I have not seen any evidence that the Launchpad is limited ONLY to apps from the Mac App Store. What the Apple site says is that apps from the store are automatically added to Launchpad. That's not the same thing as saying "only" store apps are added to Launchpad. In fact what it says is "Your open windows fade away, replaced by an elegant, full-screen display of all the apps on your Mac." All the apps. (If there's a statement I'm not aware, please post a link...)
Including the apps in the update tool might be useful, but most apps on my Mac check for updates themselves when I start them. It's not like I have to remember to go out and check the Firefox or Adobe sites for patches myself.
3.5) If it is a house you have lived in for 2 of the last 5 years, the first $250k ($500k if you're married) of your appreciation is shielded from taxation.
4) If you die this year, there is no estate tax at all. If you die next year (or beyond), the first $1 million of your estate will be shielded from taxation by an offsetting credit for each recipient (if you have 3 kids the total offset is $3 million--1 for each). This issue is active in Congress so both exemptions and rates could be reset this year.
Does the desktop OS really matter that much any more? At least in the consumer space, I contend no:
- File format interoperability has improved dramatically. Numerous apps on several platforms can now open MS and Adobe formats, for instance. - More and more functionality is delivered through the browser by servers. - As a result, after-market boxed software is less and less important. Core consumer functionality comes built into computers when you buy them (word processing, photos, music, video, etc). Aside from games, consumers simply don't go to stores anymore to buy the hottest new software.
Mobile OS is still very app-oriented though. And Linux is doing very well there, in the form of Android.
Desktop OS still matters a lot in the corporate setting because of custom business applications that have been developed on the MS platform for years. They would be a huge pain to port, and businesses will ride them for as long as they can. But even in those cases, when they develop new apps, there's a good chance they'll be developing server-based software running on Linux (even if the desktop OS is still Windows).
So even though Linux adoption on the desktop might have slowed, that matters less and less in the big picture. The big problem with MS's domination of the desktop was that it was their chokepoint of control because it was the default environment for all developers. For consumers at least, that chokepoint is largely gone. The default environment for developers now is the server.
We were looking to move a few dozen sites off of a proprietary Web CMS and one of the reasons we decided on popular OSS solutions like Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, etc. is that it is pretty easy to find vendors who know them. We lease virtualized servers at Rackspace so we control the hosting, and then we hire on vendors to help us build and support our sites.
My metaphor was that going with a hosted, proprietary CMS was like leasing a car where you had to always pay the dealer for work. Hosting our own Wordpress or Drupal site is like owning a car--if we don't like our mechanic we can get a different one.
It has already paid off a couple times--we soured on a vendor and were able to easily find and bring in a new one to support the site.
One reason we decided against Plone is that it is not heavily used or supported in my area (DC).
Where even a relatively simple electronic throttle control system became the focus of a witch hunt, despite a complete lack of evidence that it had failed. In fact the preponderance of the evidence now is that most cases were simply a case of wrong-footing the gas pedal...just like with Audi's the last time. Yet Toyota has suffered massive economic consequences.
Beating a human at handling unanticipatable events seems a straightforward engineering task. Let's say that a kid darts out from behind a car with absolutely no warning. If the computer car has sensors better than human eyes, and a reaction time quicker than a human's, then it should beat the human in that situation. Seems very possible to me.
But it is the situations that CAN be anticipated where computers will have hard time catching up to humans. Because--what goes into human anticipation? A computer can be programmed to know where school zones are, based on GPS coords. But on a random side street, a computer would have a hard time noticing that the street looks a little more parked-in than typical, and one house has a pink mylar balloon on the mailbox--therefore, drive slower than usual because there's probably a birthday party with over-excited kids running around.
Or consider the very subtle ways we evaluate the driving of the cars around us. Have you ever thought to yourself, "that car is about to cut me off," and then it happens? What went into that moment of anticipation? Probably dozens of clues about how that car was moving through traffic. You probably are not even aware of all the factors--you just learned over time. It will extremely difficult to capture that sort of anticipation in software.
Elections for state office are regulated by state laws. And many states have never had the limitations on corporate speech that existed federally prior to Citizens United. Yet they do not stand out as significantly more corrupt or worse off in any correlated way.
Money is not the only factor in elections. If it was, multi-millionaires like Ross Perot, Mitt Romney, or Jon Corzine could buy their way into office whenever they wanted. But they can't.
Interestingly, much of the modern Japanese approach to design and manufacturing is based on quantitative quality management practices created by Americans like Ed Deming. U.S. companies were not interested because they were experiencing strong success based on the way they had always done things. Japan was recreating many of its industries from scratch, and knew good ideas when they say them. Decades later they bore fruit as the Japanese were able to produce higher quality products, faster, and cheaper than U.S. manufacturers.
The whole reason the military funded research into packet-switched networks was their potential for flexibility and uptime. On 9/11 a major Verizon switch was destroyed by the collapse of the WTC, but e-mails still got where they were going. The Internet routes around damage.
Now imagine setting up a secure, separate physical network. In order to provide the same flexibility and recoverability you will need to fund many redundant links from each node to many other nodes. Expensive!! The reason the Internet works is because each company only needs to fund a few links themselves. Then they can internetwork with everyone else's links and voila: mass redundancy and multiple paths for packets.
The answer to secure computing in the future is mostly in software and configuration IMO.
Are you arguing that a private development effort with a few developers will be more secure than an open-source project with many developers? Isn't the exact opposite logic used to explain why Linux is more secure than Windows? Drupal has a community bug reporting process, and core and module patches are issued quite frequently.
I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a developer to learn about the framework they're using. Drupal can be hard to learn and yes that's a knock against it. But if you do learn it, it is powerful and flexible.
For a skilled developer it might be a faster and better experience to code from scratch. For a content-focused organization, it's better to spend the time and money on developing content than developing code. A framework makes that possible, even if it's not the most perfect solution.
Apple says over 120 million "iOS" (formerly iPhone OS) devices have shipped since the iPhone introduction in 2007. Every one is a tablet computer. The iPad just happens to be the largest.
He wasn't fired because of sexual harassment or because he loaded risque pics on his work machine.
Rather, he was fired because the board did not trust him anymore. Part of that erosion of trust was that he hired someone with such a risque past to act as a "face" of HP at high-profile events. The search history was just proof that he was aware of her past. By themselves the pics/video were not enough to get him (or probably most managers) fired. Maybe if they repeatedly subjected subordinates or coworkers to them.
"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main"
The human genome does not boot-strap to a human; humans are produced within other humans who were produced within other humans, etc., etc. back to the blue-green algae. That unbroken chain of reproduction is the self-modifying program; any given genome is only the latest bit of data fed into part of it.
Increases in average life expectancy mostly reflect our improving ability to keep people from dying young. We have not significantly improve our ability to keep any given person alive for longer. For all the medical advances in the world, it's still very unlikely Kurzweil will live to see his 100th birthday.
Looking at the economic impact, the iPod was a game-changer and Google Maps was not. The iPod made tens of billions of dollars for Apple. Google Maps was innovative from a technological point of view, but how much money has Google made directly from Google Maps?
From an economic point of view, technological innovation alone is not enough. It needs to drive a lot of revenue to create impact. Google's search technology was a game changer because it is handing Google tens of billions of dollars. Maps is not. Gmail is not.
Rumors are that it will be based on the iOS operating system. This implies it will have access to the App Store.
The new iPhone has a display resolution of 960 x 640 pixels. New games are being written for that resolution, and old games being updated for it.
Turn it sideways...640p is not that far from 720p. Since it's a dedicated TV device, Apple could handle the up-res from 640 to 720 in hardware. You'd have a $99 device not much bigger than an iPhone that could store and play hundreds of video games...games that already exist. The device would launch with a huge game library from day one.
You could use your iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad as the controller (or buy a dedicated controller if you don't have any of those). The coup de grace would be wireless or cloud syncing so that you could pause a game on the TV and continue it on your mobile device later (and vice versa).
If Apple can get this thing out the door fast enough, it could be the big video game system for the holidays.
When I close the lid on my MacBook, it goes to sleep right away. When I open the lid, it wakes up right away. It works exactly as well 6 months later. The only time I reboot my laptop is when a software update requires it. This is something that my Thinkpad, Dell, and HP laptops have all had problems with in the past. To the end user, it's a hardware function...close or open the lid.
And the multitouch trackpad on my laptop is so good that I ended up buying a used Fingerworks trackpad so I could get similar functionality on my Dell.
The OS X UI has all sorts of wonky inconsistencies. Which is why (speaking of the iPad), Apple designed an entirely new UI for their touch products. To get rid of some of that crap.
de Havilland Otters and Beavers are probably the most respected aircraft in Alaska bush flight. They were designed and built specifically for backcountry flying by de Havilland Canada. To this day they are used for dangerous mountain flying, including glacier landings and flying into Denali basecamp (through "One Shot Pass"). When I visited a friend in Alaska we took a flight-seeing tour over Denali National Park and the flight was in a single-engine Otter.
They rarely go up for sale and when they do, they are very expensive because they are so highly sought-after.
He was not fired for the sexual harassment stuff. In fact he was cleared of violating HP's policy and he settled the suit out of court. Both he and woman have confirmed that they did not have a sexual relationship.
He was fired for filing inaccurate expense reports totalling about $20,000. Basically he concealed the fact that he was expensing meetings with this woman. HP has stated that they do have clear evidence of that, and that Hurd admitted it and offered to repay the $20k. Instead they fired him.
He was a superstar manager. If HP's financial performance suffers without Hurd, they could lose tens of billions of dollars in market cap. If that happens I have to think that investors are going to question whether that $20k was worth it.
If a phone doesn't have an external, extendable antennas like my Motorola v325 does, it doesn't have much of a leg to stand on when it comes to antenna performance.
Every smart phone I'm aware of has an internal antenna, which compromises performance. Manufacturers do this because consumers care about aesthetics when they pick out a phone, and if they have problems with coverage or calls, they always blame the network operator, not the phone.
Highlight an image the folder you want to browse and hit the spacebar. The image will pop up in a black-bordered window. There is a button to make it full-screen. Use the arrow keys on your keyboard to navigate through the pictures in that folder.
This feature is called "Quick Look" and was introduced with OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard" in August 2009. It works with a wide variety of file types...like MS Office docs, PDFs, Photoshop files, and a variety of video formats. Just click once to highlight the file and hit the space bar.
It's called proportional fonts, and they have been standard on computers for decades. Use MS Word or some other font-aware piece of software to print this comment out and measure the spacing between words within this sentence, and then the spacing between this sentence and the preceding period. It's not a full two spaces, but you don't need a full two spaces to make the visual distinction to which you're referring.
If you're working in constant width fonts, you should still add an extra space between sentences.
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I have not seen any evidence that the Launchpad is limited ONLY to apps from the Mac App Store. What the Apple site says is that apps from the store are automatically added to Launchpad. That's not the same thing as saying "only" store apps are added to Launchpad. In fact what it says is "Your open windows fade away, replaced by an elegant, full-screen display of all the apps on your Mac." All the apps. (If there's a statement I'm not aware, please post a link...)
Including the apps in the update tool might be useful, but most apps on my Mac check for updates themselves when I start them. It's not like I have to remember to go out and check the Firefox or Adobe sites for patches myself.
3.5) If it is a house you have lived in for 2 of the last 5 years, the first $250k ($500k if you're married) of your appreciation is shielded from taxation.
http://www.bankrate.com/finance/real-estate/capital-gains-home-sale-tax-break-a-boon-for-owners-1.aspx
4) If you die this year, there is no estate tax at all. If you die next year (or beyond), the first $1 million of your estate will be shielded from taxation by an offsetting credit for each recipient (if you have 3 kids the total offset is $3 million--1 for each). This issue is active in Congress so both exemptions and rates could be reset this year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estate_tax_in_the_United_States
Does the desktop OS really matter that much any more? At least in the consumer space, I contend no:
- File format interoperability has improved dramatically. Numerous apps on several platforms can now open MS and Adobe formats, for instance.
- More and more functionality is delivered through the browser by servers.
- As a result, after-market boxed software is less and less important. Core consumer functionality comes built into computers when you buy them (word processing, photos, music, video, etc). Aside from games, consumers simply don't go to stores anymore to buy the hottest new software.
Mobile OS is still very app-oriented though. And Linux is doing very well there, in the form of Android.
Desktop OS still matters a lot in the corporate setting because of custom business applications that have been developed on the MS platform for years. They would be a huge pain to port, and businesses will ride them for as long as they can. But even in those cases, when they develop new apps, there's a good chance they'll be developing server-based software running on Linux (even if the desktop OS is still Windows).
So even though Linux adoption on the desktop might have slowed, that matters less and less in the big picture. The big problem with MS's domination of the desktop was that it was their chokepoint of control because it was the default environment for all developers. For consumers at least, that chokepoint is largely gone. The default environment for developers now is the server.
We were looking to move a few dozen sites off of a proprietary Web CMS and one of the reasons we decided on popular OSS solutions like Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, etc. is that it is pretty easy to find vendors who know them. We lease virtualized servers at Rackspace so we control the hosting, and then we hire on vendors to help us build and support our sites.
My metaphor was that going with a hosted, proprietary CMS was like leasing a car where you had to always pay the dealer for work. Hosting our own Wordpress or Drupal site is like owning a car--if we don't like our mechanic we can get a different one.
It has already paid off a couple times--we soured on a vendor and were able to easily find and bring in a new one to support the site.
One reason we decided against Plone is that it is not heavily used or supported in my area (DC).
Where even a relatively simple electronic throttle control system became the focus of a witch hunt, despite a complete lack of evidence that it had failed. In fact the preponderance of the evidence now is that most cases were simply a case of wrong-footing the gas pedal...just like with Audi's the last time. Yet Toyota has suffered massive economic consequences.
Beating a human at handling unanticipatable events seems a straightforward engineering task. Let's say that a kid darts out from behind a car with absolutely no warning. If the computer car has sensors better than human eyes, and a reaction time quicker than a human's, then it should beat the human in that situation. Seems very possible to me.
But it is the situations that CAN be anticipated where computers will have hard time catching up to humans. Because--what goes into human anticipation? A computer can be programmed to know where school zones are, based on GPS coords. But on a random side street, a computer would have a hard time noticing that the street looks a little more parked-in than typical, and one house has a pink mylar balloon on the mailbox--therefore, drive slower than usual because there's probably a birthday party with over-excited kids running around.
Or consider the very subtle ways we evaluate the driving of the cars around us. Have you ever thought to yourself, "that car is about to cut me off," and then it happens? What went into that moment of anticipation? Probably dozens of clues about how that car was moving through traffic. You probably are not even aware of all the factors--you just learned over time. It will extremely difficult to capture that sort of anticipation in software.
Elections for state office are regulated by state laws. And many states have never had the limitations on corporate speech that existed federally prior to Citizens United. Yet they do not stand out as significantly more corrupt or worse off in any correlated way.
Money is not the only factor in elections. If it was, multi-millionaires like Ross Perot, Mitt Romney, or Jon Corzine could buy their way into office whenever they wanted. But they can't.
Interestingly, much of the modern Japanese approach to design and manufacturing is based on quantitative quality management practices created by Americans like Ed Deming. U.S. companies were not interested because they were experiencing strong success based on the way they had always done things. Japan was recreating many of its industries from scratch, and knew good ideas when they say them. Decades later they bore fruit as the Japanese were able to produce higher quality products, faster, and cheaper than U.S. manufacturers.
The whole reason the military funded research into packet-switched networks was their potential for flexibility and uptime. On 9/11 a major Verizon switch was destroyed by the collapse of the WTC, but e-mails still got where they were going. The Internet routes around damage.
Now imagine setting up a secure, separate physical network. In order to provide the same flexibility and recoverability you will need to fund many redundant links from each node to many other nodes. Expensive!! The reason the Internet works is because each company only needs to fund a few links themselves. Then they can internetwork with everyone else's links and voila: mass redundancy and multiple paths for packets.
The answer to secure computing in the future is mostly in software and configuration IMO.
Are you arguing that a private development effort with a few developers will be more secure than an open-source project with many developers? Isn't the exact opposite logic used to explain why Linux is more secure than Windows? Drupal has a community bug reporting process, and core and module patches are issued quite frequently.
The community does. That is the whole point of using a popular, open-source project.
I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a developer to learn about the framework they're using. Drupal can be hard to learn and yes that's a knock against it. But if you do learn it, it is powerful and flexible.
For a skilled developer it might be a faster and better experience to code from scratch. For a content-focused organization, it's better to spend the time and money on developing content than developing code. A framework makes that possible, even if it's not the most perfect solution.
Apple says over 120 million "iOS" (formerly iPhone OS) devices have shipped since the iPhone introduction in 2007. Every one is a tablet computer. The iPad just happens to be the largest.
He wasn't fired because of sexual harassment or because he loaded risque pics on his work machine.
Rather, he was fired because the board did not trust him anymore. Part of that erosion of trust was that he hired someone with such a risque past to act as a "face" of HP at high-profile events. The search history was just proof that he was aware of her past. By themselves the pics/video were not enough to get him (or probably most managers) fired. Maybe if they repeatedly subjected subordinates or coworkers to them.
"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main"
The human genome does not boot-strap to a human; humans are produced within other humans who were produced within other humans, etc., etc. back to the blue-green algae. That unbroken chain of reproduction is the self-modifying program; any given genome is only the latest bit of data fed into part of it.
Increases in average life expectancy mostly reflect our improving ability to keep people from dying young. We have not significantly improve our ability to keep any given person alive for longer. For all the medical advances in the world, it's still very unlikely Kurzweil will live to see his 100th birthday.
Looking at the economic impact, the iPod was a game-changer and Google Maps was not. The iPod made tens of billions of dollars for Apple. Google Maps was innovative from a technological point of view, but how much money has Google made directly from Google Maps?
From an economic point of view, technological innovation alone is not enough. It needs to drive a lot of revenue to create impact. Google's search technology was a game changer because it is handing Google tens of billions of dollars. Maps is not. Gmail is not.
Rumors are that it will be based on the iOS operating system. This implies it will have access to the App Store.
The new iPhone has a display resolution of 960 x 640 pixels. New games are being written for that resolution, and old games being updated for it.
Turn it sideways...640p is not that far from 720p. Since it's a dedicated TV device, Apple could handle the up-res from 640 to 720 in hardware. You'd have a $99 device not much bigger than an iPhone that could store and play hundreds of video games...games that already exist. The device would launch with a huge game library from day one.
You could use your iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad as the controller (or buy a dedicated controller if you don't have any of those). The coup de grace would be wireless or cloud syncing so that you could pause a game on the TV and continue it on your mobile device later (and vice versa).
If Apple can get this thing out the door fast enough, it could be the big video game system for the holidays.
When I close the lid on my MacBook, it goes to sleep right away. When I open the lid, it wakes up right away. It works exactly as well 6 months later. The only time I reboot my laptop is when a software update requires it. This is something that my Thinkpad, Dell, and HP laptops have all had problems with in the past. To the end user, it's a hardware function...close or open the lid.
And the multitouch trackpad on my laptop is so good that I ended up buying a used Fingerworks trackpad so I could get similar functionality on my Dell.
The OS X UI has all sorts of wonky inconsistencies. Which is why (speaking of the iPad), Apple designed an entirely new UI for their touch products. To get rid of some of that crap.
de Havilland Otters and Beavers are probably the most respected aircraft in Alaska bush flight. They were designed and built specifically for backcountry flying by de Havilland Canada. To this day they are used for dangerous mountain flying, including glacier landings and flying into Denali basecamp (through "One Shot Pass"). When I visited a friend in Alaska we took a flight-seeing tour over Denali National Park and the flight was in a single-engine Otter.
They rarely go up for sale and when they do, they are very expensive because they are so highly sought-after.
If they lack a functioning morality, then why did Hurd get fired?
He was not fired for the sexual harassment stuff. In fact he was cleared of violating HP's policy and he settled the suit out of court. Both he and woman have confirmed that they did not have a sexual relationship.
He was fired for filing inaccurate expense reports totalling about $20,000. Basically he concealed the fact that he was expensing meetings with this woman. HP has stated that they do have clear evidence of that, and that Hurd admitted it and offered to repay the $20k. Instead they fired him.
He was a superstar manager. If HP's financial performance suffers without Hurd, they could lose tens of billions of dollars in market cap. If that happens I have to think that investors are going to question whether that $20k was worth it.
If a phone doesn't have an external, extendable antennas like my Motorola v325 does, it doesn't have much of a leg to stand on when it comes to antenna performance.
Every smart phone I'm aware of has an internal antenna, which compromises performance. Manufacturers do this because consumers care about aesthetics when they pick out a phone, and if they have problems with coverage or calls, they always blame the network operator, not the phone.
Highlight an image the folder you want to browse and hit the spacebar. The image will pop up in a black-bordered window. There is a button to make it full-screen. Use the arrow keys on your keyboard to navigate through the pictures in that folder.
This feature is called "Quick Look" and was introduced with OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard" in August 2009. It works with a wide variety of file types...like MS Office docs, PDFs, Photoshop files, and a variety of video formats. Just click once to highlight the file and hit the space bar.
It's called proportional fonts, and they have been standard on computers for decades. Use MS Word or some other font-aware piece of software to print this comment out and measure the spacing between words within this sentence, and then the spacing between this sentence and the preceding period. It's not a full two spaces, but you don't need a full two spaces to make the visual distinction to which you're referring.
If you're working in constant width fonts, you should still add an extra space between sentences.