Are you sure that neural nets are not turing machines? I mean, if that is true it would mean that there is no way of implementing* a neural network;
You can implement a neural net physically (the whole point is that they're meant to be models of how biological systems work) and, of course, most neural network research is done by simulating the networks on a computer... but if you actually built the network out analogue electronics or "wetware" then there's no absolute guarantee that it would work the same way as the simulation. It might work - it could be very accurate - but you don't get the "Turing Promise" that you algorithm will behave identically regardless of the implementation.
if this is the case then what exactly is it that is not implementable?
Well, as I said, anything truly random or unpredictable (which might just be important if you want to give Mr Data free will, creativity or intuition). A Turing machine - even running a neural net simulation - is completely deterministic: the initial state can be described exactly and will always produce the same result. A physical net could depend on random physical processes. A physical neural net is massively parallel - each neuron working independently - a Turing machine has to work sequentially and calculate each neuron's state at the next 'clock tick' which can only ever be an approximation. A physical net could be chaotic (...again, being on the edge of chaoitc behaviour could easily be relevant to AI) in which case any approximation (e.g. due to the sequential nature of a computer simulation) could change it's behaviour beyond recognition...
Aside: Technically, you can't ever implement a Turing machine either - its an idealised mathematical abstraction. You certainly can't build a Universal Turing machine without infinite storage - if it only had N characters of storage then it would be trivial to invent an algorithm that needed N+1... but even a specific Turing machine executes its instructions with 100% fidelity, and have you seen the size of the "errata" for a typical modern CPU? A computer is a pretty good TM for all practical purposes, but once you rely on a qualifier like "all practical purposes" you've lost the ability to make absolute pronouncements (e.g. about universality) based on the pure mathematics.
In the Apple vs Samsung case in California the jury needs instruction from the court. It seems the rectangular jury table with round corners infringes upon Apple's patent and the jury is unable to proceed.
Unfortunately, this can't be resolved, because Samsung and Google have bought the publisher of the books containing the relevant law and are demanding huge license fees to allow them to be used in this case (even though the court has already paid for the books themselves).
So Apple is paying what they should have payed under FRAND rules, plus compensation for using the patent without licensing it.
Whereas Samsung got to use a patent that Apple was under no obligation whatsoever to license to its competitors, under any terms. Meanwhile, several other phone and tablet manufacturers have proved that you can build phones and tablets without copying Apple*, whereas if you want to use the cell network you have no choice but to pay Samsung and Motorola because they got their patent written into the standards.
(* oh, sorry, right, Samsung's designs were actually based on a clip from 2001 and/or a photo frame they made a few years ago and it was total coincidence that they came out shortly after Apple had a big hit with the iPad/Phone... yeah....).
Also Turing equivalence says an electronic computer should be able to do anything that a human brain can.
No it doesn't. It says that any electronic computer that can be shown to be equivalent to the theoretical Turing machine can solve any problem that it is possible to solve analytically using an algorithm (and also defines lots of problems that can't be solved that way).
A Turing machine can't even generate a random number - just the next term in a well-defined, but complex, number series that is totally deterministic. You can attach a 'true' random number generator (i.e. that uses some physical process like thermal noise) but then you no longer have a Turing machine.
AFAIK, the best current guess is that the brain is a neural net, not a Turing machine. Neural nets are not Turing machines and do not solve problems analytically using algorithms - they produce "best guess" solutions based on a network of connections and probabilistic processes, usually developed by 'learning'. They can 'solve' ill-defined or uncomputable problems in the sense that they produce a very reliable guess: you don't actually solve a differential equation every time you catch a ball.
Here's me guessing that "Self-awareness" is not a computable problem... but the snag is that before you can start citing Turing* and all that you actually need to have a complete definition of the problem. I don't think we yet have such a definition for 'self awareness'. You could use any bit of off-the-shelf image recognition technology to flash a light when a robot matched an image in the mirror with the image defined as "me" in its database.
Of course, he's also credited with the "Turing Test" which is really nothing to do with Turing machines, failed by 90% of allegedly human call-centre operators and pretty much refuted by the "Chinese room" argument (sort-of like how a call centre is supposed to work).
My uninformed 0.5c is that any "Artificial Intelligence" would have to be an emergent, unexpected property, not something deliberately designed-in (or it's just a Chinese Room).
Wake me up if Apple actually try to claim that this new store infringes their IP rights.
Even then, it's not a case of "did they copy" but rather "did they infringe any valid, enforceable, copyrights, patents or trademarks" because it is completely bloody obvious that anybody designing a new consumer IT retail store would take a few leads from what the most successful international chain of consumer IT retail stores was doing.
They aren't talking about suing the individual programmers, they're talking about suing the software companies. Specifically, they want to disallow this kind of language very common in EULAs (this is taken from an actual EULA, name omitted to protect the guilty):
This is a symptom - not a problem. What the law needs to do is to disallow all such one-sided terms in contracts unless they have been negotiated between equal parties and impose penalties on anybody trying to impose them (because those terms are already void in many juristdictions, but they still have bullshit value if the victim can't afford - or if the transactiion is too triivial to justify - legal advice).
Don't get me wrong: My lawyer should be able to thrash out a contract with your lawyer without interference (beyond the usual rules on unconscianable terms) . The problem is EULAS and "Terms and conditions" that aren't subject to negotiation, or other situations where one side has a team of crack stunt lawyers and the other side has Wikipedia.
If you use computers then you probably click "I have read and accept the terms and conditions" or something similar on an almost daily basis. Even some GPL software does this (we all know it's mostly harmless, but how is someone who doesn't know about GPL meant to make a judgement - especially if it's the legalese-ridden GPLv3?) . The T&Cs for a well-known brand of online media/applications store run to 30 pages and you're expected to accept them every time the software auto-updates.
More and more consumer items are coming with "services" attached that have T&Cs that only a lawyer could love. If I'm buying a house, I'll hire a lawyer. If I'm buying a pint of milk and a frozen pizza on my debit card and the card terminal flashes up "Refer to Terms" (yes, this used to happen in my local store) - not so much. This needs to be stopped.
Even the legal system ought to be smart enough to apply "you get what you pay for" to this situation and make a distinction between the liabilities of someone giving away their software and a big company charging industrial grade annual licensing fees.
If you want guarantees on open source software, get a support contract.
True, however the terms you mention are somewhat open to interpretation. If some dipshit was writing a text message while driving and pulled over under those terms, they could argue that they were actually still in control of the vehicle.
...yes, but a court is usually going to accept a sworn statement from a police officer saying that the car was weaving around or that the driver didn't appear to be holding the wheel or looking at the road. If a cop thought that someone was texting they''d probably tail them a while and wait for evidence of careless driving (...or just pull in in front an tap your brakes...:-)) . On the other hand if the police book someone for "texting while driving" that's much harder to spot and they actually have to prove that the driver was texting. Even if they get phone records, which is (and/or should be) a legal hassle, phones can queue messages until they get a signal.
It can also lead to "low-hanging fruit" cases of people getting pointlessly booked for making a call while square-wheeled in a traffic jam because they were technically "driving", or routinely having to hand over your phone records every time you have a minor accident.
... is because they are almost hopeless to enforce
Also, I'm pretty sure that, in most jurisdictions, the police have always had the ability to charge people with various forms of "careless driving/dangerous driving/driving without due care and attention/not being in control of the vehicle" so the laws are completely redundant.
...unlike commercial television, whereby anybody who buys a packet of breakfast cereal is forced to make a donation to the cost of TV, even if they never watch it... and when they do watch it everything is effectively censored to avoid upsetting the advertisers. Or do you think the money to pay for commercial TV is magically conjured up by the Invisible Hand Fairy?
Hope I'm wrong, but I think I might have found the catch.
It seems like this is a replacement for "full retail" and what they've really dropped is the "Generic, shrinkwrap OEM license" package which is what personal system builders used to buy (with debatable legality).
Unfortunately, I suspect that's also what the handful of nice PC makers who currently sell PCs with Windows as an optional extra offer. So maybe MS's plan is to throw a spanner in that - perhaps they'll have to sign up to a 'proper' OEM licensing deal with MS, and sell PCs with a "proper" vendor-customised Windows pre-installed (...and be 'discouraged' from selling bare PCs).
That would explain the otherwise convoluted wording "You may not install the software as an operating system on any computer except one that you are building for your own use or as an operating system running on a local virtual machine or a separate partition." when they just could say "You can install this on one computer, owned by you, for your personal use". (see the ZDNet article) and the demise of the Full Retail version. I can't believe that they want to stop people replacing the whole OS on their Mac or Linux PC with Windows, but it does make it clear that a PD maker couldn't sling one of these licenses in with an otherwise bare, but ready-made, PC.
Yeah - some people here seem to lack the engineering imagination to realise how much weight you save by using 'no user servicable parts' designs. The 'fixed battery' is a good example - you'd have to add extra bulkheads to protect the internals when the battery was removed, doors, latches, spring-loaded electrical contacts and a thicker shell for the battery itself so that it was safe for klutzes to handle outside of the computer.
You also missed one:
(3) upgradability of laptops - certainly beyond RAM - is not a high priority for many people. Its fiddly and non-techies are nervous about breaking stuff. Plus, computers and consumer electronics in general are pretty damn reliable these days (some of us remember the days when you would be nuts to buy your own TV, because it would pop a valve a couple of times a year).
No, the problem with Apple (and many other manufacturers) is that they still charge over-the-odds for BTO RAM and HD upgrades. (I think the 8->16GB upgrade for the Retina is £160 - about 3x what I recently paid for an extra 8GB for last-year's model MBP - I'd expect a small premium for newer, faster chips but not 3x). The main reason I've ever upgraded RAM in recent years is that it cost too much over the odds to buy the machine with adequate RAM in the first place. There's really no reason, these days, for a 'premium' product like the Retina not to come with 16GB of RAM as standard.
Total nonsense. It wasn't "sealed." You simply needed a certain torx screwdriver to open it. And there certainly were user-upgradeable parts inside.
Plus, the monitor was built in, hence lots of high voltage zinging around, including some nice big caps that stayed live for a while after the power was off - good idea not to let Joe average user get in there without jumping a few hoops.
Also, the Mac computers that are designed with easy internal expansion in mind (NuBus cards, then PCI) have often been made particularly easy to work on - from the clip-on lids on the Mac IIs (and the Apple II for that matter), the way the G3/4 towers opened up, and even the Mac Pro (interesting to see which way the new Pro, promised next year, goes),
Everything useful is written against MySQL specifically, with Postgres support an afterthought. This sucks, yes.
Well, that's because not everybody has the luxury of choosing which database is supported by their web hosting service and MySQL is by far the most common. So your wonderful blogging application really needs to target MySQL if it's going to be widely used.
Plus, "Linux, Apache, MySQL, (PHP|Perl|Python)" = LAMP. Switching to LASP or LAPP just wouldn't give you such a good acronym. Why do you think server-side Ruby, HaXE, nodeJS etc. have never dethroned scripting languages starting with "P"?...and server-side ECMAScript would just be LAME.
C.f. PostgreSQL: Old-school MySQL with MyISAM tables was perfect for data-driven websites, where most accesses are 'read only' and any updates tend to be straightforward 'add new record' operations. If you don't do complicated update queries then you can live without transactions, referential integrity and all that jazz, and avoid a lot of the overhead that you'd get with PostgreSQL. That advantage mostly disappears if you start using newer MySQL features.
On the other hand, unlike SQLite, MySQL is still client/server based which might be more practical for, say, a web hosting provider who doesn't want users to be able to make files writable by the web server, and/or wants the flexibility to host databases on a dedicated server. The individual databases may be simple, but the service provider has a lot of them to serve...
Plus, with a server-based DBM you can run a desktop tool to connect to the database on your remote server (I use a ssh tunnel) rather than log in via a shell or using a clunky PHP-based admin tool.
Personally I prefer Postgresql to MySQL. While Postgresql looks more 'plain vanilla' I actually find it more straightforward to get easy things done
I've used both and am inclined to agree with you. Unfortunately, they are sufficiently different to make migrating existing projects a pain. Also, MySQL is commonly available in commercial web-hosting services, which makes it the safest bet for data-driven websites. I'd also agree that PostgreSQL isn't quite as falling-off-a-log simple to get started with as MySQL (which is the usual consequence of a more sophisticated system),
It used to be 'horses for courses': The MySQL of a few versions ago really hit the sweet spot for website backends, in which "reads" are far more common than "writes", and most updates simply consisted of adding a new record to a table. In that case, you can live without transactions, referential integrity checking, functions etc. and enjoy the resulting performance. That's what started the "myth" that MySQL was faster than PostgreSQL (of course it was - it was doing less!).
The later versions of MySQL seem like putting traction control and power steering on a bicycle. Perhaps someone should (or maybe has) fork "classic" MySQL as the ideal tool for data-driven websites, and leave the grown-up stuff to PostgreSQL? Or, maybe sqlite is the way to go for that.
"In response to learning of possible patent litigation from Apple, et. al., we have decided to delay the launch of the Nexus Q while we cover our asses and try to remove the infringing bits."
Whu? Have Apple finally been granted a patent on "selling a product for 3x the cost of competing products"?
The Nexus 6 would be great if it wasn't for the ridiculous built-in obsolescence. A few years and then all the content you've collected vanishes, like tears in rain.
Do you know that they _ARE_ doing similar things in England?
In England, in some schools, students do not received grades, and they do not know how they fair inside their own class - because, according to those so-called "experts", they do not want to "hurt the feeling of those children who aren't doing well"
In Engand, Narnia, maybe (No, really, The Silver Chair actually featured such a school... 1953 called and it wants its education debate back.)
While you might get a few numpties not wanting to upset kids by giving them an F, your comment sounds like a smear job on Formative Assessment in which the emphasis is on providing critical feedback rather than a summative grade.
To put it simply, if you give someone an "F" it doesn't help them much, while if you give most students a 'B' they'll say "great, sorted" and move on rather than go back and see if they could make it an 'A+'. The surprising thing shown by the research is that if you do the "common sense" thing and give feedback and a grade then many kids just look at the grade and ignore the feedback.
In England, Real World - as in the US - the struggle is that the government and/or school management are so obsessed with assessment and progress tracking that the kids never learn to do anything other than answer test questions. For the sake of "reliability" and easy grading these tend to be broken down into step-by-step processes so each stage can be marked against the curriculum. At worst, instead of "Solve this quadratic equation" - you'd see "(a) Factorize this quadratic , (b) Hence solve the equation" - not to make the question easier to do, but to make the question easier to grade and link to the curriculum. (And, of course, in the US it would lilkely get turned into a multiple choice). Actually having a problem that could be solved by using quadratics but which doesn't say "Quadratic Equation" on the tin? Heven forbid, ther ecould be an alternative, valid method - how would we score it?
No, not at all. Adobe invented it. Adobe implemented it as a printer language. Without Apple, we'd still have Postscript.
...but probably not as a general-purpose printer language because in your own words "the only thing Apple can lay claim to is convincing Adobe to actually implement it as a general purpose printer language".
Apple took the laser printer, they took Postscript and they took local area networking and they put them together to produce a laser printer with Postscript and a plug-and-play, peer-to-peer LAN, so it could do advanced typesetting without the PC having to render and send huge bitmaps, and the cost of the expensive printer could be spread over a dozen users. If you don't think that counts as innovation then have it your way...
Why is it so fucking hard for you fanboys to accept that Apple wasn't responsible for every innovation in computing ever?
Why is it so hard for you to read and at least try to comprehend the argument - which is that a lot of Apple innovation consists of seeking out innovative ideas and turning them into successful products? If you want to argue that actually getting new ideas to market and promoting them doesn't count as part of "innovation" then please go ahead, but do try and state your case in words of more than 4 letters.
A Concorde going overhead at around 1000 feet and normal cruising speed is no more noisy than a normal jet. It's the afterburners that are loud (REALLY VERY LOUD) and those are only used at take-off.
Noise in and around airports is an issue too, and modern planes are relatively quiet.
I was once sitting in a cattle-class passenger jet queuing for the runway at Heathrow. The noise of other planes taking off was barely enough to distract you from the gripping in-flight magazine. Then it was Concorde's turn...
Bloody hellfire.* If you lived near Heathrow, your double-glazing would need double-glazing.
Apart from the take-off noise, the sonic booms could be clearly heard along the south coast of England. Its not that a couple of Concorde flights a day caused problems, it was the potential impact if supersonic travel became commonplace.
*Having said that, years before, I visited one of the test Concordes on public display at Yeoville when some space jockey on the adjoining airfield went VTOL in a Harrier. That was louder...
No, not at all. The thing that made it successful was Adobe getting it supported by as many printers as possible - the only thing Apple can lay claim to is convincing Adobe to actually implement it as a general purpose printer language.
So you're saying it wouldn't have existed in its present form without Apple...
Also, the fact that Macs and Laserwriters featured cheap, plug-n-play local area networking (LocalTalk) before Ethernet became common/affordable (or easy to use) on PCs made it much easier to justify the cost of a laser printer by sharing it with a workgroup.
That's the whole point - there's more to "Innovation" than just coming up with bright ideas. Apple has an amazing track record in taking ideas that were 'bubbling under' and turning them into market-changing products.
I wonder what the history of personal computing would have been like if someone at Xerox management had been given a tap with the clue stick and thought "Hmm. We've got this amazing research lab who have invented the graphical user interface, the mouse, ethernet and the laser printer, plus we've got a customer base for our copiers that rivals IBM. I dunno... could we put that all together and make some sort of 'system for doing publishing on the top of your desk'(r) based on 'computers that one person can use'(tm)?'
Hindsight is A wonderful thing. Still, If they kept the magic beans^H^H^H^H shares that Steve let them buy then they'll have made a few pennies.
Slashdot Mirror
We really only have your personal anecdote to back up the assertion that personal anecdotes only tell a narrow picture.
My Gran used 40 personal anecdotes a day, and she lived to be 97...
Are you sure that neural nets are not turing machines? I mean, if that is true it would mean that there is no way of implementing* a neural network;
You can implement a neural net physically (the whole point is that they're meant to be models of how biological systems work) and, of course, most neural network research is done by simulating the networks on a computer... but if you actually built the network out analogue electronics or "wetware" then there's no absolute guarantee that it would work the same way as the simulation. It might work - it could be very accurate - but you don't get the "Turing Promise" that you algorithm will behave identically regardless of the implementation.
if this is the case then what exactly is it that is not implementable?
Well, as I said, anything truly random or unpredictable (which might just be important if you want to give Mr Data free will, creativity or intuition). A Turing machine - even running a neural net simulation - is completely deterministic: the initial state can be described exactly and will always produce the same result. A physical net could depend on random physical processes. A physical neural net is massively parallel - each neuron working independently - a Turing machine has to work sequentially and calculate each neuron's state at the next 'clock tick' which can only ever be an approximation. A physical net could be chaotic (...again, being on the edge of chaoitc behaviour could easily be relevant to AI) in which case any approximation (e.g. due to the sequential nature of a computer simulation) could change it's behaviour beyond recognition...
Aside: Technically, you can't ever implement a Turing machine either - its an idealised mathematical abstraction. You certainly can't build a Universal Turing machine without infinite storage - if it only had N characters of storage then it would be trivial to invent an algorithm that needed N+1... but even a specific Turing machine executes its instructions with 100% fidelity, and have you seen the size of the "errata" for a typical modern CPU? A computer is a pretty good TM for all practical purposes, but once you rely on a qualifier like "all practical purposes" you've lost the ability to make absolute pronouncements (e.g. about universality) based on the pure mathematics.
US Patent 812376/2: Method and apparatus for Applying a "plague" to more than one house.
US Patent 212872/1: System for comparing colors of cooking implements.
In the Apple vs Samsung case in California the jury needs instruction from the court. It seems the rectangular jury table with round corners infringes upon Apple's patent and the jury is unable to proceed.
Unfortunately, this can't be resolved, because Samsung and Google have bought the publisher of the books containing the relevant law and are demanding huge license fees to allow them to be used in this case (even though the court has already paid for the books themselves).
So Apple is paying what they should have payed under FRAND rules, plus compensation for using the patent without licensing it.
Whereas Samsung got to use a patent that Apple was under no obligation whatsoever to license to its competitors, under any terms. Meanwhile, several other phone and tablet manufacturers have proved that you can build phones and tablets without copying Apple*, whereas if you want to use the cell network you have no choice but to pay Samsung and Motorola because they got their patent written into the standards.
(* oh, sorry, right, Samsung's designs were actually based on a clip from 2001 and/or a photo frame they made a few years ago and it was total coincidence that they came out shortly after Apple had a big hit with the iPad/Phone... yeah....).
Also Turing equivalence says an electronic computer should be able to do anything that a human brain can.
No it doesn't. It says that any electronic computer that can be shown to be equivalent to the theoretical Turing machine can solve any problem that it is possible to solve analytically using an algorithm (and also defines lots of problems that can't be solved that way).
A Turing machine can't even generate a random number - just the next term in a well-defined, but complex, number series that is totally deterministic. You can attach a 'true' random number generator (i.e. that uses some physical process like thermal noise) but then you no longer have a Turing machine.
AFAIK, the best current guess is that the brain is a neural net, not a Turing machine. Neural nets are not Turing machines and do not solve problems analytically using algorithms - they produce "best guess" solutions based on a network of connections and probabilistic processes, usually developed by 'learning'. They can 'solve' ill-defined or uncomputable problems in the sense that they produce a very reliable guess: you don't actually solve a differential equation every time you catch a ball.
Here's me guessing that "Self-awareness" is not a computable problem... but the snag is that before you can start citing Turing* and all that you actually need to have a complete definition of the problem. I don't think we yet have such a definition for 'self awareness'. You could use any bit of off-the-shelf image recognition technology to flash a light when a robot matched an image in the mirror with the image defined as "me" in its database.
Of course, he's also credited with the "Turing Test" which is really nothing to do with Turing machines, failed by 90% of allegedly human call-centre operators and pretty much refuted by the "Chinese room" argument (sort-of like how a call centre is supposed to work).
My uninformed 0.5c is that any "Artificial Intelligence" would have to be an emergent, unexpected property, not something deliberately designed-in (or it's just a Chinese Room).
Wake me up if Apple actually try to claim that this new store infringes their IP rights.
Even then, it's not a case of "did they copy" but rather "did they infringe any valid, enforceable, copyrights, patents or trademarks" because it is completely bloody obvious that anybody designing a new consumer IT retail store would take a few leads from what the most successful international chain of consumer IT retail stores was doing.
They aren't talking about suing the individual programmers, they're talking about suing the software companies. Specifically, they want to disallow this kind of language very common in EULAs (this is taken from an actual EULA, name omitted to protect the guilty):
This is a symptom - not a problem. What the law needs to do is to disallow all such one-sided terms in contracts unless they have been negotiated between equal parties and impose penalties on anybody trying to impose them (because those terms are already void in many juristdictions, but they still have bullshit value if the victim can't afford - or if the transactiion is too triivial to justify - legal advice).
Don't get me wrong: My lawyer should be able to thrash out a contract with your lawyer without interference (beyond the usual rules on unconscianable terms) . The problem is EULAS and "Terms and conditions" that aren't subject to negotiation, or other situations where one side has a team of crack stunt lawyers and the other side has Wikipedia.
If you use computers then you probably click "I have read and accept the terms and conditions" or something similar on an almost daily basis. Even some GPL software does this (we all know it's mostly harmless, but how is someone who doesn't know about GPL meant to make a judgement - especially if it's the legalese-ridden GPLv3?) . The T&Cs for a well-known brand of online media/applications store run to 30 pages and you're expected to accept them every time the software auto-updates.
More and more consumer items are coming with "services" attached that have T&Cs that only a lawyer could love. If I'm buying a house, I'll hire a lawyer. If I'm buying a pint of milk and a frozen pizza on my debit card and the card terminal flashes up "Refer to Terms" (yes, this used to happen in my local store) - not so much. This needs to be stopped.
Even the legal system ought to be smart enough to apply "you get what you pay for" to this situation and make a distinction between the liabilities of someone giving away their software and a big company charging industrial grade annual licensing fees.
If you want guarantees on open source software, get a support contract.
True, however the terms you mention are somewhat open to interpretation. If some dipshit was writing a text message while driving and pulled over under those terms, they could argue that they were actually still in control of the vehicle.
...yes, but a court is usually going to accept a sworn statement from a police officer saying that the car was weaving around or that the driver didn't appear to be holding the wheel or looking at the road. If a cop thought that someone was texting they''d probably tail them a while and wait for evidence of careless driving (...or just pull in in front an tap your brakes... :-)) . On the other hand if the police book someone for "texting while driving" that's much harder to spot and they actually have to prove that the driver was texting. Even if they get phone records, which is (and/or should be) a legal hassle, phones can queue messages until they get a signal.
It can also lead to "low-hanging fruit" cases of people getting pointlessly booked for making a call while square-wheeled in a traffic jam because they were technically "driving", or routinely having to hand over your phone records every time you have a minor accident.
... is because they are almost hopeless to enforce
Also, I'm pretty sure that, in most jurisdictions, the police have always had the ability to charge people with various forms of "careless driving/dangerous driving/driving without due care and attention/not being in control of the vehicle" so the laws are completely redundant.
...unlike commercial television, whereby anybody who buys a packet of breakfast cereal is forced to make a donation to the cost of TV, even if they never watch it... and when they do watch it everything is effectively censored to avoid upsetting the advertisers. Or do you think the money to pay for commercial TV is magically conjured up by the Invisible Hand Fairy?
Hope I'm wrong, but I think I might have found the catch.
It seems like this is a replacement for "full retail" and what they've really dropped is the "Generic, shrinkwrap OEM license" package which is what personal system builders used to buy (with debatable legality).
Unfortunately, I suspect that's also what the handful of nice PC makers who currently sell PCs with Windows as an optional extra offer. So maybe MS's plan is to throw a spanner in that - perhaps they'll have to sign up to a 'proper' OEM licensing deal with MS, and sell PCs with a "proper" vendor-customised Windows pre-installed (...and be 'discouraged' from selling bare PCs).
That would explain the otherwise convoluted wording "You may not install the software as an operating system on any computer except one that you are building for your own use or as an operating system running on a local virtual machine or a separate partition." when they just could say "You can install this on one computer, owned by you, for your personal use". (see the ZDNet article) and the demise of the Full Retail version. I can't believe that they want to stop people replacing the whole OS on their Mac or Linux PC with Windows, but it does make it clear that a PD maker couldn't sling one of these licenses in with an otherwise bare, but ready-made, PC.
Yeah - some people here seem to lack the engineering imagination to realise how much weight you save by using 'no user servicable parts' designs. The 'fixed battery' is a good example - you'd have to add extra bulkheads to protect the internals when the battery was removed, doors, latches, spring-loaded electrical contacts and a thicker shell for the battery itself so that it was safe for klutzes to handle outside of the computer.
You also missed one:
(3) upgradability of laptops - certainly beyond RAM - is not a high priority for many people. Its fiddly and non-techies are nervous about breaking stuff. Plus, computers and consumer electronics in general are pretty damn reliable these days (some of us remember the days when you would be nuts to buy your own TV, because it would pop a valve a couple of times a year).
No, the problem with Apple (and many other manufacturers) is that they still charge over-the-odds for BTO RAM and HD upgrades. (I think the 8->16GB upgrade for the Retina is £160 - about 3x what I recently paid for an extra 8GB for last-year's model MBP - I'd expect a small premium for newer, faster chips but not 3x). The main reason I've ever upgraded RAM in recent years is that it cost too much over the odds to buy the machine with adequate RAM in the first place. There's really no reason, these days, for a 'premium' product like the Retina not to come with 16GB of RAM as standard.
Total nonsense. It wasn't "sealed." You simply needed a certain torx screwdriver to open it. And there certainly were user-upgradeable parts inside.
Plus, the monitor was built in, hence lots of high voltage zinging around, including some nice big caps that stayed live for a while after the power was off - good idea not to let Joe average user get in there without jumping a few hoops.
Also, the Mac computers that are designed with easy internal expansion in mind (NuBus cards, then PCI) have often been made particularly easy to work on - from the clip-on lids on the Mac IIs (and the Apple II for that matter), the way the G3/4 towers opened up, and even the Mac Pro (interesting to see which way the new Pro, promised next year, goes),
Everything useful is written against MySQL specifically, with Postgres support an afterthought. This sucks, yes.
Well, that's because not everybody has the luxury of choosing which database is supported by their web hosting service and MySQL is by far the most common. So your wonderful blogging application really needs to target MySQL if it's going to be widely used.
Plus, "Linux, Apache, MySQL, (PHP|Perl|Python)" = LAMP. Switching to LASP or LAPP just wouldn't give you such a good acronym. Why do you think server-side Ruby, HaXE, nodeJS etc. have never dethroned scripting languages starting with "P"? ...and server-side ECMAScript would just be LAME.
C.f. PostgreSQL: Old-school MySQL with MyISAM tables was perfect for data-driven websites, where most accesses are 'read only' and any updates tend to be straightforward 'add new record' operations. If you don't do complicated update queries then you can live without transactions, referential integrity and all that jazz, and avoid a lot of the overhead that you'd get with PostgreSQL. That advantage mostly disappears if you start using newer MySQL features.
On the other hand, unlike SQLite, MySQL is still client/server based which might be more practical for, say, a web hosting provider who doesn't want users to be able to make files writable by the web server, and/or wants the flexibility to host databases on a dedicated server. The individual databases may be simple, but the service provider has a lot of them to serve...
Plus, with a server-based DBM you can run a desktop tool to connect to the database on your remote server (I use a ssh tunnel) rather than log in via a shell or using a clunky PHP-based admin tool.
Personally I prefer Postgresql to MySQL. While Postgresql looks more 'plain vanilla' I actually find it more straightforward to get easy things done
I've used both and am inclined to agree with you. Unfortunately, they are sufficiently different to make migrating existing projects a pain. Also, MySQL is commonly available in commercial web-hosting services, which makes it the safest bet for data-driven websites. I'd also agree that PostgreSQL isn't quite as falling-off-a-log simple to get started with as MySQL (which is the usual consequence of a more sophisticated system),
It used to be 'horses for courses': The MySQL of a few versions ago really hit the sweet spot for website backends, in which "reads" are far more common than "writes", and most updates simply consisted of adding a new record to a table. In that case, you can live without transactions, referential integrity checking, functions etc. and enjoy the resulting performance. That's what started the "myth" that MySQL was faster than PostgreSQL (of course it was - it was doing less!).
The later versions of MySQL seem like putting traction control and power steering on a bicycle. Perhaps someone should (or maybe has) fork "classic" MySQL as the ideal tool for data-driven websites, and leave the grown-up stuff to PostgreSQL? Or, maybe sqlite is the way to go for that.
"In response to learning of possible patent litigation from Apple, et. al., we have decided to delay the launch of the Nexus Q while we cover our asses and try to remove the infringing bits."
Whu? Have Apple finally been granted a patent on "selling a product for 3x the cost of competing products"?
Who cares about the Nexus Q, I want a Nexus 6.
The Nexus 6 would be great if it wasn't for the ridiculous built-in obsolescence. A few years and then all the content you've collected vanishes, like tears in rain.
Do you know that they _ARE_ doing similar things in England? In England, in some schools, students do not received grades, and they do not know how they fair inside their own class - because, according to those so-called "experts", they do not want to "hurt the feeling of those children who aren't doing well"
In Engand, Narnia, maybe (No, really, The Silver Chair actually featured such a school... 1953 called and it wants its education debate back.)
While you might get a few numpties not wanting to upset kids by giving them an F, your comment sounds like a smear job on Formative Assessment in which the emphasis is on providing critical feedback rather than a summative grade. To put it simply, if you give someone an "F" it doesn't help them much, while if you give most students a 'B' they'll say "great, sorted" and move on rather than go back and see if they could make it an 'A+'. The surprising thing shown by the research is that if you do the "common sense" thing and give feedback and a grade then many kids just look at the grade and ignore the feedback.
In England, Real World - as in the US - the struggle is that the government and/or school management are so obsessed with assessment and progress tracking that the kids never learn to do anything other than answer test questions. For the sake of "reliability" and easy grading these tend to be broken down into step-by-step processes so each stage can be marked against the curriculum. At worst, instead of "Solve this quadratic equation" - you'd see "(a) Factorize this quadratic , (b) Hence solve the equation" - not to make the question easier to do, but to make the question easier to grade and link to the curriculum. (And, of course, in the US it would lilkely get turned into a multiple choice). Actually having a problem that could be solved by using quadratics but which doesn't say "Quadratic Equation" on the tin? Heven forbid, ther ecould be an alternative, valid method - how would we score it?
a nuclear-powered, MINI-Cooper-sized super rover will land on Mars.
Is that an English Mini Cooper or a German Mini Cooper?
You'd think NASA would be more careful with their metric-vs-traditional units after the last Mars landing cock-up!
No, not at all. Adobe invented it. Adobe implemented it as a printer language. Without Apple, we'd still have Postscript.
...but probably not as a general-purpose printer language because in your own words "the only thing Apple can lay claim to is convincing Adobe to actually implement it as a general purpose printer language".
Apple took the laser printer, they took Postscript and they took local area networking and they put them together to produce a laser printer with Postscript and a plug-and-play, peer-to-peer LAN, so it could do advanced typesetting without the PC having to render and send huge bitmaps, and the cost of the expensive printer could be spread over a dozen users. If you don't think that counts as innovation then have it your way...
Why is it so fucking hard for you fanboys to accept that Apple wasn't responsible for every innovation in computing ever?
Why is it so hard for you to read and at least try to comprehend the argument - which is that a lot of Apple innovation consists of seeking out innovative ideas and turning them into successful products? If you want to argue that actually getting new ideas to market and promoting them doesn't count as part of "innovation" then please go ahead, but do try and state your case in words of more than 4 letters.
A Concorde going overhead at around 1000 feet and normal cruising speed is no more noisy than a normal jet. It's the afterburners that are loud (REALLY VERY LOUD) and those are only used at take-off.
Noise in and around airports is an issue too, and modern planes are relatively quiet.
I was once sitting in a cattle-class passenger jet queuing for the runway at Heathrow. The noise of other planes taking off was barely enough to distract you from the gripping in-flight magazine. Then it was Concorde's turn...
Bloody hellfire.* If you lived near Heathrow, your double-glazing would need double-glazing.
Apart from the take-off noise, the sonic booms could be clearly heard along the south coast of England. Its not that a couple of Concorde flights a day caused problems, it was the potential impact if supersonic travel became commonplace.
*Having said that, years before, I visited one of the test Concordes on public display at Yeoville when some space jockey on the adjoining airfield went VTOL in a Harrier. That was louder...
No, not at all. The thing that made it successful was Adobe getting it supported by as many printers as possible - the only thing Apple can lay claim to is convincing Adobe to actually implement it as a general purpose printer language.
So you're saying it wouldn't have existed in its present form without Apple...
Also, the fact that Macs and Laserwriters featured cheap, plug-n-play local area networking (LocalTalk) before Ethernet became common/affordable (or easy to use) on PCs made it much easier to justify the cost of a laser printer by sharing it with a workgroup.
That's the whole point - there's more to "Innovation" than just coming up with bright ideas. Apple has an amazing track record in taking ideas that were 'bubbling under' and turning them into market-changing products.
I wonder what the history of personal computing would have been like if someone at Xerox management had been given a tap with the clue stick and thought "Hmm. We've got this amazing research lab who have invented the graphical user interface, the mouse, ethernet and the laser printer, plus we've got a customer base for our copiers that rivals IBM. I dunno... could we put that all together and make some sort of 'system for doing publishing on the top of your desk'(r) based on 'computers that one person can use'(tm)?'
Hindsight is A wonderful thing. Still, If they kept the magic beans^H^H^H^H shares that Steve let them buy then they'll have made a few pennies.