But if you use, say, half the wars in the past 200 years as data to create the model, and then find that it predicts the other half (which were NOT used as data) accurately, doesn't that show some predictive power? What if you used it on some obscure wars whose outcome you didn't know until after you'd run the model - how would that be different from using it on a current/future war? The model doesn't know whether you know the outcome or not, unless you're being dishonest and futzing with it every time to get the results you want.
I'm confused as to which of those functions you list belongs on a telephone. A tablet computer, sure. A PDA, sure. This isn't being marketed as either of those, it's being marketed as a fancy cel phone with features similar to other fancy cel phones. It might pave the way to Apple making a product that is marketed as one of those other items, but right now it's not, and I don't see why it should have all the features of a product that it's not. Apple is not one to try and make a product that is all things to all people, especially not in its first incarnation.
Yes, you need a tool. No, this isn't it. It's also not a hammer, a printer, or a fork. Yes, I wish they would release a PDA or tablet computer too. I have no use for an iPhone, but I also don't have/need an iPod or a camera phone - that doesn't mean I don't think those items should exist or doubt their popularity with people who aren't me.
My husband and I were looking for laptops last year, and we could easily find used iBooks that would meet our needs for around $600. Macs generally last longer than PCs - my eMac is five years old and running great, we're not planning on upgrading it for at least a couple more years unless something goes seriously wrong (hard drive dies, for instance). A two-year-old used Mac laptop will have no problem meeting basic needs for several more years; if you need something better, then this article applies and the new Macs are comparable to other laptops.
I have to assume that these middle-aged politicians do these sorts of things because they think it's what their middle-aged-and-older constituency wants. The one bright spot is that the people who grew up (or at least went to high school/college) with the internet as a daily part of life are edging ever closer to being old enough that they actually vote with some regularity. Another ten years, and the politicians will be starting to face a new constituency that doesn't run from the threat of the Evil Int0rnetz; another twenty and a lot of politicians will have grown up with it, too.
Just gotta hope they don't do any real damage before then.
Actually, I was running 1 for several years until two weeks ago - and cursing it every day for its incredible slowness. After I put 2 on my work computer and it was actually usable, I thought that maybe it was 2 instead of the faster computer, so I installed it here - but no. But 1 was no better.
I'll agree with that. On my work machine (an Intel iMac less than a year old) NeoOffice is actually usable, and no slower than Word.
On my 5-year-old eMac, though, it is positively painful. I hate using it, but Appleworks just doesn't have enough functionality for anything I can't do in TextEdit anyway. I'd put off installing it on my work machine because of its performance at home, but when I finally did (b/c my installation of Office has some strange problems and I can't get the IT guys to reinstall it) I was pleasantly surprised.
Aside from the whole interstate commerce thing, do you REALLY think the seller is the one who would end up paying, and not the consumer? Do you think that all online retailers are just going to quietly accept a 5% (or whatever the local tax rate is) dip in profits without raising prices at all?
Of course, sellers in states with high tax rates (no matter who technically "pays" them) will be at a disadvantage and probably have to take lower profit margins to be competitive, which will drive at least some of them (likely the smallest ones, the online equivalents of those mom & pop stores that people think the online stores are hurting) out of business. When the state sees that it's losing businesses, though, it won't cut taxes to get them back - it will raise taxes to make up for the loss of tax revenue from failing businesses! (At least, if the state is, say, Michigan.) And then wonder why its unemployment rate is so high...
This is definitely not always the case. I've had this problem a few times recently - the first page or two of results is a mix of a few useful sites and a lot of sites that happen to contain the two words, but on unrelated parts of the page. I have to dig through the results to find what I need. Especially if the unuseful sites are very popular ones and the ones I want are more obscure.
It also forces you to use Windoze, which itself sucks life.
I would like to point out that my department is all-Mac, and is very Word-heavy. When I turn in assignments in RTF format I get them back as commented Word files. Though some professors do use Keynote over Powerpoint.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it - but this prof was using it mainly *because* he was not that computer-literate and could not have dealt with the raw markup. I'm just challenging the idea that everyone with a PhD is a computer whiz who can or will make informed decisions about which products to use for which purposes.
You don't even want to hear what I went through when I tried to suggest once that PageMaker or InDesign would be more appropriate for one of our projects than Word... It doesn't matter what the right tool for the job is, some people know how to use a hammer and will use that hammer to drive a screw in no matter what you tell them about these newfangled "screwdrivers". (Thank goodness, I'm in a more computer-literate department now and we ARE using InDesign for a similar project.)
I'm not saying that Word clearly has more functionality than LaTeX and so is a far superior choice - just trying to show why not all science fields NEED LaTeX as badly as others do.
Btw, on #1 we do use Macs (so does his math dept actually); #2 my university does provide EndNote, but I will say that I'm impressed with BibTeX; #3 and #4 I've never really had problems yet with but I'm sure you're probably right.
It mostly comes down to: Most people know Word and similar word processors and have been using them for decades, and there is a good chunk of my field (though probably not the majority, since some of the field is about writing software) who are not computer whizzes. LaTeX would have to have some really huge and obvious advantages to get the entire field (or most of it) to switch. And if it's not standard, journals won't be accepting it anyhow, and things like #3 cease to matter if none of my collaborators use it.
Though I can see PDF just for the review copy, for the final version it would be a pain in the ass to format for the journal. You can copy/paste the text out of most PDFs (though I'm guessing you'd lose the formatting) but how would you get tables out, other than just recreating them?
Fine, take a look at my professor from my master's program - a woman who has a chaired professorship multiple multi-million dollar federal grants going at any one time. She had to have me copy and paste something for her once because she couldn't remember how to do it. She would freak if asked to use anything but Word, because she's barely learned that.
Or heck, a math professor my husband had in grad school, who used LaTeX because that's standard but used a WYSIWIG editor (and barely could use that) because the actual markup was far beyond him.
I could believe that being brilliant at computer science implies that you are on the cutting edge technologically and demand only the best for your computing. Being brilliant at math or biology or psychology implies no such thing.
(Though I will say, "superiors" is a bad choice of words. "IT Department," yes, but not superiors.)
Hell yes they do. My husband is a mathematician, and he uses the whole alphabet, the whole greek alphabet, and then has to improvise in some of his papers, and it's full of actual equations with all kinds of superscripts and subscripts and various integration symbols and whatnot. I'm in grad school in a social science field, and I rarely to never would even put an equation of any sort in a paper. I'd run all my ANOVAs and regressions and whatever other stats on SPSS and then put in some graphs and tables that show numbers, not variables. I might use N or F or p. Biologists would be much closer to what I do than to what he does, though physicists would be closer to him (he publishes in some physics journals as well). I could use LaTeX like he does, but I don't really have a need for it.
Really? Interesting, I didn't know that cartridges were treated differently. I think they would be hard-pressed to show that someone with original NES cartridges now (or even SNES, many of mine have worn out) had no legitimate use for a backup.
See, that's a major drawback for me. I do use my DS at home, but I play it a lot on the bus and I specifically got it to keep me distracted on airplanes (it has really helped my panic attacks). I do think they're more likely to do that first, though.
I know that there would be huge piracy concerns with a cartridge-based approach. I'm sure some heavy DRM would be needed. But I still want it. I'd take it, DRM and all. Well, I mean, once I get a Wii.
I've been watching TV shows on DVD recently, and I keep waiting for a commercial so I can feed the dogs, go to the bathroom, etc. Sometimes if the dogs are really insistent on going out I even get up and still forget to pause it, and get annoyed that I have to miss some key part...
I'm not sure "ballsy" is the right word - more like "small and desperate to break into the market." I don't know how much it costs to develop for the VC, but it can't be that much. It seems like the ideal place for a fledgling company to get in with some interesting 8- or 16-bit action. I know nothing about game development, so maybe I'm wrong and Nintendo makes you buy an entire Wii dev kit plus a several-thousand-dollar VC add-on, but I doubt it.
Even if you have the old consoles, the VC has a lot of appeal. I still have my SNES, but some of the cartridges don't work anymore, or only work sporadically. And if you want some rare games this could be way cheaper - have they released Earthbound yet? You're lucky to find that one for $30-40 on eBay, sometimes it's as much as $80. I bought one used SNES game from gamestop.com and it came DOA - but I couldn't return it in store and it would have cost as much to mail it back as the refund I would have gotten.
Even when I get a Wii, I'll keep my SNES for nostalgia, but I might actually rebuy some games on the VC for ease of use.
This is modded funny, but seriously, middle-click-paste is the one thing that my husband is STILL complaining about since a combination of me and a new job made him switch fully from linux to mac two years ago. Every time he has to copy and paste and I'm around he has to complain about what a pain it is to hit command-c command-v.
But then, I switched from linux five years ago, and I still try to behave as though my mouse had sloppy focus sometimes. That's what Apple needs to add.
To believe that MS and PS3 won't heavily invest in more casual games (considering the trouncing their getting) is pointless. Once those consoles have better casual gamer expearence you start taking away its advantages, the biggest disadvantage will be its graphics.
I think one thing that you're missing is that the Wii controller is central to its casual gaming experience and expanded market. When you take a person who has never played a video game in their life (or maybe not since the Atari 2600 at parties when they were 20) and give them a controller with a dozen buttons on it, even if you're having them play Bingo they're going to freeze up and get confused. Give them a wand that they swing to play tennis or bowling, and they get it immediately. I actually saw this in action several years ago - my brother got Crazy Taxi for his Dreamcast, along with a steering wheel/pedal controller. We brought it over to my grandma's house and she actually really enjoyed playing it. The Wii (and the DS - think brain age) is just an expansion of that.
If MS and Sony are going to take any of the casual/non-gamer market away from Nintendo, they're going to have to come out with controllers that are just as intuitive. Otherwise, they'll just keep scaring that market away with all those buttons that only "the kids" can understand.
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But if you use, say, half the wars in the past 200 years as data to create the model, and then find that it predicts the other half (which were NOT used as data) accurately, doesn't that show some predictive power? What if you used it on some obscure wars whose outcome you didn't know until after you'd run the model - how would that be different from using it on a current/future war? The model doesn't know whether you know the outcome or not, unless you're being dishonest and futzing with it every time to get the results you want.
Yes, you need a tool. No, this isn't it. It's also not a hammer, a printer, or a fork. Yes, I wish they would release a PDA or tablet computer too. I have no use for an iPhone, but I also don't have/need an iPod or a camera phone - that doesn't mean I don't think those items should exist or doubt their popularity with people who aren't me.
My husband and I were looking for laptops last year, and we could easily find used iBooks that would meet our needs for around $600. Macs generally last longer than PCs - my eMac is five years old and running great, we're not planning on upgrading it for at least a couple more years unless something goes seriously wrong (hard drive dies, for instance). A two-year-old used Mac laptop will have no problem meeting basic needs for several more years; if you need something better, then this article applies and the new Macs are comparable to other laptops.
Just gotta hope they don't do any real damage before then.
A chair with legs! What'll they think of next, a bicycle with wheels?
Actually, I was running 1 for several years until two weeks ago - and cursing it every day for its incredible slowness. After I put 2 on my work computer and it was actually usable, I thought that maybe it was 2 instead of the faster computer, so I installed it here - but no. But 1 was no better.
On my 5-year-old eMac, though, it is positively painful. I hate using it, but Appleworks just doesn't have enough functionality for anything I can't do in TextEdit anyway. I'd put off installing it on my work machine because of its performance at home, but when I finally did (b/c my installation of Office has some strange problems and I can't get the IT guys to reinstall it) I was pleasantly surprised.
Of course, sellers in states with high tax rates (no matter who technically "pays" them) will be at a disadvantage and probably have to take lower profit margins to be competitive, which will drive at least some of them (likely the smallest ones, the online equivalents of those mom & pop stores that people think the online stores are hurting) out of business. When the state sees that it's losing businesses, though, it won't cut taxes to get them back - it will raise taxes to make up for the loss of tax revenue from failing businesses! (At least, if the state is, say, Michigan.) And then wonder why its unemployment rate is so high...
This is definitely not always the case. I've had this problem a few times recently - the first page or two of results is a mix of a few useful sites and a lot of sites that happen to contain the two words, but on unrelated parts of the page. I have to dig through the results to find what I need. Especially if the unuseful sites are very popular ones and the ones I want are more obscure.
I would like to point out that my department is all-Mac, and is very Word-heavy. When I turn in assignments in RTF format I get them back as commented Word files. Though some professors do use Keynote over Powerpoint.
You don't even want to hear what I went through when I tried to suggest once that PageMaker or InDesign would be more appropriate for one of our projects than Word... It doesn't matter what the right tool for the job is, some people know how to use a hammer and will use that hammer to drive a screw in no matter what you tell them about these newfangled "screwdrivers". (Thank goodness, I'm in a more computer-literate department now and we ARE using InDesign for a similar project.)
Btw, on #1 we do use Macs (so does his math dept actually); #2 my university does provide EndNote, but I will say that I'm impressed with BibTeX; #3 and #4 I've never really had problems yet with but I'm sure you're probably right.
It mostly comes down to: Most people know Word and similar word processors and have been using them for decades, and there is a good chunk of my field (though probably not the majority, since some of the field is about writing software) who are not computer whizzes. LaTeX would have to have some really huge and obvious advantages to get the entire field (or most of it) to switch. And if it's not standard, journals won't be accepting it anyhow, and things like #3 cease to matter if none of my collaborators use it.
Though I can see PDF just for the review copy, for the final version it would be a pain in the ass to format for the journal. You can copy/paste the text out of most PDFs (though I'm guessing you'd lose the formatting) but how would you get tables out, other than just recreating them?
Or heck, a math professor my husband had in grad school, who used LaTeX because that's standard but used a WYSIWIG editor (and barely could use that) because the actual markup was far beyond him.
I could believe that being brilliant at computer science implies that you are on the cutting edge technologically and demand only the best for your computing. Being brilliant at math or biology or psychology implies no such thing.
(Though I will say, "superiors" is a bad choice of words. "IT Department," yes, but not superiors.)
Hell yes they do. My husband is a mathematician, and he uses the whole alphabet, the whole greek alphabet, and then has to improvise in some of his papers, and it's full of actual equations with all kinds of superscripts and subscripts and various integration symbols and whatnot. I'm in grad school in a social science field, and I rarely to never would even put an equation of any sort in a paper. I'd run all my ANOVAs and regressions and whatever other stats on SPSS and then put in some graphs and tables that show numbers, not variables. I might use N or F or p. Biologists would be much closer to what I do than to what he does, though physicists would be closer to him (he publishes in some physics journals as well). I could use LaTeX like he does, but I don't really have a need for it.
Yes - this fixed a couple, but some are just beyond cleaning.
Really? Interesting, I didn't know that cartridges were treated differently. I think they would be hard-pressed to show that someone with original NES cartridges now (or even SNES, many of mine have worn out) had no legitimate use for a backup.
See, that's a major drawback for me. I do use my DS at home, but I play it a lot on the bus and I specifically got it to keep me distracted on airplanes (it has really helped my panic attacks). I do think they're more likely to do that first, though.
I know that there would be huge piracy concerns with a cartridge-based approach. I'm sure some heavy DRM would be needed. But I still want it. I'd take it, DRM and all. Well, I mean, once I get a Wii.
I've been watching TV shows on DVD recently, and I keep waiting for a commercial so I can feed the dogs, go to the bathroom, etc. Sometimes if the dogs are really insistent on going out I even get up and still forget to pause it, and get annoyed that I have to miss some key part...
I'm not sure "ballsy" is the right word - more like "small and desperate to break into the market." I don't know how much it costs to develop for the VC, but it can't be that much. It seems like the ideal place for a fledgling company to get in with some interesting 8- or 16-bit action. I know nothing about game development, so maybe I'm wrong and Nintendo makes you buy an entire Wii dev kit plus a several-thousand-dollar VC add-on, but I doubt it.
Though personally, I'm waiting for the opposite - a way to d/l VC games onto a cartridge for use in DSes.
Even when I get a Wii, I'll keep my SNES for nostalgia, but I might actually rebuy some games on the VC for ease of use.
But then, I switched from linux five years ago, and I still try to behave as though my mouse had sloppy focus sometimes. That's what Apple needs to add.
I think one thing that you're missing is that the Wii controller is central to its casual gaming experience and expanded market. When you take a person who has never played a video game in their life (or maybe not since the Atari 2600 at parties when they were 20) and give them a controller with a dozen buttons on it, even if you're having them play Bingo they're going to freeze up and get confused. Give them a wand that they swing to play tennis or bowling, and they get it immediately. I actually saw this in action several years ago - my brother got Crazy Taxi for his Dreamcast, along with a steering wheel/pedal controller. We brought it over to my grandma's house and she actually really enjoyed playing it. The Wii (and the DS - think brain age) is just an expansion of that.
If MS and Sony are going to take any of the casual/non-gamer market away from Nintendo, they're going to have to come out with controllers that are just as intuitive. Otherwise, they'll just keep scaring that market away with all those buttons that only "the kids" can understand.
Acrobat is $300 - you can get an older Mac running 10.1-10.3 for less than that. :) (Yes, OS X can print anything to PDF.)