As my old boss said, "Cigarettes will take years off of your life. However, it's the years at the end of your life--the ones where you're wearing an adult diaper and spending most of your days drooling."
The health problems you mention come later in life. It's not like you're going to smoke a cigarette and suddenly be incapacitated. Heck, I smoke and I used to ride my bike a minimum of 100 miles a week and had no problems. So the ethereal, "You'll have health problems later in life" isn't much of a dissuading factor for young people.
When my Mom quit, it was because she watched her oldest sister die from lung cancer. When my Dad quit, it was after seeing a chest X-ray. Something that really brings the point home is usually the best way to convince yourself to quit smoking.
From what I've been told, it's pretty easy to quit smoking once you want to quit. But if you'd like to quit or you think that quitting smoking might be somewhat better for you in regards to your health, it's going to be tough.
Perhaps you'd like to give up [...] OSHA regulations
This is one of the things that always struck me as interesting.
Way back when, employers created dangerous working conditions because it was cheaper than providing safe working conditions. Employees banded together to create unions to force employers to provide safe working conditions. And we all thought this was a good thing.
Then the government came along and created OSHA--The Occupation Safety and Health Administration. So we now have a government organization that protects workers from dangers in the workplace. So what are the unions doing to keep employees safe that OSHA isn't doing? Do we really need two organizations looking out for employee safety?
"Even if you figure in the cost of launching that built equipment from Earth instead of from the Moon, the benefits of not stretching our supply chain to (or beyond) practical limits during the preparatory phase of an interplanetary expedition make up for any extra cost of launching from Earth."
Personally, I'm not all that interested in an "interplanetary expedition" just yet.
One of the big questions is, "Why should we have a manned space program--or any space program at all? Why send men when we can send robots cheaper, easier, and safer?" Now we all have our etherial answers about the good of mankind and science and propagating the species and yadda yadda yadda. And all that is well and good. But I think it would far better serve our purpose to get some people living and doing work in space. And not just scientific work but the kind of work that Joe Sixpack can understand--building stuff.
There are great reasons to launch rockets from the moon rather than from Earth. One of the ones I bring up over and over is the fact that you can use things like nuclear propulsion without necessarily worrying about what happens if the rocket fails. Everybody's afraid to lift uranium out of the atmosphere--"What happens if the rocket blows up?!? We'll all die!!" Well, there's uranium on the moon. As has been said over and over, chemical propulsion isn't going to get us where we want to go.
The idea of going to the Moon should be to stay there. Lots of useful stuff to build things with. Less gravity which is good for launching stuff, but not so much less that normal operations are hindered (as I've said in other posts, if you drop a screw it falls on the ground--it doesn't go floating off).
When we have done this, we can build the ship that will transport explorers to Mars on the Moon.
Well, you can conceivably build things in zero G. The question would be whether it's easier to build things in zero G or where there's a bit of gravity. Gravity has some advantages: Drop something and it will hit the ground, rather than floating away. While building stuff in zero G looks way cool, I'm more interested in efficiency.
The problem with getting stuff from Earth is that it's at the bottom of a really deep gravity well, which limits how much stuff we can get out of it. So shipping water and building materials up to Earth orbit is expensive. Remember that, for x amount of fuel, you can ship 6X the weight from the Moon than you could from Earth.
The problem with getting stuff from Asteroids is political: you have the "what if something goes wrong?" crowd. "Let me get this straight--you want to go find an asteroid and send it toward the Earth?! What happens if you can't control it?! What happens if something goes wrong and it crashes into the Earth?!? Won't somebody think of the children?!?!"
You could mine it and process it on the asteroid and then ship it to Earth orbit for assembly. But we're back to the gravity issues: Mining and processing in negligible G (eg Ceres, the largest asteroid, is 0.03G) will have it own issues as well. On the moon, we have to deal with dust--imagine how much dust mining an asteroid will generate? This a problem we have to solve anyway, whether it's on the Moon or an asteroid.
As for water, I may be wrong but space is not only pretty darn cold, it's pretty darn hot. The ISS temperatures range from -250 F to +250 F, depending on whether it's in direct sunlight. So I would think water would melt. But I may be wrong.
Well, the advantage of the dry gravity-cursed rock is that there are actually things you could use to build stuff on the moon. There's not much building stuff in near-earth orbit and the closest building stuff is in this really deep gravity well.
Personally, I think the Moon is an OK trade-off. You can mine asteroids but you'll have to take the raw materials somewhere else to actually build anything. On the Moon, you have "low" gravity (no, not as low as an asteroid but much less than the Earth) lots of materials, lots of empty ground to build stuff, and no environmental concerns (so you can launch nuclear-powered rockets to your heart's content).
Apply [sic] did intentionally cripple their OS because Atoms are standard X86 instruction sets.
But what is a standard X86 instruction set? Does it include SSE3?
The Atom includes SSE3, but Intel's compilers require a special switch to generate SSE3 compatible code for the Intel Atom. So I would assume there is something "special" about SSE3 on the Atom.
So, possibility one is that Apple is explicitly saying that they want to crush these people making Hackintosh Netbooks. Possibility two is that Apple is now using instructions that are not available on the Intel Atom because they don't make an Intel Atom-based machine and would rather optimize their code for the machines that they do make.
So Apple will try but they may make mistakes. Fair enough.
But if we accept the fact that mistakes will be made, how is this better than either a "Wild West" approach where anyone can publish applications with no review whatsoever or, conversely, a competitive store approach where some stores will be better than others about evaluating what an app does?
Had you excercised proper engineering methodology, you would have known to test each product/application being put on the network in test markets and used the use data to predict what the peak would be, and then only deploy it when you had a 20-50% greater capacity than what the data suggests.
Oh yeah. Apple would have really gone for that.
"Here's a bunch of iPhones 6 months before we release them. Send them around the country to your employees and let them try them out and make sure your network doesn't choke. But--shhhh--don't tell anybody you have them because we like doing big secret announcements."
[...] they knew getting into this deal that iPhones would grab a huge user base, which is why they negotiated an exclusive contract. Conclusion: More users = more traffic.
In theory, no they didn't.
Keep in mind that, outside the Apple Fanboi sites, confidence wasn't all that high. It wasn't known whether the iPhone was going to be another iPod (huge market share) or another Mac (small market share). AT&T had phones running Internet Explorer, what's to say that the iPhone was going to be much bigger?
It's easy to be a Monday morning quarterback and say, "They should have known!" But suppose AT&T had spent tons of money to upgrade their network and the iPhone had flopped?
More importantly, though, as AT&T actually begins to feel the financial effects of fleeing iPhone users, they're going to have no choice but to ramp up the infrastructure upgrades to compete.
Not necessarily.
Remember that profit is revenue minus expenses. So if AT&T brings in $10,000,000 but has to spend $5,000,000 improving their network, that's a $5,000,000 profit. On the other hand, if 1/3 of AT&T subscribers leave, AT&T brings in $6,666,666 but they don't have to worry about improving their network now that 1/3 of the previous users have left. So they make more money with fewer customers.
Not supporting is one thing. Intentionally disabling is another.
Well, I think either is legal for Apple. I think intentionally disabling is very tacky, though.
Imagine that Apple's going to use a compiler which produces faster code for the Intel Core/Core 2 CPUs. Unfortunately, it is using instructions that are not available on the Intel Atom CPUs.
So you're improving your products which are based on the Intel Core/Core 2 CPUs and you're removing compatibility with the Intel Atom. Since you never shipped a computer with the Intel Atom, it isn't a problem. Since you never stated that your software will work with an Intel Atom CPU, there's no legal issue.
I mean, should I be upset because I can't install Mac OS X on a 80386-based PC just because I could NeXTStep?
Frankly, it's pretty easy to come up with a scenario where Apple broke compatibility with Intel Atom CPUs not through any nefarious scheme but because it makes their Core/Core 2 products better, which is a good thing.
They have NO RIGHT to tell me what I can or can't install their OS on.
Agreed. But that doesn't mean they have to make sure that (a) it works and (b) continues working beyond what they tell you it will work on--an Apple branded Intel-based Computer.
Just because I might be able to get the pieces of Snow Leopard on my PowerPC Mac hard drive does not mean that it will work or that Apple is somehow required to make it work.
Moon rocks returned by Apollo manned missions: 382kg Moon rocks returned by Soviet robot missions: 0.326 kg
So they cost less but they return less.
There's also the argument that, assuming a geologist is collecting them, you'll end up with better "quality" rocks than an automated mission could return.
I remember back in 2003 when Xcode 1.0 came out and Steve was on stage showing "Fix and Run" (where you could have the program running, change some code, recompile and dynamically link that code into the running binary). All he had to do was change a few lines of code in the demo and hit the "Fix & Run" button, but you could see his cheat sheets and he, very carefully, was typing in exactly what was on the sheet and no idea what he was doing.
Of course, he was joking that he had no idea what he was doing--he wasn't trying to pretend that he was some superprogrammer or anything. There've also been a few times when he's talked about processors and instruction paths and geeky hardware stuff and followed it up with, "I have no idea what that means."
Steve is pretty good about surrounding himself with people who know this stuff (ie, Woz, Avie Tevanian) and turning pure technology into products that people want to buy.
What I think we'll see for US "smartphone" market share in early 2011:
iPhone 4GSX (iPhone OS) with 25%
Motorola Droid 2 (Android) with 17%
HTC Wombat (Android) with 13%
Blackberry Square (RIM) with 12%
Microsoft PinkFon (WinMo 7) with 6%
Apple will loudly proclaim that they are the most popular smartphone. Google will proclaim that Android is the most popular smartphone OS. RIM and Microsoft will say, "Hey! Remember us? We've got amazing stuff coming real soon now!"
The point is that both Apple and Google will be proclaiming victory.
Slashdot Mirror
As my old boss said, "Cigarettes will take years off of your life. However, it's the years at the end of your life--the ones where you're wearing an adult diaper and spending most of your days drooling."
The health problems you mention come later in life. It's not like you're going to smoke a cigarette and suddenly be incapacitated. Heck, I smoke and I used to ride my bike a minimum of 100 miles a week and had no problems. So the ethereal, "You'll have health problems later in life" isn't much of a dissuading factor for young people.
When my Mom quit, it was because she watched her oldest sister die from lung cancer. When my Dad quit, it was after seeing a chest X-ray. Something that really brings the point home is usually the best way to convince yourself to quit smoking.
From what I've been told, it's pretty easy to quit smoking once you want to quit. But if you'd like to quit or you think that quitting smoking might be somewhat better for you in regards to your health, it's going to be tough.
There's eReader for Android. Don't know how it compares...
Which apps? If you mention which ones, you might find someone who will either tell you that the exist already or might actually decide to write them.
There are more than a few developers here on Slashdot...
Circa 2002: Windows has 96% of the market. Apple has 2%. Somehow, I'm not particularly concerned.
What are these "comments" of which you speak? These sound intriguing and I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter...
My favorite was a guy I worked with who wrote code to handle inventory valuation and such. He continually misspelled "received" as "recieved."
I merely added a comment into his struct definition that said, "recieved is misspelled for historical reasons."
No one get's a soda, they get a coke, even when that 'coke' is a Pepsi
Depends on where you live...
Perhaps you'd like to give up [...] OSHA regulations
This is one of the things that always struck me as interesting.
Way back when, employers created dangerous working conditions because it was cheaper than providing safe working conditions. Employees banded together to create unions to force employers to provide safe working conditions. And we all thought this was a good thing.
Then the government came along and created OSHA--The Occupation Safety and Health Administration. So we now have a government organization that protects workers from dangers in the workplace. So what are the unions doing to keep employees safe that OSHA isn't doing? Do we really need two organizations looking out for employee safety?
"Even if you figure in the cost of launching that built equipment from Earth instead of from the Moon, the benefits of not stretching our supply chain to (or beyond) practical limits during the preparatory phase of an interplanetary expedition make up for any extra cost of launching from Earth."
Personally, I'm not all that interested in an "interplanetary expedition" just yet.
One of the big questions is, "Why should we have a manned space program--or any space program at all? Why send men when we can send robots cheaper, easier, and safer?" Now we all have our etherial answers about the good of mankind and science and propagating the species and yadda yadda yadda. And all that is well and good. But I think it would far better serve our purpose to get some people living and doing work in space. And not just scientific work but the kind of work that Joe Sixpack can understand--building stuff.
There are great reasons to launch rockets from the moon rather than from Earth. One of the ones I bring up over and over is the fact that you can use things like nuclear propulsion without necessarily worrying about what happens if the rocket fails. Everybody's afraid to lift uranium out of the atmosphere--"What happens if the rocket blows up?!? We'll all die!!" Well, there's uranium on the moon. As has been said over and over, chemical propulsion isn't going to get us where we want to go.
The idea of going to the Moon should be to stay there. Lots of useful stuff to build things with. Less gravity which is good for launching stuff, but not so much less that normal operations are hindered (as I've said in other posts, if you drop a screw it falls on the ground--it doesn't go floating off).
When we have done this, we can build the ship that will transport explorers to Mars on the Moon.
Well, you can conceivably build things in zero G. The question would be whether it's easier to build things in zero G or where there's a bit of gravity. Gravity has some advantages: Drop something and it will hit the ground, rather than floating away. While building stuff in zero G looks way cool, I'm more interested in efficiency.
The problem with getting stuff from Earth is that it's at the bottom of a really deep gravity well, which limits how much stuff we can get out of it. So shipping water and building materials up to Earth orbit is expensive. Remember that, for x amount of fuel, you can ship 6X the weight from the Moon than you could from Earth.
The problem with getting stuff from Asteroids is political: you have the "what if something goes wrong?" crowd. "Let me get this straight--you want to go find an asteroid and send it toward the Earth?! What happens if you can't control it?! What happens if something goes wrong and it crashes into the Earth?!? Won't somebody think of the children?!?!"
You could mine it and process it on the asteroid and then ship it to Earth orbit for assembly. But we're back to the gravity issues: Mining and processing in negligible G (eg Ceres, the largest asteroid, is 0.03G) will have it own issues as well. On the moon, we have to deal with dust--imagine how much dust mining an asteroid will generate? This a problem we have to solve anyway, whether it's on the Moon or an asteroid.
As for water, I may be wrong but space is not only pretty darn cold, it's pretty darn hot. The ISS temperatures range from -250 F to +250 F, depending on whether it's in direct sunlight. So I would think water would melt. But I may be wrong.
Well, the advantage of the dry gravity-cursed rock is that there are actually things you could use to build stuff on the moon. There's not much building stuff in near-earth orbit and the closest building stuff is in this really deep gravity well.
Personally, I think the Moon is an OK trade-off. You can mine asteroids but you'll have to take the raw materials somewhere else to actually build anything. On the Moon, you have "low" gravity (no, not as low as an asteroid but much less than the Earth) lots of materials, lots of empty ground to build stuff, and no environmental concerns (so you can launch nuclear-powered rockets to your heart's content).
Bah. Unix is just Multics with the balls cut off.
Apply [sic] did intentionally cripple their OS because Atoms are standard X86 instruction sets.
But what is a standard X86 instruction set? Does it include SSE3?
The Atom includes SSE3, but Intel's compilers require a special switch to generate SSE3 compatible code for the Intel Atom. So I would assume there is something "special" about SSE3 on the Atom.
So, possibility one is that Apple is explicitly saying that they want to crush these people making Hackintosh Netbooks. Possibility two is that Apple is now using instructions that are not available on the Intel Atom because they don't make an Intel Atom-based machine and would rather optimize their code for the machines that they do make.
Which one seems like it makes more sense?
So Apple will try but they may make mistakes. Fair enough.
But if we accept the fact that mistakes will be made, how is this better than either a "Wild West" approach where anyone can publish applications with no review whatsoever or, conversely, a competitive store approach where some stores will be better than others about evaluating what an app does?
And sooner or later a micro-meteorite is going to slam through someones skull and end their life. However, we should do absolutely nothing about this.
Unless it's a child.
Dear God, won't somebody think of the children?!
Had you excercised proper engineering methodology, you would have known to test each product/application being put on the network in test markets and used the use data to predict what the peak would be, and then only deploy it when you had a 20-50% greater capacity than what the data suggests.
Oh yeah. Apple would have really gone for that.
"Here's a bunch of iPhones 6 months before we release them. Send them around the country to your employees and let them try them out and make sure your network doesn't choke. But--shhhh--don't tell anybody you have them because we like doing big secret announcements."
[...] they knew getting into this deal that iPhones would grab a huge user base, which is why they negotiated an exclusive contract. Conclusion: More users = more traffic.
In theory, no they didn't.
Keep in mind that, outside the Apple Fanboi sites, confidence wasn't all that high. It wasn't known whether the iPhone was going to be another iPod (huge market share) or another Mac (small market share). AT&T had phones running Internet Explorer, what's to say that the iPhone was going to be much bigger?
It's easy to be a Monday morning quarterback and say, "They should have known!" But suppose AT&T had spent tons of money to upgrade their network and the iPhone had flopped?
More importantly, though, as AT&T actually begins to feel the financial effects of fleeing iPhone users, they're going to have no choice but to ramp up the infrastructure upgrades to compete.
Not necessarily.
Remember that profit is revenue minus expenses. So if AT&T brings in $10,000,000 but has to spend $5,000,000 improving their network, that's a $5,000,000 profit. On the other hand, if 1/3 of AT&T subscribers leave, AT&T brings in $6,666,666 but they don't have to worry about improving their network now that 1/3 of the previous users have left. So they make more money with fewer customers.
No no, the US is Canada's chesterfield
Fixed that for you.
I laughed, I cried, It was better than "Cats!"
Not supporting is one thing. Intentionally disabling is another.
Well, I think either is legal for Apple. I think intentionally disabling is very tacky, though.
Imagine that Apple's going to use a compiler which produces faster code for the Intel Core/Core 2 CPUs. Unfortunately, it is using instructions that are not available on the Intel Atom CPUs.
So you're improving your products which are based on the Intel Core/Core 2 CPUs and you're removing compatibility with the Intel Atom. Since you never shipped a computer with the Intel Atom, it isn't a problem. Since you never stated that your software will work with an Intel Atom CPU, there's no legal issue.
I mean, should I be upset because I can't install Mac OS X on a 80386-based PC just because I could NeXTStep?
Frankly, it's pretty easy to come up with a scenario where Apple broke compatibility with Intel Atom CPUs not through any nefarious scheme but because it makes their Core/Core 2 products better, which is a good thing.
They have NO RIGHT to tell me what I can or can't install their OS on.
Agreed. But that doesn't mean they have to make sure that (a) it works and (b) continues working beyond what they tell you it will work on--an Apple branded Intel-based Computer.
Just because I might be able to get the pieces of Snow Leopard on my PowerPC Mac hard drive does not mean that it will work or that Apple is somehow required to make it work.
Dunno.
Moon rocks returned by Apollo manned missions: 382kg
Moon rocks returned by Soviet robot missions: 0.326 kg
So they cost less but they return less.
There's also the argument that, assuming a geologist is collecting them, you'll end up with better "quality" rocks than an automated mission could return.
A far as I know Steve Jobs is no geek
But it's so cute when he tries.
I remember back in 2003 when Xcode 1.0 came out and Steve was on stage showing "Fix and Run" (where you could have the program running, change some code, recompile and dynamically link that code into the running binary). All he had to do was change a few lines of code in the demo and hit the "Fix & Run" button, but you could see his cheat sheets and he, very carefully, was typing in exactly what was on the sheet and no idea what he was doing.
Of course, he was joking that he had no idea what he was doing--he wasn't trying to pretend that he was some superprogrammer or anything. There've also been a few times when he's talked about processors and instruction paths and geeky hardware stuff and followed it up with, "I have no idea what that means."
Steve is pretty good about surrounding himself with people who know this stuff (ie, Woz, Avie Tevanian) and turning pure technology into products that people want to buy.
What I think we'll see for US "smartphone" market share in early 2011:
Apple will loudly proclaim that they are the most popular smartphone. Google will proclaim that Android is the most popular smartphone OS. RIM and Microsoft will say, "Hey! Remember us? We've got amazing stuff coming real soon now!"
The point is that both Apple and Google will be proclaiming victory.