Blame the customer. That's a sound business philosophy
I'm not suggesting that. I'm wondering why he bought it if it didn't meet his needs without a future unannounced upgrade. Most people buy things that serve a need, now. Not that might do so one day IF they decide to produce an upgrade. That's like buying a small hatchback now even though what you really need is a 7-seater MPV, on the offchance that the company might produce an "upgrade" to the MPV later, even though they haven't said they would ever do so.
If he bought machines he had no use for, on the basis that later he could upgrade them (so they'd be useful then, perhaps?) then it's his own fault. Why did he buy a machine for $12,000 if it was of no use to him at that precise moment? You can't blame Apple for bad buying decisions - either the machine was worth the money or it wasn't in which case he shouldn't have spent it. Simple.
Isn't using GPS for sun tracking just a tad over-engineered? Why not just track the big bright thing in the sky using simple optical sensors? And if it's too cloudy to get a good fix on the sun, well, the system isn't going to do you any good anyway...
I was waiting for this update hoping that the iBook would get a bigger screen. My existing iBook is a venerable 600MHz model, and while it is actually really usable and is my workhorse, I need a bigger screen for occasional coding work.
I feel a bit let down since this to my mind is the main drawback of the iBook. Surely a bit more screen resolution is not unreasonable?
Morality doesn't require religion, it simply requires a social conscience. I get very pissed off with people assuming that because I'm an atheist I must ipso facto be immoral. That's false logic, but then that's what religious type folk are good at I guess...
because, as I understand it, I'm likely to evolve more fingers
Then clearly you don't understand it, not by a very long chalk. So why not read a bit about it and then come back and argue it. Try "The Blind Watchmaker" by Richard Dawkins, it's a good start.
I don't have to imagine it, as I *have* the mutation that grows an extra vertebrae
That's great!:) You may be speciation in action - if your extra vertebra confers an advantage (and, perhaps crucially, chicks dig it), you could be the model for the future of our species. I honestly truly hope so (evidence of you being on Slashdot notwithstanding) because it would shut those stupid evolution deniers up good and proper! Look folks, this is how it happens - one little tweak at a time!
I think we are saying the same thing. For everyday velocities, Newton works. If you use Einstein's equations instead for everyday velocities, relativistic effects become so small that the equations collapse to Newton's equations - the tiny amount of correction that relativity brings can be discounted at those velocities. Of course at larger velocities, the "correction" becomes so large that the original newtonian part breaks down altogether, so in that sense Newton is inadequate.
2) Second law of thermodynamics. While another somewhat weak argument in the eyes of many evolution proponents, the significance of a mutation actually increasing the intellectual properties of of an organism would be a major scientific find of unbelievable proportions and would indicate that our analysis of closed systems needs to be rethought. Specifically, I'm talking about DNA and the "information argument". Species don't just get smarter, yet it is clear that we are more intelligent than dogs, for instance. The hard part is determining *why*.
Simple, energy is being put into the system by the sun. The total system to be considered is the whole of the local solar system. There, entropy is increasing, but because there is a flow of energy to the earth, there is a mechanism that can allow the local entropy on the earth to decrease. There is no conflict here, you just need to consider a bigger system than just the planet.
5) Spontaneous generation. It's never been proven
That's because it doesn't happen, and has never happened. Life on earth doesn't depend on SG, it depends on a very slow process that went from inorganic to organic chemistry to some form of self-replicating system (not DNA, that is a much later evolution of whatever came first). There is probably no evidence to be found for this because as a process it took place an incredibly long time ago on a very different earth - all traces wil lhave been long obliterated. And besides, the emergence of life after the formation of the earth took a mind-bogglingly long time, which indicates that whatever this process was, it was either very slow or very chancy. Odds are this will always remain a mystery - we have to accept that there are some things that can never be known, only speculated about
because we *could* be the 1 in septendecillion instance
This is the "weak anthropic principle". We could be the only life in the universe. Why us? Because we are here to observe it, so nothing else could observe it. It's a definite possibility.
Evolution of the eye. We have no indication of how or why the eye evolved
Oh, that old chestnut. The eye has evolved separately numerous times, and is actually pretty obvious! Read Dawkins. The eye is so obviously useful for a creature's survival that its evolution is more or less guaranteed. More difficult to answer would be subtler thing such as sexual reproduction, etc.
Evolution of the vertebrae
Not sure why this one should be tricky. The vertebra is easy to undertand from the point of view of mechanical efficiency when propelling oneself through water. Tiny creatures experience water as a viscous medium but as they grow larger then simple propulsion methods such as cilia or flagellae become very inefficient. Hence muscle will tend to evolve from the motility cells, but muscle will work best when it has a framework to work with and so that will co-evolve - this has happened twice at least - insects evolved exoskeletons and animals evolved endoskeletons. The endo- route proved more suitable for even larger creatures and a simple way for a creature to get larger is to replicate parts of its existing structures - it's easy to imagine how a gene for building a vertebra could mutate and get expressed twice and so there were then two vertebrae, and so on. I don't see how any particular body part every "disproves" evolution. Usually their very ad-hoc-ness tends to show that a natural process is at work. If bodies had been designed there are many things that could be drastically simplified for no loss of function.
Macro-evolution is not falsifiable. If something is not falsiable, like creation for instance, it's considered part of a belief system or religion.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by macro-evolution not being falsifiable. It has not been observed taking place yet - speciation at any rate. But macro-evolution is observable - it's all around us in every different living creature. The key
Not disproving, extending... Newton was right and still is to a first approximation at the speeds we experience as human beings. Einstein merely extended Newton to work for light speeds.
This is reflected in the fact that modern engineering (spaceshots, etc aside) uses Newton, not Einstein, and buildings still stay up, and machines work. The tiny error correction that Einstein brings to Newton is still way below the tolerances that modern engineering works with.
You're entitled to your belief system, and I'm entitled to mine, which is: a belief in God(s) is a relic of an unenlightened age which is increasingly causing problems in a world that has, by and large, moved on and realised the truth (whatever it turns out to be, we don't have it all yet) is both more complex and more beautiful than the silly old myths of old. Resorting to the "God hypothesis" as an explanation for the phenomena we see around us is, to my mind, childish in a very real sense. Hence the "grow up". It's time mankind grew up. Religion is a crutch and letting it go will be a difficult and traumatic process - but we must do it, otherwise as a species we have no future. We can make a start now by stopping this politically correct pandering to religions that is going on - and I mean all religions, none of them are any better than any others, as they all take as their starting point some ridiculous creationist notions. Superstitious silly nonsense, all of it. And to kill in its name is the height of stupidity; it amounts to a mental dysfunction of staggering proportions. If we don't get over it we are doomed.
Nice idea, not going to happen. The Mac Mini is aimed at non-geeks who just want a neat machine to help them manage their iPods. Adding on an external drive is geek stuff, not the Mac Mini's target market.
This behaviour has changed a few times - in the classic Mac OS the invalid documents were hidden, in OS X at present they are greyed. I think there is still a way to hide unwanted files altogether by coding it that way if you want, but the present default is greying. I'm not quite sure which approach is the best - personally I'd prefer them to be hidden.
That's exactly the point, those guys are presumed to be terrorists, in other words they are presumed guilty until proven innocent. Until they are tried in a court of law, and evidence presented which proves their guilt, they are being denied their basic human rights as citizens.
Rights. Not privileges, rights. It is my right as a citizen of a free country to be considered innocent until proven guilty, to be given a fair and speedy trial, and to not speak until I can talk to my attorney. I am indeed privileged to have these basic human rights (which, sadly, do not exist in some third world lands)
The USA is in the third world now? Cough... cough... Guantanamo... cough...
Open/Save dialogs are not part of the Finder, they are a UI service provided by the OS frameworks.
There is an "Up" button - just click the menu at the top and you get the full path down to where you are, with the current location highlighted. Go up one. In fact go up two, three, whatever - it's much more useful than a single "up" button. Also, there is a back/forward button so you can easily navigate through your file browsing history.
There are legitimate issues with Finder usability, but to be honest most actual users don't spend much time in the Finder, they use applications to get Stuff Done(TM).
This is debatable, but the only one of his points which might have some foundation - it would be handy to be able to winnow files in the open dialog. Presumably the justification is that files should always be visible, even if they're not directly available in a certain program.
This is up to the application, and all good applications will do this. The default behaviour when you code the Open dialog is to show all files, but it is trivially easy to supply a list of openable types from your app so that only those that can be opened are shown. It's also easy to add a pop-up menu to control this behaviour. I guess the default is there so that if you don't go the extra inch to code it properly, it at least works.
Another result of the same decision to use th eALT key for keyboard shortcuts is that it prevented form being used as a kind of super-shift key for typing characters. On the Mac this is great - it's trivially easy to type accented charactérs as you gö along if you want, without breaking your typing speed or train of thought - by using ALT (or option, in Mac parlance) to get to those characters. On Windows, you have to open up a whole separate character palette and cut and paste it from there, or else memorise very arcane keyboard codes. While OS X also has a character palette, it's not often that you have to use it, while on Window you have little choice. To compound the problem on Windows, it also cuts and pastes the font and style from the character palette, which is just plain stupid - I just want the character, please adopt the font and style where I paste it! This is so obvious that I wonder just who provides UI decisions on Windows - this one could have been done better if a 5-year old child had been consulted.
What MS should have done is to specify that an extended keyboard with a command key would be necessary to access keyboard shortcuts in Windows, and within 6 months or a year, those keyboards would have been the standard. Instead they imposed a workaround that had no upsides except compatibility with the existing PC keyboard, and many downsides that are simply accepted by the 'dozers today as "the way it is".
If anyone is in the wrong here it's Windows. Appel established all the common keyboard shortcuts years before Windows was even a gleam in Bill Gate's eye. Windows copied them - BUT DECIDED TO USE ALT INSTEAD for its modifier. Maybe it had no choice - those early PC keyboards didn't have the appropriate key that Apple had added to their keyboards.
But don't go blaming Apple for this, they decided it needed a special, different key and so added it. They have stuck to their guns and rightly so - the Windows implementation is a workaround. As usual Windows ignores what is RIGHT and does what it can within its own imposed limitations, and the population is just expected to learn it that way and to hell with the HCI research.
Satellite images, digital cameras, GPS, colour printers.... how on earth did mankind ever manage mapping in the 16th century? A decent theodolite, a compass and some painstaking triangulation are all that you really need. Now THAT's low tech. Seriously, the older techniques are still perfectly valid and useful - ask any surveyor.
I think the minimum is 3 instructions[1]) can run any algorithm
In the CS class I took (about 14 years ago now) I was told that you only needed one instruction - "subtract and branch if negative". One of the set project challenges was to actually build one in hardware and then write a compiler for it. I'm not sure if anyone took it up, I almost wish I had, sounds interesting... a processor like that could be made so simple that it could be made to run at an incredibly high speed - so it might even outperform any form of RISC/CISC processor.
Slashdot Mirror
Blame the customer. That's a sound business philosophy
I'm not suggesting that. I'm wondering why he bought it if it didn't meet his needs without a future unannounced upgrade. Most people buy things that serve a need, now. Not that might do so one day IF they decide to produce an upgrade. That's like buying a small hatchback now even though what you really need is a 7-seater MPV, on the offchance that the company might produce an "upgrade" to the MPV later, even though they haven't said they would ever do so.
If he bought machines he had no use for, on the basis that later he could upgrade them (so they'd be useful then, perhaps?) then it's his own fault. Why did he buy a machine for $12,000 if it was of no use to him at that precise moment? You can't blame Apple for bad buying decisions - either the machine was worth the money or it wasn't in which case he shouldn't have spent it. Simple.
Isn't using GPS for sun tracking just a tad over-engineered? Why not just track the big bright thing in the sky using simple optical sensors? And if it's too cloudy to get a good fix on the sun, well, the system isn't going to do you any good anyway...
Stop hoping, and go out and get it today. It's called "Mac OS X 10.4"
I was waiting for this update hoping that the iBook would get a bigger screen. My existing iBook is a venerable 600MHz model, and while it is actually really usable and is my workhorse, I need a bigger screen for occasional coding work.
I feel a bit let down since this to my mind is the main drawback of the iBook. Surely a bit more screen resolution is not unreasonable?
then all religions a like is pointless.
Amen to that brother.
There is no right or wrong, only consequences
Morality doesn't require religion, it simply requires a social conscience. I get very pissed off with people assuming that because I'm an atheist I must ipso facto be immoral. That's false logic, but then that's what religious type folk are good at I guess...
because, as I understand it, I'm likely to evolve more fingers
Then clearly you don't understand it, not by a very long chalk. So why not read a bit about it and then come back and argue it. Try "The Blind Watchmaker" by Richard Dawkins, it's a good start.
I don't have to imagine it, as I *have* the mutation that grows an extra vertebrae
:) You may be speciation in action - if your extra vertebra confers an advantage (and, perhaps crucially, chicks dig it), you could be the model for the future of our species. I honestly truly hope so (evidence of you being on Slashdot notwithstanding) because it would shut those stupid evolution deniers up good and proper! Look folks, this is how it happens - one little tweak at a time!
That's great!
I think we are saying the same thing. For everyday velocities, Newton works. If you use Einstein's equations instead for everyday velocities, relativistic effects become so small that the equations collapse to Newton's equations - the tiny amount of correction that relativity brings can be discounted at those velocities. Of course at larger velocities, the "correction" becomes so large that the original newtonian part breaks down altogether, so in that sense Newton is inadequate.
2) Second law of thermodynamics. While another somewhat weak argument in the eyes of many evolution proponents, the significance of a mutation actually increasing the intellectual properties of of an organism would be a major scientific find of unbelievable proportions and would indicate that our analysis of closed systems needs to be rethought. Specifically, I'm talking about DNA and the "information argument". Species don't just get smarter, yet it is clear that we are more intelligent than dogs, for instance. The hard part is determining *why*.
Simple, energy is being put into the system by the sun. The total system to be considered is the whole of the local solar system. There, entropy is increasing, but because there is a flow of energy to the earth, there is a mechanism that can allow the local entropy on the earth to decrease. There is no conflict here, you just need to consider a bigger system than just the planet.
5) Spontaneous generation. It's never been proven
That's because it doesn't happen, and has never happened. Life on earth doesn't depend on SG, it depends on a very slow process that went from inorganic to organic chemistry to some form of self-replicating system (not DNA, that is a much later evolution of whatever came first). There is probably no evidence to be found for this because as a process it took place an incredibly long time ago on a very different earth - all traces wil lhave been long obliterated. And besides, the emergence of life after the formation of the earth took a mind-bogglingly long time, which indicates that whatever this process was, it was either very slow or very chancy. Odds are this will always remain a mystery - we have to accept that there are some things that can never be known, only speculated about
because we *could* be the 1 in septendecillion instance
This is the "weak anthropic principle". We could be the only life in the universe. Why us? Because we are here to observe it, so nothing else could observe it. It's a definite possibility.
Evolution of the eye. We have no indication of how or why the eye evolved
Oh, that old chestnut. The eye has evolved separately numerous times, and is actually pretty obvious! Read Dawkins. The eye is so obviously useful for a creature's survival that its evolution is more or less guaranteed. More difficult to answer would be subtler thing such as sexual reproduction, etc. Evolution of the vertebrae
Not sure why this one should be tricky. The vertebra is easy to undertand from the point of view of mechanical efficiency when propelling oneself through water. Tiny creatures experience water as a viscous medium but as they grow larger then simple propulsion methods such as cilia or flagellae become very inefficient. Hence muscle will tend to evolve from the motility cells, but muscle will work best when it has a framework to work with and so that will co-evolve - this has happened twice at least - insects evolved exoskeletons and animals evolved endoskeletons. The endo- route proved more suitable for even larger creatures and a simple way for a creature to get larger is to replicate parts of its existing structures - it's easy to imagine how a gene for building a vertebra could mutate and get expressed twice and so there were then two vertebrae, and so on. I don't see how any particular body part every "disproves" evolution. Usually their very ad-hoc-ness tends to show that a natural process is at work. If bodies had been designed there are many things that could be drastically simplified for no loss of function. Macro-evolution is not falsifiable. If something is not falsiable, like creation for instance, it's considered part of a belief system or religion.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by macro-evolution not being falsifiable. It has not been observed taking place yet - speciation at any rate. But macro-evolution is observable - it's all around us in every different living creature. The key
disproving" Newtonian mechanics
Not disproving, extending... Newton was right and still is to a first approximation at the speeds we experience as human beings. Einstein merely extended Newton to work for light speeds.
This is reflected in the fact that modern engineering (spaceshots, etc aside) uses Newton, not Einstein, and buildings still stay up, and machines work. The tiny error correction that Einstein brings to Newton is still way below the tolerances that modern engineering works with.
You're entitled to your belief system, and I'm entitled to mine, which is: a belief in God(s) is a relic of an unenlightened age which is increasingly causing problems in a world that has, by and large, moved on and realised the truth (whatever it turns out to be, we don't have it all yet) is both more complex and more beautiful than the silly old myths of old. Resorting to the "God hypothesis" as an explanation for the phenomena we see around us is, to my mind, childish in a very real sense. Hence the "grow up". It's time mankind grew up. Religion is a crutch and letting it go will be a difficult and traumatic process - but we must do it, otherwise as a species we have no future. We can make a start now by stopping this politically correct pandering to religions that is going on - and I mean all religions, none of them are any better than any others, as they all take as their starting point some ridiculous creationist notions. Superstitious silly nonsense, all of it. And to kill in its name is the height of stupidity; it amounts to a mental dysfunction of staggering proportions. If we don't get over it we are doomed.
How is this relevant to biology?
Nice idea, not going to happen. The Mac Mini is aimed at non-geeks who just want a neat machine to help them manage their iPods. Adding on an external drive is geek stuff, not the Mac Mini's target market.
We were created, man. Get used to it.
No we weren't. Get used to it. And Grow Up.
This behaviour has changed a few times - in the classic Mac OS the invalid documents were hidden, in OS X at present they are greyed. I think there is still a way to hide unwanted files altogether by coding it that way if you want, but the present default is greying. I'm not quite sure which approach is the best - personally I'd prefer them to be hidden.
That's exactly the point, those guys are presumed to be terrorists, in other words they are presumed guilty until proven innocent. Until they are tried in a court of law, and evidence presented which proves their guilt, they are being denied their basic human rights as citizens.
Rights. Not privileges, rights. It is my right as a citizen of a free country to be considered innocent until proven guilty, to be given a fair and speedy trial, and to not speak until I can talk to my attorney. I am indeed privileged to have these basic human rights (which, sadly, do not exist in some third world lands)
The USA is in the third world now? Cough... cough... Guantanamo... cough...
Open/Save dialogs are not part of the Finder, they are a UI service provided by the OS frameworks.
There is an "Up" button - just click the menu at the top and you get the full path down to where you are, with the current location highlighted. Go up one. In fact go up two, three, whatever - it's much more useful than a single "up" button. Also, there is a back/forward button so you can easily navigate through your file browsing history.
There are legitimate issues with Finder usability, but to be honest most actual users don't spend much time in the Finder, they use applications to get Stuff Done(TM).
This is debatable, but the only one of his points which might have some foundation - it would be handy to be able to winnow files in the open dialog. Presumably the justification is that files should always be visible, even if they're not directly available in a certain program.
This is up to the application, and all good applications will do this. The default behaviour when you code the Open dialog is to show all files, but it is trivially easy to supply a list of openable types from your app so that only those that can be opened are shown. It's also easy to add a pop-up menu to control this behaviour. I guess the default is there so that if you don't go the extra inch to code it properly, it at least works.
Another result of the same decision to use th eALT key for keyboard shortcuts is that it prevented form being used as a kind of super-shift key for typing characters. On the Mac this is great - it's trivially easy to type accented charactérs as you gö along if you want, without breaking your typing speed or train of thought - by using ALT (or option, in Mac parlance) to get to those characters. On Windows, you have to open up a whole separate character palette and cut and paste it from there, or else memorise very arcane keyboard codes. While OS X also has a character palette, it's not often that you have to use it, while on Window you have little choice. To compound the problem on Windows, it also cuts and pastes the font and style from the character palette, which is just plain stupid - I just want the character, please adopt the font and style where I paste it! This is so obvious that I wonder just who provides UI decisions on Windows - this one could have been done better if a 5-year old child had been consulted.
What MS should have done is to specify that an extended keyboard with a command key would be necessary to access keyboard shortcuts in Windows, and within 6 months or a year, those keyboards would have been the standard. Instead they imposed a workaround that had no upsides except compatibility with the existing PC keyboard, and many downsides that are simply accepted by the 'dozers today as "the way it is".
If anyone is in the wrong here it's Windows. Appel established all the common keyboard shortcuts years before Windows was even a gleam in Bill Gate's eye. Windows copied them - BUT DECIDED TO USE ALT INSTEAD for its modifier. Maybe it had no choice - those early PC keyboards didn't have the appropriate key that Apple had added to their keyboards.
But don't go blaming Apple for this, they decided it needed a special, different key and so added it. They have stuck to their guns and rightly so - the Windows implementation is a workaround. As usual Windows ignores what is RIGHT and does what it can within its own imposed limitations, and the population is just expected to learn it that way and to hell with the HCI research.
You resize a window by dragging the bottom right corner of the window, or zooming it my clicking the green button at top left of the title bar.
Satellite images, digital cameras, GPS, colour printers.... how on earth did mankind ever manage mapping in the 16th century? A decent theodolite, a compass and some painstaking triangulation are all that you really need. Now THAT's low tech. Seriously, the older techniques are still perfectly valid and useful - ask any surveyor.
I think the minimum is 3 instructions[1]) can run any algorithm
In the CS class I took (about 14 years ago now) I was told that you only needed one instruction - "subtract and branch if negative". One of the set project challenges was to actually build one in hardware and then write a compiler for it. I'm not sure if anyone took it up, I almost wish I had, sounds interesting... a processor like that could be made so simple that it could be made to run at an incredibly high speed - so it might even outperform any form of RISC/CISC processor.