One should watch assumptions. The Canon 1Ds, for example, saves its RAW data in a.TIF file format, split into meta data, a thumbnail, and the raw data.
A major difference, however, lies in the fact that PS has to read the file, then you add the adjustment layer, and THEN you get to save the file as a PSD (assuming you want to stay non-destructive). And if we're talking RAW, we're talking some LARGE files here. Especailly if we're batch processing a set of images.
Aperture, OTOH, keeps the RAW image, and seems to store (somewhere) the adjustments to it. No large copies of large files hanging around.
Just as an aside, I considered and eliminated most of the schemes that relied on obfuscating, hashing, or encrypting the phone number as not being "different" enough. An obfuscated phone number is still, after all, a phone number.
So? Announce a new service. You can make as many free 1 minute calls as you want. After which, we lookup the number to see how many minutes you have left. If none, we TERMINATE the call.
-- or --
Announce a new service. You buy a phone good for N number of calls (max length 20 minutes each). We lookup your number to see how many calls (not minutes) you have left.
-- or --
Announce a new service. Provide a phone with a little card reader. You then buy a card with N minutes on it and swipe it, transferring the CARD's number to the phone. Lookup the CARD number in the database to see how many minutes remain.
I'm not sure who to believe, you or the prior poster. He says that customers are too dumb to even ask if their software will run. You, OTOH, seem to think that the Best Buy or WalMart retail employee knows about CrossoverOffice and Cedega, can and will sell it, and the customer is smart enough to install it and use it.
At any rate, it demonstrates why Apple, as an example, practically had to write all of their own applications for the Mac. Without a ton of preinstalled and/or commercially available software, an OS by itself doesn't do much...
Probably because said retailer can count with the fingers of his left foot the number of commercial shrink wrapped software packages available to sell with it.
Customer: A Linux box? I've heard of those. And a $200 cheaper? Cool. Oh, I use MS Office at work, let's add that too.
Salesman: Well, MS doesn't make Office for it, but there's a...
Customer: No Office? Huh. I take pictures, how about Photoshop? Can I get that?
Salesman: No, but there's this thing you can download called...
Customer: How about Quicken?
Salesman: No.
Customer: No productivity software? Okay... How about games? I really like Half Life.
Salesman: Not available. But some people can get...
Customer: No games?
Salesman, resigned: No.
Customer: Well! I can see why it's so cheap. It doesn't run any of my programs!
"But some locales are contemplating making wireless accessible [azcentral.com] to the general public."
I have yet to be convinced this is a good thing. Some town will implement public broadband and sooner or later some politician and/or the public will want to know why their tax dollars are financing access to porn and other "unhealthy" sites...
Assuming, of course, that there are no licensing fees (unlikely, as the orignal investors would no doubt like some of their money back), and that, somehow, the R&D costs of developing ALONtm razor blades are also zero. (i.e. that you spent no R&D money of your own in design, testing, tooling, and so on)
You might find this article interesting. According to Ehrlich, in The Population Bomb, we should have all died of starvation a couple of decades ago.
Also read this. Make sure you note, "According to the most recent EPA statistics, pollution of the air and water is not increasing, it is decreasing..."
Forgive me, but that's a dumb solution. They're well known in the high-end market, and they're pretty busy mixing up new batches of Kool-Aid.
Your solution, however, would end up positioning them as yet another Linux X86 harware integrator in a commodity market, with little or no competitive advantage. And as much as Linux would like to think it's up to Solaris standards... it's not.
"...then more commercial developers might see a reason to port programs to or develop for other platforms."
Just to play devil's advocate here [apt]... why isn't a single universal OS a good idea? Why should I have to check the back of the box to see if it works, or hunt around for a version that runs on my platform?
The way I look at it, an OS provides basic services such as memory and file management, device control, scheduling, and so on. Other than for specialized applications (such as embedded), why do I need three, four, or dozens of solutions each reimplementing the wheel?
A single widespread platform means a larger audience for developers, who only have to write their software once, and who can work on features and bugs rather than ports. You also end up with a correspondingly larger selection of software for users.
"Secondly warmer surface water temps may make more storms and make them more powerful."
And a little more heat may mean more evaporation which means more cloud cover, with higher albedoes that reflect more incoming heat, which cool things down again. Equilibrium.
The problem is that we don't know. Adjust a few variables in a model, and we get melted ice and rising seas... or we get more ice and another ice age... or we just get a little warmer.
Let's see. You come out of an ice age, and glaciers melt, uncovering land formerly covered by ice. "At the peak of the last glaciation, approximately 97% of Canada was covered by ice." Since most of Canada is no longer covered by ice, I assume glaciers tend to melt over time.
And according to measured data, the amount of Antartic ice seems to be increasing.
So, apparently, we're still picking the "facts" that suit our positions...
"The new research suggests instead that this shift is due to a change in the oscillation frequency of atmospheric carbon dioxide abundances, a hypothesis that can be directly tested by deep drilling on the Antarctic Ice Cap. If proved correct, this theory would suggest that relatively small, naturally occurring fluctuations in greenhouse gases are the master variable that has driven global climate change on time scales of ten thousand to one million years."
In other words: we're still guessing, and we'll get back to you if and when we actually find out anything...
Reread the sentence. I said "significantly" better. Beta was slightly better than VHS in several aspects (image quality), but not in all (running time, market penetration). As such it wasn't significantly better.
So, to pick another example, Linux may be "better" as in more stable, but worse in terms of available commercial software. In fact, in many ways Linux, like OS/2, is perceived as a "me too" product. Your system has windows, menus, and uses a mouse. Mine does too. How is yours better again?
Take OS/2 vs. Windows, or WP vs. Word, and compare feature sets. Nearly identical. Given that, how do you choose? By what your friends have, or what you use at work?
Google was a major case of "significantly" better. Fast, easy, and highly relevent results. But let someone come up with something significantly better, like the "Star Trek" computer interface ("computer, find me a commercial source for XYZ widgets at less than a buck a piece"), and they're history.
In terms of building a solid product... it's used on roughly 95% of the world's desktops. Nothing significantly better exists, or the vast majority of people would have jumped ship long ago.
In terms of good corporate citizenship... shall we talk about the $28.8 billion dollars in the Gates Foundation? The $7.5 billion given away to date?
In terms of ethical and moral behavior? Sorry, Enron is shocking and shameful. Dow's toxic waste dumps in India are shocking and shameful. Declaring bankruptcy just to get out from under your employee's pension obligations is shocking and shameful.
Microsoft's big crime seems to have been giving companies a bigger discount if they sell more of their products. Let's see...
Your coin tossing analogy is about as valid as all analogies, as it assumes there's no upside, no middle ground, and assumes the downside is the worst outcome possible.
We are, for example, a bit overdue for another ice age. Could it be that "global warming" has affected that outcome, to our benefit?
A couple of decades ago, scientists were talking about "global cooling", and discussing spreading tons of soot over the ice caps to increase heat retention. Guess they were mistaken about that too.
Don't get me wrong. I think we should do what we can to reduce polution, but only because there are other "side effects" like cleaner air to breathe, water to drink, and so on. And not because of a theory called global warming.
An interesting show on television a few weeks ago discussed the benefits outsourcing jobs to India had on the people there. A young girl who works in a call center now supports her family, sends her brother to school, buys him clothes, buys her own clothes, books, music, and so on. The call center itself supports two other people for every employee in terms of vendors, restraunts, security, transportation, and so on. Trickle down effects are quite real.
I could just as easily live in Canada, England, France, Germany, Japan, Austraila, or any number of other "first world" countries with a equally high standard of living.
Slashdot Mirror
One should watch assumptions. The Canon 1Ds, for example, saves its RAW data in a .TIF file format, split into meta data, a thumbnail, and the raw data.
Aperture, OTOH, keeps the RAW image, and seems to store (somewhere) the adjustments to it. No large copies of large files hanging around.
Yeah, but if you have already done all the color tweaking ... then why go to a consumer lab that's bound to mess up all your hard work?
How do you know that the code you've just seen is actually the code that was on the ROM of the machine used?
Just as an aside, I considered and eliminated most of the schemes that relied on obfuscating, hashing, or encrypting the phone number as not being "different" enough. An obfuscated phone number is still, after all, a phone number.
-- or --
Announce a new service. You buy a phone good for N number of calls (max length 20 minutes each). We lookup your number to see how many calls (not minutes) you have left.
-- or --
Announce a new service. Provide a phone with a little card reader. You then buy a card with N minutes on it and swipe it, transferring the CARD's number to the phone. Lookup the CARD number in the database to see how many minutes remain.
All patent pending, btw.... (grin)
At any rate, it demonstrates why Apple, as an example, practically had to write all of their own applications for the Mac. Without a ton of preinstalled and/or commercially available software, an OS by itself doesn't do much...
Customer: A Linux box? I've heard of those. And a $200 cheaper? Cool. Oh, I use MS Office at work, let's add that too.
Salesman: Well, MS doesn't make Office for it, but there's a...
Customer: No Office? Huh. I take pictures, how about Photoshop? Can I get that?
Salesman: No, but there's this thing you can download called...
Customer: How about Quicken?
Salesman: No.
Customer: No productivity software? Okay... How about games? I really like Half Life.
Salesman: Not available. But some people can get...
Customer: No games?
Salesman, resigned: No.
Customer: Well! I can see why it's so cheap. It doesn't run any of my programs!
I have yet to be convinced this is a good thing. Some town will implement public broadband and sooner or later some politician and/or the public will want to know why their tax dollars are financing access to porn and other "unhealthy" sites...
Assuming, of course, that there are no licensing fees (unlikely, as the orignal investors would no doubt like some of their money back), and that, somehow, the R&D costs of developing ALONtm razor blades are also zero. (i.e. that you spent no R&D money of your own in design, testing, tooling, and so on)
You might find this article interesting. According to Ehrlich, in The Population Bomb, we should have all died of starvation a couple of decades ago.
Also read this. Make sure you note, "According to the most recent EPA statistics, pollution of the air and water is not increasing, it is decreasing..."
Too late... Unions seek video iPod residuals
Your solution, however, would end up positioning them as yet another Linux X86 harware integrator in a commodity market, with little or no competitive advantage. And as much as Linux would like to think it's up to Solaris standards... it's not.
Just to play devil's advocate here [apt]... why isn't a single universal OS a good idea? Why should I have to check the back of the box to see if it works, or hunt around for a version that runs on my platform?
The way I look at it, an OS provides basic services such as memory and file management, device control, scheduling, and so on. Other than for specialized applications (such as embedded), why do I need three, four, or dozens of solutions each reimplementing the wheel?
A single widespread platform means a larger audience for developers, who only have to write their software once, and who can work on features and bugs rather than ports. You also end up with a correspondingly larger selection of software for users.
Sorry, but the "Population Bomb" didn't happen either. Also, birth rates in most industrialized nations are declining.
And a little more heat may mean more evaporation which means more cloud cover, with higher albedoes that reflect more incoming heat, which cool things down again. Equilibrium.
The problem is that we don't know. Adjust a few variables in a model, and we get melted ice and rising seas... or we get more ice and another ice age... or we just get a little warmer.
And according to measured data, the amount of Antartic ice seems to be increasing.
So, apparently, we're still picking the "facts" that suit our positions...
In other words: we're still guessing, and we'll get back to you if and when we actually find out anything...
Which has the strictest environmental laws and regulations?
Which has the cleanest air? Water?
Which spends the most on pollution controls and systems?
BTW, that "extinction" line? If you know something the rest of the world and scientific community don't, then give...
Oh, well. In that case it's all right then...
So, to pick another example, Linux may be "better" as in more stable, but worse in terms of available commercial software. In fact, in many ways Linux, like OS/2, is perceived as a "me too" product. Your system has windows, menus, and uses a mouse. Mine does too. How is yours better again?
Take OS/2 vs. Windows, or WP vs. Word, and compare feature sets. Nearly identical. Given that, how do you choose? By what your friends have, or what you use at work?
Google was a major case of "significantly" better. Fast, easy, and highly relevent results. But let someone come up with something significantly better, like the "Star Trek" computer interface ("computer, find me a commercial source for XYZ widgets at less than a buck a piece"), and they're history.
In terms of good corporate citizenship... shall we talk about the $28.8 billion dollars in the Gates Foundation? The $7.5 billion given away to date?
In terms of ethical and moral behavior? Sorry, Enron is shocking and shameful. Dow's toxic waste dumps in India are shocking and shameful. Declaring bankruptcy just to get out from under your employee's pension obligations is shocking and shameful.
Microsoft's big crime seems to have been giving companies a bigger discount if they sell more of their products. Let's see...
Depends on your definition, doesn't it?
We are, for example, a bit overdue for another ice age. Could it be that "global warming" has affected that outcome, to our benefit?
A couple of decades ago, scientists were talking about "global cooling", and discussing spreading tons of soot over the ice caps to increase heat retention. Guess they were mistaken about that too.
Don't get me wrong. I think we should do what we can to reduce polution, but only because there are other "side effects" like cleaner air to breathe, water to drink, and so on. And not because of a theory called global warming.
An interesting show on television a few weeks ago discussed the benefits outsourcing jobs to India had on the people there. A young girl who works in a call center now supports her family, sends her brother to school, buys him clothes, buys her own clothes, books, music, and so on. The call center itself supports two other people for every employee in terms of vendors, restraunts, security, transportation, and so on. Trickle down effects are quite real.
I could just as easily live in Canada, England, France, Germany, Japan, Austraila, or any number of other "first world" countries with a equally high standard of living.