Re the N95... it looks like a Swiss Army Knife. Lots-o-blades, klunky. So-so battery life, etc. It boils down to the old check-list of features versus how it looks and feels and operates. I'll admit I have not USED one, though, so perhaps looks are deceiving. (P.S. The N95 has an accelerometer. I just read an article where they put out a demo application to show it off. Too bad it's not actually useful.)
In terms of Wall Street, it's precisely because Wall Street has under-estimated Apple for years that its stock has done so well. Slashdot Power Phone user opinions don't influence a stock. It turns out that the I-want-the-most-checkmarks-for-my-device crowd and Wall Street tend to agree, contrary to your assertion. Yes, Steve Jobs has achieved demi-god status in the press, including the financial press, but Wall Street still doesn't get it. How many were saying that Apple's name change (from "Apple Computer" to "Apple") and the fact that iPods were hot meant that Apple's computer business was simply a drag on profits? That there was no "halo effect"? Until last quarter, when Mac-related sales skyrocketed and they were again caught flat-footed.
In terms of the keyboard, trying it out for 15 minutes at a store will deceive you. It is quite different from a Blackberry keyboard. In some ways it's more like a full-sized keyboard, and in some ways it's like a handwriting-recognition system. My typing style changes depending on the task at hand. For extended, real text, I type ahead and don't care about mistakes. The auto-correction feature is quite good, and the magnifying-glass makes it straightforward to go back and correct the couple of words that it got wrong. For arbitrary, non-dictionary text (phone numbers, URLs, names, etc), I slow down a little and take advantage of the fact that keypresses are confirmed on the keyboard and do not register until key release, to get 100% accuracy.
I've also found that it works quite well for one-handed typing , or for putting it down on a flat surface and typing with two fingers. I don't think many of the keyboard phones do very well in situations where you don't hold the phone in two hands and use your thumbs. (And of course, stylus phones are crippled in non-standard situations.)
Your final point is backwards. You mistake check-list features for design and feel. Yes, the iPhone has similar features to other phones. It's a phone, so I would hope so. It's even inferior in some feature areas. But its the way they are designed and put together in a SYSTEM that is different. Quite different. And it is NOT that there are Apple fans out there who will buy anything Apple makes and convince everyone else to do so. Apple has its share of flops (Newton, sub-notebooks, Cube, iTV, etc) that the "faithful" did not support.
It's the design -- not just features -- first, the fandom second. And as long as some techies (and reviewers, and Wall Street) keep thinking it's the Apple "fan boys" who make Apple successful, I'll continue to make money on my stock.
The iPhone does several things that no other phone in the world does. But that's not the point. Those "super-advanced" European cellphones don't do anything that 5-year-old phones do. Perhaps locate themselves a bit more accurately. Perhaps have a higher-rez camera. Perhaps have a faster Internet connection with a half-baked "web browser".
The point is that the iPhone does mostly what other phones do in a new way. The phone works like a cellphone would if it had just been invented, unlike other cellphones which are essentially a lot of bling and tech-spec thrown onto foundation/philosophy from 10 years ago. And that's why the iPhone is all that. And that's why you'll read reviews on European sites that say things like "my head says no, but my heart says yes." The iPhone makes sense, and has a unique feel, even if it falls short in certain individual categories.
In terms of actual new things, the iPhone has visual voicemail. All of those other "advanced" phones have voicemail that works like a 1970's cassette-tape answering machine.
The iPhone has a proximity sensor to turn off its light and touch surface when it's next to your face on a call. (Perhaps other phones do this. I have not seen or read that any do.) It has accelerometers so it knows what way it's facing (landscape or portrait), which may actually exist in other phones, but is certainly not widespread. The iPhone has a consistent, fingers-only interface with things like pinch and stretch (which are unique).
Just look at how you move through photos or through tabbed web pages: they made it work the same. Other phones don't even have real web browsers, much less tabbed web browsers, much less one where they've rethought how you move between tabs so it's clean and consistent with the rest of the phone.
In the end, I'm glad to hear the naysayers. The more the better -- up to a point -- for my stock investment. Apple stock does so well because so many people underestimate Apple. "Death spiral", "iPod-killer", "iTunes-killer", "nothing new iPhone", "market share too small and can't grow", "no halo effect", etc, etc.
(Not to mention this is iPhone 1.0 and it's competing against Nokia 15.0 (or whatever) and Windows mobile 6.0 (?). Not that much different from the initial iPods, which did not exceed then-current MP3 players in many aspects, but did do it in a more stylish and polished way.)
"Vista does it more transparently, without the need for application integration because of its simplicity..."
Could you please expand on this sentence? There's no need for any application integration for Time Machine, either. You can retrieve any file from the Time Machine App (in conjunction with the Finder). The application integration, if I understand your usage of the phrase, means that you can use iCal to retrieve individual calendar events, Address Book to retrieve individual contacts, etc. Basically backup/restore at the record level. Does Previous Versions do this?
It's nice that Vista provides a two-stage backup: one on-disk and one to an external one. It would not be usable for me, for a variety of reasons, but it's nice. And that's the only advantage I can see in Vista's Previous Versions, based on your comments. Please expand on the "technically better" aspect of Previous Versions.
And let's poke the stick the other way for a second. Lots of people are saying Spotlight is like Vista's equivalent search. The problem is, it's not live. If I have a Spotlight search results window up, looking for "Vista Previous Versions" and I type that phrase in a text document and save it, BINGO, it instantly appears in the search window. As far as I can tell (from experiments, not documentation), Vista cannot do this, and is perhaps still doing the old batch-indexing method?
Yes, I can understand someone who does not own a suit showing up without one. Or someone who only wears one for weddings/funerals. Etc.
But the no-shoes thing is definitely trying to make an in-your-face statement. I don't know and have never worked with anyone who does not wear shoes in an urban environment. Or for that matter, in a wilderness environment. The only place they go shoeless is in their own home, at the pool, and perhaps in their backyard or at a park.
So when someone decides to make a statement by what they wear, they should not be surprised when people react to the action as much as to whatever else was supposed to be discussed. It's really no different from Stallman agreeing to discus DRM, and instead showing up on stage and talking about the Dali Lama instead.
Problem is, normal-speed trains are already very expensive, and not terribly convenient in some ways.
I have traveled from Washington, DC, to New York and also to Boston. The Boston trip was overnight, and it was rather fun to take the overnight sleeper. You end up in downtown Boston in the morning. The NY trips also drop you off at a convenient place in Manhatten. Problems are:
1. You don't get reserved seats, leading to a cattle rush at the New York end in particular. A few minutes before departure, they announce what gate the train is at (presumably to give everyone a running chance). Bah. Unless you get an Accela train, which is slightly faster and significantly more expensive, in which case you still don't get reserved seats but you do get a waiting room with seats while you await the stampede.
2. They are pretty expensive. I'd say the trains are always more expensive than coach class flights, based on my random datapoints. You are essentially paying for the convenience of city-center-to-city-center transport and no baggage check-in, etc, which does make the trip faster. If you actually are going to the city center.
True, and another observation...
on
Cracking Go
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Speaking of how hard it is to even decide if a board position is good or bad, there are three more things I can add:
1. One of the key concepts of Go is "influence". Stones literally radiate influence. Different groupings of stones, in different regions of the board, and in opposition to other groupings, radiate differing amounts of influence. And in a Heisenberg-ish kind of way (at least during the early stages of a game) pushing too strongly for influence will create less space and pushing too strongly for space will lead to less influence. The master strives for just enough more influence or space to win.
For example, fencing in areas near the edge of the board early on. You may be solidifying space -- though no guarantees if you are not very certain of what you are doing -- but you are giving your opponent great influence -- if they play well, no guarantees.
No doubt chess has a similar concept (pieces, control, development potential), but it just feels different... Not as fluid or symmetrical in so many ways.
In some sense, you are creating your pieces by placing atoms on the board. No doubt chess has a similar concept, say having a bishop and a knight work together, or two rooks, etc, but the small size of the board and the severe movement restrictions and clutter makes these chess meta-pieces much more awkward than Go.
2. Sente (initiative) is a very important part of the game. You may jump around the board making five or six moves in sente, then finally go back to patch up a weakness in gote (yielding sente). One of the difficulties of the game is deciding how urgent moves are, and thus when you should yield sente in order to address them. (Of course, the perfect solution is to figure a way to make the urgent moves in sente, but...)
Of course, in Go it is always advantageous to move if you can -- as opposed to, say, chess -- and the Go board is large-enough scale that it's easily possible to have a dozen places you'd LIKE to move but you have to rank them and decide how long you can postpone most of those moves so you retain sente. I just don't see this in chess -- though perhaps I don't know it well enough.
3. Go has an aesthetic sense. You might say that it's simply a different word for intuition and chess is no different. But I don't think so, because chess does not allow you to move pieces arbitrarily to fulfill "balance" or other aesthetic concepts. I am only an intermediate Go player, but I have been amazed at the number of high-level games I've viewed over the years and I've been able to see where a move must go, based almost entirely on an aesthetic sense that the move somehow balances or fills in something.
(The problem of course is sente -- WHEN should that move be made -- as well as playing the entire rest of the game at that same level of insight, stringing together move after move. Perhaps that's one way that Go is like golf. One of the reasons that golf is so addictive, IMO, is that any good player occasionally hits a shot that's as good as Tiger Woods. The rest of the game does not go that well, but they get a tantalizing taste of greatness for an instant and that's very addictive.)
A couple of years ago the company I was working for was constructing a building and steel proces skyrocketed in the months it took to complete. I was told that it was China's hot economy and insatiable raw materials appetite. Not saying it is China (alone), but I don't think the US economy is using the raw materials that China's is at this point.
True about the military. And for a bit of trivia bonus, the short name they use for "kilometers" is "clicks", as in "The landing zone is about 3 clicks north of here".
even if Apple knew they'd lose, the would get the buzz from the obvious "IPhone" for 6 months until the real thing comes out -- with the added lawsuit and "will they lose the name" buzz to keep it on front pages -- then they could rebrand it the Apple Phone or the iTunes Phone or whatever and get even MORE buzz as they get the release publicity plus the "Apple had to rebrand their phone" publicity that would of course also describe the phone.
Sort of like the old saying, "I don't care what you print about me in your newspaper as long as you spell my name right". (Or something like that.)
First, being below the poverty line in the US does not mean a person cannot meet their basic needs. (I could qupte all kinds of semi-meaningful statistics like the number of such homes with telephones, refrigerators, and televisions, but let's stick with the basic definition which is more complicated than "can't meet their basic needs".) I'm not saying I'd like to live below the poverty line, but that line is not what propagandists make it out to be.
Second, I believe that US government statistics are based on INCOME, which does not count welfare, assistance from charitable organizations, etc,. People below the poverty line receive more in benefits than their "income" figure would indicate. So comparing them directly to poverty statistics from other nations, which may well (sensibly) count benefits, is misleading. (In fact, there is an unfortunate side-effect from welfare rules that encourages those on welfare to lower their independent income to maximise their welfare benefits.)
Third, your "starvation itself" remark is simply inflammatory with nothing to support it, but it is obviously meant to imply that 10% of the US population is starving, which is patently untrue.
Fourth, your "The US government... hide miles underground..." remark is ridiculous. They in fact do have a major concern and run policy towards that end. But in case of a disaster of any kind (including nuclear war), government functions must continue to the extent that they can, otherwise human loses will be compounded as the country colapses into sub-feudal societies. Your remark is the typical ignorant conspiracy theory that is more appropriate for X-Files than an "educated" mind.
Police have used informants for years and we've all seen it on police shows. Nothing new here. Nothing wrong here.
Informants are involved in all kinds of unsavory business, but it's BECAUSE of where they are and what they do that they know things which benefit the police in an investigation. Yep, let's pass laws that say police can only talk to people who do not commit crimes. (Do we include traffic violations in there? Tax evasion?)
The credit card example is ridiculous. An informant does not have a carte blanche. As another example, consider a bounty hunter: they do work at the edges of the law at times, but if they break the law -- shoot an innocent person, for example -- they are just as liable as anyone else. They are not above the law.
... make your living creating or selling things that can be cloned. You'll find little satisfaction that your "original copy" is unaffected by those not-stealing your works.
The "photocopying" jab is for MS simply copying without innovating or improving. In many cases, even copying down to the color scheme.
Sure there have been versioning systems before. This one is a brilliant VISUAL implementation and individual applications can take advantage of it to provide record-level versioning as well. (See the demo where they restore an individual Address Book entry.) Plus, being graphical it lets you preview the document you want to restore before going ahead with the restore (I believe).
Scrambling to fix problems? If they're saying their release date is sometime in 2007, I don't think they need to scramble.
Scramble != Making rapid progress
Scrambling has to do with sound and fury, with temperature, not with progress. Once you understand that, it does in fact make sense. They've evidently pulled programmers off of other projects to complete this. They've pulled features over the last 5 years to try to meet deadlines they've repeatedly missed. They're missing a KEY selling season for their "partner". And there's talk of rewriting MAJOR portions of the code in the last 20% (year) of the development cycle?
No, it doesn't matter to them if they overfarm. The employees are working 12-hour shifts for pennies, killing, stealing, and looting stuff. You'd probably have to get gold prices down to something like US 20 cents per GP before the owners would have to think about not making money.
Second, there's a balancing cycle: if they accumulate too much gold and it isn't selling as they want, they simply turn to the AH and camp out there and corner the market on certain key items, buying them immediately and then putting them right back up for 2x or 3x what they paid. Like any monopoly, they make out pretty well that way.
Third, they can always turn around and start selling characters instead of gold, as the XP advancement process is not much different from the gold farming process.
Fourth, they can move into outright ninja looting, bugs, and loopholes to get extremely valuable items as well.
No, I don't see any economic reaon that would curtail "chinese farmers" activities, which do screw up economies, do make a mockery of levels (ruining pickup groups, since playing with a level 60 is absolutely no indication that they have any experience), and can cause extreme inconvenience (as farmers keep you from completing a quest in an area they're farming).
And MS could have had tabs in IE by now, and could have integrated RSS, and could have had Aero (their equivalent to Apple's 3-year-old Quartz), and could have had desktop search (their equivalend to Apple's 2-year-old Spotlight) and could have had popular MP3 players and a reasonable purchased MP3 business model (their equivalent to... forget it). But they haven't. It's always been the NEXT Big Thing. Just six months away.
Sure, this six months away looks much more likely THIS time around. (It has to be.) But the targets they must meet are moving too. Vista would've blown away (technically, at least) MacOS X... three years ago. But MacOS X is a moving target, which be at version 5.0 around the time MS releases Vista 1.0. Same with Google: they're a moving target and they have at least 6 months to build on what they've been delivering, while MS is still prepping to deliver v 1.0.
How about waiting until MS actually (and finally) delivers and compare it to the state of the art at THAT point in time, instead of comparing MS's future plans (with an established track record of not delivering) versus last year's competition?
BTW, MS was hiring "the best and brightest", WAY before Google came along and started sucking them up. And they've delivered absolutely nothing equivalent to what much smaller companies (Apple, Google) have been delivering on an ongoing basis. It's not simply a matter of having smart people, it's having a culture that allows them to do cool things instead of forcing them to try to leverage and extend a monopoly, to preempt the competition, and to Invent Everything Here. MS's problem is that they sink a huge number of IQ points into politics, not better products.
Separate devices are more convenient overall. First, the controls can be optimized for the task at hand. A phone and an iPod have two entirely different interfaces. The iPod does not need any kind of keypad, and a phone with just a dial and 4 buttons would be pretty limited. (Add in phone text messaging and trying to use an iPod interface is even more unrealistic.)
Second is device size. A phone can be tiny and needs only a minimal display but has a very specific shape requirement based on how it is held/placed in non-speakerphone use. A photo/video iPod needs a larger display at a different aspect ratio, meaning a larger and differently-shaped device. I do NOT want to talk into a waffle as Blackberry users do.
Third, battery life. I can make a choice to run my iPod battery to zero because I want to watch that video on the metro ride. I'll recharge it when I get to work. I don't want to also be running my phone battery to zero, in general. On the other hand, I might be in a situation where I'm going to make a video proposal to a client so I absolutely cannot afford to run by iPod battery down, but I may be willing to run my phone battery dangerously low by making a call to tell them I'm running a little late. One device is entertainment one is communication.
It's like insisting that lawnmower and BBQ grills converge into single devices. THey're both used in the backyard in the summer, after all. Very convenient!
The battery issue may eventually be resolved. Maybe we'll get batteries that can power the video portion of the iPod Phone for 16 hours straight and at that point you can play tunes, play videos, or make calls (or all 3 at once) without much worry about problem #3. Problem #2 might be solved by always using, say, a Bluetooth headphone, but then you're back to carrying two devices: the iPod Phone which is shaped for music/videos and the headphone which is optimized for phone use. Problem #1 might be solved once there's good enough voice recognition that you have the Star Trek version that you talk to when you want to dial or compose a text message, and it reads to you. Still not usable in a noisy or embarrasingly quiet environment.
In summary, convergence will happen because it's cool. I hope those of us who care about functionality will still have options.
If you read the article all the way to the, you know, END, you'll find that the chimps did not do "better" than the humans.
What they discovered is that we've been mistaken in assuming that figuring out someone's goal is "more advanced" learning than simply imitating them. This is true for simple cases, such as in the experiment where you just have to open a box. But it's not true for more advanced tasks, such as learning to build or use a complex tool. For complicated behaviors, simply knowing the goal is not enough to generate the steps necessary to reach the goal.
I've played 120 levels of WoW and am fully familiar with how the rating system works. I've never seen or heard of a quest that takes into account anything like you say: travel time, etc.
Your "other factors" speculation is completely backwards in my prime example. THe boss was harder, but the approach to the boss was ALSO MUCH harder than other quests that were literally next door. The quest was part of a chain in Hillsbrad, so these other quests had the same travel time, the same mob types, etc, etc. BUT it also featured a very high respawn rate which caused many wipes that I watched, including wipes of groups on the way out -- the respawn rate was insanely high.
So the boss was harder, the approach was harder, and you were guaranteed a 5-on-N fight due to linkage in a confined space. All the "other" factors were equal (travel time) or WAY, WAY harder. No "balancing" of easier approach and harder boss. I've never seen that kind of tradeoff anywhere in the game. Can you give any counter-examples?
And I've seen too many exceptions that prove the rule, too. Another quest I remember near Crossroads was very easy: super-low travel time, single-pull mobs, medium respawn time, etc. But even though I only encountered yellow mobs, it was rated orange. According to your reasoning, it should have probably been green because "other factors" were so ridiculously easy. I was so curious, that I investigated it when I passed through the area later and then I saw that there were one or two roaming orange mobs in the area.
Evidently someone had picked off one of them before I arrived the first time, allowing me to reach my target without even seeing any orange mobs. But even if that had not happened, it would have been trivial to get to the target without encountering an orange mob. Evidently they quest rating assumed that you'd have to encounter one of the orange roamers, which was not true. Again, mis-rated, though making it easier rather than harder, and with no possible explanation due to balancing out or "other factors" or "travel time": it simply looked at the possibility of encountering a single orange mob and rated it orange.
Back in Hillsbrad, it rated as yellow another encounter that featured four (or five, I forget now) linked mobs all in the same room. Perhaps a Frost Mage could take them on as an even-level challenge, but neither my Shaman nor my Warlock could. (In fact, both times I asked a higher-leveled passerby for help, they ended up dying helping me.) Again, they took into account the highest-leveled mob, but not the number you'd have to simultaneously face. ("Other factors" were equal of course: mob types, travel time, etc: there are so many other quests in Hillsbrad to compare to.)
I could go on all night. Your explanation holds no water. It simply does not explain things that I watched while leveling 2 different classes to 60, plus my discussions with guildies along the way. It's well-known that there are such mis-rated quests in the game. That's really not open to debate, despite your best efforts at speculation.
And it all boils down to WoW's major problem: an overwhelmed Blizzard that refuses to admit they're overwhelmed or that they could even make a mistake. "Working as intended!" In fact, the quest I complained about did get changed eventually, when several changes were made in Hillsbrad. The designers told the GM, the GM told me: working as intended. But when they were in there making changes a month later, sure enough they saw it was wrong and changed it (by toning down the mini-boss to the quest's rated level).
Not sure why you're disagreeing, or on what basis -- other than speculation -- you're doing so.
I was doing a yellow-rated quest in WoW. That meant that the mobs I encountered should be all yellow (or lower) to me. (I.e. essentially, at my level.) Except the boss-ish mob that was the target of the quest was orange-rated! (I.e. at least 3 levels above me.) So I lodged a ticket.
The response? "Working as intended". Obviously an error, but working as intended.
Even worse, the whole quest rating system is flawed. They rate something as yellow if you'll only encounter yellow mobs. BUT they do not take into account how many at a time. You can have a quest where you can pull a single yellow mob at a time and it's yellow. Or you can have a quest where you must attack 4 linked yellow mobs in a confined space with no hope of single-pulling.
TOTALLY different things, but rated the same because their ill-conceived rating system simply looks for the highest-level mob involved and that's the rating. So to have quests (and I encountered two or three) that aren't even correct by that erroneous method, and then to point this out and to be told that it's working as intended?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, Visual Voicemail is trivial to do even on the EDGE network. Voce is extremely low bandwidth, as in dialup modem speeds.
It's the will to do it. The design that insists on it. The idea to make it consistent and a part of the baseline for a phone.
Re the N95... it looks like a Swiss Army Knife. Lots-o-blades, klunky. So-so battery life, etc. It boils down to the old check-list of features versus how it looks and feels and operates. I'll admit I have not USED one, though, so perhaps looks are deceiving. (P.S. The N95 has an accelerometer. I just read an article where they put out a demo application to show it off. Too bad it's not actually useful.)
In terms of Wall Street, it's precisely because Wall Street has under-estimated Apple for years that its stock has done so well. Slashdot Power Phone user opinions don't influence a stock. It turns out that the I-want-the-most-checkmarks-for-my-device crowd and Wall Street tend to agree, contrary to your assertion. Yes, Steve Jobs has achieved demi-god status in the press, including the financial press, but Wall Street still doesn't get it. How many were saying that Apple's name change (from "Apple Computer" to "Apple") and the fact that iPods were hot meant that Apple's computer business was simply a drag on profits? That there was no "halo effect"? Until last quarter, when Mac-related sales skyrocketed and they were again caught flat-footed.
In terms of the keyboard, trying it out for 15 minutes at a store will deceive you. It is quite different from a Blackberry keyboard. In some ways it's more like a full-sized keyboard, and in some ways it's like a handwriting-recognition system. My typing style changes depending on the task at hand. For extended, real text, I type ahead and don't care about mistakes. The auto-correction feature is quite good, and the magnifying-glass makes it straightforward to go back and correct the couple of words that it got wrong. For arbitrary, non-dictionary text (phone numbers, URLs, names, etc), I slow down a little and take advantage of the fact that keypresses are confirmed on the keyboard and do not register until key release, to get 100% accuracy.
I've also found that it works quite well for one-handed typing , or for putting it down on a flat surface and typing with two fingers. I don't think many of the keyboard phones do very well in situations where you don't hold the phone in two hands and use your thumbs. (And of course, stylus phones are crippled in non-standard situations.)
Your final point is backwards. You mistake check-list features for design and feel. Yes, the iPhone has similar features to other phones. It's a phone, so I would hope so. It's even inferior in some feature areas. But its the way they are designed and put together in a SYSTEM that is different. Quite different. And it is NOT that there are Apple fans out there who will buy anything Apple makes and convince everyone else to do so. Apple has its share of flops (Newton, sub-notebooks, Cube, iTV, etc) that the "faithful" did not support.
It's the design -- not just features -- first, the fandom second. And as long as some techies (and reviewers, and Wall Street) keep thinking it's the Apple "fan boys" who make Apple successful, I'll continue to make money on my stock.
The iPhone does several things that no other phone in the world does. But that's not the point. Those "super-advanced" European cellphones don't do anything that 5-year-old phones do. Perhaps locate themselves a bit more accurately. Perhaps have a higher-rez camera. Perhaps have a faster Internet connection with a half-baked "web browser".
The point is that the iPhone does mostly what other phones do in a new way. The phone works like a cellphone would if it had just been invented, unlike other cellphones which are essentially a lot of bling and tech-spec thrown onto foundation/philosophy from 10 years ago. And that's why the iPhone is all that. And that's why you'll read reviews on European sites that say things like "my head says no, but my heart says yes." The iPhone makes sense, and has a unique feel, even if it falls short in certain individual categories.
In terms of actual new things, the iPhone has visual voicemail. All of those other "advanced" phones have voicemail that works like a 1970's cassette-tape answering machine.
The iPhone has a proximity sensor to turn off its light and touch surface when it's next to your face on a call. (Perhaps other phones do this. I have not seen or read that any do.) It has accelerometers so it knows what way it's facing (landscape or portrait), which may actually exist in other phones, but is certainly not widespread. The iPhone has a consistent, fingers-only interface with things like pinch and stretch (which are unique).
Just look at how you move through photos or through tabbed web pages: they made it work the same. Other phones don't even have real web browsers, much less tabbed web browsers, much less one where they've rethought how you move between tabs so it's clean and consistent with the rest of the phone.
In the end, I'm glad to hear the naysayers. The more the better -- up to a point -- for my stock investment. Apple stock does so well because so many people underestimate Apple. "Death spiral", "iPod-killer", "iTunes-killer", "nothing new iPhone", "market share too small and can't grow", "no halo effect", etc, etc.
(Not to mention this is iPhone 1.0 and it's competing against Nokia 15.0 (or whatever) and Windows mobile 6.0 (?). Not that much different from the initial iPods, which did not exceed then-current MP3 players in many aspects, but did do it in a more stylish and polished way.)
When I select Advanced, I see only two options:
1. Enable Firewall Logging
2. Enable Stealth Mode
I believe they were both off by default, but can't remember.
"Vista does it more transparently, without the need for application integration because of its simplicity..."
Could you please expand on this sentence? There's no need for any application integration for Time Machine, either. You can retrieve any file from the Time Machine App (in conjunction with the Finder). The application integration, if I understand your usage of the phrase, means that you can use iCal to retrieve individual calendar events, Address Book to retrieve individual contacts, etc. Basically backup/restore at the record level. Does Previous Versions do this?
It's nice that Vista provides a two-stage backup: one on-disk and one to an external one. It would not be usable for me, for a variety of reasons, but it's nice. And that's the only advantage I can see in Vista's Previous Versions, based on your comments. Please expand on the "technically better" aspect of Previous Versions.
And let's poke the stick the other way for a second. Lots of people are saying Spotlight is like Vista's equivalent search. The problem is, it's not live. If I have a Spotlight search results window up, looking for "Vista Previous Versions" and I type that phrase in a text document and save it, BINGO, it instantly appears in the search window. As far as I can tell (from experiments, not documentation), Vista cannot do this, and is perhaps still doing the old batch-indexing method?
I placed the Dock on the right side of the screen, and it is automatically 2D. Evidently they listened to comments.
Yes, I can understand someone who does not own a suit showing up without one. Or someone who only wears one for weddings/funerals. Etc.
But the no-shoes thing is definitely trying to make an in-your-face statement. I don't know and have never worked with anyone who does not wear shoes in an urban environment. Or for that matter, in a wilderness environment. The only place they go shoeless is in their own home, at the pool, and perhaps in their backyard or at a park.
So when someone decides to make a statement by what they wear, they should not be surprised when people react to the action as much as to whatever else was supposed to be discussed. It's really no different from Stallman agreeing to discus DRM, and instead showing up on stage and talking about the Dali Lama instead.
Problem is, normal-speed trains are already very expensive, and not terribly convenient in some ways.
I have traveled from Washington, DC, to New York and also to Boston. The Boston trip was overnight, and it was rather fun to take the overnight sleeper. You end up in downtown Boston in the morning. The NY trips also drop you off at a convenient place in Manhatten. Problems are:
1. You don't get reserved seats, leading to a cattle rush at the New York end in particular. A few minutes before departure, they announce what gate the train is at (presumably to give everyone a running chance). Bah. Unless you get an Accela train, which is slightly faster and significantly more expensive, in which case you still don't get reserved seats but you do get a waiting room with seats while you await the stampede.
2. They are pretty expensive. I'd say the trains are always more expensive than coach class flights, based on my random datapoints. You are essentially paying for the convenience of city-center-to-city-center transport and no baggage check-in, etc, which does make the trip faster. If you actually are going to the city center.
Speaking of how hard it is to even decide if a board position is good or bad, there are three more things I can add:
1. One of the key concepts of Go is "influence". Stones literally radiate influence. Different groupings of stones, in different regions of the board, and in opposition to other groupings, radiate differing amounts of influence. And in a Heisenberg-ish kind of way (at least during the early stages of a game) pushing too strongly for influence will create less space and pushing too strongly for space will lead to less influence. The master strives for just enough more influence or space to win.
For example, fencing in areas near the edge of the board early on. You may be solidifying space -- though no guarantees if you are not very certain of what you are doing -- but you are giving your opponent great influence -- if they play well, no guarantees.
No doubt chess has a similar concept (pieces, control, development potential), but it just feels different... Not as fluid or symmetrical in so many ways.
In some sense, you are creating your pieces by placing atoms on the board. No doubt chess has a similar concept, say having a bishop and a knight work together, or two rooks, etc, but the small size of the board and the severe movement restrictions and clutter makes these chess meta-pieces much more awkward than Go.
2. Sente (initiative) is a very important part of the game. You may jump around the board making five or six moves in sente, then finally go back to patch up a weakness in gote (yielding sente). One of the difficulties of the game is deciding how urgent moves are, and thus when you should yield sente in order to address them. (Of course, the perfect solution is to figure a way to make the urgent moves in sente, but...)
Of course, in Go it is always advantageous to move if you can -- as opposed to, say, chess -- and the Go board is large-enough scale that it's easily possible to have a dozen places you'd LIKE to move but you have to rank them and decide how long you can postpone most of those moves so you retain sente. I just don't see this in chess -- though perhaps I don't know it well enough.
3. Go has an aesthetic sense. You might say that it's simply a different word for intuition and chess is no different. But I don't think so, because chess does not allow you to move pieces arbitrarily to fulfill "balance" or other aesthetic concepts. I am only an intermediate Go player, but I have been amazed at the number of high-level games I've viewed over the years and I've been able to see where a move must go, based almost entirely on an aesthetic sense that the move somehow balances or fills in something.
(The problem of course is sente -- WHEN should that move be made -- as well as playing the entire rest of the game at that same level of insight, stringing together move after move. Perhaps that's one way that Go is like golf. One of the reasons that golf is so addictive, IMO, is that any good player occasionally hits a shot that's as good as Tiger Woods. The rest of the game does not go that well, but they get a tantalizing taste of greatness for an instant and that's very addictive.)
A couple of years ago the company I was working for was constructing a building and steel proces skyrocketed in the months it took to complete. I was told that it was China's hot economy and insatiable raw materials appetite. Not saying it is China (alone), but I don't think the US economy is using the raw materials that China's is at this point.
I'd substitute Interarchy for Transmit. Otherwise, looks reasonable.
Also, OmniOutliner is VERY nice for many tasks. And Silverkeeper is a free basic backup program that does well enough for me.
True about the military. And for a bit of trivia bonus, the short name they use for "kilometers" is "clicks", as in "The landing zone is about 3 clicks north of here".
even if Apple knew they'd lose, the would get the buzz from the obvious "IPhone" for 6 months until the real thing comes out -- with the added lawsuit and "will they lose the name" buzz to keep it on front pages -- then they could rebrand it the Apple Phone or the iTunes Phone or whatever and get even MORE buzz as they get the release publicity plus the "Apple had to rebrand their phone" publicity that would of course also describe the phone.
Sort of like the old saying, "I don't care what you print about me in your newspaper as long as you spell my name right". (Or something like that.)
Google's out there experimenting and trying things because they might be great.
Microsoft's trying to extend a monopoly with little concern for actual innovation. And they're arrogant bullies as well.
THAT influences how we view them: fun, whacky inventors versus mean, leveraging bullies.
That plus, what GREAT software has MS made?
Nice propaganda!
First, being below the poverty line in the US does not mean a person cannot meet their basic needs. (I could qupte all kinds of semi-meaningful statistics like the number of such homes with telephones, refrigerators, and televisions, but let's stick with the basic definition which is more complicated than "can't meet their basic needs".) I'm not saying I'd like to live below the poverty line, but that line is not what propagandists make it out to be.
Second, I believe that US government statistics are based on INCOME, which does not count welfare, assistance from charitable organizations, etc,. People below the poverty line receive more in benefits than their "income" figure would indicate. So comparing them directly to poverty statistics from other nations, which may well (sensibly) count benefits, is misleading. (In fact, there is an unfortunate side-effect from welfare rules that encourages those on welfare to lower their independent income to maximise their welfare benefits.)
Third, your "starvation itself" remark is simply inflammatory with nothing to support it, but it is obviously meant to imply that 10% of the US population is starving, which is patently untrue.
Fourth, your "The US government... hide miles underground..." remark is ridiculous. They in fact do have a major concern and run policy towards that end. But in case of a disaster of any kind (including nuclear war), government functions must continue to the extent that they can, otherwise human loses will be compounded as the country colapses into sub-feudal societies. Your remark is the typical ignorant conspiracy theory that is more appropriate for X-Files than an "educated" mind.
Police have used informants for years and we've all seen it on police shows. Nothing new here. Nothing wrong here.
Informants are involved in all kinds of unsavory business, but it's BECAUSE of where they are and what they do that they know things which benefit the police in an investigation. Yep, let's pass laws that say police can only talk to people who do not commit crimes. (Do we include traffic violations in there? Tax evasion?)
The credit card example is ridiculous. An informant does not have a carte blanche. As another example, consider a bounty hunter: they do work at the edges of the law at times, but if they break the law -- shoot an innocent person, for example -- they are just as liable as anyone else. They are not above the law.
... make your living creating or selling things that can be cloned. You'll find little satisfaction that your "original copy" is unaffected by those not-stealing your works.
The "photocopying" jab is for MS simply copying without innovating or improving. In many cases, even copying down to the color scheme.
Sure there have been versioning systems before. This one is a brilliant VISUAL implementation and individual applications can take advantage of it to provide record-level versioning as well. (See the demo where they restore an individual Address Book entry.) Plus, being graphical it lets you preview the document you want to restore before going ahead with the restore (I believe).
NOT a photocopy.
Scrambling has to do with sound and fury, with temperature, not with progress. Once you understand that, it does in fact make sense. They've evidently pulled programmers off of other projects to complete this. They've pulled features over the last 5 years to try to meet deadlines they've repeatedly missed. They're missing a KEY selling season for their "partner". And there's talk of rewriting MAJOR portions of the code in the last 20% (year) of the development cycle?
That sounds like "scrambling" to me.
No, it doesn't matter to them if they overfarm. The employees are working 12-hour shifts for pennies, killing, stealing, and looting stuff. You'd probably have to get gold prices down to something like US 20 cents per GP before the owners would have to think about not making money.
Second, there's a balancing cycle: if they accumulate too much gold and it isn't selling as they want, they simply turn to the AH and camp out there and corner the market on certain key items, buying them immediately and then putting them right back up for 2x or 3x what they paid. Like any monopoly, they make out pretty well that way.
Third, they can always turn around and start selling characters instead of gold, as the XP advancement process is not much different from the gold farming process.
Fourth, they can move into outright ninja looting, bugs, and loopholes to get extremely valuable items as well.
No, I don't see any economic reaon that would curtail "chinese farmers" activities, which do screw up economies, do make a mockery of levels (ruining pickup groups, since playing with a level 60 is absolutely no indication that they have any experience), and can cause extreme inconvenience (as farmers keep you from completing a quest in an area they're farming).
And MS could have had tabs in IE by now, and could have integrated RSS, and could have had Aero (their equivalent to Apple's 3-year-old Quartz), and could have had desktop search (their equivalend to Apple's 2-year-old Spotlight) and could have had popular MP3 players and a reasonable purchased MP3 business model (their equivalent to... forget it). But they haven't. It's always been the NEXT Big Thing. Just six months away.
Sure, this six months away looks much more likely THIS time around. (It has to be.) But the targets they must meet are moving too. Vista would've blown away (technically, at least) MacOS X... three years ago. But MacOS X is a moving target, which be at version 5.0 around the time MS releases Vista 1.0. Same with Google: they're a moving target and they have at least 6 months to build on what they've been delivering, while MS is still prepping to deliver v 1.0.
How about waiting until MS actually (and finally) delivers and compare it to the state of the art at THAT point in time, instead of comparing MS's future plans (with an established track record of not delivering) versus last year's competition?
BTW, MS was hiring "the best and brightest", WAY before Google came along and started sucking them up. And they've delivered absolutely nothing equivalent to what much smaller companies (Apple, Google) have been delivering on an ongoing basis. It's not simply a matter of having smart people, it's having a culture that allows them to do cool things instead of forcing them to try to leverage and extend a monopoly, to preempt the competition, and to Invent Everything Here. MS's problem is that they sink a huge number of IQ points into politics, not better products.
Separate devices are more convenient overall. First, the controls can be optimized for the task at hand. A phone and an iPod have two entirely different interfaces. The iPod does not need any kind of keypad, and a phone with just a dial and 4 buttons would be pretty limited. (Add in phone text messaging and trying to use an iPod interface is even more unrealistic.)
Second is device size. A phone can be tiny and needs only a minimal display but has a very specific shape requirement based on how it is held/placed in non-speakerphone use. A photo/video iPod needs a larger display at a different aspect ratio, meaning a larger and differently-shaped device. I do NOT want to talk into a waffle as Blackberry users do.
Third, battery life. I can make a choice to run my iPod battery to zero because I want to watch that video on the metro ride. I'll recharge it when I get to work. I don't want to also be running my phone battery to zero, in general. On the other hand, I might be in a situation where I'm going to make a video proposal to a client so I absolutely cannot afford to run by iPod battery down, but I may be willing to run my phone battery dangerously low by making a call to tell them I'm running a little late. One device is entertainment one is communication.
It's like insisting that lawnmower and BBQ grills converge into single devices. THey're both used in the backyard in the summer, after all. Very convenient!
The battery issue may eventually be resolved. Maybe we'll get batteries that can power the video portion of the iPod Phone for 16 hours straight and at that point you can play tunes, play videos, or make calls (or all 3 at once) without much worry about problem #3. Problem #2 might be solved by always using, say, a Bluetooth headphone, but then you're back to carrying two devices: the iPod Phone which is shaped for music/videos and the headphone which is optimized for phone use. Problem #1 might be solved once there's good enough voice recognition that you have the Star Trek version that you talk to when you want to dial or compose a text message, and it reads to you. Still not usable in a noisy or embarrasingly quiet environment.
In summary, convergence will happen because it's cool. I hope those of us who care about functionality will still have options.
If you read the article all the way to the, you know, END, you'll find that the chimps did not do "better" than the humans. What they discovered is that we've been mistaken in assuming that figuring out someone's goal is "more advanced" learning than simply imitating them. This is true for simple cases, such as in the experiment where you just have to open a box. But it's not true for more advanced tasks, such as learning to build or use a complex tool. For complicated behaviors, simply knowing the goal is not enough to generate the steps necessary to reach the goal.
I've played 120 levels of WoW and am fully familiar with how the rating system works. I've never seen or heard of a quest that takes into account anything like you say: travel time, etc.
Your "other factors" speculation is completely backwards in my prime example. THe boss was harder, but the approach to the boss was ALSO MUCH harder than other quests that were literally next door. The quest was part of a chain in Hillsbrad, so these other quests had the same travel time, the same mob types, etc, etc. BUT it also featured a very high respawn rate which caused many wipes that I watched, including wipes of groups on the way out -- the respawn rate was insanely high.
So the boss was harder, the approach was harder, and you were guaranteed a 5-on-N fight due to linkage in a confined space. All the "other" factors were equal (travel time) or WAY, WAY harder. No "balancing" of easier approach and harder boss. I've never seen that kind of tradeoff anywhere in the game. Can you give any counter-examples?
And I've seen too many exceptions that prove the rule, too. Another quest I remember near Crossroads was very easy: super-low travel time, single-pull mobs, medium respawn time, etc. But even though I only encountered yellow mobs, it was rated orange. According to your reasoning, it should have probably been green because "other factors" were so ridiculously easy. I was so curious, that I investigated it when I passed through the area later and then I saw that there were one or two roaming orange mobs in the area.
Evidently someone had picked off one of them before I arrived the first time, allowing me to reach my target without even seeing any orange mobs. But even if that had not happened, it would have been trivial to get to the target without encountering an orange mob. Evidently they quest rating assumed that you'd have to encounter one of the orange roamers, which was not true. Again, mis-rated, though making it easier rather than harder, and with no possible explanation due to balancing out or "other factors" or "travel time": it simply looked at the possibility of encountering a single orange mob and rated it orange.
Back in Hillsbrad, it rated as yellow another encounter that featured four (or five, I forget now) linked mobs all in the same room. Perhaps a Frost Mage could take them on as an even-level challenge, but neither my Shaman nor my Warlock could. (In fact, both times I asked a higher-leveled passerby for help, they ended up dying helping me.) Again, they took into account the highest-leveled mob, but not the number you'd have to simultaneously face. ("Other factors" were equal of course: mob types, travel time, etc: there are so many other quests in Hillsbrad to compare to.)
I could go on all night. Your explanation holds no water. It simply does not explain things that I watched while leveling 2 different classes to 60, plus my discussions with guildies along the way. It's well-known that there are such mis-rated quests in the game. That's really not open to debate, despite your best efforts at speculation.
And it all boils down to WoW's major problem: an overwhelmed Blizzard that refuses to admit they're overwhelmed or that they could even make a mistake. "Working as intended!" In fact, the quest I complained about did get changed eventually, when several changes were made in Hillsbrad. The designers told the GM, the GM told me: working as intended. But when they were in there making changes a month later, sure enough they saw it was wrong and changed it (by toning down the mini-boss to the quest's rated level).
Not sure why you're disagreeing, or on what basis -- other than speculation -- you're doing so.
Well yes, you do get replies. But....
I was doing a yellow-rated quest in WoW. That meant that the mobs I encountered should be all yellow (or lower) to me. (I.e. essentially, at my level.) Except the boss-ish mob that was the target of the quest was orange-rated! (I.e. at least 3 levels above me.) So I lodged a ticket.
The response? "Working as intended". Obviously an error, but working as intended.
Even worse, the whole quest rating system is flawed. They rate something as yellow if you'll only encounter yellow mobs. BUT they do not take into account how many at a time. You can have a quest where you can pull a single yellow mob at a time and it's yellow. Or you can have a quest where you must attack 4 linked yellow mobs in a confined space with no hope of single-pulling.
TOTALLY different things, but rated the same because their ill-conceived rating system simply looks for the highest-level mob involved and that's the rating. So to have quests (and I encountered two or three) that aren't even correct by that erroneous method, and then to point this out and to be told that it's working as intended?
I think being ignored might be prefereable.