The robot can I.D. guns by the sound. It won't be fooled by cheap rifles if it is listening for a sniper shot. It said that in the summary, for Pete's sake!
I can't tell you how many times I've been congratulated on how skilled I am "for a woman" (even though I'm better than all the males in my dept.) or been asked why I'm interested in science/technology, because isn't that strange for a woman?
Well, it is unusual for a woman to be so skilled, and it is an unusual field for women to be interested in. That's what the article is about. So what's the problem? Why shouldn't they congratulate you on your skills, or wonder why you chose tech?
Fine, you don't have to buy it. But consider the following.
1) 3G is a BIG DEAL...Wake me when iPhone supports it... or when it actually manages to download an entire web page, whichever comes first.
I'll set your alarm clock for next year, then. The iPhone is starting out with EDGE, but the next one, for the European market, will have 3G. The 3G argument is FUD.
2) Closed platform. Hello? What?... My phone also contains a couple of hacked together apps of my own that use the (admittedly piss-poor) data connection to grab Internet data while I'm on the road that's useful to me.
Yeah, a lot of third party apps are piss-poor. That's one of the reasons why I got rid of my Treo. It crashed all the time. Even my Sony-Ericsson has recently started acting strange, and I don't have any third party apps on there! I'm guessing Cingular pushed a bogus update.
The point is, the more weird software you put on a device, the more likely it is that the device randomly turns into a paperweight. We have no idea how restrictive Apple intends to be about third-party software (by which I mean software developed by third parties and offered through Apple's site to install on the iPhone). Apple doesn't have a track record in this area. Could be good, could be bad. Maybe the iPhone is visible as a hard drive, and you just have to copy the software to the right folder.
But even if Apple completely locked in the software, I can still see where they are coming from. The iPhone is a purpose-built device. It should perform that purpose. If third-party apps interfere with that purpose -- and evidence suggests that they usually do -- I don't have a problem with restricting them. Obviously, opinions will differ on this, and you make good points.
It becomes a choice between stability and extra features. Which would you rather have?
3) Dumb Phone at a Smartphone Price. What does the iPhone do that my wife's Motorola SLVR doesn't? Do I hear crickets?
Usability. It really is a feature. A very important one, and one that has to be applied throughout every other feature offered. As a Mac user, you ought to understand that. The iPhone looks like it will be dead-simple to use.
The only thing the iPhone has going for it is eye candy... and that will get old really quick.
What eye candy? I saw large, clearly labeled buttons. Those are functionally useful, because they are large and clearly labeled. I saw flick scrolling. Functionally useful, because it is fast. I saw the scrolling bounce at the end. Functionally useful, because if it just stopped, it'd jar you and you might try to flick again. I saw touch-based pan-and-zoom. Functionally useful, obviously the best way to do it. Tilt sensor, functionally useful, because it saves adding one more control to the screen. The only thing I'd classify as eye candy is that cover flow thing. Jobs made a big deal out of it, I'm like "whatever." But that was it.
Oh wait, it has color graphics and semi-transparent overlays. Is that what you meant? But so does everything else, including the OpenMoko. Actually, I just saw some OpenMoko screenshots, and it doesn't look half as clean as the iPhone. Lots of gratuitous reflections and other busy elements -- I'd certainly consider that eye-candy. Not something you want to deal with when on the go, which you will be if you are looking at your phone at all.
I've mentioned it twice; the OpenMoko platform is going to give this phone a run for its money. It's going to be available before the iPhone and will be an extensible and open platform. I for one will be buying one of the first-gen devices because I want to develop for it. It doesn't have the camera, or the tilt sensors... neither of which are things I need anyway. It'll be the first of many devices based
Re:Because you'll end up at Lisp.
on
Lisp and Ruby
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· Score: 1
What most people don't realize is that Lisp is the inherent representation of virtually all programming languages. This is even true for languages like C, Java, Smalltalk, and Ruby. We can plainly see this by the very fact that basically every compiler or interpreter for those languages parses the language into an abstract syntax tree. And that's exactly what Lisp is: a textual representation of an AST.
You say that like it's a good thing. Look, assembly language is the inherent representation of all code. Assembly language syntax is simple, a textual representation of machine code. It's as powerful as it gets, but no one uses it because it is verbose and doesn't group things into statements, blocks, or data structures that can be easily grokked. It's just a stream of opcodes, with some macros to make things easier.
Lisp is the same way. Everything's a list, or an AST to use your perspective. Yay, hooray. But it doesn't let you group things, it doesn't let you collect, isolate, and distinguish concepts. It's a mass of words and parens.
In the same way that assembly is too close to the metal, Lisp is too close to the...not the metal, but to a different kind of machine. It isn't really a language for humans to work with. It isn't a high-level language, syntactically, conceptually.
Re:Genuine question about perl vs ruby
on
Lisp and Ruby
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· Score: 1
Why does coming from Japan make it not surprising that it's slow and has little support for Unicode?
The Japanese do not like Unicode. They prefer using one of their own encodings (I believe there are two major ones). From what I can gather, the reason is not-invented-here syndrome or a strawman argument against Unicode's ideograph system.
Of course, it could just be a vocal minority. I don't live in Japan myself, so I can't tell.
My CEO is a really nice guy. This topic came up once when I was conversing with him, and this is what he said about income: CEOs have to be paid more than they'd think they'd make running their own company.
This makes perfect sense. CEOs have a great deal of self-confidence. Most of them have started and run their own company at least once. They know if they did it once, they can do it again. And they know they can make hella money doing just that. So why should they work for your company if they can start their own? And that is is why they get paid so well.
Hey, that video of the Gizmodo thing, with the augmented reality game, looks pretty awesome! I hadn't realized the techniques involved had gotten that good yet. There is definitely potential there.
We saw the smudging in the keynote. It will smudge, the question is how distracting that will be. I can tell you it's pretty annoying on my Sony-Ericsson.
Re:I've been using vi for so long...
on
The Birth of vi
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· Score: 1
I love my vvii
In the midst of heavy editing, do you lose control of the keyboard and it flies off your desk?
Microsoft Word isn't commodity software at all. It's common software, and maybe that's what you meant, but commodity software would mean that there are other word processors that are equally functional, and Microsoft has to compete with them on some basis other than features.
Word has been extensively customized by many companies though VB -- and is able to be so customized, which is something other apps can't claim. It has better support for front matter and back matter than most other word processors.
It most definitely has flaws, but it is not commodity.
If she got rid of the CDs (as in sold), she didn't have the right to keep the ripped copies in the first place.
WTF are you talking about? CDs aren't sold with a license! If she bought the CD, she can rip and re-sell it all she wants. Copyright law only says that she can't do public performances; selling the CD does not count.
Slashdot Mirror
The robot can I.D. guns by the sound. It won't be fooled by cheap rifles if it is listening for a sniper shot. It said that in the summary, for Pete's sake!
I can't tell you how many times I've been congratulated on how skilled I am "for a woman" (even though I'm better than all the males in my dept.) or been asked why I'm interested in science/technology, because isn't that strange for a woman?
Well, it is unusual for a woman to be so skilled, and it is an unusual field for women to be interested in. That's what the article is about. So what's the problem? Why shouldn't they congratulate you on your skills, or wonder why you chose tech?
Overhead?
I mean syntactically. It has these things, but they all look like nested & indented lists.
I'll set your alarm clock for next year, then. The iPhone is starting out with EDGE, but the next one, for the European market, will have 3G. The 3G argument is FUD.
Yeah, a lot of third party apps are piss-poor. That's one of the reasons why I got rid of my Treo. It crashed all the time. Even my Sony-Ericsson has recently started acting strange, and I don't have any third party apps on there! I'm guessing Cingular pushed a bogus update.
The point is, the more weird software you put on a device, the more likely it is that the device randomly turns into a paperweight. We have no idea how restrictive Apple intends to be about third-party software (by which I mean software developed by third parties and offered through Apple's site to install on the iPhone). Apple doesn't have a track record in this area. Could be good, could be bad. Maybe the iPhone is visible as a hard drive, and you just have to copy the software to the right folder.
But even if Apple completely locked in the software, I can still see where they are coming from. The iPhone is a purpose-built device. It should perform that purpose. If third-party apps interfere with that purpose -- and evidence suggests that they usually do -- I don't have a problem with restricting them. Obviously, opinions will differ on this, and you make good points.
It becomes a choice between stability and extra features. Which would you rather have?
Usability. It really is a feature. A very important one, and one that has to be applied throughout every other feature offered. As a Mac user, you ought to understand that. The iPhone looks like it will be dead-simple to use.
What eye candy? I saw large, clearly labeled buttons. Those are functionally useful, because they are large and clearly labeled. I saw flick scrolling. Functionally useful, because it is fast. I saw the scrolling bounce at the end. Functionally useful, because if it just stopped, it'd jar you and you might try to flick again. I saw touch-based pan-and-zoom. Functionally useful, obviously the best way to do it. Tilt sensor, functionally useful, because it saves adding one more control to the screen. The only thing I'd classify as eye candy is that cover flow thing. Jobs made a big deal out of it, I'm like "whatever." But that was it.
Oh wait, it has color graphics and semi-transparent overlays. Is that what you meant? But so does everything else, including the OpenMoko. Actually, I just saw some OpenMoko screenshots, and it doesn't look half as clean as the iPhone. Lots of gratuitous reflections and other busy elements -- I'd certainly consider that eye-candy. Not something you want to deal with when on the go, which you will be if you are looking at your phone at all.
You say that like it's a good thing. Look, assembly language is the inherent representation of all code. Assembly language syntax is simple, a textual representation of machine code. It's as powerful as it gets, but no one uses it because it is verbose and doesn't group things into statements, blocks, or data structures that can be easily grokked. It's just a stream of opcodes, with some macros to make things easier.
Lisp is the same way. Everything's a list, or an AST to use your perspective. Yay, hooray. But it doesn't let you group things, it doesn't let you collect, isolate, and distinguish concepts. It's a mass of words and parens.
In the same way that assembly is too close to the metal, Lisp is too close to the...not the metal, but to a different kind of machine. It isn't really a language for humans to work with. It isn't a high-level language, syntactically, conceptually.
Why does coming from Japan make it not surprising that it's slow and has little support for Unicode?
The Japanese do not like Unicode. They prefer using one of their own encodings (I believe there are two major ones). From what I can gather, the reason is not-invented-here syndrome or a strawman argument against Unicode's ideograph system.
Of course, it could just be a vocal minority. I don't live in Japan myself, so I can't tell.
I thought a "klick" was a unit of distance, as in "5 klicks southwest."
People already buy metric wrenches and screwdrivers for just that reason -- products made overseas.
...
Brilliant!
However, the idea of the US as 'the land of opportunity' persists; and clearly seems misplaced.
So long as people think this is the land of opportunity, that works too.
My CEO is a really nice guy. This topic came up once when I was conversing with him, and this is what he said about income: CEOs have to be paid more than they'd think they'd make running their own company.
This makes perfect sense. CEOs have a great deal of self-confidence. Most of them have started and run their own company at least once. They know if they did it once, they can do it again. And they know they can make hella money doing just that. So why should they work for your company if they can start their own? And that is is why they get paid so well.
Hey, that video of the Gizmodo thing, with the augmented reality game, looks pretty awesome! I hadn't realized the techniques involved had gotten that good yet. There is definitely potential there.
That's a filthy lie!
(j/k, I'm in Washington. The State. Those D.C. guys ought to change their name.)
As for smudges, you have not tried this thing.
We saw the smudging in the keynote. It will smudge, the question is how distracting that will be. I can tell you it's pretty annoying on my Sony-Ericsson.
I love my vvii
In the midst of heavy editing, do you lose control of the keyboard and it flies off your desk?
On a bar of Dial soap: "Directions: Use like regular soap."
Wait...if Dial isn't regular soap, what is?
Does it have directions?
Someone sues them for the cost of a ballpoint pen?
Plus five grand for mental trauma.
So, yeah. Looks like no-one has any better recommendations...and little to say that's constructive at all, for that matter.
Microsoft Word isn't commodity software at all. It's common software, and maybe that's what you meant, but commodity software would mean that there are other word processors that are equally functional, and Microsoft has to compete with them on some basis other than features.
Word has been extensively customized by many companies though VB -- and is able to be so customized, which is something other apps can't claim. It has better support for front matter and back matter than most other word processors.
It most definitely has flaws, but it is not commodity.
Magnetorheological fluid
I've found the Loch Ness Monster! It's in the X-chromosome-shaped lake.
No wonder we've never found proof -- she migrated to Titan!
If she got rid of the CDs (as in sold), she didn't have the right to keep the ripped copies in the first place.
WTF are you talking about? CDs aren't sold with a license! If she bought the CD, she can rip and re-sell it all she wants. Copyright law only says that she can't do public performances; selling the CD does not count.
Anyway, I meant "get rid of" as in "threw away."
Unless she got rid of the CD's -- because they were all on the computer.
I am not telling the name of the supplier I felt was good...
Why not?