I bought an iPhone so that I could read and send e-mail on the go, which gave me an edge keeping in contact with my boss and our clients. I bought the bottom of the line 3Gs, less than a year before the release of the 4G, so there was damn little "cool" or "status" involved. Similarly, I bought an iPad (version 1) only a month ago (again, no "cool" or "status" in owning the obsolete older model) because I could build spreadsheets (Numbers), write documents (Pages and PlainText), draw diagrams (iDraw), read and write e-mails (Mail), and connect to our production servers (Prompt, iSSH and ezDesktop, all over a Cisco VPN. which is supported natively by iOS) from a device that weighs a fraction of what my laptop weighs, whose battery last two or three times as long as the laptop's battery, and which cost half what my work laptop cost.
Just spouting off your prejudices doesn't make you right, no matter how many times you repeat yourself. The idea that "open" is a winning strategy in the tablet market is belied by simple observation: the dominant platform in the tablet market, by a factor of at least 10 to 1, is NOT an open platform. The people spending the money obviously don't care about "open" and to assume, as you obviously do, that this is evidence of the buying public's stupidity just brands you as arrogant and elitist. I would say that it's a damn good thing that you are not running one of the companies trying to make and sell tablets, but it seems that most of the companies in the market display the same kind of contempt for their prospective customers as you do, so it wouldn't much matter.
This. For a living I do support and spend most of my time speaking to people who really shouldn't have been granted admin privileges on anything more complicated than an etch-a-sketch.
take the word of one who has procreated: even the nipple is not an intuitive interface. A shocking large number of newborns (including my own daughter) need to be trained to nurse!
congressional investigations don't have to adhere to the same rules of evidence that apply in a court of law, so "inadmissibility" isn't a concern here.
um, that's between $150,000 and $215,000 a year, depending on if we are talking about only working days or not. While that's not CEO-money, it's nothing to sneeze at (it puts you in the top 20% of households in the U.S.A.). I'd say that would be worth my time, and the time of just about everyone that I know, assuming that you could pull it off in no more than 40 hours per week.
Your experiences and DO NOT BUY recommendation for the old OS are irrelevant.
Really? Really?!? In what corrupt and twisted world do you live in where previous products and services from a company are irrelevant to evaluating whether or not to buy current products or services from that company?
"For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive -- you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same programme."
given that most Microsoft software is designed to deliver a bulleted list of features (regardless of how well those features actually work in real use) I don't think that it should be surprising that for the feature "randomly ordered ballot for browser selection" they managed to deliver "browser selection ballot whose choices are not always in the same order."
That they have opened the company to a couple more rounds of expensive and pointless litigation (wasting millions of dollars/euros/whatever for both Microsoft and for EU tax payers) in order to save several thousand dollars of programmer time shouldn't come as any surprise, either.
A device that costs twice as much, doesn't work half the time (did anyone watch the videos?) and has a bizarre collection of user interface metaphors to cover the jury-rigged hodge-podge of processors and operating systems.
When it is first undocked from the main body, you can see that it appears completely unresponsive to touch from the user. Oddly, after a few swipes with the finger go unregistered by the device, the video abruptly comes to an end. Later on, in the next video down the page, we can see that the device is sluggish and crude (it doesn't seem to support any of the obvious multi-touch gestures, using a drag control to resize images rather than pinch or stretch gestures) and the voice over claims that this is because it keeps dropping it's 3G connection (so that they can't show us the Really Cool[TM] demo that would have knocked our socks off, put the iPad to shame, and justified the $2000 price tag).
Sure, the iPad may not be the second coming, but, with competition like this, Apple has nothing to worry about.
The main reason to patent publicly funded work is to prevent anybody from restricting access to that work. I'm not saying that this patent is supposed to be used for that purpose, but other work has been patented specifically to ensure that anyone can use the technology without restriction (as the dedication on the referenced patent indicates).
it appears that nobody, including the submitter, read the actual source article (I know: I must be new here).
In fact, there are 10 screws that hold the bottom plate on the machine, not 13 as indicated in the summary, then three screws that hold hold the battery in place.
Yes, the three screws that hold the battery in place are weird, tamper-resistant screws, but you can easily make a driver for them by filing down three points on a torx driver of the appropriate size (I did this about 15 years ago in order to open my first Gameboy, which used similar tamper resistant screws).
If you're not up for filing down a few points on a torx driver, you have no business fiddling around inside a laptop anyhow.
I would like to see the ID crowd come up with an actual science that could predict whether something was created by an intelligence
The ID/Creationism folks can't ever produce such a thing because they don't believe that there are any examples of things that were not intelligently designed! They literally believe that everything that exists was created intentionally by an intelligent being, even apparently random processes that we can contemporaneously observe (as opposed to apparently random processes whose existence we only infer from a preponderance of evidence) are actually processes directed by the will of the intelligent designer.
Creationists/ID proponents, even when they claim otherwise, are inherently anti-scientific and anti-intellectual; they are driven purely and absolutely by unquestioning faith and an unquenchable drive to cram that faith down the throats of every other living person on the planet. They aren't even interested in the truth or falsity of their claims; the real issue, for them, are the moral and political implications of scientific discoveries. Creationists/ID proponents claim that anything that undermines the faith in a deity (and in the institutions that claim to represent that deity) leads directly to immoral behavior, because they believe that nobody would obey principles of morality unless there were a cruel and vengeful deity waiting to punish us for any immoral behavior after we die (probably because most Creationists/ID proponents are, in fact, immoral sociopaths who only observe the minimum requirements of civilized behavior out of fear themselves).
To call Creationism/Intelligent Design morally and intellectually bankrupt implies, incorrectly, that it's proponents ever had any moral or intellectual capital to squander.
There is a big difference between the subscription plan you buy with your mobile phone and subscription plans like this: with the mobile phone, the thing the customer is actually interested in isn't the physical phone, but the ability to make phone calls on the network, so paying the subscription fee makes sense for the consumer; the cost of the phone, which is usually indexed to the customer's desire for features/prestige/etc. is incidental to the actual thing being sold: access to the wireless network. With all these plans to sell full-fledged computers by tacking their price onto some other service, the problem is that the other service is usually incidental to customer's actual interest: the computer. If the customer doesn't really want the thing you are trying to sell, then you will have a tough time keeping them in the subscription plan.
This was tried by a number of companies in the late nineties, and all failed miserably. Apparently there are a bunch of young MBAs out there who didn't learn the lesson of the iOpener.
Is anybody else feeling really inadequate right now?
Not really, at the age of 12 I did all the stuff I needed or wanted to do, at the time. For everything after the age of 12, that may be a different story...
If you compare the price of OS X with the price of Vista and then compare the volume of each one and what you get for the money you'll quite easily find out that those $129 or whatever isn't enough for the OS.
I haven't the faintest idea what you could possibly mean by this sentence. Apple sells at least 1 million copies of OS X per year (on average. They sell about 1 million copies in the first month or two after a new release, and then it tails off over the next couple years, until the next release). That means they make almost $130 million per year off of OS X sales (not counting the copies bundled with each Mac sold), which is enough to maintain a staff of 650 engineers whose average compensation is $100k. I would guess (entirely uninformed) that the engineering staff for OS X is much smaller than 650 people, probably closer to 65 people. At that rate, OS X upgrade sales alone pay for the entire OS software division several times over.
I've been at a number of companies where the IT staff (or some specific individual on the staff) has come up with a "clever" coded naming method for the hosts. Without fail this has been a disaster either usability (easy recall by technical staff) or security (naming for the platform or function tells an attacker too much). The coding scheme has always been sold as "more professional" that the previous (thematic) naming scheme, but is obviously just an excuse to lord authority over other departments at the expense of any real technical benefit.
While I can understand that the thematic naming schemes can be seen as unprofessional, that's no excuse for the unusable or insecure schemes that replace them. My advice, if you are not going to go the simple thematic route, is to use an even simpler coding scheme: one or two letters followed by two or three numbers: A1 or AB123. This results in more than enough hostnames for any conceivable purpose (625,000 hosts should be enough for anyone), allows a certain amount of meta-coding on top of the names, without revealing anything to would-be attackers (e.g. DNS servers can be named ?D???, mail servers can be ?M???, workstations ?W???, etc.), and, best of all, the names are reasonably memorable (at least as memorable as a license plate). By only using one or two letters, you also avoid the possibility of accidentally assigning "naughty" words as hostnames while handing out sequential names.
The oldest extant computer architectures are IBM System/360 (now called System z, but able to run object code from the 360) and Burroughs B5000 descendants (now called Libra). Both architectures date from the early 1960s (1964 for the System/360 and 1961 for the B5000), so we can guess that the oldest running programs date from the same period, or about 40 years ago.
This also fits well with one of the unwritten requirements of the questions: that there be a language in which to write the lines of code. The earliest computer languages (LISP, COBOL and Fortran) date from only a few years prior to the introductions of these systems (LISP was invented in 1958, COBOL in 1959 and Fortran in 1957).
This also fits well with a couple of long lived software systems with which I am familiar: The IRS tax return processing system dates from 1964, written in a combination of COBOL and System/360 machine code, it only now being replaced by C++ code (the project is called CADE and has been featured in a number of newspaper articles over the past 10 years as a monumental failure). The airline reservation system, SABER, dates from around 1960 and has been in constant use since it went live in 1964. While SABER was originally written for IBM 7090 mainframes, it was transitioned to System/360 in the early 70s.
Embedded systems aren't a consideration at this time scale (the first microprocessor didn't appear until 1971), so we don't need to worry that some washing machine from the 1950s is still running some program written at that time. Still, it sounds like the oldest running programs must be about 50 years old.
is that the radiation detectors actually work, unlike other projects paid for by this government. Once you have something that actually detects what it's supposed to detect, getting the false positive rate down is just an engineering detail.
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Bullshit. And unsupported bullshit to boot.
I bought an iPhone so that I could read and send e-mail on the go, which gave me an edge keeping in contact with my boss and our clients. I bought the bottom of the line 3Gs, less than a year before the release of the 4G, so there was damn little "cool" or "status" involved. Similarly, I bought an iPad (version 1) only a month ago (again, no "cool" or "status" in owning the obsolete older model) because I could build spreadsheets (Numbers), write documents (Pages and PlainText), draw diagrams (iDraw), read and write e-mails (Mail), and connect to our production servers (Prompt, iSSH and ezDesktop, all over a Cisco VPN. which is supported natively by iOS) from a device that weighs a fraction of what my laptop weighs, whose battery last two or three times as long as the laptop's battery, and which cost half what my work laptop cost.
Just spouting off your prejudices doesn't make you right, no matter how many times you repeat yourself. The idea that "open" is a winning strategy in the tablet market is belied by simple observation: the dominant platform in the tablet market, by a factor of at least 10 to 1, is NOT an open platform. The people spending the money obviously don't care about "open" and to assume, as you obviously do, that this is evidence of the buying public's stupidity just brands you as arrogant and elitist. I would say that it's a damn good thing that you are not running one of the companies trying to make and sell tablets, but it seems that most of the companies in the market display the same kind of contempt for their prospective customers as you do, so it wouldn't much matter.
welcome to the nation's capital?
digitalchinky asked:
in reference to CJSpil's reply
to biodata's original question:
It seems to be an abbreviation of the the phrase "it means this."
FTFY
take the word of one who has procreated: even the nipple is not an intuitive interface. A shocking large number of newborns (including my own daughter) need to be trained to nurse!
Yeah, it shocked me too.
Is professional success or fame the definition of a "good" adult?
just sayin'.
then your wait is over
You are welcome. Have a nice day.
congressional investigations don't have to adhere to the same rules of evidence that apply in a court of law, so "inadmissibility" isn't a concern here.
um, that's between $150,000 and $215,000 a year, depending on if we are talking about only working days or not. While that's not CEO-money, it's nothing to sneeze at (it puts you in the top 20% of households in the U.S.A.). I'd say that would be worth my time, and the time of just about everyone that I know, assuming that you could pull it off in no more than 40 hours per week.
jeffgeno wrote:
Really? Really?!? In what corrupt and twisted world do you live in where previous products and services from a company are irrelevant to evaluating whether or not to buy current products or services from that company?
What are they teaching the kids these days?
from the first paragraph of chapter 12 of HHGTTG:
Right. That's bad. Okay. All right. Important safety tip. Thanks, Egon.
given that most Microsoft software is designed to deliver a bulleted list of features (regardless of how well those features actually work in real use) I don't think that it should be surprising that for the feature "randomly ordered ballot for browser selection" they managed to deliver "browser selection ballot whose choices are not always in the same order."
That they have opened the company to a couple more rounds of expensive and pointless litigation (wasting millions of dollars/euros/whatever for both Microsoft and for EU tax payers) in order to save several thousand dollars of programmer time shouldn't come as any surprise, either.
Yeah, the boys in Redmond sure are geniuses.
A device that costs twice as much, doesn't work half the time (did anyone watch the videos?) and has a bizarre collection of user interface metaphors to cover the jury-rigged hodge-podge of processors and operating systems.
When it is first undocked from the main body, you can see that it appears completely unresponsive to touch from the user. Oddly, after a few swipes with the finger go unregistered by the device, the video abruptly comes to an end. Later on, in the next video down the page, we can see that the device is sluggish and crude (it doesn't seem to support any of the obvious multi-touch gestures, using a drag control to resize images rather than pinch or stretch gestures) and the voice over claims that this is because it keeps dropping it's 3G connection (so that they can't show us the Really Cool[TM] demo that would have knocked our socks off, put the iPad to shame, and justified the $2000 price tag).
Sure, the iPad may not be the second coming, but, with competition like this, Apple has nothing to worry about.
What a joke.
Good point! It should be "ungoodware" (or, maybe, "double plus ungoodware")
The main reason to patent publicly funded work is to prevent anybody from restricting access to that work. I'm not saying that this patent is supposed to be used for that purpose, but other work has been patented specifically to ensure that anyone can use the technology without restriction (as the dedication on the referenced patent indicates).
it appears that nobody, including the submitter, read the actual source article (I know: I must be new here).
In fact, there are 10 screws that hold the bottom plate on the machine, not 13 as indicated in the summary, then three screws that hold hold the battery in place.
Yes, the three screws that hold the battery in place are weird, tamper-resistant screws, but you can easily make a driver for them by filing down three points on a torx driver of the appropriate size (I did this about 15 years ago in order to open my first Gameboy, which used similar tamper resistant screws).
If you're not up for filing down a few points on a torx driver, you have no business fiddling around inside a laptop anyhow.
Jeff Atwood is a living example of Sturgeon's Law.
cromar wrote:
The ID/Creationism folks can't ever produce such a thing because they don't believe that there are any examples of things that were not intelligently designed! They literally believe that everything that exists was created intentionally by an intelligent being, even apparently random processes that we can contemporaneously observe (as opposed to apparently random processes whose existence we only infer from a preponderance of evidence) are actually processes directed by the will of the intelligent designer.
Creationists/ID proponents, even when they claim otherwise, are inherently anti-scientific and anti-intellectual; they are driven purely and absolutely by unquestioning faith and an unquenchable drive to cram that faith down the throats of every other living person on the planet. They aren't even interested in the truth or falsity of their claims; the real issue, for them, are the moral and political implications of scientific discoveries. Creationists/ID proponents claim that anything that undermines the faith in a deity (and in the institutions that claim to represent that deity) leads directly to immoral behavior, because they believe that nobody would obey principles of morality unless there were a cruel and vengeful deity waiting to punish us for any immoral behavior after we die (probably because most Creationists/ID proponents are, in fact, immoral sociopaths who only observe the minimum requirements of civilized behavior out of fear themselves).
To call Creationism/Intelligent Design morally and intellectually bankrupt implies, incorrectly, that it's proponents ever had any moral or intellectual capital to squander.
There is a big difference between the subscription plan you buy with your mobile phone and subscription plans like this: with the mobile phone, the thing the customer is actually interested in isn't the physical phone, but the ability to make phone calls on the network, so paying the subscription fee makes sense for the consumer; the cost of the phone, which is usually indexed to the customer's desire for features/prestige/etc. is incidental to the actual thing being sold: access to the wireless network. With all these plans to sell full-fledged computers by tacking their price onto some other service, the problem is that the other service is usually incidental to customer's actual interest: the computer. If the customer doesn't really want the thing you are trying to sell, then you will have a tough time keeping them in the subscription plan.
This was tried by a number of companies in the late nineties, and all failed miserably. Apparently there are a bunch of young MBAs out there who didn't learn the lesson of the iOpener.
Mordok-DestroyerOfWo asked:
Is anybody else feeling really inadequate right now?
Not really, at the age of 12 I did all the stuff I needed or wanted to do, at the time. For everything after the age of 12, that may be a different story...
aliquis wrote:
I haven't the faintest idea what you could possibly mean by this sentence. Apple sells at least 1 million copies of OS X per year (on average. They sell about 1 million copies in the first month or two after a new release, and then it tails off over the next couple years, until the next release). That means they make almost $130 million per year off of OS X sales (not counting the copies bundled with each Mac sold), which is enough to maintain a staff of 650 engineers whose average compensation is $100k. I would guess (entirely uninformed) that the engineering staff for OS X is much smaller than 650 people, probably closer to 65 people. At that rate, OS X upgrade sales alone pay for the entire OS software division several times over.
I've been at a number of companies where the IT staff (or some specific individual on the staff) has come up with a "clever" coded naming method for the hosts. Without fail this has been a disaster either usability (easy recall by technical staff) or security (naming for the platform or function tells an attacker too much). The coding scheme has always been sold as "more professional" that the previous (thematic) naming scheme, but is obviously just an excuse to lord authority over other departments at the expense of any real technical benefit.
While I can understand that the thematic naming schemes can be seen as unprofessional, that's no excuse for the unusable or insecure schemes that replace them. My advice, if you are not going to go the simple thematic route, is to use an even simpler coding scheme: one or two letters followed by two or three numbers: A1 or AB123. This results in more than enough hostnames for any conceivable purpose (625,000 hosts should be enough for anyone), allows a certain amount of meta-coding on top of the names, without revealing anything to would-be attackers (e.g. DNS servers can be named ?D???, mail servers can be ?M???, workstations ?W???, etc.), and, best of all, the names are reasonably memorable (at least as memorable as a license plate). By only using one or two letters, you also avoid the possibility of accidentally assigning "naughty" words as hostnames while handing out sequential names.
The oldest extant computer architectures are IBM System/360 (now called System z, but able to run object code from the 360) and Burroughs B5000 descendants (now called Libra). Both architectures date from the early 1960s (1964 for the System/360 and 1961 for the B5000), so we can guess that the oldest running programs date from the same period, or about 40 years ago.
This also fits well with one of the unwritten requirements of the questions: that there be a language in which to write the lines of code. The earliest computer languages (LISP, COBOL and Fortran) date from only a few years prior to the introductions of these systems (LISP was invented in 1958, COBOL in 1959 and Fortran in 1957).
This also fits well with a couple of long lived software systems with which I am familiar: The IRS tax return processing system dates from 1964, written in a combination of COBOL and System/360 machine code, it only now being replaced by C++ code (the project is called CADE and has been featured in a number of newspaper articles over the past 10 years as a monumental failure). The airline reservation system, SABER, dates from around 1960 and has been in constant use since it went live in 1964. While SABER was originally written for IBM 7090 mainframes, it was transitioned to System/360 in the early 70s.
Embedded systems aren't a consideration at this time scale (the first microprocessor didn't appear until 1971), so we don't need to worry that some washing machine from the 1950s is still running some program written at that time. Still, it sounds like the oldest running programs must be about 50 years old.
is that the radiation detectors actually work, unlike other projects paid for by this government. Once you have something that actually detects what it's supposed to detect, getting the false positive rate down is just an engineering detail.