What's the difference between E. Coli and a human being? One is self-aware, the other is simnply automatically responding to it's environment based on programmed predictable responses.
Well E. Coli is not always completely predictable-- there is some variance in a cell's response to stimuli. And humans don't fail to be fairly predictable in many ways. I would still agree that there's a difference, but the difference is not as clear as we sometimes pretend.
I know there are audio/graphic/video applications for Linux and they can be used for certain professional purposes (it depends on what you're doing). However, having lots of software available is not the same as having the software you need. As you note, it's one thing to ask "Is MS Word available?" and another to ask "are there word processors?" But it's still a third to ask, "Are there word processors that have the features that I use in Microsoft Word?"
More to the point, Maya is not a drop-in replacement for Adobe Photoshop. You can't take go to a NYC ad agency and tell their graphic editors to drop Photoshop and to use Maya, and it's not an issue of retraining. It's an issue of Maya being a different sort of program made for different purposes. Mathematica, again, is not the same sort of program.
So yes, Linux has many applications, and of course many of these applications are good for what they do. However, this should not mislead the Linux community into thinking that there are applications sufficient to allow every person to switch to Linux if they wished to. Many creative pros are forced to choose between OSX and Windows because those are the operating systems their vendor supports, and there is no sufficient replacement for the software they need on Linux. And the creative industry is an example that I'm familiar with, but not necessarily the limit of the phenomenon.
However, I am also saying is that a lot of these professionals need little else from their OS other than the ability to run these applications. I know graphics pros who could get by on little more than Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat, a simple file manager, and Firefox. That's it. It's sort of like business people who just need an office suite, web browser, file manager, and e-mail app, but those people have feasible options on Linux.
Across the realms of science and philosophy, the mind is always seperate from body in as much as they can't be divided into eachother.
That's not so. Descartes did much to separate the two in people's minds, and most of western civilization has failed to break free of this influence. However, this doesn't mean that the separation is ubiquitous in philosophic thought, nor even that this separation is sensible. Perhaps most notable is Aristotle, from whom each of the philosophers you mention can trace their intellectual lineage, and for whom the body and soul were not separable.
In terms of applications, I think there are tons more apps available for linux than windows, but the windows apps have marketing budgets and advertise.
It's not as simple as advertising budgets. There are still some holes in the selection of Linux applications, as I mentioned in my post. Seriously, if you could point me in the direction of Photoshop/Illustrator, Sound Forge, and Final Cut/Premiere replacements in Linux that would satisfy professional audio/video people, I'd be extremely grateful.
I think it's not as simple as pre-installing Linux on more computers. At the very least, you'd need a lot of people to buy these Linux computers, which means that the way to increase Linux market share is for more people to buy Linux. That's obvious, but not terribly helpful.
Really what you're saying, I think, is that Linux needs better marketing. Dell sells Linux computers, but they don't really try to push them. They don't advertise them, and if you call and say you want to buy a computer they assume you want Windows. People don't ask for Linux because they don't know what it is or they're scared of it.
Similarly the idea of simulating human intelligence is largely ignored by many people in the field.
Well I guess it depends on what people are talking about when they talk about "artificial intelligence". It's my understanding that "in the field", they usually just mean a something that sorts through data in interesting "intelligent" ways. However, if you're talking about what the layman thinks of when you say "artificial intelligence", i.e. making self-aware machines who have something similar to "mind" or "understanding", then the intelligence will need to be very similar to human intelligence.
It seems to me that, whenever I hear about someone interested in creating the latter sort of AI, they fail to grasp the extent to which the qualities that they're trying to create are bound up with other human qualities.
That's a good point-- except that Dell/HP/Wallmart do make up a significant piece of the market, and if these guys were more successful with Linux, others might follow suit. Plus, a lot of computers are controlled by companies with an IT staff who perform regular installs and images of machines.
So to recap, it seems to me that you're saying that Linux's easy set up is only a threat to Microsoft in the following markets:
Yeah, but I guess what I'm getting at is that gaining experience and learning to match patterns requires a certain kind of activity. On a very basic level, our intelligence is not a removed entity "in our heads", so to speak. You learn by trial and error, effecting changes in the world around you, getting feedback in the form of punishment/reward and pain/pleasure.
This often seems overlooked by what I read about AI researchers. I hear about researchers who want robots to paint or understand language or something, but don't provide a mechanism for the "intelligence" to get up, move around, explore, etc. Some of these people seem to really misunderstand human intelligence, thinking that activity has no part in the development of human experience. We would not learn if we were passive and without desire and fear.
I've come to think that it's rather stupid that we think of "intelligence" and "awareness" as mystical disembodied things. I mean to include some scientists and philosophers in this group-- pretty much anyone who talks about "the mind" as a separable entity from "the body".
It seems to me that our intelligences are built around an organism with innate desires and certain abilities to affect the world around them towards achieving those desires. I don't believe that any attempt at artificial intelligence will be truly successful without these components.
Follow the damn thread, I responded to a statement that it wouldn't be good to have high-resolutions on laptops because things would be too small, and I was saying that would be a non-issue with the next release of OSX.
What you're saying now is half-true. The reason for scaling is, of course, so they can offer higher resolution displays without shrinking the UI to an absurd degree. Yes, the reason Apple isn't offering high-resolution displays right now is specifically because they can't scale their UI easily enough, and super-tiny text and controls are a pain. Hell, a lot of Apple users complain already about the MacBook Pros for everything being too tiny.
Will Apple offer a slider in "system preferences" for the user to scale the UI directly? Maybe, maybe not. Will they "lock users out" from this functionality? It'd be stupid to do that, and you have no reason to think they will. If nothing else, it would help their accessibility options to allow people to grow it a bit. If nothing else, they're opening some control to developers, which means that at a bare minimum, you should be able to tweak the setting somewhere.
But what, this whole inane discussion is for you to brag that you like tiny UI controls, running a 17" display at 1600x1200? Great, pat yourself on the back for being a 733t h4x0r. I'm out.
This whole movement toward prettifying the desktop reminds me of the recent trend in computer and console gaming to emphasize graphics over gameplay. The proponents of better graphics say that pretty graphics brings better gameplay... somehow, despite the fact that there has been games with great gameplay since the early, blocky, ugly gaming era of the 2600 and the early arcades.
Well all of that is really a bit of a false dichotomy. You're saying instead of focussing on making the UI pretty, they should make it useful, but it's not really an either-or proposition. There can be games with blocky/ugly graphics *and* bad gameplay, or games with great graphics *and* great gameplay. All things considered, I'd rather have both, particularly since well-placed effects can offer more gameplay options and conventions, even if only to increase immersion.
Likewise with computer UIs, I think things like drop-shadows and smooth 3D animations can be useless eye-candy, or they can be useful visual cues so that it's easier for the user to understand what's going on. A desktop that's hideously ugly can be unpleasant to use. Poor color choice can make controls harder to spot or text harder to read. All of these things make a difference, and all things considered you'll have an easier time getting people to use software if it looks pretty and professional.
Finally, someone who is addressing the root cause of why Linux continues to trail market leaders in desktop share
It seems to me there have been three general problems with Linux on the desktop:
It's hard
It's ugly
It lacks applications
A lot has been done a lot to solve these issues. I would say many distributions are easier to set up than Windows. I would even say that the default setup of Ubuntu, SuSE, and Fedora are all prettier than the default blue Luna theme in Windows XP (which I've always thought was hideous). Sure, things can always be improved, but things are going fairly well.
Application, however, are still a bit of a sore spot. Firefox, OpenOffice, and Evolution make great replacements for IE, MSO, and Outlook. However, you start hitting problems, still, in other areas. If you're doing professional graphic, sound, or movie editing, you'll probably need to go to another platform. So I think that's a real roadblock for some people. We need Photoshop, Sound Forge, and Final Cut replacements. GIMP and Audacity are great apps, but not on the same level.
I'm not criticizing the community or anything. I'm just happy, most of the time, to have such great software available for free. However, since people seem to be asking how to drive Linux adoption, I'm giving my perspective. Linux could be easier, but it is easy enough. It could be prettier, but it is pretty enough (I've had Windows users comment on how pretty my Ubuntu setup is, and it's pretty much the standard setup). If it were just these issues, the free price tag, in tandem with diminished risk of viruses, would be enough for a lot of people to take the plunge.
What would really help is if someone would make more professional-grade apps for Linux. Hell, Adobe would make a big difference all by itself. If Adobe ported their entire product line to Linux, that alone would increase the feasibility of switching people to Linux to an incredible degree.
Either way, it doesn't hurt to make things prettier, so I'm not really arguing with Shuttleworth. However, i know people who would like to switch to Linux and just can't because there aren't FOSS alternatives to the apps they use. Oh, and porting more games wouldn't hurt either. I know people who stick with Windows just for the games.
So your position is that even though they're going through all the trouble to make their OS resolution independent, they'll lock people out from the ability to control their scaling? What makes you think that? Give me a quote that even implies that, rather than offering this feature as a tool for users and developers, they're going to use it to lock people at 100dpi.
I claimed Apple was going to offer resolution independence that would keep high resolutions from being unreasonable on small monitors, you asked, "who said?", and I pointed you to a quote which said they were already implementing this feature. Grow up and quit nit-picking.
The way I see it, there will be a couple people losing their data.
Most idiotic home users won't know enough about it to use this tech. Either they'll be specialty drives or it will require an added bit of voodoo to enable the features, but either way it won't be used on most systems. Most IT departments will be smart enough to know when to use this technology, and the rest will be too dumb to worry about technology at all.
There will be a few tinkerers who, out of misguided fantasies of being James Bond, will enable this without having any clue what they're doing. Some of these people will be smart enough to back up their data anyway, and others will be lucky enough to not forget their passwords.
In the end, you'll have a select few retarded tinkerers who will screw up and lose all of their data, but the net loss will be small. You see, most of those tinkerers were going to accidently reformat their hard drives anyway.
If you read the very last paragraph in the article, it states that the phone isn't going to be available in the US unless someone will carry it (and it doesn't have a way for Verizon et al to nickel and dime you to death with photos, ringtones etc, so good luck getting them to do it)...
Not only that, but it's not expensive enough for Verizon. Some people don't realize, but US cellphone carriers *like* the idea that, if you want to buy a phone without locking yourself into a 5 year contract, it'll cost you something like $400 for what Verizon is offering for "free". They want to have the power to lock you into their plan for a couple years, and push the phones that will have features that they can, in turn, charge you to use.
People aren't always upgrading their phones for the reasons you mentioned. I have a Razr. Do I use the camera? Nope. Play the games or check my e-mail? Uhn-uh. So why did I get a Razr? It's thin. At the time I got it, it was the thinnest thing available, and I carry around a bunch of equipment, so I'd like each thing to be thin and light.
There are advances in technology besides squeezing more crap into phones. They can get smaller, thinner, lighter, with better sound and reception. The power consumption might drop giving better battery life. Personally, I wouldn't mind getting an all-in-one device, but not until someone makes one that performs all of it's functions well. In the mean time, give me a small, light, efficient phone that does a good job at being a phone, and I'll buy it.
The old assumption that displays are 72dpi has been rendered obsolete by advances in display technology. Macs now ship with displays that sport native resolutions of 100dpi or better. Furthermore, the number of pixels per inch will continue to increase dramatically over the next few years. This will make displays crisper and smoother, but it also means that interfaces that are pixel-based will shrink to the point of being unusable. The solution is to remove the 72dpi assumption that has been the norm. In Leopard, the system, including the Carbon and Cocoa frameworks, will be able to draw user interface elements using a scale factor. This will let the user interface maintain the same physical size while gaining resolution and crispness from high dpi displays.
Their new OS, coming in a couple months, will be resolution-independant, and allow scaling the entire UI to account for high-resolution displays.
Anyone think Apple jumped on the RoR bandwagon a little too soon? The whole "movement" has lost a lot of steam and it doesn't appear to be the silver bullet everyone originally thought it was.
Wouldn't that mean they jumped on the bandwagon a little too late?
Anyway, RoR isn't the solution to all programming problems, but it seems to have enough steam that it's going to stick around. OSX comes with Apache, and it's not hard to get PHP, MySQL, or whatever else installed. There's a ruby interpreter in the OS already, and a lot of the prominent people in the RoR community are OSX users.
I can't RTFA to know what they've actually done, but why wouldn't they support RoR? In spite of not finding the meaning of life, solving world hunger, or finding hot women for me, it's a pretty good tool. Something can be useful without solving every single problem, you know.
First, of course companies do this. Think about it from Apple's point of view-- if you have cool swag to hand out, are you going to give it to the writers of MacWorld or one of those Dvorak types who have been claiming to 20 years that Apple's death is imminent?
But that's not the thing that bothers me so much as an explicit statement that the thing is quid pro quo, or tit-for-tat, or however you want to say it. But worse than handing out "review" systems is the advertising dollars. It's always bothered me how, in the late 90s, PC Magazine always gave Gateway extremely good reviews. Maybe it's just me, but every Gateway system I've dealt with has been total crap, and you have professional reviewers giving them glowing reviews while every other ad in their magazine is a Gateway ad.
To my knowledge, no one has publicly accused them of impropriety, but I find it more than a little suspicious and, to this day, don't trust any reviews out of cnet/zdnet (all owned by Ziff-Davis).
Yeah, well if the UI is resolution independent and they give you the controls to scale the UI, you can do whatever you want. My point is that 1920x1200 is not to much for a 15" screen if you can scale everything.
I've run both Linux and OS X on my beige box P4 desktop machine and the Darwin kernel seems much less responsive the the Linux kernel for everyday tasks AND the driver and open software availability are just crap compared to any modern Linux distro (or even cygwin on windows).
I'm not sure of the level of unresponsiveness you're experiencing or what the precise cause is. OSX is plenty fast for me, however, from what I understand, the Darwin kernel is slower than the Linux kernel in some ways due to the fact that it's a microkernel. I'm no expert here, but I'm told that micro kernels have some advantages, including security, and monolithic kernels have other advantages, including speed. It's a design decision and there are tradeoffs, but it doesn't seem to me that thing are sufficiently slowed for desktop purposes to complain.
But did you install Darwin or OSX? Was it the kernel that was slow or the system in general, or perhaps some specific application?
It just works. When I come from home from work and need to do something on my computer, I don't want to have to worry about it. I don't want to worry, for instance, if the new kernel I apt-geted broke my VMWare installation and now requires a module recompile. I don't have the time, nor the energy, to care anymore. OS X is for the practical inside of me. OS X is for the artist inside of me. OS X is for the lazy inside of me.
I wanted to second this. It's not that I don't like Linux, but I work with a Linux guy, much smarter than me, who laughs at me for using OSX. But then, we find ourselves someplace with WPA on the WiFi connection, and he spends 20 minutes trying to connect before giving up. For me on my Macbook, it takes 20 seconds while I click a couple places and type a password. At some point or another, we need to use VPN, and it takes him a couple hours to get it running on this Linux machine. I just open up "Internet Connect", enter a few settings, and bingo!, I'm in. Still, he makes fun of me for having a 1-button mouse.
I don't doubt that there are advantages to Linux. I run Linux in various places, like it a lot for how I use it, and my coworker's setup is a hell of a lot slicker than any of my Linux machines. Still, I've never had to recompile the kernel on OSX in order to get my 3D capabilities working on my graphics card.
Maybe it's just me, but I can't really shave against the grain very well either. Unless I'm already pretty well shaven and making a second pass, I just end up cutting myself that way. But every fracking time I see a Gillette commercial, the guy goes up from his adams-apple to his chin, which I find nearly impossible to do without making at least 4 cuts.
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What's the difference between E. Coli and a human being? One is self-aware, the other is simnply automatically responding to it's environment based on programmed predictable responses.
Well E. Coli is not always completely predictable-- there is some variance in a cell's response to stimuli. And humans don't fail to be fairly predictable in many ways. I would still agree that there's a difference, but the difference is not as clear as we sometimes pretend.
I know there are audio/graphic/video applications for Linux and they can be used for certain professional purposes (it depends on what you're doing). However, having lots of software available is not the same as having the software you need. As you note, it's one thing to ask "Is MS Word available?" and another to ask "are there word processors?" But it's still a third to ask, "Are there word processors that have the features that I use in Microsoft Word?"
More to the point, Maya is not a drop-in replacement for Adobe Photoshop. You can't take go to a NYC ad agency and tell their graphic editors to drop Photoshop and to use Maya, and it's not an issue of retraining. It's an issue of Maya being a different sort of program made for different purposes. Mathematica, again, is not the same sort of program.
So yes, Linux has many applications, and of course many of these applications are good for what they do. However, this should not mislead the Linux community into thinking that there are applications sufficient to allow every person to switch to Linux if they wished to. Many creative pros are forced to choose between OSX and Windows because those are the operating systems their vendor supports, and there is no sufficient replacement for the software they need on Linux. And the creative industry is an example that I'm familiar with, but not necessarily the limit of the phenomenon.
However, I am also saying is that a lot of these professionals need little else from their OS other than the ability to run these applications. I know graphics pros who could get by on little more than Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat, a simple file manager, and Firefox. That's it. It's sort of like business people who just need an office suite, web browser, file manager, and e-mail app, but those people have feasible options on Linux.
Across the realms of science and philosophy, the mind is always seperate from body in as much as they can't be divided into eachother.
That's not so. Descartes did much to separate the two in people's minds, and most of western civilization has failed to break free of this influence. However, this doesn't mean that the separation is ubiquitous in philosophic thought, nor even that this separation is sensible. Perhaps most notable is Aristotle, from whom each of the philosophers you mention can trace their intellectual lineage, and for whom the body and soul were not separable.
In terms of applications, I think there are tons more apps available for linux than windows, but the windows apps have marketing budgets and advertise.
It's not as simple as advertising budgets. There are still some holes in the selection of Linux applications, as I mentioned in my post. Seriously, if you could point me in the direction of Photoshop/Illustrator, Sound Forge, and Final Cut/Premiere replacements in Linux that would satisfy professional audio/video people, I'd be extremely grateful.
This last makes me think you are a troll.
What makes you think I'm a troll?
Unfortunately those unemotional rational AIs will remain in sci-fi movies, because unemotional rational beings cannot be intelligent.
I think it's not as simple as pre-installing Linux on more computers. At the very least, you'd need a lot of people to buy these Linux computers, which means that the way to increase Linux market share is for more people to buy Linux. That's obvious, but not terribly helpful.
Really what you're saying, I think, is that Linux needs better marketing. Dell sells Linux computers, but they don't really try to push them. They don't advertise them, and if you call and say you want to buy a computer they assume you want Windows. People don't ask for Linux because they don't know what it is or they're scared of it.
Similarly the idea of simulating human intelligence is largely ignored by many people in the field.
Well I guess it depends on what people are talking about when they talk about "artificial intelligence". It's my understanding that "in the field", they usually just mean a something that sorts through data in interesting "intelligent" ways. However, if you're talking about what the layman thinks of when you say "artificial intelligence", i.e. making self-aware machines who have something similar to "mind" or "understanding", then the intelligence will need to be very similar to human intelligence.
It seems to me that, whenever I hear about someone interested in creating the latter sort of AI, they fail to grasp the extent to which the qualities that they're trying to create are bound up with other human qualities.
That's a good point-- except that Dell/HP/Wallmart do make up a significant piece of the market, and if these guys were more successful with Linux, others might follow suit. Plus, a lot of computers are controlled by companies with an IT staff who perform regular installs and images of machines.
So to recap, it seems to me that you're saying that Linux's easy set up is only a threat to Microsoft in the following markets:
Ease of install sounds important enough to me.
Yeah, but I guess what I'm getting at is that gaining experience and learning to match patterns requires a certain kind of activity. On a very basic level, our intelligence is not a removed entity "in our heads", so to speak. You learn by trial and error, effecting changes in the world around you, getting feedback in the form of punishment/reward and pain/pleasure.
This often seems overlooked by what I read about AI researchers. I hear about researchers who want robots to paint or understand language or something, but don't provide a mechanism for the "intelligence" to get up, move around, explore, etc. Some of these people seem to really misunderstand human intelligence, thinking that activity has no part in the development of human experience. We would not learn if we were passive and without desire and fear.
I've come to think that it's rather stupid that we think of "intelligence" and "awareness" as mystical disembodied things. I mean to include some scientists and philosophers in this group-- pretty much anyone who talks about "the mind" as a separable entity from "the body".
It seems to me that our intelligences are built around an organism with innate desires and certain abilities to affect the world around them towards achieving those desires. I don't believe that any attempt at artificial intelligence will be truly successful without these components.
Follow the damn thread, I responded to a statement that it wouldn't be good to have high-resolutions on laptops because things would be too small, and I was saying that would be a non-issue with the next release of OSX.
What you're saying now is half-true. The reason for scaling is, of course, so they can offer higher resolution displays without shrinking the UI to an absurd degree. Yes, the reason Apple isn't offering high-resolution displays right now is specifically because they can't scale their UI easily enough, and super-tiny text and controls are a pain. Hell, a lot of Apple users complain already about the MacBook Pros for everything being too tiny.
Will Apple offer a slider in "system preferences" for the user to scale the UI directly? Maybe, maybe not. Will they "lock users out" from this functionality? It'd be stupid to do that, and you have no reason to think they will. If nothing else, it would help their accessibility options to allow people to grow it a bit. If nothing else, they're opening some control to developers, which means that at a bare minimum, you should be able to tweak the setting somewhere.
But what, this whole inane discussion is for you to brag that you like tiny UI controls, running a 17" display at 1600x1200? Great, pat yourself on the back for being a 733t h4x0r. I'm out.
Well all of that is really a bit of a false dichotomy. You're saying instead of focussing on making the UI pretty, they should make it useful, but it's not really an either-or proposition. There can be games with blocky/ugly graphics *and* bad gameplay, or games with great graphics *and* great gameplay. All things considered, I'd rather have both, particularly since well-placed effects can offer more gameplay options and conventions, even if only to increase immersion.
Likewise with computer UIs, I think things like drop-shadows and smooth 3D animations can be useless eye-candy, or they can be useful visual cues so that it's easier for the user to understand what's going on. A desktop that's hideously ugly can be unpleasant to use. Poor color choice can make controls harder to spot or text harder to read. All of these things make a difference, and all things considered you'll have an easier time getting people to use software if it looks pretty and professional.
It seems to me there have been three general problems with Linux on the desktop:
A lot has been done a lot to solve these issues. I would say many distributions are easier to set up than Windows. I would even say that the default setup of Ubuntu, SuSE, and Fedora are all prettier than the default blue Luna theme in Windows XP (which I've always thought was hideous). Sure, things can always be improved, but things are going fairly well.
Application, however, are still a bit of a sore spot. Firefox, OpenOffice, and Evolution make great replacements for IE, MSO, and Outlook. However, you start hitting problems, still, in other areas. If you're doing professional graphic, sound, or movie editing, you'll probably need to go to another platform. So I think that's a real roadblock for some people. We need Photoshop, Sound Forge, and Final Cut replacements. GIMP and Audacity are great apps, but not on the same level.
I'm not criticizing the community or anything. I'm just happy, most of the time, to have such great software available for free. However, since people seem to be asking how to drive Linux adoption, I'm giving my perspective. Linux could be easier, but it is easy enough. It could be prettier, but it is pretty enough (I've had Windows users comment on how pretty my Ubuntu setup is, and it's pretty much the standard setup). If it were just these issues, the free price tag, in tandem with diminished risk of viruses, would be enough for a lot of people to take the plunge.
What would really help is if someone would make more professional-grade apps for Linux. Hell, Adobe would make a big difference all by itself. If Adobe ported their entire product line to Linux, that alone would increase the feasibility of switching people to Linux to an incredible degree.
Either way, it doesn't hurt to make things prettier, so I'm not really arguing with Shuttleworth. However, i know people who would like to switch to Linux and just can't because there aren't FOSS alternatives to the apps they use. Oh, and porting more games wouldn't hurt either. I know people who stick with Windows just for the games.
So your position is that even though they're going through all the trouble to make their OS resolution independent, they'll lock people out from the ability to control their scaling? What makes you think that? Give me a quote that even implies that, rather than offering this feature as a tool for users and developers, they're going to use it to lock people at 100dpi.
I claimed Apple was going to offer resolution independence that would keep high resolutions from being unreasonable on small monitors, you asked, "who said?", and I pointed you to a quote which said they were already implementing this feature. Grow up and quit nit-picking.
The way I see it, there will be a couple people losing their data.
Most idiotic home users won't know enough about it to use this tech. Either they'll be specialty drives or it will require an added bit of voodoo to enable the features, but either way it won't be used on most systems. Most IT departments will be smart enough to know when to use this technology, and the rest will be too dumb to worry about technology at all.
There will be a few tinkerers who, out of misguided fantasies of being James Bond, will enable this without having any clue what they're doing. Some of these people will be smart enough to back up their data anyway, and others will be lucky enough to not forget their passwords.
In the end, you'll have a select few retarded tinkerers who will screw up and lose all of their data, but the net loss will be small. You see, most of those tinkerers were going to accidently reformat their hard drives anyway.
Not only that, but it's not expensive enough for Verizon. Some people don't realize, but US cellphone carriers *like* the idea that, if you want to buy a phone without locking yourself into a 5 year contract, it'll cost you something like $400 for what Verizon is offering for "free". They want to have the power to lock you into their plan for a couple years, and push the phones that will have features that they can, in turn, charge you to use.
People aren't always upgrading their phones for the reasons you mentioned. I have a Razr. Do I use the camera? Nope. Play the games or check my e-mail? Uhn-uh. So why did I get a Razr? It's thin. At the time I got it, it was the thinnest thing available, and I carry around a bunch of equipment, so I'd like each thing to be thin and light.
There are advances in technology besides squeezing more crap into phones. They can get smaller, thinner, lighter, with better sound and reception. The power consumption might drop giving better battery life. Personally, I wouldn't mind getting an all-in-one device, but not until someone makes one that performs all of it's functions well. In the mean time, give me a small, light, efficient phone that does a good job at being a phone, and I'll buy it.
Apple does. From Apple's web site:
Their new OS, coming in a couple months, will be resolution-independant, and allow scaling the entire UI to account for high-resolution displays.
Wouldn't that mean they jumped on the bandwagon a little too late?
Anyway, RoR isn't the solution to all programming problems, but it seems to have enough steam that it's going to stick around. OSX comes with Apache, and it's not hard to get PHP, MySQL, or whatever else installed. There's a ruby interpreter in the OS already, and a lot of the prominent people in the RoR community are OSX users.
I can't RTFA to know what they've actually done, but why wouldn't they support RoR? In spite of not finding the meaning of life, solving world hunger, or finding hot women for me, it's a pretty good tool. Something can be useful without solving every single problem, you know.
First, of course companies do this. Think about it from Apple's point of view-- if you have cool swag to hand out, are you going to give it to the writers of MacWorld or one of those Dvorak types who have been claiming to 20 years that Apple's death is imminent?
But that's not the thing that bothers me so much as an explicit statement that the thing is quid pro quo, or tit-for-tat, or however you want to say it. But worse than handing out "review" systems is the advertising dollars. It's always bothered me how, in the late 90s, PC Magazine always gave Gateway extremely good reviews. Maybe it's just me, but every Gateway system I've dealt with has been total crap, and you have professional reviewers giving them glowing reviews while every other ad in their magazine is a Gateway ad.
To my knowledge, no one has publicly accused them of impropriety, but I find it more than a little suspicious and, to this day, don't trust any reviews out of cnet/zdnet (all owned by Ziff-Davis).
Yeah, well if the UI is resolution independent and they give you the controls to scale the UI, you can do whatever you want. My point is that 1920x1200 is not to much for a 15" screen if you can scale everything.
I'm not sure of the level of unresponsiveness you're experiencing or what the precise cause is. OSX is plenty fast for me, however, from what I understand, the Darwin kernel is slower than the Linux kernel in some ways due to the fact that it's a microkernel. I'm no expert here, but I'm told that micro kernels have some advantages, including security, and monolithic kernels have other advantages, including speed. It's a design decision and there are tradeoffs, but it doesn't seem to me that thing are sufficiently slowed for desktop purposes to complain.
But did you install Darwin or OSX? Was it the kernel that was slow or the system in general, or perhaps some specific application?
I wanted to second this. It's not that I don't like Linux, but I work with a Linux guy, much smarter than me, who laughs at me for using OSX. But then, we find ourselves someplace with WPA on the WiFi connection, and he spends 20 minutes trying to connect before giving up. For me on my Macbook, it takes 20 seconds while I click a couple places and type a password. At some point or another, we need to use VPN, and it takes him a couple hours to get it running on this Linux machine. I just open up "Internet Connect", enter a few settings, and bingo!, I'm in. Still, he makes fun of me for having a 1-button mouse.
I don't doubt that there are advantages to Linux. I run Linux in various places, like it a lot for how I use it, and my coworker's setup is a hell of a lot slicker than any of my Linux machines. Still, I've never had to recompile the kernel on OSX in order to get my 3D capabilities working on my graphics card.
Not if they're offering a completely scaling UI. Supposedly, when Leopard comes out, it will be resolution independent.
Maybe it's just me, but I can't really shave against the grain very well either. Unless I'm already pretty well shaven and making a second pass, I just end up cutting myself that way. But every fracking time I see a Gillette commercial, the guy goes up from his adams-apple to his chin, which I find nearly impossible to do without making at least 4 cuts.