Statutory annual basic safety & emissions check for any car over 3 years old. There's absolutely no guarantee that a car with a current MOT certificate hasn't developed a fault since it was tested, though - "But Officer, it has a MOT certificate" won't get you anywhere if you're pulled over with a fault.
Do ya'll negotiate the car prices over there like we do here...or is the price on the sticker the price you pay over there?
There's usually some room for negotiation - especially if you're trading in your old car, the value of which is heavily dependent on how badly the dealer wants to sell you the new car. Not a nation of great hagglers (anyway, a haggling culture only means that dealers inflate the initial price).
new cars are great but i dont know anyone stupid enough to buy one.
Obviously some people do, or there wouldn't be any used cars. Let's raise a glass to those fearless folk who break in new cars for the good of the used-car-buying public.
I'm not living in the american cultural sphere. Around here carsalesmen never go to their managers, they are also not aggressively pushy.
Eh? I didn't know they had car salesmen in Narnia!
Based on my last experience, we don't have car salesmen in England, either - we have financial product salesmen who push loans, hare-brained leasing deals and dubious extended warranty schemes to people who have already decided to buy the car and are (figuratively, at least) waving the cash in their face. Its pretty clear that actually selling cars has little to do with their business model.
Oh, and I have it on good authority that (as I always suspected) the "consulting my manager" theatre means "putting the kettle on in preparation for a celebratory brew" (maybe in the US it is more likely to be turning on the coffee machine)... or maybe headbutting the wall a few times if the stubborn customer has insisted on actually paying for the car, thus depriving you of the finance company commission.
Apple, and the computing industry, was different in 1993.
Yes - back then, Apple's once industry-defining proprietary platform was facing mounting competition from multiple vendors selling a wide diversity of hardware but sharing a common, de-facto industry standard, operating system licensed from a near-monopolist.
For $60, I can get an 80GB SSD or I can get a 2TB HDD. That 80GB SSD is going to require an additional HDD anyway for storage for many people.
...that's if you ignore the performance benefits of using a SSD as your system drive. I stuck a SSD in my 2-year old system and it felt like a new machine - its not just about loading/copying large files - the vastly reduced seek times put the skates under virtually anything that uses the disk. That's worth money.
Then they should definitely do it next time round provided (a) they can get a good actress and (b) come up with some good scripts. In the show's "reality" there's no reason why it couldn't happen*, and this is exactly the sort of debate that SF/Fantasy can and should provoke.
Female Doctor + male space-marine type companion could be fun.
*Aside from the whole Corsair transgender-regens-do-happen thing, they've missed an opportunity this time to get round the 12-regen limit: they could have had the current Doctor really die and let another character take up his mantle. Plenty of candidates: Clara's now all twined up in his timeline, Jenny (female clone) is still out there, as is Donna (human/doctor mashup - if she can somehow remember without her brain exploding) and although River is technically dead, she's still available for download.
However, they've gone for Peter Capaldi. I don't doubt he'll do a good job. Actually, nobody out there seems to doubt that he'll do a good job. Maybe they've played it a bit too safe?
I work for Xerox. I specifically support these machines in a tier 3 capacity. I have not seen or heard a single case of this. My group handles calls from all of North America, and some South.
Perhaps they're all trying to call the support number on the user guide that they just printed out...:-)
Nah... it would be nigh-on impossible to actually start filming without the news leaking. It has always been announced in advance. Anyway, if they were going to do a spoof they'd have chosen someone a lot more controversial (e.g. Jenna-Louise Coleman or Billie Piper).
The show last night looked to me like the BBC had about a week's notice of a half-hour gap in the schedule (probably the World Tiddlywinks Championship got cancelled due to a fungal nail infection outbreak) and found a relatively novel way of filling it without resorting to the usual re-run of the 1974 Dad's Army Christmas Special. That would explain the seemingly random guest list...
I was hoping for a woman this time. Would make for some great antics.
In the interview on the "reveal" show Steven Moffat showed clearly what he thought of that.
Approximate quote: "Helen Mirren was quoted as saying it that a woman should be chosen to play the Doctor. I say that its about time that a man was chosen to play the Queen."
I've been hearing "the tablet bubble is about to burst" for three years now, and during that time I've seen the number of tablets out there grow and grow and grow.
Yes, that's how bubbles work. They grow, and grow and grow... and then burst. Of course, anybody who could predict whether they'd burst now, next year, or 2015 would be too busy shorting Apple and Samsung to post on Slashdot.
How many MBAs does it take to miss that mind-boggingly obvious fact?
Well, I think part of the MBA philosophy is that if you need something to be true or possible, then it must be - and Microsoft need it to be possible to run desktop apps on a mobile device.
Microsoft are late to the post-iPad tablet party, and Windows Phone has a sucky reputation. Their main hope for a distinguishing, unique selling point is to leverage their PC near-monopoly by offering tablets that can offer the same UI and household-name Office software.
They can't - of course. Windows RT Office is "office" in name only, and the Surface Pro is interesting, but more like an Ultrabook than a tablet. The latter might succeed if the guys ARM sit around playing Angry Birds waiting for Intel to catch up and overtake them on low-power performance.
The even bigger risk for MS is their policy of forcing a tabletized UI on their established desktop customers, presumably on the assumption that this will make them queue up to buy mobile devices with the same UI. Anybody other than Microsoft, that would be suicide, but....
The joke is, I'm sure the tablet bubble will burst soon. I'm not saying that they will disappear - but I suspect that the smaller tablets will converge with phones and the bigger tablets will merge with laptops.
Mind you, the wonderful adverts showing how, with a Surface RT, you could, er, sit around in the sun clicking the smart cover on or off and looking cool probably didn't help. Apple might just have something with those ads showing people doing stuff on an iPad (not that Apple don't make the occasional vapid advert as well).
All this internet censorship of foul language, gratuitous sex and graphic violence (possibly all at the same time) is really just HBO's latest scheme to stop people torrenting Game of Thrones...
Presentation and layout should not be your concern--leave this to the professionals (editors and layout people).
TFA was about a PhD thesis. Let me briefly explain the organisational structure of PhD thesis production:
Author = you
Editor = you
Layout people = you
Graphic artist = you
Printer = you
PDF production = you (most Universities now want an electronic copy as well)
Binder = your responsibility (typically, you have to submit two professionally bound copies, although all but the most hardened Renaissance-persons pay someone to do this.)
Finance = you
...at least, that's how it works where I live. Most theses don't have much in the way of layout (& university regs tend to be conservative - personally, I just ignored them and nobody complained) but if you actually want your magnum opus to look good its all down to you.
Anyway, it doesn't sound like you've used LaTeX (maybe you're confusing it with TeX, the typesetting engine it is built on). LaTeX is a semantic mark-up language. You mark up chapters, sections, figures, citations and It formats your work according to a pre-defined template (and comes with templates covering the house styles of many scientific journals). You can dive into TeX to modify the layout if you wish, but that's a bit of a vertical learning curve.
People don't use LaTeX so they can mess about with layout - they use it because its mathematics, table-of-contents/table-of-figures, bibliography & citations features are invaluable for academic writing.
(Confession - I wrote my thesis in OpenOffice & spent the last 20% of the time wishing I'd used LaTeX instead...)
As with a lot of professionals, they view themselves as people with special skills, capable of individually bargaining for themselves
As with a lot of professionals who take responsibility for getting projects completed on time, they probably find that the only real consequence of going on strike for a couple of days is that they have to work double hard afterwards to catch up. (Unless they spend the strike day working at home and get twice as much done without all the interruptions. Long-term it doesn't look good if strikes increase productivity - people might misunderstand).
The reason their analysis excludes pharma is purely political: the big pharma lobby has such an immense power that anything they perceive as risk will be torpedoed.
Probably true.
The silly thing is, Pharma is the easiest one to fix. If a country doesn't require new drugs to be licensed/approved based on (expensively gathered) evidence of their efficacy and safety then, well, they should. A fixed term exclusive right to manufacture could easily be built into the licensing process.
Hate for python whitespace is a sure sign of a superficial appreciation for its tradeoffs.
It doesn't say anything bad about the language, it just shows you haven't actually used it for anything and are willing to make egregious statements based on unfamiliarity and ignorance.
...says someone who's never moved their C/C++/PHP/Java/Javascript/HTML code from one text editor to another that handles tabs/linefeeds or auto-indentation differently - or even cut/pasted code from files with different indentation styles - and seen all the beautiful indentation get mangled. Significant whitespace is Just. Dumb. for the sake of removing a bit of redundancy. Maybe, just maybe, there's a reason why Pascal, VB, Java, Javascript, C, C++, C#, FORTH, Postscript, Perl, HTML, SQL etc. (and probably loads of others that I've never tried) don't do it. You can forgive FORTRAN because it was designed to be entered on punched cards. Years before Python there used to be a joke article circulating around explaining how Unix was an April Fool's joke by Richie & co, and one of the examples was the use of significant whitespace in Makefiles.
Why learn a language if it's not a bit unfamiliar in the first place?
Er, because it offers some powerful new features? Being 'unfamiliar' should be a means to that end. Thing is, both Python and Perl feel like they are designed to be different for the hell of it. Perl got away with it by having brilliant regex support, until other languages caught up.
A year or so back I did decide to give Python a proper go and try a "real project" with it - replacing the kludgey PHP utility I use to sync my iTunes music with vanilla MP3 players. Steeled myself to stop worrying and love significant whitespace. Went looking for the XML/XPATH/DOM library (the iTunes library metadata is stored in XML) and found... half-a-dozen independently written and half-finished XML libraries, none of which did XML + XPATH, and a lot of blog discussions about what would be a "pythonesque" way of doing XML.
So I went back to PHP and just used the DOM XML library that's been there for years and basically gives you more-or-less 1:1 bindings for the standard DOM API, that you'd recognise from Java, Javascript, C/C++ or any book on XML...
PHP may be a fugly language but it is chock-full or useful libraries written by people who wanted to get the job done for people who wanted to get the job done. Perhaps the fugliness helps to scare off the paradigm evangelists.
Re:Most popular web scripting language?
on
PHP 5.5.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
im guessing javascript somehow doesn't qualify? lol
How many server-side PHP projects don't rely on a bit of Javascript client-side?
It's just a way for Lucas to make his film more marketable to parents of young children by still having lots of epic battles, but no blood and seeimingly victimless deaths. [snip] To me it's a purely driven by a financial and marketability point.
Exactly. TFA answers its own question in paragraph 2 - after that, TLDNR and confirmation bias.Plus, if you want huge battle scenes, its easier to CGI droids than it is people, and Lucas has painted himself into a corner with the Jedi's choice of weapon - Gore-free swordfights are far less convincing than gore-free raygun fights.
The films started as serious adult adventures (especially Empire) and went back into kiddie land from there beginning with the Ewoks.
Oh come on - Empire was a bit brave by having a mildly downbeat/unresolved ending, but the original Star Wars was pure kids-aged-8-to-80 adventure stuff, mainly inspired by the old "Saturday morning cinema" serials (hence all the 'Episode IV' stuff!) that succeeded because of a dearth of such films in the 1970s. It then spent a couple of decades acquiring depth as the spin-off novels "matured" to appeal to the kids who had seen it as they grew up.
One problem with the new films was that they tried to appeal to both audiences and ended up an incongruous mix of kiddies stuff (whee! pod races!) and self-consciously "adult" politics (trade federations and tax tariffs FS!).
If people want to philosophise about the relationship between man and robots, go watch Blade Runner, The Bicentennial Man or even iRobot (if you can stand the product placement and accept that its not based on the book).
The truth is we don't know. Big groundbreaking ideas are rare which is why it is amazing Apple has had 3-4 in the entire history of the company (Not every year as media for some weird reason expects),
3-4? Lets see:
Apple II (Maybe a tie with Commodore PET and the TRS-80 for 'take home and plug in' personal computer).
Lisa/Mac GUI (Yes, I know it was inspired by Xerox, but Xerox weren't going anywhere with it.)
Laserwriter & DTP (Apple didn't invent the laser printer, but they put the pieces together: GUI computers with built-in networking to share the expensive printer).
Powerbook No they didn't invent the laptop, but the first Powerbook introduced the now-standard laptop format with the set-back keyboard and central pointing device (ISTR the previous Mac Portable, although a flop, was the first with a TFT display).
Newton he who makes no mistakes, usually makes nothing... and if nothing else, Newton was influential.
iMac...yup, in a world of beige boxes, people will buy an attractively designed all-in-one. Also kicked USB out of limbo.
iPod & iTunes...yada yada Nomad yada yada... but innovation is about successful marketing, too.
iPhone Yah, I know, Steve built a time machine and travelled 3 years into the future to rip off Android. But even then...
App stores...now everybody wants one.
iPad Just a big iPhone without the phone... except, turns out that people wanted a big iPhone without the phone. Whoda thunk it?
Oh yeah, and somewhere along the line they actually, finally, got Unix onto the desktop, which had been going to happen next year since 1988.
As for "what have Apple done for us recently" well, they've been pushing >200ppi displays when the rest of the world had stalled at 1080p. The MacBook Air popularised (if not introduced) the Ultrabook concept. They're pushing hard on SSDs as standard. They've just announced a workstation the size of a Watney's Party Seven, with dual high-end GPUs and only Thunderbolt for expansion. Not rocket science, but they're still pushing.
...but then I don't equate "innovation" with "invention". Innovation involves taking inventions and turning them into successful products that alter the industry,
Apple is the king of put what you don't need into computers. Unless your doing intensive video editing or mass virtualization, you simple don't need the bandwidth that is given from PCIe flash.
For general-purpose use, the killer feature of SSD is not bandwidth, but seek time. With SSD, you see a huge speed-up in boot times, application load times and, if you run out of RAM, swapping. If using PCIe reduces access time or CPU load (seems plausible c.f. going through an unnecessary intermediate interface designed for spinning discs on the ends of long cables) then it still might be worthwhile.
Also, there is no fundamental reason why a PCIe SSD should cost more than an equivalent SATA-3 SSD as long as Apple shifts enough computers to get decent economies of scale. I'm sure they're not using the same grade/speed of flash chips in the Air as they are planning to do on the new Pro.
Hands up who had heard about Sony offering PCIe Flash as an option.
Now hands up who had heard about Apple offering PCIe Flash as standard.
What Apple "gets" is that it is no good innovating unless you're going to market the fuck out of it. Apple didn't invent [GUIs,LANs,laser printers,small form-factor,USB,music players,touch screen phones,app stores,tablets,'retina' displays,...] they just persuaded people to buy them in quantity while the original inventors sat around admiring their new mousetrap and waiting for the world to beat a path to their door.
Slashdot Mirror
What's your point - war should be wage only using very expensive and difficult weaponry? Who does that benefit?
The people who make money from selling "expensive and difficult weaponry", maybe?
What's a MOT?
Statutory annual basic safety & emissions check for any car over 3 years old. There's absolutely no guarantee that a car with a current MOT certificate hasn't developed a fault since it was tested, though - "But Officer, it has a MOT certificate" won't get you anywhere if you're pulled over with a fault.
Do ya'll negotiate the car prices over there like we do here...or is the price on the sticker the price you pay over there?
There's usually some room for negotiation - especially if you're trading in your old car, the value of which is heavily dependent on how badly the dealer wants to sell you the new car. Not a nation of great hagglers (anyway, a haggling culture only means that dealers inflate the initial price).
new cars are great but i dont know anyone stupid enough to buy one.
Obviously some people do, or there wouldn't be any used cars. Let's raise a glass to those fearless folk who break in new cars for the good of the used-car-buying public.
I'm not living in the american cultural sphere. Around here carsalesmen never go to their managers, they are also not aggressively pushy.
Eh? I didn't know they had car salesmen in Narnia!
Based on my last experience, we don't have car salesmen in England, either - we have financial product salesmen who push loans, hare-brained leasing deals and dubious extended warranty schemes to people who have already decided to buy the car and are (figuratively, at least) waving the cash in their face. Its pretty clear that actually selling cars has little to do with their business model.
Oh, and I have it on good authority that (as I always suspected) the "consulting my manager" theatre means "putting the kettle on in preparation for a celebratory brew" (maybe in the US it is more likely to be turning on the coffee machine)... or maybe headbutting the wall a few times if the stubborn customer has insisted on actually paying for the car, thus depriving you of the finance company commission.
Apple, and the computing industry, was different in 1993.
Yes - back then, Apple's once industry-defining proprietary platform was facing mounting competition from multiple vendors selling a wide diversity of hardware but sharing a common, de-facto industry standard, operating system licensed from a near-monopolist.
Whereas now...
Why pay the "Gold Price" when you can pay the "Iron Price" ? :-)
For $60, I can get an 80GB SSD or I can get a 2TB HDD. That 80GB SSD is going to require an additional HDD anyway for storage for many people.
...that's if you ignore the performance benefits of using a SSD as your system drive. I stuck a SSD in my 2-year old system and it felt like a new machine - its not just about loading/copying large files - the vastly reduced seek times put the skates under virtually anything that uses the disk. That's worth money.
Then they should definitely do it next time round provided (a) they can get a good actress and (b) come up with some good scripts. In the show's "reality" there's no reason why it couldn't happen*, and this is exactly the sort of debate that SF/Fantasy can and should provoke.
Female Doctor + male space-marine type companion could be fun.
*Aside from the whole Corsair transgender-regens-do-happen thing, they've missed an opportunity this time to get round the 12-regen limit: they could have had the current Doctor really die and let another character take up his mantle. Plenty of candidates: Clara's now all twined up in his timeline, Jenny (female clone) is still out there, as is Donna (human/doctor mashup - if she can somehow remember without her brain exploding) and although River is technically dead, she's still available for download.
However, they've gone for Peter Capaldi. I don't doubt he'll do a good job. Actually, nobody out there seems to doubt that he'll do a good job. Maybe they've played it a bit too safe?
I work for Xerox. I specifically support these machines in a tier 3 capacity. I have not seen or heard a single case of this. My group handles calls from all of North America, and some South.
Perhaps they're all trying to call the support number on the user guide that they just printed out... :-)
But a man WAS chosen to play the Queen. In the opening ceremony for the Olympics, the stuntman who dressed as the Queen and parachuted down was male.
OK, but if you're going to count spoofs then a woman DID get chosen to play the Doctor.
Nah... it would be nigh-on impossible to actually start filming without the news leaking. It has always been announced in advance. Anyway, if they were going to do a spoof they'd have chosen someone a lot more controversial (e.g. Jenna-Louise Coleman or Billie Piper).
The show last night looked to me like the BBC had about a week's notice of a half-hour gap in the schedule (probably the World Tiddlywinks Championship got cancelled due to a fungal nail infection outbreak) and found a relatively novel way of filling it without resorting to the usual re-run of the 1974 Dad's Army Christmas Special. That would explain the seemingly random guest list...
I was hoping for a woman this time. Would make for some great antics.
In the interview on the "reveal" show Steven Moffat showed clearly what he thought of that.
Approximate quote: "Helen Mirren was quoted as saying it that a woman should be chosen to play the Doctor. I say that its about time that a man was chosen to play the Queen."
I've been hearing "the tablet bubble is about to burst" for three years now, and during that time I've seen the number of tablets out there grow and grow and grow.
Yes, that's how bubbles work. They grow, and grow and grow... and then burst. Of course, anybody who could predict whether they'd burst now, next year, or 2015 would be too busy shorting Apple and Samsung to post on Slashdot.
How many MBAs does it take to miss that mind-boggingly obvious fact?
Well, I think part of the MBA philosophy is that if you need something to be true or possible, then it must be - and Microsoft need it to be possible to run desktop apps on a mobile device.
Microsoft are late to the post-iPad tablet party, and Windows Phone has a sucky reputation. Their main hope for a distinguishing, unique selling point is to leverage their PC near-monopoly by offering tablets that can offer the same UI and household-name Office software.
They can't - of course. Windows RT Office is "office" in name only, and the Surface Pro is interesting, but more like an Ultrabook than a tablet. The latter might succeed if the guys ARM sit around playing Angry Birds waiting for Intel to catch up and overtake them on low-power performance.
The even bigger risk for MS is their policy of forcing a tabletized UI on their established desktop customers, presumably on the assumption that this will make them queue up to buy mobile devices with the same UI. Anybody other than Microsoft, that would be suicide, but....
The joke is, I'm sure the tablet bubble will burst soon. I'm not saying that they will disappear - but I suspect that the smaller tablets will converge with phones and the bigger tablets will merge with laptops.
Mind you, the wonderful adverts showing how, with a Surface RT, you could, er, sit around in the sun clicking the smart cover on or off and looking cool probably didn't help. Apple might just have something with those ads showing people doing stuff on an iPad (not that Apple don't make the occasional vapid advert as well).
All this internet censorship of foul language, gratuitous sex and graphic violence (possibly all at the same time) is really just HBO's latest scheme to stop people torrenting Game of Thrones...
Presentation and layout should not be your concern--leave this to the professionals (editors and layout people).
TFA was about a PhD thesis. Let me briefly explain the organisational structure of PhD thesis production:
Author = you
Editor = you
Layout people = you
Graphic artist = you
Printer = you
PDF production = you (most Universities now want an electronic copy as well)
Binder = your responsibility (typically, you have to submit two professionally bound copies, although all but the most hardened Renaissance-persons pay someone to do this.)
Finance = you
...at least, that's how it works where I live. Most theses don't have much in the way of layout (& university regs tend to be conservative - personally, I just ignored them and nobody complained) but if you actually want your magnum opus to look good its all down to you.
Anyway, it doesn't sound like you've used LaTeX (maybe you're confusing it with TeX, the typesetting engine it is built on). LaTeX is a semantic mark-up language. You mark up chapters, sections, figures, citations and It formats your work according to a pre-defined template (and comes with templates covering the house styles of many scientific journals). You can dive into TeX to modify the layout if you wish, but that's a bit of a vertical learning curve.
People don't use LaTeX so they can mess about with layout - they use it because its mathematics, table-of-contents/table-of-figures, bibliography & citations features are invaluable for academic writing.
(Confession - I wrote my thesis in OpenOffice & spent the last 20% of the time wishing I'd used LaTeX instead...)
As with a lot of professionals, they view themselves as people with special skills, capable of individually bargaining for themselves
As with a lot of professionals who take responsibility for getting projects completed on time, they probably find that the only real consequence of going on strike for a couple of days is that they have to work double hard afterwards to catch up. (Unless they spend the strike day working at home and get twice as much done without all the interruptions. Long-term it doesn't look good if strikes increase productivity - people might misunderstand).
The reason their analysis excludes pharma is purely political: the big pharma lobby has such an immense power that anything they perceive as risk will be torpedoed.
Probably true.
The silly thing is, Pharma is the easiest one to fix. If a country doesn't require new drugs to be licensed/approved based on (expensively gathered) evidence of their efficacy and safety then, well, they should. A fixed term exclusive right to manufacture could easily be built into the licensing process.
Hate for python whitespace is a sure sign of a superficial appreciation for its tradeoffs.
It doesn't say anything bad about the language, it just shows you haven't actually used it for anything and are willing to make egregious statements based on unfamiliarity and ignorance.
...says someone who's never moved their C/C++/PHP/Java/Javascript/HTML code from one text editor to another that handles tabs/linefeeds or auto-indentation differently - or even cut/pasted code from files with different indentation styles - and seen all the beautiful indentation get mangled. Significant whitespace is Just. Dumb. for the sake of removing a bit of redundancy. Maybe, just maybe, there's a reason why Pascal, VB, Java, Javascript, C, C++, C#, FORTH, Postscript, Perl, HTML, SQL etc. (and probably loads of others that I've never tried) don't do it. You can forgive FORTRAN because it was designed to be entered on punched cards. Years before Python there used to be a joke article circulating around explaining how Unix was an April Fool's joke by Richie & co, and one of the examples was the use of significant whitespace in Makefiles.
Why learn a language if it's not a bit unfamiliar in the first place?
Er, because it offers some powerful new features? Being 'unfamiliar' should be a means to that end. Thing is, both Python and Perl feel like they are designed to be different for the hell of it. Perl got away with it by having brilliant regex support, until other languages caught up.
A year or so back I did decide to give Python a proper go and try a "real project" with it - replacing the kludgey PHP utility I use to sync my iTunes music with vanilla MP3 players. Steeled myself to stop worrying and love significant whitespace. Went looking for the XML/XPATH/DOM library (the iTunes library metadata is stored in XML) and found... half-a-dozen independently written and half-finished XML libraries, none of which did XML + XPATH, and a lot of blog discussions about what would be a "pythonesque" way of doing XML.
So I went back to PHP and just used the DOM XML library that's been there for years and basically gives you more-or-less 1:1 bindings for the standard DOM API, that you'd recognise from Java, Javascript, C/C++ or any book on XML...
PHP may be a fugly language but it is chock-full or useful libraries written by people who wanted to get the job done for people who wanted to get the job done. Perhaps the fugliness helps to scare off the paradigm evangelists.
im guessing javascript somehow doesn't qualify? lol
How many server-side PHP projects don't rely on a bit of Javascript client-side?
It's just a way for Lucas to make his film more marketable to parents of young children by still having lots of epic battles, but no blood and seeimingly victimless deaths. [snip] To me it's a purely driven by a financial and marketability point.
Exactly. TFA answers its own question in paragraph 2 - after that, TLDNR and confirmation bias.Plus, if you want huge battle scenes, its easier to CGI droids than it is people, and Lucas has painted himself into a corner with the Jedi's choice of weapon - Gore-free swordfights are far less convincing than gore-free raygun fights.
The films started as serious adult adventures (especially Empire) and went back into kiddie land from there beginning with the Ewoks.
Oh come on - Empire was a bit brave by having a mildly downbeat/unresolved ending, but the original Star Wars was pure kids-aged-8-to-80 adventure stuff, mainly inspired by the old "Saturday morning cinema" serials (hence all the 'Episode IV' stuff!) that succeeded because of a dearth of such films in the 1970s. It then spent a couple of decades acquiring depth as the spin-off novels "matured" to appeal to the kids who had seen it as they grew up.
One problem with the new films was that they tried to appeal to both audiences and ended up an incongruous mix of kiddies stuff (whee! pod races!) and self-consciously "adult" politics (trade federations and tax tariffs FS!).
If people want to philosophise about the relationship between man and robots, go watch Blade Runner, The Bicentennial Man or even iRobot (if you can stand the product placement and accept that its not based on the book).
The truth is we don't know. Big groundbreaking ideas are rare which is why it is amazing Apple has had 3-4 in the entire history of the company (Not every year as media for some weird reason expects),
3-4? Lets see: ...yup, in a world of beige boxes, people will buy an attractively designed all-in-one. Also kicked USB out of limbo.
...yada yada Nomad yada yada... but innovation is about successful marketing, too.
...now everybody wants one.
Apple II (Maybe a tie with Commodore PET and the TRS-80 for 'take home and plug in' personal computer).
Lisa/Mac GUI (Yes, I know it was inspired by Xerox, but Xerox weren't going anywhere with it.)
Laserwriter & DTP (Apple didn't invent the laser printer, but they put the pieces together: GUI computers with built-in networking to share the expensive printer).
Powerbook No they didn't invent the laptop, but the first Powerbook introduced the now-standard laptop format with the set-back keyboard and central pointing device (ISTR the previous Mac Portable, although a flop, was the first with a TFT display).
Newton he who makes no mistakes, usually makes nothing... and if nothing else, Newton was influential.
iMac
iPod & iTunes
iPhone Yah, I know, Steve built a time machine and travelled 3 years into the future to rip off Android. But even then...
App stores
iPad Just a big iPhone without the phone... except, turns out that people wanted a big iPhone without the phone. Whoda thunk it?
Oh yeah, and somewhere along the line they actually, finally, got Unix onto the desktop, which had been going to happen next year since 1988.
As for "what have Apple done for us recently" well, they've been pushing >200ppi displays when the rest of the world had stalled at 1080p. The MacBook Air popularised (if not introduced) the Ultrabook concept. They're pushing hard on SSDs as standard. They've just announced a workstation the size of a Watney's Party Seven, with dual high-end GPUs and only Thunderbolt for expansion. Not rocket science, but they're still pushing.
...but then I don't equate "innovation" with "invention". Innovation involves taking inventions and turning them into successful products that alter the industry,
Apple is the king of put what you don't need into computers. Unless your doing intensive video editing or mass virtualization, you simple don't need the bandwidth that is given from PCIe flash.
For general-purpose use, the killer feature of SSD is not bandwidth, but seek time. With SSD, you see a huge speed-up in boot times, application load times and, if you run out of RAM, swapping. If using PCIe reduces access time or CPU load (seems plausible c.f. going through an unnecessary intermediate interface designed for spinning discs on the ends of long cables) then it still might be worthwhile.
Also, there is no fundamental reason why a PCIe SSD should cost more than an equivalent SATA-3 SSD as long as Apple shifts enough computers to get decent economies of scale. I'm sure they're not using the same grade/speed of flash chips in the Air as they are planning to do on the new Pro.
Why Apple is taking credit for this new trend?
Hands up who had heard about Sony offering PCIe Flash as an option.
Now hands up who had heard about Apple offering PCIe Flash as standard.
What Apple "gets" is that it is no good innovating unless you're going to market the fuck out of it. Apple didn't invent [GUIs,LANs,laser printers,small form-factor,USB,music players,touch screen phones,app stores,tablets,'retina' displays,...] they just persuaded people to buy them in quantity while the original inventors sat around admiring their new mousetrap and waiting for the world to beat a path to their door.