You have no idea what you're talking about, so please don't post about aviation. The 'highway in the sky' is a concept that has been bouncing around NASA for quite a while, and involves nothing more than the presentation of existing navigational routes to the pilot in an intuitive way, as if s/he were flying on a virtual highway. In no way does it imply there will be aircraft flying in close proximity. The same rules and conventions separating aircraft would apply. Furthermore, one facet of the proposal is to have traffic information integrated into the display, making the concept even safer in terms of collision avoidance.
But thanks for contributing your ignorance to the public. We already have enough reasons for the public to be irrationally afraid of progress in private aviation, thank you.
You're also wrong about Moller. The recent progress on the skycar has been significant due to improvements in engine technology and avionics. While nobody can be sure he'll get everything together, he is definitely closer than he's ever been, and tethered flight is still flight.
Hello, it's plastic, not glass, it's going to get scratched up, just like your car is going to get door dinged in the parking lot; that's life.
They could make it out of scratch resistant plastic if they were willing to come down on their ludicrous margins. However, given their target demographic of sycophants, it's probably not neccesary. Also, I can't resist addressing this: there are places in the country (definitely not the Northeast) where having your car dinged up by self-absorbed jerks isn't an inevitable part of life. So on a more general note, I think part of the problem in both cases is low expectations of people and companies.
Don't criticize someone for criticizing someone if you're not doing your part. In all seriousness, pointing out that somebody's idea of "helping" is a waste of time IS useful, because maybe the resources won't be wasted. What IS truly useless, however, was your self-righteous post which offered nothing but hypocracy.
For what it's worth, I completely agree with the GP. I can just imagine Negroponte going down there with a savior complex handing out these laptops while children try to knaw on them and look at him quizzically. "No, children, no eat. Program! Java! Write open source!"
Furthermore, why do we always assume what we have is the solution to everybody's problem? That's pretty arrogant. Maybe even if we did help fix their food and resource shortages, they wouldn't even want to become a service economy like ours. Maybe they'd actually like the BUILD something and have industry in their country. Perhaps Negroponte can send over some of our old tooling plants we're no longer using.
You're probably joking, but I think there's more truth to that than we'd all like to admit. The way a word sounds, and the connotations given that word by popular media, probably have more importance than we know. Why don't they call it "business class" or "corporate class"? Certainly nobody ever says they work for an "enterprise" or are communiting to their "enterprise"? But "enterprise class" sounds cooler, probably because of Star Trek and NASA.
I think this kind of thing is pretty symptomatic of our times.
qualifying my statements by saying "(transparent|thin) film plastic screens" which is rather specific
Hogwash. You made that little bit of psuedoscience up. Thin films are an entirely separate issue, and as far as I know they are deposited and are not polymers. The plastics used are molded, and are not thin. Transparency is another issue, and there are many different types of plastic that are transparent.
Finally, I agree you're probably right that if Apple did use the same plastic it was the fact that the screen was inlaid that made the difference. So, wouldn't that point to a design error in the nano? I'm not going to buy a nano and then spend another $30 to put it inside something that doubles its size. That's fucking ludicrous. Apple is really full of shit sometimes with their products. They are all about looks, it seems.
Why are we seeing numerous posts from people who say their other iPods didn't scratch as much? Why, for that matter, are we seeing this entire story? I apologize for being rude and flaming you before, but the idea that all "plastic" devices will have similar scratch resistant is just untenable. It's like saying all metal objects will have the same density. I'm guessing Apple's design guy was so busy worrying about how the thing looked, that they didn't do enough testing on how it worked it real life. That seems to me the most likely explanation. Otherwise you have to wonder why, all of sudden, people are abusing the nano when they didn't abuse their previous ipods.
So, just because a company makes nice products you should hitch your emotional wellbeing to them? I never said Apple didn't make great stuff. I've owned Apple computers since the Mac Plus. I just don't understand why some people seem to take it personally when you suggest Apple isn't perfect.
Before you make a further fool of yourself, perhaps you should read a bit about plastic, which is not a material but a name for a wide category of materials which include everything from materials you could scratch with your fingernail to bulletproof "glass". If they wanted to to, they could make the player with plastic far more resistant to scratching. In fact, they managed to with their other players. But with people like you buying their product, I'm not sure they need to.
I never understood why people were so harsh on stereotypical Apple fans. Now I know why. Do you know how stupid you all sound, suggesting it's perfectly reasonable for somebody to sell an expensive pocket MP3 player that you are then REQUIRED to buy a protective case for lest it become unusable? Do you know how pathetic it sounds when you suggest, with a straight face, that it's actually ok for your screen to be unreadable because you listen to an MP3 player, not look at it?
What sort of psychological issues do you have to be suffering from to become sychophantic to a company to the point of tying your ego to them and their products? You seriously need to find something more meaningful in your life if you've become irrationally defensive on behalf of a company that doesn't even know you or care about you.
It's just a company trying to make money. It's not a "lifestyle". Sometimes they screw up. You're still an ok person if you admit that.
It's not accurate. It's not even feasible! The tiny device is a niche, not a wholesale paradigm shift. How quickly could you possibly input data into something that fits in your pocket? Do you really want to watch a movie on something that fits in your pocket? The world is a complicated, multifarious place, and so the technology landscape must be, as well. So it's just plain oversimplistic and hyperbolic to say anything will be the new desktop. The desktop computer is a form that matches certain functions. The pocket device is another. I don't see either ever becoming moot. If I've got the space, I'll always rather do work on a desktop system. I only want a pocket device when all I've got is a pocket. How long have people been predicting the death of the desktop?
There may be true paradigm shifts, but for every one that actually happens, there are a million that get breathlessly predicted and claimed and forgotten. And let me go out on a limb to say that true paradigm shifts have required difficult physical technological breakthroughs, like the integrated circuit or massive magnetic storage density. So they are generally hard to do, and rare to come by. It's not something Steve Jobs can just spit out at a cocktail party. If Jobs hadn't come up with the iPod, somebody would've the week later; it's a rather accessible conclusion of what to do with existing technology. (As opposed to the physics of magnetic storage, which takes more than a highschool degree and a mock turtleneck to understand.) Daydreaming "technologists" who prattle on with market speak about the next big paradigm shift are a dime a dozen. The real action happens over years by the guys working in obscurity on the difficult problems. The next TRUE shift will come from them, and we just don't know what it is, yet. For example, a computer which fit in your pocket and displayed wirelessly into your optic nerve and read your thoughts as input. Now THAT would replace the desktop. But a little memory stick with a few buttons and a one inch screen? That's an MP3 player.
If you are wise you don't surround yourself with people who keep agreeing with you.
But I suppose you also shouldn't surround yourself with stupid people/fools all the time either.
I couldn't agree more. I'm not sure exactly how to do it, algorithmically, but I think a only system which allows moderation from the majority of people at any given time has a chance at achieving this goal. Right now, I think the current moderation system, being so subject to the whims of a few, ends up being very polarizing. I think you pretty much only get the party line on/. (Does one end that sentence with another period?) In theory, a system with more data would be able to statistically distinguish between a post which is just crap and one which is just controversial. I would imagine, for one, that the variance in voting for one would be different than the other, even if the mean is the same. Anyway, I'm not sure it's worth messing with, but I think it's fun to think about how one would best handle a moderation system. It's essentially an embodiment of a social protocol for judging Quality.
Alas, I can't. I've personally never seen a board like I've suggested. I've seen places where people can vote for posts, but nothing where everyone votes up or down and the system computes some sort of distillation of the voting and allows you to view with the nice customization of Slashdot. Slashdot is great when it comes to customization, but I just think the moderation system could be less transiently despotic. In other words, I love the idea of scores of -1 to 5, I just think the computation of it should be done with more data and with some logic to throw away outlyers. One vote should never cause you to miss a post, but here it does.
Another way to put it: why am I reading posts simply because one or two people liked them? There are thousands and thousands of users reading each comment stream. Why not harnass that more effectively? Look at all the ridiculous complexity brought about by the current moderation system? We've got the selection criteria for moderators. Then there's the need for moderation of moderations in the form of under/over-rated moderations. Then there's metamoderation. And finally there are all the moderation types, apparently needed so that people don't just moderate in an ad hoc basis (even though they do anyway). It's starting to look like a Microsoft solution. A simple voting scheme of +/- that takes a lot more people into account would get rid of all that complexity.
Yeah, that too! For what it's worth, I think we should just do away with the whole "Offtopic" moderation. Nobody seems to understand what it's for. This place would be really boring if people didn't go off topic. And a well written and substantial troll is about as good as it gets. I think there should just be plus and minus. No reasons. Who gives a damn about why something was modded up? The reasons never make sense anyway.
While I'm dreaming: the mod system should just be a voting system. Everybody with positive karma (or maybe excellent or whatever) should be able to mod any post. With the increased number of mods, statistical methods could be used. Outlyer moderations could be thrown out, and the rest could be averaged so that one single moderation up or down won't affect the score. Random moderations (everybody disagrees) would just count as nothing. Or maybe we could get cute and allow people to view based on standard deviation, as well as average score (in case you're interested in both the good and the controversial). Anyway, I won't hold my breath. But the idea that two guys with political agendas can kill a post is dumb. Community moderation should be done by the community. Not by a few blessed individuals at a time. We all vote at once.
Well, given that it was essentially a yes or no question, I'm sure approximately 50% of the answers will be correct. 100% of them will be within one bit of correct.
Isn't asking about nuclear fusion on an IT site kind of like asking for formula one driving tips on, well, an IT site? The only correct answer you'll get is "I have no goddam idea."
I can't believe the parent post is marked insightful.
You've been here long enough you should know better than to be surprised.:-) One could take a bowel movement and post the details on Slashdot and it will get modded "+5 Insightful" as long as it's one of the first posts. On the other hand, you could write the next "Principia Mathematica" as a response to said first post and it will be modded "-1 Troll" if you don't praise open source in the first few sentences.
My criticism had nothign to do with newness, and everything to do with it being buzzwordy, substanceless bullshit. I thought that was clear from the media lab reference.:-) I mean, what the hell does that mean "the pocket is the new platform"? I guess that's cooler than saying "things will get smaller" and a lot more satisfying than saying the truth: "Something's might get smaller because memory costs have come down and certain applications don't require large screens or large human interfaces. However, some do, so we can't really say *everything* will get smaller because sometimes you're working on a spreadsheet in the middle of O'Hare and you'd like to see everything but you don't want to project your company's sensitive financial information on the wall in front of other people, but sometimes you really do so maybe sometimes you'll want to have a mini-projector that's separate in case that's ALL you want to do, etc..."
So I was serious in asking why people now have this innate need to overstate and oversimplify, as if somehow the world is a worse place when it's heterogeneous and complicated, like what we REALLY need is a big paradigm change that can be summarized on a powerpoint slide using phrases like "* is the new *" and "all * will be *". The world doesn't work like that, but maybe technology has complicated our lives so much people are feeling this pull away from it, and yet, ironically, try to address the problems of technology with more technology. Or maybe it's just our modern preoccupation with the individual ego, and everybody has to be a fucking profound visionary, even if they're just talking about a little toy that plays music. I dunno, but I think it would be an interesting discussion. Maybe some other place, though...
The pocket is the new platform? Sounds like the media lab hype of years gone by. Anyway, until your fingers shrink I think it's premature to predict the death of the laptop. Projection needs a place to project, too. That's not a feasible solution for display. Let me offer a sober suggestion: nothing is the death of anything. Nothing is the next big thing that's going to change our lives completely, blah blah blah. There's a bunch of stuff, some of it better at certain things than others. Why is it that people aren't happy unless they can hype the second coming and predict simplistic sea changes that can be summarized in a buzzword? I'm serious about the question, as it seems to be a modern phenomenon.
What a well-reasoned, thoughful post. Except media companies did just fine in the hundreds of years before we had DRM! It's a little hard to argue your theory when we have already tried the experiment and proven you wrong. The ability to copy works freely didn't destroy creative industries in the previous few centuries, I'm sure they'll do ok without DRM in the next few. It may be a bit easier to copy with digital media, but we had digital media sans DRM for a while, too, and life on the planet was fine. And analog loss never stopped people from copying one iota. The ONLY thing that's different now is distribution over the net changes the scale. But it also increases awareness of good music. Any loss of sales will be due, in my opinion, to stupid record companies selling worse versions of music than that freely available illegally. Why would you pay for a crippled version when there are free ones out there without restriction? To do the right thing? Please. I'd rather never obtain any new music than pay for crippled music. And I'd rather download music illegally than never listen to new music. I think most people's calculus is about the same, even if they don't explicitly realise it.
It's quite possible the exact opposite of your thesis is true: that DRM will destroy a media company. I will NEVER buy a track from Apple after hearing all of my friends deal with problems arising from switching computers or upgrading their OS. Hell, I've downloaded their free tracks and got so sick of the DRM issues with my iPod that I just erased all of them. I don't trust DRM. Apple loses their key servers (I hope they have backups outside of earthquake country) and every sucker who bought $1000 of music loses it all. Probably won't happen, but there are other ways to lose the keys. I like the fact that when I buy a CD, I can encode the songs and have them forever, give them to my grandchildren if I like when I die. DRM is partly a way to keep the music from pirates, and partly a way to limit its lifespan. Have you read the license closely? Is your music transferrable?
You've lost me. First you're talking about free software that nobody paid anybody to write. Then all of a sudden, you're talking about Google Maps, and using that to justify FSTNPATW. Well, people got paid a lot of money to develop Google Maps. And it's free in any way shape or form, except to link to. So it's neither free as in software or beer. (You can, for example, download a binary and run it on your own site.) It's free as in TV. It's part of a business plan, generating advertising money. So, this all begs the question: what is your point?
So you think Encyclopedia Brittanica hires expert to write all of their articles? If you want a chance at a real expert, I actually think the Wikipedia is not a bad place to look. Often, the people writing articles on scientific topics are those currently doing research in those areas. Were Britannica to actually pay these people to write articles, they'd go bankrupt. I think your entire post was pure conjecture based on bias. Amazingly enough, if you actually read articles on Wikipedia (which you should do before posting about it) you'd find that they are often technically more advanced than those in commerical encyclopedias. For example, do you really think you could learn about the index of refraction in any detail from the World Book? That the Wikipedia works as well as it does is one of the most optimistic things I've ever seen.
Good points. I figured when my Mac got sluggish and unresponsive it was because of apps waiting for IO from the kernel, but I agree it could just be badly written apps. (Though, for the record, they would have to be badly written by Apple, too.) Also, I'm sure part of the reason my PowerBook feels so less responsive than my PC laptop is that my PC is running a Pentium 4 whereas my PB is running a 500 MHz G4. I'm sure the Mac OS will be greatly improved when running on Pentiums.
When you start a post with a patronizing insult, you should do better with the quality control in the rest of the post:
I haven't run into a Resource fork issue in Years and I run a Mac and Windows support office.
Good. But try tarring your documents folder and then untaring it and see how well it works. Or try using the "UNIX" file system that's supposedly supported by Apple. Lots of people have had problems with resource fork issues. Just because you haven't means you've made good choices, not that it's not an issue. Do a google search and you'll see what I mean.
you're comparing Applescript (which is what, 2 decades old? nearly there? to the shell of a beta OS that's due, maybe, in a year
Actually, the windows XML shell is already done for the most part. But you've exactly made my point. Apple is using a 15 year old scripting tool. Microsoft is coming up with a modern shell. Which one is the innovative company again? My whole post was about Apple using old technology in Mac OS X, so you're really not making much headway going on about how long in the tooth AppleScript is.
but since Vista won't ship with WinFS and it's officially vaporware, what's the point? Spotlight doesn't wake up before me and scramble my eggs and put the coffee on either but it's still a sweet tool.
I agree. I love Spotlight. But in your blind defensiveness about Apple you completely missed the point of my post. I know WinFS is vapor at this point. But what is the status of Apple's effort in this arena? It's not that the database is tied to the FS or not. It's that Spotlight isn't a database. It's a keyword list. Fundamentally different from WinFS. And if you want to talk about corrupted filesystems, you're working on the world's most easily corrupted file system. What, it's fucking 2005 and we still can't load a Mac disk past 85% or so for fear of extent tree corruption. That's a goddam disgrace on Apple's part. Don't you think it's a little odd that one of the most popular software packages for the Mac is a disk repair utility? I don't care if they have journaling or not, I've never seen any computer have more file system corruption than my Mac.
Part of the reason Apple can get away with some of this stuff is that their core user base is composed of blind zealots. You know, the world's not going to end if you admit Apple makes mistakes, and it might make them do better.
Yeah, life is a waste of fossil fuel. Why don't we all just sit in our apartments all day and practice shallow breathing? Your use of a computer to write your post was a waste of fossil fuels, too, wasn't it? Next time leave your computer off, Mr. Gore.
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But thanks for contributing your ignorance to the public. We already have enough reasons for the public to be irrationally afraid of progress in private aviation, thank you.
You're also wrong about Moller. The recent progress on the skycar has been significant due to improvements in engine technology and avionics. While nobody can be sure he'll get everything together, he is definitely closer than he's ever been, and tethered flight is still flight.
They could make it out of scratch resistant plastic if they were willing to come down on their ludicrous margins. However, given their target demographic of sycophants, it's probably not neccesary. Also, I can't resist addressing this: there are places in the country (definitely not the Northeast) where having your car dinged up by self-absorbed jerks isn't an inevitable part of life. So on a more general note, I think part of the problem in both cases is low expectations of people and companies.
For what it's worth, I completely agree with the GP. I can just imagine Negroponte going down there with a savior complex handing out these laptops while children try to knaw on them and look at him quizzically. "No, children, no eat. Program! Java! Write open source!"
Furthermore, why do we always assume what we have is the solution to everybody's problem? That's pretty arrogant. Maybe even if we did help fix their food and resource shortages, they wouldn't even want to become a service economy like ours. Maybe they'd actually like the BUILD something and have industry in their country. Perhaps Negroponte can send over some of our old tooling plants we're no longer using.
I think this kind of thing is pretty symptomatic of our times.
Hogwash. You made that little bit of psuedoscience up. Thin films are an entirely separate issue, and as far as I know they are deposited and are not polymers. The plastics used are molded, and are not thin. Transparency is another issue, and there are many different types of plastic that are transparent.
Finally, I agree you're probably right that if Apple did use the same plastic it was the fact that the screen was inlaid that made the difference. So, wouldn't that point to a design error in the nano? I'm not going to buy a nano and then spend another $30 to put it inside something that doubles its size. That's fucking ludicrous. Apple is really full of shit sometimes with their products. They are all about looks, it seems.
Why are we seeing numerous posts from people who say their other iPods didn't scratch as much? Why, for that matter, are we seeing this entire story? I apologize for being rude and flaming you before, but the idea that all "plastic" devices will have similar scratch resistant is just untenable. It's like saying all metal objects will have the same density. I'm guessing Apple's design guy was so busy worrying about how the thing looked, that they didn't do enough testing on how it worked it real life. That seems to me the most likely explanation. Otherwise you have to wonder why, all of sudden, people are abusing the nano when they didn't abuse their previous ipods.
So, just because a company makes nice products you should hitch your emotional wellbeing to them? I never said Apple didn't make great stuff. I've owned Apple computers since the Mac Plus. I just don't understand why some people seem to take it personally when you suggest Apple isn't perfect.
Before you make a further fool of yourself, perhaps you should read a bit about plastic, which is not a material but a name for a wide category of materials which include everything from materials you could scratch with your fingernail to bulletproof "glass". If they wanted to to, they could make the player with plastic far more resistant to scratching. In fact, they managed to with their other players. But with people like you buying their product, I'm not sure they need to.
What sort of psychological issues do you have to be suffering from to become sychophantic to a company to the point of tying your ego to them and their products? You seriously need to find something more meaningful in your life if you've become irrationally defensive on behalf of a company that doesn't even know you or care about you.
It's just a company trying to make money. It's not a "lifestyle". Sometimes they screw up. You're still an ok person if you admit that.
There may be true paradigm shifts, but for every one that actually happens, there are a million that get breathlessly predicted and claimed and forgotten. And let me go out on a limb to say that true paradigm shifts have required difficult physical technological breakthroughs, like the integrated circuit or massive magnetic storage density. So they are generally hard to do, and rare to come by. It's not something Steve Jobs can just spit out at a cocktail party. If Jobs hadn't come up with the iPod, somebody would've the week later; it's a rather accessible conclusion of what to do with existing technology. (As opposed to the physics of magnetic storage, which takes more than a highschool degree and a mock turtleneck to understand.) Daydreaming "technologists" who prattle on with market speak about the next big paradigm shift are a dime a dozen. The real action happens over years by the guys working in obscurity on the difficult problems. The next TRUE shift will come from them, and we just don't know what it is, yet. For example, a computer which fit in your pocket and displayed wirelessly into your optic nerve and read your thoughts as input. Now THAT would replace the desktop. But a little memory stick with a few buttons and a one inch screen? That's an MP3 player.
I couldn't agree more. I'm not sure exactly how to do it, algorithmically, but I think a only system which allows moderation from the majority of people at any given time has a chance at achieving this goal. Right now, I think the current moderation system, being so subject to the whims of a few, ends up being very polarizing. I think you pretty much only get the party line on /. (Does one end that sentence with another period?) In theory, a system with more data would be able to statistically distinguish between a post which is just crap and one which is just controversial. I would imagine, for one, that the variance in voting for one would be different than the other, even if the mean is the same. Anyway, I'm not sure it's worth messing with, but I think it's fun to think about how one would best handle a moderation system. It's essentially an embodiment of a social protocol for judging Quality.
Another way to put it: why am I reading posts simply because one or two people liked them? There are thousands and thousands of users reading each comment stream. Why not harnass that more effectively? Look at all the ridiculous complexity brought about by the current moderation system? We've got the selection criteria for moderators. Then there's the need for moderation of moderations in the form of under/over-rated moderations. Then there's metamoderation. And finally there are all the moderation types, apparently needed so that people don't just moderate in an ad hoc basis (even though they do anyway). It's starting to look like a Microsoft solution. A simple voting scheme of +/- that takes a lot more people into account would get rid of all that complexity.
While I'm dreaming: the mod system should just be a voting system. Everybody with positive karma (or maybe excellent or whatever) should be able to mod any post. With the increased number of mods, statistical methods could be used. Outlyer moderations could be thrown out, and the rest could be averaged so that one single moderation up or down won't affect the score. Random moderations (everybody disagrees) would just count as nothing. Or maybe we could get cute and allow people to view based on standard deviation, as well as average score (in case you're interested in both the good and the controversial). Anyway, I won't hold my breath. But the idea that two guys with political agendas can kill a post is dumb. Community moderation should be done by the community. Not by a few blessed individuals at a time. We all vote at once.
Well, given that it was essentially a yes or no question, I'm sure approximately 50% of the answers will be correct. 100% of them will be within one bit of correct.
Isn't asking about nuclear fusion on an IT site kind of like asking for formula one driving tips on, well, an IT site? The only correct answer you'll get is "I have no goddam idea."
You've been here long enough you should know better than to be surprised. :-) One could take a bowel movement and post the details on Slashdot and it will get modded "+5 Insightful" as long as it's one of the first posts. On the other hand, you could write the next "Principia Mathematica" as a response to said first post and it will be modded "-1 Troll" if you don't praise open source in the first few sentences.
My criticism had nothign to do with newness, and everything to do with it being buzzwordy, substanceless bullshit. I thought that was clear from the media lab reference. :-) I mean, what the hell does that mean "the pocket is the new platform"? I guess that's cooler than saying "things will get smaller" and a lot more satisfying than saying the truth: "Something's might get smaller because memory costs have come down and certain applications don't require large screens or large human interfaces. However, some do, so we can't really say *everything* will get smaller because sometimes you're working on a spreadsheet in the middle of O'Hare and you'd like to see everything but you don't want to project your company's sensitive financial information on the wall in front of other people, but sometimes you really do so maybe sometimes you'll want to have a mini-projector that's separate in case that's ALL you want to do, etc..."
So I was serious in asking why people now have this innate need to overstate and oversimplify, as if somehow the world is a worse place when it's heterogeneous and complicated, like what we REALLY need is a big paradigm change that can be summarized on a powerpoint slide using phrases like "* is the new *" and "all * will be *". The world doesn't work like that, but maybe technology has complicated our lives so much people are feeling this pull away from it, and yet, ironically, try to address the problems of technology with more technology. Or maybe it's just our modern preoccupation with the individual ego, and everybody has to be a fucking profound visionary, even if they're just talking about a little toy that plays music. I dunno, but I think it would be an interesting discussion. Maybe some other place, though...
The pocket is the new platform? Sounds like the media lab hype of years gone by. Anyway, until your fingers shrink I think it's premature to predict the death of the laptop. Projection needs a place to project, too. That's not a feasible solution for display. Let me offer a sober suggestion: nothing is the death of anything. Nothing is the next big thing that's going to change our lives completely, blah blah blah. There's a bunch of stuff, some of it better at certain things than others. Why is it that people aren't happy unless they can hype the second coming and predict simplistic sea changes that can be summarized in a buzzword? I'm serious about the question, as it seems to be a modern phenomenon.
It's quite possible the exact opposite of your thesis is true: that DRM will destroy a media company. I will NEVER buy a track from Apple after hearing all of my friends deal with problems arising from switching computers or upgrading their OS. Hell, I've downloaded their free tracks and got so sick of the DRM issues with my iPod that I just erased all of them. I don't trust DRM. Apple loses their key servers (I hope they have backups outside of earthquake country) and every sucker who bought $1000 of music loses it all. Probably won't happen, but there are other ways to lose the keys. I like the fact that when I buy a CD, I can encode the songs and have them forever, give them to my grandchildren if I like when I die. DRM is partly a way to keep the music from pirates, and partly a way to limit its lifespan. Have you read the license closely? Is your music transferrable?
(1) And it's NOT free in any way... (2) You CAN'T, for example, download a binary...
It appears my QC is way off today. Sorry.
You've lost me. First you're talking about free software that nobody paid anybody to write. Then all of a sudden, you're talking about Google Maps, and using that to justify FSTNPATW. Well, people got paid a lot of money to develop Google Maps. And it's free in any way shape or form, except to link to. So it's neither free as in software or beer. (You can, for example, download a binary and run it on your own site.) It's free as in TV. It's part of a business plan, generating advertising money. So, this all begs the question: what is your point?
So you think Encyclopedia Brittanica hires expert to write all of their articles? If you want a chance at a real expert, I actually think the Wikipedia is not a bad place to look. Often, the people writing articles on scientific topics are those currently doing research in those areas. Were Britannica to actually pay these people to write articles, they'd go bankrupt. I think your entire post was pure conjecture based on bias. Amazingly enough, if you actually read articles on Wikipedia (which you should do before posting about it) you'd find that they are often technically more advanced than those in commerical encyclopedias. For example, do you really think you could learn about the index of refraction in any detail from the World Book? That the Wikipedia works as well as it does is one of the most optimistic things I've ever seen.
Good points. I figured when my Mac got sluggish and unresponsive it was because of apps waiting for IO from the kernel, but I agree it could just be badly written apps. (Though, for the record, they would have to be badly written by Apple, too.) Also, I'm sure part of the reason my PowerBook feels so less responsive than my PC laptop is that my PC is running a Pentium 4 whereas my PB is running a 500 MHz G4. I'm sure the Mac OS will be greatly improved when running on Pentiums.
I haven't run into a Resource fork issue in Years and I run a Mac and Windows support office.
Good. But try tarring your documents folder and then untaring it and see how well it works. Or try using the "UNIX" file system that's supposedly supported by Apple. Lots of people have had problems with resource fork issues. Just because you haven't means you've made good choices, not that it's not an issue. Do a google search and you'll see what I mean.
you're comparing Applescript (which is what, 2 decades old? nearly there? to the shell of a beta OS that's due, maybe, in a year
Actually, the windows XML shell is already done for the most part. But you've exactly made my point. Apple is using a 15 year old scripting tool. Microsoft is coming up with a modern shell. Which one is the innovative company again? My whole post was about Apple using old technology in Mac OS X, so you're really not making much headway going on about how long in the tooth AppleScript is.
but since Vista won't ship with WinFS and it's officially vaporware, what's the point? Spotlight doesn't wake up before me and scramble my eggs and put the coffee on either but it's still a sweet tool.
I agree. I love Spotlight. But in your blind defensiveness about Apple you completely missed the point of my post. I know WinFS is vapor at this point. But what is the status of Apple's effort in this arena? It's not that the database is tied to the FS or not. It's that Spotlight isn't a database. It's a keyword list. Fundamentally different from WinFS. And if you want to talk about corrupted filesystems, you're working on the world's most easily corrupted file system. What, it's fucking 2005 and we still can't load a Mac disk past 85% or so for fear of extent tree corruption. That's a goddam disgrace on Apple's part. Don't you think it's a little odd that one of the most popular software packages for the Mac is a disk repair utility? I don't care if they have journaling or not, I've never seen any computer have more file system corruption than my Mac.
Part of the reason Apple can get away with some of this stuff is that their core user base is composed of blind zealots. You know, the world's not going to end if you admit Apple makes mistakes, and it might make them do better.
Yeah, life is a waste of fossil fuel. Why don't we all just sit in our apartments all day and practice shallow breathing? Your use of a computer to write your post was a waste of fossil fuels, too, wasn't it? Next time leave your computer off, Mr. Gore.