Just want to point out that 'hairdressing' is a proper degree
No, it isn't.
My wife is a stylist, and she has a half dozen co-workers who make $90k / year.
Which is irrelevant. Lots of people with little academic education make a lot of money. A qualification in hairdressing is a vocational qualification, not an academic one, and so is not a degree. That doesn't mean that it's less valuable, but a big part of the reason that higher education in the UK is such a mess is this idea that everything has to be a degree. I know a few people in aerospace who have spent the last decade complaining about this: a couple of the former polys used to offer really first class vocational courses in this area. People with those qualifications could walk into companies like Boeing and get a job designing aircraft. Now, those institutions are universities, and they offer academic degrees. Their graduates are worthless.
The reason Turing is so respected is that he, like Dijkstra and very few others, made significant contributions to both the theoretical and practical side of computer science. As well as proposing a theoretical model of computation, he worked to create some of the first real computing engines. That's what makes people regard him as the father of modern computing: taking some interesting theories and turning them into machines that helped win the second world war and went on to produce the foundations for our society.
There are far more heterosexuals with AIDS than there are homosexuals in total.
Estimates place the homosexual percentage of the population anywhere from one to twenty percent, with the five to ten percent range being backed by most studies. If more than five percent of the heterosexual population has AIDS, then the species is in a pretty poor state...
I have to click a button in the corner or hit escape. It made it much less efficient to use
You can now swipe with four fingers on the trackpad to get in and out of dashboard, which I find means that I actually use dashboard regularly, for the first time since it was introduced.
Why did they invert the mouse?
Invert the mouse? They inverted the default scroll direction, but it's trivial to change it back by going in to system preferences.
What's the point of launchpad?
No idea. Dragged it from the dock, don't care about it. The dock or spotlight (only a command-space away) are faster ways of launching applications.
Why did they make address book and ical look like "real" items. It's ugly and requires extra clicks to add calendar entries from different calendars
I can't disagree there, but making iCal suck more isn't a new feature. With 10.5 they removed the tentative / confirmed flag in appointments, for example.
The problem is that all the good apple and next people retired
That's very true. Most of the people I respected at Apple are no longer there.
GCD (libdispatch) is awesome
It is, but it was introduced with 10.6 and is now fully supported on FreeBSD and mostly supported on Linux / Solaris. I didn't see any changes in the 10.7 documentation, but maybe they just forgot to update them.
They have added some shiny things to the Objective-C runtime (now reimplemented in GNUstep libobjc, should be in the upcoming 1.6 release), but they didn't bother documenting any of them. imp_implementationFromBlock() is great, but not mentioned anywhere in the documentation.
Another poster had a legitimate complaint about SMB support. They removed Samba, but their replacement sucks. For example, my printer can write to an SMB share - Windows or Samba - but it won't write to one that 10.7 exports, because 10.7 doesn't support the authentication mechanism that it wants to use.
The lack of Rosetta is a bit irritating too, although about the only thing I used it for was to run some old games (no more Diablo II! I bought that game for Windows and the same CD worked on MacOS 9, Mac OS X all the way from 10.0 to 10.6).
My boss upgraded to Lion, and I used it for about two minutes before deciding to stick with Snow Leopard for the foreseeable future. Lion feels like a toy.
Care you elaborate? Lion still has all of the same stuff as Snow Leopard. It also improves things like Time Machine and File Vault. The POSIX stuff is still there. If you do Objective-C development, then automatic reference counting with weak references is a huge improvement. The gesture interfaces are nicer, and the full-screen mode is great when you want to work in a terminal without distractions. The sandboxing stuff in the kernel is also massively improved, and a lot of the standard programs use it out of the box, so from a security standpoint 10.7 is a lot better (although I prefer the Capsicum stuff in FreeBSD 9).
iRex made an A4 reader. I have their iLiad, which does pretty well for PDFs. Their hardware was pretty nice, but their Linux install sucked - battery was drained in a day even if you didn't touch the machine, which is completely unacceptable for an eBook reader.
They worried that now movies will be stored in physical mediums that last a lot less than 100 years
You mean, like film? Making film last 20 years is easy. Making it last 50 requires considerable effort. Making it last 100 is really hard. The advantage that film has is that it degrades gradually. A film that's been badly stored (assuming it doesn't spontaneously combust, which is a problem with a lot of old films) will probably be watchable, but the quality will be bad. Digital recording tend to either be perfect or completely unplayable - there isn't much middle ground. The advantage of the digital recording is that, while it is not damaged, copies will be exactly the same quality as the original. This makes archiving a lot easier.
The law wouldn't have to be very complex, it could just specify 'a bona fide effort to distribute in a common format playable on all devices reasonably expected to be able to play media of this form' and leave it up to the courts. Currently, the definition of fair use is pretty fuzzy and there's a lot of leeway for the courts to interpret it. That phrasing would also have the nice side effect that anything that was distributed in a format where DRM blocked format shifting would not count.
Don't mean to be impolite...but, you could start...paying for things
Actually, you often can't. The content industry has pushed for region coding, meaning that you can't import US DVDs and watch them in Australia. Australia is Region 4 - most DVDs get a Region 1 release, then a Region 2 release a bit later, and maybe a Region 4 release if the content producers can be bothered.
One of the changes that I would love to see made to copyright law is a refusal to distribute count made a valid affirmative defence for non-commercial copyright infringement. Copyright is a bargain between society and the creators giving them exclusive distribution rights (for a limited time) in exchange for publishing their work. If they refuse to publish it, then they should not be given the protection of copyright. This would give the content industry a very strong incentive to start making worldwide downloads available as soon as their work is ready, rather than releasing DVDs in the USA 6 months after a film shows, in Europe a year after, and in Australia eventually (maybe).
This isn't limited to child pornography. If you become aware of a crime and don't report it, then you can often be charged as an accessory after the fact.
Add to that, a society where the entire notion of value is completely screwed up. A big chunk of my income comes from writing software. Some of what I've written is used by millions of people, some is used by medical research to improve the speed of things like protein folding simulations. I periodically get job offers from banks telling me I could be making five to ten times as much money doing something that contributes nothing to society other than allowing a small group of people to skim money off the top of real work.
One of my friends is a doctor, training to be a neurosurgeon. She works stupidly long hours, including working most weekends and being on call in the evenings. She makes far less than I get offered to work on HFT. Apparently our society values the leeches more than the real contributors of value.
In a variety of places. For example, they can invest in Swiss Francs (not such a good bet anymore) or gold, which are generally safe places to store money. Or they can put them in another one of the pump and dump scams that GS itself operates. For example, their Facebook fund, where they bought a large amount of Facebook stock and then created a fund backed by it. Because they are a single holder, Facebook doesn't have to go public, even though thousands of people may invest in the fund, which means that they don't have to publish their balance sheets and so no one actually knows how much they're worth. This lets GS set the value of the fund completely arbitrarily. Typically, to a large value right up until they and their friends have sold all of their shares in it and then to a more accurate value soon after...
Most of the time they don't 'keep' their profits anywhere - they move them around in a massive shell game. This is generally beyond the abilities of small investors.
You can base a society on greed, but only if you select very intelligent people to be part of your society. Those people will realise that mutually beneficial cooperation will give better long-term results than short-term gains at the expense of others. They will also realise that it's easy in a largely trusting and cooperating society for sociopaths to gain an advantage by exploiting this in others and will institute controls to prevent this from happening.
Otherwise, see the tragedy of the commons for what happens.
The main difference between what we call selfishness and what we call altruism is the scope. Someone acting altruistically improves the society in which they live, which eventually benefits them.
Yes, actually. Their whiny hippie grandparents went to prison rather than accept the draft. They broke segregation laws to push for equal rights and often ended up beaten or imprisoned as a result. They gave up their material possessions because they were at odds with their beliefs (not that I'd advocate this kind of lifestyle) and went to live in communes.
Today, their grandchildren are sipping Starbucks lattes while posting from their (parent-bought) MacBooks about the evils of corporations.
It made me sad some months ago that the biggest student protest that the UK has seen for decades was about... raising tuition fees. It's easy to get students to turn out to protest having to spend money, but that seems to be the only cause that really interests them these days.
A higher order function is one that either takes a function as an argument, or returns a function. Assuming you count instances of the BlockClosure class as functions (if they don't bind to any local variables, then they are semantically equivalent to functions), Smalltalk-80 did have higher order functions. It also has higher-order messages, which are basically curried message sends. For example, you can do:
uppercase:= array map toUpper.
And the new array will be the result of sending the #toUpper message to every element in the original array (we also support this and similar operations in the EtoileFoundation framework in Objective-C and Pragmatic Smalltalk). Smalltalk still isn't a functional language.
You say that like it's an achievement. I was dragged to the pub for that game. I sat with my back to the screen, and managed to look around for the only exciting bits of the match. It contained a hilarious goal. The English keeper stopped the ball, put it on the ground, and then watched as it rolled slowly across the line...
Actually, a better solution might be a bit lower tech - a long wire. It doesn't matter if it's a single-use thing. Just fire it out, unspool the wire, and stream back (and record) videos until the wire snaps. The military doesn't tend to care much about equipment being reusable after it's been in combat. There's a reason they're the only people using LiS batteries - a drone typically gets blown up long before the 30 recharge cycle limit is reached.
An increase in linear read speed, anyway. Hard drive random seek times haven't seen much change since the '80s. Densities have improved by a factor of over a million while seek times have improved by a factor of less than two.
Pre-AMD? AMD was created because IBM demanded a second source for 8088 chips. They produced Intel-compatible chips from the 8086 onwards. From the 80s to the 90s there were half a dozen other companies producing x86-compatible chips. The '90s was probably the most competitive time for Intel.
Slashdot Mirror
Just want to point out that 'hairdressing' is a proper degree
No, it isn't.
My wife is a stylist, and she has a half dozen co-workers who make $90k / year.
Which is irrelevant. Lots of people with little academic education make a lot of money. A qualification in hairdressing is a vocational qualification, not an academic one, and so is not a degree. That doesn't mean that it's less valuable, but a big part of the reason that higher education in the UK is such a mess is this idea that everything has to be a degree. I know a few people in aerospace who have spent the last decade complaining about this: a couple of the former polys used to offer really first class vocational courses in this area. People with those qualifications could walk into companies like Boeing and get a job designing aircraft. Now, those institutions are universities, and they offer academic degrees. Their graduates are worthless.
The reason Turing is so respected is that he, like Dijkstra and very few others, made significant contributions to both the theoretical and practical side of computer science. As well as proposing a theoretical model of computation, he worked to create some of the first real computing engines. That's what makes people regard him as the father of modern computing: taking some interesting theories and turning them into machines that helped win the second world war and went on to produce the foundations for our society.
There are far more heterosexuals with AIDS than there are homosexuals in total.
Estimates place the homosexual percentage of the population anywhere from one to twenty percent, with the five to ten percent range being backed by most studies. If more than five percent of the heterosexual population has AIDS, then the species is in a pretty poor state...
Other fact: gay men tend to have A LOT MORE partners than anyone else
Awww, looks like someone's jealous..
I have to click a button in the corner or hit escape. It made it much less efficient to use
You can now swipe with four fingers on the trackpad to get in and out of dashboard, which I find means that I actually use dashboard regularly, for the first time since it was introduced.
Why did they invert the mouse?
Invert the mouse? They inverted the default scroll direction, but it's trivial to change it back by going in to system preferences.
What's the point of launchpad?
No idea. Dragged it from the dock, don't care about it. The dock or spotlight (only a command-space away) are faster ways of launching applications.
Why did they make address book and ical look like "real" items. It's ugly and requires extra clicks to add calendar entries from different calendars
I can't disagree there, but making iCal suck more isn't a new feature. With 10.5 they removed the tentative / confirmed flag in appointments, for example.
The problem is that all the good apple and next people retired
That's very true. Most of the people I respected at Apple are no longer there.
GCD (libdispatch) is awesome
It is, but it was introduced with 10.6 and is now fully supported on FreeBSD and mostly supported on Linux / Solaris. I didn't see any changes in the 10.7 documentation, but maybe they just forgot to update them.
They have added some shiny things to the Objective-C runtime (now reimplemented in GNUstep libobjc, should be in the upcoming 1.6 release), but they didn't bother documenting any of them. imp_implementationFromBlock() is great, but not mentioned anywhere in the documentation.
Another poster had a legitimate complaint about SMB support. They removed Samba, but their replacement sucks. For example, my printer can write to an SMB share - Windows or Samba - but it won't write to one that 10.7 exports, because 10.7 doesn't support the authentication mechanism that it wants to use.
The lack of Rosetta is a bit irritating too, although about the only thing I used it for was to run some old games (no more Diablo II! I bought that game for Windows and the same CD worked on MacOS 9, Mac OS X all the way from 10.0 to 10.6).
My boss upgraded to Lion, and I used it for about two minutes before deciding to stick with Snow Leopard for the foreseeable future. Lion feels like a toy.
Care you elaborate? Lion still has all of the same stuff as Snow Leopard. It also improves things like Time Machine and File Vault. The POSIX stuff is still there. If you do Objective-C development, then automatic reference counting with weak references is a huge improvement. The gesture interfaces are nicer, and the full-screen mode is great when you want to work in a terminal without distractions. The sandboxing stuff in the kernel is also massively improved, and a lot of the standard programs use it out of the box, so from a security standpoint 10.7 is a lot better (although I prefer the Capsicum stuff in FreeBSD 9).
iRex made an A4 reader. I have their iLiad, which does pretty well for PDFs. Their hardware was pretty nice, but their Linux install sucked - battery was drained in a day even if you didn't touch the machine, which is completely unacceptable for an eBook reader.
You don't need to burn film, just leave it exposed to the air for long enough and it will burn itself...
They worried that now movies will be stored in physical mediums that last a lot less than 100 years
You mean, like film? Making film last 20 years is easy. Making it last 50 requires considerable effort. Making it last 100 is really hard. The advantage that film has is that it degrades gradually. A film that's been badly stored (assuming it doesn't spontaneously combust, which is a problem with a lot of old films) will probably be watchable, but the quality will be bad. Digital recording tend to either be perfect or completely unplayable - there isn't much middle ground. The advantage of the digital recording is that, while it is not damaged, copies will be exactly the same quality as the original. This makes archiving a lot easier.
The law wouldn't have to be very complex, it could just specify 'a bona fide effort to distribute in a common format playable on all devices reasonably expected to be able to play media of this form' and leave it up to the courts. Currently, the definition of fair use is pretty fuzzy and there's a lot of leeway for the courts to interpret it. That phrasing would also have the nice side effect that anything that was distributed in a format where DRM blocked format shifting would not count.
Don't mean to be impolite...but, you could start...paying for things
Actually, you often can't. The content industry has pushed for region coding, meaning that you can't import US DVDs and watch them in Australia. Australia is Region 4 - most DVDs get a Region 1 release, then a Region 2 release a bit later, and maybe a Region 4 release if the content producers can be bothered.
One of the changes that I would love to see made to copyright law is a refusal to distribute count made a valid affirmative defence for non-commercial copyright infringement. Copyright is a bargain between society and the creators giving them exclusive distribution rights (for a limited time) in exchange for publishing their work. If they refuse to publish it, then they should not be given the protection of copyright. This would give the content industry a very strong incentive to start making worldwide downloads available as soon as their work is ready, rather than releasing DVDs in the USA 6 months after a film shows, in Europe a year after, and in Australia eventually (maybe).
This isn't limited to child pornography. If you become aware of a crime and don't report it, then you can often be charged as an accessory after the fact.
Imaginary people have rights too. Just ask the corporations...
A machine that's using 130W is not a laptop, it is a luggable.
Add to that, a society where the entire notion of value is completely screwed up. A big chunk of my income comes from writing software. Some of what I've written is used by millions of people, some is used by medical research to improve the speed of things like protein folding simulations. I periodically get job offers from banks telling me I could be making five to ten times as much money doing something that contributes nothing to society other than allowing a small group of people to skim money off the top of real work.
One of my friends is a doctor, training to be a neurosurgeon. She works stupidly long hours, including working most weekends and being on call in the evenings. She makes far less than I get offered to work on HFT. Apparently our society values the leeches more than the real contributors of value.
Most of the time they don't 'keep' their profits anywhere - they move them around in a massive shell game. This is generally beyond the abilities of small investors.
You can base a society on greed, but only if you select very intelligent people to be part of your society. Those people will realise that mutually beneficial cooperation will give better long-term results than short-term gains at the expense of others. They will also realise that it's easy in a largely trusting and cooperating society for sociopaths to gain an advantage by exploiting this in others and will institute controls to prevent this from happening.
Otherwise, see the tragedy of the commons for what happens.
The main difference between what we call selfishness and what we call altruism is the scope. Someone acting altruistically improves the society in which they live, which eventually benefits them.
Yes, actually. Their whiny hippie grandparents went to prison rather than accept the draft. They broke segregation laws to push for equal rights and often ended up beaten or imprisoned as a result. They gave up their material possessions because they were at odds with their beliefs (not that I'd advocate this kind of lifestyle) and went to live in communes.
Today, their grandchildren are sipping Starbucks lattes while posting from their (parent-bought) MacBooks about the evils of corporations.
It made me sad some months ago that the biggest student protest that the UK has seen for decades was about... raising tuition fees. It's easy to get students to turn out to protest having to spend money, but that seems to be the only cause that really interests them these days.
And the new array will be the result of sending the #toUpper message to every element in the original array (we also support this and similar operations in the EtoileFoundation framework in Objective-C and Pragmatic Smalltalk). Smalltalk still isn't a functional language.
This gets really *really* interesting if you can do this for a raptor nest,
I'm sure!
such as a hawk.
Ah, I see we weren't thinking along the same lines at all. Never mind...
beating even England
You say that like it's an achievement. I was dragged to the pub for that game. I sat with my back to the screen, and managed to look around for the only exciting bits of the match. It contained a hilarious goal. The English keeper stopped the ball, put it on the ground, and then watched as it rolled slowly across the line...
Actually, a better solution might be a bit lower tech - a long wire. It doesn't matter if it's a single-use thing. Just fire it out, unspool the wire, and stream back (and record) videos until the wire snaps. The military doesn't tend to care much about equipment being reusable after it's been in combat. There's a reason they're the only people using LiS batteries - a drone typically gets blown up long before the 30 recharge cycle limit is reached.
To see what pictures it took. Duh.
An increase in linear read speed, anyway. Hard drive random seek times haven't seen much change since the '80s. Densities have improved by a factor of over a million while seek times have improved by a factor of less than two.
Intel in the 90's, pre-AMD
Pre-AMD? AMD was created because IBM demanded a second source for 8088 chips. They produced Intel-compatible chips from the 8086 onwards. From the 80s to the 90s there were half a dozen other companies producing x86-compatible chips. The '90s was probably the most competitive time for Intel.