If you're referring to centrifugal forces, then you might like to do the sums sometime to work out how big it would need to be for the difference between perceived gravity at your feet and in your head to be close enough not to be noticed (say, within 0.05g). Then add in the amount of extra space you'd need because you can now only use one side of every room, rather than the entire volume. Then multiply the result by the cost of getting things into space. And then realise why the ISS does not do this.
What, your school seriously wouldn't let you or a teacher ring home to say that one of your close friends had been killed in a car accident?
They probably would have done, but in a year group of over 100 there would have been a very long queue for the phone. Fortunately, I had a mobile so I didn't need to find out.
NIH is the reason why UEFI exists at all. OpenFirmware already existed, had several independent implementation (including some open source ones), and was a free standard that anyone could implement. So Intel made a new 'standard' that is a crappy copy of OpenFirmware.
If they're as competent as NASA, then the most likely cause of the error is that one end was using metres while the other end was using light millifortnights.
No, you're saying that a curved path between two points is shorter than a straight path between two points. That would certainly give some interesting data about the structure of space-time, but it's more likely that you're (as usual) just plain wrong.
Their iDevice market is where their big profits are, they don't have a "what's next" lined up right now
I think you nailed it. Apple led the market in pushing laptops. Their laptop sales passed desktop sales about 2 years before the rest of the market caught up. By the time laptops started to become more of a commodity item, they owned the high-end MP3 player market. Before this started to be eaten by cheaper alternatives, they entered the mobile phone market, where they only have about 5% of the total market but something like 60% of the total profit. That's a common position for Apple, but it's precarious because you just need cheap commodity alternatives to become almost as good and your profits shrink a lot. They tried to push tablets, but this is still a really tiny market. Something like 1% of the size of the mobile phone market even after all of the hype, so not a comfortable place to fall back on when the super-expensive phone market starts to shrink.
Apple's strategy for the past decade has been to enter a market, sell high-end, high-margin products, and then move on by the time the high-end market has shrunk enough to no longer be a major source of revenue. Unfortunately (for Apple shareholders), they don't seem to have a new market lined up.
to only including ANCIENT copies of GNU utilities on MacOS
Blame the FSF for this. Apple includes the latest GPLv2 versions of utilities. In common with many other companies, they won't touch GPLv3 stuff. They're slowly replacing the old GPLv2 utilities with BSD alternatives, since the FSF decided to change the license for everything.
School is a place for education, not entertainment
If you think that these are totally disjoint, then I hope you don't work in education. And I'm very glad I'm not you - you must lead a very depressing life.
In rural areas, at least where I grew up in the UK, it was quite common for children to get a school bus to and from a school in the city, or to car-share and get a lift with another parent. Sometimes, there are problems with this. For example, my school bus left over half an hour after the end of school, from about 10 minutes walk away from the school. If I missed it, but didn't realise, I wouldn't get back to the school until about an hour after school finished, at which point there may not be any teachers around. There was a phone box on school, so I had a phone card that I could use to call home in the case of any problems.
The first time I used the school bus, I managed to get on the wrong one. I noticed when it got on the motorway, which definitely wasn't on my way home. I got off at the services, found a payphone and called home, but if I'd had a mobile then I'd have been able to call home from the bus and check where the best place to get off was.
And, on a more prosaic level, having a mobile phone later (I got mine when I was 16, which was when cheap pre-pay ones started to appear), it was useful to be able to call my parents if some after-school activity was cancelled, or something else happened that required me to leave school at a different time, such as when one of my close friends was killed in a car accident, or when I was coopted to the debate team at the last minute before a competition.
The problem with NeXT was not that they were made in the USA, it was that, as you said, they were really really awesome computers. They were graphical UNIX workstations, with high resolution displays. They were definitely not consumer products. This is the difference between the NeXT and Apple philosophies: NeXT wanted to make the best computer possible, Apple wants to make computers that aren't as bad as the competition's products.
I play a lot of Flash games, but I wouldn't pay money for them. If you buy the Premium Edition of games, you still have to connect to their servers to play, so you can only play as long as they keep supporting it. If you move to some device that doesn't support Flash, you can't easily run it in an emulator. I contrast, I have a lot of old games that I still play in DOSBox or WINE, and I've bought quite a few games from gog.com recently, because I know I can dig them out again in the future if I'm bored.
You seem to assume guidance for evolution. For a species to evolve a trait, two things need to happen:
One individual in that species needs to mutate and develop that trait.
The trait needs to give a sufficiently large advantage that members of the the species with that trait displace ones without it.
The first is often a stumbling block for evolution. For humans living on the coast, having gills as well as lungs would be a significant advantage, because it would dramatically increase their ability to find food. Part of the problem with this is that evolution can only optimise for local maxima. The intervening stages for developing lungs or gils are quite beneficial for simple organisms as they increase the size that the creature can grow to, but they are problematic for organisms that already have a large degree of specialisation among cells.
The second is also a problem. Consider short sightedness. This has a significant evolutionary disadvantage, but individual characteristics are not selected for. If the gene happens to be on the same chromosome as one that carries an advantage (increased sperm count, higher intelligence, or whatever) then it will be selected for to a certain degree, but the disadvantage may mean that it will never spread through the entire population.
There is also the question of timescale. If you have a characteristic that is such an evolutionary advantage that it will always be selected for (i.e. any member of the species will always choose to mate with members of that phenotype in preference to any others) then it will still take thousands of years for it to spread to the entire human population.
Finally, remember that evolution only selects for things that are good for the species, not for individuals. The theory of evolution is a tautology: genes that are good at propagating themselves will propagate better than genes that are not good at propagating themselves. Consider rats. They have a very high mutation rate, which is good for the species because it makes them hard to poison: one rat in a population will probably have an immunity to whatever the poison is, and the next generation will all be immune. This sucks for individual rats though: the ones that aren't immune still die, and the ones that are die of cancer soon after.
Having the members of a species competing for resources after they've passed on their genes (and ensured the survival of their offspring for long enough to breed) is bad for a species, but I doubt many people in their 40s would consider that suicide is good for the individual...
More importantly, deploy it in browsers, don't display the padlock, and do print a warning when using TLS 1.0. I'm sure sites will get upgraded nice and quickly once their customers start telephoning and saying 'my browser gave a scary warning when I tried to enter my credit card details!'
Why shouldn every product have to make it's own profit. I see printers at the store that cost less than their replacement cartridges. A new razor costs less than the replacement blades it contains. I still have a choice to buy or not.
But these are within the same market, they are not cross-subsidies. You don't see Gilette giving away cheap printers. This is disallowed for a simple reason. If you permit it, then you eventually end up with only one company making everything. When the company wants to enter a new market, it takes money from its profitable divisions (where it's already gained a monopoly) and uses this to flood the new market with products until its competitors go bust. It can then raise the prices and increase its overall profit, making it possible to push into another new market, and so on.
These laws exist because companies did behave like this before they were enacted.
You just said a few sentences before that a competitor can't lower prices to steal your business make up your mind. You also make the assumption that everyone is equally good at doing anything.
No, I said that you can't lower your prices below your cost of production to drive your competitors out of business. This is called dumping, and it is illegal for a very good reason. If you permit it, then the company in a given market with the largest amount of capital will sell their products at below cost until all of the competitors have gone bankrupt, then hike up the prices.
Close. If you're charging more than your competitors for equivalent products then the free market dictates that no one will buy your products. Therefore, if people are buying them in large numbers, then this implies that there is some distortion in the market, which may be you abusing your market influence.
If you're charging so much less than your competitors that you are making a loss on each sale, then this means that you are subsidising your product from somewhere. If it is from some initial funding to gain a foothold in the market, then this is probably fine. If it's from sales of another product, then it may not be. If it's for the purpose of driving your competitors out of business, at which point you'll be able to raise prices, then it definitely isn't.
If you're charging the same as your competitors and you have large profit margins then, in an open market, one of your competitors would lower their price slightly and steal all of your business. You'd then repeat this a few times until you reached an equilibrium point where none of you were willing to cut anything further from your profit margins. If this isn't happening, then it is probably due to some agreement between the major players to keep the prices high, so that they each get a smaller market share than they would if they lowered the prices, but higher margins to make up for it. If so, then this is illegal.
Yes, and they do it in an incredibly uncomfortable way. I'd be willing to bet that the person who suggested this has never pulled more than about 2Gs. When the acceleration is enough that it's hard to pump blood up into your head, you experience nausea and lots of small pains. This generally starts mildly at around 4Gs and becomes progressively worse as the force increases.
Basically, this idea sounds like someone saying 'well, the blood draining out of your brain is quite a relaxing way to die, we should chop people's balls off for euthanasia so that their blood will drain out quickly and they'll have a quick and peaceful death.'
I'm not sure if it still does, but Apple's Mail.app used to come with a default mail rule that said anything from @apple.com was not spam. Of course, this rule didn't do any SPF checking, so any mail that had spammer@apple.com as the From: field would skip the spam checks.
What makes you say that? The Objective-C compiler (clang) is open source (UIUC, BSD-style, license). Apple's runtime is also open source (APSL), and the GNUstep project has a more portable replacement (MIT licensed). In both cases, you're using proprietary libraries (in the Flash player or Cocoa Touch0.
They're not going to compete. HTML5 competes with the Flash plugin. This is not a revenue generator for Adobe, it's a thing that the give away to try to persuade people to buy their authoring tools. As it becomes well supported, Adobe can transition the developer tools over to targeting HTML5 as well as, then instead of, the Flash plugin. Long term, they stop having to develop Flash (which costs them money) and get to keep selling the authoring tools. What's not to like?
Slashdot Mirror
I can send you 24 hour surveillance videos of my cattle
I can't tell from your post - are you a farmer, or a member of congress?
If you're referring to centrifugal forces, then you might like to do the sums sometime to work out how big it would need to be for the difference between perceived gravity at your feet and in your head to be close enough not to be noticed (say, within 0.05g). Then add in the amount of extra space you'd need because you can now only use one side of every room, rather than the entire volume. Then multiply the result by the cost of getting things into space. And then realise why the ISS does not do this.
What, your school seriously wouldn't let you or a teacher ring home to say that one of your close friends had been killed in a car accident?
They probably would have done, but in a year group of over 100 there would have been a very long queue for the phone. Fortunately, I had a mobile so I didn't need to find out.
NIH syndrome
NIH is the reason why UEFI exists at all. OpenFirmware already existed, had several independent implementation (including some open source ones), and was a free standard that anyone could implement. So Intel made a new 'standard' that is a crappy copy of OpenFirmware.
If they're as competent as NASA, then the most likely cause of the error is that one end was using metres while the other end was using light millifortnights.
Either the theory is wrong or the universe is wrong? Well, one of the two is significantly easier to fix...
No, you're saying that a curved path between two points is shorter than a straight path between two points. That would certainly give some interesting data about the structure of space-time, but it's more likely that you're (as usual) just plain wrong.
Their iDevice market is where their big profits are, they don't have a "what's next" lined up right now
I think you nailed it. Apple led the market in pushing laptops. Their laptop sales passed desktop sales about 2 years before the rest of the market caught up. By the time laptops started to become more of a commodity item, they owned the high-end MP3 player market. Before this started to be eaten by cheaper alternatives, they entered the mobile phone market, where they only have about 5% of the total market but something like 60% of the total profit. That's a common position for Apple, but it's precarious because you just need cheap commodity alternatives to become almost as good and your profits shrink a lot. They tried to push tablets, but this is still a really tiny market. Something like 1% of the size of the mobile phone market even after all of the hype, so not a comfortable place to fall back on when the super-expensive phone market starts to shrink.
Apple's strategy for the past decade has been to enter a market, sell high-end, high-margin products, and then move on by the time the high-end market has shrunk enough to no longer be a major source of revenue. Unfortunately (for Apple shareholders), they don't seem to have a new market lined up.
to only including ANCIENT copies of GNU utilities on MacOS
Blame the FSF for this. Apple includes the latest GPLv2 versions of utilities. In common with many other companies, they won't touch GPLv3 stuff. They're slowly replacing the old GPLv2 utilities with BSD alternatives, since the FSF decided to change the license for everything.
School is a place for education, not entertainment
If you think that these are totally disjoint, then I hope you don't work in education. And I'm very glad I'm not you - you must lead a very depressing life.
In rural areas, at least where I grew up in the UK, it was quite common for children to get a school bus to and from a school in the city, or to car-share and get a lift with another parent. Sometimes, there are problems with this. For example, my school bus left over half an hour after the end of school, from about 10 minutes walk away from the school. If I missed it, but didn't realise, I wouldn't get back to the school until about an hour after school finished, at which point there may not be any teachers around. There was a phone box on school, so I had a phone card that I could use to call home in the case of any problems.
The first time I used the school bus, I managed to get on the wrong one. I noticed when it got on the motorway, which definitely wasn't on my way home. I got off at the services, found a payphone and called home, but if I'd had a mobile then I'd have been able to call home from the bus and check where the best place to get off was.
And, on a more prosaic level, having a mobile phone later (I got mine when I was 16, which was when cheap pre-pay ones started to appear), it was useful to be able to call my parents if some after-school activity was cancelled, or something else happened that required me to leave school at a different time, such as when one of my close friends was killed in a car accident, or when I was coopted to the debate team at the last minute before a competition.
The problem with NeXT was not that they were made in the USA, it was that, as you said, they were really really awesome computers. They were graphical UNIX workstations, with high resolution displays. They were definitely not consumer products. This is the difference between the NeXT and Apple philosophies: NeXT wanted to make the best computer possible, Apple wants to make computers that aren't as bad as the competition's products.
Sure, just like how all of the crap programmers left the industry when COBOL, and VB6 went out of fashion...
I play a lot of Flash games, but I wouldn't pay money for them. If you buy the Premium Edition of games, you still have to connect to their servers to play, so you can only play as long as they keep supporting it. If you move to some device that doesn't support Flash, you can't easily run it in an emulator. I contrast, I have a lot of old games that I still play in DOSBox or WINE, and I've bought quite a few games from gog.com recently, because I know I can dig them out again in the future if I'm bored.
The first is often a stumbling block for evolution. For humans living on the coast, having gills as well as lungs would be a significant advantage, because it would dramatically increase their ability to find food. Part of the problem with this is that evolution can only optimise for local maxima. The intervening stages for developing lungs or gils are quite beneficial for simple organisms as they increase the size that the creature can grow to, but they are problematic for organisms that already have a large degree of specialisation among cells.
The second is also a problem. Consider short sightedness. This has a significant evolutionary disadvantage, but individual characteristics are not selected for. If the gene happens to be on the same chromosome as one that carries an advantage (increased sperm count, higher intelligence, or whatever) then it will be selected for to a certain degree, but the disadvantage may mean that it will never spread through the entire population.
There is also the question of timescale. If you have a characteristic that is such an evolutionary advantage that it will always be selected for (i.e. any member of the species will always choose to mate with members of that phenotype in preference to any others) then it will still take thousands of years for it to spread to the entire human population.
Finally, remember that evolution only selects for things that are good for the species, not for individuals. The theory of evolution is a tautology: genes that are good at propagating themselves will propagate better than genes that are not good at propagating themselves. Consider rats. They have a very high mutation rate, which is good for the species because it makes them hard to poison: one rat in a population will probably have an immunity to whatever the poison is, and the next generation will all be immune. This sucks for individual rats though: the ones that aren't immune still die, and the ones that are die of cancer soon after.
Having the members of a species competing for resources after they've passed on their genes (and ensured the survival of their offspring for long enough to breed) is bad for a species, but I doubt many people in their 40s would consider that suicide is good for the individual...
(Although, if you display this kind of communication skill on your CV and in interviews, no further explanation is necessary...)
Sex without a girl, if you are a girl, means sex without you, so it's probably not much to brag about either...
More importantly, deploy it in browsers, don't display the padlock, and do print a warning when using TLS 1.0. I'm sure sites will get upgraded nice and quickly once their customers start telephoning and saying 'my browser gave a scary warning when I tried to enter my credit card details!'
Who gets to decide if it's equivalent?
The courts. That's what they're for.
Why shouldn every product have to make it's own profit. I see printers at the store that cost less than their replacement cartridges. A new razor costs less than the replacement blades it contains. I still have a choice to buy or not.
But these are within the same market, they are not cross-subsidies. You don't see Gilette giving away cheap printers. This is disallowed for a simple reason. If you permit it, then you eventually end up with only one company making everything. When the company wants to enter a new market, it takes money from its profitable divisions (where it's already gained a monopoly) and uses this to flood the new market with products until its competitors go bust. It can then raise the prices and increase its overall profit, making it possible to push into another new market, and so on.
These laws exist because companies did behave like this before they were enacted.
You just said a few sentences before that a competitor can't lower prices to steal your business make up your mind. You also make the assumption that everyone is equally good at doing anything.
No, I said that you can't lower your prices below your cost of production to drive your competitors out of business. This is called dumping, and it is illegal for a very good reason. If you permit it, then the company in a given market with the largest amount of capital will sell their products at below cost until all of the competitors have gone bankrupt, then hike up the prices.
You know, looking back on it, if you exclude foodstamps, I've earned not a single penny in income
I think this sentence needs some clarification.
Close. If you're charging more than your competitors for equivalent products then the free market dictates that no one will buy your products. Therefore, if people are buying them in large numbers, then this implies that there is some distortion in the market, which may be you abusing your market influence.
If you're charging so much less than your competitors that you are making a loss on each sale, then this means that you are subsidising your product from somewhere. If it is from some initial funding to gain a foothold in the market, then this is probably fine. If it's from sales of another product, then it may not be. If it's for the purpose of driving your competitors out of business, at which point you'll be able to raise prices, then it definitely isn't.
If you're charging the same as your competitors and you have large profit margins then, in an open market, one of your competitors would lower their price slightly and steal all of your business. You'd then repeat this a few times until you reached an equilibrium point where none of you were willing to cut anything further from your profit margins. If this isn't happening, then it is probably due to some agreement between the major players to keep the prices high, so that they each get a smaller market share than they would if they lowered the prices, but higher margins to make up for it. If so, then this is illegal.
Yes, and they do it in an incredibly uncomfortable way. I'd be willing to bet that the person who suggested this has never pulled more than about 2Gs. When the acceleration is enough that it's hard to pump blood up into your head, you experience nausea and lots of small pains. This generally starts mildly at around 4Gs and becomes progressively worse as the force increases.
Basically, this idea sounds like someone saying 'well, the blood draining out of your brain is quite a relaxing way to die, we should chop people's balls off for euthanasia so that their blood will drain out quickly and they'll have a quick and peaceful death.'
I'm not sure if it still does, but Apple's Mail.app used to come with a default mail rule that said anything from @apple.com was not spam. Of course, this rule didn't do any SPF checking, so any mail that had spammer@apple.com as the From: field would skip the spam checks.
That's infinitely more open than Objective-C
What makes you say that? The Objective-C compiler (clang) is open source (UIUC, BSD-style, license). Apple's runtime is also open source (APSL), and the GNUstep project has a more portable replacement (MIT licensed). In both cases, you're using proprietary libraries (in the Flash player or Cocoa Touch0.
They're not going to compete. HTML5 competes with the Flash plugin. This is not a revenue generator for Adobe, it's a thing that the give away to try to persuade people to buy their authoring tools. As it becomes well supported, Adobe can transition the developer tools over to targeting HTML5 as well as, then instead of, the Flash plugin. Long term, they stop having to develop Flash (which costs them money) and get to keep selling the authoring tools. What's not to like?