Not at all, but you cannot just shove religion into a science book - creationism is not science, and is not an alternative to evolution, nor is "God made the universe" an equally weighty statement to "the big bang created the observable universe" (unless the former statement is in a religion class).
Science may not be able to explain how the big bang occurred, or the immediate conditions prior to the event, but we can detect and time accurately the actual explosion itself, and the conditions that occurred right afterwards.
Zues' lightning bolt is a story about a man/god with superhuman powers and abilities that we cannot test or verify other than reading stories written by people in the past. The big bang was a large explosion that occurred a very long time ago that we can measure and learn from. We can show it actually happened, and tie the observed properties of the current universe from that event. There are no photos of Zeus, or any film, or any evidence he actually exists. He's not a testable hypothesis (in a similar way to Creationism: it's not a testable scientific theory). Perhaps he was a time traveller with a taser or a very large Van de Graaff generator in his backpack - we have no way to tell, or even that he exists at all. Perhaps some humans saw lightning strike a tree near their home right after they fucked under it and took it as a sign from on high that they were being naughty. Who knows.
Science evolves, changes, creates hypotheses and tests them and correlates observed effects with theories, that then change as our understanding grows. Things that we didn't know before become more clear. Things that we originally thought were true can sometimes be proved wrong (Phlogiston!) as our understanding of the world grows. We refine theories, and don't ever claim something is *concrete, unchangeable divine fact*. When we first measured pi, back when the Egyptians were building huge pyramidal tombs, we didn't understand it was an irrational number, or even what those were. Now we do. Back when Joseph Priestly was heating mercuric oxide and evolving a gas, he had no idea that it was oxygen, or that he was creating a new element - he thought he had formed a new type of air.
To bring it into today's world. We are like Priestly and his little vial of mercuric oxide, except we're not looking for oxygen, we're looking for what creates gravity. We know quite a lot about the effects of the force, and that the bigger the mass, the bigger the force, but we don't know why. I can be pretty sure what will happen when I drop a mass to the floor, even quantitatively - the velocity when it hits the ground, the force it exerts and so on, buy why does it fall?
Zeus' lightning bolt is a story of a god who can shoot you with electricity. There's really nowhere to go with that, other than historical interest (which clearly is an important discipline).
There are plenty of things we know little about that we are trying to learn. This is not a blanket reason to shove religion into science classes, or alter the historical facts about the founding of the USA with a Christian bias.
I fully expect that they'll try to make it seem like "under God" was in the original pledge all along.
That's a time thing I think - when I fire up the map app on the phone it often takes a little while to update and settle on a GPS fix, probably because the GPS isn't powered on all the time for battery life, and it can take upto 30 seconds to register a satellite (due to the nature of the GPS signal itself), so if you just pop open the photo app and take a shot quickly you might get wildly inaccurate data.
Wasn't there a demo during the release of the iPhone 3GS keynote that showed the use of this metadata with a bunch of GPS-aware cameras, including the iPhone and the new version of iPhoto that uses this data to create clickable maps with pushpins for each photo you have taken?
I suppose some people could think it was "magic", since embedded data in an image isn't something that is immediately obvious to a normal user. Perhaps if it was called "Virtual Writing on the back of your Photos".
No, my point was that there is a minor grievance with Apple's software model, that isn't even really accurate for OS X - it's more a critique of the iPhone OS and app store, and then makes a wildly inaccurate claim that not only are Apple's apps poorly coded, but that they're the only things available for Mac OS X.
I said in my point that there are obviously going to be consenting and dissenting opinions about Apple, but stick to, y'know, actual facts.
It's the equivalent of saying "Open Source apps are just poorly coded software slung together by a bunch of volunteers in the their free time - you get no support, and you're lucky if it'll even run on your distro, and forget a usable UI or any refinement or documentation!"
Slashdot is meant to be populated by nerds who at least use their brains - the original AC post just serves no one, and the mod who gave it a positive score should hand in their geek card at the door.
Sure, hate Apple all you like, but if you are going to get modpoints on/., at least use your brain. This is just laughably poor moderation. Hello Kitty Island Adventure might be more your level of technical content, whoever modded the parent post.
I have also "been there, done that", and have spent approximately £70,000 (business and personal) in Apple stores, and have advised at least 5 of my close friends (3 of them total computer illiterate people) to go and browse in the store.
Not once has a Mac Pro been forced on any of us.
I have anecdotes too!
You must have some serious axe to grind if you are going to contest that in an Apple store, of all places - the land of shiny consumer gadgets like the MacBook, Macbook Pro and iMac, custom designed for granny and the family - will have store personnel who steer people away from there over to the Mac Pro and say "this is what you need" then you are clearly just spoiling for a fight, or are unwilling to see past your nerd rage.
Or is your anecdote "I asked for a Mac that I could upgrade with a new GPU and they told me only the Mac Pro has that ability" and thus concluded from your single data point that they try to sell Mac Pros to everyone.
4 digit ID. I assumed all of you guys were pretty together as far as tech stuff went. ebay it, maybe? How much did you pay?
My initial point was that there are (were) UI inconsistencies that became mental roadblocks for me when I tried GIMP - the lack of save on the actual file menu being one of the weirdest, although I hear it is fixed now.
I was mainly taking issue that anyone used to a consistent (if unimaginative and occasionally odd) UI in Photoshop is a "luddite whiner" who have "forced" an inferior UI on GIMP.
No, but you could check out a textbook from the university library onto your iPad, and buy a hardcopy (or electronic version) if you wanted.
They're obviously never going to be free - very few services are unless they are subsidised, but if the cost of the iPad comes down, then even if the textbooks remain very expensive, it will still be worth it.
Having an entire copy of Warren around, with illustrations and diagrams I can zoom in on, and that may even be animated, and with the ability to quickly jump to a web source or other network resource right off the page (highlight, google search!) would be awesome.
Perhaps particular universities could add lecture recordings to specific pages to help with the topic, or provide links on specific pages to online course material.
I already have a rich online university portal with problem sets, handouts and other info. Linking the two together seems like a logical next step.
Is the layers menu actually under "layers" now instead of "dialogs"?
Can you go to the file menu and save from there or do you have to right click the image?
These are sorts of inconsistencies that that "luddite" photoshop UI doesn't have to contend with.
the GIMP UI is like a toilet with a rope attached to the flush mechanism, with a handwritten note attached to the handle on the outside that says "we'll implement this sometime later". Sure it works, but if you use it every day you want it to work properly.
Who is saying that? Hyped up journalists trying to drive hits to their blogs?
I am as big an Apple fan as you're likely to find, and I have no illusions that the iPad is about to sweep away all other computers - it;s not even really a computer. It's an extension to my computer like my iPod or iPhone is. When I bought my iPhone I didn't just stop using my main machine. The iPad would be exactly the same (although need to wait for gen 2, for cheaper pricing).
The other people I've seen claiming this are Apple haters - talking about how Apple (and then naturally everyone else) is going to turn desktop OS X (and other OSes) into the closed App Store model where you can only buy from one source and you won't be able to multitask and the sky will fall etc because this is "obviously going to happen". Someone on/. actually said "this is likely to occur", which is total nonsense.
Laugh at us Apple fans who spend "too much" for our hardware and play in a walled garden, but don't attribute stuff to us that we just don;t think is true - blame the tech journalists for that - the hype machine has been *insane* for this thing, and almost none of it has been from Apple themselves (the invite to the event, the adverts and the keynote itself). Everything else has been from outside - including crazy fud articles like this one, with 7/8 questions already answered by Apple or already painfully obvious.
You will pry my dual booting Intel iMac out of my cold dead hands (or replace it with a 27" version) - the iPad is not replacing it.
Apple's "innovation" is taking things that are almost there and making them into desirable products. They did it with the iPod, which was not the first mp3 player by a long chalk, they are doing it with the iPhone (expanding the smartphone demographic far beyond the blackberry set, and spawning a ton of iPhone-alikes), and they did it with the all-in-one computer.
None of those were "original" concepts, but Apple's implementations tend to be excellent - the first time you use an iPhone (ignoring the closed nature/non open source yada yada) it is a joy, compared to other smartphones of the time - even the blackberry. The same was true with the iPod compared to the other mp3 players of the time. It didn't even have the best audio hardware in it, or the most storage space, but it sold like hotcakes. You can argue that this is all marketing and they are "duping people" but flashy marketing will only get you so far (and you clearly do need decent marketing) - if a product is truly awful then very shortly it will fail, regardless of the ad campaign, so they must be doing *something* right with the products they are making.
In short, they make products that lots of people like using, but that sometimes clash with the "wants" (needs?) of the "technical elite" who want to be able to install linux on their doorbell so it fingers them on port 55 and writes out the time to a logfile when someone calls at the door.
Tablets have been around for years, but very few people are using them because, apart from niche markets, there is no real use for them. If Apple had simply made an OS X tablet, I wager it would have been just like those other tablets, except with even smaller market share. So they are trying this. It may flop terribly, or just not gain huge traction (Apple TV), or it could sell like the iPod. Time will tell.
If the iPad, a solid, working, real world object that has been seen in person by many people outside of Apple is "vapourware" then what is Duke Nukem Forever?
This story is really a non-story, and is pretty much an Apple-bash. It has no purpose being on/. but such is the nature of Apple's products at the moment (for every fawning 'change the world' story, there's one like this).
7 of the 8 "unanswered" questions are in Apple's literature, or are directly comparable to the iTouch and iPhone that run the same OS. The article is just another FUD piece that is having its desired effects - getting people on/. pissed off about "apple stories".
Will the iPad "change the world" - I don;t think so, but it might just fit into a niche for itself and become popular enough to make it useful. It's not a replacement for a netbook, or any other sort of computer, although the bulk of the complaints about the form factor seem to be that it isn't a netbook.
If the only thing it ever does is become the way college students use textbooks it will be a huge success. I would kill to have my copy of Warren (Organic Chem) on an iPad. It may be 10" across, but it doesn't weigh 3kg, and is a lot thinner. For the price of 5 textbooks, I could get the cheapest one, and the price is only going to come down.
Use Safari on 10.4 if you want to use the same browser that they are shipping with 10.6 - it is fully up to date. They also released a security patch in September 2009.
Mozilla's handwaving is somewhat premature for an OS that was being shipped new only 3 years ago.
And Apple still ships its current version of Safari on 10.4! And last patched it with a security update in September 2009. This is entirely Mozilla's decision - the code and APIs still exist. You can still target builds for your project for 10.4 if you like, but Apple included new, faster APIs for text rendering in 10.5. You can leave in the code to use the old stuff in 10.4, which Apple have obviously done with Safari. It's just more work to maintain it, and adds problems with new features in your app.
What did you want them to do? Backport CoreText to 10.4, or just not improve the APIs they were using? According to the wiki, it looks like CpreText was a private API in 10.4, so I guess they could officially make it a public API as far back as that, although it may have undergone revision between 10.4 and its official release as public in 10.5. Who knows.
Oh I know, I know, this is all Apple's fault for.... I don't know, something to do with the iPad being DoA due to not having a stylus.
I agree, but the bolded portion of the GP's post states as fact that Apple are no longer patching 10.4, when no one really knows for sure, as well as containing some opinion-as-fact about "not putting effort into supporting old OSes" (while releasing current iTunes and Safari updates for 10.4).
Their last security update for 10.4 was in mid/late 2009, so it may be tailing off. I guess a lot will depend if they run into the same issue as Mozilla - that there is no CoreText in 10.4.
Consider that the latest version of Safari is still supported on Tiger...
This is not Apple's decision, although there were large API changes between 10.4 and 10.5 that make supporting pre-10.5 more challenging for third party developers.
Slashdot Mirror
Not at all, but you cannot just shove religion into a science book - creationism is not science, and is not an alternative to evolution, nor is "God made the universe" an equally weighty statement to "the big bang created the observable universe" (unless the former statement is in a religion class).
Science may not be able to explain how the big bang occurred, or the immediate conditions prior to the event, but we can detect and time accurately the actual explosion itself, and the conditions that occurred right afterwards.
Zues' lightning bolt is a story about a man/god with superhuman powers and abilities that we cannot test or verify other than reading stories written by people in the past. The big bang was a large explosion that occurred a very long time ago that we can measure and learn from. We can show it actually happened, and tie the observed properties of the current universe from that event. There are no photos of Zeus, or any film, or any evidence he actually exists. He's not a testable hypothesis (in a similar way to Creationism: it's not a testable scientific theory). Perhaps he was a time traveller with a taser or a very large Van de Graaff generator in his backpack - we have no way to tell, or even that he exists at all. Perhaps some humans saw lightning strike a tree near their home right after they fucked under it and took it as a sign from on high that they were being naughty. Who knows.
Science evolves, changes, creates hypotheses and tests them and correlates observed effects with theories, that then change as our understanding grows. Things that we didn't know before become more clear. Things that we originally thought were true can sometimes be proved wrong (Phlogiston!) as our understanding of the world grows. We refine theories, and don't ever claim something is *concrete, unchangeable divine fact*. When we first measured pi, back when the Egyptians were building huge pyramidal tombs, we didn't understand it was an irrational number, or even what those were. Now we do. Back when Joseph Priestly was heating mercuric oxide and evolving a gas, he had no idea that it was oxygen, or that he was creating a new element - he thought he had formed a new type of air.
To bring it into today's world. We are like Priestly and his little vial of mercuric oxide, except we're not looking for oxygen, we're looking for what creates gravity. We know quite a lot about the effects of the force, and that the bigger the mass, the bigger the force, but we don't know why. I can be pretty sure what will happen when I drop a mass to the floor, even quantitatively - the velocity when it hits the ground, the force it exerts and so on, buy why does it fall?
Zeus' lightning bolt is a story of a god who can shoot you with electricity. There's really nowhere to go with that, other than historical interest (which clearly is an important discipline).
There are plenty of things we know little about that we are trying to learn. This is not a blanket reason to shove religion into science classes, or alter the historical facts about the founding of the USA with a Christian bias.
I fully expect that they'll try to make it seem like "under God" was in the original pledge all along.
That's a time thing I think - when I fire up the map app on the phone it often takes a little while to update and settle on a GPS fix, probably because the GPS isn't powered on all the time for battery life, and it can take upto 30 seconds to register a satellite (due to the nature of the GPS signal itself), so if you just pop open the photo app and take a shot quickly you might get wildly inaccurate data.
Wasn't there a demo during the release of the iPhone 3GS keynote that showed the use of this metadata with a bunch of GPS-aware cameras, including the iPhone and the new version of iPhoto that uses this data to create clickable maps with pushpins for each photo you have taken?
I suppose some people could think it was "magic", since embedded data in an image isn't something that is immediately obvious to a normal user. Perhaps if it was called "Virtual Writing on the back of your Photos".
No, my point was that there is a minor grievance with Apple's software model, that isn't even really accurate for OS X - it's more a critique of the iPhone OS and app store, and then makes a wildly inaccurate claim that not only are Apple's apps poorly coded, but that they're the only things available for Mac OS X.
I said in my point that there are obviously going to be consenting and dissenting opinions about Apple, but stick to, y'know, actual facts.
It's the equivalent of saying "Open Source apps are just poorly coded software slung together by a bunch of volunteers in the their free time - you get no support, and you're lucky if it'll even run on your distro, and forget a usable UI or any refinement or documentation!"
Slashdot is meant to be populated by nerds who at least use their brains - the original AC post just serves no one, and the mod who gave it a positive score should hand in their geek card at the door.
How the hell did this get +1 insightful?
Sure, hate Apple all you like, but if you are going to get modpoints on /., at least use your brain. This is just laughably poor moderation. Hello Kitty Island Adventure might be more your level of technical content, whoever modded the parent post.
They are on record somewhere on the D3 forums (or at Blizzcon) stating that D3 would not be released until after SC2 had shipped.
I can see the headlines now: "Linux rings in the new year with an embedded device that will open doors for all of us!"
I have also "been there, done that", and have spent approximately £70,000 (business and personal) in Apple stores, and have advised at least 5 of my close friends (3 of them total computer illiterate people) to go and browse in the store.
Not once has a Mac Pro been forced on any of us.
I have anecdotes too!
You must have some serious axe to grind if you are going to contest that in an Apple store, of all places - the land of shiny consumer gadgets like the MacBook, Macbook Pro and iMac, custom designed for granny and the family - will have store personnel who steer people away from there over to the Mac Pro and say "this is what you need" then you are clearly just spoiling for a fight, or are unwilling to see past your nerd rage.
Or is your anecdote "I asked for a Mac that I could upgrade with a new GPU and they told me only the Mac Pro has that ability" and thus concluded from your single data point that they try to sell Mac Pros to everyone.
4 digit ID. I assumed all of you guys were pretty together as far as tech stuff went. ebay it, maybe? How much did you pay?
I figured it would be something like that.
My initial point was that there are (were) UI inconsistencies that became mental roadblocks for me when I tried GIMP - the lack of save on the actual file menu being one of the weirdest, although I hear it is fixed now.
I was mainly taking issue that anyone used to a consistent (if unimaginative and occasionally odd) UI in Photoshop is a "luddite whiner" who have "forced" an inferior UI on GIMP.
Is that "dialogs" menu on my version of Photoshop? Can you show me where that is - I have "windows", unless the two are equivalent terms for GIMP.
Either way, there is no "dialogs" menu in my copy of Photoshop.
Ah, did they finally roll it into Motion?
I haven't done any comp work in ages (I went back to college).
No, but you could check out a textbook from the university library onto your iPad, and buy a hardcopy (or electronic version) if you wanted.
They're obviously never going to be free - very few services are unless they are subsidised, but if the cost of the iPad comes down, then even if the textbooks remain very expensive, it will still be worth it.
Having an entire copy of Warren around, with illustrations and diagrams I can zoom in on, and that may even be animated, and with the ability to quickly jump to a web source or other network resource right off the page (highlight, google search!) would be awesome.
Perhaps particular universities could add lecture recordings to specific pages to help with the topic, or provide links on specific pages to online course material.
I already have a rich online university portal with problem sets, handouts and other info. Linking the two together seems like a logical next step.
Great, so those two were fixed.
Right, so tethering on Verizon would also have been free?
Sprint would have totally changed their network infrastructure to support the iPhone?
Picking the carrier in the US market is like choosing which gun you would like to be shot in the head with. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Either way, the iPhone was capable of tethering, but it was a network operator's choice, not Apple's.
Is the layers menu actually under "layers" now instead of "dialogs"?
Can you go to the file menu and save from there or do you have to right click the image?
These are sorts of inconsistencies that that "luddite" photoshop UI doesn't have to contend with.
the GIMP UI is like a toilet with a rope attached to the flush mechanism, with a handwritten note attached to the handle on the outside that says "we'll implement this sometime later". Sure it works, but if you use it every day you want it to work properly.
Who is saying that? Hyped up journalists trying to drive hits to their blogs?
I am as big an Apple fan as you're likely to find, and I have no illusions that the iPad is about to sweep away all other computers - it;s not even really a computer. It's an extension to my computer like my iPod or iPhone is. When I bought my iPhone I didn't just stop using my main machine. The iPad would be exactly the same (although need to wait for gen 2, for cheaper pricing).
The other people I've seen claiming this are Apple haters - talking about how Apple (and then naturally everyone else) is going to turn desktop OS X (and other OSes) into the closed App Store model where you can only buy from one source and you won't be able to multitask and the sky will fall etc because this is "obviously going to happen". Someone on /. actually said "this is likely to occur", which is total nonsense.
Laugh at us Apple fans who spend "too much" for our hardware and play in a walled garden, but don't attribute stuff to us that we just don;t think is true - blame the tech journalists for that - the hype machine has been *insane* for this thing, and almost none of it has been from Apple themselves (the invite to the event, the adverts and the keynote itself). Everything else has been from outside - including crazy fud articles like this one, with 7/8 questions already answered by Apple or already painfully obvious.
You will pry my dual booting Intel iMac out of my cold dead hands (or replace it with a 27" version) - the iPad is not replacing it.
Apple's "innovation" is taking things that are almost there and making them into desirable products. They did it with the iPod, which was not the first mp3 player by a long chalk, they are doing it with the iPhone (expanding the smartphone demographic far beyond the blackberry set, and spawning a ton of iPhone-alikes), and they did it with the all-in-one computer.
None of those were "original" concepts, but Apple's implementations tend to be excellent - the first time you use an iPhone (ignoring the closed nature/non open source yada yada) it is a joy, compared to other smartphones of the time - even the blackberry. The same was true with the iPod compared to the other mp3 players of the time. It didn't even have the best audio hardware in it, or the most storage space, but it sold like hotcakes. You can argue that this is all marketing and they are "duping people" but flashy marketing will only get you so far (and you clearly do need decent marketing) - if a product is truly awful then very shortly it will fail, regardless of the ad campaign, so they must be doing *something* right with the products they are making.
In short, they make products that lots of people like using, but that sometimes clash with the "wants" (needs?) of the "technical elite" who want to be able to install linux on their doorbell so it fingers them on port 55 and writes out the time to a logfile when someone calls at the door.
Tablets have been around for years, but very few people are using them because, apart from niche markets, there is no real use for them. If Apple had simply made an OS X tablet, I wager it would have been just like those other tablets, except with even smaller market share. So they are trying this. It may flop terribly, or just not gain huge traction (Apple TV), or it could sell like the iPod. Time will tell.
If the iPad, a solid, working, real world object that has been seen in person by many people outside of Apple is "vapourware" then what is Duke Nukem Forever?
This story is really a non-story, and is pretty much an Apple-bash. It has no purpose being on /. but such is the nature of Apple's products at the moment (for every fawning 'change the world' story, there's one like this).
7 of the 8 "unanswered" questions are in Apple's literature, or are directly comparable to the iTouch and iPhone that run the same OS. The article is just another FUD piece that is having its desired effects - getting people on /. pissed off about "apple stories".
Will the iPad "change the world" - I don;t think so, but it might just fit into a niche for itself and become popular enough to make it useful. It's not a replacement for a netbook, or any other sort of computer, although the bulk of the complaints about the form factor seem to be that it isn't a netbook.
If the only thing it ever does is become the way college students use textbooks it will be a huge success. I would kill to have my copy of Warren (Organic Chem) on an iPad. It may be 10" across, but it doesn't weigh 3kg, and is a lot thinner. For the price of 5 textbooks, I could get the cheapest one, and the price is only going to come down.
So they stopped selling their content creation apps? FCS, Logic, Shake?
Damn!
I didn't pay a fee. I just tethered it to my laptop and connected.
Oh sorry, you meant on AT&T. Whose fault is that again? Apple's?
Apple supports it. Mozilla doesn't.
Use Safari on 10.4 if you want to use the same browser that they are shipping with 10.6 - it is fully up to date. They also released a security patch in September 2009.
Mozilla's handwaving is somewhat premature for an OS that was being shipped new only 3 years ago.
And Apple still ships its current version of Safari on 10.4! And last patched it with a security update in September 2009. This is entirely Mozilla's decision - the code and APIs still exist. You can still target builds for your project for 10.4 if you like, but Apple included new, faster APIs for text rendering in 10.5. You can leave in the code to use the old stuff in 10.4, which Apple have obviously done with Safari. It's just more work to maintain it, and adds problems with new features in your app.
What did you want them to do? Backport CoreText to 10.4, or just not improve the APIs they were using? According to the wiki, it looks like CpreText was a private API in 10.4, so I guess they could officially make it a public API as far back as that, although it may have undergone revision between 10.4 and its official release as public in 10.5. Who knows.
Oh I know, I know, this is all Apple's fault for.... I don't know, something to do with the iPad being DoA due to not having a stylus.
I agree, but the bolded portion of the GP's post states as fact that Apple are no longer patching 10.4, when no one really knows for sure, as well as containing some opinion-as-fact about "not putting effort into supporting old OSes" (while releasing current iTunes and Safari updates for 10.4).
You'll have to ask Apple.
Their last security update for 10.4 was in mid/late 2009, so it may be tailing off. I guess a lot will depend if they run into the same issue as Mozilla - that there is no CoreText in 10.4.
Consider that the latest version of Safari is still supported on Tiger...
This is not Apple's decision, although there were large API changes between 10.4 and 10.5 that make supporting pre-10.5 more challenging for third party developers.