Just one little nit to pick: there was nothing fundametnally wrong with the theory of the luminiferous aether, aside from the fact that it was flat out wrong. As a scientific theory it performed admirably. It even went so far as to provide nice, falsifiable, hypotheses (unlike some modern cosmological theories I could name <cough>string theory</cough>) which could be tested given the technical capabilities of the period. If the theory of dark matter performs half as well as the luminiferous aether, it will have done a great service to the advancement of human understanding, if only by allowing itself to be categorically disproven by a well constructed experiment.
Unfortunately, you seem to be confused about the use of the term planet: we didn't think that a planet could only by X, Y or Z, we had defined a planet to only be X, Y or Z and are now finding things that are technically outside of that definition but which, otherwise, fit our intuitive understanding of what a planet is (or should be). The problem is, of course, that a planet is a made-up thing, a category entirely of human devising. There is no objective reality that segregates things into "planet" and "non-planet" groups. This is the the same problem that bedevils the demarcation between planets, moons and planetoids.
Leave it to Apple to set the trends again. I bet all the other companies are gonna copy them and come out with black laptops now... ; )
Oddly enough, while Apple didn't make the first black laptops (that honor belongs to GRiD Systems, who also invented and patented the clamshell configuration used by all modern laptops) they did popularize the color scheme. Before 1991 laptops tended to be light colored (usually the same beige color as many desktops). However, after Apple released the first PowerBook in 1991 almost every other laptop manufacturer released dark-colored laptops. Even the IBM ThinkPad, with it's iconic black alloy case, was clearly a response to the original PowerBooks.
Another example of the influence of the original PowerBook on the rest of the laptop industry is the placement of the keyboard and pointing devices: prior to the release of the PowerBook pointing devices were either non-existant on PC laptops (purchased separately and hung off the side of the laptop by a hook or bracket) or were situated above the keyboard or on the display and keyboards were placed in a "key-forward" position without a palm or wrist rest. After the release of the powerbook, however, almost all laptops placed pointing devices below the keyboard or used the IBM TrackPoint eraser-head mechanism in the middle of the keyboard itself and moved the keyboard back to allow the user's wrists to rest on the blank space at the front of the laptop case.
When MS-DOS was first written, there was no such thing as directories. Everything lived in the root, and there was no need for path names or path separators. It quickly became necessary to pass arguments to commands, and the natural way to do this was to distinguish them from paramters by pre-pending a character. MS chose to use/.
Time passed, and directories were invented. People started to use / as a path separator, in similar fashion to how references are built up - eg major part/minor part/whatever/etc, say "57b/6". MS obviously had to support directory trees, but didn't want to break backward compatibility (something they are loathe to do to this day), and so could not use/. Thus, they went with the next nearest thing, \.
There is just so much wrong with what you wrote that it is hard to know where to begin, it almost seems that you weren't even alive when these things happened:
while MS-DOS 1.0 did not have an hierarchical file system (a file system with directories and sub-directories) the concept of directories most certainly existed at the time that MS-DOS 1.0 was released (around 1981 or 1982). Other operating systems, including Unix, had been using hierachical file system for at least a decade (Unix was invented around 1972 and had a hierarchical file system almost from day one). While hierarchical file systems were not common on personal computers of the era, they were far from unknown.
The slash was not chosen as the option flag indicator by the makers of MS-DOS, it was adopted in order to be compatible with the dominant personal computer operating system of the day, CP/M, from which much of MS-DOS's design was originally cribbed. The use of the slash to indicate an option flag to a command in CP/M was taken, in turn, from the same custom used by operating systems from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), such as RT-11, RSX-11, TOPS-10 and, later, VMS. The use of the slash character to indicate an option flag was, therefore, a part of MS-DOS from its inception.
Other aspects of MS-DOS were also taken from DEC OS's via CP/M: drive letters delimited by a colon, the 8.3 file name limit, file extensions and much of the original MS-DOS API are all carried over from CP/M and are in CP/M because they mirror similar features of DEC operating systems.
When a hierarchical file system was introduced to MS-DOS with version 2.0 it was pretty clear, at the time, that Micorsoft was trying to turn MS-DOS into a Unix look-alike (the hierarchical file system was unixy, as were a number of new OS APIs, including a whole new set of handle-based file-I/O routines, as well as command I/O redirection and piping in the shell). Since the slash had already been used by the DEC-lovers for option flag indication, and since the new-guard at MS wanted stuff to look as unixy as possible, they settled on the next-best-thing to a slash: a backslash. In other words, the backslash was chosen, not for it's incompatability but because it was as compatible as possible without breaking backward compatability with MS-DOS 1.0 and CP/M.
In fact, the Microsoft folks had very little choice in the workings of MS-DOS 1.0: they bought it for a song from the original author and had to ship it almost immediately. They couldn't have changed the flat file system or the other CP/M-isms even if they had wanted to (they probably didn't want to, initially, since the CP/M 'compatability' was a selling point). To suggest, however, that any of this was done in innocent ignorance, or that any of these things were invented after the introduction of MS-DOS, is simply dishonest: all the concepts that Microsoft later incorporated into MS-DOS 2.0 were present in existing operating systems ten years earlier (1970-73) and were well known to anyone familiar with computers at the time (1981/82).
"In 1874 a company called Sholes and Glidden developed the QWERTY keyboard layout for their typewriters in order to decrease the frequency of mechanical failure."
What are you talking about? According an article referenced from your first link:
The first typewriter had its letters on the end of rods called "typebars." The typebars hung in a circle. The roller which held the paper sat over this circle, and when a key was pressed, a typebar would swing up to hit the paper from underneath. If two typebars were near each other in the circle, they would tend to clash into each other when typed in succession. So, Sholes figured he had to take the most common letter pairs such as "TH" and make sure their typebars hung at safe distances.
He did this using a study of letter-pair frequency prepared by educator Amos Densmore, brother of James Densmore, who was Sholes' chief financial backer. The QWERTY keyboard itself was determined by the existing mechanical linkages of the typebars inside the machine to the keys on the outside. Sholes' solution did not eliminate the problem completely, but it was greatly reduced.
The keyboard arrangement was considered important enough to be included on Sholes' patent granted in 1878 (see drawing), some years after the machine was into production. QWERTY's effect, by reducing those annoying clashes, was to speed up typing rather than slow it down.
This indicates that the QWERTY layout is a direct result of the inventor attempting to prevent mechanical jams in the device. The submitter of the article wrote:
In 1874 a company called Sholes and Glidden developed the QWERTY keyboard layout for their typewriters in order to decrease the frequency of mechanical failure.
The myth to which you are alluding, however, is that Sholes developed the QWERTY layout to decrease the speed of typists (admittedly, to prevent the same jamming of typebars), when, in fact, the QWERTY layout acheived exactly the opposite effect (it allowed typists to type faster because jamming was less likely). The submitter is not claiming that Sholes was trying to slow down the typists (a myth) but that he was trying to reduce typebar jams (the truth).
Again, you don't get to decide whether those things are "irrational" or against the individual's interests, provided the individual's decision is voluntary; only the individual gets to decide that by the definition of voluntary!
You refuse to accept this and as a result, you cannot understand the logic of what I am saying.
So you're saying that nobody ever acts irrationally, under any circumstances, even by their own admission? That nobody has ever done anything in the heat of passion, panic or intoxication? That nobody, ever in the history of the world, has done anything that they later regretted and for which they could not provide, even to themselves, an adequate excuse? You honestly believe that all actions, by all people, under all circumstances are rational, calculated and exlicable?
Human nature tells us that an individual can't possibly make a decision against what he sees as his best interests
Complete bullshit, people do all sorts of things that are completely irrational, because at the moment that they did them they couldn't think straight (due to emotion, intoxication, haste, etc.). In a moment of irrational exuberence (or panic) a persion is at least as likely to act against their own best interests (whether we are talking monetary, psychological or even physical) as they are not to. This is the sort of circumstance in which a person might jump into a freezing cold river to save a drowning person or run into a burning house to save a person calling for help, even though ration thought would tell them that they are far more likely to perish themselves than to effect a successful rescue.
While this sort of action might benefit the species or society or the geneome, it is clearly detrimental to the individual, and can't be reconciled with some naive notion of pure utility and self-interest. Simply put, the absurd notion that people always act in some manner to maximize some intelectual goal (profit, moral integrity, etc.) depends upon the notion that people always act rationally, since it is clear that people don't always act rationally (in fact, many people seem to act irrationally most of the time) the proposition fails on it's own premises.
I know we don't have the previous satellite images from years gone by, but would it be practical to use some sort of image diffing program to look for changes in satellite imagery in the future? Yes, you'd get all the new building activity and whatnot, but we should also be able to tell when new craters hit (or other bigger changes happen) automatically. 'course, I've no idea how often global satellite images are updated, or how long it takes, so it might not be practical any time soon... Hundred years or so from now, it would be fun (if nothing else) to watch movies of how areas changed, both from direct human changes (buildings, etc) and from natural forces (coastal erosion and so on).
In all probability we do have plenty of satalite imagery from pervious years (at least from the last 30 years or so), it's probably even fully indexed and available for download from some someU.S. governmentagency or another.
As for how long it would take to re-image the entire planet: a little more than a month, at minimum, but probably more like a year on average. The calculation is easy: it takes about 90 minutes to make one orbit of the Earth in low orbit. If we assume a conservative low orbit altitude of 100 miles and a conservative aperature for the orbital camera of 22 degrees, we get a ground track about 40 miles wide. The Earth's circumference is about 24,000 miles so it would take 600 orbits to get imagery strips covering the entire equator (assuming a polar or near-polar orbit). That would take at least 600*90 minutes = 5400 minutes / 60 minutes in an hour = 900 hours / 24 hours in a day = 37.5 days.
You can already get time-lapse movies and comaprison photos showing coastal erosion and human impact, the difference over only 10 years is quite noticable (heck, the difference from year to year for barrier islands is astonishing).
Here's my dilemma. I like music and I like my computer. I used to like CD's, but I like my computer more than I like CD's. I don't like the mixed-bag-of-root-kits-and-DRM that CD's want to put on my computer, so I don't buy them. I also don't like the DRM from iTunes, but at least from them I know what I'm getting. But, I've never bought from iTunes. So, where should I buy my music?
You can buy from iTunes.
Once bought, you are free to:
burn a CD (sans-DRM) directly from iTunes
re-rip the songs off the above CDs as MP3s (sans-DRM)
re-encode your purchased music from (DRM'd) AAC to MP3 (sans-DRM)
burn the (DRM'd) AAC files to CD for archival purposes
I regularly do all except for #2 (re-rip from burned CDs) partly out of paranoia (I don't want to lose any of the music I paid good money for, so I have multiple backups in multiple formats) and partly because I like to reencode the music I have on my iPod at half the bitrate (it still sounds pretty good and you fit a lot more music in iPod).
For all the fuss people make about Apple's DRM it's really pretty toothless. The total amount of extra work required to get non-DRM music out of iTunes is pretty minimal: you can do it with nothing more than the software Apple gives you and you don't even need to do any techie stuff (no hex-editing the iTunes binary, no mucking about in the registry, just a round trip through a CD-burner). The fact that the major labels agreed to Apple's DRM scheme almost suggests that they don't really care about piracy so long as it can be made inconvenient (or, alternately, that nobody at the major labels is bright enough to recognize the gaping holes in Apples DRM and thought everything was tight as a drum).
While I have little doubt that Microsoft has the technical ability to build as good a search engine as Google, I don't think that they have the corporate will do it.
People don't seem to recall what search was really like before Google. There were two major problems: first, searches tended to return results based on word frequency, which made the search engines susceptible to simple gaming and gave lots of results that were completely irrelevant to your query (in fact, the least relevant results seemed to be first in most search results). Second, major search engines started taking money in exchange for search placement, which only exacerbated the first problem.
Shortly after Alta-Vista started taking bribes to screw up their otherwise very good search results, that Google came on the scene. Not only did Google have a revolutionary method of ranking pages, but they weren't taking bribes and any rube could tell the difference in the results. On top of this, Google presented a stripped-down search interface that removed all the distractions that had accumulated at the other search sites.
Even now, when Google has started taking payment to place ads on result pages, they still segregate ads from search results, and the search results are unaffected by the paid placement ads. It is this basic ethic that keeps Google popular, all other nonesense aside. Unless Microsoft is willing to remain completely unbiased in the presentation of search results, they will not be able to deliver a search engine better than, or even as good as, Google.
While Microsoft can probably resist the temptation to skew search results for money from outside sources (pay for placement), I don't believe that they can resist internal pressure to skew results in favor of Microsoft products or against Microsoft competitors. Their history as a company argues strongly that they will take evey advantage they can get, even at the expense of a single product (they have introduced bugs into their operating systems to put competitors at a disadvantage, they introduce blatant incompatabilities into their web browser to damage their competition, they cripple thier own products on competing platforms in order to strengthen the position of their own platform). I see no reason to believe that MSN Search is going to be any different.
They may be able to use their monopoly position to put MSN Search in front of most people's eyeballs, and that should guarantee that MSN Search is, at least, the second most popular search engine on the planet, but search is such a quality-dependant function (that is to say, people are very sensitive to the quality of the returned search results, much more sensitive than they are to the quality of output from a word processor or spreadsheet) that even a slight difference in quality is likely to result in an overwhelming advantage in the market.
So long as Google is willing to keep their hands off the search results (as they have, mostly, proven they are willing to do) and Microsoft is not, Google is likely to hold the lead in the search-race.
In a nutshell, too many choices often lead to a inability to decide. It is the same reason people take so long to decide on an ice-cream flavor at Baskin-Robbins or on a dish from a chinese carry-out menu: too many choices. Most people simply don't want to think too hard when making a purchase, so it's a good idea for companies to make the range of choices as few and distinct as possible.
Hate crimes are in essence thought crimes too. Think about it.. hate is a thought. Your reasons for feeling a certain way are thoughts. So in essence you can be subject to more severe penalties purely based on your personal opinions while performing a crime. Not only that you can be convicted of a hate crime alone where your sole criminal act was an expression of hatred for something.
It appears that you misunderstand the definition of a hate crime: hate crimes are, in general, regular criminal acts whose motivation arises out of hatred for a specific class or group (as opposed to crimes motivated by greed, passion or negligence, or crimes motived by hatred for a specific individual). Since we already distinguish crimes based on thier motivation (murder and opposed to manslaughter based on whether or not you intended to kill the victim) there is nothing unusual about the classification of hate crimes based purely on the accused's state of mind.
Again, in general, you can't be convicted of a hate crime simply because you hate some class or group. You can only be convicted of a hate crime if you allow your hatred of that class or group to spur you to commit an otherwise ordinary crime (murder, assault and battery, destruction of private property, etc.) against that class or group. If you have a hatred of Jews, for example, and you set fire to a halal grocery becuase the owners wanted to collect the insurance money, it would awfully hard to charge you with a hate crime. You could still be charged with arson, but since you don't have any animosity towards Muslims, you are pretty much clear on the hate crime issue.
If all you do with your hatred is sit and stew, or even if you engage in non-criminal overt acts (writing a web page, for example), you are not, in general, subject to hate crime statutes. Federal hate crime statutes seem particularly limited in scope, only covering certain sorts of criminal acts (e.g. arson or violent crimes) and only under certain circumstances (e.g. interfering with a federally protected activity).
I guess according to the OwnedByTwoCats School of Shitty Logic that Anti-War people are also Anti-Soldier, and Pro-abortion people are anti-life.
Three points:
OwnedByTwoCats wasn't making a logical argument (there was no series of assumptions and theorems leading to a conclusion) but simply stating the facts based on observation (George Bush, by his actions and policies, has demonstrated a disdain for science. Anti-abortionists are opposed to the recognition of the fundamental human right of self determination and control of one's medical affairs for women).
Many anti-war people, while they may not be opposed to particular individual soldiers, are, in general, opposed to the institution of soldiering: that is to say, they are anti-military, at least in as much as the military exists to fight wars, and if there were no more wars (however improbably such a condition may be) there would be no need for the military.
Unlike the anti-abortion crowd, the pro-abortion crowd, in general, supports life in other situations that do not conflict with the fundamental human right to controls one's medical affairs: most pro-abortion folk are also anti-death penalty, anti-war and pro-enviornment, all of which are, arguably, positions in favor of 'life'. Most of the anti-abortion folks I know are for the death penalty, oppose environmental and endangered species regulations, oppose government sponsored health care for the poor and elderly, and are perfectly happy to have folks in other parts of the world (including pregnant mothers and their unborn embryos or fetuses) bombed into oblivion for no good reason.
This isn't a matter of logic or rhetoric -- though many people in the conservative, right-wing, religious party seem to think that rhetoric is all that matters -- it is a simple matter of examining the statements and actions of people and groups. If someone advocates policies that undermine the teaching and progress of science (teaching religious dogma in biology classes, defunding or outlawing basic research, squelching scientific reports that conflict with administration policies, etc.) it is perfectly reasonable to conclude that that person or group is anti-science.
People keep saying that a write-only spec for MS Office documents is worthless and making vague generalizations that it is much easier to write a conforming document than to read one. Just in case the perils of a write-only spec are not obvious, here is a concrete example of how a write-only spec can be correct, open and utterly worthless:
Suppose that we have some proprietary format which we will call the Hypothetical Text Markup Language (HTML, for short). We submit a spec for writing conforming HTML to a standards body which reads:
To write a conforming HTML document start the document with the string "<html><body>" followed by all of the text you want to have in the document, replacing all occurances of the less-than symbol (<), greater-than symbol (>) and the ampersand (&) with the strings "<", ">" and "&". Finally, the document must end with the string "</body></html>".
So, we have a spec that allows our competitors to generate conforming HTML documents but without any of the fancy bells and whistles that we get to use in the HTML documents we generate from our own programs (such as styled text, lists, tables, images, anchors, etc.). Our competitors are reduced to being input-only clients to our programs, unable to read any but the most rudimentary documents produced by our programs.
Microsoft's submitting a write-only spec standard to ECMA for Office documents is exactly analogous to this toy example I have just presented. We don't even need to pre-suppose Microsoft's malign intent to know that they are going to hold back all kinds of precious details in the write-only spec: if they weren't going to hold all the good stuff back they would be submitting a real spec that tells you how to both write and read any Office format document, not just a conforming subset.
The manager is left out of the equation, and the bellhop's payment is erroneously given as a credit when it should be a debit.
Yes, this is, essentially, how my friend the accountant described the solution. In fact, she told me about the riddle independantly, having heard it in her accounting class as an example of why you must not mix debits and credits on a balance sheet. My fathter, an engineer, simply said that the riddle was based on an error in the order of operations, but couldn't be much more precise.
Three men arrive at a motel late one evening. The motel manager says that he only has one room available but the men can have it for $30. The men agree, pay the manager $10 each, and retire to their room.
A bit later the manager realizes that he made a mistake and that the room rate should have been $25. The manager calls the bellhop, hands him $5 and tells him to take the money up to the men as a refund. On the way up the bellhop thinks to himself that three men cannot divide $5 evenly between themselves, so he pockets two dollars as a tip and gives the men $3 as a refund, which the men easily divide evenly, $1 to each man.
Now, each man has paid $9 which totals $27 for the room, plus the $2 in the bellhop's pocket, for a total of $29: where is the missing dollar?
The only person I ever knew who could solve the riddle was an accountant, everyone else (engineers, computer scientists, mathematicians, etc.) get's terribly flummoxed.
Your project is trivial and spec may be achievable.
Your project is not trivial and spec is copied from some existing product
You have written the spec after making the program.
There is no way around this!
You seem to have missed a few "inevitable" possabilities:
Your project is non-trivial and you have written a trivial and incorrect spec from scratch: even if you meet this spec, the resulting software is, by definition, flawed.
Your project is non-trivial and you have written a non-trivial spec from scratch, but the spec is flawed in a subtle way: the resulting may or may not be flawed, but determining if or how the software is flawed will be nearly impossible.
Your project is non-trivial and you have written a non-trivial but (against all odds) correct spec: the resulting software may or may not meet the spect, but, again, determining whether the software conforms to spec will be nearly impossible.
The fundamental problem with software engineering is that it is inherently complex: possibly more complex than any other human undertaking. Other engineering disciplines have taken, at minimum, centuries to arrive at the current level of predictability and reliability, and those disciplines deal with much simpler systems than are dealt with in software engineering.
Software engineering has had about half a century to mature, so we can't expect that it will be anything like its older siblings. Maybe, in another several hundred years we will be able to produce systems of similar reliability to mechanical or electrical systesm in software on a repeatable basis, but to expect such a thing today is simply unrealistic.
Well, we'll see whether Jobs has the kahoonas to stand up against the record companies.
Um, what (or who) are "kahoonas"? Are they some indie surfer-rock band from Hawaii, or, prehaps, you were trying to write cojones (which I, at least, have only heard pronouced ka-HON-es, with a long-o as in home). You may, in fact, have meant kahunas, in which case I would have a look at who is on the boards of directors of either Apple or Pixar, but that seems like a bit of a reach.
Just a nitpick, however, since I thought the rest of your comment was spot on.
The states will also entice online retailers to collect state and local sales taxes by offering amnesty on taxes the retailers haven't collected in the years since the Internet retail boom began.
A guy named Guido broke my leg last week. He said that if I paid this year's protection money, he wouldn't break it three more times for the last three years I've been in business. In other words, rather than threatening or extorting, Guido enticed me into paying my protection money.
You've got the analogy wrong, it should go like this:
A guy named Guido came by and said that if I paid my protection money from now on he would give me a pass on the last three years when he, graciously, didn't come by and break my legs.
I suppose that there is some kind of latent threat in there (maybe, if I don't pay my protection money, he'll retroactively break my legs?) but it just seems like a bit of a reach: If the states (Guido) have not successfully enforced their tax collection rules on me in the past, why should I expect that they'll be able to do so in the future? Why should I even believe that their rules actually apply to me (assuming that I'm not a resident of the states involved)?
Wouldn't it be best to launch from somewhere outside the United States - say from the equator? It just makes more sense to me if they used something like Sea Launch
If you're a US citizen/company, you still need FAA approval, no matter where in the world you're launching from. No, I don't know why.
Well, I don't actually know why either, but I can guess: First, as with sea going vessels, every aircraft must be registered somewhere and international laws may require that aircraft be registered in the owners home nation (unlike sea going vessels, which, it appears, may be registered in any convenient nation). Second, If an aircraft, operating in international airspace, collides with some other aircraft, causing hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage, or, worse, killing several hundred people, who is held responsible? Nations have gone to war over such things.
In order to avoid such messy circumstances there is probably some requirement that all aircraft operating in international airspace be registered with their home nation, so that the home nation can make appropriate notifications to other nations whose aircraft may be operating nearby or inform the aircraft's operator what airspace to avoid.
you already admit to pirating the OS and building the PCs. I'm not sure how you can recommend buying stock PCs if you build them...but...whatever. It's a lot more likely that it goes like this:
Next month your parents decide they want to upgrade their PC and come to you for advice (because you built their last PC). You tell them to order OS X compatible parts, and you install your pirated copy of the OS on the machine after you build it. Apple gains market share and makes no money.
...
Market share continues to grow, but people aren't actually purchasing any Apple products. Rinse and repeat for your entire family. I doubt you build your friend's computers, but if you do...or your friends are similar to you (i.e. technically savy and have copies of OS X) rinse and repeat for them. In 5 years listen to all of the "Apple is DYING" trolls on slashdot because Apple is a hardware company and isn't selling any hardware. In 10 years your son asks you, "What is Apple?" and you tell him, "Oh we're running the last version of their OS on our Dell. Great company, too bad they went under."
There are two problems with your scenario:
First, buying only OS X86 compatible parts is probably too difficult a task for someone who needs to pirate OS X86 (it's only about $129.00, so what makes you think these folks will be willing to shell out for the $50.00 ethernet card and the $150.00 motherboard when there are "perfectly good" ethernet cards to be had for $10.00 and motherboards to be had for $80.00?). Given that building with OS X86 compatible parts is too much hassle for the pirates, it is likely that the pirated copies of OS X86 will be less stable than the same software running on genuine Apple hardware. This will be a stumbling block to mass adoption of pirated OS X86.
Second, it is unlikely that everyone that wants to run OS X86 on non-Apple hardware would pirate the OS: a copy of OS X is just not expensive enough to deflect all potential customers. Since Apple wouldn't be providing support to all the non-Apple hardware users, even the small fraction of non-Apple hardware users that didn't pirate the OS would be a positive benefit to Apple's bottom line.
Apple doesn't currently do anything to hamper use of OS X (PPC) on older machines (or, for that matter, on machines with processor upgrades), they just don't support it. They would obviously prefer for you to buy a brand spanking new Mac, rather than upgrade you 5 year old machine and slap a $129.00 copy OS X on it, but if you're not going to shell out for new machine, they'd rather get the price of the OS X license than drive you to the competition.
I don't see any good reason to expect this attitude to change very much with OS X86. If anything, the barrier to purchasing a new Mac will decrease, since X86 Macs will be slightly cheaper to manufacture than current PPC machines.
Finally, your implication that an increase in Market share doesn't benefit Apple unless an Apple product (software or hardware) is purchased, is somewhat misleading: Apple has a pretty hard time keeping hardware and software vendors on the platform, mostly due to the small installed base to which Apple-based third party products can be sold (this is the primary reason they switched from ADB to USB, for example). If the installed base were larger, whether or not all (or even much) of that installed base were direct customers of Apple, it would make it much easier for Apple to attact and maintain their flock of third-party vendors.
The absence of oxygen consuming organisms at that time is said to have lead to destruction of atmospheric methane which had hitherto warmed the earth.
So if I am generating methane I'm really saving the planet? Will someone explain this to my wife?
No. If you are generating methane, you are killing the planet by contributing to global warming (methane is a greenhouse gas, and we're currently getting all the warmth we need from the sun). However, 630 million years ago the sun was not as hot or bright as it is today, and the earth needed a prodigious greenhouse effect to keep the planet from freezing, so greenhouse gasses were necessary.
As with so many debates, the real problem is the issue is being misstated, so that there appears to be a contradiction where there is none. "Information should be free" refers to knowledge about facts such as history, public policy, etc. It does not refer to my bank accounts or medical history. Same goes for abortion vs death penalty. The former has not commited a crime that suggests he may not be cabaple of living in society. You may still disagree with views on either, but to juxtapose the two issues for purposes of debate is ignorant.
Oddly, you don't do a very good job of restating the issues in any less misleading a manner.
How are bank account or medical records any less factual than "history, public policy, etc."? I don't think the issue is whether personal information is fundamentally different from public information, but that, as a society, we would like to classify certain facts into protected categories while leaving other facts in the open. While there may be valid public policy reasons for the different classifications, they are, essentially, arbitrary decisions.
As for the question of abortion versus the death penalty, your restatement makes the unwarrented assumption that the person being put to death is actually guilty of some crime. Recentevents have shown, however, that innocent people can easily wind up on death row.
These views (information freedom/privacy rights, abortion/death penalty) are only contradictory based on the context in which they are evaluated. When you violently disagree with another person's views, it is very tempting to cast their views in a context that emphasizes the contradictions and suggests that the other person is a hypocrite. While there may be some truth to this sort of accusation, the tactic is more rhetorical than factual.
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Just one little nit to pick: there was nothing fundametnally wrong with the theory of the luminiferous aether, aside from the fact that it was flat out wrong. As a scientific theory it performed admirably. It even went so far as to provide nice, falsifiable, hypotheses (unlike some modern cosmological theories I could name <cough> string theory </cough>) which could be tested given the technical capabilities of the period. If the theory of dark matter performs half as well as the luminiferous aether, it will have done a great service to the advancement of human understanding, if only by allowing itself to be categorically disproven by a well constructed experiment.
Unfortunately, you seem to be confused about the use of the term planet: we didn't think that a planet could only by X, Y or Z, we had defined a planet to only be X, Y or Z and are now finding things that are technically outside of that definition but which, otherwise, fit our intuitive understanding of what a planet is (or should be). The problem is, of course, that a planet is a made-up thing, a category entirely of human devising. There is no objective reality that segregates things into "planet" and "non-planet" groups. This is the the same problem that bedevils the demarcation between planets, moons and planetoids.
Oddly enough, while Apple didn't make the first black laptops (that honor belongs to GRiD Systems, who also invented and patented the clamshell configuration used by all modern laptops) they did popularize the color scheme. Before 1991 laptops tended to be light colored (usually the same beige color as many desktops). However, after Apple released the first PowerBook in 1991 almost every other laptop manufacturer released dark-colored laptops. Even the IBM ThinkPad, with it's iconic black alloy case, was clearly a response to the original PowerBooks.
Another example of the influence of the original PowerBook on the rest of the laptop industry is the placement of the keyboard and pointing devices: prior to the release of the PowerBook pointing devices were either non-existant on PC laptops (purchased separately and hung off the side of the laptop by a hook or bracket) or were situated above the keyboard or on the display and keyboards were placed in a "key-forward" position without a palm or wrist rest. After the release of the powerbook, however, almost all laptops placed pointing devices below the keyboard or used the IBM TrackPoint eraser-head mechanism in the middle of the keyboard itself and moved the keyboard back to allow the user's wrists to rest on the blank space at the front of the laptop case.
What the hell is Nexis-Lexis? Maybe the submitter meant LexisNexis and maybe the so-called editors should have caught this?
There is just so much wrong with what you wrote that it is hard to know where to begin, it almost seems that you weren't even alive when these things happened:
while MS-DOS 1.0 did not have an hierarchical file system (a file system with directories and sub-directories) the concept of directories most certainly existed at the time that MS-DOS 1.0 was released (around 1981 or 1982). Other operating systems, including Unix, had been using hierachical file system for at least a decade (Unix was invented around 1972 and had a hierarchical file system almost from day one). While hierarchical file systems were not common on personal computers of the era, they were far from unknown.
Other aspects of MS-DOS were also taken from DEC OS's via CP/M: drive letters delimited by a colon, the 8.3 file name limit, file extensions and much of the original MS-DOS API are all carried over from CP/M and are in CP/M because they mirror similar features of DEC operating systems.
When a hierarchical file system was introduced to MS-DOS with version 2.0 it was pretty clear, at the time, that Micorsoft was trying to turn MS-DOS into a Unix look-alike (the hierarchical file system was unixy, as were a number of new OS APIs, including a whole new set of handle-based file-I/O routines, as well as command I/O redirection and piping in the shell). Since the slash had already been used by the DEC-lovers for option flag indication, and since the new-guard at MS wanted stuff to look as unixy as possible, they settled on the next-best-thing to a slash: a backslash. In other words, the backslash was chosen, not for it's incompatability but because it was as compatible as possible without breaking backward compatability with MS-DOS 1.0 and CP/M.
In fact, the Microsoft folks had very little choice in the workings of MS-DOS 1.0: they bought it for a song from the original author and had to ship it almost immediately. They couldn't have changed the flat file system or the other CP/M-isms even if they had wanted to (they probably didn't want to, initially, since the CP/M 'compatability' was a selling point). To suggest, however, that any of this was done in innocent ignorance, or that any of these things were invented after the introduction of MS-DOS, is simply dishonest: all the concepts that Microsoft later incorporated into MS-DOS 2.0 were present in existing operating systems ten years earlier (1970-73) and were well known to anyone familiar with computers at the time (1981/82).
What are you talking about? According an article referenced from your first link:
This indicates that the QWERTY layout is a direct result of the inventor attempting to prevent mechanical jams in the device. The submitter of the article wrote:
The myth to which you are alluding, however, is that Sholes developed the QWERTY layout to decrease the speed of typists (admittedly, to prevent the same jamming of typebars), when, in fact, the QWERTY layout acheived exactly the opposite effect (it allowed typists to type faster because jamming was less likely). The submitter is not claiming that Sholes was trying to slow down the typists (a myth) but that he was trying to reduce typebar jams (the truth).
So you're saying that nobody ever acts irrationally, under any circumstances, even by their own admission? That nobody has ever done anything in the heat of passion, panic or intoxication? That nobody, ever in the history of the world, has done anything that they later regretted and for which they could not provide, even to themselves, an adequate excuse? You honestly believe that all actions, by all people, under all circumstances are rational, calculated and exlicable?
You, sir, are a wanker.
Complete bullshit, people do all sorts of things that are completely irrational, because at the moment that they did them they couldn't think straight (due to emotion, intoxication, haste, etc.). In a moment of irrational exuberence (or panic) a persion is at least as likely to act against their own best interests (whether we are talking monetary, psychological or even physical) as they are not to. This is the sort of circumstance in which a person might jump into a freezing cold river to save a drowning person or run into a burning house to save a person calling for help, even though ration thought would tell them that they are far more likely to perish themselves than to effect a successful rescue.
While this sort of action might benefit the species or society or the geneome, it is clearly detrimental to the individual, and can't be reconciled with some naive notion of pure utility and self-interest. Simply put, the absurd notion that people always act in some manner to maximize some intelectual goal (profit, moral integrity, etc.) depends upon the notion that people always act rationally, since it is clear that people don't always act rationally (in fact, many people seem to act irrationally most of the time) the proposition fails on it's own premises.
In all probability we do have plenty of satalite imagery from pervious years (at least from the last 30 years or so), it's probably even fully indexed and available for download from some some U.S. government agency or another.
As for how long it would take to re-image the entire planet: a little more than a month, at minimum, but probably more like a year on average. The calculation is easy: it takes about 90 minutes to make one orbit of the Earth in low orbit. If we assume a conservative low orbit altitude of 100 miles and a conservative aperature for the orbital camera of 22 degrees, we get a ground track about 40 miles wide. The Earth's circumference is about 24,000 miles so it would take 600 orbits to get imagery strips covering the entire equator (assuming a polar or near-polar orbit). That would take at least 600*90 minutes = 5400 minutes / 60 minutes in an hour = 900 hours / 24 hours in a day = 37.5 days.
You can already get time-lapse movies and comaprison photos showing coastal erosion and human impact, the difference over only 10 years is quite noticable (heck, the difference from year to year for barrier islands is astonishing).
You can buy from iTunes.
Once bought, you are free to:
I regularly do all except for #2 (re-rip from burned CDs) partly out of paranoia (I don't want to lose any of the music I paid good money for, so I have multiple backups in multiple formats) and partly because I like to reencode the music I have on my iPod at half the bitrate (it still sounds pretty good and you fit a lot more music in iPod).
For all the fuss people make about Apple's DRM it's really pretty toothless. The total amount of extra work required to get non-DRM music out of iTunes is pretty minimal: you can do it with nothing more than the software Apple gives you and you don't even need to do any techie stuff (no hex-editing the iTunes binary, no mucking about in the registry, just a round trip through a CD-burner). The fact that the major labels agreed to Apple's DRM scheme almost suggests that they don't really care about piracy so long as it can be made inconvenient (or, alternately, that nobody at the major labels is bright enough to recognize the gaping holes in Apples DRM and thought everything was tight as a drum).
People don't seem to recall what search was really like before Google. There were two major problems: first, searches tended to return results based on word frequency, which made the search engines susceptible to simple gaming and gave lots of results that were completely irrelevant to your query (in fact, the least relevant results seemed to be first in most search results). Second, major search engines started taking money in exchange for search placement, which only exacerbated the first problem.
Shortly after Alta-Vista started taking bribes to screw up their otherwise very good search results, that Google came on the scene. Not only did Google have a revolutionary method of ranking pages, but they weren't taking bribes and any rube could tell the difference in the results. On top of this, Google presented a stripped-down search interface that removed all the distractions that had accumulated at the other search sites.
Even now, when Google has started taking payment to place ads on result pages, they still segregate ads from search results, and the search results are unaffected by the paid placement ads. It is this basic ethic that keeps Google popular, all other nonesense aside. Unless Microsoft is willing to remain completely unbiased in the presentation of search results, they will not be able to deliver a search engine better than, or even as good as, Google.
While Microsoft can probably resist the temptation to skew search results for money from outside sources (pay for placement), I don't believe that they can resist internal pressure to skew results in favor of Microsoft products or against Microsoft competitors. Their history as a company argues strongly that they will take evey advantage they can get, even at the expense of a single product (they have introduced bugs into their operating systems to put competitors at a disadvantage, they introduce blatant incompatabilities into their web browser to damage their competition, they cripple thier own products on competing platforms in order to strengthen the position of their own platform). I see no reason to believe that MSN Search is going to be any different.
They may be able to use their monopoly position to put MSN Search in front of most people's eyeballs, and that should guarantee that MSN Search is, at least, the second most popular search engine on the planet, but search is such a quality-dependant function (that is to say, people are very sensitive to the quality of the returned search results, much more sensitive than they are to the quality of output from a word processor or spreadsheet) that even a slight difference in quality is likely to result in an overwhelming advantage in the market.
So long as Google is willing to keep their hands off the search results (as they have, mostly, proven they are willing to do) and Microsoft is not, Google is likely to hold the lead in the search-race.
<Simpsons voice="homer">Mmmm, steaks and garlic. Ahhgglglglgl...</Simpsons>
It appears you have never heard of the paradox of choice.
In a nutshell, too many choices often lead to a inability to decide. It is the same reason people take so long to decide on an ice-cream flavor at Baskin-Robbins or on a dish from a chinese carry-out menu: too many choices. Most people simply don't want to think too hard when making a purchase, so it's a good idea for companies to make the range of choices as few and distinct as possible.
Here is an excerpt from the book.
It appears that you misunderstand the definition of a hate crime: hate crimes are, in general, regular criminal acts whose motivation arises out of hatred for a specific class or group (as opposed to crimes motivated by greed, passion or negligence, or crimes motived by hatred for a specific individual). Since we already distinguish crimes based on thier motivation (murder and opposed to manslaughter based on whether or not you intended to kill the victim) there is nothing unusual about the classification of hate crimes based purely on the accused's state of mind.
Again, in general, you can't be convicted of a hate crime simply because you hate some class or group. You can only be convicted of a hate crime if you allow your hatred of that class or group to spur you to commit an otherwise ordinary crime (murder, assault and battery, destruction of private property, etc.) against that class or group. If you have a hatred of Jews, for example, and you set fire to a halal grocery becuase the owners wanted to collect the insurance money, it would awfully hard to charge you with a hate crime. You could still be charged with arson, but since you don't have any animosity towards Muslims, you are pretty much clear on the hate crime issue.
If all you do with your hatred is sit and stew, or even if you engage in non-criminal overt acts (writing a web page, for example), you are not, in general, subject to hate crime statutes. Federal hate crime statutes seem particularly limited in scope, only covering certain sorts of criminal acts (e.g. arson or violent crimes) and only under certain circumstances (e.g. interfering with a federally protected activity).
Three points:
This isn't a matter of logic or rhetoric -- though many people in the conservative, right-wing, religious party seem to think that rhetoric is all that matters -- it is a simple matter of examining the statements and actions of people and groups. If someone advocates policies that undermine the teaching and progress of science (teaching religious dogma in biology classes, defunding or outlawing basic research, squelching scientific reports that conflict with administration policies, etc.) it is perfectly reasonable to conclude that that person or group is anti-science.
Suppose that we have some proprietary format which we will call the Hypothetical Text Markup Language (HTML, for short). We submit a spec for writing conforming HTML to a standards body which reads:
So, we have a spec that allows our competitors to generate conforming HTML documents but without any of the fancy bells and whistles that we get to use in the HTML documents we generate from our own programs (such as styled text, lists, tables, images, anchors, etc.). Our competitors are reduced to being input-only clients to our programs, unable to read any but the most rudimentary documents produced by our programs.
Microsoft's submitting a write-only spec standard to ECMA for Office documents is exactly analogous to this toy example I have just presented. We don't even need to pre-suppose Microsoft's malign intent to know that they are going to hold back all kinds of precious details in the write-only spec: if they weren't going to hold all the good stuff back they would be submitting a real spec that tells you how to both write and read any Office format document, not just a conforming subset.
Yes, this is, essentially, how my friend the accountant described the solution. In fact, she told me about the riddle independantly, having heard it in her accounting class as an example of why you must not mix debits and credits on a balance sheet. My fathter, an engineer, simply said that the riddle was based on an error in the order of operations, but couldn't be much more precise.
The only person I ever knew who could solve the riddle was an accountant, everyone else (engineers, computer scientists, mathematicians, etc.) get's terribly flummoxed.
You seem to have missed a few "inevitable" possabilities:
The fundamental problem with software engineering is that it is inherently complex: possibly more complex than any other human undertaking. Other engineering disciplines have taken, at minimum, centuries to arrive at the current level of predictability and reliability, and those disciplines deal with much simpler systems than are dealt with in software engineering.
Software engineering has had about half a century to mature, so we can't expect that it will be anything like its older siblings. Maybe, in another several hundred years we will be able to produce systems of similar reliability to mechanical or electrical systesm in software on a repeatable basis, but to expect such a thing today is simply unrealistic.
Um, what (or who) are "kahoonas"? Are they some indie surfer-rock band from Hawaii, or, prehaps, you were trying to write cojones (which I, at least, have only heard pronouced ka-HON-es, with a long-o as in home). You may, in fact, have meant kahunas , in which case I would have a look at who is on the boards of directors of either Apple or Pixar, but that seems like a bit of a reach.
Just a nitpick, however, since I thought the rest of your comment was spot on.
You've got the analogy wrong, it should go like this:
I suppose that there is some kind of latent threat in there (maybe, if I don't pay my protection money, he'll retroactively break my legs?) but it just seems like a bit of a reach: If the states (Guido) have not successfully enforced their tax collection rules on me in the past, why should I expect that they'll be able to do so in the future? Why should I even believe that their rules actually apply to me (assuming that I'm not a resident of the states involved)?
to which qbwiz responded:
Well, I don't actually know why either, but I can guess: First, as with sea going vessels, every aircraft must be registered somewhere and international laws may require that aircraft be registered in the owners home nation (unlike sea going vessels, which, it appears, may be registered in any convenient nation). Second, If an aircraft, operating in international airspace, collides with some other aircraft, causing hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage, or, worse, killing several hundred people, who is held responsible? Nations have gone to war over such things.
In order to avoid such messy circumstances there is probably some requirement that all aircraft operating in international airspace be registered with their home nation, so that the home nation can make appropriate notifications to other nations whose aircraft may be operating nearby or inform the aircraft's operator what airspace to avoid.
There are two problems with your scenario:
First, buying only OS X86 compatible parts is probably too difficult a task for someone who needs to pirate OS X86 (it's only about $129.00, so what makes you think these folks will be willing to shell out for the $50.00 ethernet card and the $150.00 motherboard when there are "perfectly good" ethernet cards to be had for $10.00 and motherboards to be had for $80.00?). Given that building with OS X86 compatible parts is too much hassle for the pirates, it is likely that the pirated copies of OS X86 will be less stable than the same software running on genuine Apple hardware. This will be a stumbling block to mass adoption of pirated OS X86.
Second, it is unlikely that everyone that wants to run OS X86 on non-Apple hardware would pirate the OS: a copy of OS X is just not expensive enough to deflect all potential customers. Since Apple wouldn't be providing support to all the non-Apple hardware users, even the small fraction of non-Apple hardware users that didn't pirate the OS would be a positive benefit to Apple's bottom line.
Apple doesn't currently do anything to hamper use of OS X (PPC) on older machines (or, for that matter, on machines with processor upgrades), they just don't support it. They would obviously prefer for you to buy a brand spanking new Mac, rather than upgrade you 5 year old machine and slap a $129.00 copy OS X on it, but if you're not going to shell out for new machine, they'd rather get the price of the OS X license than drive you to the competition.
I don't see any good reason to expect this attitude to change very much with OS X86. If anything, the barrier to purchasing a new Mac will decrease, since X86 Macs will be slightly cheaper to manufacture than current PPC machines.
Finally, your implication that an increase in Market share doesn't benefit Apple unless an Apple product (software or hardware) is purchased, is somewhat misleading: Apple has a pretty hard time keeping hardware and software vendors on the platform, mostly due to the small installed base to which Apple-based third party products can be sold (this is the primary reason they switched from ADB to USB, for example). If the installed base were larger, whether or not all (or even much) of that installed base were direct customers of Apple, it would make it much easier for Apple to attact and maintain their flock of third-party vendors.
No. If you are generating methane, you are killing the planet by contributing to global warming (methane is a greenhouse gas, and we're currently getting all the warmth we need from the sun). However, 630 million years ago the sun was not as hot or bright as it is today, and the earth needed a prodigious greenhouse effect to keep the planet from freezing, so greenhouse gasses were necessary.
To recap:
So listen to your wife, and lay off the bean dip.
Oddly, you don't do a very good job of restating the issues in any less misleading a manner.
How are bank account or medical records any less factual than "history, public policy, etc."? I don't think the issue is whether personal information is fundamentally different from public information, but that, as a society, we would like to classify certain facts into protected categories while leaving other facts in the open. While there may be valid public policy reasons for the different classifications, they are, essentially, arbitrary decisions.
As for the question of abortion versus the death penalty, your restatement makes the unwarrented assumption that the person being put to death is actually guilty of some crime. Recent events have shown, however, that innocent people can easily wind up on death row.
These views (information freedom/privacy rights, abortion/death penalty) are only contradictory based on the context in which they are evaluated. When you violently disagree with another person's views, it is very tempting to cast their views in a context that emphasizes the contradictions and suggests that the other person is a hypocrite. While there may be some truth to this sort of accusation, the tactic is more rhetorical than factual.