That same die shrink could have been used the power efficiency to extend life or make the battery smaller... so there still is some merit in his comment, even if the idea of a Samsung with a camcorder battery is absurd.
250GB phone is more important than the 100% useless 1080p video playback.
You say this as if the two are exclusive of one another - as if the manufacturer said, "Well, we can put either 1080p or 250GB of storage on the phone... 1080p it is!".
The fact is that they are loading as much storage as they can in a package that costs $600 and fits in your pocket. 250GB of flash ram in a slim profile would cost the manufacturer somewhere north of $1000. On the other hand, 1080p comes almost "free" when you add video-out and increase the processing power - things that they were going to do anyway.
So do you think that people would pay $1600 or so for a Droid that can store and output a full 1080p movie or two? Wouldn't it be more cost effective at that point to just buy/rent the Blu-Ray and bring that to your friend's house instead?
May I suggest the possibility, however remote, that the PnP manager doesn't work constantly on all hardware Apple tested on from Windows 2000 through Windows 7? Granted, the current version of iTunes runs only on XP - but it is possible that PnP manager doesn't work as well as Apple wanted.
There are certainly plenty of results when you Google for problems with PnP manager.
There's nothing wrong with having a service running which looks for a certain bit of hardware to connect to the machine, at which point it launches the appropriate application.
Where Apple should be ashamed is that this service takes more than a few k of RAM.
You are missing his point. "Cash on hand" is not actually cash, but a mixture of cash and short-term investments. Even the "cash" is actually just a balance in a bank account, which obviously is re-invested by the bank.
By family income and wealth. Compared to before 1980.
How do you arrive at your definition of income and wealth? Income has to be adjusted for inflation - which usually includes things like energy and health care. Energy is at least twice as expensive as it was in the '50s. Health care is many times as expensive. In both cases, it's not a fair comparison. Even the cheapest cars get many times the mileage as a '50s car, making gas prices a wash. And '50s health care was limited to antibiotics, mended bones, and minor surgeries. State of the art was the boom of vaccines. No replacement hips, knees, effective diabetes treatments, heart surgeries, stroke treatments, etc... to say nothing of cancer, which was a death sentence. I'd love to see someone compare the costs of health services that were actually available in the '50s with what they cost today. This article echos my sentiments. Certainly, manufactured goods are much less expensive.
So what's left? Housing. Housing has gotten more expensive, for sure... about double by most estimates I see. Of course, the houses are twice the size, so I'm not sure why this is a big mystery. Halve your square footage and live like the average person did in the '50s and you'll probably find a comparable price.
Ah, almost forgot education. This is another example of people demanding more. Take a look at any college campus and note the EXPLOSION of buildings with a cornerstone newer than 1980. For good or for bad, students are demanding a lot more out of colleges than they did in the '50s. I won't claim you get "more" or that the cost is worth it, but they are simply responding to demand and the costs have risen accordingly. For what it's worth, you can still go to a public school for about $5000 on average... that's a hell of a bargain, though it varies tremendously by state. Also, consider that in the '50s only about 6% of people actually got a college degree... your argument that the average person could send kids to college seems suspect given this statistic. I suspect you are thinking of a idealizing based on a very small portion of the population. Today over 16% go on to finish college, despite the cost increase.
In fact, you could say that the lower the cost of things at Wal-Mart, the lower the quality of life.
This statement is pretty vague... lower for who? Certainly the average person benefits from lower cost goods - but obviously the US factory workers suffer when goods are produced in another market for less money. Of course, those same workers are SOL when a robot takes their job - but I wouldn't argue against automation based on job impact. I think the move to China is a sham, but it will self-correct in time... and far sooner than it will get corrected by any political action or protectionist measures. Think about it... what are the Chinese going to do with trillions in US currency? Hold on to it forever, until inflation and devaluation render it worthless? Or buy stuff with it. When they buy stuff with it, who will benefit?
In 1956, a single breadwinner, earning the average wage, could expect to put a couple of kids through college and own a nice single-family home and provide health care to all the members of his family, even buying a new car every 5 years, all without having to use a credit card.
I'd love to see a source for this. Average salary in 1955 was around 4 grand. College seems to have cost about $1000. An "average" family in no way could have "a couple" of kids in college. As I said, 94% of people did not finish college. Health care only cost about $500/year but bought you virtually nothing except antibiotics, pain killers, and mended bones. You could probably still do that for $500/year if you could find a doctor willing to prescribe the crap they used in the '50s. And I'm glad you said "a
I don't know for you, but for me Services in Windows are the counterpart of Daemons in Unix OSs. The fact that an OS requires of those to manage some operations doesn't mean any application should be starting and running those at any time.
What? That's what services/daemons are for! It's a non-gui background process for applications that you want running all of the time. If you want to have iTunes start immediately when you plug in an iPod or insert a CD, you need to use some kind of a service/daemon. If you don't want that behavior, turn it off. I agree that Apple should be smarter about the use and disabling of their services, but they aren't evil simply for using them.
The answer is that people want systems that boot fast, and run fast.
And yet they also demand all of the automated magic that is handled by services. What can I say? Truthfully, most of the run-time hit that people see is the horrendous anti-virus that they have. And as for boot... who boots? Sleep is pretty good these days, and most people are buying laptops now. Besides, MS gives you a desktop long before the services are actually all started.
Don't you think you've steered away from the topic a bit?:)
Profits are up, but for most working people, income and quality of life are down.
I hear this a lot, but I don't buy the argument. By what measure is quality of life down? Compared to when? Sure, we spend more of our income on health care - but we get a lot more, too. Life expectancy has steadily increased over the years. Cancers are often not terminal anymore. AIDS is a chronic condition rather than a death sentence. In the mid 80s we were astounded by open-heart surgery - now it's often an outpatient procedure.
Cars are more expensive, but you are a lot less likely to die in them and they routinely last 3-5 times longer than they did in the past. And despite this, you can still pick up an accent or Versa for about $10,000. In 1955, that would have gotten you a used Ford (adjusting for inflation, naturally).
A walk into Wal-Mart should amaze anyone who remembers what things used to cost. Hell, even in the 80s my mother was patching holes in our pants. Do they still make patches? Does anyone bother? I haven't seen a patch in ages. Clothes are so cheap that when you donate clothes to charity, they ship them to Africa because no one here wants them.
I reckon that you can live a 1950s lifestyle for a smaller portion of your paycheck than you could in the 50s. It's just that no one wants to give up their TVs, phones, cars, clothes drier, dishwasher, computers, fresh produce from Peru in the middle of the winter... need I go on?
Most people can "earn" an additional $100 or so per month by dropping cell phone service and cable. Most decide to live somewhere that requires one or even two cars.
Anyway, I think you can argue that Wall Street needs to be reigned in without trying to argue that we are worse off than previous generations. I mean, obviously people are worse off in 2010 then they were in 2008 - but the long term trend is not down.
They're making billions as box pushers, isn't that good enough?
If they paid dividends, maybe.
Since they don't, they are expected to grow. And grow they have not.
Technically, they've roughly doubled their revenue in the last 10 years, but their net income has been flat or declining.
If you are an investor, you have other choices in the growth game - like competitor Apple with their 10x revenue growth and corresponding net income growth. Or HP with their 3x revenue growth and significant net income growth.
They are being out-grown by their competitors. If they aren't in that game anymore, then they need to issue a dividend and compete for retiree money.
Dell's problem is its founding business model - mass-assemble PCs using standardization and volume to bring costs down - doesn't work on any of the new electronics markets.
As I see it, they either need to embrace their role as a builder of boxes and switch to a dividend rather than growth company - or they need to stop selling low-margin shit. How much do they make on a $400 laptop? Why do that to themselves? If they are afraid that their store will not be a "one stop shop", then make the store a separate corporation and sell cheap shit from other companies - only put the "Dell" badge on high-margin - and preferably high-quality - merchandise.
If running useless services and automatically installing software are deal killers, then I'd love to hear how you justify running Windows.
The answer is that most people really don't care how many services are running and their Start menu is at least 3 pages long. The only people I know who go after services and such are gamers and people with a misbehaving computer.
rule number 1 of slashdot: ANY thread can be twisted into a bash of microsoft/Apple. no exceptions.
Used to be George Bush. Someone would post an Ask Slashdot about the relative merits of Apache 1.x vs 2.x and the Bush-bashers would chime in with something about the Iraq war.
Seriously, only in Hollywood would this thing get an award. Everyone I've talked to who was actually in Iraq said the movie was complete BS. Even Newsweek whacked it with a cluestick. Does no one on the entire Oscar committee know an actual veteran?
Isn't that a new topic entirely? Your original question was regarding why an atheist would have a personal code, and my answer was that one reason is that they have to sleep at night - and that is hard if a person is both nasty and empathetic.
As to WHY a person is empathetic, I think it probably is because humans with that trait did better than humans without that trait because it made their society/tribe more likely to succeed as a whole. But that is decidedly not my field, and I'm just speculating wildly.
'm in the strange position of having reached the realization that essentially, unless I'm willing to devote about 20 years of my life studying the matter on my own I'm going to have to decide to accept it by faith and not by reason.
This isn't as strange as you seem to think. You should almost always defer to experts in a field. If you want the best possible explanation of how the natural world works, then you should probably listen to scientists. If you want the best possible explanation of how the supernatural world works, then turn to religious experts.
To use a patented Slashdot car analogy: You don't try to manufacture your own brake pads, despite your very life depending on their flawless operation. Is this "faith"? Only for a very broad definition of faith IMHO.
What the fuck does it matter to you if he believes in 'an invisible sky wizard'?
It must be the same force that drives people to become an evangelical Christian. Some people just have a bug to tell people how they should be living their lives.
Honestly, I feel sorry for these people - they are destined to be unhappy, as they will never convince everyone. That has to be frustrating as hell.
I'm curious how you would describe the reasons for even having a personal code?
Just like religious people, atheists have various reasons. But I think what it boils down to is that - with the exception of sociopaths - people generally have a sense of empathy and so doing terrible things to other people makes it hard to sleep at night, even with prescription drugs.
I've even seen an economic argument against things like murder. The fact is that religions tend to codify rules that existed before that particular religion itself did.
If they are wrong, and there turns out to be a judgement day they will spend eternity burning in hell.
Let's say I'm an atheist, and you've just convinced me that I don't have my bases covered. Now I have to pick a moral code and religion to live by so that I don't piss off whomever it is that gets to pass judgment on me when I die. Who should I pick? Jesus seems cool... but won't worshiping him piss off the Jewish/Islamic God? What if they are right? What if the Romans and Greeks were right and I'm really ticking off Jupiter and friends? Won't Buddha do a belly laugh at my attempts to join him in Nirvana and just re-cast me as a cricket? What would Mother Earth say? How many Gods have I just angered by leaving them out of this list?
To a non-believer, the idea that you must practice a religion "just in case" is rather odd. Which one is right? How can you expect someone who expects empirical evidence to accept a faith?
Forgive me if I'm being naive, but couldn't you reboot ONE of your machines as a test and then just roll out the kernel patch to any other identical machines without rebooting?
The casio graphers are speedy, work well and are cheap.
I used Casios for years until I was converted into the RPN religion. Casio had a algebraic entry system that was ALMOST as fast and clear as RPN, and the calculators were much, much cheaper than the TI models.
Of course, now I've gone RPN and I'm spoiled - even have to seek out software RPN calculators for all my computers and devices:)
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That same die shrink could have been used the power efficiency to extend life or make the battery smaller... so there still is some merit in his comment, even if the idea of a Samsung with a camcorder battery is absurd.
250GB phone is more important than the 100% useless 1080p video playback.
You say this as if the two are exclusive of one another - as if the manufacturer said, "Well, we can put either 1080p or 250GB of storage on the phone... 1080p it is!".
The fact is that they are loading as much storage as they can in a package that costs $600 and fits in your pocket. 250GB of flash ram in a slim profile would cost the manufacturer somewhere north of $1000. On the other hand, 1080p comes almost "free" when you add video-out and increase the processing power - things that they were going to do anyway.
So do you think that people would pay $1600 or so for a Droid that can store and output a full 1080p movie or two? Wouldn't it be more cost effective at that point to just buy/rent the Blu-Ray and bring that to your friend's house instead?
May I suggest the possibility, however remote, that the PnP manager doesn't work constantly on all hardware Apple tested on from Windows 2000 through Windows 7? Granted, the current version of iTunes runs only on XP - but it is possible that PnP manager doesn't work as well as Apple wanted.
There are certainly plenty of results when you Google for problems with PnP manager.
There's nothing wrong with having a service running which looks for a certain bit of hardware to connect to the machine, at which point it launches the appropriate application.
Where Apple should be ashamed is that this service takes more than a few k of RAM.
I'm specifically talking about the cash on hand.
You are missing his point. "Cash on hand" is not actually cash, but a mixture of cash and short-term investments. Even the "cash" is actually just a balance in a bank account, which obviously is re-invested by the bank.
By family income and wealth. Compared to before 1980.
How do you arrive at your definition of income and wealth? Income has to be adjusted for inflation - which usually includes things like energy and health care. Energy is at least twice as expensive as it was in the '50s. Health care is many times as expensive. In both cases, it's not a fair comparison. Even the cheapest cars get many times the mileage as a '50s car, making gas prices a wash. And '50s health care was limited to antibiotics, mended bones, and minor surgeries. State of the art was the boom of vaccines. No replacement hips, knees, effective diabetes treatments, heart surgeries, stroke treatments, etc... to say nothing of cancer, which was a death sentence. I'd love to see someone compare the costs of health services that were actually available in the '50s with what they cost today. This article echos my sentiments. Certainly, manufactured goods are much less expensive.
So what's left? Housing. Housing has gotten more expensive, for sure... about double by most estimates I see. Of course, the houses are twice the size, so I'm not sure why this is a big mystery. Halve your square footage and live like the average person did in the '50s and you'll probably find a comparable price.
Ah, almost forgot education. This is another example of people demanding more. Take a look at any college campus and note the EXPLOSION of buildings with a cornerstone newer than 1980. For good or for bad, students are demanding a lot more out of colleges than they did in the '50s. I won't claim you get "more" or that the cost is worth it, but they are simply responding to demand and the costs have risen accordingly. For what it's worth, you can still go to a public school for about $5000 on average... that's a hell of a bargain, though it varies tremendously by state. Also, consider that in the '50s only about 6% of people actually got a college degree... your argument that the average person could send kids to college seems suspect given this statistic. I suspect you are thinking of a idealizing based on a very small portion of the population. Today over 16% go on to finish college, despite the cost increase.
In fact, you could say that the lower the cost of things at Wal-Mart, the lower the quality of life.
This statement is pretty vague... lower for who? Certainly the average person benefits from lower cost goods - but obviously the US factory workers suffer when goods are produced in another market for less money. Of course, those same workers are SOL when a robot takes their job - but I wouldn't argue against automation based on job impact. I think the move to China is a sham, but it will self-correct in time... and far sooner than it will get corrected by any political action or protectionist measures. Think about it... what are the Chinese going to do with trillions in US currency? Hold on to it forever, until inflation and devaluation render it worthless? Or buy stuff with it. When they buy stuff with it, who will benefit?
In 1956, a single breadwinner, earning the average wage, could expect to put a couple of kids through college and own a nice single-family home and provide health care to all the members of his family, even buying a new car every 5 years, all without having to use a credit card.
I'd love to see a source for this. Average salary in 1955 was around 4 grand. College seems to have cost about $1000. An "average" family in no way could have "a couple" of kids in college. As I said, 94% of people did not finish college. Health care only cost about $500/year but bought you virtually nothing except antibiotics, pain killers, and mended bones. You could probably still do that for $500/year if you could find a doctor willing to prescribe the crap they used in the '50s. And I'm glad you said "a
I don't know for you, but for me Services in Windows are the counterpart of Daemons in Unix OSs. The fact that an OS requires of those to manage some operations doesn't mean any application should be starting and running those at any time.
What? That's what services/daemons are for! It's a non-gui background process for applications that you want running all of the time. If you want to have iTunes start immediately when you plug in an iPod or insert a CD, you need to use some kind of a service/daemon. If you don't want that behavior, turn it off. I agree that Apple should be smarter about the use and disabling of their services, but they aren't evil simply for using them.
The answer is that people want systems that boot fast, and run fast.
And yet they also demand all of the automated magic that is handled by services. What can I say? Truthfully, most of the run-time hit that people see is the horrendous anti-virus that they have. And as for boot... who boots? Sleep is pretty good these days, and most people are buying laptops now. Besides, MS gives you a desktop long before the services are actually all started.
Don't you think you've steered away from the topic a bit? :)
Profits are up, but for most working people, income and quality of life are down.
I hear this a lot, but I don't buy the argument. By what measure is quality of life down? Compared to when? Sure, we spend more of our income on health care - but we get a lot more, too. Life expectancy has steadily increased over the years. Cancers are often not terminal anymore. AIDS is a chronic condition rather than a death sentence. In the mid 80s we were astounded by open-heart surgery - now it's often an outpatient procedure.
Cars are more expensive, but you are a lot less likely to die in them and they routinely last 3-5 times longer than they did in the past. And despite this, you can still pick up an accent or Versa for about $10,000. In 1955, that would have gotten you a used Ford (adjusting for inflation, naturally).
A walk into Wal-Mart should amaze anyone who remembers what things used to cost. Hell, even in the 80s my mother was patching holes in our pants. Do they still make patches? Does anyone bother? I haven't seen a patch in ages. Clothes are so cheap that when you donate clothes to charity, they ship them to Africa because no one here wants them.
I reckon that you can live a 1950s lifestyle for a smaller portion of your paycheck than you could in the 50s. It's just that no one wants to give up their TVs, phones, cars, clothes drier, dishwasher, computers, fresh produce from Peru in the middle of the winter... need I go on?
Most people can "earn" an additional $100 or so per month by dropping cell phone service and cable. Most decide to live somewhere that requires one or even two cars.
Anyway, I think you can argue that Wall Street needs to be reigned in without trying to argue that we are worse off than previous generations. I mean, obviously people are worse off in 2010 then they were in 2008 - but the long term trend is not down.
They're making billions as box pushers, isn't that good enough?
If they paid dividends, maybe.
Since they don't, they are expected to grow. And grow they have not.
Technically, they've roughly doubled their revenue in the last 10 years, but their net income has been flat or declining.
If you are an investor, you have other choices in the growth game - like competitor Apple with their 10x revenue growth and corresponding net income growth. Or HP with their 3x revenue growth and significant net income growth.
They are being out-grown by their competitors. If they aren't in that game anymore, then they need to issue a dividend and compete for retiree money.
Dell's problem is its founding business model - mass-assemble PCs using standardization and volume to bring costs down - doesn't work on any of the new electronics markets.
As I see it, they either need to embrace their role as a builder of boxes and switch to a dividend rather than growth company - or they need to stop selling low-margin shit. How much do they make on a $400 laptop? Why do that to themselves? If they are afraid that their store will not be a "one stop shop", then make the store a separate corporation and sell cheap shit from other companies - only put the "Dell" badge on high-margin - and preferably high-quality - merchandise.
I can't believe iTunes is still a Carbon app to this day.
Maybe it's their cross-platform library. Are there any pure Cocoa apps ported to Windows?
Seriously, why people use that software!?
If running useless services and automatically installing software are deal killers, then I'd love to hear how you justify running Windows.
The answer is that most people really don't care how many services are running and their Start menu is at least 3 pages long. The only people I know who go after services and such are gamers and people with a misbehaving computer.
rule number 1 of slashdot: ANY thread can be twisted into a bash of microsoft/Apple. no exceptions.
Used to be George Bush. Someone would post an Ask Slashdot about the relative merits of Apache 1.x vs 2.x and the Bush-bashers would chime in with something about the Iraq war.
If you bothered reading other replies you would know what occurred.
You typed out your ignorance and got modded troll?
Looking for a culprit ?
I'd say it was the sweaty man fight.
Seriously, only in Hollywood would this thing get an award. Everyone I've talked to who was actually in Iraq said the movie was complete BS. Even Newsweek whacked it with a cluestick. Does no one on the entire Oscar committee know an actual veteran?
Isn't that a new topic entirely? Your original question was regarding why an atheist would have a personal code, and my answer was that one reason is that they have to sleep at night - and that is hard if a person is both nasty and empathetic.
As to WHY a person is empathetic, I think it probably is because humans with that trait did better than humans without that trait because it made their society/tribe more likely to succeed as a whole. But that is decidedly not my field, and I'm just speculating wildly.
'm in the strange position of having reached the realization that essentially, unless I'm willing to devote about 20 years of my life studying the matter on my own I'm going to have to decide to accept it by faith and not by reason.
This isn't as strange as you seem to think. You should almost always defer to experts in a field. If you want the best possible explanation of how the natural world works, then you should probably listen to scientists. If you want the best possible explanation of how the supernatural world works, then turn to religious experts.
To use a patented Slashdot car analogy: You don't try to manufacture your own brake pads, despite your very life depending on their flawless operation. Is this "faith"? Only for a very broad definition of faith IMHO.
Specialization is NOT just for insects :)
What the fuck does it matter to you if he believes in 'an invisible sky wizard'?
It must be the same force that drives people to become an evangelical Christian. Some people just have a bug to tell people how they should be living their lives.
Honestly, I feel sorry for these people - they are destined to be unhappy, as they will never convince everyone. That has to be frustrating as hell.
And hey, if you do that, you'll become a martyr! Just imagine all the children you'll usher into heaven, even if you're going to hell.
And as a bonus, more reward virgins await suicide bombers in heaven!
I'm curious how you would describe the reasons for even having a personal code?
Just like religious people, atheists have various reasons. But I think what it boils down to is that - with the exception of sociopaths - people generally have a sense of empathy and so doing terrible things to other people makes it hard to sleep at night, even with prescription drugs.
I've even seen an economic argument against things like murder. The fact is that religions tend to codify rules that existed before that particular religion itself did.
If they are wrong, and there turns out to be a judgement day they will spend eternity burning in hell.
Let's say I'm an atheist, and you've just convinced me that I don't have my bases covered. Now I have to pick a moral code and religion to live by so that I don't piss off whomever it is that gets to pass judgment on me when I die. Who should I pick? Jesus seems cool... but won't worshiping him piss off the Jewish/Islamic God? What if they are right? What if the Romans and Greeks were right and I'm really ticking off Jupiter and friends? Won't Buddha do a belly laugh at my attempts to join him in Nirvana and just re-cast me as a cricket? What would Mother Earth say? How many Gods have I just angered by leaving them out of this list?
To a non-believer, the idea that you must practice a religion "just in case" is rather odd. Which one is right? How can you expect someone who expects empirical evidence to accept a faith?
No actual discovery of bacteria or idea WHY the remedy heals.
Agreed. I have a feeling it went more like, "Baby Aapep is sick!"
"Fetch the physician!"
"We must feed him beer from the garden of Min. Also, wear this amulet."
Forgive me if I'm being naive, but couldn't you reboot ONE of your machines as a test and then just roll out the kernel patch to any other identical machines without rebooting?
Idgit.
He says that the Titanium model is the replacement that he bought while he was fabricating the aluminum case for the broken unit.
The casio graphers are speedy, work well and are cheap.
I used Casios for years until I was converted into the RPN religion. Casio had a algebraic entry system that was ALMOST as fast and clear as RPN, and the calculators were much, much cheaper than the TI models.
Of course, now I've gone RPN and I'm spoiled - even have to seek out software RPN calculators for all my computers and devices :)