Apple essentially invented a new market, just like Starbucks did. Were MP3 players (and expensive espresso drinks) available before that? Yes. Could you download music before that? Yes. What Apple did that wasn't so readily available before was made a device that could hold tons of music and had the market power to negotiate contracts to make music available for purchase on iTunes.
Perhaps even more importantly, Apple made it dirt simple for the everyman to actually get their music onto their device.
I had an early MP3 player. It was from before USB was popular, and used a parallel port interface. Getting music onto it required the following procedure:
- Unplug the printer (after ensuring no print jobs were going)
- Plug in the custom parallel cable
- Run the custom software
- Hope that the custom software would actually work from the time you started it, to the time the transfer completed. The software for my MP3 player was notoriously bad, and updates were virtually non-existent.
- Find music you don't want on the device anymore and delete it
- Navigate around the file interface to find all the MP3s you wanted added to the device
- Transfer the files, and hope the software didn't crash during the transfer.
- It was completely up to you to organize your music on your hard drive. The device had no display, didn't work with any form of metadata like ID3 tags.
Contrast this with the original iPod, where iTunes took care of organizing all your music on your hard drive for you, made metadata handling easy, and allowed you to simply plug-in your iPod, wait for the "Do not unplug" icon on its display to go away, and unplug and walk away.
I had the opportunity back-in-the-day to experiment with a lot of MP3 players, and for almost every single one, it's bigger failing was in the software to get music onto the device. These devices were primarily pushed out by small consumer electronics companies that knew very little about software development; the software was often painfully craptastic. Some of the better ones did simply identify themselves as USB Mass Storage devices, but you still had to manually catalog and organize all your music (a task admittedly some people seem to enjoy; myself this is a perfect sort of task for the computer to do for me while I focus on more important tasks), and then sit and drag-and-drop music to the device.
It was the overall iPod experience that really made it excel. Apple took the time and care to make everything right end-to-end. The majority of the other devices just pushed out hardware, and paid very little attention to decent software integration to make the process seamless to the (particularly non-technical) end user.
Not to mention the fact that virtually no other MP3 player had an integrated store to make it even easier to put music on your devices -- I remember the days of ripping CDs, or scouring FTP sites known to host MP3s. Apple made both CD ripping and downloading (for a fee) pretty simple, whereas for most other MP3s, getting the music in the first place was your problem, and not one their software would tackle.
For those who aren't aware of what was said, in the case of Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau's comments, I don't think Godwin is being appropriately applied.
Mr. Trudeau didn't compare the government to that of the Nazis. He didn't compare it to Hitler. He didn't claim that a government policy was as bad as the Holocaust.
What he did say is that current anti-Muslim government policies are akin to the Canadian policy just after World War II of "none is too many" when it came to Jewish immigrants to Canada, which the Government of Canada has since admitted was wrong.
In essence, it compared a current policy to a previous policy that the Government had admitted was wrong. I don't see why everyone is so upset, other than that the government would like to try to make this into a Godwin-like comparison in order to score cheap political points. For the record, according to the interview (for anyone who doesn't RTFA), Mr. Godwin agrees with this analysis.
Minister Blaney, however, seems in my mind to have skirted the line much more closely, specifically bringing up the Holocaust as an example to try to prop up support for an unpopular bill. His specific statement, that the Holocaust didn't begin with the gas chambers, but with words is correct -- however I have to agree with MP Randall Garrison (FWIW, he represents my riding, although admittedly I didn't vote for him in the last election) who said that this was "over-inflated rhetoric".
So in essence we have one instance worthy of invoking Godwin against, and another that had nothing directly to do with the Holocaust, but instead a Canadian policy that happened around the same time, and affected the same people, which mirrors in some respects what the current Government is attempting to do with a different population, for which Godwin shouldn't apply (but which is being brought out in some corners in an attempt to score political hay).
You see, there isn't one "Placebo Effect". The effect is different for different ailments.
An example: you have a patient who is suffering from a migraine. You give them a placebo. In 10 minutes, they say they feel somewhat better. That may be the "placebo effect".
A second patient comes in who has had a heart attack. They aren't breathing, and there is no pulse. You give them a placebo. In 10 minutes, they're dead.
When constructing studies with placebos, you typically have to compare like with like. There isn't a universal Placebo Constant you just throw into your paper to compare against-- you have to compare outcomes between a population of patients with condition X taking the substance being tested, to the outcomes of a population of patients, also with condition X, who are taking placebos. The placebos may or may not have any effect -- that makes no difference. What is important is that the substance you're testing will ideally do better than placebos do, otherwise you might as well just use the cheaper placebos for the condition at hand, and head back to the drawing board.
(This is, of course, a gross oversimplification of how such studies are run and constructed -- it is provided for illustrative purposes only)
Of course they found similar results when compared with placebo. Placebos can actually be effective.
And that's why they compare things like this to placebos, and not poisons.
The purpose of such testing to see if the medicine in question is actually having an active, biological effect against disease. Placebos don't have any sort of active biological effect on people; they have a more passive, mental effect. If your effect is statistically indistinguishable from a placebo, than all you really have is a different type of placebo. If you do statistically better than a placebo, then we infer that there is an active biological effect of the substance in question. If you somehow do statistically worse than a placebo, then you have some serious issues with the compound you're studying.
In effect, what this research has found is that homeopathic preparations have no active biological effect, and that they are, in fact, just overly-processed, overly-expensive placebos. For things that can be healed psychosomatically (or which will heal in the normal course of time, and just makes the patient feel less anxiety over something being done about their condition), they're just a very expensive version of a sugar pill. They still, however, have no effect on AIDS or brain tumours or TB.
Placebos are often used as the control because we expect medicine to be better than a placebo. And as this study has shown, homeopathy isn't better than a plain-jane placebo.
Now if homeopathic practitioners were honest about this, it probably wouldn't be an issue. But they claim they can cure everything from ingrown toenails to cancer -- and that's a serious issue.
In ten years and in 100 years, Apple Watch will still tell time, exactly like the Rolex, except with much greater accuracy.
Actually, that may depend. I haven't looked at the WatchKit APIs yet to see what internal time representation they're using, but it may be susceptible to the Year 2038 Problem
Of course, what everyone seems to be ignoring is that the case is (as are some of the pins in the straps) 18k gold. According to Apple, the large Apple Edition watch has a case that weighs 69g. Now that's probably not all gold (the back is ceramic, the front is glass, the internals are electronic), however at the very least there is roughly $1000 USD of gold in there.
So while it's possible it won't retain its original price, it will probably never become worthless -- at the very least, there is some 30g or so of 18k gold there.
Or maybe just read a US news website once in a while.
Isn't your media much less diverse?;)
Well, it's not my media -- I'm Canadian, and have never lived in the US. I visit from time to time, and have had some business related trips here and there, but it's not my country.
Still, if you want a more impartial view of things that are happening in the US, you can do worse than talking to a Canadian. Canadians are the great American watchers. It's somewhat hard to avoid -- we share a continent, they have 10 times our population, and we get most of their television channels. Their politics and business often affects us quite intimately, so we have a collective habit of paying a lot of attention to what they're doing down there. To paraphrase one of our greatest Prime Ministers, we're a mouse in bed with an elephant. It's certainly good policy to keep an eye on the elephant, in case it decides to roll over.
The whole court system I guess is more scary in the US.
Sweden was a good country.. =P, it's just that I feel like the freedoms may be given away / taken away by people of different ideas and I don't see how a generous small well-fare state (we don't have the highest taxes of the OECD any longer but we could easily get there again..) as applicable together with open borders / citizenship for everyone.
I've never been to Sweden, so I can't really say much about your experiences there.
What I can say is that anytime an American has decided they need more freedom, they come to Canada. There are a lot of examples over the last few hundred years: the United Empire Loyalists (basically, people loyal to England during the American Revolution), black slaves via the Underground Railroad, Vietnam draft dodgers, Iraq veterans who did't want to be redeployed yet again -- the list is long and varied.
In Sweden people think the police are "racist" if they ask people to identify themselves to figure out if they are illegal immigrants and I think you can hide for four years if you are supposed to be forced out of the country and if that haven't happened within those then it's supposedly societies fault and you get away with it.
This debate has also occurred within the US, in conjunction with illegal immigrants from Mexico, particularly in places like Arizona, which tried to pass laws permitting law enforcement to target people like this. IIRC, the measure failed in the end due to the fact they were targeting people who "looked Mexican", even if they were long-time American citizens. So that's hardly unique to Sweden.
It's the basic idea of freedom I'm after.
There is a big difference between the propaganda and how Hollywood would like everyone to see the US, and reality here too, unfortunately.
It's hard to be free when you can't afford health care, and a member of your family gets ill. It's hard to be free when the state you live in has a history of serious racial segregation. It's hard to be free when you're homosexual and your employer is 100% legally entitled to fire you from your job, or your landlord to evict you because of your sexual orientation. And the US has the largest incarcerated population of any country in the world (more than 2.2 million Americans are in jail, giving it the second highest per capita incarceration rate in the world). There are a lot of people in the US for whom "land of the free" has never lived up to the hype.
I'd much rather take US idea of "hey we need to be able to surveillance all communication!" and be free to express my opinion than being able too but also having too hide my ass to express it.
I'm somewhat proud of "my old Sweden", but I'm also not ignorant to the fact that the US have shown better growth and as such at least parts of it is richer.
Taxes are lower in the US though. And I guess it may not be the general opinion in the US but they are at least spent on:
1) Upholding the law & society.
2) Upholding the border.
and hence:
3) Guarantee the society of their citizens.
You seriously need to take off those rose-tinted glasses.
Or maybe just read a US news website once in a while. The US is a country where a) justice is applied very unequally, depending on your race (ref: the recent analysis of Ferguson, Missouri); b) where there are all sorts of political battles raging right now over the number of illegal immigrants living in the US (estimated in 2008 as 12 million people; more than the entire population of Sweden! The basis is often about how the President isn't doing enough to "protect the border"), and has the highest murder rate of any of the western, industrialized nations (by quite a bit -- you're nearly 7 times more likely to be murdered in the US than in Sweden, for example).
There are a lot of things to laud the United States over -- but the ones you specifically picked aren't them. Unless you were going for sarcasm, in which case "whoosh!" to me.
It is actually kind of sad if you know their history.
Back in the day they were competing with Palm, and had Windows CE and Pocket PC 2000. When PocketPC 2002 came out my employer switched over from Palm and I got to rewrite a bunch of tools. They did pretty good for a while with Mobile 2003, and Windows Mobile 5. It knocked Palm down several notches in the mobile market, with Palm losing value and getting bought out in 2005.
I'm not convinced you know your history of devices at the time all that well.
WinCE/Windows Mobile/etc. didn't start to succeed against Palm because of great improvements in Windows for devices; it started to take over because of overt stagnation in PalmOS-based devices.
Palm become successful with the PalmPilot and PalmPilot Pro, in part because it was simple, quick, and worked. It avoided many of the complexities of the PC ecosystem, such as the notion of everything being in a "file" (PalmOS used an in-memory record-based storage model instead), so that people could work with the kinds of PDA data they wanted to work with in a more natural manner.
Unfortunately, Palm saw great success, and pretty much decided to keep on doing what they were doing, without really pushing any significant boundaries. They dragged their feet on implementing a colour display. They dragged their feet adding any form of wireless communication (before the Tungsten era, they only communications you could get were either via the serial interface, or via a modem over the serial interface). Palm OS 6.0 (Cobalt) was in development for a good part of a decade, and in the end never shipped on any device. The business itself went from being a stand-alone business to being bought out by US Robotics, which was then bought out by 3Com two years later. The founders didn't like the direction 3Com was taking the company, bailed, and formed Handspring. Meanwhile, only two years later, 3Com spun Palm off into it's own, separate company again. Two years after that, Palm broke itself into palmOne (hardware) and PalmSource (software)...in another two years, palmOne bought out some of PalmSources IP, and the rest of PalmSource was sold to ACCESS. palmOne became Palm again, merged with Handspring, developed webOS -- and a few short years later was bought out by HP.
Now I didn't have a very large peek behind the scenes -- I was out on the sidelines writing the jSyncManager, once in a while hearing from a manager at Palm, but even from the outside it was easy to see that the serious game of Hot Potato being played with/by Palm led to some serious issues with innovation. There really wasn't any. Developments were iterative and slow. Where they were once ahead of the curve, by the year 2000 they were already falling behind. It took them ages just to integrate their system with a phone! The device and platform was nearly stagnant by the time webOS was released, and while innovative, in the end it was too little, too late -- especially when compared to what Apple showed the world with iOS.
The point being, Windows on mobile devices didn't rise in prominence because they suddenly were seen as extremely good devices. They had a UI with lots of small items that needed a stylus to manipulate, their browser was substandard, and the devices needed frequent rebooting. Battery life wasn't great, and when compared to Palm with it's simplified interface, were a PITA to use for normal PDA uses. Sure, they were great for the Windows geek who wanted to show how they had an underpowered Windows PC in their pocket, and became somewhat the standard for use in embedded systems like barcode scanners, but for virtually everyone else, they were nearly useless. However, they did suck much less than Palm did by that time. PalmOS pretty much hadn't changed in 10 years. It took ages for them to add simple things like colour and wireless networking (and even when they did, that was a feature relegated to only one or two models). The core of the OS was pretty close
So I have a method that brute forces something, then I go back and figure out how to do it with a better big 0, and the functionality doesn't change, but that still isn't refactoring, because... ?
Because it violates the standard definition of "refactoring".
Refactoring is about changing the structure of the code, and not the algorithms used within the code. The goal is typically to reduce coupling, increase cohesion, and (frequently) to improve testability.
Replacing an algorithm with a better algorithm isn't "refactoring", it's "rewriting".
Taking your giant brute-force method and breaking it into smaller parts in a cohesive unit (source file, class, package, etc.) with lowered coupling (perhaps by genericizing previously tightly-coupled bits), in such a way that the individual units have a smaller testing surface -- but is otherwise the same algorithm -- then you've refactored the code, by definition.
The new machines lack LPT ports? WTF kind of machine did you buy without an LPT port? A laptop, sure, a desktop? You have to look hard, even today to find a machine that doesn't have a printer port.
It isn't that hard -- Macs haven't had any sort of specialty printer port on any model that I'm aware of for at least 15 years now.
Unfortunately, the experiment came to an abrupt end when they threw "ET: The Extra Terrestrial" at the AI, whereupon after an hour of trying different tactics the AI decided that the only way to win was to send a power surge through the system, frying the only working Atari 2600 the researchers could dig up.
This still classifies the AI as coming up with the best solution to the game ever implemented.
I very much approve of reading the actual papers. However...
Scientific papers are usually dry and hard to read.
I agree -- however, I find most people with some background in at least one science can at least glean something from reading the abstract, and hopefully some bits and pieces of the statistical analysis (something I admittedly wish I had better background in. If I could afford the time and money to go back to University, I'd love to take stats and philosophy of science).
If papers come to conflicting conclusions, it's hard to figure out which is right. If you're in the field, you read the papers (or at least glance at the abstracts), and have a good sense of which studies have been confirmed and which disproved.
I think part of the problem for many peoples that the state of knowledge in science isn't a binary proposition. In much of science, the answer to 'Is X true?" boils down to five possibilities: 'yes', 'yes with caveats', 'no', 'no with caveats', and 'uncertain' ("more research in this area is required"). So if you're seeing only a few studies, and they seem to be contradictory, the conclusion you need to take is simply "this area requires more research".
And that is my problem with how most people approach science. They see one study, and say 'Science says X!", when in reality, it's really just one study that says X. Unless you have a massive body of scientific work behind a concept (such as evolution, or gravitation), one can't really make any claims as to what "science" says. Consequently, you also shouldn't be disappointed if future research on a new or lightly researched area of science later produces a paper with a contradictory view -- you can't feel that this means that "Science was wrong!". Science is seldom, if ever, "wrong" -- but how much importance people put into preliminary/early/initial results can certainly make them mistakenly feel that way.
I'm somewhat reminded of how people with multiple sclerosis reacted to Dr. Paolo Zamboni's "liberation therapy". Here was a medical doctor who produced a paper where he looked at the neck veins of a group of people with MS, found they had some narrowing of the veins and iron deposits in the brain, and came up with an angioplasty procedure to open these veins up, believing that MS was caused by "chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency" (basically, insufficient blood drainage from the brain). He tried it on his own wife, she subjectively said she felt a bit better, and suddenly MS sufferers around the world were flying to third-world countries to have this done to them (for a fee, of course), and in some countries (like Canada) were begging their national governments to bring the procedure on-shore and to make it part of the social healthcare system.
Unfortunately, Dr. Zamboni's research was deeply flawed. Firstly, his study wasn't "blinded". It also didn't have a comparison group -- he didn't even look for vein narrowing in non-MS populations. Thirdly, he didn't disclose that he had financial ties to a company that made equipment to treat the condition he had "discovered". These are all problematic, but IMO the worst was really the lack of a comparison group for control purposes. As twofurther studies have shown, the type of vein narrowing Dr. Zamboni detected are equally prevalent in both people with MS and people without MS.
Now MS is a terrible disease. People who suffer from MS live in a sort of quiet bravery, in constant struggle against their condition, and with a lot of hope for a cure. I hope one is found. Unfortunately, all too many of them jumped on this one, and got ill-advised procedures done, which in some cases has led to a worsening of their symptoms, and even death. Damage has been done, all because one p
Yup -- we have a 4yo. The recommendation we received was to give her some small smears of peanut butter around the age of 1 now and then, and to simply watch for any negative reactions.
She had none, which of course doesn't prove anything in and of itself.
I should note that the results from the recent study aren't new. Here are a few papers worth checking out on the subject:
Factors Associated with the Development of Peanut Allergy in Childhood(2003 - an interesting part of this article link is that it contains a tab to read all of the letters the journal received concerning this research. It's a useful read for you, as it shows how research is commented on, and potentially refined within the scientific community).
Interestingly, the above link does mention that the advice you received was common advice (at the time of publication in 2008) in the UK, Australia, and in the past in North America (so I don't disbelieve that you received this advice -- although "common" doesn't necessarily imply "supported by research").
Yes, but I have kids and we've always been told not to feed them peanuts till they are a certain age. Now it looks like that was bad advice.
Yes, but who was the one telling you this? Did you read it in a paper in a peer-reviewed scientific journal? Or was it something your co-workers mother told you because she saw it on Oprah? Or did you just read it in the newspaper?
The problem with what most people "believe" about science is that they don't read the actual science. They read someone else's summary of what they think the science says, and then go by that, believing they "know what science has to say on a subject".
I'll note here FWIW that in my experience, most Medical Doctors are bad scientists. They don't do primary research, and don't necessarily read the primary research. And if they do, they don't necessarily understand the limitations of the primary research. Or they might make a recommendation based upon an overabundance of caution based on incomplete research (which is probably the case of what you thought you knew about peanuts).
Again, as I extolled in another recent post to you -- read the actual research if you want to get an idea of what "science" has to say about a subject. And don't take what you read as cannon until it's been backed up by a number of studies reproducing the first, along with a meta-analysis of all such papers published. Until the scientific community has labelled something as either a "law" or a "theory", it pretty much needs to be considered as not-necessarily-100%-reliable.
The question is, when do you know the science is "finished"? I swear every year there is a new study saying something is good for you, followed by more studies saying it's bad for you, then more saying it's good for you.
My guess is you don't read the studies, but just go by what you read in the press.
Look, learning about new discoveries from the newspaper/radio/TV/Internet isn't a bad thing -- but it's only a first step. Unless you're reading specialized research magazines or journals, however, you're probably not getting more than a glimmer of useful information.
As an example (not to be confused with a real-life example; I'm too tired to start researching references for a/. post...), a researcher may do a study, and release a paper saying "X dose of compound Y, commonly found in alcoholic beverage B, lessens human cell type Z mortality by K% in a petrie dish". It will also include a whole pile of caveats, and probably the statement "more research is needed" somewhere towards the end, along with a section on some future research directions.
Mr. Science Desk Writer hears about it from somewhere, looks up the average human lifespan L, and publishes an article with the headline "New research shows drinking alcoholic beverage B will increase your lifespan by K%!". You read it, and decide to go and hit your alcohol cabinet for a drink.
Of course, the column doesn't properly represent the research. It takes data out of context: in this case a) by not properly correlating the dose X of compound Y with how much alcohol you would need to drink to get those dose, b) whether that chemical is converted by your liver to something else before it gets to where it needs to go, c) whether that chemical is even absorbed by the bloodstream to get to human cell type Z, d) whether what was found to be true in a petrie dish will also be true inside a human body, e) that what is found to be true of cell type Z may not hold true for other types of cells, f) whether any benefits attributable to cell type Z are negated by negative effects on any other types of human cells, or any other part of human physiology, and g) that you can't correlate a reduction of cell death to a whole body (i.e.: you can't just take two numbers you read in studies and multiply them together, in this case human lifespan and some cell death reduction percentage).
On top of this, as things turn out, a year later some other researcher (Researcher B) gets some research funding, and decides to replicate the experiments from the original paper. Maybe they do this because they find the statistical methods used by the original researcher don't make for a particularly strong case, or maybe they just want to verify the results. Researcher B sets up the experiment, but does it on a much larger scale (perhaps they have better funding) in order to get more data. After doing a detailed analysis of the data, they find that the effect either a) isn't anywhere as strong as the original paper described, or b) the effect doesn't exist at all, or c) that there was an error in the experimental setup that accounts for the effect (i.e: they found out that in order to help prevent compound Y from breaking down too easily for the experiment, that it had been refrigerated to 5C before being applied to the cells in the culture, and this had a sort of cryonic effect on the cells that extended their lifespan -- that the nature of the compound Y had nothing to do with the measured results). They publish their own paper, again with "more research needed" caveat, and a list of possible future directions.
Mr. Science Desk Writer, of course, may never see this paper, and so may continue to report on the original research. Or they may have moved on to some other area, like whatever the latest NASA probe photographed. Or perhaps they even wind up reporting on the latest research -- and you read it, and suddenly decide "those crazy scientists don't know what they're talking about! They keep ch
The referenced UK survey showed that families with engineers in them can have between 2.5 to 8.6 *times* the statistical occurrence of autism in their children.
Just in case anyone reading your message jumps to the wrong conclusion, I'll remind everyone that correlation != causation, even in this case.
There is, however, growing evidence that microexons -- tiny gene fragments that aren't well understood -- that are linked to altered brain development in individuals with autism (paper).
And (IIRC) there is a certain amount of correlation between problems with microexons and older fathers. Due to the cost and length of their education, engineers may not be having children until they are older (and perhaps more established in their careers), increasing the risk factor (it has been well established that older fathers are more likely to sire autistic children).
I'm not accusing you of having much such an assumption. The correlation is interesting and needs further investigation, however it may just stems from age of fathers, rather than any special mental makeup of engineers.
Ok... so if it's an STD and I am one of those monogamous types, could you explain the benefit to me or others for me getting it?
I'm not anti-vaccine, though I am anti-vaccine-if-the-risk-of-the-vaccine-is-greater-than-the-benefit. And no, I don't think autism comes from vaccines, etc.
What, and you can absolutely guarantee that your monogamous partner has never been with someone else and contracted the disease?
You can see into the future and (goodness forbid) know you'll never lose your partner in some unfortunate way, and won't ever be in a new relationship again?
A Windows laptop is less expensive than the cellular Internet subscription needed to connect a tablet to EC2 or Azure while away from home.
Maybe where you live, but the cost of my iPad 2 3G service is $15 a month. On top of that, if you I've in an urban centre, you're probably well covered by WiFi anyway. So that $15 goes quite a long way. I can pay for 2 years of 3G service at the cost of what a Windows laptop would cost me, with the benefit being (wait for it)...I don't have to carry a crappy sub-$300 Windows laptop with me everywhere I go. The EC2 Windows instance living in the cloud I use most frequently is a quad-core with 24GB of RAM and a few TB of hard disk space -- and you're not going to find a cheap sub-$300 Windows laptop with those sorts of specs.
To complete this analogy, someone who can use a car most of the time and only occasionally needs to do these "tons of things" can rent a truck, such as a moving truck from U-Haul or a pickup truck from The Home Depot. Is there a comparable PC rental ecosystem?
Of course there is. You install an RDP or VNC client on your phone or tablet, take a few minutes to setup a cloud OS instance on your favourite cloud service (EC2, Azure, whatever), and connect. You now have the full PC experience on your phone or tablet, running whatever you want, from wherever you want, for however long you want it.
It would be cool to see which programming languages could have the best short chess programs.
I'd nominate Haskell, scheme and prolog to try it in.
To make things fair, I think you'd have to define the valid set of languages as general purpose languages. I could see coming up with a chess-specific language that would be super-efficient in that the language would already have known chess properties as built-in elements.
Sigh, forcing people to "learn to code" is just going to create legions of substandard programmers.
Alternately (and somewhat more likely), it will create a legion of future business people with software needs who know how to articulate those needs in a logical way when trying to write a specification.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple essentially invented a new market, just like Starbucks did. Were MP3 players (and expensive espresso drinks) available before that? Yes. Could you download music before that? Yes. What Apple did that wasn't so readily available before was made a device that could hold tons of music and had the market power to negotiate contracts to make music available for purchase on iTunes.
Perhaps even more importantly, Apple made it dirt simple for the everyman to actually get their music onto their device.
I had an early MP3 player. It was from before USB was popular, and used a parallel port interface. Getting music onto it required the following procedure:
Contrast this with the original iPod, where iTunes took care of organizing all your music on your hard drive for you, made metadata handling easy, and allowed you to simply plug-in your iPod, wait for the "Do not unplug" icon on its display to go away, and unplug and walk away.
I had the opportunity back-in-the-day to experiment with a lot of MP3 players, and for almost every single one, it's bigger failing was in the software to get music onto the device. These devices were primarily pushed out by small consumer electronics companies that knew very little about software development; the software was often painfully craptastic. Some of the better ones did simply identify themselves as USB Mass Storage devices, but you still had to manually catalog and organize all your music (a task admittedly some people seem to enjoy; myself this is a perfect sort of task for the computer to do for me while I focus on more important tasks), and then sit and drag-and-drop music to the device.
It was the overall iPod experience that really made it excel. Apple took the time and care to make everything right end-to-end. The majority of the other devices just pushed out hardware, and paid very little attention to decent software integration to make the process seamless to the (particularly non-technical) end user.
Not to mention the fact that virtually no other MP3 player had an integrated store to make it even easier to put music on your devices -- I remember the days of ripping CDs, or scouring FTP sites known to host MP3s. Apple made both CD ripping and downloading (for a fee) pretty simple, whereas for most other MP3s, getting the music in the first place was your problem, and not one their software would tackle.
Yaz
It is however killing somebody in cold blood
No, it is just completing what the murderer chose to start.
Murderers rationalize their crimes in exactly the same way.
Yaz
For those who aren't aware of what was said, in the case of Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau's comments, I don't think Godwin is being appropriately applied.
Mr. Trudeau didn't compare the government to that of the Nazis. He didn't compare it to Hitler. He didn't claim that a government policy was as bad as the Holocaust.
What he did say is that current anti-Muslim government policies are akin to the Canadian policy just after World War II of "none is too many" when it came to Jewish immigrants to Canada, which the Government of Canada has since admitted was wrong.
In essence, it compared a current policy to a previous policy that the Government had admitted was wrong. I don't see why everyone is so upset, other than that the government would like to try to make this into a Godwin-like comparison in order to score cheap political points. For the record, according to the interview (for anyone who doesn't RTFA), Mr. Godwin agrees with this analysis.
Minister Blaney, however, seems in my mind to have skirted the line much more closely, specifically bringing up the Holocaust as an example to try to prop up support for an unpopular bill. His specific statement, that the Holocaust didn't begin with the gas chambers, but with words is correct -- however I have to agree with MP Randall Garrison (FWIW, he represents my riding, although admittedly I didn't vote for him in the last election) who said that this was "over-inflated rhetoric".
So in essence we have one instance worthy of invoking Godwin against, and another that had nothing directly to do with the Holocaust, but instead a Canadian policy that happened around the same time, and affected the same people, which mirrors in some respects what the current Government is attempting to do with a different population, for which Godwin shouldn't apply (but which is being brought out in some corners in an attempt to score political hay).
Yaz
I'm fairly sure the Placebo Effect is effective.
Well, then you'd simply be wrong.
You see, there isn't one "Placebo Effect". The effect is different for different ailments.
An example: you have a patient who is suffering from a migraine. You give them a placebo. In 10 minutes, they say they feel somewhat better. That may be the "placebo effect".
A second patient comes in who has had a heart attack. They aren't breathing, and there is no pulse. You give them a placebo. In 10 minutes, they're dead.
When constructing studies with placebos, you typically have to compare like with like. There isn't a universal Placebo Constant you just throw into your paper to compare against-- you have to compare outcomes between a population of patients with condition X taking the substance being tested, to the outcomes of a population of patients, also with condition X, who are taking placebos. The placebos may or may not have any effect -- that makes no difference. What is important is that the substance you're testing will ideally do better than placebos do, otherwise you might as well just use the cheaper placebos for the condition at hand, and head back to the drawing board.
(This is, of course, a gross oversimplification of how such studies are run and constructed -- it is provided for illustrative purposes only)
Yaz
Of course they found similar results when compared with placebo. Placebos can actually be effective.
And that's why they compare things like this to placebos, and not poisons.
The purpose of such testing to see if the medicine in question is actually having an active, biological effect against disease. Placebos don't have any sort of active biological effect on people; they have a more passive, mental effect. If your effect is statistically indistinguishable from a placebo, than all you really have is a different type of placebo. If you do statistically better than a placebo, then we infer that there is an active biological effect of the substance in question. If you somehow do statistically worse than a placebo, then you have some serious issues with the compound you're studying.
In effect, what this research has found is that homeopathic preparations have no active biological effect, and that they are, in fact, just overly-processed, overly-expensive placebos. For things that can be healed psychosomatically (or which will heal in the normal course of time, and just makes the patient feel less anxiety over something being done about their condition), they're just a very expensive version of a sugar pill. They still, however, have no effect on AIDS or brain tumours or TB.
Placebos are often used as the control because we expect medicine to be better than a placebo. And as this study has shown, homeopathy isn't better than a plain-jane placebo.
Now if homeopathic practitioners were honest about this, it probably wouldn't be an issue. But they claim they can cure everything from ingrown toenails to cancer -- and that's a serious issue.
Yaz
In ten years and in 100 years, Apple Watch will still tell time, exactly like the Rolex, except with much greater accuracy.
Actually, that may depend. I haven't looked at the WatchKit APIs yet to see what internal time representation they're using, but it may be susceptible to the Year 2038 Problem
Of course, what everyone seems to be ignoring is that the case is (as are some of the pins in the straps) 18k gold. According to Apple, the large Apple Edition watch has a case that weighs 69g. Now that's probably not all gold (the back is ceramic, the front is glass, the internals are electronic), however at the very least there is roughly $1000 USD of gold in there.
So while it's possible it won't retain its original price, it will probably never become worthless -- at the very least, there is some 30g or so of 18k gold there.
Yaz
"Special Snowflake" and "Social Justice Warrior" aren't pejoratives in the sense that "idiot" or "cocksucker" are.
Sure they are -- they're just really early on the euphemism treadmill
Can you recall a time when someone didn't use one of these terms as a put-down? I sure can't.
Yaz
Or maybe just read a US news website once in a while.
Isn't your media much less diverse? ;)
Well, it's not my media -- I'm Canadian, and have never lived in the US. I visit from time to time, and have had some business related trips here and there, but it's not my country.
Still, if you want a more impartial view of things that are happening in the US, you can do worse than talking to a Canadian. Canadians are the great American watchers. It's somewhat hard to avoid -- we share a continent, they have 10 times our population, and we get most of their television channels. Their politics and business often affects us quite intimately, so we have a collective habit of paying a lot of attention to what they're doing down there. To paraphrase one of our greatest Prime Ministers, we're a mouse in bed with an elephant. It's certainly good policy to keep an eye on the elephant, in case it decides to roll over.
The whole court system I guess is more scary in the US.
Sweden was a good country .. =P, it's just that I feel like the freedoms may be given away / taken away by people of different ideas and I don't see how a generous small well-fare state (we don't have the highest taxes of the OECD any longer but we could easily get there again ..) as applicable together with open borders / citizenship for everyone.
I've never been to Sweden, so I can't really say much about your experiences there.
What I can say is that anytime an American has decided they need more freedom, they come to Canada. There are a lot of examples over the last few hundred years: the United Empire Loyalists (basically, people loyal to England during the American Revolution), black slaves via the Underground Railroad, Vietnam draft dodgers, Iraq veterans who did't want to be redeployed yet again -- the list is long and varied.
In Sweden people think the police are "racist" if they ask people to identify themselves to figure out if they are illegal immigrants and I think you can hide for four years if you are supposed to be forced out of the country and if that haven't happened within those then it's supposedly societies fault and you get away with it.
This debate has also occurred within the US, in conjunction with illegal immigrants from Mexico, particularly in places like Arizona, which tried to pass laws permitting law enforcement to target people like this. IIRC, the measure failed in the end due to the fact they were targeting people who "looked Mexican", even if they were long-time American citizens. So that's hardly unique to Sweden.
It's the basic idea of freedom I'm after.
There is a big difference between the propaganda and how Hollywood would like everyone to see the US, and reality here too, unfortunately.
It's hard to be free when you can't afford health care, and a member of your family gets ill. It's hard to be free when the state you live in has a history of serious racial segregation. It's hard to be free when you're homosexual and your employer is 100% legally entitled to fire you from your job, or your landlord to evict you because of your sexual orientation. And the US has the largest incarcerated population of any country in the world (more than 2.2 million Americans are in jail, giving it the second highest per capita incarceration rate in the world). There are a lot of people in the US for whom "land of the free" has never lived up to the hype.
I'd much rather take US idea of "hey we need to be able to surveillance all communication!" and be free to express my opinion than being able too but also having too hide my ass to express it.
I'm somewhat proud of "my old Sweden", but I'm also not ignorant to the fact that the US have shown better growth and as such at least parts of it is richer.
You'd probabl
Taxes are lower in the US though. And I guess it may not be the general opinion in the US but they are at least spent on:
1) Upholding the law & society.
2) Upholding the border.
and hence:
3) Guarantee the society of their citizens.
You seriously need to take off those rose-tinted glasses.
Or maybe just read a US news website once in a while. The US is a country where a) justice is applied very unequally, depending on your race (ref: the recent analysis of Ferguson, Missouri); b) where there are all sorts of political battles raging right now over the number of illegal immigrants living in the US (estimated in 2008 as 12 million people; more than the entire population of Sweden! The basis is often about how the President isn't doing enough to "protect the border"), and has the highest murder rate of any of the western, industrialized nations (by quite a bit -- you're nearly 7 times more likely to be murdered in the US than in Sweden, for example).
There are a lot of things to laud the United States over -- but the ones you specifically picked aren't them. Unless you were going for sarcasm, in which case "whoosh!" to me.
Yaz
It is actually kind of sad if you know their history.
Back in the day they were competing with Palm, and had Windows CE and Pocket PC 2000. When PocketPC 2002 came out my employer switched over from Palm and I got to rewrite a bunch of tools. They did pretty good for a while with Mobile 2003, and Windows Mobile 5. It knocked Palm down several notches in the mobile market, with Palm losing value and getting bought out in 2005.
I'm not convinced you know your history of devices at the time all that well.
WinCE/Windows Mobile/etc. didn't start to succeed against Palm because of great improvements in Windows for devices; it started to take over because of overt stagnation in PalmOS-based devices.
Palm become successful with the PalmPilot and PalmPilot Pro, in part because it was simple, quick, and worked. It avoided many of the complexities of the PC ecosystem, such as the notion of everything being in a "file" (PalmOS used an in-memory record-based storage model instead), so that people could work with the kinds of PDA data they wanted to work with in a more natural manner.
Unfortunately, Palm saw great success, and pretty much decided to keep on doing what they were doing, without really pushing any significant boundaries. They dragged their feet on implementing a colour display. They dragged their feet adding any form of wireless communication (before the Tungsten era, they only communications you could get were either via the serial interface, or via a modem over the serial interface). Palm OS 6.0 (Cobalt) was in development for a good part of a decade, and in the end never shipped on any device. The business itself went from being a stand-alone business to being bought out by US Robotics, which was then bought out by 3Com two years later. The founders didn't like the direction 3Com was taking the company, bailed, and formed Handspring. Meanwhile, only two years later, 3Com spun Palm off into it's own, separate company again. Two years after that, Palm broke itself into palmOne (hardware) and PalmSource (software)...in another two years, palmOne bought out some of PalmSources IP, and the rest of PalmSource was sold to ACCESS. palmOne became Palm again, merged with Handspring, developed webOS -- and a few short years later was bought out by HP.
Now I didn't have a very large peek behind the scenes -- I was out on the sidelines writing the jSyncManager, once in a while hearing from a manager at Palm, but even from the outside it was easy to see that the serious game of Hot Potato being played with/by Palm led to some serious issues with innovation. There really wasn't any. Developments were iterative and slow. Where they were once ahead of the curve, by the year 2000 they were already falling behind. It took them ages just to integrate their system with a phone! The device and platform was nearly stagnant by the time webOS was released, and while innovative, in the end it was too little, too late -- especially when compared to what Apple showed the world with iOS.
The point being, Windows on mobile devices didn't rise in prominence because they suddenly were seen as extremely good devices. They had a UI with lots of small items that needed a stylus to manipulate, their browser was substandard, and the devices needed frequent rebooting. Battery life wasn't great, and when compared to Palm with it's simplified interface, were a PITA to use for normal PDA uses. Sure, they were great for the Windows geek who wanted to show how they had an underpowered Windows PC in their pocket, and became somewhat the standard for use in embedded systems like barcode scanners, but for virtually everyone else, they were nearly useless. However, they did suck much less than Palm did by that time. PalmOS pretty much hadn't changed in 10 years. It took ages for them to add simple things like colour and wireless networking (and even when they did, that was a feature relegated to only one or two models). The core of the OS was pretty close
So I have a method that brute forces something, then I go back and figure out how to do it with a better big 0, and the functionality doesn't change, but that still isn't refactoring, because ... ?
Because it violates the standard definition of "refactoring".
Refactoring is about changing the structure of the code, and not the algorithms used within the code. The goal is typically to reduce coupling, increase cohesion, and (frequently) to improve testability.
Replacing an algorithm with a better algorithm isn't "refactoring", it's "rewriting".
Taking your giant brute-force method and breaking it into smaller parts in a cohesive unit (source file, class, package, etc.) with lowered coupling (perhaps by genericizing previously tightly-coupled bits), in such a way that the individual units have a smaller testing surface -- but is otherwise the same algorithm -- then you've refactored the code, by definition.
Yaz
Objective-C++!
(Yes, there is such a thing. And yes, I'm being facetious.)
Yaz
The new machines lack LPT ports? WTF kind of machine did you buy without an LPT port? A laptop, sure, a desktop? You have to look hard, even today to find a machine that doesn't have a printer port.
It isn't that hard -- Macs haven't had any sort of specialty printer port on any model that I'm aware of for at least 15 years now.
Yaz
Unfortunately, the experiment came to an abrupt end when they threw "ET: The Extra Terrestrial" at the AI, whereupon after an hour of trying different tactics the AI decided that the only way to win was to send a power surge through the system, frying the only working Atari 2600 the researchers could dig up.
This still classifies the AI as coming up with the best solution to the game ever implemented.
Yaz
I very much approve of reading the actual papers. However...
Scientific papers are usually dry and hard to read.
I agree -- however, I find most people with some background in at least one science can at least glean something from reading the abstract, and hopefully some bits and pieces of the statistical analysis (something I admittedly wish I had better background in. If I could afford the time and money to go back to University, I'd love to take stats and philosophy of science).
If papers come to conflicting conclusions, it's hard to figure out which is right. If you're in the field, you read the papers (or at least glance at the abstracts), and have a good sense of which studies have been confirmed and which disproved.
I think part of the problem for many peoples that the state of knowledge in science isn't a binary proposition. In much of science, the answer to 'Is X true?" boils down to five possibilities: 'yes', 'yes with caveats', 'no', 'no with caveats', and 'uncertain' ("more research in this area is required"). So if you're seeing only a few studies, and they seem to be contradictory, the conclusion you need to take is simply "this area requires more research".
And that is my problem with how most people approach science. They see one study, and say 'Science says X!", when in reality, it's really just one study that says X. Unless you have a massive body of scientific work behind a concept (such as evolution, or gravitation), one can't really make any claims as to what "science" says. Consequently, you also shouldn't be disappointed if future research on a new or lightly researched area of science later produces a paper with a contradictory view -- you can't feel that this means that "Science was wrong!". Science is seldom, if ever, "wrong" -- but how much importance people put into preliminary/early/initial results can certainly make them mistakenly feel that way.
I'm somewhat reminded of how people with multiple sclerosis reacted to Dr. Paolo Zamboni's "liberation therapy". Here was a medical doctor who produced a paper where he looked at the neck veins of a group of people with MS, found they had some narrowing of the veins and iron deposits in the brain, and came up with an angioplasty procedure to open these veins up, believing that MS was caused by "chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency" (basically, insufficient blood drainage from the brain). He tried it on his own wife, she subjectively said she felt a bit better, and suddenly MS sufferers around the world were flying to third-world countries to have this done to them (for a fee, of course), and in some countries (like Canada) were begging their national governments to bring the procedure on-shore and to make it part of the social healthcare system.
Unfortunately, Dr. Zamboni's research was deeply flawed. Firstly, his study wasn't "blinded". It also didn't have a comparison group -- he didn't even look for vein narrowing in non-MS populations. Thirdly, he didn't disclose that he had financial ties to a company that made equipment to treat the condition he had "discovered". These are all problematic, but IMO the worst was really the lack of a comparison group for control purposes. As two further studies have shown, the type of vein narrowing Dr. Zamboni detected are equally prevalent in both people with MS and people without MS.
Now MS is a terrible disease. People who suffer from MS live in a sort of quiet bravery, in constant struggle against their condition, and with a lot of hope for a cure. I hope one is found. Unfortunately, all too many of them jumped on this one, and got ill-advised procedures done, which in some cases has led to a worsening of their symptoms, and even death. Damage has been done, all because one p
Yup -- we have a 4yo. The recommendation we received was to give her some small smears of peanut butter around the age of 1 now and then, and to simply watch for any negative reactions.
She had none, which of course doesn't prove anything in and of itself.
I should note that the results from the recent study aren't new. Here are a few papers worth checking out on the subject:
Interestingly, the above link does mention that the advice you received was common advice (at the time of publication in 2008) in the UK, Australia, and in the past in North America (so I don't disbelieve that you received this advice -- although "common" doesn't necessarily imply "supported by research").
Yaz
Yes, but who was the one telling you this? Did you read it in a paper in a peer-reviewed scientific journal? Or was it something your co-workers mother told you because she saw it on Oprah? Or did you just read it in the newspaper?
The problem with what most people "believe" about science is that they don't read the actual science. They read someone else's summary of what they think the science says, and then go by that, believing they "know what science has to say on a subject".
I'll note here FWIW that in my experience, most Medical Doctors are bad scientists. They don't do primary research, and don't necessarily read the primary research. And if they do, they don't necessarily understand the limitations of the primary research. Or they might make a recommendation based upon an overabundance of caution based on incomplete research (which is probably the case of what you thought you knew about peanuts).
Again, as I extolled in another recent post to you -- read the actual research if you want to get an idea of what "science" has to say about a subject. And don't take what you read as cannon until it's been backed up by a number of studies reproducing the first, along with a meta-analysis of all such papers published. Until the scientific community has labelled something as either a "law" or a "theory", it pretty much needs to be considered as not-necessarily-100%-reliable.
Yaz
My guess is you don't read the studies, but just go by what you read in the press.
Look, learning about new discoveries from the newspaper/radio/TV/Internet isn't a bad thing -- but it's only a first step. Unless you're reading specialized research magazines or journals, however, you're probably not getting more than a glimmer of useful information.
As an example (not to be confused with a real-life example; I'm too tired to start researching references for a /. post...), a researcher may do a study, and release a paper saying "X dose of compound Y, commonly found in alcoholic beverage B, lessens human cell type Z mortality by K% in a petrie dish". It will also include a whole pile of caveats, and probably the statement "more research is needed" somewhere towards the end, along with a section on some future research directions.
Mr. Science Desk Writer hears about it from somewhere, looks up the average human lifespan L, and publishes an article with the headline "New research shows drinking alcoholic beverage B will increase your lifespan by K%!". You read it, and decide to go and hit your alcohol cabinet for a drink.
Of course, the column doesn't properly represent the research. It takes data out of context: in this case a) by not properly correlating the dose X of compound Y with how much alcohol you would need to drink to get those dose, b) whether that chemical is converted by your liver to something else before it gets to where it needs to go, c) whether that chemical is even absorbed by the bloodstream to get to human cell type Z, d) whether what was found to be true in a petrie dish will also be true inside a human body, e) that what is found to be true of cell type Z may not hold true for other types of cells, f) whether any benefits attributable to cell type Z are negated by negative effects on any other types of human cells, or any other part of human physiology, and g) that you can't correlate a reduction of cell death to a whole body (i.e.: you can't just take two numbers you read in studies and multiply them together, in this case human lifespan and some cell death reduction percentage).
On top of this, as things turn out, a year later some other researcher (Researcher B) gets some research funding, and decides to replicate the experiments from the original paper. Maybe they do this because they find the statistical methods used by the original researcher don't make for a particularly strong case, or maybe they just want to verify the results. Researcher B sets up the experiment, but does it on a much larger scale (perhaps they have better funding) in order to get more data. After doing a detailed analysis of the data, they find that the effect either a) isn't anywhere as strong as the original paper described, or b) the effect doesn't exist at all, or c) that there was an error in the experimental setup that accounts for the effect (i.e: they found out that in order to help prevent compound Y from breaking down too easily for the experiment, that it had been refrigerated to 5C before being applied to the cells in the culture, and this had a sort of cryonic effect on the cells that extended their lifespan -- that the nature of the compound Y had nothing to do with the measured results). They publish their own paper, again with "more research needed" caveat, and a list of possible future directions.
Mr. Science Desk Writer, of course, may never see this paper, and so may continue to report on the original research. Or they may have moved on to some other area, like whatever the latest NASA probe photographed. Or perhaps they even wind up reporting on the latest research -- and you read it, and suddenly decide "those crazy scientists don't know what they're talking about! They keep ch
The referenced UK survey showed that families with engineers in them can have between 2.5 to 8.6 *times* the statistical occurrence of autism in their children.
Just in case anyone reading your message jumps to the wrong conclusion, I'll remind everyone that correlation != causation, even in this case.
There is, however, growing evidence that microexons -- tiny gene fragments that aren't well understood -- that are linked to altered brain development in individuals with autism (paper).
And (IIRC) there is a certain amount of correlation between problems with microexons and older fathers. Due to the cost and length of their education, engineers may not be having children until they are older (and perhaps more established in their careers), increasing the risk factor (it has been well established that older fathers are more likely to sire autistic children).
I'm not accusing you of having much such an assumption. The correlation is interesting and needs further investigation, however it may just stems from age of fathers, rather than any special mental makeup of engineers.
Yaz
Ok... so if it's an STD and I am one of those monogamous types, could you explain the benefit to me or others for me getting it?
I'm not anti-vaccine, though I am anti-vaccine-if-the-risk-of-the-vaccine-is-greater-than-the-benefit. And no, I don't think autism comes from vaccines, etc.
What, and you can absolutely guarantee that your monogamous partner has never been with someone else and contracted the disease?
You can see into the future and (goodness forbid) know you'll never lose your partner in some unfortunate way, and won't ever be in a new relationship again?
Yaz
A Windows laptop is less expensive than the cellular Internet subscription needed to connect a tablet to EC2 or Azure while away from home.
Maybe where you live, but the cost of my iPad 2 3G service is $15 a month. On top of that, if you I've in an urban centre, you're probably well covered by WiFi anyway. So that $15 goes quite a long way. I can pay for 2 years of 3G service at the cost of what a Windows laptop would cost me, with the benefit being (wait for it)...I don't have to carry a crappy sub-$300 Windows laptop with me everywhere I go. The EC2 Windows instance living in the cloud I use most frequently is a quad-core with 24GB of RAM and a few TB of hard disk space -- and you're not going to find a cheap sub-$300 Windows laptop with those sorts of specs.
Yaz
To complete this analogy, someone who can use a car most of the time and only occasionally needs to do these "tons of things" can rent a truck, such as a moving truck from U-Haul or a pickup truck from The Home Depot. Is there a comparable PC rental ecosystem?
Of course there is. You install an RDP or VNC client on your phone or tablet, take a few minutes to setup a cloud OS instance on your favourite cloud service (EC2, Azure, whatever), and connect. You now have the full PC experience on your phone or tablet, running whatever you want, from wherever you want, for however long you want it.
Yaz
It would be cool to see which programming languages could have the best short chess programs.
I'd nominate Haskell, scheme and prolog to try it in.
To make things fair, I think you'd have to define the valid set of languages as general purpose languages. I could see coming up with a chess-specific language that would be super-efficient in that the language would already have known chess properties as built-in elements.
Yaz
Sigh, forcing people to "learn to code" is just going to create legions of substandard programmers.
Alternately (and somewhat more likely), it will create a legion of future business people with software needs who know how to articulate those needs in a logical way when trying to write a specification.
Yaz
To the average Windows user, their computer is a means to an end.
As an outside observer, that end appears to be to run as much anti-virus/anti-malware as possible.
Yaz