Sure early Alzheimers must be a bit frustrating for the sufferer, but this is tempered by a loss of cognitive function (ie. you don't necessarily realise that you have the condition). It is probaly far more horrifying for the people who remember Jim being all bright and sharp but now see him dulled.M
I'd think that a stroke or other direct physical impediment must be far more frustrating for the actual sufferer.
Increasing Alzheimers is mostly a result of keeping people alive longer. No matter how age care progresses, there will always be a weakest link. The designed lifetime of the human body is being exceeded. Perhaps we should allow people to die earlier with dignity.
Buy an ipod to be a cool teenager. Go to college and need a laptop? What's it going to be?
Buy an ipod to listen to music/podcasts. Go to istore to buy music/load podcasts. Get exposed to Macs. Need a computer Whats it going to be?
Apple has unprecedented brand loyalty that is largely gained by slingshot effect from the ipod. The upod user experience is flowing into other products too.
The oil in an engine does not do anything that actively makes power, yet it helps by making the engine run smoothly and protects the engine as well as the parts inside it.
The best managers reasise that employees don't work "for them", but instead they work for the employees, helping get rid of obstacles so that the employees can give of their best.
Boot Camp is mostly just a nice marketing gadget. It tells people they can move to Mac hardware without the "risk" of cutting themselves off from Windows. But, this is mostly just a feel-good/hand-hold to ease the transition. Once people have switched to a Mac what % really use Boot Camp and run Windows? I don't have any numbers but I guess once people experience OSX there's very little motivation to buy an XP license.
Yes that is an over used term, but in this case it is warranted. With all the brand exposure over the last few years (ipod) and more recently (iphone) is it suprising that people are getting the idea that Apple makes cool stuff?
With Vista firmly planted on the rocks, Apple are in a strongest position they have been in since the original Mac.
As posted slesewhere... TFS is broken. These people did not forget to lock their door. They left it wide open with a Welcome mat out and a big "Help Yourself" sign.
For instance, I recently installed Fedora on a system. This went pretty seamlessly, except that I wanted to use a dual monitor. The installtion video driver was not enough and I needed to find and install the NVidia rpms. Bummer was that the NVIDIA rpms were not built for xen, so I had to switch to a non-xen kernel (fiddle with GRUB etc). Not too hard, but a lot more hassle then Joe Average would be able to handle. XP worked straight out the box. Perhaps Ubuntu is easier....
I then wanted to get my printer going. Brother network printer. The installation was not straight forward as I had to do to the brother website, figure out which driver to install, figure out what printer management I was using, navigating a few links etc. I got it working, but the XP hook-up was a lot simpler: just load the CD and hit next a few times...
Sure, the drivers do (often/mostly) exist, but they need to be on the installation CDs or have slicker downloading.
Perhaps the biggest stumbling block to this is the tussle between various package management mechanisms. I won't start a flame war as to whether rpm or apt is better, but one thing is for sure: having just one would make it far easier for hw manufacturers to get on board and would make life far easier for Joe Average consumers who don't want to compile from scratch.
Its a way to explain why phones don't live up to their advertised battery life.
But think of the situations where you have to turn a cell phone off for safety reasons: hospitals, gas stations, planes. Activating a cell phopn'e transmitter is not always a good idea.
Both embedded systems and servers have been very successful for Linux mainly because there are no user-OS interations. Users can only interact through very controlled and locked-down mechanisms.
Getting Linux onto the desktop requires a great deal more user interaction. I think though that Linux is getting there. Windows is not much easier to use than Linux, but it does need a lot more support from hardware vendors to get to the "just works" level.
In a place like South Africa, only a government regulated monopoly would be interested in providing telecom to a lot of very poor people with very poor credit rating. Free market companies would just walk away from that because it makes no business sense.
During the apartheid days, South Africa had a well established telecommunications industry that could make phones etc. These companies could easily have done what was needed to provide the telecom infrastructure for the new Southa Africa. THis would have kept money in the country and provided a few more jobs.
However, most of these companies were also involved in making military stuff that propped up the apartheid regime. Likely they were "punished", to the detrament of all.
That's not really any different than how you measure programmer productivity, or gardner productivity or any other service productivity.
Measuring programmer output in KLOCs is broken (who want's 1000 lines of bad code??). Bugs fixed is a bad measure (who put those bugs in there anyway??). The dummies often get to fix lots of silly/obvious one-liners while the better programmers will tackle the more complex/subtle problems. The best will be generating very few bugs.
It is wise to think of how you could justify your existence if the CEO stopped you in the hallway and asked you why the company should be employing you.
Anything activity that ends up on the cost side of the balance sheet is very difficult to measure. It is a bit easier for programmers because at least there is some tie between product features and sales: "I implemented feature abc or fixed bug xyz that resulted in $2million more revenue".
For pure service sectors (like IT) it is hard to link actions to revenue. About the best you can do is to measure trends or compare them against some industry benchmarks: "We had 1 virus event last year, industry average for comparable organisations was 5 events", "Our average time to restore a backup is x vs y"...
Sure, many small-scale SCADA systems (factory control, building automation etc) will have private networks. Many larger ones (power reticulation, traffic control etc) cover a huge area and will often use internet to hook up remote sensors/actuators.
Even smaller systems will often have web interfaces and mechanisms to send alerts via email etc as a way to call out supervisors/engineers/service personnel at night and allow them to fix stuff remotely without having to come in to the plant or make a flight etc..
... well the correct technical term is endurance. That's typically 10k for MLC NAND flash or 100k for SLC NAND flash. Most devices will be using MLC because it is far cheaper.
Most of these systems will be using wear levelling to prevent the certain flash regions being happered too hard. Any system that does not use wear levelling will break down pretty quickly.
Slashdot Mirror
I personally prefer the existing technology used to create life.
I'd think that a stroke or other direct physical impediment must be far more frustrating for the actual sufferer.
Increasing Alzheimers is mostly a result of keeping people alive longer. No matter how age care progresses, there will always be a weakest link. The designed lifetime of the human body is being exceeded. Perhaps we should allow people to die earlier with dignity.
This service added a lot of value to MS customers. Tearing it down because they were better than their equivalent is destructive.
Doing things that make your products harder to use is bad business sense. It really shows how badly out of touch MS is with the industry.
Been built in to *nix for ages!
Buy an ipod to listen to music/podcasts. Go to istore to buy music/load podcasts. Get exposed to Macs. Need a computer Whats it going to be?
Apple has unprecedented brand loyalty that is largely gained by slingshot effect from the ipod. The upod user experience is flowing into other products too.
Must be a sumbarine patent http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polaris_missile
The best managers reasise that employees don't work "for them", but instead they work for the employees, helping get rid of obstacles so that the employees can give of their best.
Boot Camp is mostly just a nice marketing gadget. It tells people they can move to Mac hardware without the "risk" of cutting themselves off from Windows. But, this is mostly just a feel-good/hand-hold to ease the transition. Once people have switched to a Mac what % really use Boot Camp and run Windows? I don't have any numbers but I guess once people experience OSX there's very little motivation to buy an XP license.
With Vista firmly planted on the rocks, Apple are in a strongest position they have been in since the original Mac.
Just because you get food poisoning once does not mean you should stop eating. Just stop eating at the place that sold you that dodgy burger.
As posted slesewhere... TFS is broken. These people did not forget to lock their door. They left it wide open with a Welcome mat out and a big "Help Yourself" sign.
For instance, I recently installed Fedora on a system. This went pretty seamlessly, except that I wanted to use a dual monitor. The installtion video driver was not enough and I needed to find and install the NVidia rpms. Bummer was that the NVIDIA rpms were not built for xen, so I had to switch to a non-xen kernel (fiddle with GRUB etc). Not too hard, but a lot more hassle then Joe Average would be able to handle. XP worked straight out the box. Perhaps Ubuntu is easier....
I then wanted to get my printer going. Brother network printer. The installation was not straight forward as I had to do to the brother website, figure out which driver to install, figure out what printer management I was using, navigating a few links etc. I got it working, but the XP hook-up was a lot simpler: just load the CD and hit next a few times...
Sure, the drivers do (often/mostly) exist, but they need to be on the installation CDs or have slicker downloading.
Perhaps the biggest stumbling block to this is the tussle between various package management mechanisms. I won't start a flame war as to whether rpm or apt is better, but one thing is for sure: having just one would make it far easier for hw manufacturers to get on board and would make life far easier for Joe Average consumers who don't want to compile from scratch.
But think of the situations where you have to turn a cell phone off for safety reasons: hospitals, gas stations, planes. Activating a cell phopn'e transmitter is not always a good idea.
Of course MS is going to use any means possible to push people onto Vista to hike their revenue.
We all know that gamers are the cuting edge/high paying consumers in desktop computing so from MS perspective this is an easy target.
Getting Linux onto the desktop requires a great deal more user interaction. I think though that Linux is getting there. Windows is not much easier to use than Linux, but it does need a lot more support from hardware vendors to get to the "just works" level.
Let them eat cake!
The purpose of slashdot is to just make comments. You are not supposed to RTFA or TFS. That's cheating!
They don't let you plug in anything, don't give you root, bash or anything that allows you to fiddle.
In a place like South Africa, only a government regulated monopoly would be interested in providing telecom to a lot of very poor people with very poor credit rating. Free market companies would just walk away from that because it makes no business sense.
However, most of these companies were also involved in making military stuff that propped up the apartheid regime. Likely they were "punished", to the detrament of all.
Measuring programmer output in KLOCs is broken (who want's 1000 lines of bad code??). Bugs fixed is a bad measure (who put those bugs in there anyway??). The dummies often get to fix lots of silly/obvious one-liners while the better programmers will tackle the more complex/subtle problems. The best will be generating very few bugs.
It is wise to think of how you could justify your existence if the CEO stopped you in the hallway and asked you why the company should be employing you.
Anything activity that ends up on the cost side of the balance sheet is very difficult to measure. It is a bit easier for programmers because at least there is some tie between product features and sales: "I implemented feature abc or fixed bug xyz that resulted in $2million more revenue".
For pure service sectors (like IT) it is hard to link actions to revenue. About the best you can do is to measure trends or compare them against some industry benchmarks: "We had 1 virus event last year, industry average for comparable organisations was 5 events", "Our average time to restore a backup is x vs y"...
Even smaller systems will often have web interfaces and mechanisms to send alerts via email etc as a way to call out supervisors/engineers/service personnel at night and allow them to fix stuff remotely without having to come in to the plant or make a flight etc..
Being able to blow up physical devices is a lot more spectacular than playing with numbers in bank accounts which can be resotred from backups.
Most of these systems will be using wear levelling to prevent the certain flash regions being happered too hard. Any system that does not use wear levelling will break down pretty quickly.
Is an ongoing chemical reaction life? Is a self replicating chemical reaction life?