The name has a lot to do with it. “Apple” is friendly and inviting. Being a common, house-hold item, it is something people can identify with. On the otherhand, most people I speak to have no idea what a “Microsoft” is. Before you tell me that the latter is more successful than the former, I would submit that Apple have accomplished a lot more in shorter time, pushing new technology faster than anyone else in the industry. But I digress.
What I intended to point out was iTunes and the iPod. I do not need to quote statistics; you no doubt know how wildly successful these products have been. But if Apple Computer had adhered to the earlier ruling and refrained from entering the music business, two things would happen. First, they would either struggle to stay afloat or they would start cutting corners. I think that Apple uses iPod and iTunes to fund new development efforts. Second, portable digital music players would be a few years behind and online music offerings would be either non-existent or of inferior quality.
Again, this is largely based not only on speculation, but personal opinion as well and I apologize for that. However, if we eliminate these variables, I think we can be fairly certain that if Apple had done everthing by the books, we would have fewer products at best and inferior products at worst. Neither of these outcomes is beneficial to you and I. In some way or another, we would be worse off if the law had been obeyed.
I support that statement with other observations of our so-called Intellectual Property system at work. There are companies out there with massive patent portfolios who have absolutely no intention whatsoever of implementing those ideas. If someone comes along and does some actual work, they sue them into the ground. (I am sure you are aware of NTP v RIM.) This ultimately has a chilling effect on the industry which stifles progress.
Imagine for a moment if Apple Computer had obeyed copyright and trademark laws to a “t” in this case. What products we never have seen the light of day? When you ponder this for a moment, it becomes clear how out-of-hand this nonsense is.
I cannot believe there is anybody out there nay-saying this move. Nintendo, by changing the name to something “controversial” has just drummed up more buzz than the “coolest-name-evar” could possibly generate. Every so-called analyst and commentator who is weighing in on this misses the point: it has nothing to do with being a good or bad name but everything to do with forcing it into our collective consciousness. Wii will always be with you now.
It is tragic that the moderators are so thick-skulled that they failed to notice the humor in swapping “Windows” with “Mac OS X” (and other similar references) in this troll. Rest assured that at least someone “got it.”
I think I put it best in an older post on this matter of software getting “bloated” or “ramshackle”. A load of nonsense from people attempt to appear as if they possess an understanding of technology, but really do not.
Suddenly, Ballmer got that twinkle in his eye. For no reason whatsoever, he leapt out of his seat and hurled the chair at Steve. The surprise only shook Jobs for a fraction of a moment as he grabbed a small blue box out of his pocket and clicked a button. His Reality Distortion Field Generator went into full effect, bathing him in a glow of white light. In defiance of the laws of physics and indeed any laws pertaining to the natural universe, the chair was deflected harmlessly and fell to the ground. Rising slowly, Jobs slipped the RDF machine into the pocket of his blue jeans, brushed off his black turtleneck sweater, took a swig from the bottle of water on the desk before sitting back down again to continue the meeting.
When did Ballmer and Jobs start throwing chairs at each other? There has to be a chair throwing scene in there somewhere or the realism of your script is out the window.
Suddenly, Steve Ballmer got that twinkle in his eye. For no reason whatsoever, hHe leapt out of his seat and hurled the chair at Jobs. The surprise only shook Jobs for a fraction of a moment as he grabbed a small blue box out of his pocket and clicked a button. In a remarkly strange, but yet visually appealing fashion, he defied the laws of physics and became depthless as he moved to the left—out of thrown chair's path—as if he were positioned on the face of a rotating cube. A moment later, a two-dimensional Jobs repeared and moved back in from the right. Rising slowly, looking rather proud in his bluejeans and black turtleneck, Jobs took a bottle of water from the desk and had a sip before sitting back down again to continue the meeting.
Again, the military budget is only 20% of all federal spending. It is certainly not enormous when it is compared to the rest of what the government spends our money on.
A military budget of nearly $440 billion seems like a lot to me. If we could eliminate our military presence in the middle east, I think that number would go down considerably.
What about our military acting as a humanitarian force after the 2004 tsunami (and nearly every other disaster). Should we stop spending money for these things as well?
We should most certainly allow for such uses of our military. But the necessary funds could (and I think would) be acquired by emergency appropriations bills. The same way that the Bush Administration currently gets all of its Iraq war supplements. And furthermore, I would rather see our money spent on humanitarian efforts rather than shipments of cruise missiles and tanks.
As for our “insatiable thirst for oil”... the last time I checked, no one held a gun to peoples' heads and forced them to drive gas-guzzing SUVs or other junkers. If you really want to affect change, you need to go to the people who are part of the problem and stop them instead of trying to deny reality.
This is a red-herring. Despite the motivations of people to consume far more resources than they should, they are still doing it. The end result is that we are faced with more conflict as we fight to acquire those resources.
Find alternative energy sources and we can have a win-win situation. People can drive their SUVs (which the market seems to demand) and we can avoid creating conditions of suffering for people abroad. No matter how you slice it, using more money now to find better energy sources cuts costs across the board for the long-term. Or we can keep pumping up our military indefinitely and keep applying band-aid solutions to a systemic problem. You be the judge.
I think that is incorrect and is perhaps one of the greatest tragedies of Christianity and similar religions because of the psychological damage it does. This nonsense that all people are born sinners is a remarkably effective tool for subjugation. When a person is born, that person is totally innocent. He or she is guilty of no crime and is not responsible for his or her actions. That may change once the person learns socially unacceptable behavior (which is relative to the society, by the way) from others, but nevertheless, the person has the will to choose to not do anything wrong. Supernatural beings do not enter into the equation and there is nothing to indicate that the person is “born bad.”
So, the clergy in some religions are real happy to tell everyone they are sinners or have a sinful nature from birth. But why? Because... they said so? Because some religious book written by purveyors of said religion said so? Is there any defense of this? There is no reason other than they get to define both the problem (your problem) and the solution. Pretty lucrative position for them to be in.
I think people are born neutral but with moral tendencies. Any one of us is capable of doing both good and harm. Furthermore, our morality is a product of evolution. It is essential for our survival that we function in a “herd” (what we call civilization) and that causing injury to members of the herd harms the herd in general. Some people certainly do choose to ignore this morality if they somehow think that the risk and consequences outweigh the reward, but in general everyone can identify a desire to not inflict harm on others. This is why, for instance, we cringe or attain a heightened state of alertness when we observe the misfortune of others. It is hardwired into us that injury and insult is bad and should be avoided. It negatively impacts our survival if others we depend on are hurt. So ultimately, ensuring the wellness of those around us is a naturally selected mechanism to help our survival.
What the parent poster also forgot to realize is that part of the reason we have such an enormous military budget is to deal with the global unrest caused by our insatiable thirst for oil. If we were to eliminate our dependence on foreign energy sources, we could leave the middle east alone and stop propping-up dictators and making life miserable for the people who want to kill us that presently live on top of “our oil.”
This study does at least show that, if whatever pertinent deity exists, it cares more about its ego than the needs of people who may die as the result of an illness. (Which, because the fact of existence remains hidden, ensures that more people will suffer eternal damnation.) In otherwords, “God” cares les about human life and than about being worshipped by those with superstition. (Which is ironic because if we were created, we were created with logical, thinking minds which drive us to discover cause and effect rather than pursue blind faith.) So whether or not such a supernatural entity exists, we must find ways to advance and rely upon our science rather begging for help from invisible men in the sky.
I had a very traumatic experience as a young boy which involved beer at a church... but it also involved a Catholic priest and a locked back room, you insensitive clod!
This is a little OT, but why would those people be interested in giving their money to such a cause?
There is nothing in the Christian bible which says it is wrong to look at naked people. There isn't even anything in it that says you can't have sex before marriage. What it does say that if you are married, you shouldn't go sleeping around with other people. But then their bible condones people having 1,000 sex partners, so even that is a toss-up.
The whole bit about making sure only couples married within a religious institution can have sex is a form of church-instituted eugenics. It is relatively modern concept in the grand scheme of things. They want only people with “faith” to have kids. The Catholics even have a more proactive breeding program where they forbid couples to not have as many children as possible.
Anyway, the people caught up in these messy schemes have no personal interest in preventing human beings from engaging in human sexuality (oh noes). So they should keep their tithes. It is the orgaizations that have suckered them in that want this crap because it ensures more income from future generations.
Some of the content of the article seemed to imply that, but maybe I just had a knee-jerk reaction. One quote I zeroed in on was “Windows is now so big and onerous because of the size of its code base... just slows everything down.” Looking over it again, I read too much into this statement. So while you are correct to point out my error (and thank you for doing so), I think it is nonetheless true that people blame the size of any give piece of software as the cause of poor performance.
Everyone likes to think they are experts on technical design by relating to physical manifestations. Saying that a piece of software is big and bulky with lots of patches and duct-tape is really convincing when you are trying to tell someone that it is slow and onerous. (Just the other day, I heard someone commenting on the radio that “They” are building a “New Internet” because the one we have is so patched and jury-rigged that it cannot be fixed. See all the confusion you people with your “Web 2.0” terminology are creating?) Fortunately, that is just not the case. Software is not a bridge or a house or a car or a toolshed.
I am no Windows apologist (hate it), but just because it has nine hundred million gazillion lines of code (oh noes) does not mean it is slow for the user (and in fact, Windows is not slow). Consider the 90/10 Law which states that a program spends 90% of its time in 10% of the code, and you realize that all that so-called bloat does not matter that much. Two decades of legacy libraries which remain unlinked and unloaded are not going to cause the system any headache. (There are caveats here, but for all intents and purposes, the win16 libraries in WindowsXP are not causing slower frame rates, or making Office users less productive, or taking floating point operations away from mathematicians. What does, if anything, slow down Windows is the presence of many services which the user simply does not use (or want). When you install Office, for example, its libraries are preloaded at start up to help make the program load more responsively when requested (this is also the case with Internet Explorer). This takes up memory, which in many cases will cause swapping. Furthermore, a principle cause of sluggishness in Windows is all the garbage users add to the system after it is installed. This is hardly to blame on Microsoft.
These arguments that software performance is inversely proportional to the amount of code in it are nonsense, and is demonstrated in many areas. A practical example would be found in how much code is in your average Linux distribution. An academic example might compare the tiny implementation of a Bubble Sort to the much longer implementation of a Radix Sort. I suppose the experts at the New York Times would have us believe Bubble is faster because it can be as small as four lines of code (or less).
Now, do not get this confused with the maintanence of software. Yes, indeed, as software grows in complexity, it becomes much more difficult to change it and fix it without causing additional problems. But this is not necessarily a factor on runtime performance.
It may seem silly, but I think it is worth transfering your domains away to another service if you disapprove. As a left-leaning individual, I would cease giving business to an organization which, say, started donating to RNC. Similarly, I dislike Microsoft and I do not want to support businesses who support them. All of us who are likewise compelled should inform Go Daddy of our view point and move on. The only question is, what is a good alternative?
Slashdot Mirror
Apple introducing desktop Macintoshes with these chips.
If only.
The name has a lot to do with it. “Apple” is friendly and inviting. Being a common, house-hold item, it is something people can identify with. On the otherhand, most people I speak to have no idea what a “Microsoft” is. Before you tell me that the latter is more successful than the former, I would submit that Apple have accomplished a lot more in shorter time, pushing new technology faster than anyone else in the industry. But I digress.
What I intended to point out was iTunes and the iPod. I do not need to quote statistics; you no doubt know how wildly successful these products have been. But if Apple Computer had adhered to the earlier ruling and refrained from entering the music business, two things would happen. First, they would either struggle to stay afloat or they would start cutting corners. I think that Apple uses iPod and iTunes to fund new development efforts. Second, portable digital music players would be a few years behind and online music offerings would be either non-existent or of inferior quality.
Again, this is largely based not only on speculation, but personal opinion as well and I apologize for that. However, if we eliminate these variables, I think we can be fairly certain that if Apple had done everthing by the books, we would have fewer products at best and inferior products at worst. Neither of these outcomes is beneficial to you and I. In some way or another, we would be worse off if the law had been obeyed.
I support that statement with other observations of our so-called Intellectual Property system at work. There are companies out there with massive patent portfolios who have absolutely no intention whatsoever of implementing those ideas. If someone comes along and does some actual work, they sue them into the ground. (I am sure you are aware of NTP v RIM.) This ultimately has a chilling effect on the industry which stifles progress.
Imagine for a moment if Apple Computer had obeyed copyright and trademark laws to a “t” in this case. What products we never have seen the light of day? When you ponder this for a moment, it becomes clear how out-of-hand this nonsense is.
I cannot believe there is anybody out there nay-saying this move. Nintendo, by changing the name to something “controversial” has just drummed up more buzz than the “coolest-name-evar” could possibly generate. Every so-called analyst and commentator who is weighing in on this misses the point: it has nothing to do with being a good or bad name but everything to do with forcing it into our collective consciousness. Wii will always be with you now.
Being able to read source code makes it easier to find flaws in said code. Details at 11.
Where do they think all these electronics get manufactured otherwise? Hint: not here in the good 'ol U-S-of-A.
It is tragic that the moderators are so thick-skulled that they failed to notice the humor in swapping “Windows” with “Mac OS X” (and other similar references) in this troll. Rest assured that at least someone “got it.”
I think I put it best in an older post on this matter of software getting “bloated” or “ramshackle”. A load of nonsense from people attempt to appear as if they possess an understanding of technology, but really do not.
But with a good conscience.
Suddenly, Ballmer got that twinkle in his eye. For no reason whatsoever, he leapt out of his seat and hurled the chair at Steve. The surprise only shook Jobs for a fraction of a moment as he grabbed a small blue box out of his pocket and clicked a button. His Reality Distortion Field Generator went into full effect, bathing him in a glow of white light. In defiance of the laws of physics and indeed any laws pertaining to the natural universe, the chair was deflected harmlessly and fell to the ground. Rising slowly, Jobs slipped the RDF machine into the pocket of his blue jeans, brushed off his black turtleneck sweater, took a swig from the bottle of water on the desk before sitting back down again to continue the meeting.
Suddenly, Steve Ballmer got that twinkle in his eye. For no reason whatsoever, hHe leapt out of his seat and hurled the chair at Jobs. The surprise only shook Jobs for a fraction of a moment as he grabbed a small blue box out of his pocket and clicked a button. In a remarkly strange, but yet visually appealing fashion, he defied the laws of physics and became depthless as he moved to the left—out of thrown chair's path—as if he were positioned on the face of a rotating cube. A moment later, a two-dimensional Jobs repeared and moved back in from the right. Rising slowly, looking rather proud in his bluejeans and black turtleneck, Jobs took a bottle of water from the desk and had a sip before sitting back down again to continue the meeting.
It is interesting that thousands, possibly tens of thousands of people all thought the exact same thing as they read this article summary.
I hope that is not sarcasm. ;)
A military budget of nearly $440 billion seems like a lot to me. If we could eliminate our military presence in the middle east, I think that number would go down considerably.
We should most certainly allow for such uses of our military. But the necessary funds could (and I think would) be acquired by emergency appropriations bills. The same way that the Bush Administration currently gets all of its Iraq war supplements. And furthermore, I would rather see our money spent on humanitarian efforts rather than shipments of cruise missiles and tanks.
This is a red-herring. Despite the motivations of people to consume far more resources than they should, they are still doing it. The end result is that we are faced with more conflict as we fight to acquire those resources.
Find alternative energy sources and we can have a win-win situation. People can drive their SUVs (which the market seems to demand) and we can avoid creating conditions of suffering for people abroad. No matter how you slice it, using more money now to find better energy sources cuts costs across the board for the long-term. Or we can keep pumping up our military indefinitely and keep applying band-aid solutions to a systemic problem. You be the judge.
I think that is incorrect and is perhaps one of the greatest tragedies of Christianity and similar religions because of the psychological damage it does. This nonsense that all people are born sinners is a remarkably effective tool for subjugation. When a person is born, that person is totally innocent. He or she is guilty of no crime and is not responsible for his or her actions. That may change once the person learns socially unacceptable behavior (which is relative to the society, by the way) from others, but nevertheless, the person has the will to choose to not do anything wrong. Supernatural beings do not enter into the equation and there is nothing to indicate that the person is “born bad.”
So, the clergy in some religions are real happy to tell everyone they are sinners or have a sinful nature from birth. But why? Because... they said so? Because some religious book written by purveyors of said religion said so? Is there any defense of this? There is no reason other than they get to define both the problem (your problem) and the solution. Pretty lucrative position for them to be in.
I think people are born neutral but with moral tendencies. Any one of us is capable of doing both good and harm. Furthermore, our morality is a product of evolution. It is essential for our survival that we function in a “herd” (what we call civilization) and that causing injury to members of the herd harms the herd in general. Some people certainly do choose to ignore this morality if they somehow think that the risk and consequences outweigh the reward, but in general everyone can identify a desire to not inflict harm on others. This is why, for instance, we cringe or attain a heightened state of alertness when we observe the misfortune of others. It is hardwired into us that injury and insult is bad and should be avoided. It negatively impacts our survival if others we depend on are hurt. So ultimately, ensuring the wellness of those around us is a naturally selected mechanism to help our survival.
Which makes us not innately sinners.
What the parent poster also forgot to realize is that part of the reason we have such an enormous military budget is to deal with the global unrest caused by our insatiable thirst for oil. If we were to eliminate our dependence on foreign energy sources, we could leave the middle east alone and stop propping-up dictators and making life miserable for the people who want to kill us that presently live on top of “our oil.”
This study does at least show that, if whatever pertinent deity exists, it cares more about its ego than the needs of people who may die as the result of an illness. (Which, because the fact of existence remains hidden, ensures that more people will suffer eternal damnation.) In otherwords, “God” cares les about human life and than about being worshipped by those with superstition. (Which is ironic because if we were created, we were created with logical, thinking minds which drive us to discover cause and effect rather than pursue blind faith.) So whether or not such a supernatural entity exists, we must find ways to advance and rely upon our science rather begging for help from invisible men in the sky.
I had a very traumatic experience as a young boy which involved beer at a church... but it also involved a Catholic priest and a locked back room, you insensitive clod!
This is a little OT, but why would those people be interested in giving their money to such a cause?
There is nothing in the Christian bible which says it is wrong to look at naked people. There isn't even anything in it that says you can't have sex before marriage. What it does say that if you are married, you shouldn't go sleeping around with other people. But then their bible condones people having 1,000 sex partners, so even that is a toss-up.
The whole bit about making sure only couples married within a religious institution can have sex is a form of church-instituted eugenics. It is relatively modern concept in the grand scheme of things. They want only people with “faith” to have kids. The Catholics even have a more proactive breeding program where they forbid couples to not have as many children as possible.
Anyway, the people caught up in these messy schemes have no personal interest in preventing human beings from engaging in human sexuality (oh noes). So they should keep their tithes. It is the orgaizations that have suckered them in that want this crap because it ensures more income from future generations.
Some of the content of the article seemed to imply that, but maybe I just had a knee-jerk reaction. One quote I zeroed in on was “Windows is now so big and onerous because of the size of its code base ... just slows everything down.” Looking over it again, I read too much into this statement. So while you are correct to point out my error (and thank you for doing so), I think it is nonetheless true that people blame the size of any give piece of software as the cause of poor performance.
Everyone likes to think they are experts on technical design by relating to physical manifestations. Saying that a piece of software is big and bulky with lots of patches and duct-tape is really convincing when you are trying to tell someone that it is slow and onerous. (Just the other day, I heard someone commenting on the radio that “They” are building a “New Internet” because the one we have is so patched and jury-rigged that it cannot be fixed. See all the confusion you people with your “Web 2.0” terminology are creating?) Fortunately, that is just not the case. Software is not a bridge or a house or a car or a toolshed.
I am no Windows apologist (hate it), but just because it has nine hundred million gazillion lines of code (oh noes) does not mean it is slow for the user (and in fact, Windows is not slow). Consider the 90/10 Law which states that a program spends 90% of its time in 10% of the code, and you realize that all that so-called bloat does not matter that much. Two decades of legacy libraries which remain unlinked and unloaded are not going to cause the system any headache. (There are caveats here, but for all intents and purposes, the win16 libraries in WindowsXP are not causing slower frame rates, or making Office users less productive, or taking floating point operations away from mathematicians. What does, if anything, slow down Windows is the presence of many services which the user simply does not use (or want). When you install Office, for example, its libraries are preloaded at start up to help make the program load more responsively when requested (this is also the case with Internet Explorer). This takes up memory, which in many cases will cause swapping. Furthermore, a principle cause of sluggishness in Windows is all the garbage users add to the system after it is installed. This is hardly to blame on Microsoft.
These arguments that software performance is inversely proportional to the amount of code in it are nonsense, and is demonstrated in many areas. A practical example would be found in how much code is in your average Linux distribution. An academic example might compare the tiny implementation of a Bubble Sort to the much longer implementation of a Radix Sort. I suppose the experts at the New York Times would have us believe Bubble is faster because it can be as small as four lines of code (or less).
Now, do not get this confused with the maintanence of software. Yes, indeed, as software grows in complexity, it becomes much more difficult to change it and fix it without causing additional problems. But this is not necessarily a factor on runtime performance.
I hope it includes a performance of the chilling “Where There's A Whip, There's A Way.”
With support from Tommy, Steve is the man now, dog.
It may seem silly, but I think it is worth transfering your domains away to another service if you disapprove. As a left-leaning individual, I would cease giving business to an organization which, say, started donating to RNC. Similarly, I dislike Microsoft and I do not want to support businesses who support them. All of us who are likewise compelled should inform Go Daddy of our view point and move on. The only question is, what is a good alternative?