can no longer be retrieved because the data was permanently transformed in their spreadsheet and they don't know how to get it back.
That is when they realize they should have stored their data somewhere useful, like a database... And then pulled out a record set for manipulation.
You get the same thing with business people who try coding but don't know what source control is... They overwrite their important macro and can't get it back.
There's nothing Power about Excel. It's an okay front end for exploring data sets. It's not a reporting solution though and it's absolutely not a good way to store data.
Actually they re supposedly going to demo air sharing for iOS. Share files between devices directly.
Put an encrypted disk image on Dropbox. Them just use it as you normally would.
Luckily spacecraft dont need aerodynamics.
Amazon has way more need for delivery than Walmart (well WalMart as of today). Delivery is probably one of Amazon's biggest expense lines. Why shouldn't they get into it?
They will soon if they end up delivering groceries. They'll have trucks, drivers and people paying delivery fees. Amazon just got in the delivery business. Next up they'll start offering it to others and get a cut of that money too.
That's the real nugget here, not the old discussion about tax laws.
OnStar, CarShield - likely others. Maybe one of them has an exploit and comes standard on some trim packages.
Use GIT and pull requests. Have a maintainer. Use GIT flow methodology. Have unit tests for all functional code. Every feature is a branch, every hot fix is a branch.
Test your branch before you request a pull by sending it through a build server. The maintainer tests it after the merge with the develop branch. If all unit tests pass and the maintainer is happy with the build output (after linting, static analysis or any other heuristics he cares about) he pushes it to a QA environment.
Now the QA team runs their suite of integration tests and files bugs. After those bugs are fixed (should be minimal) the maintainer tags it and creates a release branch. This is pushed to a staging environment. QA does a quick regression suite and then the business users pound it in designated areas or you can put it out for a community dev release (beta) for user feedback. Any bugs are filed and fixed.
Now it's ready for production. Follow your prod release process (approvals, sysadmins, etc). Now merge back to the master branch and back down to develop.
In the meanwhile another feature branch has been completed. They should have already merged back develop and tested that. Rinse and repeat.
Get a bug report from a user? Hotfix branch off of Master - pull request, merge into Master and down to any release branches and develop.
Code does not get stomped on. New code either passes tests or it doesn't go anywhere.